8:23 Down Thane Local

I am 30. Born on a day my parents do not remember. Fourth daughter in a family of nine. Always more mouths to feed than arms to earn the bread. Still, for nine years I have seen a school. Perhaps for the Tiffin they gave. Or, perhaps because my mother had hoped my lot could be better than hers.

How she toiled for all of us! My father had two faces. The meek book-keeper at the round-the-corner grocer’s all day long; and the drunken charioteer of ever-fleeting fortune all night. How my mother took the beating! Working part-time as an ayah at a government hospital, she married off my two eldest sisters before they were fifteen; at what price I do not know. The third was lured away into the faceless dark of street corners and alleyways. Of her, we do not speak. No, unless in the broken sighs of my mother her name drips, half-whispered.

I still remember my tiny classroom. My desk and stool, work-books without cover and erasers leaving dark stains behind. The comely face of my teacher, newly married and glowing --- and her husband picking her up on a red scooter after work. How we all envied and loved her! Lofty she stood on her high pedestal of unachievable bliss. How we smiled and flushed at her painted nails even when they scratched our cheeks!

Then, suddenly, I was a ninth-grader; I was sixteen. I saw you at our landlord’s place. You were a loved nephew, come from a distant city. I was dark and unlovely. You were a bright student with a promised future. My father owed your uncle five months’ rent.

Yet I was sixteen. Yes, Sixteen and a Saaree, was I. I met you below the broken foot bridge, I did. And I loved.

Tell me now, after all these years, do you remember? Did you, ever? Did you tell your beloved, now your wife, about me? I too saw her once, beside you, when you returned to seek your uncle’s blessings eight years later. Ah, yes, she was a bright light below all bright lights. Agreed, it was a match made in heaven. How beautiful everything looked, how it burned me! How, shrinking away, I only murmured—cherish, love, prosper!

I too, am married now. And a child is mine. I work at a parlour somewhere in the city. Tending to the manicured beauty of the rich and sophisticated. They pay me a few meagre hundreds for the twelve hours of each day that I spend in that ten-by-ten feet den smelling invariably of bleach and tangy perfumes. The man I was married off to is a man-friday of a local M.L.A’s second lieutenant. He comes and goes with the shadows.

Only, I do not take my beatings well. I still shout and cry and curse a little. Sometimes, a few scratches, too. And then, one more sunrise. Tea, stale chapattis and the steam of rice. The bemused face of my child in front of the school. The rush in the suburban street and then, the train.

And sometimes, the moon comes and looks at me where I sleep on the cold hard ground. Who knows where my lost sister is now, with whom she stays. I long to go see you some day. You, in your grand home. I long to see you. Today’s portion is finished; yet what tomorrow will bring? How would the day have been if I too was lost? How would it be, if I am lost, now?

(my humble homage to Joy Goswami’s “Benimadhav”)