The girl, eleven, sees that thing—the beast with two backs—while climbing the stairs to the broad flat terrace that’s her situation room in the afternoons. Or rather, she sees the beast split in two parts—two people—who, despite her remaining quiet, have felt her presence. They’re one of the compound’s many part-time housemaids and the young fellow who lives in her home as a man-of-all-work.
Which is not to say her family is wealthy. Where they live, in this province of India, this country known for yo-yoing between crisis and Western charity, labor is as cheap as human life. The Maoist guerillas sometimes send the government bloody and homemade explosive reminders of this.
The young fellow, the man-of-all-work, may think no one sees how much the girl troubles him, but because she senses it, she always attempts to meet his detestation half-way. Now, her bulbous eyes take things in, her expressionless face refusing—probably cruelly in the fellow’s opinion—to give away if she’s seen the beast in its entirety, seen a little, or nothing at all; more importantly, if she’s understood anything, something, or all of what she’s seen. She’s sneaky. Withholding if she’ll tell, if she’ll talk. Keeping her counsel like a cocked gun.
The girl flickers out into the white-hot rectangle that’s the doorway leading to the open terrace. The man-of-all-work thrusts some bills at the housemaid, whose head snapped back from the young fellow’s groin when he leaped up, rogue’s honor at stake even if he didn’t get full service. Maybe he also pities the housemaid with her smallpox-scarred face, pug nose, mouth like a gash with pell-mell buck teeth stuck in it. It’s probably not by choice that she does this thing—she has no man, or none that have stayed. He shoos her away gently.
The eleven-year-old daughter of his master and mistress was nine when he came to work in this home, a good train ride from his own in a red-earthed, guerilla-infested village. He said he wanted to get away before the age when he’d qualify as a recruit for the rebels. Here, there was safety in whitewashed bungalows and tree-lined avenues inside the gates of the factory managers’ residential compound. Besides, the master said he could get him a factory job, real man’s work, in a few years…If it all worked out…Maybe…
A week ago, a workers’ strike began in the factory where the girl’s father is a manager. It blew up the man-of-all-work’s hopes of the better, manlier work in a real factory that his master had practically promised him after probation as home help. Blew them up at least for the immediate future.
The striking factory workers who will blockade the managers’ compound for two weeks can be seen squatting outside the west gate. Heard too. “There goes the cripple,” they squawk when the girl’s father limps out of the bungalow to carpool to the factory where the rusting machines on the plant floors meet management like ghosts. Wheels, this factory makes. For the cars that few own but feverishly cherish as status symbols.
The girl is reading Shakespeare in school. Othello is not her favorite among the plays but a phrase like that about double-sided beastliness can’t but stick. Shakespeare meant for it to. A wink at her across time’s frozen galaxies because the girl plans to become a writer too when she grows up. She goes to the terrace on dog day afternoons to slacken her gaze and squint into imagination other worlds, a future in even whiter washed buildings with no dust, no heat. She will not stay back in this grimy place that must seem heavenly to the man-of-all-work. She wants to end up in that big, better world farther west than anyone she knows has ever been. And others expect it, want it for her, her parents included. Her father pushes her onward even if her mother pulls her back a bit.
Some weeks ago, the girl witnessed the fellow’s reaction to the bad news about his job. Her father was lying in bed after lunch at home, before returning to the factory for the afternoon, eyes closed. The fellow crept—sidled up actually—to the open bedroom door. Like a scrawny puppy, he leaned against the doorframe.
“Master, what about my factory job?”
The girl stiffened because she knows that the truth is her father has no power to get this fellow a job. He’s an assistant manager at war with the top brass. Unlikely to be promoted. Little or no institutional pull. She knows this, at least in part, because she reads Shakespeare and other literature that tells her the world’s knottier and crueler than anyone lets on—has always been, will always be. And also because whenever her parents fight, her mother throws at her father his stalled career, and he shoves back with how blockheaded the cretins under whom he works are. They see the value neither of his personal–or is it personnel?–value nor his radical management ideas. Her father’s not a pet of the chain of command. This has echoed through the bungalow for years.
Sometimes the girl wonders if she will grow up to be like her father, a thorn in the side of the powerful, or at least an unpleasant Bartleby who’ll never make it to the top. But she promises herself that she will never let that happen, will do everything possible to stay out of trouble, not get into fights she can’t win, get along with people who call the shots until her exquisite literary fame puts her beyond anyone’s power, when she can do whatever she likes. Unlike her father, a resentful, rebellious forever-teenager, she will know how to wait—she will wait—for the right, heady stage of invincibility.
That afternoon, her father said to the fellow, “Is it that easy? Then why do you think it hasn’t happened already? You don’t think I would do it if I could? And do you know that a strike is coming? How can I get you a job now?” A chill went up and down the girl’s spine. It was the closest her father had come to acknowledging failure, ever.
The fellow didn’t respond. He can be poker-faced except on the occasions when the girl invades the kitchen and demands this or that, or if he’s asked to make extra food without notice because guests have arrived unexpectedly, or if he hasn’t had enough sleep because his work is too, too much, or his sleep was broken by nightmares he describes in lurid detail to the girl’s mother while helping with dinner. That day too he looked inscrutable after her father barked, but the girl’s stomach wall contracted from the hot acid of disgust. She detested both men. Failed, flawed creatures. She’d become an unwilling witness of their failures and flaws. The man-of-all-work’s lewdness. Her father’s limp.
The limp that the striking workers outside the compound witness and hoot, “Cripple!” At which her father gives a twisted, conspiratorial smile. It is factory and compound legend—helped along in its spread by himself as he often plummets into both private and public self-pity—that he’s come up through the ranks himself. And that limp is from flat-footedness and hand-me-down shoes from the days when he plodded to factory work every morning, a poor young draftsman with a humble lunch packed by a sniffling mother.
Slowly, slowly her father must have limped from worker to assistant foreman to foreman to assistant manager.
Some of the strikers are even almost his buddies, though, of course, at the requisite psychic and material distance. This fraternity—and that the compound’s children have dubbed him “handsome uncle”—is all the validation the girl’s father apparently needs.
To the girl, all this has the feel of a secret romance, not class warfare. The strike will break too, eventually, everyone knows this. And when it does, her father’s heart will split in two, half in relief for himself, half in compassion for the workers from whom he stands, perhaps only by god’s grace, some rungs above. But the man-of-all-work would not know, believe, or understand this, though he’ll believe in his own future rising-through-the-ranks saga.
The girl chooses not to tell her parents about the beast with two backs splitting in two before her eyes, partly because it is so grotesque and sick that one could hardly speak of it to one’s parents, partly because maybe her father, the powerless assistant manager failing to secure the young fellow a factory job, is ultimately responsible for this beastliness. In the fellow’s home village, his thirteen-year-old fiancée waits for him to make his children with her when he has the manlier factory job but, likely, he can’t handle the waiting, which is where the middle-aged unmaidenly housemaid helps out, the girl has grasped.
Over the last year or so the girl has also grasped that sometimes she’s caught this fellow staring at her thinking no one saw. She might be reading in bed some afternoons, knees drawn up, one ankle crossed over one knee, face buried in the book. Suddenly she’ll catch out of the corner of her eye the fellow standing at her bedroom door when he’s not needed. He has a half-pained, half-vicious look on his face as if he can’t believe she’s doing this.
What business is it of his, her posture while being bookish in the afternoons in this bungalow that belongs to her? Or at least temporarily to her father, whose company—started by white people who had run away after centuries of saying they were taking over this country only to civilize it—makes the literal wheels of progress on which the country runs. The company maintained a wheel-making monopoly when the country, young and free as a toddler, played with Development Plans that would make it catch up with the West where all the white people went. Then the home-help types would have honest-to-goodness real factory jobs instead of mucking around in whitewash-faded bungalows of compounds. Live in decent government housing instead of stairwells and shacks, even if the Maoists still taunted them—Servants of Bourgeoisie!
But Development’s arrhythmia and Western pressure to keep the economic legs of the country open wide to free market multinationals flatlined the company. It’s caving to competition. Workers don’t get raises. So they strike now and then, with rationed food and adulterated cooking oil and toxic country liquor already crippling them.
The girl doesn’t know all of this, of course, but since the afternoon of her father’s dressing down of the man-of-all-work, she’s begun grasping why her comfortable life riles up the young fellow. Grasping enough to link his wounded glare and the beast with two backs to his still working for them. Enough to link him being riled up to her father’s empty promise of a factory job. Maybe he’s thinking those Maoists he ran from are right after all about that Servants of the Bourgeoisie stuff. She feels afraid. In self-defense, she glares back at his louche scowl at her door, knowing she has the upper hand as the master’s daughter, that this defiance too is like another cocked gun for pointing and shooting should the time come, should there be a strike at home among the help, should the stockpiled domestic rage in the bungalows spark and burn white-hot, explode.
Then this fellow drops a bomb. He has tuberculosis.
The girl thinks she’s seen this coming, at least since the afternoon of the splitting beast. Such company. Such risks. She waits, stiff, for what her parents will do, say. The quality of mercy is not strained, she thinks. She remembers the afternoon the fellow found out the truth about the factory job. The beast is really her father’s fault. She feels huge relief when her parents say the fellow can take six months off and recover in his village. They also offer to pay for his treatment. Yes, Mercy is twice blest and blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
He leaves, and furtively, for a few days, the girl watches the pug-nosed housemaid when she strides from bungalow to bungalow, part-time job to part-time job. The girl sees no distress, no collapse, only the same pockmarked face and wide mouth full of crowded, crooked teeth. The maid doesn’t cough either, like the fellow did before he packed his small bag and left.
While he’s gone, another factory strike starts and ends just as the girl’s older cousin, mafioso-handsome in a black biker’s jacket, arrives. He is her father’s nephew and close friend who’s motorcycled all the way from the city on a whim to see his favorite uncle and aunt. He’s never had much to say to the girl, just has a look on his face when he glances at her that’s neither friendly nor unfriendly but as if he’s seeing a new life form for the first time and is mildly curious.
The girl prefers things this way. Her cousin has a slight limp that only endears him more to her father, though some angry relatives have volunteered the view that it’s from venereal disease. His lonely death will come decades later, at which point he’ll barely be able to walk from the shakes and tremors of what the angry relatives will swear is syphilis and delirium tremens, but the girl will surmise—she’s studying medicine in the West by then—is untreated advanced muscular neurodegenerative disease.
It is, however, true that the cousin is known, handsome and all, to be a drunkard and “whoremongerer” in the city. This word the girl has learned from her girl cousins, his younger sisters, one of whom will later die of the same disease without anyone being accused of venereal disease.
When her cousin arrives, the strikers are plucking mats, umbrellas, sheets off their street occupation zone cheek-by-jowl with the west security gate, and the guards like obelisks watch. They are careful to leave cigarette packs, used paper and plastics, rags, stained tissue, towels, torn sandals, spittle, leftover food. They crow, seeing poetic justice if no other kind. “Look, one more cripple has come to visit ours! A whole family of cripples!” Her father chortles indulgently. The girl smolders.
Inside the bungalow, the girl has other problems, like maybe catching some dreadful dirty disease from sharing bathrooms with this cousin who “goes to women.” She feels in this instance the quality of mercy should be restrained by her parents. For her sake, their eleven-year-old, only daughter. So what if the cousin is family; is he their own child? But when have they ever really put her first unless she’s brought home top grades, but even then, it isn’t like the light on her father’s face when the cousin shows up, her father who will later cry like a baby when the cousin dies. The rest of the family will have renounced him long ago, and even his own father and sisters will say good riddance, or that other wise thing—“It’s better, he won’t suffer any more”—when he dies, but the girl’s father will say, weakly, “He was family,” and who knows why, for one of a handful of times in the girl’s life, she will see her mother shed a tear too.
The man-of-all-work is gone for six months or more. The girl has lost count because the household adapts to his absence with temporary hires. For the girl it’s one less unstrung man to deal with.
He returns beaming. He’s tuberculosis-free. He sets to his old household work with renewed bustle. The girl dips into the kitchen for a snack and hears her mother, a part-time maid—not that pug-nosed one—and the fellow talking.
“I can’t gut fish right now, Madam,” he says.
“And why is that?” The girl’s mother’s on-call whine is working up to a grievance.
“Because at home there is new fish coming.”
Her mother is stumped, like the girl herself. The maid interprets. “Good news! He will have a baby soon!”
There is hubbub. Suddenly this fellow is a new man, a father-to-be. He took the opportunity of his sick leave to marry his Intended and father a child, so custom requires he not slaughter any living thing till the child is born. This is a good rule, the girl thinks, because blood is blood, even if it’s from a fish. The fish awaits dismembering on the kitchen block, its beady eye glaucous.
The child is born. A son. The man-of-all-work’s glow had dimmed a little from returning to household work, but again, he’s radiant. The girl’s mother says, grinning, “Now you’ll become responsible and not forget to put out the milk bottles every other day,” and he smiles the broadest smile the girl has ever seen on his face, and her father says, “Well done!” which makes the girl cringe.
The pug-nosed maid, the other half of the splitting beast, flits outside the dining room window from one job to another, a ghost.
The new father packs a bag smiling like a well-loved child. He will take the morning train to his home village. But he does not see his newborn son and wife. A few miles from his village, the compartments of the train he’s on leap up like humped beasts, like fish jackknifing out of rivers for the lofty skies, leaving no survivors. The papers bury the news pages deep because such things are so common in these days of political and social chaos, the dead are neither notable nor countable, and the Maoist rebel group claiming responsibility probably just wants the limelight.
The cousin turns up. The girl’s father trundles toward him like the tombed alive stumbling toward the light. The girl’s father and cousin drink whiskey deep into a mossy night that dangles the bone-colored hook of a moon, the sole sounds from the guards on night patrol. The girl’s father weeps unabashed. Her mother doesn’t mock him for being a sentimental fool but sits silent by his side, companionably morose. A little chocolate lariat of the snuff he takes as consolation for giving up cigarettes, though he will eventually die of emphysema, creeps down the gulch of his long, upper lip.
Cousin, whose gait is noticeably more unsteady than last time even, says, “Grieve, Uncle, grieve, it’s ourselves we grieve for.”
The girl is stunned by cousin turning philosopher poet. Her father hiccups, blurt-babbles. “He was family, he was like family.”
The girl wants to say, “Choose. Which one? Family, or like family? And why?”
The cousin asks between hiccups, “You think my family’s going to cry for me when I die, Uncle?”
The girl’s father is now falling-down drunk and sobs harder, in little explosions, his mouth trembling, puffing, spurting like a child’s.
In her father’s sobs and grimaces, the girl knows her blotto cousin is right, sees the self-pity of the defeated for derailed dreams, wonders what waking dreams came to the man-of-all-work as he rode home full-tilt into the razor-edged wind whipping his fine-featured face and bony chest at the open railcar door, the earth rushing past, before his finally unbroken sleep. She slackens her gaze to squint into imagination all the echoing blasts of tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.
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Nandini Bhattacharya is a writer, professor of English, public speaker, reviewer, and blogger. Her first novel Love’s Garden (2020) garnered critical praise as “a fascinating and well-crafted journey into India’s complex past” (Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni), and “a sprawling family saga set against a background of some of the most momentous events of twentieth-century Indian history” (Clifford Garstang). Shorter work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bellevue Literary Review, ROOM, Chicago Quarterly Review, River Styx, Rumpus, Notre Dame Review, Oyster River Pages, Folio Literary Journal, Sky Island Journal, Bangalore Review, Bombay Review, PANK, and more. Her second novel, Something of Me in You—about love, caste, colorism, and violent religious fundamentalism in India, and racism and xenophobia in post-Donald Trump America—is under submission. She is working on two other novels about the mysteriousness of family and mysterious families.
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Michael Singh is an interdisciplinary artist originally from Southern California. He works across painting, printmaking, illustration, and collage. He taught drawing and painting in Los Angeles before relocating to New York in 2017. In 2021 he briefly studied painting at The New York Art Students League and The 92nd St Y. He now works and resides in upstate New York.
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Another Chicago Magazine 