Child Crying

“Are you any good with children?” The question surprised me. Though he had sat next to me in the lecture hall for nearly two months, Sudeep had never bothered to make conversation.

“I suppose so” I said “I have two nephews and a niece.”

The lecturer continued to draw a complicated diagram of the human colon on the board. “How do you make them stop crying?” “Well . . . depends why they’re crying, really” I said, with the

wisdom of an uncle who has spent years sorting out squabbles. “If they’ve hurt themselves you should try to distract them. If they’re sulking, ignore them . . . oh, I don’t know. Could be crying for a hundred reasons.”

The diagram on the board grew rapidly in another direction. I looked at my feeble copy and came to the conclusion that I had a couple of yards more intestine than was humanly possible.

“I don’t know if you know that I stay alone at Gariahat,” said Sudeep.

Don’t know! We’d talked of nothing else the first week that college had opened. Every discussion, no matter how potent— the National Congress, Nehru’s stand on independence, Gandhiji’s latest statement—invariably came back to envious speculation about what exactly Roll No. 27 did with the undreamt of indulgence of a flat of his own. It was even rumoured that he had a gramophone set. Every single person in the class had tried to worm an invitation out of Sudeep, with no suc-cess. We had finally concluded he was a dull, unfriendly dog. And here he was, issuing an invitation to me!

“There’s a child at home that just won’t stop crying. It keeps me awake all night. I wish you would come and see what you can do.”

Of course nothing would have made me miss a chance to see the gramophone. So that evening instead of going to the Cof-fee House, Sudeep and I caught a tram from College Street to Gariahat.

Sudeep had two rented rooms in one corner of a vast family mansion. He unlocked the door, and there, gleaming in a cor-ner, was the well polished horn of the gramophone. His little room was very cosy, though largely obscured with piles of books.

“Well” I said, after I’d finished complimenting him about his little apartment, “where’s the child?” He raised a hand.

“Listen.”

I listened, and there it was—a tiny voice crying heartbroken, its breath catching in deep sobs. The voice would gasp tiredly and fade away as if the unseen weeper had been crying uncomforted for a long time, then it would rise again in fresh paroxysms of grief.

“Can you hear it?” he asked.

“Yes” I replied, and was surprised to see a momentary expression of relief on his face.

I was about to open my mouth to speak when I noticed Sudeep had his eyes fixed on a wooden door in the corner of the room. The little voice was coming from there, right through the thickness of a padlocked wooden door.

“If you lock up a child like that of course it’s going to cry! Let the poor thing out at once! Bechara!”

“That’s the box room” said Sudeep briefly, as if that explained it all, and continued to sit on the bed.

“Give me the key!” I cried.

Sudeep looked at me, then fixed his eyes on the door again without replying. I began to think he was a very strange fellow after all.

“Chatterjee” he said, “I have opened that door.”

I waited. In the silence, the tired hiccoughing sounded even louder.

“There’s nothing in there. No child.”

“But that’s ridiculous,” I said. “I can hear it as clearly as you.”

“I’m glad. For a while I thought I might be imagining it.”

I grew impatient with him sitting on the bed while that pathetic little child sobbed its heart out.

“Look. Give me the key. I’ll let the poor thing out.”

He handed me the keys promptly, and watched me as I fumbled with the lock.

“The switch is on the right” he called out, making no move to join me.

A dim bulb hanging from a wire lit up a profusion of cases and battered tin trunks tumbled together in a tiny windowless room. The crying sounded with renewed desperation around me. I pushed a couple of trunks aside, and though the young voice sobbed and wailed around me—there was obviously no child in the room. The strangeness of it all got to me, and I stepped out of the room, slamming the door.

“Is there a child in a room adjoining this one?” Sudeep shook his head. We looked at each other. I took a deep breath and asked, “Then where does the sound come from?”

“I wish I knew!” said Sudeep vehemently. “All I know is that it’s driving me mad. I can’t bear to hear that voice break its heart over god knows what childish tragedy. If you’d lain here the last three nights and heard it go on endlessly as if there was no hope, no happiness, nothing in the world . . . I can’t bear it, I tell you!”

I think he surprised himself as much as I with his eloquent outburst, because he subsided silently on the bed, averting his eyes from the door in the corner.

“Do you think it’s a . . .” I hesitated over saying the word.

“I don’t know and I don’t care. I only care that it cries so much. So terribly hopelessly.”

I sat down again and we both stared at the door in silence. Nothing or nobody should have cause to cry like that. Especially not a little child. I thought of my niece, Tuktuki.

“We must do something.”

Sudeep sat with his eyes averted. “You know something about children. You make it stop.”

I was about to retort that I hadn’t the faintest idea how to calm a phantom child when it struck me that his rough man-ner hid a desperate concern. I subsided into my chair and thought hard.

“When did it start?”

“Three days ago,” said Sudeep. “I haven’t slept since then.”

“Did you do something to start it off?”

“What could I do to start something like this off?” he asked with a flash of irritation. “I just cleaned the box room and shifted my trunks into it because I was running out of space in this room.”

“Did you move anything out from there, or shift anything?”

“Just rubbish. Cardboard boxes, paper . . . a broken broom.”

“Well” I said cautiously, as I began to have the glimmerings of an idea, “maybe the voice is crying because you took some-thing that belonged to it. Maybe a toy or something like that. What did you do with the stuff?”

“I gave it to the sweeper to throw out.”

I quietened down. “If he threw it out three days ago, we can’t possibly get our hands on it now.”

“I don’t know,” said Sudeep, getting up with sudden energy. “He’s a lazy old fellow. May not have chucked it out as yet. I’ll go find him.”

“Wait!” I cried, determined not to be left out of any find, “I’m coming!”

We found the sweeper in a little tumbledown shack that leaned against the back wall of the house. He was deep in the slack-jawed sleep of old age, but Sudeep shook him awake.

When he explained what we wanted the sweeper was most reluctant. “You want it back?” he whined. “Nobody’s ever taken anything back after giving it to me—they only give me the things they don’t want anymore.”

It took much persuasion to get him to dig out the bundle he had carried away from Sudeep’s box room. We pounced on it, but it yielded only some papers and flattened cardboard boxes.

“Was there any child’s book or toy in this package?” I asked. He denied it.

“Was there anything else in the rubbish I gave you?” asked Sudeep, looking so fierce that the old man reluctantly mumbled, “A pot. Just an old pot.” He had been planning to clean it and use it to set curd. Nobody ever took back anything they gave him.

“Yes, yes” said Sudeep impatiently, “I’ll buy you another. I’ll buy you three. Now give us that damn pot.”

Sudeep almost snatched it from him. He turned the pot over and a vast quantity of clotted dust and cobwebs fell out— along with something that tinkled on the floor and gleamed in the light of the lamp the old man had lit.

“Why, they’re broken bangles!” Sudeep put a few pieces together. “For a pair of very tiny hands.”

I looked at the broken circlet of red that glinted on the ground. “That’s the size of my niece’s hand, and she’s only seven.”

I rummaged a bit more and was rewarded with half a circlet of white coral. “These are bangles worn by a bride.”

Sudeep and I looked at each other. “They’ve been broken. Not a bride. A widow.”

I thought of the desolate little voice that cried in a locked room with no windows, for the only beautiful thing she had ever had.

Sudeep abruptly took the bits from me and stuffed them in the pot. I followed him silently from the sweeper’s house. I thought of my small niece taken from her games and hero worship of her two brothers, and plunged into a life bounded by four walls and darkness.

The crying came through the door as Sudeep paused to unlock the door to his rooms. He suddenly turned to me “It’s late. Your family must be worried. You’d better go.”

“But . . .” I protested, “I want to return the pot and see. . .”

“I’ll do it” he said, cutting me short. “Goodnight.”

With that, he entered his room and slammed the door in my face. I raised my hand with some idea of banging on the door and demanding admission, but somewhere in the house a grandfather clock chimed the hour. I hadn’t realised it was so late! Mother would be frantic.

My nephews had been posted in the lane as lookouts. I came up the stairs to their joyful halloos, and their little sister ran to put two arms around my neck. As my mother came running from the kitchen and my sister scolded me, I whispered to Tuktuki that she was a good girl and was to have the garish ribbons that had so caught her fancy a few days before.

Of course everyone had heard of my eccentric and fabulously wealthy classmate. I was bombarded with questions about the gramophone. Since everyone supposed I had got delayed listening to that wonderful invention, I left it at that.

The next day I pounced on Sudeep the minute I saw him. “What happened?” I asked eagerly.

“Oh, she stopped crying,” he said and that was all I could get out of him.

I was picking up my books at the end of the day, sure that this time no invitation to visit was forthcoming, when Sudeep surprised me by thrusting a package at me.

“Here”, he said, “perhaps your niece will like these. I seem to have some left over.”

When I pulled the wrapping off, the packet was full of bangles of every description and colour. Sudeep looked embarrassed.

“I bought more than could fit in the pot” he muttered, and left before I could speak.

Tuktuki was so delighted she ran around the house five times without stopping. And we could hear her tinkling delightfully about the house for weeks.