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They had been traveling since early afternoon along the hot, dusty road. The Ambassador car had picked them up at the Raipur airport and was now bobbing rhythmically at every pothole. The road had changed suddenly and drastically after the check post at the border between the states of Madhya Pradesh and Orissa. From a smooth asphalt surface it had transformed into a jagged, gravely sheet of sandpaper as if someone had forgotten to lay the top seal coat. Soon Asha would come to recognize every turn of this state highway, every large asphalt crack that snaked across the road, every yawning pothole and every hedge along the way behind which the men with her would go discreetly for a leak. She would never dare to do the same and would choose instead to avoid liquids and suppress the urges of her bladder for the seven hour journey, knowing full well that in the years to come she would pay for this abuse to her kidneys.

It was just after the monsoon and the paddy fields were lush with little green blades sticking out of the water. Dark, taut bodies of women glistening with sweat stood hunched in the submerged fields, deftly tweezing the paddy saplings from their moorings. Barefoot and barebreasted, their saris came apart along the sides above the waist and hinted at what lay underneath. Mohan followed her gaze and remarked, ‘The men plough the fields, the women replant and harvest. Beautiful bodies, don’t you think?’ She continued to stare out of the window.

Every few kilometers they would come across a group of women walking in a single file alongside the road, carrying a bundle of twigs and driftwood on theirs heads. It was easy to determine their age from the contours of their body. The saris of the younger ones were held tightly in place by firm, rounded breasts rising miraculously from an otherwise one dimensional body supported on spindly legs. The older women’s saris sagged into multiple Grecian folds with the flat, ribbed chest revealed underneath - two dark brown marbles in muddy rippling water -but they did not seem to care. Their tired, emaciated bodies recounted stories of starvation deaths which hit the national headlines unfailingly each year. A large number of children with canvas school bags slung across the shoulders walked with the aid of a stick or hobbled along, propelling forward a deformed leg with the help of an arm. Reading her mind, Mohan commented, ‘Malnutrition. And no money to buy crutches or calipers. C’est Kalahandi, the poorest district of India.’

This happened often, the way men she worked with enjoyed believing they could sneak into her mind and discover her thoughts. ‘We have a long association to go through, Mr. Mohan Sinha, CEO. Don’t try so hard to get to know all about who I am and what I think. There will be time enough for that.’ Aloud she asked,
‘Do all the children go to school?’

‘I don’t know about that. But they do have far more graduates than they have a need for’, he sighed.
When they reached Bhawani Patna, the district headquarters of Kalahandi, it was almost nine in the night.
‘Let’s eat first. We’ll not want to get out once we go to our rooms.’

The past few years had stripped her of all expectations of James Bondian luxury on locales. Asha had not hoped for anything fancier than a clean, well-lighted place. She wanted nothing more than to have a hot bath to cleanse herself of the dirt clinging to her hair and body. She could not understand why they could not have their meal in the in-house restaurant.
‘Do you think we could eat in the hotel?’, she asked tentatively.
‘You don’t seem to have ever worked in a small town of India’, he smiled. ‘A city girl.’ Asha bristled at this but resisted retorting back.

Jumping across a puddle of water, they came to a tin shed still hot from the day’s scorching sun. Kerosene lamps hung from the bamboo rafters under the roof. There were five rows of long wooden benches where people sat huddled together like in a State Transport bus, elbows brushing, feet entangling, unconcernedly going about their task of slurping off moundfuls of rice and dal and spitting out pieces of bone onto their plate or ground. The place was full and steaming with sweat and hot rice. Mohan and Asha stood at the entranceway, slapping mosquitoes off their arms. Finally, two men got up. Before they could sidle their way to the empty seats, two dogs pushed past them and perched themselves on the bench, licking the tin plates clean.
‘That’s eco-friendliness for you. Welcome to BhawaniPatna’
After a while a boy shuffled along, collected the almost clean plates and reluctantly shooed off the dogs. He motioned them to take the seats and without a word returned with two plates of dal and rice.
‘Eat. There is no place better. ’

After dinner, which she had left almost untouched, they walked along the market road. At that desolate hour, all the shops were closed except for a small stall selling country liquour. They stopped at a two storeyed concrete frame building. She looked up. An open passage ribboned along the length of the building on all floors. A few men in short-sleeved vests and pajamas stood leaning along the balustrade of these passages. All of them seemed to be scratching their bodies. Again Mohan butted into her thoughts,
‘Mosquitoes bite without discrimination. Come, this is the lodge we shall be staying in. Don’t keep the windows open. Rats tend to come up from them. And turn on the aircooler. That helps’.

The power went off for five hours that night. The next morning he saw her wan face, her brave smile, her site gear - shoes, helmet, jeans, and smiled.
‘Next time things will be different, I promise.’
But she soon forgot the previous day’s travails on seeing the project site. It was spectacular, a piece of land scooped out from the valley, a brown sugar bowl surrounded by green hills. From that distance, the bright fresh shrubs dotting the hills looked like verdant ringlets on a once closely cropped dark head.
‘The landscape must have been like this for centuries, untouched’, she thought. ‘And now we have come to wreak havoc’.

The civil contractors were already at site. Mohan watched her as she unfolded the layout drawing and turned it around to align it with the site orientation. But the contour survey plan sent to her on which she had marked the proposed structures was of no use. Every tree, every shrub used as marking posts for the survey had disappeared. ‘Firewood for the locals’, Mohan shook his head in despair.

They worked backwards from the road and this time they made concrete pedestals as benchmarks. By evening they had completed the line-out of the main plant. What had looked like a mammoth building on paper seemed like an incongruous speck in the large sprawling landscape. But she knew too that once the ancillary buildings were laid out, the housing colony was marked, bit by bit the open spaces would disappear and this would become like one more industrial town- Sooty, dusty and grimy.

Asha went over and inspected the trial pits. She was struck at the colour of the soil. Multicoloured pieces of stone- carnelian, garnet, topaz glinted back at her from between the coarse brown and gray gravely sand. She held a fistful of it in her hand. So different from the red earth of the Deccan Plateau or the fine sand of the Gangetic Plains or the black soil of Gujarat. Years later when she would close her eyes and recall her projects, it would not be the built landscape that would come to her mind but the soil- Each one exuding a different smell, a different texture and colour.

Asha left for Raipur the next morning, promising to send the foundation details soon. She wanted to thank Mohan for not behaving like a stuck-up CEO. Instead, she smiled brightly and waved out to him from the moving car.

Two weeks later, back again at the Raipur airport, she encountered a young man she had not met before bearing a placard with her name.
‘Mohansaab was very busy. He has sent me to receive you. I am his assistant, Ajit.’
An airconditioned Contessa car with a uniformed driver saluted her. The same journey, the same roads, the same songs playing on the cassette player. But on reaching BhawaniPatna, the driver took a right turn instead of a left. So it was not to be the lodge. She heaved a sigh a relief. Anything else could only be better. After a few turns in narrow lanes without sidewalks, the car swooped into a canopied driveway. A beaming Mohan welcomed her into an imposing two storeyed house.
‘Be warned. It is a house of men without women’, he ushered her in.

A strapping twentyish year old boy greeted her with a smile that revealed protruding white teeth. He brought her a cup of tea in gold rimmed white bonechina crockery. From tin plates to bonechina, the contrast from one visit to another was acute and intense, as she was to find out about all else in BhawaniPatna. The boy carried her bag up to her room. The bed was already made, the sheets sparkling with the brilliance of fresh mill bleach. The three other bedrooms were already occupied by the men who had now moved to BhawaniPatna. Mohan, their financial controller and the general manager. Mohan had reserved the only room with an attached bath for Asha.

‘I have been waiting for you from so long, ever since Mohansaab said there is a woman-engineer’, the lad smiled. ‘I am Nabinkumar, the house manager.’
‘Aaah, a house manager. Good. And what are your qualifications for the job?’
‘ I am a BA from BhawaniPatna, didi. May I call you that? It was like this, didi. There were no office jobs available in the entire district. So I have taken up this post. It does not befit a Brahmin like me to be a house manager but it’s only temporary. Mohansaab has promised me a job in the office.’

Nabin’s idea of a well-laid table was what he had picked up from television. Dinner was served in Corelleware and water in long-stemmed wineglasses. Mohan twirled the glass in wonder and Asha suppressed a giggle. The silverware was elaborate- Four spoons, two forks and a knife.
‘Nobin, from tomorrow do you think we could have just one spoon, one fork and regular water glasses, please?’
‘Yes, saab, anything you say, saab.’
All through the dinner, Nabin exhorted them to eat more, dolloping extra vegetable or rice on the plates of the unsuspecting diner.
‘No, Nabin, we’ll ask when we want more, okay?’
‘Yes, saab, whatever you say, saab.’
‘What an effeminate little boy he is’, Mohan remarked in annoyance out of his earshot.
‘Our wife in absentia’, the GM laughed.

Every evening when they would come back from the site, Nabin would have laid a fresh towel in her bathroom, the water heater would be turned on and the mosquito repellent in the room would be lighted.

‘Didi, is it true they found diamonds in the plot neighbouring our site?’ he asked excitedly the second evening. In the land of bullockcarts and rickshaws, news such as this reached faster than the wind. ‘Do you think we will find some on ours too? Who will own it? The government or the company?’

The men usually spent a couple of hours drinking and unwinding before dinner. There would be a new guest each day for the evening meal. The DCP, the BDO, the MLA, all the important local politicians and bureaucrats would be serenaded with food and wine. Asha would slip quietly up to the terrace. Dusk came early on the eastern skies. There was load shedding every evening from six to eight and the whole town would be plunged into silent darkness except for the bright lights powered by the diesel generator in the guest house. Asha would watch the earthen lamps as they threw dancing shadows all around from their niches in the earthen walls of the thatched houses below. It was the quietest hour of the day. Nabin would come silently up and wordlessly leave a torch and some tiffin for her on a little stool. He more than any of the pinstriped men below understood her need for solitude at this pensive hour.

One morning there was a great commotion. When Asha came out of her bath she called Nobin and asked him what the trouble was.
‘Didi, it is the servant Jyotiamma’
‘What’s wrong with her? She seems a good lady.’
‘Yes, but she is an untouchable. I have told her to do the sweeping and swabbing after you leave for the site but she wants to finish off the job in the morning. What if she accidentally touches you?’
‘O is that why she steps out of my way and falls at my feet from a distance? Please tell her not to do that. I dislike such nonsense. And anyway Nabin, I am not a brahmin. So I don’t think I will suffer as much pollution as you.’
‘What didi, you are not a brahmin? I don’t believe it! How could you be so educated?’
‘Nabin, you say you are a graduate and you live in the dark ages. The caste system is long ago abolished. Surely you know that’.
‘In the city, didi. But not here.’

Asha shook her head and smiled at him. The same day Asha was to find out what a graduate meant in BhawaniPatna. As their car reached the gate of the site, a group of 50 young men converged as an army to the car and had to be restrained by the armed security guards.
‘What is going on?’ Mohan demanded.
‘Sir, they all have recommendation letters from the local MP or MLA. They want employment here. Sir, they are all graduates.’
‘Tell them to come a year later when the plant is ready.’
‘They won’t leave, Sir, until you have promised them a job.’
Mohan shook his head. ‘Call the police.’

Inside it was Asha’s turn to despair. She had asked to see some fabrication work before she left for Mumbai. A sample had been prepared. She could not believe the miserable quality of welding, the poorly gas-cut holes.
‘Are you a certified welder?’
‘No, saab.’
‘What experience do you have then?
‘Saab, I used to weld broken parts of bicycles before.’

Inside the site office, Asha is adamant.
‘Mohan, I cannot have these unskilled guys fabricating and erecting 24 metre high Portal frames. We’ll have to get a skilled team from Raipur or Bhubaneshwar, whichever is easier. Mohan nodded absently. He had hoped to pacify the politicians by hiring some locals for the construction work.

‘Mohan, you can use them as Bhistis, to pour water on concrete. Or as unskilled labour. But that’s all’. It was Asha’s turn to read his mind. That evening Nabin was waiting at the door for her. As soon as the others had gone into their rooms he asked,

‘Didi, I believe you shouted at the site today? They say you are like a man only. You are not afraid of anyone?’

Asha laughed. ‘No Nabin, in work there is no gender and there is no caste.’
‘That is what you say. But here we have different thoughts.’

The next evening when Mohan asked for water he was served in a teacup.
‘Nobin, I thought we had 2 dozen glasses’.
‘Yes sir, we do. But they are all in the sink. Jyotiamma has gone on leave since the past two days. She says she will not come back but will send her daughter. So everything is lying unwashed in the sink.’
‘Can you not wash some glasses for us?’
‘I would saab, I would do anything for you saab, but I have promised my mother I will not do anything unbefitting a Brahmin boy.’
‘Will you write your mother and ask her if it is all right to wash utensils in an emergency?. Tell her your Brahmin Saab washes when required’. So saying Mohan got up and washed some utensils.

The guesthouse was very quiet during Asha’s next visit. The general manager and the financial controller had gone to Bhubaneshwar for some official work. There was only a harassed, overworked Mohan smiling valiantly, happy to see her again. She noted a new deep furrow between his eyebrows and crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes. The difficult site where even a nail had to be ordered from a hundred miles away was taking its toll on everyone. Only Nabin was as sprightly as ever. Asha asked him if his mother had replied to his query. Nobin smiled brightly. ‘Yes, my mother has said it was all right to wash glass utensils. Didi, I have been thinking about what you had said. The caste system was abolished long ago. It is only the uneducated who still believe in untouchability.’

Asha wondered for a long time about this. It was only later in the night when she could not sleep and stepped out into the balcony that she saw Nobin giving a jasmine gajara to the young beautiful daughter of Jyotiamma and understood the change of heart.

And at the other end of the balcony she saw Mohan standing, blowing rings of smoke into the clear, crisp night. Feeling her eyes on him, he looked back at her unsmilingly. She turned away and going back into the room, bolted the door.

Credits

• Graphic by Usha Sheth

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