‘I knew she wouldn’t be able to take care of the baby,’ a voice said from the crowd, staring at the couple sitting with the lifeless baby between them. ‘Looks like she had not fed him for days,’ said someone else. The thin crowd dispersed when the police van entered the lane blaring the siren. The few curious onlookers who stayed back, continued to watch as the police took away the body of the month-old baby. The man and woman sat motionless with a blank look on their faces. ‘He is a druggie, but what happened to her? She also looks stoned today,’ commented a man, moving away.
*
No one knows her name. They call her ‘the mad woman’ in the narrow crowded lanes of Colaba. Her skin is covered in layers of dirt accumulated over months. Her hair looks like it was never touched by a comb. She wears all the clothes she has in layers, may be because she has no place to store them. She wears a shoe on one foot and an oversized slipper on another. Sometimes she wears a worn out hat. She carries a bag – a huge blue polythene bag, the contents of which nobody knows. She has intense eyes, filled with hatred, anger and defiance.
She seemed to get a special kick out of harassing the women coming out of the beauty parlours lining the street. She would go close to them loudly uttering gibberish and they would jump away in fright and disgust. She would look at them and laugh.
She would look at the taxi drivers and vendors standing in the street and hurl choice abuses at them. They would look at her indulgently and say, ‘Pagal hai’. Sometimes one of them would take objection, and on that day there would be a big scene with the madwoman shouting at the top of her voice and the offended man being asked by other to ignore her. The tag of ‘mad woman’ gave her the freedom to mock at the manliness of the men, which she could not have done as a sane woman.
*
She used to be a sane woman like all the other women, with dreams of a knight in shining armour. She was around seventeen when a young man in her village teased her in front of a large number of people. She had the same intense eyes then, filled with defiance. The man was not prepared for the abuses that were hurled at him by this petite woman. His manliness insulted, he cornered her with his friends and showed her her place by taking turns, with his friends, to violate her. She was found unconscious in the bushes the next day by her family. The community wanted to excommunicate her family, they said she was raped because she abused the man. And her family wanted to disown her so that they could survive in the village. She cried, she shouted, she tore her clothes, she cursed everyone and threw stones and slippers at people. They said she had gone mad. Then, they brought her in a bus, and abandoned her on the streets of Mumbai.
The woman realised there was more security in being a ‘mad woman’ than a ‘woman’. And, she became ‘the mad woman of Colaba’. Living as a free soul was liberating, even if the scorn and disgust in the eyes of the people were upsetting. But then, she grew to love seeing the fear in those same eyes when she plunged at them.
*
Even being a mad woman did not protect her from the lust of a drunken man who muffled her cries and forced himself on her one dark night. Only one person heard her, the druggie at the corner of the street. He saw her get up, run after the man abusing him. She came back, sat on the piece of cloth which was her mattress and howled till someone from one of the buildings shouted at her to stop making a noise.
She sat leaning on the wall, tears leaving a dusty white trail on her face. She stared at the druggie at the corner of the road smoking his joint. She saw a car coming and stopping on the road, a young man do a quick deal with the druggie. The buses had stopped plying for the night but the cars whizzed past. The night was sultry with the pre-monsoon heat. She sat angry, hurt and scared till the darkness started melting away and the city started waking up to life with men on cycles delivering news papers and milk and the fisher folk walking to the dock. Exhausted, she finally fell asleep in broad daylight.
The carefree mad woman couldn’t sleep for the next few nights for fear of being violated. The drunken man returned again, after a few days when she had almost overcome her fear. He was not prepared for the blow on his head that the druggie gave him, and ran for his life. The druggie and the mad woman sat in silence watching the rain, the water splashing when the cars zoomed past, the reflections of light cast in the puddles.
*
Then, the baby bump appeared. She heard people saying loudly, ‘How can anyone think of having sex with her?’ She would make obscene gestures at them and laugh. She felt anxious, though, when people said, ‘She cannot take care of herself, how will she take care of the baby?’ She began to get more sympathy and more food from the restaurants. She shared this with the druggie and he bought her a bun and tea every evening.
When the baby came one night, the druggie held her hand and helped her with the birth. A few women from the flats saw the baby the next day and gave the woman some blankets and clothes. When she wrapped the baby, she felt a feeling of belonging swell in her heart. She wiped the face of the baby again and again so no dirt stuck to its face. She went to the nearby church to wash her hands and face. Her aimless loitering stopped. The man looked after the baby when she went to pick up food from the restaurants. When she returned, they ate the food in silence.
*
As she stood outside the restaurant for the leftover food one night, the boy raised his voice and said, ‘You won't get any food from tomorrow. All hotels and shops are closing for three weeks. Pandemic has hit the country.’ She looked at him with a blank stare, picked up her packet of food and walked back to her baby.
The next morning she woke up to see the police personnel toppling vegetable carts and caning people on the road, asking them to go back home. She carried the baby in her arms, the man carried her blue bag with his bundle of possessions and they ran into the inner lanes and hid in an abandoned, broken-down house. Two days went by with no food. Water from a nearby tap was their only source of sustenance. One day, a couple passing by in a car spotted them, gave them a bunch of bananas and biscuit packets and told them they could get food from the church. She ate the bananas as if her life depended on it. She had not been able to suckle her child and her milk was drying up. Soon the baby was starting to look limp, the glow had gone from his face. She ran to the flat complexes to ask the women there for food but the security shooed her away. The man went to the church and the slums where meals were being distributed but they slept hungry most days.
They shifted back to their old nook in the lane. She hoped that someone would come to her aid, at least out of concern for the baby. But the baby had already given up hope, and died in her arms. They had no tears, their hearts were too heavy with grief.
People came when they got to know the baby had died. Some one called the police. People dispersed when the sirens blared. The body of the baby was taken away.
In their concern for Covid deaths, one more hunger death went unreported.
*
Colaba wakes up to a new day every day, with the fisher women walking with baskets on their heads, buses revving up on the narrow streets, the vegetable vendors setting up their shops and taxi drivers waiting for customers, the shops doing brisk business and the restaurants opening. But Colaba is silent, the Mad woman is missing and so is the druggie.
*
Dr A L Sharada, a sociologist is the director of Population First, dealing everyday with issues of gender violence. She has a blog, Sirfgyan that features her light-hearted writing on day-to-day issues. ‘The Mad Woman of Colaba’ is her first story.