Padmini
written by: Bidisha Satpathy
It was moving day. I wanted to call Padmini. I am leaving behind some everyday items, I would say on the phone, bedsheets, utensils, plastic stools and so, you can take them. It had been over a year since I had seen Padmini. I had a different house-help now, who took nothing. Thrice, I attempted to give her cooked food and out-of-vogue salwar kameez sets, but with her characteristic “double shake” – where she politely shook her head and her right palm in synchronized harmony, she turned me down. I got the double shake earlier in the day too when I pushed into her wrinkly hands a box of store-bought chickpeas and jaggery laddoos, as a goodbye gesture along with her final dues.
With Padmini, things had been different.
‘You should give these cushions to me didi, you barely use it,’ she pointed at the four rectangular yellow-black cushions propped on the overtly expensive teal Chesterfield, all of which we had custom-made for the house after our wedding. A broad column of sunlight glinted on the velvety middle seat of the Chesterfield. The four-seater had moved multiple times in the living room, before we finally set it in the corner closest to the large French windows, ‘For the perfect amount of light and sound,’ my ex-husband had said. We worried then about the sun fading the elegant teal, and kept the drapes shut, darkening the expansive room in the process. After he left, on most days after letting Padmini in, I went back to bed after listlessly lingering for a few minutes, while she adjusted the careless drapes. Take the couch too with the cushions, I told Padmini in my head, I don’t know what to do with it.
‘Haven’t you eaten yesterday, didi?’ Her eyes had taken in the empty sink. I hadn’t entered the kitchen since her last visit the day before. ‘Should I make tea?’ she pressed her head on the column of wall leading to the hall. I ignored her. I’ll heat the food from the fridge later, I said. ‘Those brinjals will go bad, if I don’t cook it soon. It is of good quality. I will make stuffed brinjal with tomatoes and crushed peanuts, the way you like it. Let me….’ I couldn’t hear her sing-song Hindi anymore, she had popped back into the kitchen. With a very specific list of ingredients and measurements, my ex-husband had taught Padmini his mother’s brinjal recipe. When she had finally mastered it to his satisfaction, she packed three stout pieces of the curried and stuffed brinjals she had made for our lunch, for her family. I reminded her to get the stainless-steel container back.
***
The moving men had come. I asked the baby-faced watchman if he had seen Padmini lately. ‘Doesn’t she work in Juneja madam’s house in E block now. I saw her yesterday.’ He nodded with vigour when I instructed him to send someone to collect the pile I was leaving behind, ‘you can dispose of it, keep it, or sell it,’ I added, and headed upstairs with the packers.
Padmini’s husband was an office clerk. They had two pre-teen daughters. She chatted as she moved around my living room to dust surfaces. Married in her early 20s, they had three children in quick succession. ‘Two survived and one was stillborn,’ she explained, ‘The stillborn was a son.’ Adjusting her green glass bangles speckled with gold, she suppressed a sneeze and complained again, ‘You should have purchased a closed sort of bookshelf, didi. The people on the 12th floor have one with glass doors. This one gathers too much dust.’ The maids I had had before, in other cities and other houses, had chaotic faces and smelled of stale air. When Padmini came, she brought with her the scent of drugstore jasmine soap. Her long hair tied in a neat ponytail, with a wide middle parting. It swung like a pendulum when she moved.
If I really was awake, I strained all my senses to eavesdrop on her phone calls from my side of the bed, connecting words of the unfamiliar Tulu to the notes in her voice. When her conversations got crowded or there was unintelligible laughter, I droned back to sleep. The other pillow lay snug under the curvature of my body. With the broom in hand, she came to the bedroom door. I heard her clear her throat and pretended to be comatose. ‘Are you up, di?’ I grunted something that could have been a yes or a snore. It was eleven in the morning and the bedroom was dark. ‘When my husband was a night watchman, he smoked a lot. He came home reeking every morning. I forbade him from touching my daughters if he continued smoking. You know what he did, didi,’ she went on, without waiting for a response, ‘he thrashed me every chance he got, with whatever he could grab and said I had no right to order him about. But I was firm. I fought with him every day. Eventually, he stopped smoking and got a day-time job at an office.’ She gave me a practiced smile. ‘Why have you started, didi? It’s very bad for the lungs.’ A deep sleep beckoned me. At first, I disposed of the soggy butts and tidied the house of cigarette ash before she arrived. I kept the ashtray out of her sight and washed the whiskey glasses myself. But as I became more permanent on the king-sized bed, flecks of ash dotted the tv remote, wash basin, arm-rests of the couch… When she moved the crimson-red bedside table with tens of sundry objects atop it, it creaked. There was ash underneath it. I heard her clucking her tongue as I closed my eyes shut.
***
The young couple from the flat opposite mine, who had moved in about the same time we did four years ago, stood waiting for the elevator when I alighted my floor with the packers. IT professionals who looked like models. The tall husband and the short wife greeted me a wide smile and asked after my moving arrangements. My ex-husband had labelled them ‘witchy laughter couple,’ and with that any trace memory of their actual names had permanently erased. I tried to suppress a smile at that memory. The lift closed and went up, without them. When their house-help was away for an extended period, Padmini had worked at their place. She reported to me about their incessant food wastage, ‘Ice cream from the night before lay melting on the kitchen counter, didi. Yesterday it was a barely eaten serving of butter chicken. God only knows what they’ll waste tomorrow. And the stench in their kitchen! Young people are inexplicable. They waste their food, they while away their time and complain about life all the time,’ she shot me a look of distaste. My cheeks burned as I sat upright on the couch. She rambled some more about them. When she entered the kitchen, I couldn’t hear her above the banging utensils.
Smiling, I continued the polite chatter with the young couple. I asked if they had Padmini’s number. I want to give her some of the stuff I am leaving behind, I explained. ‘Oh yes, Padmini. Always laughing and chatting. She was a bit slow though, wasn’t she,’ the wife said, and fed the number into my phone. I bade them goodbye and entered the house.
There were days when Padmini’s silence was distinct. I knew from experience her husband had thrashed her the night before. ‘Why does he beat you,’ my ex-husband had probed the first time. ‘I miscarry each time.’ But it’s not your fault, I had reasoned with her. ‘It’s not his fault too, didi,’ she wrapped a few ice cubes from my freezer in a kitchen towel and pressed it to the sides of her swollen face. ‘He just really wants a son,’ she continued with her various tasks as we retreated to a corner of the house, young and numb.
Every time she was pregnant, the pattern remained the same. ‘How old are you?’ I asked one time, following her to the kitchen. ’38.’ ‘Are you keeping it?’ ‘It could be a son,’ she shrugged. In a few weeks, she miscarried, and the days following it, complied with the thrashing. Her limp became a permanent fixture. After the second miscarriage, I purchased for her a standing floor mop.
It must have been her fifth pregnancy. More than a year had passed since my divorce. Padmini was surprised she had succeeded in reaching four months. A pink hue occupied her face. ‘We will know if it’s a boy or girl today,’ Padmini said as I walked into the kitchen to dispose of an empty bottle of raspberry vodka. She knew it was illegal to have a gender determination test done. ‘We will abort if it’s a girl.’ She frowned at the brown ceramic noodle bowl which kept slipping out of her hands as she picked it from the sink to soap. ‘It is just that, he doesn’t want another girl,’ she looked at me squarely. ‘Do you?’ She didn’t respond, concentrating on a spot on the bowl that wasn’t there. Her developing baby bump pressed against the counter. Padmini didn’t show up the next day. Or the next. I didn’t call her. Her WhatsApp showed no updates, and her display picture – a daughter of hers in a dancing pose, with a bunny face filter and a toothy smile, remained uncharacteristically the same. I asked her other employers in my building. Whenever they called, her phone was switched off. I asked the watchman. Nobody had an update. In the fridge were tightly sealed containers of various curries and one-pot rice, which Padmini had cooked. It would last me a week. After a couple of weeks of waiting, I deleted her number and told the watchman to look for another maid.
***
With a grim expression, my new maid – the double shaker who took nothing, quietly finished her daily task of cooking three meals, cleaning and dusting the house, and doing the utensils in under an hour. Padmini had taken two, in between her phone calls and the gossip she recounted to me. It had been four months since Padmini had left. One Sunday afternoon, as I lay drugged and dozing, the bell rang. Wobbly on my feet, I opened the door. Padmini, in a faded orange kurta that had once belonged to me, swam before my eyes. She started pleading.
I had given her everything. Wool blankets, men’s sneakers, handloom sarees I wouldn’t wear anymore, nail paints, books for her daughters, lamp shades, everything.. The day the watchman had first brought her up, she introduced herself and asked if she could inspect the house. We assured her it’s a two-bedroom two-bathroom standard house like the other houses in the building, but she insisted. With her leatherette bag in hand, she looked around. Standing in the middle of the hall where our new Chesterfield lay unwrapped, she quoted her price for cooking and cleaning after two people. We agreed without much protest, disorientated from our fights. After he left, she never enquired about the bespectacled second person who had lived with me, whose heavy regional accent made her split with laughter. I had to translate it to rugged Hindi for her comprehension. Yet I alluded to his vague existence while handing over the items he had left behind and continued paying her for two people. At the door presently, her baby bump was gone and the bright orange kurta hung loose and in contrast to her darkened skin. Her eyes were watery and her contours hard, the shoulders having lost their roundness. Where was she all this time? I banged the door shut as she said ‘Didi, please, listen to me..’ and switched the bell off. With the phone in my hand, I went back to bed and awoke to the Monday daylight, unsure if it was a dream.
***
The day she told me to move, she had a composed look on her face. Her dupatta hung airily on her shoulders. She picked the crushed wrappers and packets of crisps and Kit-Kats I had strewn on the floor the night before. ‘Don’t mind me saying this, didi, but it’s time you move.’ I looked at her from the couch, where I sat smoking a switch cigarette. Ash fell on the keyboard of my office laptop. ‘He’s not coming back. It has been a year didi.’ I nodded with my head down, twisting the folds of my dress with my free hand. The doorbell broke my reverie. A runner boy delivered new packets of cigarettes and potato chips.
***
The Chesterfield lay dismantled, its seat cushions were packed. ‘I am not taking the couch,’ I said as the packers dropped the armrests into a waiting carton. The men shot me an irritating look before sliding the items out. I rang Padmini. ‘Hello? Di…didi?’ she answered after two rings. I watched as the men took the drapes down from the French windows. Sunlight flooded the room. I could feel her heart thud, or maybe it was mine. ‘I am moving today,’ I said, ‘can you come?’
