Geetanjali Krishna: The massage monologues

PEOPLE LIKE THEM

Some people just can't help talking. It's a disease. You can avoid them easily on the telephone "" just keep the receiver away from your ears and keep saying "hmm" at judicious intervals. Face-to-face conversations with talkers are tougher to avoid, but not altogether impossible.

But one talker has me trapped each time "" my occasional masseuse, Meena. When she talks, she can really let herself go. And since I'm usually covered in olive oil, draped in a towel, I can't do anything but listen. The one common thread in Meena's monologues is money, or the lack of it. So she invariably ends by asking for loans "" mostly for amounts so large that even if she massaged my head every Sunday for the next thirty years, she won't be able to repay me. Last week was no different. But somehow, what she said set me thinking.

"Last week," she began, "I went home to my village in UP for my brother's son's wedding." Her no-holds-barred account of the village wedding made my eyes glaze over, but one thing she said was interesting. "It's funny, but whenever we go back home, everyone expects such lavish gifts from us!" she went on, "they think that since we live in Delhi we must be earning pots of money."

Going by what she'd told me, their family of five lived in a single room so small that their elder son became a night watchman to allow the rest of his family to sleep better. Their daughter had dropped out of school last year, saying that she could not cope with the class eight curriculum, and Meena promptly got her a domestic job instead. But even with four working members, Meena's household barely managed to eke a living in the capital.

"Why don't you just disabuse your village relatives of their wrong notion?" I suggested. Meena said that life in their backward eastern UP village was so hard that the city option looked infinitely better. "They think city life is glamorous," she sighed, showing me a little packet of leftovers someone had given her, which was going to be her lunch. "Whenever we go home, people ask if we've seen the latest movies, and ask us if they can come stay with us in Delhi ..." she said, adding, "little do they know that I get up at 4.30 am everyday to fill fresh water, do the housework, then work through the day till I'm too tired to stand..."

Meena continued her massage and stray words from her never-ending monologue filtered through. "What?" I sat up, "you've told them your daughter and you don't work?" She nodded, slightly embarrassed, "women in our family don't work outside their homes. So I've kept up that pretence too "" not that they'd ever find out!" The only problem, she said, was when they asked her to come and stay for any longer than a fortnight: "I can't explain to them that if I did that, I'd probably lose my regular clients," she added ruefully.

What a strain it must be for Meena and her family to keep up such a facade, I commented. She nodded, "This time, we actually borrowed money to buy a television for my nephew, a brocade sari for my sister-in-law and a jacket for my brother...that's what was expected from the 'rich' city relatives!"

Ironically, Meena said she often hankered for the peace of village life. "If there'd been more jobs and fewer restrictions in the village, we'd probably have returned ages ago," she mused, "...probably to be at the receiving end of expensive gifts from city cousins whom we considered 'rich'!"