by Vijayalakshmi Sridhar
Security guard Manjunath borrows money from his neighbour Stephen for treatment expenses of his daughter Angel. But Stephen uses the favour to remind Manju about one of his old commitments.
On the day when Manju had to pick Angel up from the hostel, he was running short of money. He climbed two floors down the crowded Slum Development Board apartment and knocked on Stephen’s door.
He was relieved to find Stephen at home. ‘I need one thousand five hundred rupees urgently. Angel is sick,’ stuttered Manju, as if he was talking through a mouthful of cooked rice.
Manju had received three calls from Angel’s hostel already. His daughter studied in the Uttarahalli Government School and stayed in a hostel close by, thanks to her education being funded by an NGO.
‘We have put her in the sick room,’ the caretaker had told him. Angel had also spoken with him, complaining of pain and itching, begging to be taken home. It would take him three hours, and he would have to change two buses to reach Uttarahalli. So he had waited for his weekly day off to go pick her up.
Manju shifted his weight uneasily. Stephen’s only family member, his ten-year-old son, crawled into the hall. Manju’s eyes fell on the young boy’s stunted legs. Stephen was saving money to buy an automated wheelchair for his son.
‘I will return the money next month,’ Manju said, looking at Stephen.
Stephen nodded. He went straight to Jesus’s photo in the living room, retrieved a plastic cover from behind the photo, pulled out the notes, counted and handed them to Manju.
‘Next month. Ok?’ Stephen reiterated.
Stephen owned a small bookstall near the Hebbal church. He sold books on Christianity. He also organised church celebrations. Everybody respected him. A decade back, when Manju had followed Christianity briefly, they had gone to church together. Stephen had taught him the ropes of the religion, gifted Manju his first Bible. But a year after Angel’s birth, when Manju had decided to stop praying to Jesus and going to church, the frequency of their meetings had gone down.
‘Thank you,’ Manju muttered meekly and climbed up the two floors back to his home.
Manju and his wife Kokila caught a bus to Uttarahalli. When they reached, Angel was running high temperature. The left side of her body – from the toes to the armpit – was covered in a red rash. The worried parents had no choice but to take their daughter home.
The next day Kokila took Angel to the private poly-clinic that everybody in the neighbourhood frequented. When Manju came home from work that evening, Kokila was soaking a piece of cloth in a pail of solution, and wrapping it around the rash in Angel’s arm. Baskar, their son, was looking on. The July heat and the dense, sour smell of the medicine wrapped them like a thick blanket.
‘Pain is better?’ Manju asked, touching Angel’s head and felt relieved when she nodded.
‘How much did you spend?’ he asked Kokila, eyeing the bottles of medicine and the rolls of muslin on the floor. The tension triggered a pinprick in his lower back. Throughout the day at work, he had been standing at the front gate of the gated community where he worked as a security guard. If he had not broken his back and continued boxing, maybe he could have got a better job through the Sports quota and later, a handsome pension too. His life would have been less complicated.
‘800 including the auto,’ Kokila said, unfazed by Manju’s annoyance.
‘Eight hundred rupees?’ Manju couldn’t help the derision that had crept into his voice. But he knew Kokila would have visited her parents and spent the rest of the money for them. Kokila’s father had been a great help to his family; the apartment that Manju lived in now was his father-in-law’s gift to them. While he was grateful for all the help that his wife’s father had given him, Manju was still irritated. ‘Didn’t Kokila know how they scraped through from paycheck to paycheck?’ he wondered.
‘I told you I borrowed the money from Stephen,’ he said.
‘I bought some groceries too,’ she added without looking up, and took off the cloth from Angel’s arm. As Manju looked, a bubble popped in the skin and water oozed down. His stomach in a violent heave, Manju rushed out, stuffing his feet into his shoes on the way out.
He cut across the crowded lane and walked straight, passing the market and the marriage mantap. On the backside of the mantap, he entered a dark building in the adjacent gully.
The free community gym was Manju’s only escape from his routine. Whenever he could he went there; sometimes he guided the youngsters who came to work out.
He had quit participating in competitive boxing matches following his back injury. Soon, he had married Kokila. Frustrated about having to abandon his passion, for several years into his marriage, Manju would curl up at home in front of the TV after work. When he wasn’t watching TV, he would go to sleep. Worried about his state, Kokila had spoken to her neighbours and that’s when Stephen had offered the suggestion of embracing Christianity to change Manju’s outlook towards life. It had helped Manju. Slowly he had found peace and his way back to the world. Two years later, Kokila had become pregnant for the first time.
The couple’s joy was short-lived, though, when Kokila developed complications in her final term. On the day of the delivery, when her life was in danger, Manju had prayed to Jesus for Kokila’s life. In return, he vowed to leave his firstborn for the service of the church. But after she was born, Angel became the joy of their lives. Leaving her for service was unthinkable for both of them. Panicking, Manju had simply stopped praying to Jesus and going to church. Baskar was born the following year and the couple assumed God had pardoned them. Now looking back, many times Manju wondered if his mounting debts and endless money troubles were punishments for his disloyalty. Until now he knew no way out of his predicament. The same old anxiety came back to haunt him now as he sat in the gym. Manju got up to go home.
By the end of the month, Angel recovered well and left for her hostel. With whatever little money he had left, Manju bought medicines and sent her with Kokila. The same week, he saw Stephen on the stairs with his son in his arms. Manju hung his head in guilt and walked away without uttering a word. He still had to return Stephen’s money.
Before Manju realised, it was the second week of August and one day, during lunch break, he caught sight of Stephen entering the gated community’s office. Quickly, Manju slipped into the servants’ restroom and locked the door. Through the tiny window, he saw the supervisor and one of his colleagues walking towards the restroom. Manju heard his colleague calling his name. What did Stephen tell the supervisor? Would the two have discussed their respective dues from Manju? He had planned to borrow money from the supervisor too. If Manju had explained his position, the supervisor would have loaned him one more time, Manju knew. But now thanks to Stephen, Manju would look like a cheat in the supervisor’s eyes. He wanted to face neither the supervisor nor Stephen. Panicking, he left the apartment building without reporting back for duty that afternoon.
Back home he went to the steel bureau in the bedroom, retrieved Kokila’s bag and rummaged through it. There was a hundred and fifty rupees in cash. Her silver anklets – which she had fibbed of losing – were in one of the secret compartments in the bag. He decided to pawn them and repay some of Stephen’s loan. On his way back from the shop though, Manju tripped on a loose stone in the pavement and fell down. That evening after spending on first aid and injection, he sent six hundred rupees to Stephen through Baskar.
A week later when he was resting, he heard Stephen’s voice in the living room.
‘It has been nearly two months since he took the money…’ Stephen was saying.
‘He told me you helped us out at the right moment, Anna. Thank you very much,’ Kokila was apologetic.
‘You tell him I need the money back,’ Manju detected a hint of superiority in Stephen’s voice.
‘It is not like I have fled the basti overnight with the money. I am still here and I have repaid him a portion of the money. Is Stephen trying to outsmart me with his financial muscle? Does he think I would tolerate that?’ Manju’s thoughts were racing furiously.
‘Please have your coffee. I will call him anna…we will return the money,’ Kokila was saying.
‘No, no… I didn’t come here for coffee,’ Stephen said sharply. Kokila was fumbling for a response. Stephen’s anger must have surprised her too.
‘Alright, I am taking this. Tell him to return the money and get it,’ he said bluntly, carrying Manju’s mobile phone along.
’Anna…no. He needs his phone. Please leave it here. I will tell him…’
Phone! Before Manju could recoil from the shock, Stephen was gone.
Within minutes, Manju rushed out of his home and followed Stephen out of the building.
‘Give me my phone,’ he told Stephen, confronting him.
‘When are you going to return the money?’ Stephen asked.
’Which money?’ Manju queried back, all the defiance coming back to fuel his anger. A knot of people had gathered around them.
’The money you borrowed.. for Angel.’
‘I don’t recall borrowing money from you,’ Manju pushed, enjoying the way Stephen’s eyes crinkled in shock.
‘Hey,’ Stephen caught hold of Manju’s collar. ‘You took money. Don’t act smart. It is my son’s. Jesus is watching you.’
The last line threw Manju off. Before he knew it, he had jabbed his fist on Stephen’s face and kneed him in the stomach. When Stephen tried getting up, Manju kneed him several more times in the stomach. He pulled Stephen up by the collar of his shirt. The crowd took a step back when it witnessed blood.
Stephen stemmed the flow from his nose with his hand. He looked straight into Manju’s eyes and spoke between struggled puffs of breath.
‘You know what. Keep the money. I gave it for Angel. She is God’s child. Learn to keep up your word.’
Manju stood rooted to the spot. As he kept looking at Stephen’s limping figure, Manju felt smaller and smaller and smaller.
Since she was young, stories have been part of Vijayalakshmi Sridhar’s world – both telling and listening to. She mostly writes about people and their relationship angst.
