"The Refugees" by Anisha Bhaduri
Photo Credit: Ishant Mishra, obtained and licensed through Unsplash
The Refugees
The day Ishmail scavenged a pink fifty-rupee note from the municipal refuse vat, his mother was having one of her spells. Clutching her elbows, her threadbare saree wrapped loosely around herself, Rashida was weeping. Tears streamed down her face, not blurring her gaze that was firmly fixed on a nearby lamppost. Passersby stepped deftly around Rashida as if reluctant to break the circle of sorrow in which she had firmly centred herself. People knew when they saw a woman whom sadness would not bypass. Rashida was the vortex that drew all the world’s disadvantages towards herself. Ishmail knew then to leave her alone. And he did.
The banknote had been folded. And refolded. When he slowly unwrapped it like the many treasures that he hadn’t grown up with, Ishmail wondered at its creased crispness. He pressed the banknote between his two palms, sometimes taking a break to stroke it with the spurious tenderness that he had seen men employ as a prelude to hurting his mother. He slowly refolded the note and slipped it into a rough inside pocket that his mother had sewn in his only pair of pants. Two sizes too big but a cause for celebration nevertheless when the do-gooder aunties with their determined air of purpose had offloaded it among other things for the cluster of homeless who inhabited the bus stop opposite the Mint. The periodic munificence never failed to spark a mini riot. The beneficiaries insisted that they absolutely needed everything that was dumped their way. Mothers became especially militant. And Rashida, who was otherwise tender towards Tuhina’s little daughter, fought with her neighbour before triumphantly holding up the unblemished pants to six-year-old Ishmail. When he was smaller, Ishmail wondered why the aunties waited with compressed jaws as the quarrels unfolded, doing nothing, letting fury intersect and multiply before getting spent like hard-earned money. They moved in only when the victor and the vanquished had gone back to being neighbours again and had their arms protectively around the second-hand gifts, their huddled children temporarily forgotten.
Rashida had decided later that her son needed a secret pocket should his scavenging expeditions ever prove successful. Determined hope kept Ishmail and his mother alive in this gritty city where Ishmail had washed up as a toddler with Rashida.
The wait had been breathtaking—the smell of rank fear rising with the wind. Families dithering till the last moment about evacuating paid the price of procrastination with their lives.
They had been fleeing the flood. Mother and son. The mighty Ichamati, swollen and hungry like an expectant demoness, had widowed Rashida and devoured her baby girl and homestead. On the days Rashida would wait at the bus stand, leaning against the iron railings, secretly forsaken by the world around her, she could see the yellow water. On the day of the flood, a vast expanse of it was closing in and letting go of the shore in inadvertent coitus. The bleak sky above was obdurate with the spectre of more punishing rain. A makeshift crib was bobbing on the Ichamati, slowly getting drawn towards the destiny that brought babies to the world only to snatch them back. Rashida could hear herself keening—a pitch rising and falling with the rhythm of the retreating crib. The flailing, chubby fists occasionally erupting from it to forever brand a mother’s heart with grooves of unendurable emptiness. Ishmail had saved his mother then. With a feverish toddler clinging to her, Rashida could not jump into the water. It was between either keeping Ishmail or risking three lives. She kept Ishmail. Her husband was already lost.
After 15 days of rain, the Ichamati was in spate and the water was rising. Breaking embankments, swallowing houses. Robust villages could recede to memory in a day and many did. The wait had been breathtaking—the smell of rank fear rising with the wind. Families dithering till the last moment about evacuating paid the price of procrastination with their lives.
The water came when no one was looking. Ishmail was playing near a palm tree, watching his mother scour utensils when a distant rumble became a distinct crash. Churning water suddenly charged into their home, upending the charpoy his father was sleeping on, tossing him like a straw doll and dashing his head against the trunk of the Shishu tree whose base was already submerged. Screaming, Rashida abandoned her utensils to pick up her son and secured the toddler against her body with the end of her saree before climbing the nearest tree. The baby was in her crib inside the hut on elevated ground. Rashida had thought that she would climb down a bit later to fetch her, but the sky cracked, the earth shuddered. Ishmail started wailing, fever already descending on him like the dark rain. Rashida could do nothing as the bubbling, muddy water swept into her hut and dragged the crib and everything else out. The current tugged at the baby’s basket, water slowly soaking into her swaddling. The infant erupted in anger, sleep dismissed. Eyes darting, demanding her mother before forever slipping out from Rashida’s line of vision.
Rashida and Ishmail clung to the tree for one and a half days before rescuers appeared on the horizon. Three days later, at a camp set up by the government for flood victims, Rashida met her first trafficker. Ishmail had cholera and she needed the money. But the mother and child had not been trafficked to Kolkata yet. It was the third man who slipped a ten rupees note into her hand after five minutes behind a shack who told Rashida that she could earn more in Kolkata begging than selling herself at a discount in Ranaghat. After the Ichamati receded, most other women leading a double life in the camp went back to being mothers and wives, daughters and sisters. Their husbands, sons, and brothers stopped pimping. They had another nine months before the river visited its determined devastation on them again. These women readily peeled off their transient lives and trudged back to licit domesticity. Rashida could not. The river had both consumed her home and the life she knew as a barely-literate wife of a marginal farmer.
They would always compliment Rashida on her scrubbed clean son, her sparkling utensils—few and far between—but treasured like ornaments. Her hair washed and saree clean.
Sealdah Station was the sea that accepted the detritus of fraying lives that passed through it. The huge lights shining on them were determined to cast away the shadow of an underbelly that Ishmail watched expand every night. He was toilet trained there, his mother watching over him as he peed and defecated at the designated places. Rashida bathed him every day at the municipal taps, wresting minutes by hook and crook from scores of impatient beggars barking at her with the pre-ordained contempt of seasoned beneficiaries.
But they did not live there for long. Ishmail’s mother soon found a shed near a health centre which offered free inoculations. And free condoms. She tried to enroll him in a school run by an NGO there, but Ishmail was not willing. He learnt the letters all right, but the world beyond the makeshift classroom was more magical. Many a time Ishmail brought his mother discarded treasures—a beautiful broken toy, a chipped enamel dish, and, once, even a saree, its unmended six yards without a single tear. Soon, Rashida desisted. Her disappointment sometimes she matched against what might have happened had they never migrated. Would they have been able to afford Ishmail’s education? Unlikely, Rashida would tell herself. A farmer’s son would grow up to be a farmer. She concluded that her city life had made her too hopeful. Who didn’t know that too much of anything was no good? Rashida would instead try to rustle up at least one proper meal a day for her son and keep him clean and his nose out of trouble.
Ishmail knew his mother was a good mother because he had heard the do-gooder aunties tell Rashida as much. They would always compliment Rashida on her scrubbed clean son, her sparkling utensils—few and far between—but treasured like ornaments. Her hair washed and saree clean. Rashida’s neighbours would snigger, reminding everybody that that’s why Ishmail’s mother was kept so busy through the night. The round aunties would look like suddenly shuttered shops on a bandh day, their eyes abruptly hooded and wary. Their fists forgetting to unclench as if even a slight slackening would encourage streetwalkers to clutch at them. Stiffening slightly to resist Rashida’s world from closing in on them. Ishmail had seen such a metamorphosis first when his mother, encouraged by tributes to her undisputed mothering capabilities, had wondered aloud if she could not find employment with one of the aunties, any one of them, as a housemaid. She would of course keep her son out of everybody’s way and keep her head down. Her neighbours had guffawed. The aunties had beaten a hasty retreat. That was back when mother and son had drifted into this part of the city for the first time. In the two years since, Rashida learnt to negotiate reality unerringly.
Glancing at his mother splayed against the railings of the bus stop across the road, Ishmail ran a hand over his face to wipe off the sweat. He felt the welt, prodded it slightly and winced at the nightmare that last night was.
Two drunken men had come. Tuhina was nursing her baby and shook her head, pointing to Rashida’s corner. Rashida was reclining next to Ishmail then. Her palm on her son’s brow trying to sense, like every night, if Ishmail had indeed fallen asleep. Ishmail had heard the men shuffle towards his mother. They refused to take turns. Rashida’s voice started rising. One of the men then lunged at her and she screamed. Ishmail sat up and felt a hand land on his right jaw and another yank his head backwards. He saw his mother fight like a tigress till the commotion woke up all the homeless at the bus stop and alerted the distant constable. The drunken men were driven away, but the constable wanted his turn. Though he was willing to wait till Rashida tended to Ishmail and lulled him back to sleep again. With betel staining his decayed teeth like spots of blood, the constable winked and declared, like he had done so many times before, that Rashida was worth waiting for. Ishmail never went back to sleep. He had watched over his mother throughout the night. The regulars he wasn’t too worried about, but he stiffened the moment he heard a newcomer’s shiny voice. He was still taut with tension when Rashida flopped down beside him at daybreak. Ishmail knew then that his mother would not be herself during the day.
Ishmail crept back to his mother towards the evening. Tuhina had fed him that day, like she did when Rashida occasionally receded into herself. Ishmail drew his courage from the sight of his mother combing her long hair. The burnished mane reassured him that his mother had had a bath and probably had even eaten something. When he snuggled close to her, Ishmail smelt the heady scent of a heart on the mend, at least until the next time. He ventured to open a fist. Rashida caught it and then the other one and kissed them in turns like she did when Ishmail was a baby. He felt the dampness on his cheeks as his mother slowly rubbed his nose with her own and drew him closer, tenderly whispering words wrenched from a drowned babyhood. Ishmail beamed, retrieved his small fist from his mother’s calloused adult hand, and unfolded it. Rashida stiffened at the sight of the fifty rupees note, her eyes hardening as she assessed her son.
Ishmail had been smaller then but had learnt to tremble at the sight of bullish double-decker buses aiming straight for stray toddlers before screeching to a stop close enough to hear the exhortations of an apoplectic driver. It was a game the bus stop children played fifty, hundred times a day till one or more than one became its victim.
Ishmail shivered as he again saw himself slipping out of his mother’s focus. Her eyes were with him all right, but her mind was absent. In her memory, she was already sinking her fangs into Pintu the panwalla who used to pimp for the bus stop dwellers. That was a few years ago. Ishmail had been smaller then but had learnt to tremble at the sight of bullish double-decker buses aiming straight for stray toddlers before screeching to a stop close enough to hear the exhortations of an apoplectic driver. It was a game the bus stop children played fifty, hundred times a day till one or more than one became its victim. The bereaved mothers berated the traffic constables, the unsure fathers beat the mothers and the children who survived that time pledged to play it better the next. Pintu would keep an eye on the children from his roadside shack. Suddenly screaming “Look out!” or “Watch the signal!” in the middle of folding a masala sodden betel leaf into a satisfactory triangle. Many onlookers would stop with the betel midway to their mouth--fist caught in a curious freeze, fingers protectively pinching the green triangle before coming back to life again as the kids scampered to safety. Someone would spit out “Bastards!” with a slosh of betel juice that bloomed on the tarmac like fresh blood. Pintu would nod sagely then, as if the key to the provenance of the roadside children was somehow intertwined with a dismissive discharge. He would sometimes call the wayward children to hand them a lozenge, a gift for dodging death that day.
Rashida found a five rupees coin when she was washing Ishmail’s pants. She pounced on her son, slapping him as she bellowed: “We are not beggars! I work hard enough.” The whimpering child could tell her nothing. Rashida could feel helplessness churn in her stomach as she touched the swollen lips of her sleeping son that night, silently hoping for a full, unbroken sentence sometime, someday from the child whose speech impediment the do-gooder ladies had put down as incurable. Ishmail’s watching eyes reassured her that he was putting away a lot to be shared later, perhaps, she hoped, someday in the confidence of a personal hut, surrounded by personal objects unsullied by intrusion. Rashida took heart then. She already knew that survivors were people of few words.
But Rashida would have never known had she not run out of salt that day. The sun had climbed directly above, and she had not started a fire yet. Egged on by the silent hunger of her son who never bawled but only tugged harder at her saree, Rashida hurried to the municipal tap to wash the handful of rice she had bought earlier in the day. Rummaging inside her blouse, she fingered two broken stubs of chilli and a wedge of pungent onion. It was as she watched the yellow water recede from the sparkling grains, eyes sharpened to pick out any stray stone that the grocer frequently inserted to tweak weights, that it struck her that the salt knotted at the end of her spare saree had been loaned to Tuhina. She fished out a two rupees coin from her meagre repository that nestled in a cloth sack sitting flush with her buttocks and asked Ishmail to run to the grocer’s.
The steam from the cooked rice had started to waver and the onion wilted, slowly losing its pubescent pink to an indeterminate grey when Rashida began to worry. She called out to Tuhina, asking her to watch over the food while determinedly ignoring the unblinking gaze of her neighbour’s small daughter that seemed to slowly suck the food dry of its promised flavours.
She spotted them from a long way off and didn’t think anything of it. Not at first. Not even of Ishmail’s pants around his knees and his torso swaying desperately to free his legs from the tangle of Pintu’s arms. The panwallah was laughing. His tapered fingers stroking Ishmail’s penis. Blinded by the stinging tears that were as much her son’s as her own, Rashida started running. The abrupt shift of her gait alerted others who used the alleyway as a shortcut to the nearby railway station. The silently screaming woman tearing headlong towards her son sucked many to the spectacle of the brazen paedophile. After Rashida reached them, she had blood on her lips, her teeth crimson where she had bitten through Pintu’s shirt before the mob obliterated any future need he would have of shirts. She heard Ishmail shriek “Aamma, Aamma!” clearly, without a single impediment slurring his toddler’s desperation.
As the meat stewed in one pan and rice bubbled in another, Rashida and Ishmail drew closer. The steam rising from the rice and the curry was redolent of a life they had before a river in rage had washed it away.
Ishmail tugged at his mother’s saree, the fifty rupees note still in his hand, pulling her out of the searing memory. Her eyes still glittering, Rashida followed him to the municipal vat. Ishmail pointed at the abandoned coir mattress which had yielded the fifty rupees note. Rashida probed deeper into the hole in the mattress which had caught her son’s eye during the day and extracted another fifty. Then another.
Darkness had fallen and the ragpickers had retreated. Pretending to scavenge, Rashida knelt down and slowly pried away the congealed fabric that still held the ancient mattress together. By late evening, she had a bundle.
They had mutton that night. Mother and son, cooking at a distance from their neighbours. Real cuts. No discarded offal with specks of meat attached. Tuhina and others smiled indulgently as they saw a mother making up to her son after a day of suspended devotion. As the meat stewed in one pan and rice bubbled in another, Rashida and Ishmail drew closer. The steam rising from the rice and the curry was redolent of a life they had before a river in rage had washed it away.
They couldn’t wait to reclaim it.
An award-winning Indian journalist based in Hong Kong, Anisha Bhaduri’s debut crime novella, Murders in Kolkata 26, was published by Juggernaut Books in 2020. In 2012, her first published work of fiction featured in the Random House title “She Writes: A collection of Short Stories.” The first Indian woman journalist to become a Konrad Adenauer Fellow, her fiction was longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2018. She won the first prize in a national literary contest organized by the British Council in India in 2009. Anisha aspires not to be “a journalist who wrote fiction along some margin of spare time.”