Crab Orchard Review Vol. 12, No. 2, our

6 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
Sita Bhaskar
“Chief Minister’s forty-fifth birthday.”
“She will give jobs to forty-five deserving men—one for each year
of her life.”
“Big jobs. Office jobs.”
Gaja looked at the number imprinted on the paper. Thirteen—
in bold numerals. What did it mean? Was he thirteenth in line for
a job, a big job, an office job? He didn’t need a job. He already had
a job. A profession, in fact. He looked at his damp palms as if they
had betrayed him. On a normal day he had dry palms. Palms that
made him a success in his profession—the iron man, the laundry
wallah, as his customers called him. Palms that never dripped
perspiration onto the clothes of his customers as he ran a heavy iron
powered by the heat of hot coals over their clothes. It was his duty
to see that his customers were attired in well-ironed clothes—men
with lightly starched shirts and smartly creased pants; women with
off-the-shelf salwar-kameezes who even insisted on getting their
diaphanous dupattas ironed; women with prim and proper cotton
saris draped over matching blouses tailored in the latest fashions.
Gaja had feared for his livelihood when colleges and offices relaxed
their dress rules, and college girls and young professional women
adopted western fashions and started wearing pants—pants made of
thick blue material that remained rough and heavy even after several
washes, pants that did not appear to need the discipline of a heavy
iron. But a strange conspiracy between Gaja and the mothers of the
blue-pant-clad female population had saved his livelihood. While the
young ladies were away at college or office, the blue pants—jeans or
denims as they were called—were washed post-haste by housemaids
and given to Gaja to iron. It was only then that he realized that each
person owned several pairs in the same color. What was the point in
spending money to buy clothes that looked the same and would make
people think one did not change one’s clothes? Even Gaja washed his
clothes every evening at the communal water pump. But he never
ironed them on his wooden cart. That would not be fitting.
Sweat trickled down from Nirmala’s tightly-braided hair,
winding a lazy path behind her ear, sprouting limp, damp tendrils
brushing the nape of her neck before pooling together as heavy, salty
drops. She wiped the back of her neck with the edge of her sari pallu,
an action she disliked. Ever since she had started working as a maid
at the big bungalow, she had taken to using handkerchiefs. Though