Savitri

I stood at her pyre, hands clasped. I’d seen those faces, which now stood straight, circled around her burning flesh. I’d seen them while crossing the road, and while buying stationary at a nearby store, and while waiting at the doctor’s clinic at the end of the blind street.

With an eight year old and a sack full of belongings, Savitri took a bus from her village and alighted in Mumbai the next day. This, she told me while mopping the floor under the bed, and into the first week of joining the housework. “Kishan needs to learn,” she said between her chalk-white teeth. “Kishan needs lessons.”

When Savitri completed one month, father enrolled Kishan’s name in a municipality school. So he studied in English, whilst Savitri remained at home performing house chores and lived with us.

One day, when I sat at my room, pensive and tears dulled in my eyes, Savitri strode through the door left ajar. She sat squatted next to the bed and scolded in her husky voice, “Kai re, Kashala radtos?” (Oy! Why are you crying?) She told me her own story. About her drunkard husband and his squandering habits and about their daily fights, which I listened to uninterestedly.

It was much later, when I was over the gloomy mood and had forgotten the break-up with my girlfriend, that it struck me that Savitri came to Bombay perhaps not only because Kishan needed lessons.

I indulged with her in short conversations now and then, and she began to pick a bit of English from me. She would use in her sentences words like spoon and table and plate. It fascinated me how quick she would grasp these words.

Savitri got accustomed to city life. A couple of years later when she got a kholi of her own, she moved out and joined work at two more houses to earn better living.

She called our house the first home in Bombay, and did the extra bit of work for us. When mother went to the market to shop for vegetables and grocery, Savitri would wrap the dried clothes and pile them on the bed and wash the evening vessels, which would accumulate in the sink after tea. Often, while sweeping the floor or dusting the room, she would pose in front of the cupboard and look at the mirror, adjusting the festoon of ghajara clipped to her coconut oiled hair.

It was her calm demeanor that made her likable. Never had I heard her shout or fight with mother, except when she occasionally raised her voice to negotiate for a twenty rupee increase in her salary or when she wanted a week’s leaves to go to her village and mother denied.

She negotiated for what she deserved, until she quit. At sixty three, Savitri put a period to her home-making. She did however for a while visited residences to massage babies and bathe them, until her bones gave up on her. Even years later, she would get us raw mangoes from her village to make pickles. This year there would be non.

Standing at the pyre, I could envisage her figure when she first entered the house with her eight year old. Her bindi, big and round, stuck permanently at the centre of her forehead. I could sense a trail of nilgiri she would linger behind every day when leaving the house at night.

Standing there, amidst vague acquaintances, and tears welling in my eyes, I felt as if she would emerge from amongst the wood and scold me, “Kai re, kashala radtos?”