He wakes everyday
to toll of temple bells, ring of church bells, and call of Azan in the valley.
He doesn’t know if he is a Christian, a Hindu, or, a Muslim. But he prays at
all these places. He knows the pujari of the temple, the reverend father of the
church and the kazi at the Masjid. Nobody knows how Lalla came to the valley.
But he appeared one day at his master’s door asking for a job. His master is a
retired civil servant living in a bungalow with a small garden in the valley.
The valley lies in the outskirts of the great city and is free from the hubbub
and turmoil of its streets. His master is a kind man. It is the master’s second
marriage after his first wife died and the mistress’ second one, too.
Lalla looks
majestic as he is tall and has an erect posture. His long hair is tied into a
bun at the top of his head. Apart from this he has little body hair, hardly any
facial hair. His body is muscular and strong having strong musculature around
the chest, thighs and calves. Looking at him anyone would assume he is a
wrestler or a boxer. He can always be found watering plants in his master’s
garden, or, washing his car, light tasks he did diligently. He is not paid a
monthly salary as other servants but a weekly allowance. He says he has had
primary education and can read and write. He is often seen reading a Hindi
newspaper.
In the morning he
brushes his teeth with a neem stick and then eats the breakfast which the cook
keeps at the door in an aluminium plate. Then he waters the plants in the
garden and then he washes the car before he has a bath. His bath is situated in
the garden behind a few bushes. At night he is the bungalow’s guard watching
over his master’s house. In the night there are intruders from the slums, a
short distance away. The bungalow stands in a cluster of similar houses in a
valley formed by two knots of hills. They call it the Parsik Hills. The slum
had sprouted on the outer side of the valley, and was making a steady growth up
the hills on one side. The slum people come and take whatever is left outside
the house: the garbage bin, the car tyre, the music system of the car, and
sometimes, entire patches of tiles from the sidewalk. The car is usually parked
outside the garden as the gate isn’t big enough to let it enter.
“Lalla have you
washed the car? Have you watered the plants?” His mistress would shout from the
first floor bedroom dressed in her crumpled house clothes. He thinks she looks
haggard in the morning without a bath and make up. But when she is made up and
properly dressed she looks nice, even, pretty.
From as far as he
knows he has been called Lalla, meaning little child. He has no surname. When
his master asked his name he said “Lalla.” The eldest person in the eunuch’s
colony had called him Lalla. Only he knew who Lalla’s real parents were because
he had brought him to the colony. His name was Lalloo and he died one day. With
that hopes of finding Lalla’s real parents waned. Soon after Lalla had to leave
the colony where he lived, as he wanted to work for himself and not beg for
alms.
Thereafter, he
kept no score of his age or the years he has worked for different masters. He
doesn’t know the names of his masters and mistresses and only knows them from
their appearance. Though he knows six languages in their colloquial form –
Tamil, Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Telugu, Bengali – he only knows how to write
in Hindi and English.
When he had first
come to the valley his master had immediately recognized his gender. He was
getting on in age and wanted somebody as a guard of his house and of his young
wife, the mistress, when he was away. The master owned a Skoda Octavia vehicle and
Lalla maintained it in a spotless condition washing it every day. The driver of
the car was young, a not bad looking youth, and bossed over him. When the
master would ask the driver to fetch the morning newspaper, or, milk, he would
tell Lalla to do it. He would do it with some resentment. “Why can’t he do his
own work,” he would say.
The driver is a devious
man and would scold Lalla for petty reasons. He assumes the role of the manager
of the house and would send him on errands to procure grocery and vegetables.
Sometimes he would be absent for days during which he would be driving tourist
around the country for travel agencies. This he told Lalla as a secret and
admonished him not to tell anyone. Once he had shown him a computer which he
said a tourist had gifted him.
Lalla is given a small
watchman’s cabin made of waterproof material. This cloistered and dingy place is
his home and he lives and sleeps in it. He doesn’t sleep much except a few
hours in the afternoon. In the evening he empties the garbage can, waters the
plants, and then sits in his cabin for the long vigil of the night. His toilet is
in the forest that surrounds the valley.
On his long watch
that night he falls asleep. He usually doesn’t sleep at night but that particular
night he did. May be, he was too tired, or, he was drugged. In the morning he is
awakened by the mistress’ shouting.
“Oh, God, what
happened, oh God why did this happen to me?”
He could hear a
long monologue from his master, which seemed as if he was trying to pacify her.
But she isn’t calmed and keeps wailing and blabbering.
When Lalla enters
the house to see what is wrong she showers him with curses and abuses.
“Oh you
inauspicious one, where were you, what were you doing?”
“Mistress I fell
asleep.”
“How could you?
How could you be so careless?”
All the gold
jewellery the mistress keeps in the ground floor cupboard has been stolen. She
has many tolas of jewellery which she keeps in the unlocked cupboard so that
she could change them often, for reasons only known to her.
His master gestures
to him to go away till she calms down. The cook who sleeps in the kitchen says he
hasn’t heard anything.
Then Lalla, quite
disturbed, goes and sits on a park bench under a tree in the neighbourhood. It
was about time he watered the plants and washed the car. But he does neither. He
goes and prays at the temple, the church and the mosque. People in the valley
begin accusing him of theft saying he was responsible; after all, he is an
eunuch. The accusation of theft is one Lalla cannot stand. Never in his life
has he been accused of theft. He weeps holding his head in his hands. People begin
looking suspiciously at him.
The driver comes later
that day and drives the master to the police station to lodge a complaint.
Lalla remembers the master asking the driver to make two duplicate keys of the
bungalow’s front door. The driver had
said then:
“Lalla, give these
keys and the balance money to master, I got to go to pick up mistress from her
Yoga classes.”
He had looked at
the bill and noticed that the driver had made three keys. He probably thought
that Lalla was dumb and uneducated and wouldn’t notice these things. But Lalla
reads all bills delivered at the house and even the Hindi newspaper. What did
he do with the extra key? Lalla’s suspicion grows stronger. He knows his master
doesn’t remember these trivial things and would not even look at the bill.
He tells his
master about this and advises him of its importance in the investigation. The
police enquire with the local jewellers. A man fitting the description of the
driver had walked into a jewellery shop in the valley wanting to sell some gold
which he said belonged to his wife. The jeweller had declined to buy the jewellery. He identified the driver from a photograph.
Then the police goes
to the driver’s residence to arrest him. He is nowhere. He has escaped knowing
that the police is after him.
News spread in the
valley that the driver has run away and that Lalla is innocent. From the
neighbours police get the name of the driver’s friend who lives a few kilometres
away. He doesn’t know about the crime but knows the driver’s address in a village
in the state of Uttar Pradesh. A police team is sent there to arrest him.
Meanwhile Lalla tells
his master that he wishes to move away to another place since he has lost the
right to show his face in the valley. The mistress has also doubted him and he
would never be able to forget it when he speaks to her. The master being a kind
man says:
“Lalla, forget
that all this happened. You are a member of this family. I would like you to
stay on with us.”
“No master, you
are very kind but I want to go away, somewhere.”
“I will talk to my
wife. I will convince her of your innocence.”
He does as he
said. His wife, an uncompromising, wronged woman who had gone through a divorce,
initially disagrees. She says Lalla shouldn’t have slept on guard duty. In the
end the master convinces her to keep him as the guard once more and to forgive
him.
The next day the
mistress shouts from her room upstairs to enquire whether Lalla has washed the
car and has watered the plants. But nobody replies.
Lalla is nowhere
to be seen. Nobody in the valley has seen him leave. His cabin, where he kept
his things is empty.
Lalla had moved
on.
