The Sari Shop (9 page)

Tina examined the sari. ‘Wow, that really has an ethnic look. I am dying to look at the rest of them. You might have called me.’

‘Don’t you look petulant now,’ Rina said affectionately to her younger sister. ‘You are the one who woke up so late. Don’t worry, we’ll go over them together tonight, okay?’

‘Okay. Great. I’ll just take a quick dip in the pool and then head straight for the hairdresser’s. So you’ll meet me there later then?’ Tina asked, handing the sari back.

‘Yeah,’ Rina said, turning to the saris again.

Tina waved at her mother, who nodded. Then she turned briskly and walked out with bouncing steps.

Through the window, Ramchand watched her get into the driver’s seat of a little red car, slam the door shut and drive off at full speed.

By now, the two women had gone through all the saris and had selected the ones they wanted. Ramchand started to make the bill in his head. It would come to about 80,000 rupees approximately, he thought.

Mrs Kapoor waved a hand at him. ‘Bring the bill when you bring the next batch.’

Ramchand gaped at her. Mahajan would kill him. But if he made the Kapoors angry, Mahajan would kill him anyway. So he decided to let it pass. He wondered why nobody at the shop had told him what to do about the bill.

For a moment, blind panic seized him. What if they didn’t pay? What if they denied buying these saris later? Would
he
have to shell out 80,000 rupees? His entire savings consisted of three thousand, four hundred and thirty rupees. Then Ramchand tried to get a grip on himself. These people
owned
factories. Eighty thousand rupees would be peanuts to them.

By that time, the two women had already left the room, talking excitedly about some jeweller who was supposed to bring some jewellery over in about ten minutes. Ramchand collected the saris in a daze, while Raghu waited to see him out.

The huge bill, the plush drawing room, Tina Kapoor’s red car, the strange, self-assured women, the alien smells of the Kapoor House – all this had left him dazed, confused. He pedalled back to the shop slowly, the wheels of the bicycle rotated rhythmically, the new images played themselves over in his mind again and again. The moment
Ramchand got to the shop, the first thing he did was race up to Gokul.

‘Gokul Bhaiya,’ he said, agitated, clutching Gokul’s arm.

‘Ramchand,’ Gokul said, springing up, ‘I forgot to tell you about the bill.’

Ramchand almost died of shock. He said with urgency,

‘Gokul Bhaiya, she said bring it later. I didn’t know what to do. I haven’t got the payment with me. I didn’t make out any bill…’

Gokul interrupted him, with a look of relief on his own face, ‘Thank God!’ he said. ‘You did the right thing. That is what I forgot to tell you. You did the right thing. I was so scared you’d start demanding the payment and create a scene and Mahajan would haul me up for not briefing you properly. Now, go and report to Mahajan. He has a list of all that was sent. He will send in the bill to Ravinder Kapoor who will give us a cheque. That’s how it works with these big people, you know.’

Ramchand could have wept with relief.

It did not take long to report to Mahajan and put away the saris that the Kapoor women had rejected. Mahajan seemed quite pleased with Ramchand.

Mahajan said he could leave for the day if he wanted, because it was a tiring business cycling with that heavy bundle all the way to Green Avenue and back. ‘But don’t expect that luxury every time you go the Kapoor House, boy,’ Mahajan said, when Ramchand thanked him, looking pleased. ‘I’ll speak to them over the phone. Maybe you’ll have to take another batch tomorrow.’

Ramchand walked out. The evening was chilly and he hugged himself. The events of the day had thrown him into some confusion but the change had also stirred him. The long cycle ride, the sun and the breeze, the shops, the Kapoor House – all these were outside the routine and the world he
had known for the last eleven years, and they had left his brain tingling.

The world was big, after all. He had just got into a rut – shop, room, shop, room, shop, room…

Once you got out of that rut, it was easy to see that there were endless possibilities in the world. There were the hills where the Kapoors’ servant boy had come from, there were mountain streams on those hills that were as clear as the boy’s voice. There was the swimming pool that Tina frequented – maybe it was like the one in
Baazigar
, with blue tiles and a board to dive from, at the edge of which Shilpa Shetty had writhed during a song, wearing a backless blouse and a thin yellow chiffon sari. There was the college where Mrs Sachdeva taught, there were the books that were written and read by many, there were cars and flowerpots and frosted glass trays with peacocks on them. Yes, it was a big world.

He began to feel exhilarated. He walked with a spring in his step, and then abruptly turned and began to walk in the opposite direction. He moved fast, unmindful of the cold now, sure of where he was going. Ramchand walked till he reached the cluster of small shops that sold second-hand books. These small shops were little more than wooden shacks, and were run by people who rescued old books from the kabaadi and then sold them at a profit. They mainly managed to get hold of old textbooks, but other books wandered in too.

Ramchand stopped at the first one. It was a little wooden structure, and there were piles of books and magazines inside, on the counter and even outside the shop.

Ramchand stood there and ran his eyes over them. He was determined to buy a few books today, but he had to choose carefully. He could not afford to spend more than a hundred rupees, which was a princely sum for him to put aside for books.

As Ramchand began to painstakingly look through the titles of the displayed books, he thought of his eighth-class school certificate, the certificate that still lay at the bottom of his tin trunk wrapped in a green polythene bag, the certificate that no one had ever asked to see…

Now, he had forgotten most of what he had learnt, and as he looked at the titles of the books, he realized he could read very little. He hadn’t been bad at reading when he’d been in class eight, though. Not good, but not bad either. Only, he always tried not to think of class eight, or the day he had left it… or any part of his childhood, for that matter… But he wasn’t going to let anything stop him today.

Ramchand stuck out his chin, narrowed his eyes and began to work at reading the titles.
The Complete Letter Writer
– he managed to read one out aloud, and immediately got excited. Yes, this was the one he needed. It would give him practice in reading, writing and communicating.

‘How much?’ he asked the shopkeeper.

‘Thirty,’ the shopkeeper said briskly.

Ramchand’s heart gladdened and expanded and he clutched the book happily. He went through the rest.
Medical Dictionary
,
The Mayor of Casterbridge
,
Fat to Fit in Thirty Days
,
Wuthering Heights
. No, none of this made sense to him. He turned his attention to another pile.
Indian Vegetarian Cooking
,
Physics Text Book – Class 10+2 (C.B.S.E.)
,
Feng Shui Solutions to a Happy Life
.

Ramchand felt perplexed. Then he turned to the shopkeeper again. ‘You have Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiography?’

‘No,’ he answered, intently watching a lizard that was darting from the wall to the floor. ‘Hoosh,’ he said, flapping a duster at the lizard.

It was then that Ramchand spotted the
Radiant Essays – for Schoolchildren of All Ages
. Again the happy lurch in his stomach.

‘How much is that?’ he asked pointing, keeping his voice
casual. If the shopkeeper knew he wanted it badly, he would immediately quote a high price.

‘Fifty,’ he answered.

‘Fifty?’ said Ramchand, outraged.

‘Fifty.’ The shopkeeper’s mouth was set, his voice was firm.

After a lot of bargaining, the two settled on seventy rupees for both the books. Ramchand handed the shopkeeper a hundred rupee note and waited for the change. While the man was rummaging for change in a drawer, Ramchand flipped through the books tentatively. And he discovered that though he had kept himself in practice by reading signboards in English and by trying to read the newspaper in which Lakhan packed pakoras if you wanted to take a few home with you, he could not understand most words in both the books. So, he asked, looking a little crestfallen, ‘A dictionary? Do you have a secondhand,
cheap
English dictionary?’

The shopkeeper took out a tattered old copy of the Oxford English Dictionary and handed it to him.

Ramchand took the fat volume reverently and asked, ‘How much?’

‘Forty,’ the shopkeeper said quickly.

‘Forty? For this?’ said Ramchand, holding up the dog-eared copy.

‘Yes,’ the shopkeeper answered firmly. ‘It has all the words.’

Ramchand paid ten rupees over the hundred that he had meant to spend, but could not help hugging the books to himself as he walked home.

He felt armed to fight now. He hadn’t done anything meaningful in such a long time. Suddenly reckless, he also stopped at a stationer’s and bought a bottle of Camlin Royal Blue ink, a pen and a notebook. He wondered whether to buy whitewash for his room, but did not have the courage to spend so much money in one day.

He returned home feeling rejuvenated.

Ramchand put the packet of books and the blue plastic bag from the stationers on the bed and looked around at his room. It had two windows – one that opened on to the busy, narrow street and one that looked on to the courtyard of his landlord’s house. These, in his mind, he had designated as the front window and the back window as soon as he had seen the room for the first time.

It had already been furnished with a string cot and a table when Ramchand had rented it. Apart from these two pieces of furniture, there was a framed poster hanging on the wall left behind by a previous tenant. It showed a thatched cottage with pretty wooden windows, the kind Ramchand had never seen in real life, with rambling roses growing over the doorway. There was also a chimney, and a cobbled path leading to the cottage. Behind the cottage you could see a bright blue sky and tall, snow-covered mountains. On the bottom right-hand corner of the poster were written the words, ‘Home is where the heart is.’

Ramchand had not bothered to take down the picture of the thatched cottage, and it had been hanging there for the past eleven years. By now Ramchand had memorized every small detail of the picture – the two little stone steps that led up to the door of the cottage, the pattern on the curtain that hung at the cottage window, the pattern of the thatched roof. The red roses climbing the cottage had faded a little, and the blue sky was dimmer now, but the picture still hung there.

Ramchand had, in the course of the last eleven years,
acquired a chair, a low stool, two buckets and a mug, two plastic soap cases – one for Lifebuoy soap and the other for a Rin detergent bar – a doormat, and a small mirror on the wall that looked very old. He kept meaning to get curtains too, but hadn’t got around to doing it. The money fell short every month.

He cooked simple meals in a corner of the room, where he kept a small stove and a few utensils. He rarely cooked anything more than daal and rice, and often made tea for himself. Occasionally he would buy the vegetable that was going cheapest in the market, chop it all up and drop it into the pot in which rice was cooking. This was as ambitious as his cooking ever got.

He had a saucepan, two steel plates, two steel tumblers, a few spoons, a ladle and a knife. When the utensils had to be washed, he had to carry them in a bucket to the bathroom and wash them there. Even if he had to rinse a knife to chop vegetables, he had to go to the bathroom to do it. The floor had been perpetually wet in the beginning, when he had just moved in. The steel utensils would drip while he carried them back from the bathroom after washing them, and Ramchand’s rubber chappals would leave wet footprints on the floor. It was then that Ramchand had invested in the doormat.

His cot was by the front window. By the back window, which was very low, he had placed his tin trunk and covered it with a piece of cloth. He would often sit on the trunk, looking out of the open window at the washing fluttering below in the courtyard, the washing that had been scrubbed and rinsed by the lovely hands of Sudha, the landlord’s wife. Now he looked around at the messy, neglected room.
This
was his world, he thought in disgust. No wonder his life was such a pothole. Shop, room, shop, room, shop, room.

In a fresh fit of energy, Ramchand quickly changed out of
his new clothes into an old kurta-pyjama, took up the rarely used broom and swept the floor, also clearing away as many cobwebs on the walls and the roof as he could reach. He swept all the broom-pickings, including the cobwebs, to the door, where he examined the whole collection with interest. A spider scuttled out from a recently demolished cobweb and ran away. Apart from the cobwebs and the dust, there were fluffs of wool that his old blanket had shed, bits of his hair, grains of uncooked rice that he must have scattered while screwing or unscrewing the jar lid, and little, black, tear-shaped lizard droppings. He then gathered up all these bits and pieces of his room, and tied them up in a plastic bag. He would throw it on to the rubbish heap on his way to the shop the next day.

Then he filled water in an old bucket, dipped an old rag in it and scrubbed the floor thoroughly, ignoring the chill that the wet rag sent up to his hands.

He cleared up the table, removing from it a bottle of mango pickle, jars full of rice and daal, a tin of Parachute coconut hair oil, a bright yellow tube of Burnol, a jar of Zandu pain balm (
Zandu balm, Zandu balm, peedahari balm. Sardi sar dard peeda ko pal mein dur kare. Zandu Balm, Zandu Balm
) and some clothes that he had dumped on top of everything else. He dusted the table, little clouds of dust flying into his face. Then he rubbed a wet cloth on the surface of the table. The round, oily stains made by the bottoms of various jars vanished. Ramchand lined a corner of the floor with the old newspaper in which his new clothes had been wrapped. He placed all the jars in two neat rows on this newspaper, with the bigger jars in the back row and the smaller ones in the front. This left the table bare and clean.