[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.When her parents had asked how it was to live in the Manimala Debi Girls’ Hostel in Calcutta, she had wanted to speak of the dull oppression of the ancient gray building, its sweating cement walls, its unending rules.The way her dinner would be left for her on the kitchen table, drying rice, congealed dal, covered with a net mesh to keep the cockroaches out, if she stayed too long at the library.But what of the triangular terrace, its hot, hard canopy of sky? From this terrace she could see the junction of Shyam Bajar, the nonstop bustle of hawkers and pedestrians that filled the space between them and her with a sparking, combustible energy.Maimed beggars pulled themselves along on small wooden boards with wheels.At lunchtime they gathered in the shade of a movie billboard and made raucous jokes, pointing at the bosomy film stars that loomed over them.A pickpocket was caught and beaten up by the crowd.Schoolgirls in white and brown uniforms, carrying the tricolor flag, marched in a parade every August 15, followed amicably by a Communist group waving militant red banners and shouting, in call-and-response fashion, Jyoti Basu zindabad, Congress Party murdabad.Ambulances made their tortuous, clanging way through rickshaws and cows, bearing the dying who sometimes expired before reaching the hospital.Men protesting the hike in the price of tickets burned a bus; the smoke rose in chemical gusts as the red paint on its sides melted to black.In seeing, she became part of it all.It was as much her education as the classes and the books.I like college, she had replied to her parents.I miss home.I have a quiet roommate.I have no trouble studying.I am careful not to miss curfew.You’ve seen my exam results, they’re good.She waited guiltily for them to chastise her for prevarication.But they nodded, went on to other matters.Amazed, she realized they hadn’t wanted to hear anything else.So now she told the visitors, Yes, there were two cars in her family, one for her husband, one for herself.They nodded.We knew it, we knew it, they said to her mother.Land of gold.Your Khuku is living like a queen.They looked so happily envious, so vindicated in their rightness, that she didn’t have the heart to say anything about the high insurance rates, or the drivers who cut her off during rush hour, or honked and yelled, Fucking Dothead go home.The time she’d had a flat tire on the freeway and stood there, frozen by the deafening metallic shapes hurtling past her, meteorlike, for an entire half hour until an old Chinese man stopped to help her.How could she explain to them that she would have preferred to take buses—only, there weren’t any.She liked it better when the visitors spoke about old times, times beyond her remembering.When the village was a small clearing among forests of mango and shal.Before the railroads even, before electricity, when the village doctor had to travel to his patients on a bullock cart with kerosene lamps dangling from it, and new brides were sent to their in-laws’ homes in covered palanquins.Sometimes a woman would disappear while washing clothes in the dighi, and it was whispered that the water spirit had taken her.During the independence movement the swadeshis hid from the British forces in the surrounding forests and built their bombs in an old brick pit less than a mile from here.Bandits lived in the forests too, and preyed on travelers.They wore gold earrings and painted their faces with lampblack to avoid being recognized.Because they didn’t really live in the forest.They lived right here in the village.They might have been your next-door neighbors.Once a brahmin went for a bath in the river and felt something scrape his arm, hard as teeth.Inspired by divine courage, he grasped it—it was a stone statue of Goddess Durga, the one you see in the temple by the bazaar, to whom children who are seriously ill are taken for blessing.But now, just look around, everyone and his brother has a TV antenna sticking out from his thatched roof, and the boys on the street are whistling tunes from American rock stars, even though they don’t understand the ingrezi words.Hai, where has our culture gone?The mother fell into the tales, let their current take her.She wanted desperately to believe them, to believe that through them she was learning back her past, what to pass on to her children.What America had leached away from her.In the years of drought, the zamindar threw open his granary.His wife cooked khichuri for the starving peasants with her own hands.His daughters served them on banana leaf platters.The mother closed her eyes and smelled the feast, the peppery stew of rice and lentils, potato and cauliflower, raisins imported all the way from Afghanistan.If the tales were no truer than those woven about America, how you went there penniless and in two years you owned a chain of motels, she—not unlike her parents all those years ago—didn’t want to know.THE YOUNGER BOY has fallen sick.It begins as a pain in his stomach, a slight nausea, and the mother puts him on toast and bottled Limca, bought from the most expensive store in the village to guarantee that it hasn’t been adulterated.The nausea ends, but the stomachache is worse, and when he goes to the bathroom there are only spurts of flecked brown water.He cries constantly.Kaopectate doesn’t help, nor Immodium, and Children’s Tylenol only reduces him to a glazed whimpering.Worried, the mother starts him on antibiotics.The wrenching bowel motions continue; soon he’s too weak to run about.He lies on his side and stares at the barred rectangle of yellow light from the window.He hates the taste of Limca and cries for 7-Up and his father.From time to time, in a tone of exhausted anger, he demands pepperoni pizza.At night, the mother can’t sleep
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]