It was Sunday, and Nandlal had no school to go to. A stroll through the bazaar, he thought, would do nicely. His sister-in-law had not yet left for the temple — today there was a special meal to be cooked at home. He slipped on his sandals, lifted his shirt off its peg, and pulling it on as he went, stepped out of the house.
He had barely crossed the threshold when the beat of a dholak came drifting from the alley to his left. He remembered then: his sister-in-law had said there was a wedding at Dasali's daughter's, and that he ought to look in and ask whether a hand was needed. He would stop by, he decided, for a little while.
Above the dholak, the words of the jhaag, the wedding song, came clear:
"Why do you stand half-hidden behind the sandalwood tree?"
"Here I stand at my father's side —
Father, find me a bridegroom."
"Daughter, what manner of bridegroom shall I find?"
"One like the moon among the stars,
like Krishna who outshines the moon —
find me such a Kanhaiya for a groom.
I ask for nothing less than Ayodhya's throne,
to sit upon it and reign."
The girls' voices were so sweet, the words so tender, that Nandlal halted where he stood. Something in that closing line reached into him and touched a place he could not name — I ask for nothing less than Ayodhya's throne, to sit upon it and reign. Every young woman, when her time comes, wishes the same: a husband as fair as Ramachandra, a mother-in-law as gentle as Kaushalya. It is for this that fond parents name their daughters Janak Dulari, or Janaki, or Sita.
No sooner had the name Sita crossed his mind than his thoughts swerved — to the Sita of his own neighbourhood, his sister-in-law's friend. Her face rose before his eyes. Her parents too, no doubt, had named her Sita with some such dream in their hearts. But the parents who bestow such names forget how briefly the true Sita reigned on Ayodhya's throne, even after she had wed Ayodhya's Ramachandra. Fourteen years of exile, a year held captive by Ravana, and when at last she came home to Ayodhya through all that suffering, two words from a washerman were enough to send the poor woman back to the shelter of the forest.
It seemed to Nandlal that today he had grasped something deep. This Sita of his neighbourhood was, in beauty and in grace, no less than the Sita of the Treta Yuga. It was as though loveliness itself had blossomed out of flower and bud to take her shape. What a wonder of a woman she was! Even in such poverty, what dignity she carried, what an air about her. How the whole neighbourhood talked of her.
And yet — where was this Sita, and where her husband Labbhu, that lumbering simpleton? A fine "Kanhaiya" of a groom they had found for the poor girl: a man to whom the written word meant no more than it does to a buffalo, a man whose very face set you laughing in spite of yourself. Where was that Sita's Ramachandra, and where this Labbhu! When Nature stoops to a joke, she does it with deliberate, bitter relish. Sita and Ramachandra; Sita and Labbhu! Good God — the things You contrive! Search the whole of the Ramayana and you will not turn up a character to match Labbhu.
However had the match been made? Had her people fallen so low, so desperate, that they tied their daughter — sprightly as a fairy, mistress of such beauty — to this dolt? Well might one marvel at Labbhu's luck.
Nandlal looked up to find he had reached Sita's house. A broad porch; three or four steps down to an open courtyard; and at the head of the courtyard, a wide, open room. There, in front, sat Sita on a rug, running a length of cloth through her sewing machine. Seeing Nandlal, she let the machine fall still and said with a smile, "Thank heaven, Brother — so you've found a free moment at last. No, no — I won't have you on the rug; take the chair there, I beg you."
"I've come to pick a quarrel with you today, Sister-in-law!" said Nandlal, settling into the chair.
"With me? And what harm have I ever done a soul?" A smile played over Sita's face, and as it did, dimples — those little snares of charm — gathered in both her cheeks, and Nandlal felt his eyes begin to drown in them.
"Sister-in-law, I simply can't understand who it is that dreams up a fresh tale about you every single day in this neighbourhood. Why must these stories be spun at all? There are plenty of other women living here, and yet —" Nandlal was genuinely troubled.
Sita answered, still smiling. "But Brother — were there another woman like me, the talk would gather round her, the tales would be spun about her. And why should it trouble you that people tell stories? People ought to be talked about. What sort of life is it merely to be born, to grow, to laugh and weep and die? Is that what the world calls a contented life? To be talked of — that is a human need. Isn't it so, Brother? You turn that over in your mind a moment, while I wind the thread onto the bobbin."
Cutting short the machine's clatter, Sita fitted the bobbin into place and began to wind the thread. Nandlal sat gazing at her, turning her words over. Her hair; her fair forehead; the clean line of her nose; the faint creases above her brows. She had run the machine too fast, and a little thread had snarled outside the bobbin; she reversed the machine to work it loose. On her thin red lips the smile still lingered. The thread freed at last, she looked up at Nandlal and asked:
"You really have sunk deep into thought, Brother."
"It bears thinking about, Sister-in-law — how everyone else goes in such fear and shame of these tales, and here you are telling me a person's life is no life at all unless there are tales told about it."
"I'm not lying to you, Brother. Come, then — what is this new thing you've heard about me? What's the latest story being spun?" Sita smiled again, and again the dimples surfaced in her cheeks.
"No, Sister-in-law — why don't you simply change this house?" Nandlal offered, sagely, the way out.
Sita smiled and smoothed the cloth flat beneath the needle. Then she remembered the lower thread had not yet been drawn up, and as she set about joining the threads, Nandlal fell to thinking again: he had never once seen Sita laugh outright — and the magic in her smile was a thing her laughter could never have matched.
So, at any rate, the women of the neighbourhood said.
It came back to Nandlal — only yesterday, three or four of the neighbourhood women had gathered at his sister-in-law's and fallen to discussing this very smile of Sita's. "That too is a harlot's trick," one had said. Nandu had been drinking his tea; he set the cup down after a single sip and sat listening, in anger, to the women's poisonous gossip.
"She doesn't laugh — there'll be a secret behind that as well, you mark my words," said one. "A tooth gone, no doubt — knocked out. Why else would she not laugh? Were anyone to glimpse that broken tooth, wouldn't all the glamour of that fairy face drain clean away?" And she cackled at her own wit. "Sister," put in Dwarka's mother, "those dimples don't gather in the cheeks with laughing the way they do with a smile. A gift like that, God grants only to the truly cunning. Look at her face and you'd swear she was born to royal pleasures."
"Who knows how many swimmers and non-swimmers this Shurpanakha has drowned in the deep of those dimples. And if no one has yet cut off her nose and ears for it — well, just you wait," one woman prophesied.
"The husband's a dull lump of a simpleton," said Dwarka's mother. "Who's there to cut off her nose and ears?"
"Panditani-ji, word is she's got that doctor under her spell these days," said one, as though she had fetched the news up from the underworld. But Dwarka's mother kept nothing to herself: "Out with it, girl — why do you whisper so? The whole neighbourhood knows; what's the secret in it? That wretched doctor — what's his name — Jasoda Lal, or Jasodanandan, whichever it is. Now that his hair's gone white, he's developed a taste for these little raas-leelas, and he's gone and found himself a Radhika to suit. A tenant on the one hand, a sweetheart on the other. It's hush-hush for now, but tomorrow the whole town will spit on her — mark my words."
"They say, Panditani-ji, the doctor won't so much as speak to his own wife. The poor thing weeps and weeps — to think this millstone has come down on her breast. And the children, they say, are in a wretched state — so cowed, so frightened, the poor mites have stopped growing altogether. Look at their fortune! Orphaned, you'd call it, with both parents living. Ruin take this witch. You watch — she'll be driven out of this neighbourhood yet, but not before she's set fire to people's hearts."
• • •
"Lost in thought again, Brother? Think this hard at your age and your face will turn sallow. A strange thing God made when He made thought — the enemy of youth, the rival of laughter. What was it you were saying — why don't I change this house? Take me to yours, then. Let me a little box of a room. And your watch over me into the bargain." Sita smiled.
"Were it my own, Sister-in-law, I'd have taken you in a moment — but there too I'm no better than a tenant myself. Every month I must count out sixty, seventy rupees into my sister-in-law's palm just to stay." And Nandlal thought: had he truly a little house of his own, he would not have left Sita a single day in this Lanka. For what was this neighbourhood, if not Lanka?
"If you had your own house, you really would have taken me there — wouldn't you, Brother?" Sita smiled once more. "Truly?"
And it seemed to Nandu that this "Truly?" went sounding down into him, far down, ringing like a bronze pot tumbling down a flight of stone steps. How deep a thing it is, the human heart.
"But why would you take me into your house, Brother? Is it that you pity me? Or that the things people say of me are lies? Or is there something else in your heart?" Sita asked, smiling, and took up her scissors to cut a strip of cloth for the sleeve cuffs.
Poor Nandlal fell to brooding. What questions she put to him! And what answer was there to them? The pity, yes — that much was true. Here was a hardworking young woman, who sewed other people's clothes and on it kept herself, her simpleton of a husband, and her one child. She went to no temple, no shrine of Shiva; to no recitation, no congregation; she had no taste for fairs or festivals. Yes — she dressed in clean, neat clothes; and what was the harm in that? It was the fruit of her own labour. Why should one not pity such a person? As for the infamy noised abroad — sit a while with her, exchange a few words, and the heart simply would not believe her a bad woman. In truth, her beauty was her one enemy. Envy, he thought, runs in women's very blood, mingled in with it. They burn at the sight of her, and ease the smarting of their hearts by slandering her, picking her to pieces. There is a certain relish in maligning another. This poor woman was not bad; she had been defamed deliberately. Where was the filth in those eyes? Where the poison in that smile? And besides these two reasons, what third cause could there be for his sympathy? Nandlal put the question to his own heart. Sita was watching him. When his eyes met hers, a tremor ran the length of his being, and Sita lowered her gaze. Still Nandu kept looking at her; he felt his heart had begun to race. "And which of the three has it turned out to be, Brother?" Sita asked, smiling.
"All three, Sister-in-law," slipped from Nandlal's lips before he could stop it.
"All three? So there is a third thing too, Brother?" Sita smiled, and in his downcast eyes began to sound the depth of that innocent heart.
Nandlal was startled at his own answer. Sita set the machine going again, and he sat on, gazing at her, lost.
Nandlal was neither Sita's true brother-in-law nor any near relation. When Sita had first come to take a rented room in Dr. Jasodanandan's house in this neighbourhood, it was Nandu's sister-in-law she had come to know before anyone else, and little by little a warmth had grown between the two. In getting Sita's sewing started and built up, his sister-in-law had been a great help at the outset, and for this Sita was deeply in her debt; the two were so close that there was much going to and fro between them. Nandu's own acquaintance with Sita had come about through his sister-in-law. His elder brother worked in a mill in Amritsar. Nandu had passed his F.A. and taught at a private school in the city, earning a hundred, a hundred and twenty-five rupees, of which he handed sixty or seventy to his sister-in-law toward the household. He was still unmarried, and so kept a fondness for good food and good clothes. Nandu could tell that his sister-in-law too, after all the women's talk, had been thrown into doubt about Sita; it seemed she no longer reckoned her a good woman. For some days now this fresh tale about Dr. Jasodanandan had been flying about. However did these women come by such hidden matters? Nandlal wondered, astonished. The things they invent! But what truly gnawed at him was that innocent, fearless smile of hers. Whenever he came to her and spoke of the infamy spreading through the neighbourhood, Nandu saw that she neither flustered, nor took fright, nor flinched. Smiling as ever, she would only ask just this: "And what else do people say, Brother?"
Sita's glance went to the courtyard. She saw Dr. Jasodanandan cross it, coughing, and then, unlatching his clinic, go inside. As he took off his coat and necktie, he looked two or three times toward Sita's open door; from his chair only Nandu's back was visible to him. In a white kurta, dhoti, and sandals, he came out and stood by Sita's door. "How is Lal now, Sita?" he asked. "He didn't cough in the night? Where is he?"
"He's gone to school today, Doctor-ji. He'd been lying abed so many days; today he insisted, so I let him. You said yourself there was no harm in it."
Nandlal rose from his chair and greeted the doctor with folded hands. Youth paid its respect to age, and the elder was pleased.
"And who is this, Sita? I don't think I know him."
"He's my brother-in-law, Doctor-ji."
"Aha — and who is this third party come pushing into a brother-and-sister-in-law's talk? What's his name?"
"Nandlal."
"Splendid, splendid. It needn't always be Bharat and Lakshman." The doctor gave a small laugh and went off toward the inner house. As the sound of his sandals faded, Sita said, "There, Nandu — that's the very Dr. Jasodanandan I'm supposed to have bewitched these days. See how the poor man frets and fusses. It was on his account you came today, wasn't it? Well — you've seen for yourself now. It was this man who saved my Lal's life. The boy had taken pneumonia. You've seen Lal's father — even he couldn't have saved him. What's he good for? This man got even him a place, through his own influence, at a wholesale cloth shop; he brings home fifty rupees a month now too. I can't begin to tell you how safe and easy I am, having this room of his. For fear of him the neighbourhood's idle young bucks won't set foot in this courtyard, not even on the excuse of getting a shirt stitched. Is that a small thing, Brother?" Sita smiled.
"But Sister-in-law! The women say this doctor is worse than a butcher. He won't speak to his own wife. The children shake before him." A doubt flickered in Nandlal's mind.
"Who can know what's in another's heart, Brother. He had three children. The middle one was dearer to him than his own life. I never saw the poor boy, but they say he stood first in everything — looks, virtue, learning. One day he went to bathe in the canal and never came back; the poor child drowned. It struck the doctor a deep blow to the heart. Such a gloom settled over him that the whole temper of his life was altered. The other children fell into bad company and were spoiled; they're useless at their books. He frets and grieves over them. And the wife — the sorrow of one son lost, the pain of the others gone to waste: a threefold agony. The poor woman has been ailing all her life. The doctor doesn't care for every Tom and Dick coming and going about his house; and his wife is in no state to go anywhere — it's prayers morning and evening and the work of the kitchen, and no more. People aren't wrong, Nandu, to ask: why doesn't the doctor laugh? Why doesn't he sing? Why did he let Sita a room, and what did he expect of her in return? I've found this way of people very strange indeed, Brother — they can't bear to see a person laugh, nor bear to see a person weep." Sita smiled, and the first spark broke over her face; and Nandlal sat spellbound, watching that play of light and shadow.
"Here — let me tell you one thing, Brother!" said Sita, seeing how he stared at her. He went on looking at her just the same.
"Brother, there's truly a great difference between men and women. For all that the doctor pities me — came two and three times to see Lal through his illness — still he took the money for the medicines; and the rent of the room? His instruction on that is that it must reach him by the fourth of the month. Nor do we so much as share a meal. And then look at yourself. You pity me, you have sympathy for me. Had you a house of your own, you might have let me a room or so — at a rent, or even free — and yet you never once gave me so much as a shirt or a pair of trousers to sew."
"A shirt and trousers? Sister-in-law, I don't even wear a shirt and trousers." Nandu answered, flustered.
"And even if you did, Brother, you're no shrewder than I am. You know well enough my whole living hangs on this machine. And on the other side stand these neighbourhood women. However they slander and backbite me in secret, it's thanks to them — you can see it for yourself — what a mountain of work sits before me. I keep the machine running day and night, and still the work won't end."
"There's a fineness in your hands, Sister-in-law. And you charge less than the bazaar rate besides — why wouldn't the sewing come to you?" Nandu offered, by way of his own shrewdness.
"That's not it, Nandu-ji. This work doesn't come to me for the saving of four paise. It comes on the pretext of getting a look at me. I go nowhere myself. Every woman who hears my name slandered comes to see me — 'Oh, is that so?' — and how is she to come empty-handed? So she's sure to bring two or three pieces of cloth to be stitched. And she goes away having had her look — to see, that is, just what manner of wicked sorceress this is, that there's so much talk about. They're very simple folk in our quarter, Brother. Once a woman has had her clothes sewn here, she becomes my fixed customer, and bit by bit, coming to know me, she starts to sympathise with me too. Every last thing the neighbourhood says about me, they come and report to me. How can I call these women bad? Let them slander and run me down all they like — it's they who've propped up my poverty. Is it a lie, Brother?" Sita looked at Nandu and smiled, and Nandu sat gazing at her face, transfixed.
"It's not this slander I fear, Nandu-ji. What I fear is the day — the day all these women turn sympathetic to me. That's the day my work will fall off. Then, to keep up the friendship, I'll have to go to the temples too; they'll drag me to their gatherings; the bother of fasts and rituals will begin. And where will the free time be for work? That's why this bond with these simple women suits me so well, Brother. This infamy is a cool, dense shade over me. My household is fed by it. I am very content — very much at ease."
Nandlal looked up: two women had come into the courtyard with clothes to be sewn. He rose, and left.