‘We will have to go to the village and live with your parents,’ wept Dolly.
Adhiratha shivered at the idea. ‘They have ten other children and are trying so desperately to raise enough money for the dowries so that my two sisters can marry. If there is no work in the city there is certainly none in the village. How can we possibly inflict ourselves upon them?’ He felt sick with shame.
Next day Dolly went back to the company where she and Adhiratha had once been so happy. She went from bungalow to bungalow offering to do the washing for the families there. At the end of the day she had the promise of five households of washing.
She came home and told him, saying, ‘We will have to buy a charcoal steam iron.’
Adhiratha was aghast.
‘Suggest something else then,’ said Dolly. ‘At least I will be able to make just enough so that we have shelter and do not starve.’ She added with deepening bitterness, ‘Now I understand why Ma Durga never gave us a child. Because she knew we would not be able to afford to give it a decent life.’
Adhiratha held her tight against him, hugged and hugged her till her miserable shivering stopped.
Later he said, ‘We haven’t even got running water. How are you going to wash all these clothes?’
‘In the river. Like the other dhobis,’ said Dolly firmly.
‘Oh God.’ Adhiratha groaned and put his hands over his eyes. ‘But you don’t know anything about being a dhobi.’
‘Don’t know anything?’ she mocked. ‘Darling husband, who has been washing your clothes these last three years, since your mother stopped doing them? Have you ever complained? Weren’t your collars and cuffs always crisp with starch? Didn’t I always get the last grimy traces off them? Didn’t I starch your uniforms and dhotis with boiled rice water till they were so stiff they could have stood up on their own? How can you say I don’t know how to be a dhobi?’
‘But that was different,’ said Adhiratha. ‘In the bungalow we had hot running water from the tap. A clothesline in the garden. Electricity for the iron. Here you have none of those things.’ In the bustee room the only light was from oil lamps and lanterns. Water came from a ruptured pipe along the road.
But Dolly was undaunted. ‘There is no other way. I will manage.’
She washed endless piles of clothes, all day long, standing ankle-deep in the shallow part of the river, among a line of other dhobis. Daily at dawn she would be at the riverside wetting the garments, rubbing them with strong yellow soap, then beating them against a stone already rubbed smooth and shiny by hundreds, perhaps thousands of years of dhobi wear. From the time the sun rose until it sunk again Dolly beat the washing then laid it to dry on the riverbank. At night, carrying the vast heap of dry, clean washing on her head, she would return home. There she would prepare the evening meal for her husband and herself on a chula, a stove made in a pierced bucket that had been lined with mud and which burned the cow-dung fuel that Adhiratha collected and dried each day. Their morning meal was only rice water from the previous night’s cooking.
During the weeks that followed Adhiratha tried to help Dolly in every way he could. He struggled behind her carrying the heaps of dirty clothes. Went round the bungalows collecting the washing in a basket. Even tried to assist his wife in beating the clothes against the stones. In the end she told him, ‘It is not your dharma to be a dhobi. Try to find some work that is more suited to you.’
‘I am no good at it, you mean,’ he said humbly.
‘That is what I mean,’ she laughed.
Adhiratha found a job at last. Pulling a rickshaw.
It was Dolly’s turn to be aghast. ‘You are to become a rickshaw wallah? I am to be the wife of a rickshaw wallah?’
‘Well, I am the husband of a dhobi woman,’ he laughed. ‘We are coming down in the world. That is all.’ Then he gave her a hug and said, ‘We have still got each other. We are still young. Who knows what will turn up.’ He picked up her hand, and caressed it. It was wrinkled like the hand of a dead person from so much immersion in water.
‘We would be better off if we had never had the good period in the company compound,’ she thought. Their present situation, a home surrounded by stinking drains and a single daily meal of rice and dhall, would have been easier to bear, she thought, if she had not experienced those happy days in the leafy compound, where they ate chingri and hilsa and bathed their rice in ghee.
That year, on the first day of the Durga Puja, as Dolly passed the company shrine on her way to collect the dirty washing, she turned her head the other way. And hoped the goddess noticed and felt ashamed, for by this time Dolly and Adhiratha had been married for five years and, in spite of all her prayers, there was still no child. In fact Adhiratha had begun to say that it would be a disaster if Dolly became pregnant now.
Dolly was tempted not to offer homage to the goddess that year. She wanted to punish Durga who had given her a happy life for a very short time, so as to be able to take it away and let Dolly see what she was missing.
But all the same, after she had gone round all the houses, and her basket was full, she made her way back to the shrine.
She had gone without her meal the previous evening and bought a small milk sweet with the money she had saved. As she unwrapped this, her stomach let out a rumble of hunger. She became seized with a strong temptation to eat the sweet instead of giving it to a goddess who was never going to listen to her prayer. All the same she put the sweet down on its peepul leaf and prostrating herself, begged aloud, ‘Oh Mother Durga hear my prayer and make me a mother too.’ She did not mention Adhiratha’s eyes. Perhaps she had been presumptuous, the last four years, in asking the goddess for two favours at once.
She reached the river late because of her visit to the goddess. The other dhobis were already laying their clothes out on the rocks to dry.
Dolly waded out into the water and, wetting the first of her sheets, rubbed the harsh yellow soap over it. All afternoon, up to her thighs in water, she beat the cloth against the smooth rocks.
‘You had better hurry,’ said the other dhobis in the evening, as they folded their already dried clothes and stacked them in the baskets. ‘They will be bringing the Durga down here for immersion soon and you mustn’t still be in the water.’ Dolly had to bite back tears remembering the previous years when she had been celebrating the company puja with her husband. Now she was not even allowed to stand in the water when the goddess came.
Frantically Dolly worked but the pile was huge and the clothes filthy. By the time the sun began to set the other dhobis were leaving and she had still not finished.
She would have to take the wet washing home, ten times as heavy, to dry in the tiny apartment.
She heard the shouts. People were yelling, ‘Oi, Ma, get out of the water. The goddess is coming.’
She looked up and saw the procession approaching. Men in fresh white carrying the gigantic figure of Durga on a palanquin on their shoulders. Not Adhiratha this year. Rickshaw wallahs don’t carry the goddess.
They were coming to this part of the river to immerse the Durga.
‘Out of the water, out, out,’ they cried as they approached. To immerse the goddess in water polluted by an untouchable dhobi woman would be a terrible sacrilege.
Desperately Dolly began to gather up her pile of washing, pulling still wet sheets and saris, shirts and pajamas out of the water, hurrying because the Devi was very close.
Something bumped her knee as she scrabbled up her wet washing.
It was a hand of last year’s Durga, huge, the arms of clay long since melted away. It lay palm up, its beautiful fingers curled round something sharply gleaming. Dolly bent to take a closer look and felt amazed that the nail polish should still be intact after so long in the water, thrilled because