River Town Chronicles Read online

  After we finished our tea, Ram Swarup took Pat and I on the grand tour of our new home. The single room of our house, where we had been sitting, was about twenty feet by thirty feet. Behind this room was the small courtyard filled with rubble and a hand pump to draw water from a well. Off to one side was a small shelter with a cabinet built into the wall. This would be our kitchen. On the other side of the courtyard was a small brick enclosure. Ram Swarup said this was the bathroom. I opened the door. It was a bathroom without a bathtub, without a sink, without running water or electricity. And, it was a bathroom without a toilet! There was just a shallow drain running along the cement floor and out into an alleyway. I could only imagine what was going through Pat’s mind at this time.

  On the other side of the courtyard was a small passage way that led to the area occupied by Ram Swarup and his family. I followed Ram Sarup through the doorway into three small rooms. In one room were charpois for sleeping. Another room was used for storage and the third room was a small kitchen area with a chula (a small earthen cook stove) on the floor where bhabhi prepared the family’s meals. Ram Swarup said we would share the courtyard. “Oh, and watch out for the monkeys. They are very clever.” “Monkeys?” I asked. “Yes. They like to terrorize the children.” I looked around, wondering if there were still more inhabitants I didn’t know about. “Up there. On the rooftop. You’ll meet them soon.”

  I left Ram Swarup and returned to our room, where Pat had begun to unpack our bags. She was hanging clothes on the pegs that stuck out from the wall and rearranging the remaining items in the suitcases. She decided to use the suitcases as chests of drawers. I unwound the twine from the top of the gunny sack and began to remove the items. First the blankets, then the sheets and pillows and the small kerosene stove and a few pots and pans. Finally, I pulled out two thin cotton mattresses and threw the empty sack in a corner of the room. “That’s all? That’s all we have to live with in this place for a year?” Pat asked incredulously. Her hands were on her hips again, surveying the meager items I had pulled out of the sack. “A homeless person living under a bridge would have more possessions than this.” I put the cotton mattresses, sheets and blankets on the two charpois in the middle of the room. Maybe Ram Swarup would be able to find three more charpois in the morning. Pat and I sat down on the two chairs with the crushed bottoms and Tim, Brian and Lori sat on the charpois. Pat pulled out some sandwiches and fruit she brought from Fonseca’s and we ate our first meal in River Town. It was clear that the next few days would be difficult. What would we eat and drink, and where would we get it? And the bathroom? How did that work? There was no toilet, no sink, no water, no light. Only a brick shed with a drain running along the cement floor and out into the alleyway. “You know,” Pat said, “I think that taxi driver in Delhi was right. We won’t like this place.”

  It started to rain again. At first it was just a light drizzle and then suddenly it poured down in torrents. A small stream of water trickled down one corner of the room and splashed onto the floor. A bare wire with a light bulb attached at the end and hanging from the ceiling began to sputter and spark. We were too tired to care. We finished our meager meal, put the three kids on one of the charpois and Pat and I got on the other charpoi and pulled the sheet and blanket over our heads.

  BANANAS AND MILK

  WHEN WE AWOKE the next morning, there was a gaggle of small children peering through the iron bars of our windows. The word was out that there were strangers in town. Bhabhi shooed them away and Mohan brought us cups of hot tea. We still needed food to eat, so as soon as the rain let up a little, I walked out the door of our new home in the bazaar and made my way up the lane to the chowk (center of the bazaar). I bought a kilo of oranges and a half kilo of bananas. I bought some vegetables and some flour, rice and sugar. I even found a small shop that had a few loaves of double roti (sliced bread). I looked for eggs, but couldn’t find any in the bazaar. And meat was nowhere to be found. I filled a tin with kerosene and returned to the house with my meager bag of food and was immediately set upon by Mohan, who extracted each item from my bag. “Kitnaa paisa?” (How much?) he demanded, holding up a bunch of bananas with the seriousness of a homicide detective deep into a murder investigation. I told him they cost a couple of rupees. “Bahut ziyada” (way too much), he replied. Mohan proceeded to examine each item in the bag, inspecting it for quality and price. “You ought to return all of these items to the bazaar and demand your money back.” I was discovering that no detail was too small to escape the attention of Mohan. After all, his family were banias, members of a merchant caste and the merchants had traditionally been a powerful force in River Town. But at the moment, my real concern was that we were hungry and had to survive on the few things I had brought from the bazaar. I was not about to return any of them.

  As soon as Mohan had completed his investigation and returned to his house on the other side of the courtyard, Pat lit the kerosene stove and boiled the buffalo milk that bhabhi had brought over in a brass pot. She sliced up the bananas and poured the hot milk over them and gave each of us a slice of bread toasted over the kerosene burner. The children devoured the bananas and toast and disappeared into the courtyard to play with Mohan, Mena and Paphu. “What are we going to do for lunch and dinner?” Pat asked. “We can’t eat bananas and milk three times a day.”

  For lunch, we had bananas and milk. Brian began to cry and we tried to get him to take a nap on the charpoi, but that only made him cry more. Suddenly, bhabhi stuck her head in the doorway and, seeing Brian, rushed to his side. She picked him up in her arms and began to speak softly in his ear. Ram Swarup hurried in and announced, “It’s the bananas and milk. They shouldn’t be eaten together. It has made Brian (bu-rai-yan) sick.” Great, I thought. Now we will starve to death for sure. Brian looked over bhabhi’s shoulder at us and stopped crying. He looked perfectly happy in bhabhi’s arms. He had found a co-conspirator, an enabler, someone to take his side. Bhabhi carried Brian into her cooking area next door to the courtyard, and sat him down next to her. She continued to speak to him in Hindi while she began grinding spices and making preparations for the evening meal, still many hours away. Tim had wandered out front, where the mochi sat repairing shoes and Lori raced around the courtyard chasing Meena and Paphu. Pat and I sat down feeling our familiar ways slipping away from us. “Should we try bananas and milk for dinner?” I asked. “No. I’m making an Indian meal tonight. Chapattis and vegetables. It will be good,” Pat replied.

  That evening, she prepared vegetables and made chapatti dough from the flour I had bought in the bazaar. She lit the kerosene burner and cooked the vegetables, then rolled out the dough and began to slap it back and forth into the rough shape and thickness of a chapatti. Saroj and Madhu watched every move from the edge of the kitchen, as Pat struggled to make the chapatti puff up on the talwa (a shallow, saucer shaped iron pan). “Nahin, nahin, that’s not the way to do it.” Saroj rushed over and picked up a ball of dough and rolled it out, slapped it between her hands and placed it on the hot pan. She gently pressed it with her fingers and the flat bread puffed up in the middle and around the edges. She took it off the pan and rolled out another chapatti and repeated the process. “And those vegetables, you haven’t prepared them properly,” Madhu scolded. Pat looked crestfallen. She was a grown woman with a husband and three children being chastised by two teenage girls for her poor domestic skills. It took only one day to expose us as incompetent, bumbling Americans. Pat couldn’t cook, I didn’t know where to find food or what to pay for it in the bazaar, and neither of us knew that bananas and milk, taken together, would make you sick. How were we to know any of these things? We were being swept up in a rip tide of local culture. What would be next? That we needed toilet training? Actually, I hadn’t yet figured out that whole bathroom thing. It was possible that some kind of training would be necessary.

  KAGA THE CROW

  WE SOON MANAGED TO MASTER the mysteries of the “bathroom” (the brick room without a toil
et or running water located next to the courtyard). It required a skillful act of squatting over the drain while retaining one’s balance in order to avoid falling into the drain. And I had managed to find a stash of toilet paper hidden behind some canned goods in a Sikh gentleman’s shop in the bazaar. The final piece of this puzzle was solved one morning when I heard a commotion at the door that led out into a narrow alleyway near the bathroom. There was a loud banging noise on the door. “Kholo. Darwaza kholo” (open, open the door), followed by a stream of profanity hurled from the other side of the door. I raced to open the door and was confronted by a middle-aged, pock-faced woman with a bunch of reeds fastened together at one end to make a broom about three feet long. She held the broom in one hand and balanced a flat basket on her hip. She looked me square in the eyes, unafraid, challenging, as if she possessed some deep, hidden powers. She was barefoot and wore a dirty kamiz (shirt) that hung down below her knees. Her shalwar (baggy pants) was rolled up to her knees and her dupatta (head scarf) was draped loosely over her matted, tangled hair. For a moment neither of us moved. “Who are you?” I asked. “Kaga” (crow), she replied. “I’m your sweeper.” She said it in a manner that implied she was attached to me in a permanent manner, like an arm or a leg. There would be no getting rid of her.

  Kaga jabbed her broom at me, narrowly missing my shoulder and I jumped aside letting her pass into the courtyard. Her words were rough and demanding: “Get me some water from the pump. Get out of my way. Hurry up, I don’t have all day.” Kaga spotted Pat and the children inside the house and cautiously moved toward the door with her broom raised as if she were about to take a swipe at some invisible flying object. She hesitated at the door and poked her head inside. Bhabhi had heard the commotion and rushed out from the other side of the courtyard. “Get away from there,” bhabhi shouted. “Go. Go do your work.” Kaga turned toward bhabhi with her broom still raised, then bent over and began to sweep the courtyard, mumbling something under her breath. Bhabhi watched from a safe distance, a broom length away. Kaga entered the brick bathroom and cleaned out the drain, threw a pail of water inside and swept it out into the drain in the alleyway. Then she disappeared, the basket full of waste gracefully balanced on her head. Bhabhi slammed the door shut behind Kaga. “Be careful with her. She is very clever and will try to take advantage of you. She’s dirty, a woman of the sweeper caste. Don’t let her pump water from the well. Don’t let her touch anything.”

  Kaga was now attached to us and would make her daily appearance, banging at our door each morning for the duration of our stay in River Town. She would learn the intimate details of our lives from the garbage and waste we left behind in the brick “bathroom.” From these findings, she would divine advice on how to live our lives and would suggest medicinal cures when she detected illness. She roamed the courtyard as if she owned it, shouting out insults that made bhabhi grab her ears in horror. Kaga was a vaudeville act and we were her captive audience. With her broom in hand and basket poised on her hip she struck fear in everyone, regardless of caste or nationality. She swore, commanded, and threatened us all with no fear of losing status because she had no status to lose. She was a sweeper, at the bottom of the caste hierarchy and she was as much a part of our existence as the sky above and the earth below.

  MERCHANT NEIGHBORHOODS

  BEFORE LONG, we settled into our daily routines. Pat ground spices and perfected her chapatti making skills under the watchful eyes of Madhu and Saroj. I was learning the art of bargaining in the bazaar and dealing with Mohan’s close examination of the results. Tim squatted on his haunches out front, next to the mochi, keeping an eye on the sweet shop across the lane and studying the passersby, relating to us at the end of each day how many thieves and hooligans the two of them had seen pass by our gate. Brian shuffled off each morning to take his place in bhabhi’s kitchen, sitting cross legged like a little buddha, stuffing himself with chapattis and listening to bhabhi ramble on to him in Hindi. And Lori reveled in playing marbles with Meena and Paphu, unconcerned with the fact that she was losing her best marbles, the big, brightly colored ones, to their mastery at knocking her marbles clear out of the circle.

  I was anxious to get on with my ethnographic study of River Town and engaged Roshan, a merchant’s son, to show me around the merchant neighborhoods. The most significant thing I discovered about the merchants was the network of kinship that existed among them and the way this was reflected in the layout of their neighborhoods. The neighborhoods were basically a maze of narrow alleyways where the residents traced their descent back through the male line (the common patrilineal descent pattern found in northern India). Each of the neighborhoods was associated with a particular event from the past that involved a member of a particular kin group and from which the group derived its name. These named kin groups, called byongs in the local dialect, made up the core of the different merchant neighborhoods and served as a mechanism for establishing marriage and business relationships between them. Among the names of the neighborhoods were the lathmaron ki (stick beaters), peeth mosni (stomach pilferers), chuchi pinon ki (breast suckers), and choriliyan (taken by a thief). The byongs served to identify the kinship affiliation of individual merchants and to establish the historical and current relationships among them. It was a kind of accounting system (appropriate, I suppose, for merchants) that connected the merchants from the different neighborhoods, ultimately linking them together. For example, if a girl from the lathmars had ever married in the past a boy from the peeth mosni then any future marriages between the two byongs would follow the same pattern; lathmar girl with peeth mosni boy and so on among the different byongs in an asymetrical (circular) manner.

  As Roshan and I made our way around the narrow lanes of the merchant neighborhoods, I was struck by the fortress like structure of the houses, with iron bars over shuttered openings and heavy, padlocked doors. Some of the houses were decorated with shiny mirrors embedded in the walls and ornate paintings of Rama and Sita on the shutters. What went on behind these doors was not visible to the public. The world of women and family life that took place within these neighborhoods and behind these doors was shut away from the world of the bazaar. The only evidence of life in the lanes were the young children scurrying about and the occasional stray dog that drew my careful scrutiny.

  We finally emerged from the merchant neighborhoods and I left Roshan and turned towards home. Kaga passed me on the street with a basket of human waste perched gracefully on her head. Her dupatta covered her face but I could see that her eyes recognized me and I saw her twitch her broom at me (was this a greeting or a threat?) What a contrast, I thought, to the high caste merchant women secluded behind the doors of their neighborhoods for no one to see. Kaga was a contradiction with her haughty gait and fearless manner shamelessly coupled with a basket of excrement piled on top of her head. These were the two extremes of life in River Town; high caste and low caste, purity and pollution, restraint and freedom.

  MONSOON RAINS

  THE MONSOON RAINS had tempered the heat of summer somewhat. The rains arrived sporadically now, often popping up in the afternoon, and providing welcome relief. But they also brought flooding and chaos in the streets, as passersby waded through a torrent of debris swirling down the lanes.

  Towards the end of the monsoon season, the rain poured down so hard that our roof began to leak. Outside, the electric line leading to a light bulb hanging in our entrance way began to spark. I watched as the sparks spread up the line to the bulb and shorted out all the lights in our house, creating a spectacular display of fireworks. We lit candles and placed empty buckets under the leaks in the ceiling. During the night, we moved our charpois from place to place trying to stay ahead of the streams of water that chased us around the room.

  The next morning, I asked Ram Swarup if there was someone who could fix the roof. “Not until it stops raining,” he replied. I asked him when he thought that might be. “Bhagwan jaane” (God knows), he answered.

 
We huddled together inside the house, even though it seemed at times that we couldn’t be any more miserable if we just stood outside in the rain. The rain continued the next day. And the next. Still no lights and the roof continued to leak like a sieve. We were all cranky and short tempered by the third day of steady rain. It was almost a welcome relief to hear Kaga beating her broom on the door in the mornings, demanding to be let in. She swished her broom around in puddles of water and shouted obscenities, probably hoping to confront bhabhi. But even bhabhi couldn’t be moved to confront Kaga in the pouring rain. It was as if Kaga was the only person alive in the world these days.

  The monsoon rains finally subsided and I was able to get some needed supplies from the bazaar. When I returned home, a troop of monkeys scampered overhead, one of them swinging Tarzan style just above my head. Pat was lying on the charpoi and not feeling well. I asked her if anyone had been by to fix the roof. “Yeah, a guy dumped a cart load of buffalo manure out front and said he would plaster the roof with it. Ram Swarup said that will fix the leaks when it dries up.” Ay Bhagwan. An eco-friendly solution for a leaky roof.

  THE OTHER SIDE OF RIVER TOWN

  AFTER THE MONSOON RAINS SUBSIDED, I set out with Chamu, the mochi, to explore the other areas of River Town, beyond the bazaars and merchant neighborhoods. I had seen brief glimpses of the mud huts and lean-tos that flanked the four corners of the town but knew nothing about the inhabitants who lived there.