The Shoes

Ranjita Biswas

Malti saw her from a distance but recognised her instantly. Her malkin in whose house she used to work as a domestic help until some years ago. But this area was not where they used to live, was it? Had they changed their house? Should she go and greet her, folding her hands with a ‘Namaste, Ruma-didi?’ Malti wondered. Would she recognise Malti in her new look? After all, it was more than six years since she had left the job to return to her village. At the time, she was much younger too.

Malti looked down at her shoes, smart and bright in a combination of pink and white. The logo ‘Nike’ was clearly visible. She was dressed in a pair of Levi jeans and a cropped top in bright pink with flowers all over and her hair was tied in a ponytail. Her eyebrows were nicely threaded to make a perfect arch and her lips were coloured in a light shade of pink to match the blouse. Her young dark skin glowed with a touch of moisturiser.  

Malti hesitated. Would malkin snub her or worse, ignore her? After all, you could never tell with city people. They forget people when it suited them, or when a job was done. But she scolded herself, malkin was not that bad, only a little aloof. Suddenly, a scene, and then many scenes, one after another, flashed in her mind and she closed her eyes for a moment.

Ruma-didi walking fast in the lane circling the park and Malti herself was trying hard to keep up, even as she pushed the pram with little Abhi, her worn flip-flops impeding her pace. Her malkin kept looking back from time to time, a little annoyed admonishing her, Malti, can’t you walk faster? I want to keep an eye on Abhi.’

 ‘Yes, Didi!’ she had replied trying her best to coax her twelve-year old legs to cope with her employer’s speed.

Her eyes often fell on the shoes malkin was wearing. How beautiful! What thick soles! Perhaps Ruma-didi could walk so fast because of the shoes – soft on the heels? Ah, if she could have a pair of shoes like that! Then she could have shown!

In her village she was known as the horin because she could run so fast, fleet like a deer, and barefoot too. When she played with her friends in the field, she used to outrun all the other girls. Sometimes, they climbed the mango trees in the garden of the rich farmer to pluck half-ripe fruits but were detected by the owner. When he came running wielding a stick, she was the one who scampered away the fastest, still carrying mangoes in the folds of her skirt. But now look, she was falling behind Ruma-didi who was much older to her. Was it because she was pushing the pram? Or, because the rubber flipflops were still unfamiliar to her feet?

In the evening, after coming back from the park, Ruma-didi took off her shoes, kept them in the shoe-rack at the entrance to the apartment, and then slipped into a colourful pair of flip flops. Malti had to take off hers even before entering the drawing room, carry them to the corner room where she slept, put them in a plastic packet to be brought out only when she stepped out next day. At home, she was supposed to walk barefoot.

After washing her hands with soap kept separately for her, she went to the kitchen to make a cup of tea with milk for herself and heat water in another pan for Ruma-didi’s tea; didi did not drink tea with milk. By now Malti knew what to do – take out a sachet from the box with green colour,  place it in the special cup  – Ruma-didi called it a mug, with the design of a hibiscus flower and pour hot water on it. Yuck! How could anyone drink tea like this, Malti often muttered to herself, as the green colour slowly emerged. She didn’t even like its smell. As far as she was concerned, a tea had to be tea properly strong, brewed with milk and sugar.  In their village it was often gur as sugar was more expensive. Ah! To drink tea like that, with long slurping sounds while biting into a khara biscuit from time to time! It was the best way to enjoy tea, Malti was firm in her belief. Here, however, Ruma-didi did not allow her to make slurping sounds while drinking tea as she sat on the floor next to her sofa while little Abhi slept in the pram next to them. She dared not ask why.

She enjoyed this time of relaxation, nonetheless, watching a TV programme in the company of her malkin though she didn’t understand half the things that came up on the screen, or the strange language in which the people spoke. On her arrival she did ask one day innocently, ‘Don’t they know Hindi?’ Ruma-didi informed her that they were speaking angrezi. And that she liked to watch ‘English’ programmes.

Malti would have preferred to watch Hindi programmes, and most of all, some song and dance scenes from Hindi films. In their village when puja was celebrated in autumn, the young boys organised ‘film shows’ in the evening.  A big white screen was put up, its ends tied to two poles on both sides in the field at the centre of the village where young boys played football at other times. The villagers sat on the earth – men and women, young and old, watching mesmerised as the hero ran across a green hill full of flowers. They knew beforehand what would happen next; he would meet a pretty girl in a gorgeous dress waiting for him.  Mosquitoes bit them, sometimes the chill of the autumn night made their skins break into goose bumps, but they didn’t care or notice even, their eyes were glued to the screen. When the bad man beat up the hero, they cried out in distress, but when he in turn beat up the villain, they clapped enthusiastically.

When she thought of her village and her parents, Malti’s eyes moistened. Her parents were poor. Malti and her younger brother had accepted that on some days there was going to be only one meal and that at night sometimes they would wake up with hunger pangs gnawing at the belly.  But then they were free to roam in the countryside while on their way back from the sarkari school, a ramshackle shed actually, have a bath in the village pond with friends, pluck wild greens in the open field near the main road as per their mother’s instructions since there weren’t potatoes or vegetables to cook for dinner at home, let alone lentils, and these are what they had to do with, alongside some rice and salt. Her father often did not find work to have some money to buy proper vegetables for the four of them. They did not have a patch of land around their little hut to grow some either.

Then the day arrived when her father took her out from school and brought her to this city. His cousin who worked as a guard in a high-rise in the city had told him that Malti could work as a maid in the rich folk’s home; food and clothes would be free and she could send the salary home.

All through the journey in a rickety old bus from the village and then in a train to reach the city, Malti wept sporadically. Her father, crestfallen, looked at her sideways but didn’t console her. Guilt, sadness, regret – all seemed to gather into the folds of his forehead.

These people, her employers, were not monsters as she had feared. Dada, her malkin’s husband, spoke to her kindly.  The food was okay too with an occasional fish curry to go with the rice, a boiled egg sometimes, and on Sundays, a few pieces of chicken from a curry, a must for the family on a holiday.

By now, she also knew the things she shouldn’t do – argue with Ruma-didi, talk too much when guests were in the house, and gossip with the neighbour’s maid when they went to empty the garbage bin in the morning as the ‘garbage-man’ arrived ringing his bell ting…ting…ting in front of the complex alerting the people that he had come to collect the kachra.

Malti didn’t want to lose her job and so obeyed her employers’ instructions to the T. She knew the money was badly needed back home. Her mother was suffering from some disease and medicines had to be bought. The family thought that they could get them free in the pharmacy at the sarkari hospital or at least at a discounted price, but had to return empty handed. The compounder told them that those medicines were special and were not available there. Others in the village said the medicines were supposed to be available in the pharmacy as the resident doctor had prescribed them but most probably, the compounder had sold them off in the free market behind their back. Whatever be the truth, the fact remained that Malti’s father had to borrow money to buy medicines for his wife. After sometime, people refused to lend him money; their financial condition was not much better either. Unable to cope, the only option was to send his daughter to work as a maid in the city.

So here was Malti in the big city.

One day, she dreamt that she was running on the village road, her hair flying. Strangely she was wearing a pair of shoes like Ruma-didi’s.  As she sprinted, she looked back and finding her friends far behind, she laughed in glee. She laughed so much that she woke up. Shocked, she looked at the ceiling of the small room and wept – for her parents, her friends, and the open fields of her village.

Next morning, as she swept the room and tidied the shoe rack, she took out her malkin’s shoes and tried to read the letters above the shoelaces crisscrossing each other. She had seen such letters on the blackboard of the school back home meant for the students in a higher class. Taking out a pen kept on a stand on the table, she wrote on her palm, N-I-K-E. She would ask someone afterwards, though she didn’t know whom, what it meant, and how to pronounce the word. If she saved enough money, would she be able to buy a pair like this one day, she wondered.

But her salary was sent to the village through the ‘guard’ uncle. As Ruma-didi entered the room she quickly kept the pen in place and closed her palm.

Later, before she went for her shower, she tore a leaf from an old khata from a pile stacked in a corner of her room to be sold to the kabadiwala and carefully copied the  letters from her palm, and pushed the paper to a corner of her bag.

Her father visited, when possible, once a year. Travelling cost money which he could ill afford. On these occasions Malti felt like clinging to his kurta and beg, ‘Please take me home’, she wanted to sob into his chest, but she didn’t display her emotions. Instead she smiled, served him tea and biscuits and told him that malik and malkin were good to her, Abhi loved her and she was happy. From the corner of her eyes she could make out that Ruma-didi  was hovering around to hear what she was reporting to her father. To tell the truth, she admitted to herself that her employers were not bad, compared to many in the complex as she learnt from the grapevine though Ruma-didi had forbidden her to listen to gossip.

Three years passed.

One day, however, Malti was compelled to return to the village. Her mother was too ill now to perform even the simplest of the household chores. Her father managed to get some work under MGNREGA these days but leaving her behind was a problem. Her brother was now in a higher class. Fortunately, he liked school and talked of going to college, quite a new thing in their village. Boys usually dropped out around eighth or ninth standard and looked for jobs as apprentices in some garage or were hired by landowners to till the land.

In short, there was no one to look after the household and their ailing mother and Malti was needed at home.

Her malkin was reluctant to let Malti go who had, by now she had become quite an expert in all the chores in the house, even cooking. But she could not insist, of course. Malti’s father promised to look for a girl in the village to work as a replacement. While leaving, malkin gave an extra one hundred rupees above her salary and allowed all the clothes she had bought for her to be taken home.

Malti was a bit surprised at herself for feeling a little sad at leaving the city; she was getting used to the life here. She would miss Abhi the most, a toddler now, who she liked playing with.

Coming back to the village after three years was a bit unsettling at first. She had forgotten how cold wind entered the hut at night through the holes on the mud wall pasted over a reed frame. She had forgotten too how tough it was to fetch drinking water in pots from the tubewell at a distance, the only one in the village. She had forgotten that a vegetable curry or a boiled egg could be a luxury.

Malti’s friends came to meet her and listen to the stories of the sahib-log, what they ate, how they dressed and had a dozen questions. Malti didn’t mind but sometimes she got irritated at having to answer the same questions over and over again. She didn’t show her annoyance though; she alienate the girls who would think she had put on airs as a ‘town-girl’ and stop coming to meet her. In a small community, to be friendless is to invite disaster.

With Malti at home, her father sighed in relief. He could go to work without worrying and a cooked meal waited for him on return. Her mother, completely bedridden now, was happiest to see her daughter bustling about the little hut – sweeping, cooking, scrubbing the utensils till they shone, but mostly because she sat near her to chit-chat. Her brother looked quite grown up now. He had become soft-spoken and didn’t fight with her like before. One day she took the slip of paper she had hidden in a corner of her bag to her brother and asked him to read the word. “It’s NIKE, silly! You saw it written on a pair of shoes, right?”

Malti nodded. She was very proud of her brother for being able to read the English word at one go.

“What do you want it for? Want to buy? It’s very expensive, you’ll never have money enough to buy it,” her brother told her matter-of-factly.

Looking at her crestfallen face, he hugged her and said, “Ok, when I’ll work in the city after college, I’ll buy you a pair.”

Eventually, Malti got used to the rhythm of the village life. She still wanted to run in the field during spare time but her friends said that they were now big girls and that their parents did not encourage them to run in the field ‘like the boys’.

Malti couldn’t help getting restless from time to time. Though she didn’t tell anyone, she was getting a bit bored. Sometimes she thought of the apartment in the city, Abhi, her walk with Ruma-didi in the park with so many people around, all dressed up nicely, talking, laughing.

Two years after she returned, Malti’s mother died. She cried her heart out but was glad that she could look after her in the last years of her life. Her father looked lost and she knew that her brother wept at night in his bed when he thought nobody was awake. So she was the one who had to be strong.

Time hung in her hands. With her mother gone, there was not much to do at home. She borrowed books from her brother and tried to read to see if she had forgotten the letters. Thankfully, she hadn’t.

One day she came to know from her friend Chameli that a woman from the city had come to the village. She belonged to an NGO and asked the women of the village to meet her in the afternoon to have a chat. The women were curious. What was she going to say? Sometimes, people from the city visited, talked of doing this and that for improving their life and then were gone, never to return. Life remained the same. Nothing changed. Out of curiosity, they gathered under the peepul tree anyway.

But this woman, her name was Chandrani Dhar, seemed different. She talked about what her organisation did and told them that they should learn some skill, particularly the young girls, and earn money of their own. ‘Are you interested? We can teach how to…’ she queried her eyes running over the perplexed faces. Chandrani knew what they were thinking- having seen the same dilemma reflecting on faces of women in other villagers: earning money of their own? They did not know anything else other than planting crops, harvesting, looking after the house. And who was going to pay for their work?

Malti’s hand was the first to shoot up. Then a few hesitant hands went up too. Some said they would have to ask menfolk at home for permission. Ultimately, next day, about ten women agreed to enroll.

On her next visit, Chandrani was accompanied by three women – the teachers. Most of the village women opted to learn stitching of garments, or knitting woollens, which could be sold with the NGO’s help and they would get their share of the proceeds. Malti was the only one who wanted to do a beautician’s course. She could work in a beauty parlour in the city and earn more money, she thought. Maybe then she could save enough money to buy a pair of the Nike shoes she craved so much.

Malti’s father did not object; he knew she was not happy at home of late. He and his son could manage on their own now that his ailing wife was not there. Besides, Malti promised, if she got a job in the city, she would send money for them.

Chandrani found that Malti was the best learner she had come across till now among all the villages she had visited. So, she had a soft corner for her. When Malti finished her course, Chandrani promised her that she would look out for job for her in a beauty parlour in the city. She seemed to know a lot of people and so Malti hoped that something would come out of it.

But months passed and Malti had almost given up hope. Ah, those city people! Promises made and broken. Chandrani-didi, however, did visit the village again and spoke with her. She had managed to find a job for Malti in a well-reputed parlour. Most helpfully, she could stay in a PG accommodation with other girls who also worked in the same parlour. 

So here she was in the city again, for more than a year now. Malti had thought of visiting Ruma-didi but couldn’t remember the address. She had never gone out on her own when she worked there and so was unfamiliar with the city’s terrain.

And now look, she was just a few paces behind her! Malti walked tentatively towards her and spoke softly, “Ruma-didi, it’s me.”

Her malkin did not hear her at first, but on second call, she stopped and looked back. “Arrey! It’s Malti! What are you doing here?” she exclaimed.

Surprise made Ruma-didi speak a little louder than normal and the other walkers looked at her curiously. She pulled Malti to the side of the lane. Malti told her all about the events in the past years. Ruma-didi also exchanged news. Yes, they had changed houses and bought a flat in a housing complex nearby. Abhi went to school now.

As Ruma-didi talked, Malti could also make out that she was still astonished at the change in Malti’s get-up. Her eyes screwed up, scrutinising Malti as if to check if she was telling the truth. Such expensive things, how could they be affordable to a worker in a mere beauty parlour? Then, Malti saw her eyes moving to her shoes. They were exactly in the same combination of pink and white which Ruma-didi was wearing. As if not noticing, Malti deliberately moved her foot a bit forward. The logo was clearly visible. NIKE. Was there resentment, or even disbelief, in Ruma-didi’s eyes, Malti was not sure. “Okay, Ruma-didi, we will meet again soon. I come here to jog on off days, so I will see you again, I am sure. Namaste!” Malti said cheerfully, and without waiting for an answer, sprinted across towards the centre of the big park.

The shoes were not as soft inside as Ruma-didi’s and sometimes they hurt; they were fake, after all.  And her pair of jeans with the embossed patch on the back pocket proudly declaring ‘Levi’ were bought in a stall in Kolkata’s maidan market which took pride in turning out ‘exact’ replicas of American brands. But why should she divulge that to anyone?

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