I see her everyday

I see her everyday

Rajannya Lahiri

I see her everyday. But I also see a certain couple of teachers at school everyday, and there is a difference. As for the latter (the teachers), I have grown to have them bore me already. For her, she is never the material that you could get used with. She visits us everyday in her small thin-and-pale frame; and begins to flit about the rooms with the broom (that is strangely nearly her size) in her hand, then follows it up with great swishes of soapy water and abundant rags, and ends up with the waiting dishes at the sink. Meanwhile, she keeps talking and singing, or humming (both are the same to her), to herownself.
I do not take to write about her simply because I love her salt-senses more than I can put up with my mother's. As is the matter, my sister has landed such a job in a multinational as one that could make any kid-sister feel "posh" out of the blue. And this certain lady named Rupali who works of such accord in a number of households in the urban had invited my sister and me for a big dinner one evening. O, because I am the one whose sister newly works in a multinational!

Two kids, with regular dreams of their own lighting up their eyes, greeted us into her eight-by-three feet parlour where the plaster had fallen off at various, seemingly artistically selected locations on the walls. The kitchen tables ran along more than half the length of one entire wall, narrow and crowded; a long, high bed covered the opposite wall; and you are left with barely a quarter of a foot between the bed and the kitchen. Sleeping on such a bed would give me skin as hard as Rupali's, I now come to think. An agreeably sized table stood at the head of the bed: on it rested a desperate CRT topped with a flowervase, and before the screen were arranged her ten-year-old's dog-eared schoolbooks. A broad, oddly-placed pillar consumed a sizeable amount of space.
Garments piled at almost every direction you turned your head to, everything rest which you might imagine were piled in a dark corner beyond the kitchen and the TV. And she so smilingly served us platters of steaming pulao while we sat on the bed. The children, one her son and the other her niece, were to have their meals later...

It was the short duration before the actual meal that dried me up.
The lad was an absolute rooster. First, he showed me all the expensive points he had scored on the gaudy, cheap "videogame" that he played. Then he said, "You wanna' see how high I can jump? Alright, I'll show you!", and he jumps up on the bed, drawing support with his hands from the TV-table and the pillar, on both sides of him. During the process, his leg painlessly hits the table, and the flowervase topples over on the bed before me. I saw it then - a neck and a bottom, held together by endless rounds of cellotape, gracing plastic "flowers".
Then he brought out his precious collections of a variety of pulses which is mother had given to him from her own precious collection. He told me that he had kept them all because I too did the same for my art projects at school. I stored them in those huge tin boxes familiar to everyone who has a fetish for knick-knacks; he had a couple of broken cassette-cases for the same purpose. He further showed me his toys: a stuffed tiger and an equally stuffed giraffe. Then both kids began telling me about giraffes and tigers; the girl was such a sharp brain! Soon her bright eyes turned up to me with all her standard-one knowledge of numbers: I think, aptitude is the same everywhere after all.
Suddenly, the tiger's nose had disappeared, noticed the boy. He jumped under the bed, and the first thing he got out was a shining, white bottle of glue. But where was the nose itself? When no amount of searching on the part of three very excited little persons appeared to help, the girl (of whom I have become an ardent fan) comes up with this, "Why don't you stick one of those dals on as his nose?" And a host of glue was squeezed before we had a brand, innovative nose on our tiger.

What captured me? Was it the little girl's deep, black eyes set against her young, peaches-and-cream complexion? Or, was it the dismal, the bleak light in the rooms which showed them to me? She touched me, I know. Why did she? I saw through her eyes the same, uniquely individual visions I had seen through my seven-year-old eyes back then. At this point of fifteen long years, I still see myself graduating into the woman I have dreamt. But shall she see yet the same vision when she is fifteen?...

Then the kids left the room while my sister and I had our dinner