THE IMMIGRANT Read Free

and glared at the dirty glass windows jammed shut. This same journey was such a pleasure in the mornings, with a seat assured, an hour to go through her lecture notes, suspended between home and college, combining purpose with mindlessness.
    She had to change at ITO, struggling unpleasantly against more bodies trying to squeeze into buses. If only she could occasionally treat herself to an auto as Zenobia did, but the habits of frugality ingrained during years of perpetual worry about money, and daily, hourly, weighing of cost and benefit, meant she could never take an auto, not on her birthday, not ever.
    So immersed in the world of push, shove, jab and poke, she hung onto another bus strap before being dropped off at the main road next to Jangpura.
    The evening found mother and daughter at the same Jangpura bus stop, laden with fruit. ‘I hope he likes mangoes,’ said Nina’s mother, looking uneasily at the three kilos of langra and chausa she had bought from the fruit seller that morning, ‘These are practically the last of the season and cost five rupees a kilo, five! I think one or two are slightly overripe, I hope he doesn’t mind, I thought of leaving them, but then it would look too little… ’
    ‘He will understand that it is the end of the season, and be very grateful,’ broke in Nina impatiently, her arms aching with the load. The bus came and twenty minutes later they got off at Shahjahan Road, and walked over to 43 Meena Bagh.
    ‘Please wait, ji,’ said the tall grey haired lady ushering them into the glassed in verandah. ‘He phoned to say he might be a bit late, he was called for a meeting at the last minute. He had to go, you know what it is like these days.’
    Everybody knew what it was like these days. Indira is India, India Indira, we need no one else, certainly not an opposition, D K Barooah, the Congress president, had declared as opposition was jailed, the press censored, demonstrations banned, activists tortured. The most startling objector to be thrown into prison was the venerable freedom fighter Jayaprakash Narayan. Old and frail, incarceration would destroy his health and succeed in killing integrity and conscience.
    On the wall opposite the front door was a black and white portrait of Indira Gandhi. Around her was a garland of sandalwood roses. They were in the house of a sycophant, or to interpret it more kindly, a man too scared to be seen as anything but a Believer. Slowly but surely Madam’s probing eye delved, knife-like, into every house, every heart.
    How feared she was. And how useless. Of her Twenty Point Programme the drive to produce sterile men was the only one that proved responsive to force. Poverty, alas, was resistant. Garibi Hatao. Almost thirty years after Independence that day was further away than ever, though government employees kept long hours in office, too scared to be absent or go home early. This man was obviously an example.
    ‘Papa didn’t need this kind of fear to make him work,’ burst out Nina. Her tall, vital, handsome father, hair greying at the temples, black framed glasses, clean-shaven face, slightly yellowing teeth, whose laughter was a series of snorts, who could charm with every word he spoke. Were he alive their lives would have been completely different. She tried never to think such thoughts for they led nowhere, but today, on her birthday, circumstances demanded them.
    ‘Your papa was a different breed of man,’ sighed the widow. For her every celebration was tinged with sorrow.
    ‘If papa were alive, we would not be here. Nice way to spend my birthday.’
    ‘That is why I say you should settle down. If you married an NRI or someone in the foreign services you could live abroad nicely.’
    ‘I don’t see NRIs or foreign service officers lining up to marry me. Get real Ma.’
    ‘Hasn’t happened doesn’t mean it won’t. Everything is possible.’
    Even marriage? Even happiness? Even escape?
    If a husband could protect her from