‘Girija’s World’ is a short story of mine that appeared in ITC's “Namaste” Short Story issue, edited by Monisha Mukundan. I post it here as it’s about Story – my story and my stories, Girija’s story and her stories. Our lives are less about events than about the stories of our events. We all have a story; and within that, our stories…GIRIJA’S STORY-WORLD
Girija whisked the broom indifferently under the bookshelf. “Stop following me around, troublesome child,” she snapped. I climbed up into the big chair, out of her broom’s path and said, “I saw the man you told me about the other day.”
She paused, thwacking the broom against the edge of the cupboard, then looked up at me with disgust. “And how did you know it was him?”
“He had a sad face.”
She straightened up. “The world is full of sad-faced men. “
Some minutes later, she added, “Maybe the one you saw was another - Ramu, not Suri…”
I waited. I knew that her need to tell me her endless stock of stories of the strangely interesting lives that peopled her slum was at least as strong as my need to hear them.
The Suri story was strange enough. Girija had told me that Suri, who lived in the same slum on the sides of the hill that went down to the sea, ran a small business. He had a cart from which he sold snacks outside a school, and bribed the local policemen enough that the complaints of the nuns who ran the school were ignored.
Suri was also a healer of sorts. “Not an ordinary ‘educated’ doctor; a real one, who has magic,” Girija had emphasized, as she strung out the washing on the clothesline in the backyard, while I tried to keep up, handing her the clothes pegs before she asked for them.
Girija had an inexhaustible supply of contempt for the ‘educated’, and this included us, one of the families she worked for. She never cheeked my mother or said much in her presence. But when she spoke of my educated parents to me while we were alone, her eyes said it all. Mostly she arrived each day after my parents had left for work, and under the indifferent supervision of my old great aunt who lived with us, Girija attended to or ignored her chores depending on her mood, leaving before my mother and father returned. On Thursdays, my weekly day off from school, I found in Girija a ready and potent reason to abandon my homework to follow her and her moods around the house all day.
Some months back - she had informed me, her eyes widening, her words hoarsely whispered, even though there was no one else around, her telling tinged with drama - an ‘educated’ man from a nearby building had come looking for this same Suri, and told him that he needed his help. This man’s arms and legs were covered with ugly, disfiguring boils; recently one had even appeared on his face, and when all treatments had failed, the man’s maidservant had told his wife about Suri. “I will pay whatever you ask if you can rid me of this pain and shame,” the man had told Suri. Suri whispered his fee in the man’s ear, and after a short hesitation, the man nodded, “Fine.”
Suri asked the man to lie down, then moved in clockwise circles around him, puffing and blowing slowly at his entire body, bit by bit. When the man stood up over an hour later, he was free of the disfiguring boils, and readily paid Suri the large amount of money he had agreed on. However, the next morning when Suri woke up, Girija said, the shock still visible on her face, he found his own arms and legs were covered with the same boils. “That is why he wears long sleeved kurtas and pajamas now,” Girija whispered. I had shivered.
The man I saw was dressed just like that, I was about to tell her, forgetting that so were half the men in the city, but she squatted back on her heels, pulled out her paan that was tied into a corner of her sari, stuffed it into a corner of her mouth and snapped: “Do you want to hear about Ramu, or not?”
Ramu, she began slowly, was sad because he had a real reason to be sad; not like those educated ones who get sad for no reason at all.
I once earned her displeasure when I asked her why she insisted on sending her only son Damo to school, because he would become an educated person too. Her punishment had been no stories for three painful Thursdays.
Girija had been widowed at sixteen. Pregnant with her son, she was thrown out of her in-laws’ home for being an inauspicious burden on them. Her parents were dead and to ask her brother and his family to take them in was unthinkable. She got on to a train and traveled to Bombay, first making her home with her baby Damo on the pavements of the city at night, some years later making a down payment on a hut in the slum colony by borrowing small sums of money from the five or six homes she did ‘top’ work in – jobs like the sweeping, mopping floors, and washing dishes and clothes, that our cooks and kitchen staff considered themselves too upper-caste to do.
“Ramu was sad because of his wife,” she said. “His wife could not give him sons. They had five daughters in five years; she was not a good wife.”
I felt a bubbling up need in me to explain to her about the ‘x’ and ‘y’ chromo-somethings that my mother had told me about. It was actually his fault, I wanted to shout. Wisely I weighed this impulse. Would she be pleased that my words showed that I bought into her strong belief that it was men who had to be pitied now and then and scorned the rest of the time, because they were the really useless ones after all? Or would the interruption anger her and cut off my supply of stories? I silently nodded for her to go on.
“Ramu’s wife…” Girija took up her story, and I held my breath, sensing that this woman’s misdeeds must have been truly great; our Girija could not even say her name. “Ramu’s wife decided to steal a baby boy from the hospital” My chest hurt, my head felt light – she stole a baby! “But what about the poor real mother?” I burst out.
“Am I telling you the story of the mother of this stolen baby or of Ramu?” Girija’s flashing eyes silenced me. Story-junkie that I was, I assumed what I thought was a suitably conciliatory expression. It seemed to work. “When she came home, Ramu was happy for the first time in five years ...”
I had not learnt my lessons too well. ”Didn’t he care that it was stolen from another mother?” I wailed, and had to endure a muttered “Stupid educated children asking stupid unnecessary questions.”
“… But sadly his happiness did not last long. The police were soon at their house, they took the baby away, and she is now in jail.”
“Poor thing!”
“Yes, true.” Girija said, “Now he has to look after those five girls on his own. Poor thing.” I couldn’t be sure if she had deliberately misunderstood my words, or thought that it was sad-faced Ramu that I really did feel sorry for.
The following week Girija announced that her brother’s wife had given birth to a third son, and so she would be away for the greater part of the week, starting tomorrow.
While she was away, two important things happened in my life.
I received my report card for the final examinations, and had stood first, winning most of the prizes in my class. This I would not tell Girija.
I was taken by my parents to be part of a real Grown Up Dinner Party for the first time. They all told stories too, but they were of Rani’s wonderful examination results, Tinky’s tonsils, Prashant-kaka’s promotion, Malu-massi’s arthritis, and how much Ritu-aunty got for selling the coconuts from the trees on her property.
This I would tell Girija – the educated did live less interesting lives.
May you find ways to tell your stories, may you have your stories listened to.
Marguerite Theophil
To be a person is to have a story to tell.
~ Isak Dinesen
