Bharathi looked into the mirror and grinned. The dimples on either side of her face sucked her cheeks in, in half-moon breaths. And then she frowned. The teeth were still too white and the skin on her face too dark. She squeezed out a thin reluctant line from the already stiff tube of cream she was holding, the tube curved inward and the edges were ragged with the multiple things used to nudge the cream out from stubborn corners – stainless steel spoons, the wooden roller smuggled from the kitchen, thick books, paperweights, and once even the iron with the heat turned off. Bharathi surveyed the line on her finger, and then her face, and wondered which part needed it the most. She decided it was her cheeks and carefully cut the line in half and applied it to both sides. She rubbed gently like they showed in the ads, using only the tips of her fingers, and then she closed her eyes and opened them again, channelling her inner tv model energy, hoping her skin had become just a shade lighter than it was.
No such luck.
Bharathi sighed and threw the tube of cream down and heard a hard thwack as it hit the concrete floor. She heard footsteps behind her, and quickly picked it up and shoved it into her bag.
‘What, Bharathi, still can’t give it up? Still trying your luck?’
In that tiny corridor leading to the toilets and showers on the other side, with a mirror placed just at the tip of the corridor like a biometric scanner for the face, Thilaga blocked Bharathi’s way and started singing.
‘Karuppu thaan yennaku pudicha colour-u (black is my favourite colour)’
Bharathi tried to shove past her, but Thilaga grabbed her hand and twirled her around. This was the song that Thilaga had broken into the first time she met Bharathi a year ago. Bharathi had arrived late in the evening, when the hostel wore a strange hush, like the seconds before an ambush. Bharathi remembered shuddering despite the murky Chennai summer heat. Thilaga had walked past her, stopping in front of Bharathi just for a second, smirking dramatically, and then humming the song under her breath, her perfume lingering as she moved on. Most of the girls met her over breakfast the next morning, in the small common room on the ground floor. As was the custom with any new entrant, Thilaga and her roommate Somvati made Bharathi stand on a chair, looked her up and down, turned her around and made comments about her drab clothes, her oily hair and dull gold earrings as everyone sniggered and laughed, probably remembering their own ordeal. Then Thilaga had removed kajal from the edge of her eyes and smeared it on Bharathi’s forehead.
‘Look, girls, magic! My kajal has disappeared into Bharathi’s darkness!’ She bowed as everyone clapped and started singing the song that would become the theme song in Bharathi’s slow, documentary-style hostel life. And then, as if tired of the entertainment, she had shooed Bharathi away.
This morning, too, Thilaga, just as suddenly let her go, her laughter and song trailing behind Bharathi like a shadow, as she rushed down the two floors to her own room that she shared with three other girls. It was 5:30 am, just before the morning rush began in the working women’s hostel with a mad scramble for the bathrooms and toilets, and the inevitable push and shove for time in front of the only mirror. It was a small hostel with fifteen rooms and four baths and toilets spread across three floors, housing sixty women, two cooks, one warden and one old watchman with a shrill whistle. For Bharathi, from the small town of Pollachi with its large green fields and meandering rivers, life in the hostel was like living in a tightly packed box. She often felt like if she didn’t rush about wildly, that if she stopped moving, she would be suffocated to death.
She tiptoed around her room, careful not to trip on the legs of her roommates sleeping on coir mats on the floor, bedsheets pulled tight over their heads to keep the mosquitoes away. It made them look like the gunny sacks full of rice waiting to be loaded in the mill where her father used to work. Bharathi had been six years old the first time she visited the mill and remembered marvelling at the strength of her father and the men who worked there, as they passed the sacks around like they were nothing but cotton. Bharathi now wished she could do that with her roommates (and while she was at it, might as well include Thilaga and Somvati) – send them packing in a truck to a place far away where they would be measured, parcelled, cooked, digested and excreted away. Even then, Bharathi was sure, Thilaga and Somvati would be stamped with a quality superior to the rest of them.
Bharathi always imagined that if all the girls in the hostel were lined up based on the colour of their skin, then Bharathi would be right at the end of the dark spectrum and Thilaga and Somvati right at the end on the other side. For the last one year, ever since she moved to the city after her father broke his back and lost his job, Bharathi had become extremely conscious of her skin, something she hadn’t really thought about back home, and had been diligently using the fairness cream, telling herself that eventually it was for a noble goal – fairer skin meant better opportunities and therefore more money to support her family. But in her heart, Bharathi knew she wanted the ease of Thilaga’s life, the crisp saris she wore to work, the make-up that did not look like ugly red patches on her skin, the lips made magically luscious with lipstick – red, maroon, pink – and the racy, larger-than-life romances. Thilaga had so many people vying for her attention – Bharathi had seen boys on motorbikes camp outside the hostel, even in the pouring rain; some of them sent letters wrapped in stone and hurled to the second floor, and some would follow her to work and back home. Bharathi had once heard a story of a boy who had tried to get too close and how Thilaga had simply removed the box of chilli powder she always carried in her bag and thrown it at the boy’s face. Since then, Bharathi too carried a packet of chilli powder. Maybe, she thought, she had become a city girl.
She heard her roommates stirring from their sleep, so she quickly oiled and combed her hair into a neat plait, patted some talcum powder on her face and placed a bindi between her eyebrows, her finger finding the exact spot even without a mirror. She packed her salesgirl uniform – a waistcoat – in her tote bag with the jewellery showroom’s logo and name on the top right corner: ‘Divan Diamonds’ under the image of a diamond resting on a cushion. She would wear it just before she went into work at 8 am, early shift for the wedding season, along with her badge – Bharathi Kumar – pinned above it. She left the room noiselessly. It was 5:45. She had ten minutes to get to the railway station to catch the first train at 6:00 am.
A short flight of stairs and she was in the lobby that had a small table and chair, with a picture of Gandhiji smiling benignly above it and a television mounted on the wall opposite. On the chair, the warden was snoring in her sleep, her sari provocatively moving under the fan, showing the world her ample midriff. Bharathi wondered if she should wake her up and save her embarrassment as the milkman would arrive any moment, but then Bharathi noticed, yet again, that even the warden with a permanent scowl on her face and loud booming voice was fairer than her. Not just on the face, but apparently all over. The first time Thilaga caught Bharathi with the tube of cream in her hand, she had just said, ‘Only the face? Tsk tsk.’ Bharathi, too awkward and defiant but eager to please, had applied the cream everywhere and exhausted the tube in three days. She had spent a fortune for the next few months on the creams, till Thilaga caught her applying it on her hands one morning and screeched, ‘It’s only for the face! Do you not even know this? Colour spreads downward, top to toe. What a pattikaadu you are!’
Bharathi slipped out the door and the small black gate that wouldn’t open all the way as the milkman’s moped with the big blue tray of milk tied to the back was parked in front. The streets were waking up. In somebody’s house, the tv was already blaring with devotional songs of Pondicherry Mother. Royapuram was one of the largest fishing harbours in the coast, and it always worried Bharathi that if she didn’t walk quickly enough, the thick, fetid stench of the atmosphere would stick to her skin, and already, there was no more room on her skin.
She hurried on, the uneven road full of cracks and potholes not helping her much. When she first came to the city, a friend of her uncle’s, who had got her the job at Divan Diamonds – his brother was the security person at the store, his handlebar moustache, large frame and intimidating costume in white with red frills reminiscent of a colonial era look– took her to the Royapuram Railway Station and boasted to her of its heritage like he had personally designed and built it – ‘the oldest railway station in Chennai, Bharathi, look at that architecture. You know how many years that tower took? Ten years! Can you imagine? It was destroyed by a fire halfway through, but the British didn’t give up. Really, you have to agree, the British knew how to live life.’ Bharathi saw only the dirt, the peeling walls, the stinking tracks, the homeless sprawled around, and the dilapidated structure. It felt no different this morning as she stood on Platform 1. The train had been delayed. The only people this early in the morning were the fisherfolk, with baskets of fish, their hands lazily and mechanically swatting the flies away. She walked to the tea stall that was open, the smell of boiling milk and tea decoction bravely competing with the smell of dead fish, and bought a banana and a cup of tea. As she stood there eating the banana, she thought she saw Thilaga in the distance.
No, it couldn’t be. She couldn’t have gotten here before her. And this Thilaga, appeared to be in an argument with a man who looked shabby, even from this distance, his shirt half tucked in and his hair uncombed, and for some reason, he looked shorter than not-Thilaga. He can’t possibly be a boyfriend, Bharathi surmised, and must be a cousin or something. Must be a family matter. Better not to interfere. She finished her tea, moved away and threw the banana peel onto the tracks, and checked to see if the train was coming. But she couldn’t resist the pull of drama, especially of one so fair and lovely, and she turned again towards not-Thilaga. She could make out that not-Thilaga was shouting – her shoulders and face thrust forward, but the man was not backing down. She heard the loud whistle of the train, and people around her shuffled, moving closer to the track. Bharathi moved a step forward and then saw the man holding not-Thilaga roughly by the shoulders and shaking her, and then not-Thilaga slapping him. She heard the train whoosh by her, and she knew she had to get into the train, but her feet wouldn’t move. The train’s whistle sounded again and one of the women from inside shouted loudly to Bharathi, ‘Eh, girl, get into the train. What is she looking at?’ and maybe the woman peered out and saw what Bharathi was seeing. Or maybe she didn’t. When the train began to chug away from the station, Bharathi saw something glint in the man’s hand and then his hand moved quickly over not-Thilaga, who screamed, her voice mingling with the train’s wail, and fell to the ground. The man jumped tracks and disappeared into the station. Bharathi looked around, and realised she was alone. She panicked and saw the shopkeeper’s head from the tea stall slowly emerge. He had been hiding, thought Bharathi, and fear gripped her. She turned and ran out of the station, bumped into people walking in, narrowly missed stepping on a sleeping dog’s tail, crossed the road without thinking as angry drivers cursed her, and ran all the way back to her hostel. She stopped when she saw the warden.
‘What is it, Bharathi? What happened?’
‘Ma’am … Ma’am….’
‘What ma’am ma’am … what happened? Is someone following you?’
‘Ma’am …. No, Ma’am…’
‘Then what?!’
‘I … I forgot my phone Ma’am.’
‘Che! So much for that? Look at yourself in the mirror. You look like someone stepped on your face. Go, go, get out.’
Bharathi ran up the two floors to where she knew Thilaga’s room was. She knocked on the door three times before Somvati opened it, sleep and irritation crowding her eyes.
‘What? It better be important, bitch.’
‘I … I wanted to see if Thilaga was here.’
Somavati turned her face and saw Thilaga’s empty corner. And then she turned around to face Bharathi.
‘Nope. Now get out.’
‘Akka, one second. Do … do you know where she is?’
‘I am this close, Bharathi, this close to punching you in the face. Are you leaving or waiting?’
‘Sorry, sorry Akka.’
Somvati banged the door shut, and Bharathi slumped. She went into her room – it was thankfully empty – her roommates were probably fighting for the bathrooms upstairs. Maybe Thilaga was still in the bathroom – wasn’t it just last week that Thilaga had monopolised the bathroom for over an hour as impatient girls started to bang the door and she had finally emerged, un-showered and dirty with red eyes, barked at them and walked away? Bharathi felt suddenly exhausted, like she had climbed the first of the seven Tirupati hills with its 2300 steps and couldn’t imagine ever finishing this journey. She lay down on her side of the floor, facing the wall, covered herself with her bedsheet made with her mother’s old saris, switched off her phone, and closed her eyes.
For a long time, she couldn’t sleep. Thoughts were racing around her head like a dog chasing its tail without success. She thought of the knife slashing through Thilaga like she was nothing more than a piece of cloth; she thought of the woman calling out to her from the train, the sounds of the train whooshing in and whooshing out, the smell of fish, the syrupy sweetness of tea, the empty tube of fairness cream, the hiding shopkeeper, Thilaga dancing in the morning.
When she finally slept, it was the dreamless sleep of the dead, with Thilaga’s voice wrapped around Bharathi like brittle sheets of ice.
‘You, blackie, bring me an extra idli from the kitchen.’
‘Such a pattikaadu you are.’
‘You left me to die! You left me to die!’
And then, out of nowhere, a distant memory came back, of five-year-old Bharathi watching her two-year-old brother climb up to the mouth of the low well in their backyard and peer down, while she stood there, not rushing forward to pick him up like her mother had done a few seconds later, averting what could have been a tragedy, but remembering her mother’s voice, anger and fear wrapped around the words, ‘Saniyane, look how she is standing like a senseless dunce!’
Bharathi woke up in a sweat and looked around her room. The power had gone again. She scrambled to her feet and frantically opened the door to gulp in some fresh air and spotted the police jeep. She slipped back into her room and closed the door. She switched on her phone and saw five calls from Divan Diamonds and three messages from her colleague telling her the boss was furious she didn’t show up and that she better have a plausible excuse.
She changed out of her work clothes and picked up her suitcase from above the old wooden cupboard she shared with her roommates and quickly packed her things. She worked with surprising calm, remembering to pack the small things – toothbrush, sachets of shampoo, nose drops, coconut oil bottle, the dupattas hanging on hooks behind the door, her wet towel draped on the only chair in the room over which three other wet towels were placed, her hawai chappals from near the door, the picture of sai baba from under the pillow – and remembering to keep her corner clean. The mat and pillow neatly stacked, perhaps for the next girl who would replace her in less than a week. It struck her someone would replace Thilaga too, just as quickly.
She picked up her suitcase and stood outside her door. She locked the door and left her key in plain sight on the floor near the dusty, grey doormat that said ‘welcome’. When she had first moved in, that ‘welcome’ seemed like a mockery, and now it looked ominous. She looked over the parapet and saw the police jeep still parked outside, but no sign of the police, which meant they were either in the lobby downstairs or in the warden’s tiny office.
She lugged the suitcase down and saw the only person at the lobby was a bored constable. He looked at her, not even for a second, and lost interest. Thilaga’s voice cut into Bharathi’s mind like a loud motorboat on a quiet sea. Don’t look at the sun too long, that is me, for you will be dazzled. Don’t look at the black hole too long, that is you, you will be consumed. Bharathi walked past him towards the kitchen. Like an afterthought he called to her.
‘You there. What’s in the suitcase?’
‘Dirty clothes, Sir, from my floor. It is my turn today to collect and deliver the laundry to Sita akka.’
‘Okay, okay, go.’
Bharathi went to the kitchen and saw that no one was there, and slipped out through the back door. The smell of the open gutter grabbed her. She closed her nose and walked on resolutely. At the main road on the other side of the hostel, she hailed an auto and without bargaining, went straight to the bus station.
She bought her ticket, and waited for her bus to arrive. She had another hour. She went to the ATM and withdrew all her cash – a total of Rs 30,000 – and called her parents and told them she was coming home for a break. She switched off her phone and put it into her bag, when she noticed the fairness cream. She picked it up and threw it into the overflowing dustbin. A group of flies buzzed angrily at being disturbed and then settled again.
*
Praveena Shivram is an independent writer based in Chennai, India. Both her fiction and non-fiction have been widely published. Read her work at www.praveenashivram.com