Articles
Woman and Child
Opinion | Articles | Desmond L. Kharmawphlang | 14-Dec-2020
The trudge from her hovel to the corner by the bus-stop would be covered in the time it took her to have her first mouthful of betel nut of the day, about say, 10 minutes. With her bag of bidis and cigarettes, plastic jars of shaved and pieced betel nuts and neatly folded betel leaves slung on a shoulder, she heaved the heavier bundle placed squarely on her back and plodded on the sidewalk. She shuffled past shops most of whose shutters were still down, avoiding the mongrels that were sniffing at the discarded empty boxes of designer clothing, cosmetics and cell phones heaped by the side of the pavement. The occasional cars cruised down from Police Bazar making their way to Iewduh or Bara Bazar where activities began earlier in the day.
She pulled the box from behind the bus-stop and started arranging her wares on it while gazing down the street absently. There were a few people at this time of day and taxi drivers stamping the ground and moving their limbs briskly to work up some warmth. The child she carried on her back, wrapped in a worn tapmohkhlieh, or shawl, stirred, probably hearing in his mind, the, by now, familiar sounds as the city wakes up to prepare itself for yet another spell of a resolute orgy of deals, deceit and debts.
The woman counted the kwai and cigarettes, unconsciously thinking of the improbable sale she would make during the day, the rice that was almost finished at home, the money she owed the cigarette wholesaler. The child stirred again. He lives, grows, eats on her back or sometimes in her lap when he feeds at her breasts. A man, carrying a suitcase, ambles towards the tourist taxi stand stops to buy a packet of cigarettes. He counts small change carefully and walks away. The morning trade trickles in.
By ten in the morning, raucous hawkers were stationed in strength all along the pavement, setting up shop with posters of film idols, towels, socks, ballpoints and gleaming imitation jewellery. Not to be out done, beggars display their maimed and broken bodies, whining to various gods and the rush of people for crumb and coin. Indifferent pedestrians pass by, silently suffering the fumes from cruising cars. Some stop to buy kwai and cigarettes from the woman, others walk on, allowing her to daydream a little…
She had left the village upon the gentle persuasions of the man who, one market day, befriended her in the tea shop of the village market. The man had been a handyman of one of the sumo vehicles that was ferrying people and goods between her village and Shillong. Convinced that she would find a better life away from the back-breaking labours of the unforgiving hills of her birth, she thought about the man’s proposal for a month and decided to leave her village and follow him. They stayed together in his tiny rented quarters near the stadium and football grounds in the heart of Shillong. The man was caring and responsible. He was dutiful about his work and brought home very modest earnings which were stretched very thin between the pay-day of each week. When the child came, he took up odd jobs in the evenings and on Sundays, washing cars and “ tempo driving” or substituting the regular driver of the cab owned by a cousin brother. It was when he was driving this same cab that he vanished and only days after that the cab was found abandoned by the side of the highway, a deserted stretch a kilometre away from the bridge over the Umiam lake.
The sun now sits overhead and the woman undid the knot of her jain it, the band of cloth holding the child to her back. She spreads it on the concrete and places the child on it. He whimpers. He had been ill all week, receiving only the rough affection of the woman as medication. This 24th day of December, when the cold is baring its sharpest teeth, the child lie inert, helpless, his eyes gazing blankly at the passing throng of pedestrians, shoppers, richly-clad children clutching their parents’ hands.
Night fell with embattled weariness and by this time, the child had drowsed out of sheer sickly fatigue. The few people left on the streets scurry around, making last-minute purchases of food and liquor to couch their Christmas dreams in. Working by the light of the street lamps, the woman gathers her stuff in a soiled bag, and speaking softly to the child knotted to her back by now, heaves her load on a lean shoulder, deposits the box behind the bus shelter once again, and slowly walks home.
Home was a single shed of flattened mustard oil canisters imprinted with figures of imposing deities in flight and pictures of scooters, nailed to rotting timbers, adding to the rusty perforations of the tinny walls. Placing the child on sacks cushioned with ragged lengths of cloth strewn in a comer of the room, she felt that the child was more feverish than during the day. Covering him with the tapmohkhlieh, she scooped up wood-shavings to prepare a meal of rice and a boiled potato which she takes with a little salt. She then picked up the child and loosens her breast. The child refuses to feed, mouth opened, his breath hot and fetid. Gathering him carefully in his bundle of rags, she squats on the sack mattress and dumbly rocks the child.
Outside the night was filled with the sounds of church bells and revellers, vaguely reliving the pageant of a presumed salvation through the birth of a child. Drunken greetings and curses are exchanged in the festive-charged nocturne, given and accepted like rightful gifts, everyone, naturally, looking forward to morning services which will clothe them in sobriety and sheepish grins.
The child now begins to whine and the woman stirs and touches him softly, gently, as only despair could inspire. It was pointless to go looking for help because her neighbours were as remote as the childhood dreams etched on the face of the moon of her village tucked far away in the western hills she had left. Her hut was separated from her neighbours by a huge ditch which empties itself into the bowels of a popular Cinema hall.
The activities outside becomes more frenzied – songs blare incoherently and drunken shouts get more accentuated. Church bells ring and the hands of the clock creep to the final Christmas peak. The child stops whining and looks at his mother once. Then he closes his eyes and all at once, it seemed as if a great, kindly breath blew out the light of the stars, one by one, cooling the fevered brow of the child forever.
(The Author is a Professor in Department of Cultural and Creative Studies, NEHU, and could be reached on desmondkharmawphlang@gmail.com)
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