When nothing works...

“Come on in, Sameer!” Amma calls from inside the kitchen where she is cooking rice and potato curry. She had learnt to cook potatoes in a different way ever since they had moved into the city. The city...
“Daydreaming once again, aren’t you?” His sister Sheila, five years older, pats his head and ruffled his hair before going into the kitchen.
“Amma! I am going to the Lala’s site.” Sheila steps out of the kitchen dressed in fresh clothes. The kitchen is where she and her mother change their clothes. Their bedroom doubles up as a drawing-cum-dining room.
“And you are going to carry that?” Sameer points to the sickle his sister has tied around her waist. The sickle had protected her in the village and she was considered as something of an expert with it.
“For sure,” she grins showing healthy teeth, “you just never know!”
Sheila looks more urbane and suave ever since she and Sameer had come into the city with Amma. He had been all of ten at the time. His impression of the bustling urbanscape had been that of a monster constantly rushed off its feet with no time to rest. Yet, it was here that few shunned him or his mother and sister.
Sameer missed his village, though, with its enormous corn and wheat fields. Except that now they were no longer enormous, builders and real estate agents having taken over. Besides, a new car manufacturing plant was coming up soon. But all this had been preceded by the great drought that had claimed Bapu’s life.
It wasn’t the drought that had claimed Bapu’s life, though. Bapu had taken his own life. “Debts”, Manju kaki who lived next door had articulated pushing out her thin lips pasted with cheap lipstick available in the store in the village. Manju kaki had been shrewd enough to sell her little piece of land before the land grabbers got to it. Her current dwelling place was made of concrete and it was larger than theirs. It was she who had spoken to the overseer and secured jobs for both Amma and Sheila at the construction site.
The village landowner had wrested the little land that had belonged to Bapu. “Debts!” he’d grunted, as he’d entered their hut with his goons and evicted the three of them along with their meagre belongings. He had not allowed them to take all their belongings either. The goons had snatched his mother’s gold bangles and Sheila’s earrings making her ears bleed. When he’d tried to stop them, they kicked him and punched his face. If Sheila hadn’t warded them off with her sickle they might have killed him. He had fled his village with his mother and sister that very night. They had climbed into the first train that had drawn up at the remote junction around midnight. The ticket checker, a kindly fellow with a bushy moustache, had not charged them.
“Be careful and avoid shortcuts, please!” Amma calls after his sister who, having packed her lunch, is leaving for the Lala’s construction site where they both work. Sameer is the only one who doesn’t work in the family, which is a rarity as all the children his age did the locality. He goes to a local missionary-run school where, thankfully, he is not forced to sit in a far corner of the classroom.
“Sameer!” Amma’s voice sounds unusually thin, like the wheels of the postman’s ancient bicycle in his village. “Go and buy some bread from the Plaza, quick!” She is pulling out coins from the end of her sari tied in a knot with the money bulging through it.
There is a grocery around the corner but its owner doesn’t allow Sameer inside the shop. The first – and last – time Sameer had entered the shop Mukul Lal, the grocer who too was a migrant from the same village, screamed, “I don’t want an untouchable touching my goods. You want my customers to stop coming? Out!”
People at the Plaza don’t know he is a dalit.
“Go, run!” orders Amma.
Sameer returns panting, his fingers curled over a little white loaf. The Plaza is about a mile away.
He stops short as he finds Amma sitting on top of an old steel trunk that also doubles up as a sofa. Whenever Manju kaki comes over, Amma indicates the trunk as a spot for her to sit. Just at this moment, Amma is sitting on top of the trunk, her legs sprawled out. Holding her head between her hands she is staring into space.
“What’s the matter; Amma speak to me!” Sameer is shouting on top of his voice, shaking his mother hard.
“Sheila...” Amma is choking as though she has swallowed a marble, “Manju kaki came running in to tell me that she had seen Sheila going towards the Lala’s building.”
“She does that every day, why are you getting so hysterical?”
“She hasn’t reached the Lala’s site at all.”
“She has been abducted by Hira and Shyam,” Manju kaki, who is at the door chewing paanI, says casually. “Som saw them going after her.” Som is her son and works as a labourer at the brick kiln.
“They cornered her in the lane next to Mukul Lal’s store.” Sameer knows the mean little lane inhabited by thugs and drunkards. It is a lane that both he and his friends avoid.
“And Som didn’t raise an alarm? He did nothing but let them set upon her?” He can see his mother’s shoulders tensing.
“Arrey baba! He is only twelve. What chance does he have against such thugs? God knows what they must have done to her by now!” Manju kaki makes her pronouncement and turns to leave. “Why did she have to go by that lane, doesn’t she know it is dangerous?” She departs her anklets setting off a discordant tune.
Both Sameer and his mother start when there is a knock at the door. Neither knows how long both had been sitting in the dark. Amma gets up heavily to open the door. She sees three faces.
Two policewomen are helping Sheila indoors. Sheila’s eyes are blazing and her clothes bloodied.
“What did Hira and Shyam do tell me?” Amma doesn’t realize she is screaming.
“It is what she did to them,” one of the policewomen winks.
“She split the face of one and castrated the other. Both have been taken to hospital.”