Sara Banerji - Shining Hero

They were coming to this part of the river to immerse the Durga.

‘Out of the water, out, out,’ they cried as they approached. To immerse the goddess in water polluted by an untouchable dhobi woman would be a terrible sacrilege.

Desperately Dolly began to gather up her pile of washing, pulling still wet sheets and saris, shirts and pajamas out of the water, hurrying because the Devi was very close.

Something bumped her knee as she scrabbled up her wet washing.

It was a hand of last year’s Durga, huge, the arms of clay long since melted away. It lay palm up, its beautiful fingers curled round something sharply gleaming. Dolly bent to take a closer look and felt amazed that the nail polish should still be intact after so long in the water, thrilled because the knuckles and finger rings were almost unblemished. She was thinking to herself, this must be a miracle, when the shining thing lying on the palm began to move as though it was alive. For a moment the light reflected off the holy hand became so bright that Dolly had to look away, dazzled.

When she could open her eyes, she bent to take a closer look and saw, cuddled among the goddess’ fingers, some creature with tinsel twisted round it. A puppy perhaps, that had got tangled in the remains of Durga’s marigold garlands.

The shouts of the approaching Durga worshippers were growing ever nearer and more furious.

Dolly was the only one still in the water but instead of hurrying, she bent, staring fascinated at what lay in the palm of last year’s goddess. The glittering thing let out a sound like the mewing cry of a cat. The hand began to twirl as the current caught it again.

Dolly’s arms were full of washing. It was only a half-dead kitten, then. Round the weighty bundle she did a namaskar of respect to the hand of Durga then turned away as the current caught the hand with its living glittering burden and started to twirl it off.

Then Dolly realised what the sparkling mewling thing was, dropped her armful of clean washing into the water and grabbed. Snatched the shining thing from out of the middle of the hand just a moment before it was carried out of reach.

She held a newborn child, still attached to its placenta and tangled up in sparkling tinsel. The hand that had prevented the baby from sinking went speeding off along the river.

Dolly stood thigh-deep in water, dazed with joy, because the goddess Durga had, after all these years, answered her prayer. Everybody knew that goddesses do not do things like ordinary people. This child had been sent to her in an unusual way, but all the same it was what she had asked for and what the goddess had given.

Grabbing up the once again filthy and now dripping washing and thrusting it into her basket, pressing the holy child against her breast and ignoring the furious outcry from the Durga worshippers, she waded out of the river and began to stagger home.

She arrived ages late. Adhiratha was home already and shocked at the sight of Dolly’s catch.

‘How are we going to feed this child?’ he demanded as Dolly began unravelling the baby from the twists of tinsel. ‘Put it back where it came from. We have hardly enough for ourselves. Wait till we get a child of our own then it will be able to drink milk from your breast and will cost us nothing.’

Dolly was furious. ‘How dare you speak in such a way of the gift of the goddess?’

‘Well, she should have provided some food for the child. How can she expect us to feed it?’ All the same he could not help creeping over and peeping curiously into the face of the little newborn baby.

‘Getting things from the gods is not like going shopping,’ Dolly ranted on. ‘You don’t just go and say “I would like two kilos of baby” as though you were buying onions. You don’t say “I want a couple of breastfuls of milk as well as a baby”. You just take what you get.’ The last of the tinsel was unravelled and then Dolly let out a scream of surprise for hanging round the little boy’s neck she had found a golden chain from which hung a disc. Taking it to the window she read the words ‘Koonty Pandava of the Hatibari of Hatipur’.

She turned to her husband, her eyes filled with amazement, and repeated the words to him. Her surprise now became touched with a tiny chill of fear which Adhiratha echoed by saying, ‘That is some other woman’s child.’

‘It is not. It is mine,’ cried Dolly hugging the baby against her body, and wishing the disc had been washed away in the water.

As she carried the new child to the water spurt, she felt terribly tempted to sell the piece of gold and then pretend it had never existed. She felt a scald of conflict. Without the disc the baby would have no identity but the one that she and Adhiratha gave it. Without that disc she and her husband were the baby’s parents. But on the other hand this piece of gold and the information it gave were the baby’s only possessions. She had no right to take them from him and one day the little child might need to know who he was.

She shook her head and tried to dash away the worrying thoughts that the disc aroused in her as she rubbed the mud from the baby’s body. When she got back into the room with the now spotless baby, Adhiratha was rushing round, hunting for something. He looked up, laughing, at the sight of her holding the child against her chest. The baby was making little whimpering sounds and nuzzling its lips into Dolly’s choli.

‘What have you lost?’ asked Dolly. The desperation of the baby was troubling her.

Triumphantly he held out his hands. ‘I knew I had some paise hidden in this pocket. I’ll go out now and buy some milk for her.’

‘For him,’ laughed Dolly. Happy tears began to run down her cheeks because she knew everything would be all right from now on. Holding the now howling baby in one arm, she reached up and kissed Adhiratha.

‘You don’t know how much I love you,’ she said. ‘You just don’t.’

‘I won’t be long,’ he said as he rushed out. ‘I expect there will be some left over at the khatal.’

The cattle stall in the centre of their area was owned by the landlord and his tenants bought milk for their households and businesses from there as well as using the dung for fuel.

Dolly stood at the open door looking down into the darkness of the stairway, till she heard at last the sound of his footsteps receding.

The baby went on crying for a little while and then, exhausted, fell asleep.

Dolly waited, thinking, ‘He is being a very long time. Perhaps there was no milk left at the khatal. Perhaps he has had to go to the house of the Gwala.’

An hour later she was still waiting. The baby woke up again and once more began crying. Where could Adhiratha be?

After another hour, in which Dolly started to panic and the baby’s desperation was unendurable, she decided the only hope was to go from room to room, and hut to hut begging milk from someone.

Adhiratha never came back. He was hit by a lorry and died on the spot. It was two days of numbing dread and misery before Dolly found out.

Sankha’s voice, Gandhiva’s accents, and the chariot’s booming sound, Filled the air like distant thunder, shook the firm and solid ground . Kuru’s soldiers fled in terror or they slumbered with the dead, And the rescued lowing cattle with their tails uplifted fled .

Shivarani Gupta, Koonty’s eldest sister, was so tall by the time she was thirteen that her father began to worry that she might never find a husband.

Shivarani laughed, called him an old silly and accused him of knowing nothing about the modern world in which, she said, tall women were the fashion.

By the time Shivarani was sixteen she was taller than ever and her father’s anxiety was greatly increased. As was her mother’s.