1001 Nights Cast

Meera adjusted her head scarf as she ran the seam of the shirt through the overlocker. She looked up at the clock. Seven thirty two. Her mother would be worried and her father would be angry but there was no possibility of her leaving before she had finished the twenty shirts remaining in her basket. She placed the completed garment on a hanger rack and reached for another shirt. She had lost her rhythm with her concentration and things weren’t flowing. It was at times like this that the numbness in her fingers and the relentless hum of machines penetrated and poisoned her soul and she felt herself fighting evil thoughts, thoughts of betrayal, thoughts of unmentionable behaviour.

Another shirt passed through the overlocker and onto the rack as Meera looked around the shop floor for the supervisor but he was nowhere to be seen, for the moment at least. She tried not to hate the supervisor without much success. It had taken months for her to grow her hatred for this man with the blue eyes and bad breath but it had finally settled in her like a stone bringing with it waves of shame whenever it rose. Once he had come up behind her and pulled back her headscarf and all the other women had howled in disapproval and disgust at this act of ignorant aggression. Another time he had offered Meera a ham sandwich from his lunchbox and laughed when she politely declined. It was a petty and stupid act and she was disappointed that she had let it affect her. She never told her family anything about the supervisor because she knew her father and brothers would disapprove and force her to leave the factory so everyday she was faced with the dread of his pale eyes and brittle laugh.

Another shirt passed under the needle and she cut the thread. Her feet were aching, she was hungry and she needed to go to the toilet but she would wait another thirty minutes until all her shirts were done. Talking was not allowed on the factory floor but the women had developed a sophisticated gestural language based around movements of the face to communicate and the subtle click of a tongue or a suppressed laugh could speak a thousand words. The whirr of the machines droned on into the evening. The pallid cast of the fluorescent lighting highlighted all the imperfections of the skin and exposed the reddened blood vessels in tired eyes. The supervisor’s teeth, yellowed from nicotine, and his rough, calloused hands appeared all the more sinister under the merciless glare.

She hoped he would not come back before she left. Some of the women had told her that he was a spy and that the man he met at the coffee shop worked for the government security agency, a possibility which provided no end of amusement amongst them. If he were a spy he wouldn’t be gathering much intelligence from a factory where the women only spoke in the toilets and the canteen and then in their first language which was seldom English. But there was something in his eyes, something missing, that almost made the story believable.

Fifteen shirts to go and then she would be on the late train home, through the tunnels and clickety clack of the long stretches, surrounded by bored, listless commuters hunched over newspapers or holding on for their lives as the train catapulted along the track, slicing through the Sydney suburbs delivering its tired cargo to chilly windswept platforms where they would make their way home to husbands, wives and children, to reheated meals and hot showers.

The shirts had filled the rack so Meera got up to find another one. She pushed the full rack aside and flexed her fingers, wriggling them momentarily back to life then walked to the back of the shop floor. She pushed an empty rack back to her machine and was startled by the supervisor who had appeared from nowhere. Her eyes averted his gaze as she sat down to resume her work. She could see him fingering the shirts in her basket out of the corner of her eye and at first she was afraid to reach for one to overlock. She sat there waiting for him to move on. The machine hummed, she could feel the other women looking at her. Finally, she snatched a shirt and stretched the seam under the needle plate fixing her gaze on the endless zig-zags so that her mind would be stilled and she would cease to notice the presence of the supervisor. A foul smell rose up around her. She held her breath. Her hands were moist with sweat. The thread spooled out and rivetted the fabric together beneath her trembling fingers. Only twelve to go.