So whenever she had a little gap in her work during her fifteen-hour day, Dolly would race across the yard to feed the baby. As Dolly washed the cement floors with a piece of hessian, rubbed the utensils with charcoal or swept the beds with a short straw broom, her mind was always on her little boy. She would worry about him a thousand times as she scoured the dishes with coconut string, scrubbed the saucepans with sand in a tin bowl of cold water, or washed the floors with disinfectant. The moment her work was done she would run as though the goddess Kali was after her, to where her baby lay weeping in his cradle and only feel safe when she had him hugged tight inside her arms. And then, even though she was so tired that her legs shook, she would light her cow dung brazier, heat up water, and give her little boy his bath. It troubled her that the child was left so much alone, but at least she was earning a little money, they had a roof over their heads and as he grew older she would be able to give him decent food. Karna grew older, learnt to sit and then to walk. Dolly did everything she could to keep the toddler safe while she was out, but he was forever getting up to mischief and the room was not designed for a baby. Once Karna dragged a stool to the window, climbed up, fell out and had to be retrieved screaming and bleeding from the road. Another time he managed to find matches and nearly set their bedding alight. The final straw came when Dolly rushed in at midday to give him his meal and found the door open and the room empty. It was two hours before she found Karna toddling along on the main road. She seized him from the path of a lorry in the nick of time and sat sobbing, hugging and shivering, while nine-month-old Karna, thrilled to be back in his mother’s arms, beamed and prattled triumphantly. It was half an hour before Dolly could find the strength to get up and go back to her employers, carrying her exuberant child.
Her mistress was waiting on the stairs, her expression thunderous. ‘You are incapable of even looking after that single child, let alone performing domestic duties at the same time. Every day there is some new reason for you to abandon your work,’ she shouted. ‘And today, when my husband came home there was no midday meal for him. Now he has returned to his office with an empty stomach and a great anger. Things have gone too far. I do not want you in my service. I will pay you what I owe and you must be out of that room by tonight, because I have another maid coming already.’ Dolly threw herself at the woman’s feet, wept, begged, promised, but it was no good.
‘You have made all these promises so many times already and you have never been able to keep them. It is the fault of that child. He is more trouble than three children put together and as long as you are burdened with him you will never find anyone to employ you.’ Baby Karna beamed and chuckled as though he was being complimented. Just having his mother holding him was all he ever wanted and if it meant that some woman shouted at them at the same time, what did it matter?
That night Dolly and Karna were back on the pavement again. In a way she felt relieved, for now, although they were poor once more, she could keep her child with her all the time. She became a rubbish-heap scavenger, specialising in flowers discarded from women’s hair or from thrown away garlands that had been used for honouring gods or guests. She would also find overblown blooms that gardeners had discarded, or flower arrangements that householders had considered past their prime. There were usually a few blooms that could be salvaged from any bunch or garland, no matter how wilted and damaged they at first might seem. Dolly would sort through her finds and roll the good ones into a moistened piece of cloth, to be taken home later and woven into new garlands, a little more bedraggled than the originals, but cheaper.
Dolly scavenged among men, women, children, pye dogs, crows, cows, all making a living out of the filth of the rubbish heaps. There were people who collected string, carefully garnering the lengths then rolling them into tidy balls. Others worked with old tins, others with pieces of cloth, others gathered the tinsel from garlands. There were people searching for tin, for plastic, for paper. And there were the really desperate who relied on the heaps for nourishment, fighting with the crows, dogs and rats to eat some rotten discarded end of a banana or samosa. There would be a sudden scramble because a green coconut shell had been unearthed with a little flesh still adhering or someone had come upon a thrown out bread loaf. The little desi cows seemed to be the only creatures to thrive upon the heaps. They were plump and had shining coats as though old newspapers, in which greasy food had been wrapped, provided a better diet than all the care and scientific feeding that Arjuna’s father gave to his pure-bred Jersey herd. Pandu’s Jerseys would never look as fit at the little cows of Cal. The cows were rented from their owners by people in the bustees, who fed and milked them and used their dung for fuel. They were let loose all day to forage on the rubbish heaps or among the shops where shopkeepers and passers-by would give them fruit or a sweetmeat. In the evening the animals returned to the bustee for hot bran and jaggery.
The rubbish heaps, breathing out powerful odours of rot and gas, were cleared away a couple of times a year. The raw rubbish was carted in lorries to the wet lands on the outskirts of the town and there dumped on damp land where it acted as a fertiliser for fields of vegetables. Among the hectares and hectares of still stinking debris grew the largest whitest cauliflowers, enormous aubergines, cabbages nearly two feet wide and the best ladies’ fingers in the whole of Bengal.
A new British Deputy Commissioner found one such stinking heap toppling near the High Commission and contacted the council, complaining of the health hazard, the smell and the flies and requested it be removed regularly, but was told there were insufficient funds. In the end he offered to pay for it himself, but this generous offer was greeted with fury by members of the ragpickers’ union. They marched in vast and tattered numbers round and round the residency shouting that they were about to be deprived of their living until he was forced to withdraw his offer and had to continue to live in the proximity of the heap. Sometimes these heaps would grow to ten, fifteen feet high then suddenly topple. Several ragpickers had been killed or badly injured by being buried under a collapsing heap of rubbish.
In the evening Dolly would bathe Karna ferociously under the ruptured pipe till she had rubbed away every trace of stink and rot. To Karna’s mother the sight of her frail son, shining with water in a muddy puddle, was the best sight of her whole day. When he was clean she would seat him on the ground and serve him whatever food she had managed to scrounge, for he was, after all, the man of the house. Sometimes she would manage to get enough fuel together to brew up a tiny fire on the pavement and cook her little man a hot meal of rice and lentils and on very good days even give him a spoonful of achaar to go with it. She always waited till Karna had finished before eating anything herself and as his appetite increased there would be very little left over for her. Often nothing.
When he was two she looked round and could not see him. She ran wildly up and down the road screaming and found him at last tugging at passing people’s clothes, patting his stomach and lisping, ‘No Mama, No Papa, very hungry,’ copying a bigger beggar girl called Laika.
Dolly was furious. ‘How dare you. We are not beggars. We still have our dignity.’ But the moment her back was turned he was down in the street again, and the money he gave her was welcome. She could not deny that. But there came a day when she could not find Karna anywhere. She went to all the places where he might be, till someone told her he had seen Karna being carried away by a foreign lady.
‘Which way did she go?’ asked the weeping Dolly. ‘Where did she take him?’
People pointed this way and that. Someone told her, ‘The kid was screaming.’ Dolly ran even faster and felt despair. She asked everyone she met, ‘Have you seen my little boy? He’s got golden eyes and a foreign lady has taken him.’ Dolly kept running madly and shouting, ‘Karna, Karna, Karna.’ The idea even came to her as she ran that, though she longed for her child so dreadfully, he would be better off with this foreign lady who would be able to give him good food, nice clothes and a proper education. But all the same she could not stop hunting for Karna. Perhaps when she found the lady, she might agree to let her take Karna away.
She