Shining Hero by Sara Banerji

up.
    In the months that followed she would wake in the morning and sometimes her mind would trick her into thinking that Adhiratha was still there. She would reach out for him, her hand feeling around in the dark and it would be long moments before she would be plunged back into the sadness. There were happy nights when she dreamt that he was still alive so that during the day she would long for sleep, where she could find him. She tried for a while to continue washing clothes, but the money was not enough and the day came when she could no longer afford the room.
    It was May and very hot the day she stepped out of the room where she and Adhiratha had lived together. She stood in the road, baby Karna in her arms, and did not know what to do next, or where to go. And as she hesitated, dazzled with the heat, the brightness and the hopelessness of everything, the realisation came upon her that even her work as a dhobi could not continue, for now she lacked anywhere to keep or iron the clothes. She had no income or home.
    Holding everything she owned, including the precious baby, she began to walk along the pavement, not going anywhere, but not knowing where to stop. She walked like this for two hours until at last she sank down on the spit- and urine-spotted pavement because she was so tired and because the baby had started crying. She squatted in the dust with her child across her knees, while people going past jostled against her or stepped over her, as though already she had ceased to be part of the human race.
    In the weeks and months that followed she lived on that piece of pavement, eking out the little money she had left from her dhobi work to buy the cheapest food and wondering what she would do when it was finished. At night she slept on the hard ground with only her straw mat under her, and a bedsheet wrapped round her and Karna to keep them from the mosquitoes. Karna was the only thing that made her life worth living. If it had not been for him she would have killed herself, thrown herself under one of the new underground trains, for there did not seem anything else in her life worth staying alive for. Often during those sad months she would take out the little golden disc on which was written what she had decided was the name of Karna’s mother. At first she had been tempted to take the baby back to this woman called Koonty of Hatibari, giving Karna back the life that was his right. Then, with Karna’s life ensured she would do away with her own. But a woman who has thrown a baby away once might do it again. In the end Dolly decided that the baby would be better off with her, in spite of the poverty, than being sent to a woman who did not love it.
    When Karna was four months old, a charitable organisation that specialised in getting work for pavement people found Dolly a place as a live-in maid. Dolly was given a small room in the compound where she and Karna slept, but during the day she was forced to leave the baby alone. Dolly’s new employers did not allow children in their flat. ‘You are lucky that we are giving you this chance of a job but we can easily take on someone else without children if you do not want it,’ the wife said.
    So whenever she had a little gap in her work during her fifteen-hour day, Dolly would race across the yard to feed the baby. As Dolly washed the cement floors with a piece of hessian, rubbed the utensils with charcoal or swept the beds with a short straw broom, her mind was always on her little boy. She would worry about him a thousand times as she scoured the dishes with coconut string, scrubbed the saucepans with sand in a tin bowl of cold water, or washed the floors with disinfectant. The moment her work was done she would run as though the goddess Kali was after her, to where her baby lay weepingin his cradle and only feel safe when she had him hugged tight inside her arms. And then, even though she was so tired that her legs shook, she would light her cow dung brazier, heat