The telephone rang. It was my neighbour, Paramjit.

“Did you give Madhu a kambal?”

“Yes.”

“I thought it must be you. Look, you shouldn’t give her things. It creates problems for the rest of us.” The iciness of her voice, the controlled annoyance, vibrated through the receiver.

“She brought her baby and it was so cold yesterday…”

My reply was cut short. “Your sympathy is wasted on the likes of her. If she has money to buy beedi she can buy a kambal as well. I thought I had better warn you … Bye.”

A click. I had offended my neighbour.

Madhu was the koodawali who came every day to collect garbage from our homes. She walked with an insolent swing of the hips, her hair tied in a bun on top of her head, and she smoked a beedi. My neighbours hated her but they never opposed her “demands” because of the stream of foul language that poured out the moment she was riled. That was her trump card. No one dared to challenge one who had such a lethal weapon at her command.

My first encounter with Madhu took place the day after we moved into the house. I opened the window of the bedroom at the back to find her seated on the veranda, right knee raised, smoking a beedi. I was furious. Who was she and how dare she sit on my veranda! I told her to leave. She ignored me.

“You can’t sit here,” I said.

“I always sit here,” she answered without a backward glance.

I was routed. What does one do in the face of such outright refusal? There was no scope for argument. She sat on the veranda, looking straight ahead, her elbow resting on the raised knee, the lit beedi between her fingers. She called out some instructions to her assistants who were sorting the garbage into heaps. They, too, went on with their job without looking up. I closed the shutter, feeling like I had been slapped in the face. How could I live here after such humiliation! But what alternative did I have? The insolence of a koodawali was not reason enough to move out of a good house and neighbourhood. The smoke from the beedi seeped in through the gap between the shutters. Fuming with impotent rage, I tried to gain what little comfort I could by ranting about her to my husband when he returned from work.

It was while preparing breakfast the next morning that I hit upon a brilliant idea. I would get the entire back veranda enclosed with metal grills. It would give me space to keep odds and ends, and to hang clothes to air. More importantly, it would keep out the koodawali. If our landlord refused to shell out the money, we would do it at our expense. My husband raised no objection. His astute banker’s brain worked out the monetary damage of the enterprise. He even explained the rationale of the choice so that I would not feel guilty at the unwarranted expense. If we lived in the house for three years, the money spent would be around two hundred rupees extra per month, including opportunity cost, he said. Obviously, he thought it was not too huge a price to pay, if he could avoid the constant cribbing of an irate wife or the hassle of another house hunt. Of course, he did not say that.

Our landlord raised no objections. “I understand, you want privacy. We’ve had tenants from Kerala before, who refused the ground floor because of this issue and settled for the third floor. Your wife, of course, has arthritis.” But he quickly added that he would not bear the cost. “It is an unnecessary expense for me.”

That was BS. He would definitely hike the rent for the next tenant, citing the “enclosed veranda” as a major advantage. Few ground-floor apartments had them. We, however, decided to go ahead with our plan. It was executed in just three days. One day for the contractor to come and measure the space and haggle over the cost, two days to fabricate and paint the grill. It was welded into place on the third night. The back veranda was now secured and fortified against encroachment! The next day, I couldn’t resist the temptation of taking a peek to see Madhu’s reaction. It was drizzling. I didn’t see her.

Perhaps she had decided not to come. Then I saw. She sat huddled under the sunshade of the house on the other side of the compound, sipping tea and looking out at the rain, her face expressionless. All of a sudden, I felt deflated.

I, too, had to engage Madhu because her team collected garbage from all the houses in the colony. Embarrassed to talk directly, I asked my landlady, Komal, to speak to her. The next morning, around eleven o’clock, I heard the doorbell ring. I opened the door. Madhu stood near the steps, her face expressionless. “Kooda.”

In the weeks that followed, I found myself watching Madhu often. She became my obsession. I casually gathered information about her from my landlady and the neighbours. They told me it was her husband Nana who was in charge of the garbage collection. They had two children, both girls. A third was on the way. Nana was a good man, they said. When he was not drunk or getting into fights and being arrested, he took care of Madhu and the children. But such occasions were rare. He would drink and pick fights with others in the slum. Then, the police would arrive and take him away. It was Madhu’s lot to bail him out. Whenever Nana was in jail, Madhu organised the workers, harangued them and swore at them, and got them to come regularly, so that all our homes remained garbage-free. Though my neighbours disliked her, they did admit that somehow, the work was done more efficiently when she was in charge – all this for thirty rupees a month, per house.

“You did very well, teaching her a lesson,” Komal said. “Till last year, we had to pay only twenty rupees a month. Nana never asked for an increase. Even if the payment was delayed a bit, he wouldn’t make a fuss. But that chudail Madhu! One day, just like that, she comes and knocks on my door and says, ‘From now on, the monthly charge is thirty rupees, or we will not collect the trash.’ We had to agree, what else can we do? They are all so organised!” Komal shook her head at the sorry state of affairs, where a mere koodawali could hold the entire locality to ransom.

Excerpted with permission from ‘Madhu’ in A Kind of Meat and Other Stories, Catherine Thankamma, Aleph Book Company.

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