Ananya ChowdhuryThose houses are so big Maa, let’s run, we can touch them if we run now”, Uma shouted with joy holding the end of her mother’s worn-out saree. Her mother chuckled at her words.
“Do you really think, you can touch them?”
“Yes, I can touch them!” as if taking a resolution on the spot to conquer the world.
Laxmi doesn’t want to break her 6-year- old’s heart today. The vast field, that separates the town life of babus and their small colony of poor people, seems small and conquerable under the evening hue as if just a few steps and they can touch them. But the mother knows the distance between them is way too much. The windows of those buildings, saturating yellow lights felt dreamy. Laxmi always visits those houses, rather she has to, but during the daytime only, to wash the laundries, clean the bathrooms, she sometimes stands alone in one of those white marbled balconies and looks down from there, she wonders at the sight of how clear everything seems, on other hand their colony appears so small and insignificant across the empty field. She feels numb, only to take a deep breath and go back to her usual work. From the morning to afternoon, she has to work hard, for Uma, for her small family. Her husband, a rickshaw puller contributes little to the household. But that doesn’t matter to her as long as she can work on her own, she had seen worse days before marriage, so she doesn’t care about much. At least she has a roof on her head now, unlike the days where she used to share a tiny room with many people in a slum. Now, she even has her own bathroom. She finds her refuge in her fenced hut with tiled roof. But those concrete houses with strong walls and a balcony …what are those, then? heaven?
The image of yellow lights reflected by the windows of the buildings is still hovering on her mind.
Heaven, indeed!
“Maa, tell Baba to make two windows for us next year, we will also have windows in our house.”
“Silly child”, thought her mother, it is not easy to have a big window in a fenced wall. They only have empty tiny spaces in the fence that they call, ‘ventilators’.
Laxmi cuddling with her kid, lays down on the floor of their room, she could see the tiny gaps on the tiled roof, again she has to spend her savings to repair the house. The puja baksis that she got from the babus were saved for her daughter’s school, new clothes, but she also has to spend it on her hut now, before monsoon begins.
Those gaps are making ways for the moonlight to invade the dark hut , reminding the mother-daughter duo of those yellow windows where the dreamy people live , where they do not have any sadness, any headache to repair houses every year, where they don’t need to worry about the monsoons, where they can watch the world from their balcony, where the women do not need to fight with their drunkard husbands for ten rupees where they have so many clothes, so many toys, the rich kids can have different fruits daily and to her own daughter, she cannot even put a single fruit in Uma’s mouth, she thought the yellow lights of theirs are so different than hers, those are heavenly, far from filth, disease, hunger , need. Laxmi sighs, she is tired, tired of fighting, working. She has been fighting with siblings for a piece of bread, fighting with neighbors for a bucket of water in a long queue, and now with a drunkard husband too. Too many things start flashing in front of her eyes.
“Maa, when I grow up, I will build you a tall house, with big windows, big balconies and then we can touch the stars and talk to the moon”, Uma giggles.
“Yes darling, you will” hugging her tightly, her mother hums a lullaby as if something within her healed at her words. That night they dreamt of their own yellow windows wrapped in love and warmth.
