All Creatures Great and Small

by Amita Basu

On the other side, sagging city buses and sleek SUVs raise dust clouds and honk ceaselessly; here there’s only the hum of the air-conditioner. From the morning room Pugsy barks, anticipating playtime. 48-year-old Sukhi, bent over her broom, moves dining-chairs out of the way and sweeps around towers of Amazon boxes. It was nice sitting home, getting paid without working, but her joints got stiff, and her conscience heavy around all her neighbors who’d been fired when lockdown began.

Sukhi straightens up too quickly. The world swims. Her giddiness gathers into a black storm. The thunder of an alien rage rumbles, frightening her. She clutches the granite countertop to keep upright. Without thinking Sukhi devours another slice of white bread heaped with Kissan mixed-fruit jam. She chews quickly, eyes on the door of the morning-room, where her employers are preparing for their weekend. Her vision clears. She raises her face sunflower-like and thanks God she’s alright. Sukhi’s always been famous for two things: sweet tooth and sweet temper. But these strange black spells are happening more often.

Pugsy waddles out, licking his chops. Sana-mam has re-retied the blue-and-white bow around his throat. Sukhi offers Pugsy half her snack. The vet must be mistaken: how can Pugsy be allergic to anything when thousands of street dogs thrive on garbage? Pugsy sniffs Sukhi’s offering and backs away as if she’s stabbed him in the soul.

“Ammamma!” a voice shrills from the sofa. “Tiger!”

Sukhi goes over and stands behind the sofa to watch. Her granddaughter likes coming over, and the Vermas don’t mind. Some villagers are telling the NDTV correspondent that droughts and floods and rock-bottom prices drove them out of rice-farming, and now the Forestry Department is driving them out of cattle-rearing. Sweat streams down their faces, over their skulls that are too large for their bodies with their clay-brown skin stretched drum-tight.

“They showed tiger,” six-year-old Titli insists, appropriating the brown-and-white stuffed rabbit, Sana-mam’s childhood companion, now shabby and perching incongruously atop the mauve satin sofa. “Tiger was hungry.”

Sukhi pats the crown of Titli’s head. On weekdays, when she picks Titli up from school and they’re alone here, Titli wanders around the condo, sounding out the English words on snack-packs and videogame cases. Sukhi, who struggles to read the instructions Sana-mam leaves her in large all-caps on the fridge whiteboard, listens now, as Titli mutters the English headlines rushing across the bottom of the screen. Sukhi swells with pride. She doesn’t know Titli’s muttering nonsense.

A forest guard defends government policy to the NDTV correspondent: it’s his job, he says, to keep intruders away from the Sunderbans. A tiger appears in closeup. Titli squeals. The tiger stalks through marshy undergrowth, head lowered, neck flattened, flanks skinny. The camera pans, with dramatic jerks and soap-opera lightning flashes, to a herd of goats. Titli huddles up, clutching the limp rabbit between her chest and chin. Sukhi resumes sweeping.

The emaciated villagers on the NDTV make Sukhi want to bolt a laddu, but Sana-mam has emerged from the morning-room. She wanders around the living-room, dousing her snake-plants and succulents with that stinky new plant medicine that arrived by courier. ‘ORGANIC,’ the label read, among lots of squiggly text. Sukhi bids the 30-year-old media planner Good Afternoon, then sweeps past her with eyes lowered. What if Sana-mam smells her breath and threatens to lock the fridge, like the time she caught Sukhi bolting rashmalai? Sukhi decides she’ll admit to the white bread but claim it was the super-expensive, sugar-free jam that she had lathered on. She hides her grin – it’s like she’s seven again, trying to persuade Amma it was a crow that stole the last Mysorepak.

Now Varun-sir emerges. Both her employers take hours to prepare for their Saturday—the three bathrooms full of jars and bottles crowding the basins and stampeding the windowsills. But Sana-mam and Varun-sir always look the same, always in black. The 32-year-old corporate lawyer ruffles Titli’s hair. Titli’s ogling the screen unblinkingly for her hungry tiger.

Varun-sir returns Sukhi’s full-toothed, crease-eyed smile with his mild, lopsided grin. “Are you sure I can’t make you breakfast,” she asks.

“No, thanks, we’re brunching with friends.”

He watches as she nods side-to-side. He’s watched her sitting down suddenly when she thinks nobody’s looking; he’s watched her starbright eyes dulling, and new planes and angles parsing her once moon-round face. Is her cheerfulness the child of folly? He admires it nonetheless.

“How are you, Aunty? How was your checkup?” He speaks lightly, repressing the urge to scold her preemptively.

Sukhi ducks her head. The Vermas earn fifty times her salary but call her ‘Aunty’ as if she were a relative. If they knew she collapsed on Friday after dinner, and her daughter rushed her to hospital, and the doctor said her blood sugar was 451, they’d tackle her to the floor and give her the injection. Last month, after Sukhi emptied the box of jalebi in one morning, Sana-mam said that she’d bought a syringe, and the next time Sukhi snuck any sweet stuff she’d hold her down and inject her with insulin. Sukhi giggled.

Sana-mam retorted, “You don’t believe me? You want to see the syringe?”

Sukhi assured her she’d behave.

“Checkup fine-only, sir,” says Sukhi, then begs Varun-sir to let her dispose of the empty Amazon boxes. Her grin, self-conscious about deflecting his attention, disappears as quickly as it came. The dumbbells and whey-protein-powder jars are piling up in his room but this boy’s getting so skinny—God knows when he’ll fade into thin air. He used to be so nice and plump in 2010, when she began working for the Vermas in their last flat. Sometimes, for no good reason, you see someone as if for the first time. What unrequited need, she wonders, makes him chisel his poor flesh into stone? “So much dust the boxes are getting,” she pleads. “Very-bad for your asthma!” She won’t let this unhealthily skinny boy lecture her on her health, not with her own potbellied son always nagging her.

“Hmm.” Varun-sir scratches his chin. “We’ll have to sort through them, decide which ones to save for packing-boxes… Soon, I promise.”

The Vermas set the air purifier on max, clear a track, and assume their stations to exercise Pugsy: Sana-mam under the kitchen window, Varun-sir at the dining room’s far end. He has a frisbee, she has a tennis ball, and they both have beef niblets. Pugsy had a poor appetite through the pandemic; the vet discovered that he’s allergic to most foods. Now he’s on a diet of free-range organic beef shipped every week in an icebox from Kerala. Sukhi watches the little fellow waddle back and forth, carrying his toy halfheartedly, dropping it midway to sprint openmouthed towards his nibble-sized reward. He’s already snorting, his eyes flaring too as if they were auxiliary nostrils, pink membranes bulging.

Varun-sir frowns. “Well, at least he’s not wheezing.”

“Trust me,” says Sana-mam, scratching Pugsy’s forehead, “this is better than walking him outside in all that smog.”

“Hmm,” says Varun-sir.

Did he want a different dog, Sukhi wonders, one of those shapely glossy breeds? She’s never understood rich people paying lakhs for ugly dogs. What her neighbors could do—what she could do—with that kind of money! But her neighbors’ situation isn’t anybody’s fault. It’s just how the world works. The menfolk are getting worked up over politics, but from what she can see, they’ve gained nothing. When they call her an oblivious fool, she smiles.

Sukhi enters the master bedroom. It’s dark and close. Her head reels. Clutching the headboard, she lowers herself into a squat and waits till her giddiness passes.

Every month when Sana-mam draws her up a diet plan, Sukhi nods attentively, promises eagerly, and stops listening. It’s not like she can’t afford oats and lettuce – they pay her generously – she just can’t stomach that newfangled stuff. Sana-mam makes her boil three eggs for breakfast, one each for the three of them, “Protein will keep her full,” Sana-mam says. Sukhi feeds her own egg to Titli and rinses both their mouths out afterwards. Sukhi rises too suddenly and again the giddiness takes her. Sukhi’s son and grandson have developed an appetite for chicken nuggets, but she is too old to change. She’d almost rather take injections than eat chicken nuggets or eggs or oats or lettuce. The vision of chicken nuggets has caused a revulsion which darts up her spine, dispelling her giddiness.

No use getting worked up, worrying about tomorrow – God will look after her. He got her through three childbirths without injections – and Titli’s mother took 32 hours coming out. She’s sick of popping pills; sick of people’s conflicting advice; and she’s sick of the lectures as if somehow her illness has rendered her a child. She still earns a big chunk of the income, doesn’t she? The pandemic confirmed what she’s always believed: life’s too short to worry. She finishes sweeping the master bedroom.

In the living-room, Pugsy is panting under the AC. Varun-sir has angled the vents away from Pugsy’s sensitive eyes. The sealed space stinks of dog breath and red meat. Sukhi stands in the doorway trying not to gag, breathing a prayer on the Vermas’ behalf for the cow whose death lies at their door. She beams at the pug so infirm, still so cheerful.

Sana-mam approaches the sofa. NDTV is showing an infographic that contrasts two aerial views of the Sunderbans: all jungle and mangrove in 2001, mostly farmland and pasture in 2023. Both images are grainy and sepia-toned. Sana-mam bends her face close to the child’s.

“Wanna watch something else, Titli?”

Titli buries her face in the shabby bunny, hiding from the pretty lady. Sana-mam flips to National Geographic. The Serengeti is still lush: from high-definition cameras, the rains, and David Attenborough’s peanut-brittle voice. Lounging lions with benevolent, well-fed eyes watch herds of zebra and wildebeest tearing up grass. The lions flick their tails.

“Ha-ah!” Titli gasps. She slips from the sofa and around the coffee table heaped with cozy mysteries and advertising books bookmarking each other before settling on the carpet under the television—her stuffed rabbit forgotten.

Sana-mam replaces the rabbit on the sofa back and stands watching. Attenborough’s is a land without time, like the land of Friends and HIMYM. In this land, Adam and Eve never discovered sin and the trees never began to shed. It’s been a hard week at work; this is not a weekend for watching news. She’s been plugging away on the Coca-Cola account, and it’s hard enough doing what you’ve got to do without having bleakness infiltrating your hard-earned weekend.

Sana-mam’s Fitbit beeps. Pugsy’s break is up. Sprawled on the dining room’s cool uncarpeted floor, his panting has slowed and his eyes look satiated. “You’re getting fat again,” Sana-mam says, “need more exercise.” She walks to her treat-bag on the counter. When she turns around, Pugsy is already at her heels, wagging his curled tail, ready for round two. Sana-mam cocks her brow, looks up, and meets Sukhi’s eyes.

Sukhi giggles. “So greedy he is! Can’t control himself at-all.”

The next instant Sukhi is faint again. She ducks into the morning room, to sweep behind the cupboard, trying to sweep away another black storm. These annoyances are beginning to shade into anger, becoming irrepressible. She can’t stop picturing the laddu in the fridge: second shelf, back corner, supposedly hidden. But she can’t get at the laddu, not now. And in this impasse the pattern emerges: her mind finally sees the solution her body has already been implementing. She just needs a little something!

She pictures the Coke on the fridge door, which her employers bought months ago. They’ve forgotten about it, it’s become undrinkable: one more item to bin next spring cleaning. The Coke is easy to reach, easy to bolt, no smell on her fingers. Soon Pugsy will finish exercising, Varun-sir will go to his study to check email, Sana-mam will wander to her closet in the master bedroom. Then Sukhi will sneak a sip. Just a sip: enough to set her right, to dispel this alien black cloud.

No mere illness can take away her cheerfulness.