JOIN USSavitri muttered a few choice swear words under her breath as she raised her saree above her ankles and gingerly put her foot into a pit of wet mud to take a step ahead. The monsoon had set in early that year and she had no choice but to walk through the muck and slime to get to work that day. Her mind flashed back to memories of her playing happily in the monsoon rain as a child, with her mouth open wide and trying to catch raindrops on her tongue.
Although she knew she had been ecstatic every year when the proverbial first drop fell, she could not recollect the emotion as it had been felt anymore. The rain now disgusted her. The smell of rain, which she had once associated with a kind of freshness, temporarily replacing the dull smell of the dusty city, now only brought to the fore of her mind the smell of dirty sewers overflowing. The wet, slippery roads on which she would dance barefoot because they were finally cooled down from their summertime temperatures, now only made her gag with the slush and narrow inlets of filthy water running through.
The summer months, despite the overbearing heat, were better than this. At least summer didn’t masquerade as a kind of Messiah, promising relief from a previously oppressive regime, but proving to be just as intolerable. Savitri stared up at the overcast sky as these thoughts flooded her mind, and began to pray that it wouldn’t rain until she had reached her destination.
She was to begin her first day at a new house that day. Her earlier employers had moved to a house far away and she could not afford to spend time and money travelling, so she had begun looking for a new house to work at. Her neighbour, Kamala, had pointed this house out to her, telling her that this family had just returned from a foreign country and was looking for household help.
As she neared the address, there was an ominous rumble of thunder, predictably followed by the onset of a light drizzle, which seemed to be increasing its torrential status by the second. For the second time, she cursed under her breath and quickened her pace.
Once Savitri reached the apartment building, her light-yellow saree resembled leopard spots, with the rain leaving dark water marks all over. She was greeted by a loud, almost cacophonous laugh, and looked up to see a man and a woman sitting at a shaded balcony, a few floors above, sipping from white china cups and watching the bulging raindrops accelerating down to earth. Her heartbeat also accelerated slightly as she saw them, and she almost automatically felt a sense of resentment at how they could afford to take the rain so lightly.
There were three elevators in the building, each with a sign written in English. She squinted at the text, struggling to remember English letters, but gave up once the lift in the middle opened its shiny doors. She pressed a button with the number ‘3’ on it, and looked for ‘319’ when she reached the third floor. Once she found it, she took a deep breath and rang the bell. In a few seconds, the woman from the balcony opened the door with a questioning but pleasant look on her face.
“Kamala had told me you needed a helper,” she mumbled nervously to the woman. A look of understanding crossed her face and she indicated that Savitri enter the house. An older woman was seated inside the main living room, surrounded by multicoloured cushions. She was intently watching the television screen, but whipped around to face Savitri as she entered the house.
“Why does she have to come through this door?” the old woman asked, “It’s so unpleasant when these people just come in like this.”
“There’s only one door to the house,” said the younger woman in an exasperated tone, “She can’t climb up through the window.”
The older woman gave the younger one a contemptuous look, but choosing not to comment further, returned to the television. Savitri suppressed a smile as she looked up at the younger woman.
“You will have to clean the house, wash dishes, and take care of the children. Sometimes, I might ask you to help with cooking if the other maid doesn’t come. Is that all right?” the younger woman asked.
Savitri nodded her head.
In the kitchen, two young girls sat atop the granite counter and looked at Savitri curiously with eyes so dark they were almost black. She could see a faint similarity to the old woman’s expression, but as soon as she noticed it, their faces changed to expressions of vacant disregard. She said nothing, but went to the sink and began to wash the mountain of plates and dishes that had piled up in it.
When the younger woman had gone to work on Savitri’s second day, the old woman gave her a plastic plate and a steel cup, sternly saying, “These will be only yours. Use them for eating and drinking.” She was startled at the coarseness with which the woman spoke to her, but ignored it.
A few months into working at the house, Savitri had learnt their ways. The man and woman left for office in the morning, leaving the two children alone with their grandmother. She developed her routine in the house: she would clean the rooms and the bathrooms in the first hour, wash the dishes in the second, and bathe and play with the children for the remaining time. Once her work for the day was done, she would sit in a corner of the kitchen and silently eat, vaguely dreaming of a life beyond this household. These thoughts only occupied her mind during meals and she would always vigorously shake her head once she was done eating, as though the thoughts swirling around in her mind would leave in that instant.
The children’s mother never seemed displeased and was always kind to Savitri, but the grandmother made her feel deeply uneasy. It always felt like she was watching her, no matter what she was doing, waiting for her to make a mistake. Savitri tried her best to ignore the old woman’s harsh gazes and disdainful expressions, but she could sense her discomfort when Savitri fed the children with her hands or lulled them to sleep by gently patting them, or combed their long, dark hair.
The monsoon passed, swiftly followed by a light winter, and before she knew it, Savitri found herself in the throes of summer. The formerly bare roads that she walked on now had children, almost always boys, playing some sport or the other, in the delight of holidays from school. In their worn chappals and dusty shorts, they would collectively watch a ball being thrown into the air with a sense of apprehension. She could almost hear their prayers that it wouldn’t break a window in one of the surrounding houses. Despite their fear of damaging somebody’s house décor, they went on playing rather enthusiastically, creating a curious wave of excitement and nervousness in their movements.
It was a day like any other in the cruellest month. Savitri walked towards the apartment complex, feeling the heat weigh down upon her. As she approached the building, she reminded herself, as she did daily, that she had to wait for the lift on the left. Her mind took her back to the winter, when the old woman had seen her come out of the lift.
“Why did you come out of that lift?” she had barked at Savitri, “Can’t you read?” Stunned, Savitri helplessly stared at the ground as she was instructed that she and all the other servants were to use only the lift on the left. “You should be glad that we let you use it at all,” she had said in her usual contemptuous voice, “You people should be using the stairs.”
Savitri shook her head to clear her mind and went into the house. In a few hours, the heat began to find its way into the
deepest crevices of the house. The tap water was boiling hot, the clay pots on the balcony seemed to radiate heat, and the large glass windows did nothing to help the uncomfortable warmth escape. Still, Savitri preferred it to those atrocious rains, for the extremes of the day were matched by the relative calm of the night. She entered the kitchen, turned to cleaning the house and washing the mountain of dishes, as she had been doing for long.
Suddenly, she heard a loud wail from the children’s bedroom, followed by the clanging sound of something metallic hitting the marbled floor hard. She hesitated for a second but then left the plates and ran to the bedroom, where she found the old woman towering over the elder child, shaking with anger. Savitri’s steel cup rolled over the floor and reached a stop when it hit the foot of the bed. On sensing that Savitri had arrived, she turned to face her in rage, and bellowed, “Why did you give her water in your cup? Didn’t I tell you that it was only yours and that nobody else would use it?” Savitri gaped at the old woman, and struggled to think back to whether she had given the child her cup. She couldn’t remember it in the least, and at any rate, her time to tend to the child had not even come.
“I-I-I didn’t!” she quietly exclaimed to the old woman, taking a breath to explain why it could not have been her.
Before she could get another word out, the old woman’s voice filled the room. “Don’t lie to me, you filthy woman,” she screeched, “You’ve as good as poisoned the child. She drank from the cup that you use everyday. How could you let her touch something so dirty?”
A soft cry from the elder interrupted her. “Ajji, I took it on my own,” whimpered the girl. The old woman turned on Savitri again, her mouth twisted in an ugly scowl. “I see you have taught her how to lie as well,” she spat out.
Tears sprung to Savitri’s eyes as the weight of all these cruel words descended upon her like the heat in that cruel month. With each passing second, she felt more like scum, like her touch was a virus, contaminating the household and everything in it. A growing lump in her throat began to hurt her and she struggled to maintain composure in this moment of indignity. Her head began to spin as images of her washing their clothes and cleaning their bathrooms and bathing their children appeared in bursts before her mind’s eye.
Finally, she summoned up the courage to reply. “I didn’t give her the cup,” she whispered back, humiliated and almost inaudible. The old woman’s eyes reflected only disgust and disbelief.
Eighteen years later, a young woman woke up with a start at the sound of a shrill doorbell ringing. Her hand automatically reached for the mobile phone on her bedside table. Its bright screen hurt her dark eyes for a second before she looked at the time. She groaned involuntarily at the weather forecast that had also appeared on the screen — it was going to rain, and she would have to walk all the way for her first day at work. She briefly contemplated calling a taxi to take her to work, but then reminded herself of the shoestring budget she was on.
The doorbell rang again, this time with a sense of urgency, and she quickly got out to open the door, wondering whether it was the helper or the newspaper man who had come so early.
“Hi!” she exclaimed happily as she opened the door, “How are you? I haven’t seen you since we moved from that apartment! Mummy said you were still around in this area, so I thought I’d ask you to help me out in the mornings before I leave for work. I just moved to this house a week ago, but it doesn’t feel any different from home because Mummy gave me so much of the old stuff that was lying around.” Without waiting for the other person at the door to speak, the woman hurriedly said, “Can you please help with cooking today, please? The rice is on the top shelf. I’m getting ready for work now.” She then rushed back into the bedroom and the sound of the door being locked reverberated in the unfurnished living room.
Savitri walked to the kitchen and cautiously opened the box of rice. She peered into the box and stepped back suddenly, as though she had been burned. Inside the plastic box, almost buried in rice, lay a small steel cup that she knew so well. A wave of memories hit her — the sound of crashing metal, a small girl crying, an old woman’s revulsion, her own salty tears. She picked it up with great trepidation, but also a sense of fascination, refusing to believe that it had survived so many years, and had now found its residence in this particular box. She plunged the cup back into the box, took out a cupful of rice, and poured it into the cooking pot. The sound of the grains raining down on the metal base of the pot oddly soothed her, and she began to clean the rice with water.
After she had put the rice to boil, a voice came from the other end of the house. “If you want tea, I’ve left some on the balcony table,” the woman hollered. Savitri gave a non-committal response out loud, but slowly walked to the balcony attached to the small kitchen. She picked up a white teacup and sipped from it as she leaned over the railing, watching the world scurry beneath a light drizzle from the overcast sky above.