Rajo the Rag Doll

As children, we often thought people were like trees. When they were young, they had shiny leaves, then they grew tall and lanky, then they grew weightier, finally growing gnarled and old and shrivelled, till they stooped and died one night in a storm. Of course, I have left the part about babies - that brought us considerable embarrassment. For instance, once I remember my Amma trying very hard to convince me that women who had babies before marriage were bad women. To my mind, it was like trees bearing fruit. When the woman was old enough, there would be children. And how was it her fault if her parents did not marry her off till that time?

Amma, my grandmother, kept sitting in her old chair with the rosary in her hand or lying in her bed under the fan that was always running at minimum speed. The rosary was always in her hand, moving slowly in trembling fingers. It grew out of her hand. Amma herself was like an old, gnarled guava tree. And like a tree, Amma hardly moved, she had roots that had grown into her chair. Everyone in the house had a place. The cook had his place behind the kitchen and Gangubai, the one who swept the house and cleaned dishes, was always found in her room on the roof, smoking her bidi, the slender stick of tobacco rolled in a leaf that I always thought more stylish than the cigarette Papa smoked. Somehow it was wrong if a woman smoked a cigarette, but bidis were fine. The people who were poor smoked them and not all rules applied to them.

I learned the poor could smoke bidis, drink, stay away from home and marry more than once. The rich people could not do any of it. Gangubai could roam around with men, joke with shopkeepers and when she walked; her skirt swirled around her knees while the men in the street whistled. My mother could do nothing like this. I and my sister could not loot kites like the street children, we could not smoke bidis and we could not even swear, because we were not poor.

The saddest part was that we weren't even actually rich. It seemed Papa's grandfather had a lot of money and land that he left behind in Pakistan when the British divided our country and left. I don't understand the part after that. We had a big house but no money. That was okay, but for some vague reason, we were still 'higher' than the 'lower' classes and we had to live by stupid rules and restrictions while they could make merry. In the night when the labourers who lived on a corner of our land came back from work, they would sit around a fire and sing loud songs in a language slightly different from ours. It seemed so much nicer to be poor.

To make being rich worse, there was Babulal Driver. I learned later that his name was Babulal while his 'post' was 'driver'. That time if you'd asked me, I would have perhaps told you his name was Babulal Driver, or maybe that his post was Babulal Driver. It was slightly like that in those days. When people asked me which class I studied in, I used to tell them LKG-A, or First-A as the case may be. The ‘A’ came together. Also, I was proud of always being in the A section by some twist of fate even when most children had their sections changed each year.

Babulal Driver used to bring me and my sister back from school sometimes, when Papa did not go to the office. What a man! He was just seventeen years old but shrivelled like an old tree before his time. He was born in the mountains, he said, and the bad weather and the cold shrivel up the men and the trees there. He had tiny slits of eyes that always seemed to be smiling, even when he was sad. Of his eyes and mouth, only one would remain open at a given time. When he opened his mouth to laugh, his eyes would shut. He talked funny (‘saab’ was ‘shaab’ for him) and walked with a limp. But he made up for all that by his formidable skills behind the wheel. He sometimes joked he was in the circus before the Government gave him a job. We knew this wasn't true because Papa told us his father was also a Driver and he died in an accident and then Babulal Driver got his father's job and he left school. He would do the most amazing things, suddenly start driving with his feet on the steering wheel or pretend to drive while he was sleeping (I told you about his eyes, it wasn’t difficult for him to do this). He did more dangerous stunts like get off the Jeep where the slope started and run alongside, while we children would scream for him to save us. He would then jump in at the last moment and save us. He was very brave but we never understood why he was so scared in front of my parents and why he had forbade us from telling anyone about his stunts, I think he lived a double, make-believe life, like Superman.

When Babulal Driver was caught stealing mangoes from our garden, he was fired and told that his family ought to be ashamed of him. We children did not know what was so wrong – we stole mangoes ourselves. But the day he left, he came to see us two sisters. And that was the first time we had known that Babulal Driver, our Superman, cried.

Anyway, the more important part of the story begins now. When Babulal left, he gave us a rag doll. Its name was Rajo. Actually his daughter’s name was Rajo and he had made the doll to be with her, as he told us. After he had wished us the best in life, and hugged us and cried a lot, he said he did not need her as he was going to die. We did not realise fully what was happening, but we also started crying. Then he told us his plan. He was ashamed and he did not have a job. His wife had run away with his brother, taking Rajo (the daughter) with her. Also he would not get a job now since his ‘reputation’ was stained. So he will walk to the hill in the next village and jump. I somehow felt bad for him, but also felt let down since it didn’t fit his Superman image.

Just by the way, it wasn’t actually the end. It seems he was lying as usual. I heard long after that that he was sighted driving a white government ambassador car, in a khaki uniform. My Dad had run into him in a market, and he had still saluted and said “Shalaam Shaab”. Anyhow, in this whole drama, Rajo (the doll) remained with us.

She stayed with us so long that we almost forgot her. I and my sister slept with her. By turns, we would get her to sleep with, and the other one invariably couldn’t sleep and stayed up till the one with Rajo slept, then stole her and slept with her. We would get up and unconsciously grope for her under our pillows, bed sheets and then the bed. We would usually have her under an arm as we held the toothbrushes to our teeth, mouth stretched in a sleepy grin, waiting for our mother to look the other way. When that happened, we would quickly throw out the water, rinse our mouths and run into the bathroom. Whoever finished first got the bathroom first. Now that I remember, I think at those moments, with the toothbrushes in our mouths, was the only time we could have looked like Babulal Driver’s daughter, assuming she looked like Rajo the rag doll.

Since she was supposed to resemble someone from the mountains, or maybe because she was made clumsily, she aged very fast. She first lost her teeth, which were made of seeds stuck to her permanent woollen smile. Then, the first time she had a bath in the river with us, she lost one eye, and her skin lost colour. Eventually, she lost her clothes and her pigtail (that actually our new driver’s son tore off, and we couldn’t stick it back again) but her left eye stuck on, and her smile stayed firmly stitched. And if it was possible, she became more warm, lifeless but cuddly like Amma. I and my sister often fought over who would keep her if we were sent to different schools, or if we joined different colleges, or if we married two boys who were not brothers and lived in different houses.

Once we almost lost her, when we were stealing mangoes from our neighbour’s tree and my sister forgot about her in the hurry to get back with six green mangoes clutched in her skirt. We got her back in the night itself, when we couldn’t sleep without her. Plus I had decided that her being found would be too much ‘proof’ and we could go to jail for stealing. And another time, my sister just forgot it under a pile of bedclothes and we thought it was lost and we created such a ruckus. The entire house was turned upside down while we insisted that the new driver’s son stole it and burnt it, as he had once threatened to do.

All this, of-course, was before we actually lost her. Rajo stayed with us so long that we started forgetting about her. We were growing up, and we often fell asleep without worrying about where she was. I assumed she was with my sister, and she assumed likewise. And then she would be found days later in the trash that was about to be thrown off. This was one good thing about my mother. She always used to call one of us sisters to check if there was something being thrown off that we wanted to keep. We often picked up things from the junk, like used thread-reels or broken records that we thought could fit into the dollhouse, or that looked pretty. Rajo often came back from such an end when we spotted her. To tell the truth, she was not a necessity any more. All the same, she had been with us too long. We had thought about giving her to some urchin child, but in the end, always decided against it. I don’t really know what made us stick on to her. We did not remember Babulal Driver anymore, or the story about his daughter we had never seen. In fact, what made us decide about her finally was a fairly simple thing.

It was my father, of all people, who bought us a new doll. He had gone to the city to buy some things for the marriage of one of our cousins, and he had seen the doll in a shop. It was the stuff our dreams were made off. She was like the dolls we saw in the glass windows of big shops when we went to the city. We were too confused to come up with a name for her. Rajo had come to us pre-named. We never had to do this before because – a fact that now struck us as strange – we never had another doll. Somehow, everything about the new doll suggested we should give her an English sounding name. She wore a real, small frock; unlike Rajo who wore…well, nothing. She was made of plastic, and had the most beautiful blue eyes, which, believe it or not, closed by themselves if you made her lie down. She was so pretty that we couldn’t stop looking at her. After years, me and my sister again fought over who should have the doll to sleep with.

I think we named her Diana or something, I think she was the wife of Phantom in some book my sister had read. But we forgot her name soon after.

We made a house for her out of a shoebox, and we lined it with parts of an old sari and she fitted in almost perfect into that. We postponed the pillow for another day, and we reached the critical question. What should we do with Rajo? I was willing to give her to my sister, but she didn’t want her. I kept saying Rajo is nice but in my heart of hearts I did not believe that. I knew Rajo was not nice, clearly inferior in front of this new foreign doll. We talked till night fell around us, and we decided to throw her away, finally.

Now when I look back at it, it wasn’t a hard decision to make. The tough part was saying it, and yes, actually taking her to the garbage can and throwing her was also tough. I finally got my sister to do it. She was quite calm about the whole thing. She came back, said “It’s done” in a sinister tone, grabbed the new doll and flopped on her bed. I stayed awake for a long time that night, and I think so did my sister, though she had her back to me.

It was around one-thirty in the night (you see, I remember the grandfather’s-clock in the hall struck once too many times that night, so I later calculated it must have been one strike each for twelve-thirty, then for one, then for one-thirty (and yes, I never figured out why it was called a grandfather’s-clock, it was my uncle’s actually, who died early from drinking too much)). I was watching the shadow of the gulmohor-tree on the wall, clawing in the air and much bigger than the actual tree; when my sister suddenly got up and said she was feeling cold.

Then she said imagine how cold Gangubai must be feeling (remember Gangubai? Our maid? Bidis?)…. And then the thought struck us both together.

How cold must Rajo be feeling?

Diana was comfortable in her shoebox, tucked up and warm, while Rajo was – I shuddered to think – in a cold metal dustbin. Oh no! How could we do this?

I remember reading the word ‘horror-struck’ some years later and I remembered that night all over again. We didn’t know what to do. Going out into the night to retrieve Rajo was a scary thought, and nothing else struck us. We could try calling Gangubai from the window, and asking her to go and look for Rajo and cover her up, or bring her to our room, but then we knew Gangubai never did what we told her to do unless we said so in front of Mummy. After being ‘horror-struck’ for a while and talking about it frantically, we decided there was no other way but to go out ourselves and bring her back.

Now I can’t remember what we were so scared of in the night – I guess everything. Everything we had heard of that had ever happened to anyone in the night came to haunt us. Witches, ghosts, draculas, snakes, scorpions, lizards, creepers that came alive in the night (I think I was more scared of the word ‘creeper’ – gave me a creepy feeling, as if it would creep over me slowly, starting at my feet, and then strangle me), dogs (those days it was 14 injections) and everything else.

We managed to reach the dustbin, and then had a tough time finding Rajo. We had to forage through the days junk, and vegetable peels and sodden paper bags, and we were fighting all the time because I felt my sister must not have thrown Rajo there but somewhere else, and she was insisting she was right there in the bin. We finally found her, wet and dirty and smelly. And we felt really bad for what we had done. We washed her and tried to dry her with a towel, sprayed some of Mummy’s perfume over her, and tucked her up warmly in the shoebox. Diana was anyway in my sister’s bed. And finally at around three in the morning, we slept.

We kept her for a long time, as Diana’s servant.

And we never lost her after that. She always had Diana’s bed to sleep on, and she even got a lot of cotton in her box to fluff-up the bed. She was there till the day the doll-house burnt down; but of-course that’s another story.

We grew up with time. My sister still feels it was a very mean thing to do, and hasn’t forgiven herself still for that dustbin-foraging night. I’m a school-teacher now, and she’s handling South-East Asia for a soft-toys’ company. She insisted that if I ever write this down, I never mention her name.