Frontiers by Shama Futehally

Author:Shama Futehally [Futehally Shama]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789353051785
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Published: 2018-07-05T00:00:00+00:00

3

The Interview

The auto-rickshaw swayed and jerked over the rubble. It stopped at the end of the lane, in a kind of open undefined area with a pile of garbage to the side. Pigs nosed and shuffled, grunting peacefully. Also in the pile stood two small boys, shock-headed, dressed in tattered shorts. They held long hooked sticks and were jabbing them at the larger bits of paper in the garbage. Then they would flick the paper expertly into open gunny-bags which were lying on the road. Behind them rose the familiar thick green of a mosque’s dome.

As the auto-rickshaw stopped, a crowd of half-naked children appeared from nowhere and surrounded the vehicle, unsmiling, unmoving, and determined to extract everything possible from this new event. Sunita emerged from the auto feeling as she always did on these occasions—a kind of resentment, a kind of fear, overlaid by a slightly artificial exhilaration. She smiled at the children.

‘Where is the house of …’ she consulted her notebook— ‘Sanniben?’

A group of men who were standing outside the mosque began shouting at once. ‘Just there. Next to the paan-shop. Kallu, you lazy lout! Show the memsaab!’ The children began running ahead of her in an untidy trail, shouting and pointing. Since Sanniben lost her husband in the riots, she had obviously become an important figure.

She was waiting outside her door with an air of knowing what it was all about. Her dupatta was wrapped, with some deliberation, around her head and shoulders. She had a small pinched face and frizzy hair.

‘From the newspaper? Come, come,’ she said. ‘I have been waiting since early morning, I couldn’t even wash the utensils.’

Earlier Sunita would have countered, hurt, ‘But I never said I was coming early in the morning.’ Now she smiled non-commitally and lowered herself on to the piece of mat which Sanniben spread for her. Further back in the room there was a string cot, some cooking utensils, and a pile of clothes hanging together on one hook.

The children had lined up at the door. ‘Eh! You there Kallu!’ Sanniben said again—to the oldest child, Sunita saw. ‘Go and bring a cold drink for the memsaab.’ She fumbled inside her blouse and produced a cloth purse.

‘Only tea,’ Sunita said calmly.

‘Have a cold drink, memsaab. When someone like you comes to my house, it is a big day for me.’

‘Cold drinks make me ill,’ smiled Sunita, repeating a well-rehearsed phrase. ‘Tea is best.’ The children waited and watched.

‘Well?’ Sanniben barked suddenly at Kallu. ‘Waiting for your grandmother’s wedding?’

Kallu scurried away and the children dissolved in giggles.

‘Move out, all you no-good louts,’ said Sanniben. ‘Kallu is the only one of you who’s worth half a paisa. He’s not right in the head,’ she confided to Sunita, ‘but he’s a good boy, memsaab, a very good boy. Belongs to the watchman.’

By now the news of Sunita’s arrival had spread and two or three other women, slightly shamefaced, were loitering up to Sanniben’s door.

‘Oh yes, come in all of you,’ Sanniben said.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.