Undeserved Bed
This is a piece of fiction written in 2017 for a writing class that I have no concrete plans for. The middle-of-sentence opening was a requirement of the exercise.
…and at other times, I succumb to the oddly complementary fears instilled in me by two religions — of karma and punitive reincarnation as a cockroach by my very Hindu mother at home, and of a temperamental all-seeing God who sent his own son to die for our sins by the nuns at school — and I awake in a sweat at night, look over at my son in his crib, see him snoring softly in the cool blue glow of the turtle-shaped night light. And I am relieved, for the moment, that no cosmic justice has yet come to visit on me. And I wish God, or the gods, could see it all over again, through more forgiving eyes, and let me off with a warning.
The servant girl, whose name I have not forgotten, but which it still aches to recall, stands against the wall, the tears long gone, the snot fast running dry, still snivelling, eyes fixed on the same spot on the floor, looking penitent for a crime only I know she has not committed. But mine was a foolproof plan, and I am unassailable, unimpeachable, in my position of automatic trust. Penitence will not commute her sentence now. A phonecall has been made, a messenger dispatched to the slum, and an hour later, the phonecall returned. Her father is on his way to take his thieving daughter home for good, and, it was hoped, to thrash some sense and morals into her.
She has been changed back into her own clothes, the rust-coloured langa-jacket she first arrived in. All of the hand-me-downs — my floral frocks, my T-shirts, my shorts exposing her unaccustomed hairy legs, the navy blue pinafore of my convent school uniform — recovered from the cardboard box of her belongings, now to be donated to someone more worthy. She is eleven, a year older and a bit bigger than me. They’ve always been too tight for her, but she has always looked too comfortable in them.
My mother continues to express, simultaneously, her disappointment and her knowledge of it all along. Ignorance is, after all, a sorry look on an employer. How could you do this to us? You can never trust these people. After everything we’ve done for you. No, no, we’ve spoiled you — of course, this was bound to happen.
Bruno, bless his heavenly soul, unaware of the imminent loss of his daytime companion, is wagging his tail at both of them. He never saw the difference between us. Between slobbering onto my face to wake me and onto her face to wake her. Me in my bed, with a soft blanket to retreat under when the room became bathed in sunlight. Her lying on three old sofa cushions, under an old bedsheet, in the entry hall where it smelled of shoe polish and old newspapers. Between my coddling him in English and her in Telugu. Between . . .
Her father pleads with my mother to give her another chance, insists she is innocent, then whacks the girl on the head just in case, to show whose side he’s on. Tells her to help look for the missing things. Looks under the stove, behind the gas cylinder, of all places. It is a form of theater my mother is immune to, unmoved by. There is no need for that. Go! And they’re gone.
And that night my family is whole again, pure again, unintruded upon by little girls wearing my clothes while doing the dishes or chopping brinjal or scrubbing the wash basin clean of globs of toothpaste. The nation is growing a conscience over child labour anyway, and my father, when he gets home, is relieved to be rid of the moral inconvenience. My mother tells him to shut up and leave those things to her. Bruno sleeps alone and confused on the floor. But I latch on to my father’s words and start to believe that what I have architected is a good thing even for the girl, and I sleep triumphant in my bed. My soft, undeserved bed.
