Motherji
Radha’s son, Kookoo, had died of alcoholism. Near the end, he turned yellow and his feet swelled and even in winter he could wear only slippers. On his last day, he said to his mother, “Let us eat something sweet.” Radha hurried down the lane to get jalebis, scared that he’d die alone.
A year and a half later, a government liquor shop opened on one of the roads that radiate from the Clocktower near the Old Vegetable Market in Delhi. From the moment the shutters were lifted, at noon, until they were pulled down, at ten, there were men outside. They ordered and paid at one window and waited to pick up at another. Often, there were so many of them that they spilled over the sidewalk and stood on the road.
The first time Radha saw these men, her heart raced. Her memories of Kookoo were so strong that she felt as if she were sinking into the ground. The men, bunched together, almost on top of one another, reminded her of flies on shit. She hurried home. She lived in a tenement, in a room that faced the courtyard. She chained the door behind her.
After this, Radha avoided passing the shop. Sometimes she couldn’t help passing it and she had the bad feelings but also the sense that Kookoo was still alive. It was like how, during the first rain of the year, you are your own age but you are also young again.
In Radha’s lane, there used to be a man who sat at a ground-floor window and who, when you stopped by the window and said, “Is water possible?,” would pour water for you to drink. He’d keep the curtain mostly drawn so that his vanity would not be encouraged by his being seen to perform a charitable act.
Radha was seventy-four, and there was still some black in her hair. She often wondered if Kookoo’s soul was at peace. Probably not, she thought. Her family had never done anything to deserve blessings. Earning blessings was one reason for what she did. Another was the loneliness she had begun to feel once again after the liquor shop opened.
One afternoon, a man wearing a purple kurta was standing in line outside the shop. Radha appeared at his side. “Water,” she said. The man cupped his hands and she put down the bucket she was carrying and poured slowly with a plastic mug.
She went to a boy in his early twenties. He thanked her. “Of course, son.” As she said “son,” she wished that she could take away all the boy’s problems.
She began going to the liquor shop every day to give water to the men. Sometimes she told them about Kookoo, how as a child he used to ask her to put kohl around his eyes and, when she did and his eyes stung, he’d scream, “Why did you do it?” Her talk irritated the men. She stopped speaking.
When not giving water, Radha squatted under the awning of the vegetable-oil store next to the liquor shop. She remembered when she had tried to get Kookoo married and a neighbor had told the girl’s parents that he was a drunkard. Sometimes she cried when she remembered how Kookoo had tried to hang himself, and how the people in the tenement had come running to get him down.
She had these memories and the feelings that came with them and she was also apart from the emotions. Giving water, she felt as if she were on a pilgrimage bus, with some passengers playing their phones very loud, but also with the sense that she was travelling ancient paths, that she was not just a part of history but was history itself.
One winter morning, when the mist inside the courtyard was yellow and thick, and the soap factory on the ground floor, where men squeezed bits of leftover soap from hotels into full bars, was using extension cords to run extra lights, a boy of nineteen or twenty appeared. He was leading a tall, skinny man, maybe in his thirties, who appeared to be blind and who, because he kept grimacing, then smiling, appeared also to have something wrong with his brain.
“Is Motherji here?” the boy asked one of the soap workers.
“I’m your mother,” the man answered, and, pulling his shirt aside to expose a nipple, said, “Suck.”
Radha was sitting on a stool outside her door, combing her hair. She didn’t think anything good could come from someone searching for her. She stepped into her room and chained the door. She peered through a crack.
The boy led the blind man to her door. “Motherji, this is my brother Arvind. He drank illegal alcohol. We want to leave him in your shade. I am putting his clothes here.” The boy put down a plastic bag, helped his brother sit on the stool, and left.
He returned a few minutes later and stood again at the door. “Should I leave money?” Radha didn’t say anything. “No? O.K.” He hurried off.
She opened the door slightly. The man was pacing, looking agitated. Radha saw his white eyes flicking around and felt horror.
She closed the door and went and sat at the very back of her room. She had a cot and a trunk and bags hanging from nails but little else. She heard her clock ticking and the rustle of a mouse. Radha remembered how scared she had been that Kookoo might go blind or get brain damage, how she had given him money so that he could buy legal alcohol.
After an hour, she opened the door. The stool was empty. The blind man wasn’t there.
An old woman rubbing oil on her legs said, “Put your problems on a stranger and run away.”
Radha began cooking her lunch. As she was squatting and pumping the kerosene stove, it occurred to her that someone from the blind man’s family might come looking for him and then call the police. Radha put a plate over her pot and left the compound.
She went up and down the roads that radiated from the Clocktower. She went into the lanes of the Old Vegetable Market. She went to Kamla Nagar. She kept describing the man. He was wearing black pants and a white shirt. He periodically flailed his arms.
Finally, in the late afternoon, a cheerful young woman at a nut shop said that she had seen him being led away by two short men who were holding him by the arms.
Radha wondered who the men might be. Criminals who ran teams of beggars? Perhaps they’d sell his organs. As she walked, her chest became heavy; her legs no longer felt like hers. Radha had always believed that the world was evil and people malicious. But her sense of evil had been that of an ordinary person. This taking of a blind, brain-damaged man was so extreme, it was like looking into the sun.
That night, she lay on her cot, afraid. She had wrapped herself in blankets but her teeth chattered.
The next morning, she took a piece of charcoal and wrote a prayer on the white wall beside her door. Sarasvati, take my pain. The words took up only a foot and made the rest of the wall seem empty. She wrote another prayer. Vasudeva, I salute thee. And then another. O, Durgaji, I am distressed and downtrodden.
The walls still looked naked. She began covering the whiteness with prayers. You are my relative, my friend, she wrote. Let no demon hurt the child. Let no ghost harm the child. She kept writing until there were prayers everywhere. Since the letters were not especially large, from seven or eight feet away they looked like smoke stains.
The young woman from the nut shop entered the courtyard, leading the blind man. She was excited. “I have found your boy, Mother.”
The man’s shirt was torn. He was barefoot. There were cuts on his face. “Come, boy,” Radha said, and led him into her room. She had him sit on the cot and began dabbing his cuts with Dettol.
“When I saw him, I thought, Is that him?” The young woman was standing by the cot. She appeared to want more thanks.
“You’ve saved my life,” Radha said. “Live a thousand years, daughter.”
After the young woman left, Radha closed the door and made Arvind stand. She tried to unbutton his shirt but he struggled.
“I won’t hurt you.”
He swung an arm and hit her cheek.
“I won’t hurt you.” She took a hand and pressed a wet cloth to it and held him.
Arvind became still. He began singing: “Sweet little boy, what’s in your fist?”
She removed his clothes. There were bruises on his back and buttocks. She had him stand by the drain and washed him. She thought of what people would say if they knew she was with this naked man. “Son, have you eaten?” she said nervously. “Have you had tea?” She felt her aloneness then; whatever she had to do in life, she would have to do without help.
She dressed Arvind in the clothes that his brother had left and took him outside. She made him tea. Her neighbors watched.
A little later, she tied a rope around her waist and around Arvind’s and took him to the liquor shop. He stood near her as she poured water. The men she gave water to looked shocked.
It did not take long for the rumors to start that she had brought her son back from the dead. Within a few days, strangers started requesting to touch her feet. The vegetable-oil-store owner brought her tea and asked for her blessing. People came to her tenement and left flowers for her.
After Radha died, even more people visited her courtyard. A flower seller set up a stall in the lane. The apartments in the tenement became more valuable because it was a holy site.
No one knows what happened to Arvind. He disappeared a few days after her death. ♦