all the innuendos and pointing fingers, but is this any better? All the women here also look at me
peculiarly because I am without a husband and I am fed up with all their smug whispers of “Poor
Gowri” and “What will happen to Gowri!” But where will I send my letter, Vijaya? No one knows
where he is. Some people say he has gone to Bihar, some say he lives in Indore, but no one has an
address, a contact number, nothing.’
17
Bablu Kewat and his unique invention were both aboard the Indore Dehradun Express. Bablu, with
his head reclining against the window, was reading the newspaper, his stomach satiated with the
two hot samosas that he had consumed ten minutes ago at Vikram Nagar station. As it happens on
train journeys, the stranger on the opposite berth started an innocuous conversation with him.
Prashant Batra – ‘But call me Prat’ – had a strange low hairline that began almost with his bushy
eyebrows. He was a freelance journalist who, having finished a story about the Kumbh Mela in
Ujjain for the Guardian, had decided to spend a few days white-water rafting at Rishikesh before
heading to Delhi.
Leaning towards Bablu, he began complaining about the condition of the train toilet. Bablu was
happy to participate in his still feeble English, starting with the one line he had now meticulously
practised, ‘My name is Prabhash Kewat. Nice to meet you.’
‘Look, Prat Bhai,’ he said smiling, ‘don’t see toilet as toilet. See it as a device designed by our
kind and great government to benefit both the citizens and the country by helping Indians gain
immunity from many diseases while simultaneously controlling population. When you enter the
train toilet, all germs of full India are waiting to play kabaddi with you inside and in the beginning
you may get dysentery or cholera or something.
‘If you die, then population control, and if you survive then you will have best health because after
this toilet-style of vaccination you will be immune to all germs. A win–win situation, Prat Bhai!’
Prashant Batra rubbed the sweat off his neck and started laughing at this eccentric man full of
strange sagacity. ‘You work for the government?’
Bablu laughed. ‘No, I have done many things in my life, but never a job where people try to do as
little as they can for as long as they can! I manufacture low cost sanitary napkins.’
Sensing a good story, Prashant Batra pushed Bablu to tell him more, opening his thermos and
pouring them some sweet milky tea.
And so Bablu began his long tale of trials and tribulations and his triumph when he won the
innovations award a year ago. He told the journalist that after getting a patent on the machine, he
had slowly realized the potential of what he had in his hands.
‘I had a choice, Prat Bhai, I could sell my patent to another company and make money or I could do
something for the women in this country. One day, one of my employees brought his cousin, Bharti,
to meet me. He said that she desperately needed a job. She was a tiny woman with uncombed hair,
a torn blouse and a faded sari.
‘I hired her and after six months I began to see changes. She had a new sari, her son began to go to
school. I also realized that my customers felt more comfortable talking to a woman about their
menstrual issues.
‘I began to observe that when a woman’s economic status improves, her entire family’s condition
improves, whereas for a man that may not necessarily hold true.
‘He will spend on himself, buy a new bike, spend on drinks and friends but a woman will spend
all her money on her children. And that is when I decided that I would sell my machines only to
women so that they could start their own sanitary pad making units and earn their livelihoods along
with making low cost sanitary napkins accessible to the women in their neighbourhoods.’
Bablu then recounted his first forays in Bihar, where he had made his early contacts with the help
of a cotton trader. ‘I spoke to women, no, Prat Bhai, not about menstruation directly, otherwise all
the Bihari babus would have made sure that I would be the one using a sanitary pad once again,
this time as a bandage for my bleeding nose. I spoke to them about earning a livelihood, bas, they
were all excited.
‘I began selling my machines to groups of women, these women employed other women and they
started their own sanitary napkin making units. They supplied the pads to ladies in their
neighbourhood sometimes for money, sometimes in exchange for eggs and onion.
‘And today many of them are completely independent. You know that saying, even a cat becomes a
lioness in her own lair? These women are now roaring from their well-padded caves,’ he laughed.
‘I want to replicate this model in different states now and I want to try it in Uttarakhand next.’
Prashant had been listening in stunned silence to this extraordinary story. He said, ‘Well done! So
you took sanitary napkins and turned them into a security blanket also for women!’
Bablu was puzzled. ‘Why in the world would I make napkins and then stitch them up as a blanket
when I can just buy a ready-made blanket from Moolchand Market for seventy-five rupees? No,
Prat Bhai! You didn’t understand what I was saying!’
Laughing loudly, Prashant stood up and said, ‘I have understood, my friend, but now please excuse
me for a few moments.’ He pulled out a roll of toilet paper from his haversack and, with a bottle of
water and a bar of Lux soap proffered by Bablu, went to test his olfactory nerves, sanity and sense
of balance in the train toilet.
The train lurched to the left and Prashant Batra staggered to one side, his leg precariously close to
landing inside the toilet bowl. He tried to swiftly pull his pants up in order to get out of this rattling
death trap and ended up dropping his mobile phone and a bunch of coins from the back pocket of
his khaki chinos down the chute while just about managing to hold on to his wallet in the front
pocket.
A disgruntled Prashant returned to his compartment and when he told Bablu about his mishap
Bablu pulled out his newly purchased bulky Ericsson phone from his battered briefcase and said,
‘Don’t worry, Prat Bhai, what is mine is also yours. Use any time when both God and mobile
tower next bless us with signal.’
Hours later, when Bablu got off at Dehradun station, Prashant also hauled his luggage out, deciding
to accompany his new friend on his trip to the mountain village.
Fate had dropped Bablu Kewat in his lap and he knew he had a real story on his hands, one that the
world would want to know about. As he told Bablu when the two men got off the train, ‘Life is but
a play of chance in the game of choice.’
18
Asha Rani Nautiyal was standing outside her hut, her forehead furrowed with worry and her small
eyes narrowed into thin slits.
She buttoned her burgundy sweater tightly over her salwar kameez, bracing herself for the
inevitable argument that would follow when she asked her husband for money.
She walked into the hut prepared to confront him and ended up confronting his bare backside
instead. Her husband was drunk as usual, and he was lying comatose, with his underpants tangled
between his knees and his worn-out brown sweater rolled high over his stomach. The room was
filled
with the stench of urine and liquor. She shook him awake.
Ridhim Nautiyal opened his bleary, red-rimmed eyes slowly. Annoyed at being woken up, he
pulled up his pants, hurled a volley of abuses at Asha Rani and, catching her by her long, wavy
hair with one hand, began raining blows on her head till she managed to push him away and run out
of the hut. There would be no getting money out of him today.
Asha wearily walked towards her three-year-old son playing in the mud next to their meagre
menagerie of goats and a few stray chickens. She looked over at the small fruit and vegetable field
that she had cultivated behind her house, hoping that the shrivelled scarecrow in the middle was
large enough to scare the monkeys away from the fruit-laden guava tree.
She pulled her son on to her lap, pulled off his woollen cap and started removing lice from his
hair, killing each bloodsucking pest between her thumbnails with a sharp clicking sound.
The door opened and her husband shuffled out. Throwing a cursory glance in their direction, he
headed towards the narrow road that led to the village centre. She didn’t know if he would be back
for dinner or if it would be days before he returned.
The sky changed to a pink and gold twilight. Asha Rani sat still, watching the day fade, the
sleeping child bundled in her lap. Tilting her bruised face towards the snowy mountain peaks, she
wondered if God had anything else in store for her besides grinding her down day after day, till
there was nothing left but bone and gristle.
19
Bablu and Prashant arrived at the sarpanch’s courtyard that also doubled as the council hall. With
the help of two members of Bandhu – the NGO that had invited Bablu – they set up three tables and
assembled the machines. By this time a crowd had gathered in the courtyard, looking at Bablu’s
contraptions curiously.
Bablu did a demonstration for the gathering, explaining the cost of the product, the working of the
machine and how soon they could turn a profit. In Bihar, he had learned that when he tried to talk to
his audience about hygiene and health, he lost their attention. But profit and loss always interested
everyone.
Harish Negi, the rice trader, was the first to put his hand up, wanting to examine the machine
further before placing his bid. Bablu said, ‘Bhai, this product is for women and will be made by
them. I am selling my machine at low rates only if it will benefit and provide a livelihood for
women.’
The words echoed in the courtyard. They were so simple but they held a promise of revolution.
After a few minutes of disconcerting silence, a woman standing at the back, with a bruised face
and a grubby child by her side, tentatively put her hand up.
Asha Rani Nautiyal bought the machine by giving Bablu the pieces of gold she had – a pair of
flower-shaped earrings and a small nose pin that had belonged to her grandmother. Still falling
short of the asking price, she threw in two goats and a hen and sealed the deal.
It was a leap into an unknown abyss for her, but then she was standing on the precipice of a cliff
that was crumbling under her feet.
Prashant followed Bablu everywhere with his camera, a writing pad and a pen that never stopped
moving those few weeks. He meticulously documented how Bablu helped Asha Rani set up a small
unit, enlisting Mrs Mehta from Bandhu to help with distribution in the nearby villages, before
Bablu and he took the train back to Indore.
20
Looking out of the window at the pouring rain, Sarita was grateful that she had to just go three
floors down for their neighbour Manisha’s baby shower. But first she had to finish a class and
prepare the lunch boxes that Maina and she would carry the next morning.
She entered the minuscule kitchen, giving Maina a glass of milk. Putting the rice to boil in a
stainless steel pot on one burner, she began dicing the onion and eggplant. Leaving the vegetables
to gently cook and meld with all the spices, she wiped the sticky milk moustache off Maina’s
mouth and quickly dressed her in a green salwar kameez – though Maina had almost outgrown the
salwar, it was nothing that tying the drawstring below the navel would not fix – and arranged her
hair in a simple braid.
Heading back to the kitchen, Sarita added some tomatoes and water to the pan. Leaving the curry to
simmer, she swiftly began draping her magenta silk sari with embroidered peacocks around her
thin frame.
Creating six straight-edged pleats meticulously, she draped the fabric over her shoulder and pinned
the sari to the blouse and petticoat with silver safety pins. She was contentedly humming an old
Hindi song, while occasionally checking on her curry, when the doorbell rang.
Bablu Kewat was standing in the doorway. In the months that he had been coming to her for
English lessons, she had always been dressed in a simple salwar kameez, her wavy hair in a single
plait and her reading glasses firmly perched on her nose, or sometimes pushed on her head like a
hairband.
Seeing her dressed in a sari, he blurted out in his still tottering English, ‘Sarita ji, I went out of
town for some days and you are fully changed. Very tip-top today. You are looking very nice.’
Sarita replied with a frown, ‘Prabhash, this isn’t quite right.’ Bablu felt his cheeks flush with
even begin with the “fully changed” and “tip-top” bits? But I must say that the “You are looking
very nice” part was perfect.’
And just like that his lessons had begun before he had even entered the shabby apartment.
21
The whirring fan sent a cold draught of the winter air towards Bablu, who was sitting on a lumpy
couch in the living room of a one-bedroom flat that he now rented near Jhanda Chowk. Balancing a
plate of congealing mattar paneer and cold chapattis on his bare legs, with Choti nestled beside
him, he thought of Sarita Jagpal as he had frequently done in the last few months. His mind lingered
on the way she always said his name, ‘Prabhash’.
No woman had ever called him by his first name. He was Bablu to his family and the people he
had grown up with in Mohana. Even Gowri had never used his name. She had always called him
Suno ji, a term that meant are you listening, but used by all the women in the community to call out
to their husbands.
It was a practice that had no constructive usage aside from creating mass confusion in crowded
markets when a woman sharply hissed, ‘Suno ji, enough! Stop that nonsense right now!’ And fifteen
startled men fearfully dropped what they were doing before realizing it was some other ‘Suno ji’
that was the target of that scathing tongue.
For a man as lonely as Bablu, whom every female member in his life had forsaken except for the
pet sitting by his leg, the utterance of his name was enough to stir up deep emotions. Emotions that
he had locked inside an unused part of his mind, securing the lid so firmly that their sour smell
would not reach him.
But Sarita and her gently mocking voice, with her intelligence and independence, and the trace of
uncertainty underneath, had seeped into those deep, dank parts of his self.
It had happened slowly. Bablu hadn’t even realized it until he had
returned from Uttarakhand.
A few months ago, Sarita, seeing him trying to hail an autorickshaw after class, had offered to drop
him as far as the vegetable market as she was going in that direction too.
Sitting behind her on the scooter that balmy evening, he had been careful to tightly grip the metal
handrail at the back. He did not want to make her uncomfortable by jostling against her when the
scooter went into the numerous potholes that lent Hathipala Road the distinctive appearance of
belonging to the lunar surface.
They spoke little during the ride, their words often cut off by the loud tooting of horns from
homeward-bound commuters. Bablu, not wanting Sarita to spot him inadvertently looking at her in
the rear-view mirror, kept his gaze on the thin electricity wires running across poles, drooping
over newly patched roofs, criss-crossing the minaret of an old mosque, like a fine fishnet in the sky
He was keenly aware of the woman sitting in the driver’s seat, her smell, her hair. The squawking
crows perched on the lines seemed to be watching him as well, judging him, causing an uneasy flip
of his heart that he only days later identified as guilt.
He got off along with her at the market, buying tomatoes, okra and cauliflower, things he did not
need, relishing walking beside her as she swung her rapidly filling plastic bag between them.
Sarita pointed out a billboard on the side of the road. It was a picture of a bespectacled man, in a
purple shirt, holding his hand out and apparently counting on his fingers. ‘Arvind’s English and
Mathematics’ proclaimed the bold letters on the billboard and a quote seemingly from Mr Arvind
himself stated, ‘My students say that I am the father of fingering and formula.’ This informative
sentence was followed by a phone number and a small blurb – ‘The one and only in the world’.
Sarita laughed. ‘Be glad that you didn’t join this class, Prabhash. Anything passes for English these
days, really! I was lucky that I went to Sacred Heart Convent school where at least the teachers
had decent grammar skills that made up for their heavy Punjabi twang.’
And she told him about growing up in Ludhiana, where her love for academics and reading was
never understood by her family. Reminiscing with a distant smile on her face, she added, ‘In