A MONTH PASSED. Shorbojoya lived in a constant state of hopelessness, fear and hardship. She thought constantly about different ways to stay afloat with her son, but nothing remotely useful came to her. Throughout it all, the temptation of returning to the soothing familiarity of Contentment kept popping into her mind, but each time she squashed it mercilessly. Going back wasn’t an option. First, they had nothing left in Contentment except the dilapidated old house, for all their land and possessions had been sold to either meet debts, or to finance their move to Kashi. Second, for a month before she left, Shorbojoya had taken great pleasure in painting the picture of her family’s imminent success to all the women and girls of the village. The stagnant little pond of Contentment didn’t have the wherewithal to understand her husband’s true worth, she had explained loftily, but the world outside was simply dying to bestow him with wealth and honour. It wouldn’t even take a full year, she had predicted, for their poverty to turn into a life of plenty.

That had been last Choitro—less than a year ago. How could she go back to that neighbourhood now, newly widowed and completely penniless? The very idea made her want to melt into the ground in shame and embarrassment at herself. She couldn’t bear to look into familiar eyes. No, she was not going to go back to Contentment. Whatever happened, she was going to stay here. Even if she had to beg on the streets with her son by her side, at least there would be no one to see her, no one to know who she was.

But then, at the end of the month, a new avenue opened up. A gentleman from Kedar Ghat came to the Ramkrishna Mission, asking after brahmin women in need of work. A rich Bengali family was looking for a woman from their own caste to move into their house and help with domestic chores. After some back and forth, the Mission decided to recommend Opu and his mother to the gentleman. When Shorbojoya heard the news, she felt like she had finally sighted land after months of being cast away. Two days after this, the gentleman sent word that mother and son should prepare to leave Kashi permanently, for the employing family had only been in the city for a visit. They would be leaving for their hometown soon, and needed their new employee to travel with them.

The hometown house turned out to be an enormous yellow mansion. Opu had seen several enormous multi-wing mansions in Kashi, with several verandas and courtyards. This house was exactly like those. Shorbojoya entered the house behind the long line of travelling family and staff, trying to make herself small and unnoticeable. When the group finally made its way to the inner wings, a roll of cheer went up. Not for her and her son, but for the people ahead—family members and relatives who had just returned from Kashi after a long stay.

Once the first peal of exclamations abated and the crowd dispersed a little, the mistress of the household came to meet Shorbojoya. A rather plump, pleasant-faced woman, it was obvious she had been quite a beauty in her youth. When Shorbojoya bent down to touch her feet, she said, ‘Bless you, child, bless you . . . poor girl, to be widowed at this age—is this your son? Lovely boy. What’s his name?’

Another woman of the household said, ‘So are you originally from Kashi? No? Oh, then did you . . .?’

All the scrutiny began to close in around Shorbojoya. She mumbled her answers half-heartedly, barely able to look up at the group gathered around her. When one of the upstairs’ maids finally delivered her to the tiny ground-floor room assigned to her and her son, she breathed her first sigh of relief in the house.

The next day, she formally joined the household as a cook. There were four or five cooks already employed by the family, to handle the daily duties of the many different kitchens: the fish kitchen, the vegetarian kitchen, the milk room, the sickroom kitchen, the kitchen for staff and visitors . . . and a few more. Shorbojoya gave up on trying to count the number of maids and servants employed to keep just the kitchen complex functioning smoothly. Although part of the inner wings, the kitchens were housed together in a separate building, and ruled by the brahmin maids and cooks. The women of the household stopped by once, in the morning, to lay out and explain the tasks for the day. Beyond that, they were seldom seen in the kitchen complex.

Shorbojoya had always believed herself to be an excellent cook. So when the cooks and maids began discussing which duties she could be assigned, she said, with some confidence, that she could look after the vegetarian cooking for the family. This led to barely hidden smirks.

‘You want to cook for the masters?’ the senior cook Mokkhoda asked, grinning derisively. ‘That’ll be the day!’

Then she called out to the kitchen maid Panchi to explain Shorbojoya’s ridiculous ambition in detail. ‘O Panchi, have you heard what this lady from Kashi’s been saying? She wants to start here by being in charge of the masters’ curries! What was your name again, my dear? I keep forgetting these little details . . .’

Their overt contempt and mockery nearly crushed Shorbojoya to the core, but in a few days, she realized that her public shaming had, in fact, done her a favour. With skills developed to suit a rural, poverty-plagued kitchen, she would have been utterly lost in this household’s expectations of vegetarian cooking. Never in all her life had she seen anyone mix such piles of sugar into thin gravies, or known that there was such a thing as cabbage ‘fritters’.

The mistress of the household had taken good care of Shorbojoya for