Sujoy rang the bell of his brother’s flat around eight in the evening. He had left soon after receiving the phone call; something serious must have happened for Ronojoy to summon him so abruptly.
The first thing Sujoy picked up when Ronojoy opened the door was a whiff of alcohol.
He raised his eyebrows, ‘I didn’t know you had started drinking again, Dada.’
‘I haven’t, Chhotku, but today I needed one. The last two days have been a bit … distressing.’
Sujoy waited. He noticed the trunk on the floor and walked towards it. ‘Is this Ma’s? May I...?’ he asked hesitatingly.
‘You don’t need my permission, she was your mother too,’ Ronojoy said tersely.
Sujoy sat down and opened the lid. He touched the shawl and the saree but the object of his interest was the envelope. Ronojoy watched his brother’s face as he read Baba’s scrawled note.
Sujoy appeared a bit confused for a second, then nodded almost imperceptibly as he realized what it was. He looked at the photographs, not lingering on any one for too long. Holding up the picture of the two of them on the railing, he said, ‘In happier times, yes?’
Ronojoy said nothing.
‘Dada, if this is what is distressing you…’ Sujoy stopped. There was something in Ronojoy’s face that told him this wasn’t all.
‘No, Sujoy. What I am about to share with you will be a jolt. There’s little I can do to prepare you for it. Ma left behind a letter for me with Ronen Uncle, to be handed over only after her death. I am going to give you that letter now, it will explain everything.’
Ronojoy rose and took the folded sheets of paper out of his pocket. He noted a mild tremor in his hand. Before turning it over, he looked at the papers once again, his eyes involuntarily going to the postscript on the last page – the bit that would inflict the greatest damage.
PS: I add this at the end, only as an afterthought. My intention was to spare you this knowledge. Yet, after agonizing over it for weeks, I feel I owe you the whole truth.
Sujoy’s father is no stranger, it is your uncle Apu Kaka. I don’t even have the heart to ask Sujoy to forgive me. Ma
With a heavy sigh, Ronojoy handed over the letter. Then he sat down and covered his face with both hands.
Sujoy opened the letter. It seemed to Ronojoy an interminably long stretch of time, the reading of those six pages.
When he looked up he saw that Sujoy’s face had transformed into a ruddy mask of loathing. He was shaking his head from side to side in shattered disbelief. He breathed heavily. ‘Dada? Dada, what is this? No, this is not possible!’ he blurted. The pitch was high.
‘Chhotku, I know this is very upsetting…’
‘Upsetting? Upsetting? What the fuck are you saying? Baba is not my father? Apu Kaka… that slimy bastard is my real father?’
He flung the pages on the floor and stood up, looking around as if he wanted to do something violent. Ronojoy stood up too, in alarm. He had feared just such a reaction from Sujoy. Volatile, Ma had written.
Sujoy had convulsed into sobs now. ‘Baba. That’s why …’ he muttered in anguish. ‘God, can there be anything more shameful? Your mother sleeps with your uncle, bears his bastard son – me – while he runs away from the scene. Leaving his brother to kill himself from the shame and horror of it.’ Sujoy was shouting now.
‘Watch your tongue, Chhotku!’ Ronojoy warned.
‘My tongue? No language is vile enough to describe that … that whore,’ Sujoy hissed.
‘What?’ Ronojoy walked across the room and slapped Sujoy on the face.
Sujoy’s eyes flared for a second, then he lowered his head and stormed into the kitchen. There he snatched open the door of the bar, lifted a bottle and took a swig. He found a glass and filled half of it, before returning to the room.
Ronojoy was sitting on the edge of the sofa with his head in his hands. ‘Sorry, Chhotku, I shouldn’t have…’
Sujoy raised his palm, to say it wasn’t necessary. He sat down heavily on the sofa beside him.
‘Does anyone else know?’
His voice was even now but Ronojoy knew Sujoy was nowhere near calm.
‘No, not even Dida. No one else needs to know. I wasn’t even sure I should tell you.’
‘But you had to, didn’t you?’ Sujoy hissed again. ‘How could you spare me this agony? You were drowning and had to drag me down with you, right? And she didn’t even have the guts to write to me, did she? She wrote to her precious darling son instead.’ There was a sneer on his face.
Ronojoy shook his head sadly, ‘That’s just not fair, Chhotku. I knew how hurtful this would be for you,
but … but this is too important a reality for me to have hidden from you.’ He paused: ‘Would you really rather not have known?’
Sujoy didn’t answer. He brought the glass up to his lips but it was empty.
‘You know, I always wondered why she acted the way she did. Sometimes I gave her the benefit of thinking she had lost her mental balance. But this explains everything, right?’ Sujoy said.
But then something seemed to have struck him. He sat up from his slouch, the look of distaste was back on his face. ‘What were they thinking? Hadn’t they heard of something called abortion? For heaven’s sake! This was not a hundred years back, exactly…’ Sujoy’s tirade continued.
‘To Ma, maybe the thought of terminating a child...’ Ronojoy offered.
A bitter smile appeared on the corner of Sujoy’s mouth, ‘Of course, of course. Spare yourself the guilt of killing the little bastard and let him die a hundred fucking times.’ There was no stopping him.
Ronojoy wondered whether he had made a mistake. He hadn’t been sure in the first place. He tried a different approach to pacify Sujoy and somehow bring him back to a more stable frame of mind.
‘Chhotku, listen to me. All of this happened a long time back. These people are no longer with us. But you have a family now.’
Sujoy interrupted him, ‘Who is no longer with us? That coward – no I will never call him my father – he is still alive, isn’t he? You think I will let him live this down so easily? Let him carry on with his genteel American life? Then you don’t know me, Dada.’
Ronojoy took his head in his hands again. He had not thought of this. Apu Kaka had an American wife and a daughter – Sujoy’s half-sister. How many lives would this contagion touch?
‘And don’t lecture me about bloody family. Is there a more fucked up thing in this world? Is there? Don’t we know better?’ Sujoy asked now. He was drinking steadily. Ronojoy realized this was adding fuel to the fire but refrained from saying anything. It would only give him another reason to lash out.
A period of silence followed. It felt like a respite.
Their reverie was broken by a rasping sound from outside. The evening had been very still and now there was suddenly a sharp downpour. The rain lashed against the window-panes.
Ronojoy and Sujoy stood up. Without speaking or even as much as looking at each other they started moving towards the balcony. It was Sujoy who opened the door and walked out into the rain, Ronojoy followed. They stood there getting soaked; Ronojoy with his elbows resting on the railing, Sujoy looking up at the red sky with the rain falling on his face.
After a while, Ronojoy walked up and put an arm around his brother. Sujoy turned and buried his face in his shoulder. They were back in the Nainital hostel again; two little boys missing their parents, with only each other to cling to. The years had peeled away.
They stood there for some time. As the shower eased up, they wordlessly walked back inside. Ronojoy fetched a couple of towels and shirts and handed a set to Sujoy.
The rain seemed to have taken the venom out of Sujoy. He just appeared listless now.
‘What would you do in my place now, Dada?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Do you think I should share this with Anu?’
Ronojoy hesitated, ‘That’s not for me to say, Chhotku. But as I said, no one else needs to know. If it would make you feel lighter to share this load with someone…’
Sujoy stopped him: ‘No, nothing will make it better. I don’t know if I will even be able to spell out the words. The shame of it...’
‘Was he informed about Ma’s death?’ Sujoy couldn’t even bring himself to mention Apu Kaka’s name.
‘Ronen Uncle mailed him.’
‘And?’
‘He mailed back, so he knows. I haven’t spoken to him. I think I should.’
Sujoy took this in. He said, ‘No, Dada, I will call him.’
Ronojoy stood up, ‘Chhotku, you have to think this through. Please, please don’t do anything rash. I implore you. You can cause enormous damage to innocent people. Please.’
‘Dada, how can I not…?’ Sujoy’s tone was no longer high-pitched or angry.
While the thought of him confronting Apu Kaka in such a state was a frightening one, Ronojoy reasoned that it was only natural that his brother would want to contact him. Ma was gone, Baba a distant memory, who else could Sujoy reach out to?
‘Chhotku, will you listen to me? You asked me what I would do in your shoes. This has been a blow for you and for me. Maybe it’s better to sleep over it and do nothing immediately. Eventually, if you think speaking to Apu Kaka or anyone else will aid closure, you can consider it.’
‘Closure,’ Sujoy said with a wry smile. ‘I don’t know Dada. There are just too many things going on in my mind now.’ He shook his head and walked out of the room a bit unsteadily.
When he didn’t return for some time, Ronojoy rose and followed him outside.
In the corridor, Sujoy stood transfixed in front of a painting that hung on the wall. It had been a gift from Dida, one of the few valuable works of art he possessed. It was by Jamini Roy, an image of a mother in a white saree holding her little son. Both mother and son faced the front, her saree draped around the boy. There was no discernible expression on the mother’s face but the child’s face was a picture of contentment, the kind that comes with the security of being wrapped in a mother’s arms. His eyelids were heavy.
Sujoy gazed at it for some time, lowered his head and without as much as a goodbye to Ronojoy, walked out of the house. Ronojoy let him go; there was nothing more he could do to help his brother tonight.
Ronojoy sat alone, nursing his gin. The rain had stopped. The evening had left him very agitated; he wanted to think calmly for a few moments. Barely forty-eight hours had passed since he had read Ma’s letter in their hill house – it now seemed like a lifetime. Two days that had shaken the foundation of his life. And now Chhotku had learnt it too.
The landscape of their memories, bleak as it was, had been transformed. Jostling with the outrage and hurt in Ronojoy’s head was a creeping sense of dread. Sujoy and he might have forged successful careers and seemingly stable lives for themselves but Ronojoy knew that neither of them was quite normal. They tried their best to suppress symptoms of the underlying damage but it was all there, raising its ugly head from time to time. Sujoy’s drinking was reaching alarming levels. He knew that monster all too well himself. From their last few conversations, Ronojoy suspected all was not well with his brother’s family life either. He sounded deeply frustrated. Ronojoy worried about Sujoy but also about himself. The fact that he didn’t experience Sujoy’s angry outbursts didn’t necessarily make him more stable; there were many ways a person could come apart. He regretted having that drink.
His thoughts turned to Apu Kaka. Ronojoy’s earliest memory of his uncle was a vague impression of him waiting at the bottom of a slide to catch little Ronojoy. This was probably when he was in kindergarten but he couldn’t be sure. Apu Kaka had obviously been a playmate for little Ronojoy as his early memories were mostly snatches of them playing together. He remembered the farewell, the day Apu Kaka had left for Singapore. Chhotku hadn’t been born yet. Apu Kaka had come to say goodbye to Ronojoy. He didn’t remember much of that conversation except that he had cried a lot. He had loved Apu Kaka.
Now, it was apparent that Ma had asked him to go away. Ronojoy could understand that. The idea of him being around while she raised their child in that house with Baba was not feasible. He had to leave, and he had. Ronojoy wondered if they had been in touch after that. Unlikely, he reckoned, but one never knew.
Of course, he had met his uncle on one more occasion after that. That was shortly after Baba’s death. Ronojoy remembered that meeting very clearly. Apu Kaka had come home straight from the airport carrying a small suitcase. On entering the house where Ma sat with the two of them, he had looked into Ma’s face and uttered a single word, ‘Boudi…’ and broken down. Ma had looked away as Apu Kaka sat weeping on the floor.
Ronojoy sat transfixed, studying his mother’s face closely. After a while Ma had said to him: ‘Take Chhotku and go outside for a while.’
Ronojoy and Sujoy had gone out to the lawn. They were still sitting there when Apu Kaka emerged from the house. His face was a mess, he looked utterly distraught. He paused, then turned and walked across to the boys. He hugged Ronojoy close and held him for a while, without a word. Then he had looked at Sujoy and said, ‘You are Sujoy? You haven’t met me but I am your uncle. I live in America.’ Sujoy had nodded shyly. Apu Kaka stared at him for a long time, before lifting his suitcase and walking away. That was twenty-eight years ago, they hadn’t seen him since.
Ronojoy and Sujoy had often spoken about him and wondered why he had never returned to India or made an effort to keep in touch. In the initial years, he may have been plagued by remorse, Ronojoy reasoned. But later, all those years later? Of course, he had married an American woman and had a daughter and may have therefore considered it prudent to sever his Indian roots.
The boys did get to hear of him occasionally. Ronen Uncle would exchange Christmas greetings with him every year and convey his wishes to them. Around the time Ronojoy, and later Sujoy, were applying for college, he had written offering any kind of financial assistance that may have been required. They hadn’t needed it but the offer was generous and had seemed genuine enough. Ronojoy had written back thanking him but the communication had not continued after that.
Now, in his mind’s eye, Ronojoy tried to conjure up an image of his uncle. He seemed to recall a swarthy young man standing with the sun on his face in their house on the hill, handsome in a rugged, careless fashion. Very unlike his father. But that was then, he would have been thirty-eight when they last met. He would be sixty-six now. Ronojoy wondered if their paths were about to cross again.