The story has more to it, I admit. Even the Devil, which is what Ashim had decided to be, in our lives at least, needs something to work off.
The likely source of Ashim’s grudge you will have heard of from Abhay: God knows Abhay never tires of talking about it. Ashim held Abhay responsible for their ‘banishment’ to Hazaribagh.
Abhay, why didn’t you tell Baba, and most of all your mother, how innocent my plan was and why it went wrong? Everything unfolded in front of your eyes: did I know that power cut would happen, and last through the night?
But I did, Dada, I did insist. Over and over.
Well, clearly not persuasively enough. The prospect of having your house, and your father, back all to yourself was just too tempting, huh?
No, Dada, I did, I told Ma repeatedly that we had so much bad luck, and there was no one on the streets to help us. And that all you wanted was to see the house that would briefly bring your mother back, but everything worked against us.
Of course, this isn’t a confrontation that Abhay has ever had with Ashim, certainly not as adults in the past twenty years. Maybe they had it out a few times before Ashim and his sister left the Calcutta house all those years ago, but never again since, not even in writing.
But I know it’s a conversation that Abhay, my husband, the far more fortunate and therefore guiltier of the brothers, still has regularly with himself, because he’s told me so. He’s told me the streets from Howrah, and that factory, return in his dreams as well, even as the setting for other incidents, always nocturnal.
Ashim is a sort of Rama in Abhay’s vision of the incident, unjustly sentenced to exile in the forest with Didi as his Lakshmana. What Abhay leaves unsaid is that this makes his mother the Kaikeyi, the unscrupulous manipulator seeking only to corner everything for her own son.
There are three separate burdens of guilt he carries (again, his words). First, about not having adequately conveyed his brother’s bad luck to his parents; then about his mother’s decision (a questionable conviction on Abhay’s part, perhaps) that changed the course of her stepchildren’s lives forever; and finally, an especial sorrow for how their sister Aranya’s life had been upended as well, because of her loyalty to her brother.
Sometimes he adds, ‘And don’t forget how differently things turned out for each of us from there on. I went abroad, got all my opportunities. As far as I know, neither of them left Jharkhand again.’
‘But you got yourself a scholarship,’ I would remind him. ‘From what you’ve told me, Ashim never especially cared about his studies.’
‘Perhaps he never had the home environment that would have motivated him to study, Lena. Not one day in his life did he have both parents happy under one roof, which is something I took for granted. His Ma raised them on next to nothing, from whatever scraps Baba threw her way, because more than scraps they couldn’t have been if that neighbourhood in Howrah was the best she could afford. These aren’t things you think about as a kid, and then Baba himself died before I could confront him with such questions as an adult. What kind of schooling would Dada have had before moving to live with us? Did Baba at least take care of that? And then he got turned out of his own father’s house, and was made to feel as if it was entirely his fault. Forget my guilt, imagine what he would have felt towards Didi for triggering such an earthquake in her life! Do you wonder that he found it hard to concentrate at school? He went through four schools in different places — Howrah, North and South Calcutta, and finally Namkum — just to complete his schooling, because he was uprooted so many times.’
The last time I heard that was as recently as May, when we were firming up our plans to attend Abhay’s cousin’s wedding, and I had asked him one last time before putting the credit card details into the Thai Airways website if he was ready to meet Ashim after all these years. He’d insisted it was the only reason he was going. The strong possibility that Ashim would be there had decided him.
I tell a lie. When I argued in August that it really didn’t make sense for Ashim to come with Tulti but without Moushumi, and that Abhay should kindly but firmly explain this in an email, we went through the entire A to Z of Abhay’s guilt odyssey once again! So persuasive was he that by the end I was actively looking forward to the visit. Perhaps I just wanted Abhay to at least begin to shake off this huge burden, and for that he needed to see his brother’s forgiveness in action, up close. And he needed to see his brother was OK and had landed on his feet, that his life was good now and he too had had a happy ending.
Yeah, that change of heart worked out well for you, Lena.