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The Phoney by Aju Mukhopadhyay
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Not rated by the Author.
While we shout against human trafficking, there are mothers who lead their children to sex trade and thus maintain themselves. it is a crime but goes unheeded. They mix with others and poison the society.
Moments are preceded by moments followed by others. No one moment can stay put. It is known. But some moments become remarkable to some or many. Even after long past they are remembered with awe or reverence, with pride or remorse, whatever it may be. It was such a moment when Latha came out from the turning of the lane, the renovated slum, of which they were the original inhabitants, dressed in a new green silken sari, fair with face powder, eyes bigger with collyrium, lips red-polished and a scented jasmine circlet adoring her chignon.
She came accompanied by her aunt with a big filarial leg, her mother and sisters. She looked like a beautiful bride. As she came near, the tall young man, who was waiting alone in the auto rickshaw, came out and greeted her. She saw her match maker for the first time in her life. But she was yet to see her bridegroom. The auto driver came out from a dark corner where he was smoking. He threw the butt of the cigarette and held the steering happily. The women stopped talking. As her smiling younger sisters clung to her, a pearl drop fell on the ground from her eye. Her face seemed uncertain out of trepidation. Gowri saw balls of sweat on her face glistening in the road light as she bent her head to enter the small vunty. The tall man entered from the other side and the driver sped his vehicle breaking the midnight silence with a harsh sound. It was just four days after her auspicious manjal neer celebration, Gowri remembered.
On the way to toilet through the balcony her eyes had fallen on the lane and she had spotted an auto rickshaw waiting in the middle of it at the unseemly hour. Intrigued, she stopped for some time there. After the nocturnal moment was over, she left for her errand. Completing her job she came back to her bed but could not sleep soon.
What a marriage? What it could be? She wondered and involuntarily began ruminating on the affairs of those people. She knew them well ever since she settled in this seaside locality of Pondicherry after her marriage. Once it might have belonged to the fisherman community but now it belonged to all communities. Of them the family of Lathas was famous for their selfishness and possessiveness. Belonging to a narrow sect of a religion, they had all sorts of cards to enjoy things available free or cheap, which were allowed to all special categories of people, either this way or that. Religiously converted, they were aware of their original castes but outsiders would not know for none of them used titles after their names.
Gowri saw her grandfather who walked with a crutch. They lived occupying a piece of Government land. As his children increased in numbers they scattered, living here and there in nearby areas, but their original dwelling with a small icon in a corner, remained. The crutched man himself became the progenitor of some 100 members. His sons did something, one of the many things such males usually do, and looked after their own affairs. Most of them married and have children and children’s children. Huts increased in number. Slums became thick day by day. Giving them those pattas for land, distributing sari and rice for free became the pious, popular and essential work of the politicians, their mainstay. Their children have been going to school; boys with ties and knots on their uniforms, girls with similar skirts. After some years they usually marry or live with some. Some become comparatively richer with brick built, asbestos roofed dwellings but some remain in thatched houses. Some of them left for Chennai some for Dubai.
Old values are crumbling down, borrowed ideas and practices are growing among newer denominations. It is a vast thing for study. But Gowri knew one thing for sure that each group of people knew their origin by heart. They knew their capacities, their limitations. In spite of the discovery of such things as chromosomes and genes, differences by blood and heredity have remained a puzzle to all educated and uneducated people, Gowri thought. No cloning is likely to solve the problem, she concluded mentally.
The daughters of the crutched man tried to catch men of higher orders. They could not be married off easily but they attracted some handsome men, may be for a while. Most of the four sisters gave birth to ordinary children, some bordering the ugly. They all live in nearby dwellings. None of them had a husband living with them except the last one who looked little better even with black complexion.
Gowri now remembered that after an absence of one year she came back with two daughters and a husband. The husband looked nice but disturbed. Both the husband and the wife spoke Hindi. The husband was shy of remaining in the locality. He moved round places doing odd jobs, returning home late in the evening. But he could not stay even for a year. After a couple of months he used to sleep in a suitable place outside the room. Road was his only refuge. He was much attached to his children. Gowri saw him carrying them on his shoulders or flank. He was attached to Mary also. Often he was seen talking to her or embracing her even on the road, near home. The time in between his visits became longer. Though he was originally from Tamil Nadu, his forefathers settled in the North. Again the question of originality diffused her thought. She was not sure of his real originality. Let that go, she thought. He was considered a persona non grata, a floating rogue who was temporarily attached to Mary. He was pushed away from their den, from the locality and finally from the town.
Of the two daughters, Latha the elder one, grew up nicely under the tutelage of all the sisters, including her mother. And now she was used, at the right time. An idea about the fate of the innocent girl gnawed at her heart.
‘Why are you laughing?’ Gowri asked Mary as the four sisters were crossing her doorway the next morning. Kalamuchi, the eldest one grinned, ‘To be able to laugh properly we celebrated Manjal Neer so pompously. The highest bidder only could have her.’
Not one or two but seven days passed by before Latha was dropped by an auto rickshaw at night. For the first two days after she came back she was in seventh heaven. She wore a costly sunglass, silken skirt and silver anklet. She danced like a pea-chick before her friends. All her friends, both male and female, gathered round her to hear about the new life into which she was initiated. After a couple of days she resumed going to school with others.
‘What the other girls in the school will learn from her?’ Gowri shuddered. Most of them would not complete their studies and of those who would appear for the final examination, many would get plucked, she was convinced. Yet the minister’s chest gets swollen when he narrates how education system has been improving year by year after he introduced noon-meal and breakfast-milk programmes in such schools. It is such a thing which does not invite comments for it is self explanatory, Gowri thought.
The tall pimp has become very familiar. Often he comes to fetch her or to stay for a night. Latha’s elder cousin sister, who joined the trade earlier, enjoys the tales of the neophyte. They go to school together and come back.
One day when Latha, a slim girl without much sign of womanhood, was coming back alone from school, Gowri, with painful affection for her asked, ‘What did you learn? How is life now?’
The teenager quipped with a sardonic smile, ’I have learnt the same as you learnt before me. My life? Can’t you see yours?’
Dumbfound, Gowri thought, ‘Will she ever reach her youth? Who’s the trafficker?
She or her mother?’
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