VICTORIA GLENDINNING
ED – I’M SENDING you the draft of my report as an attachment to this message. Some useful things in it for us but honestly, like we were saying, these international conferences don’t really deliver. Best not tell Her Upstairs though or we’ll never get sent on another. Do what tweaking you want on the report and come back to me. Wish I’d been going back to Dhaka like you instead of flying straight home tomorrow. I really appreciated our late-night talks. Funny how you only get to know someone properly when you’re away from the usual context. I ended up feeling a bit of an anorak though. Some of the things you said, like ‘risk-averse’, and a romantic, etc. etc. Oh well. M.
Thanks very much, great idea. If it’s really all right with you and the office, that’s exactly what I’ll do. It does seem stupid to be in Calcutta, I mean Kolkata, for the first time in my life, and to leave having seen virtually nothing but the inside of the Oberoi and the Tollygunge Club. I’ve got masses of leave owing, and there’s nothing in my diary for the next two or three weeks that can’t be rescheduled. I’ll get in touch with Marcus to sort it soonest. Presumably you won’t be back in London anyway until next Monday. Have you had time to look at my draft? I’m just off to meet old Kumar for a drink at Petercat on Park Street. Great being a free man! M.
God, Ed, I am in the shit with Charlotte. We were meant to be going up to see her parents in Durham next weekend, a big deal. I’d no idea she would mind so much. I feel really bad about it. I’ll be emailing her every day, and I’ve told a slight lie. I said I had to stay on to check local statistics for the report, so when you see her, will you back me up? I’ve even looked out some numbers from our briefing papers to impress her. Bet you never read them properly. I hadn’t till now. Did you know there were 13 million people in this city? And 80 million in West Bengal? And that about a quarter of the babies under three are malnourished? Well, Charlotte does now. M.
Re report: No, Ed, I don’t think that ‘exuberant’ would be better than ‘lively’ on page 13, para 3. I’d have written ‘exuberant’ if I did. But you’re probably right about cutting the very last para. Got a bit carried away. I’m feeling pretty lively, or exuberant, right now. This morning I moved out of the Oberoi – it’s almost empty except for a few grey-faced men in suits doing business with locals who look like they could run rings round them. And the grey men’s fat white wives reading magazines round the pool. I’ll miss the spaciousness and getting my clothes laundered, and oh God the air conditioning. Where I am now, I’m back in the 1950s. It’s just off Sudder Street, not so far from the Oberoi, but another world. Luckily there’s an Internet shack just along the street, which is where I’m writing this.
There’s a skinny little girl who hangs around just outside the overgrown kind of garden in front of my guesthouse. At least I suppose she’s a little girl. She’s completely bald. She’s got on a raggy yellow dress that’s much too big for her. When I go out, she walks along beside me chattering, and holds my hand. I tell her to ‘go home’, like one would to a dog, and she does, or at least she goes to the guesthouse, she’s always there again when I get back. She looks about five, but I suppose she could be nine or ten. M.
Yes, Marcus says he can reschedule the meetings, so I’m in the clear. How do I know the sizes of children? My sister has five kids! There are all these miniature humans like stick-insects on the streets here, talking a blue streak, me of course not understanding a word, and begging very professionally. They aren’t any taller than a three-year-old back home, and half the weight. Kumar says he will show me the red-light district this evening. That should be really interesting. I am SO HOT. The shower here is just a dribble. Let me know what Her Upstairs says about the report. M.
That’s all right then. I’ll do a bit more work on the transportation section if she really thinks that’s necessary. I’m quite glad in a way because I can tell Charlotte that too, and it’s not a lie. Today I decided to buy a lungi to wear ‘at home’. Kumar says it’s much the coolest, and everyone on the street wears them. The poor people, that is. Like the lunghis they all wear in Dhaka. I went into one or two shops that sold men’s clothes and they just looked at me pityingly and shook their heads. So I went to the New Market. It doesn’t look very new. An enormous crowded warren of stalls and shacks and what you might call ‘units’, all on different levels. Still didn’t see any lungis. A smartish man with a briefcase asked me in good English what I was looking for. He was very friendly. He said his brother sold the best lungis in Kolkata, and just round the corner. We walked for miles, twisting and turning through the market. I’d never find his brother’s shop again. Anyway I bought two lungis. They turn out to be just strips of checked cotton, with raw edges and not stitched down the side into a sort of tube like Kumar’s, which is the only way to be sure you’re decent. So I’m not much better off till I find someone to stitch them for me. M.
No Ed, I know I didn’t tell you anything about it. But I will since you say you’re interested, ‘sociologically’. Duh! But here goes. We took a cab for part of the way. It would have been quicker to walk, the traffic jams are terminal. Then on our feet we turned into a narrow unmade street, and a smaller street off that. No, not a street at all, a passage. Squalid. The buildings each side decrepit. Women squatting against the walls all the way down on both sides. Some pretty, some ugly, some thin, some fat, all ages. Some of them had silky saris and lots of glittery jewellery, some didn’t. There were little kids running around. I didn’t see any men. When we walked down the narrow space between the women they smiled up at us, or most of them did. I felt very self-conscious – and very interested. Near the end of the alley Kumar stopped outside a doorway and said he had a good friend in that house, she was sick, would I like to meet her? I chickened out and said, perhaps another time. Is this the sort of thing you want to know? M.
OK so I’ll keep you posted. We agreed we could tell each other anything. The alley, since you ask, is called Seth Bagan, and it’s off Nandy Mullick Lane. There are other alleys just like it round there. You’re right, it’s certainly not for ‘rich white men’, but then there’s very little high-end trade here apparently. Kolkata is not a sex-tourist destination. I’d guess there are some fancy callgirls in apartments somewhere for really wealthy locals. But how should I know. M.
Today I saw the worst things I have ever seen. I’ve been around, I’ve roughed it, I know about slums, but being in there is different. It changes you. Kumar took me back to the alley to see his sick friend. We took off our shoes at the entrance. The inside of the house is a dark, filthy, cramped ruin all on different levels, with the women and their families sort of camping in the rubble. The sick girl was sitting on the stone floor in the ‘kitchen’, which doesn’t have any furniture or anything to cook on, nor a roof. What can it be like when the rains come? She can’t walk because she has a sore on her leg – a round patch of flesh, or ex-flesh, about four inches across, rotted right down to the bone. A crater. She was putting some powder into it that someone from a clinic had given her. Kumar interpreted for us. They don’t say ‘AIDS’, they call it ‘the illness’. This girl doesn’t know, or doesn’t want to know, that she has the illness, though she has been sick a long time. She told me the sore was an insect bite. She’s very young. She was smoking a cigarette and had three more laid out in a row on the ground in front of her. I left her my packet. M.
Stayed in most of today on my rock-hard bed, sweating buckets, smoking, scratching my bites, and reading P.G. Wodehouse. I liked your story about Marcus’s run-in with Her Upstairs; from here she seems as surreal as Aunt Agatha in my P.G. Wodehouse. Yesterday after that visit I went on my own back to the Oberoi, which was cool and calm and grandiose as ever, and sent my emails to you and Charlotte in comfort from the Business Centre there, and then had a curry, and two Kingfishers, and about a litre of watermelon juice. I guess that’s why my stomach is upset today. Watermelon juice is good for you. It’s just that I had too much. Kolkata does not do moderation. It’s an all or nothing place.
In fact I can’t get over the extreme contrasts. How can a luxury hotel like the Oberoi operate as it does within a mile or two of those alleys? Or within a few steps of the crowds and stalls and beggars you fall over immediately you step outside it? There were old messages for you and me at the desk – they must have come the day you left, I’d never checked – from that rather impressive chap – Mr Ahmad – who we talked to for a long time at the reception at Tagore House, do you remember. It’s an invitation to drinks at his house – for tomorrow, so I might as well go. M.
I’ve had another bout of luxury. You would have loved it. The Ahmads live in an apartment block behind security gates with guards, and you can’t move without a white-gloved servant popping up to open doors etc. Mrs A very welcoming, and attractive. Smashing modern apartment, high ceilings, all white, modern art on the walls, books, rugby memorabilia. He used to play at national level. Lots of whisky, and masses of delicious bits to eat passed around by the white-gloved ones. I think I took too many, I made them my dinner. There was an English couple there as well, she’s with the British Council and he does something at the university. We talked about the cricket. The man had known a man, he said, called Ajay Chokrabarty, who actually turned down an offer to go and study cricket in England. Then we spoke about rugby, and about restoration of the colonial architecture, and about Harry Potter. Well, it certainly made a change of scene. They were very nice indeed and insisted on having me wafted back to the guesthouse with their car and driver.
No I haven’t told Charlotte about the girl with the illness. I might, some time. But not now. M.
I now know where my little bald girlfriend lives. She lives on the pavement. During the day there are cardboard boxes and rolls of cloth and pans piled up against the walls of the buildings opposite the guesthouse. Staking claims. In the evening the families come back to their personal spaces. Last night coming home late, picking my way through the encampments, I saw her in her yellow dress stretched out on the pavement on her back fast asleep with three other kids, just a couple of feet from the screeches and honks and fumes – the traffic is non-stop. There were grown-ups huddled up near them. It may sound bad to you, but I can tell you that the way things are for children here I’m just glad that she has a family. I pass street children lying in piles in doorways, the big ones cuddling the little ones. What I really don’t like, at night, are the packs of starving scabby dogs. Scary. M. Ed, I’ve been back to that house and met someone else. Too long to tell you in an email, I’ll write an attachment, you needn’t even open it if you’re busy. It’s written as much for me as for you, if you can understand that. M.
Attachment:
This afternoon I went with Kumar back to the house where the girl with the illness lives, only this time we went upstairs. The stairs are rickety rotting wood, and running wet even though it hasn’t rained. It was dark, or seemed dark after the glare outside, and I kept slipping on the slimy steps, and I kicked over a tin can full of water. Someone cried out and came up behind me to put it back, it must be to catch the leak from a drain or a spring, there is no water on tap in the house. The smell is bad, as is the heat and airlessness, but I am kind of used to all that now and it doesn’t bother me. On the way up I got sideways glimpses through open doorways into small dark spaces. Each one is home to some woman and sometimes to children too. Like living in a lightless, airless cupboard. In one of them she was just lighting a paraffin lamp. It flared up and I saw her smiling face and a man’s legs sprawling from off a bed. There were two pairs of children’s sandals on the stairs, neatly lined up.
Kumar had told me as we were coming along that Jharna has the illness and has been very sick and hasn’t been able to work for a while. She is in remission at the moment. He speaks of her with respect. He said he thought she would interest me, and that I could ask her anything I liked.
I didn’t know what to expect.
We took off our shoes. We did namaste. Her room is tiny, a cell, but at least it has a bit of natural light from a small high window with no glass in it. No door, just a curtain. The only furniture is her bed, and that’s just a shelf covered with cloths and cushions. There wouldn’t be room for anything else. Her clothes and cloths are hanging from hooks on the scabby walls. A holy Hindu picture, a coloured print, pinned up near the window, curling at the edges. Jharna was sitting on the bed, doing nothing, her back straight, her legs tucked under her, her little brown feet just showing. She was wearing an orange and yellow cotton sari and long earrings. Her hair is neatly combed and twisted back off her face. She is thin and small, and beautiful. Difficult to tell her age. Not that young – about 28? She is very still, very serene. I think she was only fairly pleased to see Kumar.
Kumar squatted on the floor and they insisted that I sit up on the bed beside her in the place of honour. I am so big and clumsy, I couldn’t tuck my legs up properly, and one dangling foot kicked over her cooking pans. She keeps then stacked in a pile on the floor at my end of the bed. It made a frightful clanging and crashing, very embarrassing.
You’d think it would be even more embarrassing to ask her about herself, but it wasn’t, though it was a bit slow, because of the two-way translating. She comes from a village, and when she was still very young she was sent to live with an aunt here in Kolkata to work as a maid. Straight away the aunt put her to work going with men, taking the money for herself. Jharna ran away from the aunt, but in order to survive she had no choice other than going on working as a prostitute. She says no one will marry someone like her, prostitutes don’t get married. The best a woman can hope for is that a regular client will take a liking to her, protect her, maybe move in with her. That happened to Jharna – he stayed around for four years and then buggered off. Those were the best four years of her life, she said. She hopes for nothing now. Women like her – they work, they get the illness, they die. That’s what she said.
She shrugged, she smiled – such a smile. Although I understood nothing until Kumar translated, she said it all in an even, gentle voice, you could tell there was no self-pity or bitterness. Just acceptance. She was looking full at me with her great eyes, all the time. Then she called out to someone downstairs, and a young boy came up with three bottles of Coca Cola. I didn’t really want any but thought I shouldn’t reject her hospitality.
When we left I kicked the tin can again, and the water slopped all down the stairs. They were wet already anyway.
I think that Jharna is the most lovely and wonderful person I have ever met. I can’t stop thinking about her.
So you did read it.
No, Ed, I haven’t, I didn’t. Not because of the illness. Not because of Charlotte either. But because Jharna is worth more than just that.
Kumar is going to Chennai the day after tomorrow on a project for his firm. He’s pleased because his parents live in Chennai. I’m really going to miss him. M.
Today I went to the Indian Museum and had a good look at the Pali statues and all the Buddhas etc., in order to have something interesting to tell Charlotte apart from statistics. (Total population of India a thousand million. Mortality rate of children under five nearly 10 per cent.) And then went for a long walk on the Maidan to clear my head. For an hour, what with the green grass and Raj monuments, I could have been in Cheltenham, except that here people meet your eye and smile and want to get into conversation with you in English – a pair of law students, an old guy who has a brother in Birmingham, a middle-aged woman who turned out to be a journalist, and an intelligent boy of about eighteen who wanted a long, in-depth discussion about art. He gave me his mobile number and I might see him again. Then I went back to my foetid room and thought about Jharna. Maybe I can help her. Maybe she can help me, too, in spite of the life she’s led. There’s something spiritual about her. Spiritual. I’ve always thought that was the ultimate no-no word. A real giveaway. Crystals, and New Age crap. But there’s no other word for what I mean about her. It’s not the romantics who are the spiritual people, it’s those who have no illusions. Does that sound ridiculous? M.
No Ed, I am not going to make a fool of myself over Jharna. ‘Risk-averse’, remember? We went to see her again today. She’s obviously very intelligent as well as beautiful. I’m beginning to think Kumar was a client, who became a friend. But he’s not the man who stayed with her four years. She had a child with that man, Kumar says. That gave me a bit of a shock, though no reason why. Here’s another attachment, for when you have time. M.
Attachment:
Yesterday I spent a long time wandering about in Howrah station after Kumar’s train went. It covers a vast, murky acreage, and half of it seems derelict. It’s noisy and hot and crowded beyond belief, same as the streets. Whole families sitting around on the ground with bits of food in cloths and all their bundles and belongings. They fill in time by having a kip.
Kumar had told me about the platform children, and it wasn’t difficult to find them. They literally live and sleep on the station, in gangs. The thing is, that although they are filthy and ragged, they are really lively and look quite happy, and the big ones look after the little ones. They all cluster round you and pat and stroke you and hold your hands. Affectionate and wanting affection. (Wanting money and anything that you’ve got in your pockets, too.) The group I hung out with for a bit were all ages up to about fourteen. There are more boys than girls but the boss of this gang is a girl, weirdly pretty and graceful, like a gypsy princess or a dancer. One misshapen girl of about twelve was carrying a bare-bottomed baby. She called me Uncle and made me hold him – he stank, and he wasn’t very well, his eyes were crusted and his nose was running. It was her baby, it had been born on the station platform. I know this from two young European women – one English, one Dutch – who came along and gave out paper and crayons and began playing with the children and setting them to draw and colour. This was going very well until a jam-packed train came in – and then the children dropped everything and stormed the train. That’s how they live. They carry bags, push trolleys, and tear up and down the train scavenging for food, papers, bottles and anything at all left by the people getting off. It’s bad at night, the women said, because the police are brutal to the children, and obviously they are prey to every kind of danger and abuse. But it’s hard to get them to stay in the night shelter that’s provided – because they don’t like to be confined inside four walls, it seems unnatural to them. They are used to running wild, with no grown-ups in charge. There’s a Loreto convent school which runs a teaching programme for the platform children, though the teachers can’t make them attend – they call them the Rainbow Children, because they come and go. You’d say they were like little wild animals, except that there’s this human intelligence shining out of them. Plus something I can’t find the word for. Fearlessness, or spirit.
Then who should I run into but the clever boy I’d met on the Maidan – is that a coincidence, or what? I’m going to take him for a drink at the Tollygunge tomorrow. His name is Sunil.
I’m now getting up my courage to go and see Jharna, on my own.
Email not sent. Saved in ‘Drafts’ folder.
Well, now I am thoroughly churned up and even more obsessed. I passed a middle-aged man coming back up the alley on my way in. He looked seedy but self-important, like a civil servant. Couldn’t help wondering whether he had been with Jharna. She must be working, else how can she survive? The women sitting in the alley recognise me now. I suppose they think I am a ‘regular’.
The boy who brings the Coca Cola was in the doorway. I said, ‘Jharna?’ He shouted to someone inside the house, and a woman’s voice shouted back. He nodded at me, and I went up.
She was sitting up on the bed as usual, and I did namaste and sat beside her as usual. But of course it was hopeless. I looked at her and I talked to her. I told her how lovely she was. I told her about home, about England. I told her I’d like to take her away from that horrible house, back to England, and make her safe and well and happy. I said anything that came into my head knowing that she could not understand a word. That’s why I could say it. I held her hand and stroked it. She just looked at me, smiling, alert, like she was wondering what the next step was. With one hand she undid a button of my shirt, still smiling. I pushed her hand away. I wanted to get her to understand I’m not just another punter, that I am interested in the whole of her, the real her, and that I want to help her.
Except of course I am just the same as anyone else, I do want to fuck her. I want it more than anything in the world. I could scarcely get my breath when she touched me. But not yet, not now, not here.
Anyway suddenly this man came in, pushing the curtain aside, and stood foursquare in front of us. He had on a lungis and nothing else. He didn’t look at Jharna. He started talking at me in a vehement way, it sounded as if he was asking questions. I shrugged and opened my hands to show him I didn’t understand. He talked at me again, sounding angrier. Jharna just sat there, impassive, smiling slightly, maybe nervously. She pulled off an earring and put it back in her ear again. The man stood there with his arms folded. He wasn’t going to go away. I got some money out of my pocket and put 100 rupees down on the bed. Neither of them looked at it or touched it. I pushed past him and down the stairs. Something scuttled down in front of me. A rat.
Apart from the humiliation of this, I am baffled because I had understood that the working girls were controlled by older women, not by men. I’ll ask Sunil about it tomorrow. He’s young but he knows his way around. M.
Hi, Ed. Remember that afternoon at the Tollygunge before you left? Watching the golfers? Strange being back there drinking Kingfishers without you and the boys, and strange being back in that tacky-smart ‘exclusive’ ex-colonial setting, after where I’ve been. They tell me that becoming a member is just as status-loaded as it was in the olden days when it was Europeans Only. Indians are just as snobbish as the Brits were. Sunil fitted in fine at the Tolly, in pressed shorts and a white shirt. I was all dingy and crumpled.
Going back there made me realise something. I was irritated by the Tolly chit system – a separate chit for everything you order, endless bits of paper and endless signatures, a mini-version of the strangulating petty bureaucracy that bedevils every single transaction, like when you and I were trying to negotiate the contract with the KMA. And then I thought about the whole of Kolkata with its 13 million people, the whole of West Bengal with its 80 million, the whole teeming subcontinent beyond that, with its dust and hunger, its inadequate infrastructure and unquantifiable lack of resources. The whole of India, in fact, in perpetual danger of collapsing into chaos.
So what you do is this: you construct small islands of orderliness in the middle of the chaos. It’s a highly functional strategy. Hence the chit system and the bureaucracy. Hence the absolute neatness of Jharna’s room and the perfection of her hair and fingernails. Hence the dignity of the people living on the streets, and the trouble they take to try and keep themselves and their children clean. The middle classes too – do you remember we noticed how many ads there are for soap on their TV? The pavement families scrub their kids at the open mains or a standpipe, there are pavement eateries and shoe-menders and pavement barbers. Everything happens in public. Privacy is a luxury they can’t afford and have not learned to need.
Do you think this is all just sentimentality? M. Christ, Ed, there was no need to give me such a bollocking. I know as well as you do that there are fantastic economic success stories here. I know as well as you do that there is a ‘burgeoning new middle class’ and how much ‘Western governments and aid agencies contribute to child health and welfare’. You don’t have to be so fucking condescending. I was just telling you how it looks from where I am standing. I suppose what I say about Jharna might seem sentimental. But what I feel about her is not sentimentality. I mean everything I said to her, more and more and definitely. I don’t suppose you know what falling in love is like, I remember how you talk about women. You are gross sometimes, so just piss off. M.
Sorry about that. It was the bit about Jharna that got me on the raw. You may be right, though I don’t think so. Sorry anyway. M.
Ed. Something amazing. Sunil has got a place to do technical drawing at some college in Liverpool, starting next year. And he started out as one of the platform children. Just proves my point, about their intelligence. Apparently there is an Englishman who takes children from the streets and stations and looks after them and educates them as far as they will go. He has a big old house where they live and are taught – a boarding school, though rather an odd one. He has to raise all the money for it. Sunil was there from age five. He calls the man who runs it ‘Uncle’, but then all friendly men are ‘Uncle’ here and all women are ‘Auntie’. I’d really like to meet that Uncle.
I told Sunil something about Jharna, and he offered to come with me and translate. I said he was too young for that sort of thing. He said he knew the area. When I raised my eyebrows, he looked me in the eye and said his mother used to work there. She died. I just nodded, there was nothing to say. I suppose it would be all right to take him with me. M.
Email not sent. Saved in ‘Drafts’ folder:
We’ve been to see her a good many times now. Sunil is a better translator than Kumar, he gets on more naturally with Jharna, and is respectful at the same time. He has very good manners, and so does she. I tell him what I want to say or ask, and he turns to her and she looks at him – not at me, as she did when Kumar was there – and their voices flow in and out of each other, never a pause. This is difficult in one way, because they talk together for two or three minutes without a break before Sunil turns to me and speaks in English. Once or twice I’ve had to attract his attention, just to stop the flow and get at what they’ve been saying. And then when he translates, he says something quite short, it can’t possibly cover everything she said.
But the good side is that while they are talking I can watch them uninterrupted. I think I see in Sunil’s attentive face the sensitive and responsible man that he will become. And Jharna – she’s like a lovely cat, she’s incapable of an ungraceful move or gesture. Her hands and her posture are as expressive as her face. I look at her and look at her, trying to memorise every little thing about her, learning her by heart.
So what else have I learned about her? Her normal charge to a client is 40 rupees. That’s less than £1, though the exchange rate is meaningless. It’s also exactly what I pay for an hour on the Internet in the place where I am now. Hard to know quite what to think about that economic parity. If the client looks rich, she might try asking 100 on the offchance, and let herself be bargained down. She prefers men who are complete strangers. It’s low prestige among the women to take men they know, from around the area – and I guess they won’t even pay the standard 40 rupees, either. Sometimes a regular will move in with a woman, and though they are glad of the protection they generally end up keeping him, and anyway he won’t stay around for long.
That’s what happened to her, as I knew from before. It reminded me to ask Sunil to find out about her child. Where was he, or she? Jharna talked to Sunil about this for a long time. All I got out of it at the end was that it’s a boy, seven years old now, and living in the countryside 75 miles from the city in a Buddhist ashram which rescues children from the red-light areas – and from lives of crime and sexual abuse. Didn’t she miss him? She shrugged. He was brought to see her every month or so. He was getting an education at the ashram. Also, it was better he was away. I thought she meant, for his sake, but she didn’t. She meant it was difficult to work with a child hanging around just outside the room, it put the customers off. Not much sentimentality there . . . When I got Sunil to ask her whether she had good friends among the other women in the area, she said no. Because they are all in competition. ‘People like me don’t have friends.’ Again, no bitterness, just acceptance, and the smile. M. Hi, Ed. I’m not going to bang on to you about Jharna any more – but you did say you were interested in the red-light area ‘sociologically’. So here’s some more nuggets. M.
Attachment:
The man in the lungis came bursting into Jharna’s room again today and started his ranting. He told Sunil he was Jharna’s brother. He wanted to know what I was up to. Obviously not the usual thing. Maybe I was from the international police or from some interfering NGO. He needed to know, to protect his sister. Sunil calmed him down. I left some money again. Seemed the safest thing to do, I just hope Jharna gets to keep it.
It was only later that it dawned on me – of course he isn’t Jharna’s brother. What a fool I am. It’s just a manner of speaking. (The aunt who turned little Jharna into a sex-worker wasn’t really her aunt, either.) The man who sold me the lungis wasn’t the brother of the man who guided me to the shop. And the brother in Birmingham whom the old man on the Maidan told me about is not really his brother. I need to ask someone about this. But I think ‘brother’ might mean ‘mate’. And sometimes it means someone whom you respect or to whom you have an obligation for favours received – commercial, financial, sexual, whatever. What I think is, you don’t mess with someone’s brother round here.
When we were leaving I saw some little Tibetan girls huddled together at the end of the alley, all done up in tinselly frocks like for a children’s party back home, but with lipstick and lots of eye make-up. Jailbait. Painful to see. Also kind of fascinating. I wanted to stop and talk to them with Sunil, but he grabbed my arm and hurried me past. He didn’t speak their language, he said. Plus, we were being watched. The little girls are goldmines. He says they are trafficked from their home villages – bought or snatched – and a great deal can be charged for them here, they are more than ten times as expensive as the local women. Because they are so young, they can be marketed as virgins a good many times over. It would be good to be able to scoop them all up and take them to the ashram where Jharna’s little boy lives. The Women’s Committee, said Sumil, try and keep an eye on them.
I hadn’t heard about the Women’s Committee. Sunil pointed out a wide open doorway on the street off our alley, with a small front room crammed with plump middle-aged women sitting and chatting and watching the world go by. That’s the Women’s Committee. All ex-pros.
I asked Jharna today about the Women’s Committee and gather that they got together in order to make the area safer. They make deals with the police to prevent working girls being harassed, and ban men who have been violent. They arrange for sick women or sick children to be taken to the hospital. They are apparently working with an NGO which subsidises them. According to Jharna, it’s only the Women’s Committee who are any help over anything. The aid-workers who come into the area from outside are useless, she says. ‘They don’t know us, and they don’t know anyone else, and they don’t stay.’
Then we went out! Jharna took us to meet a member of the Women’s Committee in her room in the next-door house. This lady is fat and smiley, and has a skinny little niece kind of waiting on her – she was sent to fetch us the inevitable Cokes. I don’t suppose she’s really a niece. I’m learning. The room was a palace compared with the rooms in Jharna’s house. Not much bigger, but crammed with stuff. The woman was reclining on a proper bed with a carved bedhead. There is a chair, which they made me sit on. Even a small television. I couldn’t get a close look, and maybe it’s just for show, or maybe she has miles of cable winding through the crumbling masonry and over the roofs, connected to the nearest building with electricity. She has an old Singer sewing-machine too, the sort you turn by hand. Maybe she would like to sew my lungis for me. Not! She has a mobile phone clamped to her wrist with elastic bands. In context, she is rich. Jharna seems in awe of her.
She’s a fixer, if I ever saw one. I’m sure she and her colleagues really do help and protect the working girls, and control what goes on in a good way – but I’d guess that control is the operative word, and that there are kickbacks to be had from all kinds of interested parties. That would seem perfectly normal to anyone round here. It’s beginning to seem normal to me too. What else can you do? People have to survive. I didn’t like the lady very much though, so I may be wrong about her. As about much else that I am telling you. Kolkata is making me realise how oafish and unsubtle I am.
Then we went to the very top of the house where another friend of Jharna’s lives on the roof. No, not a friend, Jharna doesn’t have friends, remember. The last flight of stairs was so rickety that I thought the whole thing was going to splinter under my weight. We came out into the blazing sun where about a dozen people – all aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers, no doubt – were sitting on the concrete, all round the parapet edging the roof. There was a lean-to shack supported by the high building next door. We didn’t meet the not-friend. She was behind the curtain in the shack with a customer. Maybe some of the men there were waiting their turn with her, like at the dentist or the barber. Sunil, Jharna and I did namaste to everyone and squatted down against the parapet too. I passed round my cigarettes. The aunts, uncles, cousins and brothers all took cigarettes and laughed a lot among themselves. I think they were laughing at me. This visit was not a great success.
Jharna was very tired afterwards, I don’t think she goes out very often. Sunil helped her back on to her bed and she lay down. She is not looking well. Sunil had an appointment, he went off and left me with her. I stroked her arms and her back and talked to her about whatever came into my head. M.
OK Ed, I get the message. Time’s up. I honestly hadn’t realised I’d overshot the mark. Tell Her Upstairs that I’ve got myself on to the BA flight that gets into Heathrow at 14.00 on Friday, so I’ll be back in the office on Monday morning. Is that good enough? M.
Email not sent: saved in ‘Drafts’ folder:
Ed, I’ve got to find a way of getting Jharna to England so that the illness can be treated. Do you think it would be easier to organise this from London? Otherwise I have to come back here very soon. So many of the women have the illness, and very little or nothing is done for them. I’ve done a bit of research. There are clinics, and ‘programmes’, but it’s a matter of resources, logistics, everything. Going into hospital is the end of the line. It’s just another slum to die in, if you don’t die before you’re taken there. I am determined to get her out of that hovel. I must start teaching her English. I bought an English/Bengali phrasebook this morning. I’m not even sure whether Bengali is her first language. We’ll see. I want to give her life, and a life. The way she has given me life and a purpose. Before, I was sleepwalking. M.
Ed, I’m glad Charlotte was looking so well, she told me you all had a good time. But for God’s sake, when you are next speaking to her, don’t say anything about exactly when I’m coming back. She’d probably want to meet me off the plane or something and I don’t want that. I’ve definitely decided to break it off with her. It would be disgusting to do it by email. Meanwhile my emails to her are just as disgusting, because I’m not being honest. I dare say she isn’t fooled. Hard to tell, from what she writes to me. M.
OK, no problem, not your fault. I should have said earlier. I’ll just have to tell her straight off, on the way back from Heathrow. Not so risk-averse after all?! M.
Email not sent. Saved in ‘Drafts’ folder.
I have discovered that Jharna can’t read or write. This has knocked me sideways.
I took the phrase book up to her this morning, without Sunil, and showed it to her. It was to be the beginning of our direct communication, I thought. She’s not any better, she was lying down and looks really ill. She took the book from me with polite interest, and turned the pages. She was holding it upside down. I put a ball-point in her hand and indicated that she should write her name in the book. She just laughed, and then coughed and coughed. There are black circles round her eyes.
What goes on in the head of a person who can’t read or write? How do they know when they talk where one word begins and ends? How can they even think, if they can’t put ideas into words and know what the words look like? How is this possible of my clever, articulate, lovely Jharna?
Then I thought of my sister’s kids, who’ve all expressed themselves with amazing precision and originality by the age of three. Three-year-olds can’t read or write. But we know that they will, it’s just a matter of time.
If Sunil hadn’t been taken off the station platform into that school, he probably wouldn’t be able to read or write either. For that matter – if I had never been taught, neither would I. I wonder if there’s time to get Sunil to introduce me to that English uncle who runs the school, he sounds an interesting bloke.
What else don’t I know about Jharna? Almost everything. I’ve never even kissed her and yet, before I knew her, I never knew what loving someone was really like. But I must have no illusions about her. Does she know what love is? Has she been fooling me? Were the brother’s visits pre-arranged between them so that she could make some money out of me in one way if not in another? Did she trot me round on those visits to show off some kind of profitable prize fool? Does she prefer Sunil to me anyway? I was thinking of finding the time before I leave to hire a car and take her to the ashram to see her son. Does she even care about him? I could care about him, a lot, because he is hers.
She’s not well enough to go out, anyway. I’ll go back this evening and see how she is. Perhaps something decisive will happen – something very good or very bad – to make everything clear to me so that I’ll know what to do.
I haven’t found anyone to sew my lungis yet. The little bald girl in the yellow dress hasn’t been around for the last few days, I’m anxious about her. I suppose I ought to start thinking about packing. M.
[Charlotte met the plane at Heathrow but he was not on it. He has not contacted the office.]