The House Next to the Factory E-Book

Sonal Kohli

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 200

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

The House Next to the Factory shows a changing India over three decades through the lens of one family and the house that they live in. Life in the house is humdrum and confining, but on a rare evening out, Kavya sets off in search of a nun; a beloved teacher is caught in the aftermath of the anti-Sikh riots; a loyal servant worries over his relationship with a low caste woman; while in England, an aunt reads William Trevor and pines for all that she has left behind. Over the years, the family's steel utensil business blossoms, and amid the clanging of metal and the churning of machines, the household transitions from bourgeois to elite. Yet at thirty, Kavya finds herself in Paris, hoping to get past the sorrows of her young life… Delicate and finely textured, Sonal Kohli's extraordinary debut lays bare the complexities of class and culture and the difficulties as well as excitements of change, even as it evokes loves and triumphs, the pull of incongruous desires and the tragedies of everyday life.

Leseprobe

What links Sonal Kohli’s beautiful, perspicacious stories is an aspirational India informed by historical and economic change. Sonal is very shrewd when it comes to grasping her characters’ desires and failings, and also the subtle ways in which their decisions are either enabled or thwarted by their history and by new opportunities. She has a way of absorbing the reader in her world, and also revealing very delicately how that world is surprising, unexpected, and in flux. I think the strength of many of her stories lies in the way that they are about very little, and about ordinary people, so that the interregnum described seems to capture something that’s vital but only partly perceptible from a distance.

– AMIT CHAUDHURI

Sonal Kohli tells all the truth slant and the result is a very fine collection of stories about a set of seemingly commonplace lives whose patterns and rhythms convince the reader that there is an alleviating charm, perhaps even hope for redemption, in the subdued and careful noticing of the ordinary.

– ANJUM HASAN

Here is a fully realized world with many vivid characters observed with sensitivity and grace. And the storytelling is utterly immersive. One of the most pleasurable works of fiction I’ve read in a long time.

– CHANDRAHAS CHOUDHURY

Thoughtful, delicate and wide-ranging, The House Next to the Factory is a paean to quiet lives everywhere and a testament to the often-overlooked power of the ordinary.

– MADHURI VIJAY

In quietly ambitious prose, Sonal Kohli charts the turbulent three decades of a ‘rising’ India. The House Next to the Factory is one of the very rare fictions to examine the immense human costs – profound emotional and psychological disorientations – that the Indian bourgeoisie has paid for its material success.

– PANKAJ MISHRA

In prose that is spare yet astutely detailed, Kohli evokes entire lives through just a few deft strokes. Finely-hewn, these stories carry a lingering effect.

– SHARANYA MANIVANNAN

SWIFT PRESS

First published in India by HarperCollins India 2021

First published in Great Britain by Swift Press 2022

Copyright © Sonal Kohli 2021

The right of Sonal Kohli to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Some of the stories in this book have been previously published in slightly different form: ‘Morning Visitor’ in The Caravan, ‘One Hour, Three Times a Week’ in Unthology 7, ‘The Outing’ in Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology Volume 12, ‘Steel Brothers’ in The Bombay Literary Magazine, ‘10 Bela Road’ in Blackbird, and an excerpt from ‘Kettle on the Hob’ as ‘Living in the Countryside’ in Monkeybicycle.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 9781800751316

eISBN: 9781800751323

For my parents,

Radhey Sham and Sunita Aggarwal

With her inner eye she saw how her own house and its particular history linked and contained her as well as her whole family with all their separate histories and experiences – not binding them within some dead and airless cell but giving them the soil in which to send down their roots, and food to make them grow and spread, reach out to new experiences and new lives, but always drawing from the same soil, the same secret darkness.

– Anita Desai, Clear Light of Day

MORNING VISITOR

ONE HOUR, THREE TIMES A WEEK

THE OUTING

OTHER SIDE OF TOWN

SHIRLEY

STEEL BROTHERS

10 BELA ROAD

WEEKEND IN LANDOUR

KETTLE ON THE HOB

MORNING VISITOR

—1980—

YAMUNA SAT ON THE metal cot, clipping her nails. Her hair was wet. The sun warmed her scalp.

Her two grandsons fenced with wooden swords on the grassless lawn. Amma was doing the dishes in the kitchen which looked on to the veranda. Raju could be heard dusting.

Someone clanked the main gate’s latch.

Yamuna glanced up as the gate opened and Pushpa walked in, maroon shawl on one shoulder, jute bag on the other. She went back to clipping her nails.

‘How are you?’ Pushpa said, settling down on the cot.

‘I’m fine.’ Her lips twisted as she pared the hard nail of her big toe.

‘Is that yours?’ Pushpa pointed to the brand-new pistachio Fiat in the veranda.

‘Why else would it be parked here?’ Yamuna nudged her spectacles up the bridge of her nose. ‘We bought it two weeks ago,’ she said at last.

‘Tch, that’s what I was saying, didn’t see it here before, no.’ She tipped her feet out of the chappals and wiggled her toes.

Raju came out and called to the boys, ‘Raghu! Anuj! Come, bhabhi has peeled oranges for you,’ then went back in. Behind the cot, a wall-to-wall partition of wood-framed glass doors curtained with muslin separated the inner rooms from the veranda.

‘Go now,’ Yamuna said, seeing her grandsons still playing. ‘And don’t eat half and waste the rest. Otherwise see, Auntie is here.’ She pointed at Pushpa with her chin while her hands folded the newspaper around the nail parings. ‘You know about the dungeon in her house where she puts naughty children, don’t you?’

‘So?’ Pushpa narrowed her eyes. ‘Did both of you finish your milk this morning? Come here.’

The boys froze. They gaped at the old woman. Her face was like a shrivelled apricot, her eyes were lined with kohl.

‘This bag may look small,’ she said, clutching it and shaking her head, ‘but it can easily hold ten little shaitans like you.’ With an outstretched finger, she pointed at both of them in turn.

The two little boys ran inside the house.

Pushpa, as though reminded of something, started to look through her bag. ‘Do you remember Janaki?’ she asked Yamuna.

‘Who?’

‘The one who used to live two lanes away. Back in Lahore. Whose family had a dry fruit shop,’ she said, still searching her bag.

‘Oh, Janaki! Yes, why?’

‘I met her at a client’s house last Puranmashi. She turned out to be their relative. I didn’t recognize her at first. Then it struck me who she was.’ Pushpa looked up. ‘And I said, “Remember me? I’m Pushpa. From Lahore.” She got up and embraced me with such ardour, Yamuna, I can’t tell you.’

Yes, the initial burst of enthusiasm, Yamuna thought. Isn’t that why I’ve had you hanging around my neck for fifteen years now? She will realize her mistake too when she finds you knocking at her door every month.

Yamuna and Pushpa, the two friends, had lost touch in the weeks after Partition when communal violence flared up in Punjab. Like other Hindu and Sikh families, they locked up their ancestral homes and left for the Indian side, carrying only cloth bundles of possessions. Pushpa, her husband and two-year-old son found themselves in the refugee camp at Kingsway in Delhi, while Yamuna and her in-laws went to Kanpur, only later moving to the capital. More than two decades passed without them seeing or hearing from one another. One morning Yamuna was at her tailor’s, who worked from his house at a rickety sewing machine set in the courtyard. She was discussing with him the neckline for her kameez when she heard a familiar voice call her name.

Yamuna was elated to see Pushpa, who lived with her family on the first floor. While the tailor watched their beaming faces, his feet working the treadle, fingers guiding the seams, the two friends talked about the old days. Then with sadness, they recounted the story of their journeys from home in what was now Pakistan. They asked after each other’s parents and siblings and exchanged notes on their families. How many sons? How many daughters? Pushpa invited her upstairs.

The room was narrow. Its green walls seemed sweaty. Yamuna sat on the charpai, while Pushpa filled her a glass of water from a pitcher in the corner. The window showed the cheap yellow façades of the houses across the lane and clothes spread on lines. Over the cupboard lay a mess of pots and pans, and bundles of clothes that looked like dusty pumpkins. The ropes of the charpai cut into Yamuna’s hips. She cleared her throat and shifted her weight. She told Pushpa about their other friend, Radha, who was in Delhi too. Then casually, she asked about Pushpa’s means. Pushpa told her that the family was doing well. She spoke about her own job as if it were a pastime, and Yamuna nodded along. She stayed until after lunch.

A month later Pushpa paid Yamuna a visit, followed by a second visit the next month, and one the month after that, each loosely timed to fall on days when people were likely to give donations to brahmins. Yamuna too would give her some money.

Over time the visits started to coincide more and more perfectly with such days. Sometimes she brought along Yamuna’s stitched clothes from the tailor.

Yamuna started to avoid her. If she happened to see Pushpa coming through the gate, she would order the cook to tell her she was not at home and send her away. But next month she would find Pushpa clanking the latch again.

Now Pushpa said, ‘Janaki asked about you as well. She took your phone number from me and gave hers for you. Here.’ She handed Yamuna the chit that she had finally dug out of her bag.

Yamuna looked at the number. ‘Where in Delhi?’

‘Kamla Nagar. What a house she has, Yamuna! Complete with a white marble temple. So many servants and maids. She has a bell by her bedside, she rings it and a maid comes running in to take orders. Big industrialists her sons have become. Two flour mills, one in Okhla, another one in Haryana. And do you know…’

Twirling her long gold chain, Yamuna listened with interest. These titbits about common acquaintances, and sometimes even about strangers, were the only things that she liked about Pushpa’s visits. Whose son or daughter was getting married, who got a car as dowry and who a washing machine, births and deaths, family disputes – Pushpa had all the details.

‘I’m going to her house again next month. Why don’t I come here and we go together. In your new motorcar, hmm?’

‘We’ll see,’ Yamuna said.

‘I’ll call you before I come next time.’ Pushpa made another try.

Yamuna did not reply.

The two sat in silence, one filing the uneven edge of a nail, the other picking lint off her fleecy shawl.

‘I went to Radha’s a few days ago,’ Pushpa began.

‘How is she?’ Yamuna put aside the nail clipper.

‘She’s fine, doing well. Somehow we got reminiscing about old times. Do you remember, Yamuna, how we would sneak into Radha’s aunt’s room whenever she was out? How we would go through her trunk? And one day she came back earlier than we had expected. You were prancing around the room in her sequin sari. Purple, wasn’t it? I had her salwar kameez on. And Radha was doing a song and dance, twirling her aunt’s dupatta. What a sound thrashing she gave us!’ Pushpa stretched the sentence, relishing it and smiling. Around her eyes the crow’s feet crinkled deep.

Yamuna watched her quietly.

‘But you know,’ Pushpa said, ‘whenever I see Radha, I wonder at how she has changed. She was never interested in dressing up or doing her hair. She didn’t know a thing about it. And now, always gracefully dressed. Remember, you and I would be putting laces to our saris and dupattas, and she, her hair in tangles, her sari a mess, would be skipping rope in the sun. And this was when we were quite grownup, no longer little girls.’ Yamuna and Pushpa with their fair skins had never considered the darker Radha as pretty as themselves. They treated her offhandedly, and sometimes kept her out of their games and secrets.

‘Don’t talk rubbish,’ Yamuna said. After Radha’s marriage into a sophisticated family, she had warmed to her.

‘Tch, she herself says that it was her sisters-in-law who groomed her,’ Pushpa said. ‘Anyway, when I got up to leave, she gave me fifty rupees for Ekadashi and a brand-new shawl.’

Yamuna knew this to be a lie. At the most she would have received a worn shawl along with the usual fifteen or twenty rupees.

‘And how many times I’ve asked you for a sari, and not even a new one at that. Can’t you give your friend one sari?’ Pushpa continued.

Yamuna shrugged her plump shoulders. ‘I didn’t get a chance to look through my cupboard. Next time.’

‘Next time, next time, same answer you give me always. Then—’

Their conversation was interrupted as Meera, Yamuna’s elder daughter-in-law, came out of the house. ‘Namaste, Auntie,’ she greeted Pushpa.

‘Namaste, my daughter. How are you doing?’ She dipped into her bag, took out a pair of hand-knitted cream booties and a hat and passed them to her. ‘Here, is this what you wanted?’

Meera stretched one little bootie over her fingers to see the design.

Pushpa pointed to Meera’s pregnant belly. ‘Looks like it’ll be a boy again.’

‘I’m hoping for a girl this time, Auntie.’

Pushpa smiled. ‘Yes, why not.’

‘Auntie, do you know how to knit a blouse? My mother wants one. Her eyes have become weak, she doesn’t knit any more.’

Pushpa nodded.

‘And how much for these?’ Meera brushed her hand over the booties and hat.

‘Twenty-five.’

‘I’ll just bring it. Will you have tea?’

‘Not at this hour.’ Pushpa raised her eyes to the pale blue sky. ‘Something else perhaps.’

‘I’ll send some kanji.’

After Meera went to the kitchen, Pushpa said to Yamuna, ‘I have to go get my husband’s medicine tomorrow. I’ll also get a tin box of this kohl I wear. For Meera’s mother. It improves the eyesight.’

‘Whose medicine? Your husband’s?’ Last Yamuna had heard, Pushpa and her husband had not been speaking. ‘Are you two back on talking terms then?’

Pushpa shook her head. ‘That’s not going to happen, at least not in this lifetime. And I hope I don’t get saddled with him in the next one,’ she added quickly. ‘My dharma is to take care of him if he’s not well and needs me, and that I do. Nothing more, nothing less.’

‘Oh.’ Yamuna gathered her hair and did it in a knot. ‘It must be strange to live in the same house and not talk to each other?’

‘It’s gone on for so long, Yamuna, now it doesn’t even occur to me as strange. He was the one who built this wall of silence. But now I say, good, very good that he did. Twenty years of blissful peace it has been.’

‘He must say the same thing: twenty years of blissful peace, spared of your nonstop chatter.’ Yamuna laughed.

‘Chatter?’ Pushpa looked at her friend. ‘I was hardly myself around him. And he for his part preferred to talk with his hands and feet. In the evening the clock would strike six and my heart would go cold. So much beating, so much fault-finding. Educated, manager in a big dry-clean company – is that how they behave!’

Yamuna remained quiet. She had heard this many times.

‘But the day I returned his one slap with two tight ones – a year’s resolve had gone into those slaps, Yamuna – he understood not to lay a finger on me any more.’ Pushpa’s face turned red. Sometimes, however, she liked to talk about the years when she used to send her petticoats, even blouses, to the dry cleaner.

Raju came out with two glasses of kanji. He placed the tray between them. Mustard seeds swam in the purple drink, dark carrot wedges sat at the bottom.

Yamuna took a sip. ‘That was when your husband cut himself off from you?’

‘Yes, but not immediately. For a month or so we remained on talking terms.’ Pushpa paused as though going over that time in her head. ‘Then slowly, he stopped speaking with me. I tried to talk, but he would not reply. One evening he returned with a new stove. Took half the utensils and made his separate kitchen in the corner. Next month he didn’t give me allowance for my ration, and I didn’t go begging to him for any either. “Why should I?” I thought to myself. “Hasn’t God given me two hands and legs too? I’ll put them to use.” Sure there are hard days even now, Yamuna. But I’ll survive. Somehow.’ Pushpa smiled.

Yamuna looked at her. How does she not crumble, she wondered.

It had been a harsh life. Uneducated, untrained, unprepared to earn a living, Pushpa had found herself thrust out into the world. She started sewing and knitting for the neighbours. It brought in some money, which would have sufficed had her son been earning something too, but he was already on the road to becoming an alcoholic.

Back in Lahore, one of Pushpa’s aunts, a poor brahmin widow, had lived on the meals provided by two households in the neighbourhood. She would go round to the houses at noon and again in the evening to collect her meals. On solar and lunar eclipses she even received clothes. Most households followed this contractual tradition. One day Pushpa met an acquaintance who complained of the near absence of such customs in Delhi. She asked Pushpa hesitatingly, for she knew Pushpa’s husband was reasonably well off, if she would accept a token donation from her household once in a while. Gradually, one contact led to another, and Pushpa garnered a clientele. It was 1980 now, and she went all over the city on foot, in a rickshaw, by bus. She took whatever the clients gave, little, much, food, money. In return, the clients earned good karma.

Yamuna put her glass back in the tray. Pushpa sat crunching a carrot wedge, eyes closed, the sun knocking at the lids.

Yamuna looked over the side of the cot. ‘Amma, where did Raju put the methi leaves? I told him to keep them here,’ she called.

Amma was on the lawn hanging washed clothes to dry. ‘One minute.’ Averting her face, she shook water out of a checked shirt and draped it over the line.

‘My knees have started hurting too much. Can’t walk,’ Yamuna said to Pushpa as their fingers plucked the methi leaves. They dropped the leaves on a newspaper between them and the stalks on a plate.

‘Hmm, knee aches tend to get worse in winters. And then the age factor does its bit too.’ Pushpa lifted her eyes to look at Yamuna.

‘What age factor?’ Yamuna asked without a change in expression. She knew well where the conversation was headed. ‘Why? You’re still okay.’

‘Well, I still have some catching up to do there,’ Pushpa replied.

‘What catching up? We are the same age.’

‘You should ask your sister Kanta. She’ll tell you. She and I are the same age.’

‘How’s that possible?’ Yamuna looked over her glasses. ‘Weren’t we in the same class at school?’

‘That’s because you all started school late.’

‘Nonsense,’ Yamuna declared, throwing a handful of the separated leaves on the newspaper.

Pushpa lapsed into silence.

Meera returned with three ten-rupee notes. ‘Auntie, twenty-five for the booties and hat, and you can keep the five.’

Pushpa clutched the notes. ‘I’ll make the blouse soon.’

‘Navy blue, if you can find the wool,’ Meera said before going back in.

‘I’ve been putting off buying garam masala,’ Pushpa said to Yamuna. ‘I’ll buy some on my way back today.’ She put the notes in her pouch and tucked it back into her blouse. ‘I miss it in my gobi aloo. They just don’t taste good without it. Old habits, I guess.’ She sighed.

Yamuna nodded. ‘It’s been so many years, but I’m yet to see a better stocked kitchen than your mother’s.’

Pushpa smiled.

‘From sweets to sherbets to ten types of pickles. And she loved to feed people,’ Yamuna said.

‘She was very fond of you. She would say, “I love to see Yamuna eat. How she savours every bite.”’

‘There were times, Pushpa, when the only reason I could get through the meals at my house was because I knew I would soon be eating something good at yours.’

Yamuna’s grandsons rushed past the cot to the far end of the veranda, swords in hand, wearing Rama and Ravana masks this time.

‘But all that went away with my father,’ Pushpa said. ‘He was a good man.’

‘You know, even as a child what really struck me about him was that he didn’t mind having so many daughters, you were seven sisters after all. But I never heard him complain.’

‘Never,’ Pushpa echoed. ‘Instead, he used to say, “Seven daughters, so what? What trouble do they cause me? As to finding them good husbands and households, they’ve each come with a prewritten kismat. It will provide accordingly.”’

‘Hmm, he used to say that, didn’t he? I remember now.’ Yamuna’s eyes drifted away from her friend’s face to watch Raghu and Anuj dance and clack their swords and chase each other around the Fiat, reminding her of her own childhood.

‘Your husband’s death anniversary must be round the corner,’ Pushpa said.

Yamuna turned to look at her. ‘Yes. Next Friday. Be here at nine sharp.’ Yamuna would wake up early that day to prepare a breakfast of puri, bhaji, raita and kheer that would be served to Pushpa, so that Yamuna’s husband would gain merit in the afterlife. After the meal, Pushpa would be given twenty rupees and a new blanket.

‘I’ll be on time,’ Pushpa said.

Through with the methi, Yamuna wrapped the newspaper around the leaves.

‘Is it lunchtime already?’ Pushpa said, as Raju passed by carrying a stack of plates and bowls.

Yamuna turned to see. ‘Hmm, must be one o’clock.’

Pushpa waited for a minute, then said, ‘I think I’ll go.’ She gathered her bag, slipped on her chappals and got up. ‘My Puranmashi dakshina?’ she asked, wrapping the maroon shawl around her.

‘Yes.’ Yamuna patted the front of her blouse. Locating a tenner and two fivers folded in it, she took them out. Since Meera had already given her five rupees, she had made up her mind to give only another fifteen to Pushpa instead of the usual twenty. But at the last minute she decided against it. ‘Here.’ She handed her all three notes.

Pushpa put her palms together. ‘Namaste.’

Yamuna watched Pushpa’s shawled back recede, her lizard of a plait hanging over it. It was perhaps Pushpa’s kismat that she be poor, have the husband she had, that her friends become her patrons, rich women with cars and bungalows who held her in disdain. In her next life, she hoped, her friend would start a new account. The latch clicked into place. Pushpa’s shrivelled face appeared above it. Then she turned and left.

Yamuna sat there on the cot a while longer.

ONE HOUR, THREE TIMES A WEEK

—1984—

THE HOUSE HAD TWO gates. There was a large rust-coloured one, past which Mr Lamba could see nothing. It seemed like the entrance to the factory. A few metres ahead was a small white gate with a square grille at the top. Mr Lamba walked his scooter to the smaller gate and parked it. He peeked in through the grille. There was an oval, grassless lawn and a veranda with a pistachio Fiat parked on one side. He tried the doorbell, but the switch was stuck. Mr Lamba lifted the latch and went inside.

He knocked at the glass door. In the kitchen, to his left, a yellow fridge hummed loudly. There were two Campa Cola bottle magnets on the fridge.

A boy of eight or nine came to the door.

‘Is your father at home?’ Mr Lamba said.