dust, which was being swept by our chowkidar, who gaped speechless at the campaigners’ cavalcade. The politician and his henchmen turned away disappointed. Then they remembered the factory. Their cars and motorbikes sped away towards the cantonment.
From up the hill, one of the girls working in the factory heard the noise of the motorbikes and ran out to see what was happening. I was sitting at a desk in the inner room, punching numbers into a calculator, with half an ear towards the Hindi version of “Swing Low Sweet Chariot”, which had just started playing on our tape recorder. I was adding up columns of expenses, trying to work on the figures so that they made sense for our annual report. In the outer room, half a dozen girls were fixing labels onto the hundreds of bottles of apricot, peach, and plum jam we had made that summer. The labels, which were printed in Delhi, had arrived late, and we were in a hurry now to get the bottles ready for despatch. I had asked for workers – anyone possible. Beena and Mitu came every day, and sat working for hours, getting up only to munch roasted peanuts at times, or to make tea and stretch aching shoulders.
I heard the music change and pushed my papers aside to get up and reprimand the girls. It was really too much, the way they flouted my authority. They had started a song from a film featuring a girl lost to promiscuity and drugs because of befriending hippies. Her brother in the film scoured the country for her and after many diversions, located her somewhere near Darjeeling, dancing with other hippies, to a song she sang through lips that were renowned for being the Sexiest of the Seventies. The song had a mesmeric, incantatory melody. It was an old song by the time even I came to it, but it still played at college parties Michael and I went to. Now it had been remixed and was pepped up with a thumping beat. I returned to my chair and sat down. My feet, which had travelled away to a dance floor of my memories, tapped in time to the rhythm of Dum Maro Dum. Michael’s hands were on my waist, he was whirling me round the room. I was saying, “You’re making me dizzy,” and he was saying, “That’s exactly what I want to do.”
Umed Singh and his cohorts reached the factory and found a roomful of girls hard at work. Beena and Mitu had just made tea and in a shy show of hospitality, were smiling and nodding to the visitors, pointing at the row of little glasses on their tray. I recognised Deepak in the group, and the man who was with him when Miss Wilson tried to get them to take their cars away from the school playground all those months ago. The second man was short and thickset, with a weightlifter’s shoulders. He kept his reflecting glasses on, even inside the room, and turned them towards the twins when one of them bent over him with the tea tray and the other brought around the glucose biscuits. The reflections on his glasses followed the girls about as they took the tray from person to person. The other girls did their Namastes and returned to work, suppressing giggles of complicity. The song continued to play. Its refrain was “Harey Krishna Harey Ram”. Umed Singh left disappointed. His henchmen followed, pretending they had come for a regular canvassing visit rather than to catch us out playing “missionary hymns”. Despite the drugged, seductive voice of the singer, they could not deny that the singer was chanting the names of two of the holiest Hindu gods.
That afternoon, when the jam was all bottled, labelled, and packed away in boxes, and the room’s floor empty, the girls put the song on again. The more daring among them danced to it, while the other village girls, screaming with laughter, joined in sometimes or hid behind dekchis and dupattas in embarrassment. When I entered the room, they tugged my hand, and begged me to join in. “You have to, Maya Mam, we do everything you tell us to. Now it’s your turn.”
I tied my dupatta in a knot at my hips, and danced too. It had been five years or more since I had felt as light-hearted. Diwan Sahib was well again, Charu was united with Kundan, we had bottled our jam in time, and the