With the two Singers racing again, Omprakash’s angry whispers darted their way through the hammering needles to his uncle’s ear. “You
Ishvar nodded mollifyingly. It embarrassed him to argue with Om or scold him within Dina’s earshot.
At two o’clock, when the noise of the machines was making her temples throb, Dina decided to deliver what had been completed. She was annoyed with herself. Pleading and bribing with tea was not a good example of a strict boss. It would take more practice, she concluded, to get used to bullying them.
From under the worktable she retrieved the transparent plastic sheet and brown paper in which the bolts of cloth had arrived from Au Revoir. Remembering Shirin Aunty’s advice, she wasted nothing. The little snippets of fabric continued to accumulate in great quantities. Enough, she thought, to make sanitary pads for a conventful of nuns. The larger scraps were collecting in a separate pile. She was not yet sure how to use these — for a quilt, perhaps.
She packaged the finished dresses and got her purse ready. To put in an appearance a day ahead of the deadline would impress Mrs. Gupta.
Then, keeping in mind Omprakash’s inquisitiveness, she padlocked the door from outside, just in case he decided to follow her.
Sore-bottomed and bleary-eyed, the tailors adjourned to the front room. After the morning-long hardness of wooden stools, the old sofa was sweet luxury despite its broken springs, and the pleasure keener because it was stolen. The stiff posture of their profession melted from their bones as they sank into the cushions. Raising their bare feet to the teapoy, they pulled out a packet of Ganesh Beedis and lit up, sucking greedily at the smoke. A torn-off segment of the beedi wrapper served as ashtray.
Omprakash scratched his head and examined the dandruff harvested by his fingertips. With the inch-long nails of his pinkies he cleaned under the others, flicking the oily accretions to the floor. He would not have admitted he was bored — by wasting time he was outsmarting Dina Dalai. If she thought she could drive them like a pair of dumb oxen harnessed to her plough, she was mistaken. He still had his manhood, he thought bitterly, though his uncle sometimes behaved otherwise.
Ishvar let his nephew idle away the hour. The rock of hunger lay heavy in both their hollow bellies. He watched amusedly as Omprakash squirmed and snuggled in the cushions, determined to pilfer maximum pleasure from Dina Dalai’s sofa. He meditatively fingered the cheek that kept half his smile imprisoned in frozen flesh.
Laughing, yawning, stretching, they smoked away the time, temporary kings of the broken sofa, masters of the tiny flat, when their illicit leisure was invaded by a battering at the front door.
“I know you are in there!” shouted the visitor. “This padlock on the door does not fool me!”
The tailors froze. The pounding continued. “Paying the rent means nothing! We know what goes on behind the padlock! You and your illegal business will be thrown out on the street!”
The tailors understood — it had to do with the landlord. But what was this about a padlock? The banging at the door ceased. “Quick, on the floor!” whispered Ishvar, in case the door-banger decided to look through the window.
Something fell through the mail slot, then there was silence. They waited a few moments before venturing to the door. A large envelope addressed to Mrs. Rustom Dalai lay on the floor. Ishvar turned the latch. The door moved half an inch and hit the outside hasp, confirming the padlock’s presence.
“She locked us in,” fumed Omprakash. “That woman. What does she think?”
“Must be a reason for it. Don’t get upset.”
“Let’s open her letter.”
Ishvar snatched it from his hand and put it aside. They tried to get comfortable again on the cushions, lighting up new beedis, but the intrusion had soured the pleasure. The sofa’s sagging comforts hardened into lumps of discontent. Stray threads clinging to their clothes reminded them of the work waiting in the back room. The clock displayed its baleful warning: she would soon be home. Soon, all of this prohibited behaviour would have to cease.
“She cheats us,” grumbled Omprakash. “We should sew directly for the export company. Why does she have to be in the middle?” His lips made small, careful movements that became words, his smouldering beedi hanging in uneasy equilibrium at one corner of his mouth.
Ishvar smiled indulgently. The insolence of the dangling beedi was aimed, lethal as a toy gun, at Dina Dalai. “Soon as it’s time for her to come, your face looks like you ate a sour lime.”
He continued, his tone more serious, “She is in the middle because we have no shop. She lets us sew here, she brings the clothes, she gets the orders from the company. And besides, with piecework we have more independence — ”
“Leave it, yaar. She treats us like slaves, and you talk of independence. Making money from our sweat without a single stitch from her fingers. Look at her house. With electricity, water, everything. And what do we have? A stinking shack in the slum. We’ll never collect enough to go back to our village.”
“Giving up already? That’s no way to win in life. Fight and struggle, Om, even if life knocks you around.” He held his beedi between ring and little finger and made a loose fist, raising it to his lips.
“I’ll find out where she goes, you watch,” said Omprakash with a defiant toss of his head.
“Your puff moves beautifully when you do that.”
“Just wait, I’ll get the address of the company.”
“How? You think she will tell you?”
Omprakash went to the back room and returned with a pair of large pointed scissors. He clutched it with both hands and thrust theatrically into thin air. “Hold this at her throat and she will tell us whatever we want to know.”
His uncle whacked him on the head. “What would your father say if he heard you? Stupid words pour from your mouth like stitches from your machine. And just as carelessly.”
Omprakash sheepishly put back the scissors. “One of these days I’m going to cut her out of the middle — I’ll follow her to the company.”
“I didn’t know you could walk through padlocked doors like the Great Goghia Pasha. Or is it Omprakash Pasha?” He paused to draw, then whiffed smoke through his nostrils and smiled at the scowling face. “Listen, my nephew, this is the way the world works. Some people are in the middle, some are on the border. Patience is needed for dreams to grow and give fruit.”
“Patience is good when you want to grow a beard. For what she pays, we couldn’t afford the ghee and wood for our funeral pyre.” He gave his hair a ferocious scratching. “And why do you always talk to her in that silly tone, as though you were an ignorant fellow from the countryside?”
“Isn’t that what I am?” said Ishvar. “People like to feel superior. If my tone helps Dinabai to feel good, what’s wrong in that?” Savouring the final delights of his shrinking beedi, he repeated, “Patience, Om. Some things cannot be changed, you just have to accept them.”
“You want it both ways? First you said struggle, don’t give up. Now you are saying just accept it. Swaying from side to side, like a pot without an arse.”
“Your grandmother Roopa used to say that,” laughed Ishvar.
“Make up your mind, yaar, choose one thing.”
“How can I? I’m just a human being,” he replied, laughing again. Halfway, it changed to coughing, shaking him harshly in its racking embrace. He went to the window, moved the curtain aside and spat. Were he close enough to examine it, he would have seen the usual spot of blood.
A taxi approached as he was withdrawing his head from the window. “Quick, she’s back!” he whispered hoarsely.
They began eliminating the traces of their bad behaviour: plumping the cushions, repositioning the teapoy, pocketing the matchsticks and ashes. A spark flew from the beedi in Omprakash’s mouth, as though to mock his earlier fire-breathing rage. He fanned it away from the upholstery. Drawing one last time at the beedis while running to the back room, they extinguished the stubs and chucked them out the rear window.
Dina paid the taxi and felt inside her handbag for the key ring. The brass padlock, tarnished, hung grim and ponderous. She turned the key with a twinge of guilt, no jailer at heart.
