Streets

Before long, the endless line of traffic lost the last stir of motion.

Buses, cars, taxis, cargo-loaded trucks stood along the road, a long jungle of metal and tyres. Bus conductors ambled the streets, swapping smokes and stories. For them, a cup of tea at a roadside stall was possible, as this jam wasn’t going to clear before an hour at least, till the entire rally had made its way towards the Brigade Parade Ground where they would stir up the dust in anger against the IMF.

Milan got out of the bus, quashing past the solid block of sweating, cursing flesh caught in the airless interior. Waiting inside was to ask for death by asphyxiation. One could just walk the rest of the way.

He felt hungry and tired, with a desperate thirst for tea. His head throbbed with pain, and memory struck him at the wrong moment – before leaving the house, he had forgotten his morning blood-pressure pills, as he often seemed to, these days. He hadn’t eaten anything either, apart from a cup of tea with two Thin Arrowroot biscuits.

Edging past the heaps of rubble from the construction work, he walked towards one of the roadside tea-stalls fringing the pavement. Even better would be a slice of bread with the spicy ghoogni to go with the tea, but it was a luxury at this moment. This was hardly the right time.

Bricks had been piled on top of each other for patrons to sit before the clay oven where the vendor recycled used tea leaves, boiling them in a bitter, colourless broth, adding milk and sugar, pouring them in little earthen cups that sold for a rupee each. Milan perched his aching backside on the blistery bricks and carefully laid his Shantiniketan bag on his lap. The bricks were on fire, but he needed something under his weary body, after an eternity of standing, crushed in the grip of the crowd in the bus. The tea went down like acid on his empty stomach. But still the liquid did him good, and he felt life stir back within his body. He handed over the ten-rupee note to the woman, who counted out the change to him.

He walked along the pavements, past the dropped shutters of locked shops, the standstill of endless buses, cars and trucks that seemed to extend all the way to the heart of the city. It took him about another half an hour to reach the tall building that housed the offices of the Calcutta school district office.

There was venom in the air, rising lazily with the summer heat.

There were perhaps close to a hundred young men and women in unwieldy knots on the pavement. From the rhythmic chants of party slogans and shiny banners all around, it was clear that they were from the two opposing parties that ruled the student unions of most city colleges. One was backed by the Indian National Congress, and the other thrived with the blessings of the communist party in power in the state. Banners were strung across the poles, building façades and tree-tops, held up by sitting demonstrators, mostly with the hammer-sickle-star trinity of the communist party. The façade and the neighbouring walls had received a fresh layer of graffiti. The loudest was a map of India contained in a giant bottle of Pepsi, in psychedelic blue, red and black mimicking the labels on the soft drink bottle, ‘The Joy of Pepsi’ and ‘India Inc’. – the two flowing annotations in the script of the drink’s campaign flanking the carbonating country on both sides.

The tension in the air was thick, a lingering dark mist, and yet not without a touch of boredom. This was, after all, a city where rallies were both the profession and the entertainment for the swarming unemployed youth, and where political parties often chose Friday as the day of strike so as to shape long weekends. But even after countless repetitions, the pattern brought up forebodings, each one worse than the other, to the citizen who didn’t have a banner in hand or whose voice didn’t shriek along.

Rows of hawkers’ stalls along the stretch of Gariahat had closed shop, dark tarpaulin and plastic sheets shrouding the makeshift bamboo structures. The branch of United Bank of India on the ground floor of the tall building, was, however, open for business; apparently the ire of the demonstrators had been unable to move a mulish branch manager. But the lack of customers was no surprise, and a spindly-limbed security guard in khaki sat on a stool outside, nursing an ancient gun, a blank stare aimed at the students’ anger.

Fear trickled through his spine in slow, large drops. He should go back; sit at another tea-stall, have another cup, and walk back.

But then, he could just sneak in and see if people were working inside. This was a working day, after all. Going back fruitless felt deadening, and the dreary, penniless month stretched long before him.

He looked ahead. The tall building rose high above. Paint and plaster had worn off a few floors from the ground, leaving a scarred look to the rest of the structure, from which rows of bricks jutted out like the ribs of a famine-stricken body.

One could try. Maybe just once.

As he made his way to the side entrance, a boy came and stood in his way. He was in his late teens or early twenties, and had the red badge of the communist party on his chest.

‘Today is protest day. No work inside.’

Milan looked at him. The first human face of rallying protest against demons of global capitalism was young, very young, a fresh face lined with alert furrows and tobacco-stained teeth.

What did one tell them? What words did one pick? ‘I really need to go inside, my son. I’m a retired schoolteacher and I haven’t been getting my pension for three months now.’

Freshface had evidently dealt with much imploring of the same sort, cheap as roadside dust. ‘Not today. Go home and come back another day.’

‘But I just need to go up to the school services office for a minute. I haven’t had my pension cheque for three months now.’ A minute? A lie no ritual of speech could excuse. In which government office in this city did one do his business in a minute?

‘All this is nothing but the vile work of imperialism.’ The abrasiveness in the voice had morphed into a dreamlike rhythm. ‘Surely you know of the latest policies of the IMF? That’s exactly what we’re protesting, and the man on the street needs to understand.’

Or else you’ll put a bullet through him?

And Pepsi cannot sell its fizz in India without possibly adding my pension cheque to its assets! Or maybe it has been commandeered by the IMF? Milan felt like letting out the sarcasm building up inside him.

But that would be stupid, and possibly very dangerous.

‘We need to stop thinking of our little, petty troubles and face the large evils head on. Only then can we stop the global spread of imperialism.’ The boy’s words had now fully turned into a chant, in close rhyme with the drone of slogans in the backdrop.

‘Join our rally to the Brigade Parade Ground today! Do something outside your own little world.’ He screamed, shooting a fist in the air.

He would have never made his way past the boy’s conviction, behind which lay anger, much anger, fearful clouds of it. But suddenly, uproar broke out on the other side.

One boy had grabbed the shirt collar of another and was frothing obscenities, out-roaring hymns of anticapitalist protest. Something intense and forceful about the anger of the boy rose high above the orchestra of slogans.

The boy with the arrested shirt collar, a gangly, bearded youth, quickly broke free and slammed a fist into the face of his assaulter who covered his mouth with his palm. In a flash, a thin line of blood trickled around the palm.

Bloodyface stooped to the pavement, picked up the jagged half of a brickbat. His eyes and his stooped shoulders had the touch of a wounded animal, silent, steely, death-daring. A single lunge with the jagged end of the brick could put out his opponent’s eyes, break a major artery.

The two boys were from the opposing parties, but even so, other members on both sides seemed bewildered at their outburst, not joining in the fray. This should have been a cause enough for a full-fledged battle, with knives, and sticks, and broken bottles, maybe more. A few voices, however, had risen above the confusion to cheer in a way that suggested to Milan that this wasn’t really about the IMF or foreign debt.

The boy passed the brickbat to his other hand, taking a step ahead, like in a slow dance. Milan could see the blood from his palm soaking the grainy dust of the brick’s surface.

From the scraps of virulent words and phrases spat out by the scuffling pair, Milan pieced together the reason why the timbre of this fight was closer, clearer than the chants scripted by the party high command. Annotations came flying by in the form of stray comments, and the story untangled itself as the lurid tale of back-stabbing by one college student union to steal the thunder planned by another for their annual fête. A popular local rock band had been lured away by students from one college from performing at another one. The original hosts had a royal mess for their event now, and the situation had alarmed the college authorities and the corporate sponsors bad enough to worry about the future of the event in the years to come. A sore point from the start, abuses had started flying as soon as the wound had been dug up, and family, ancestors and sexual behaviour had been flung in, pushing the IMF and global imperialists far out of the fray.

A few cops popped up as if they had been in hiding all this time, watching from the sidelines. They pushed the boys apart, strutted up and down the stretch of pavement before the building, wielding their batons, trying to break up the crowd, who, before you could stir an eyelid, had returned to a more troubled, wider world, of dreamlike chanting of protest against global imperialism and the policies of the central government to welcome it with open arms.

Milan slunk into the building.

The interior was dark and clammy, and smelled of mould and fresh paint. He walked up several flights of stairs.

To his left was the hall with clerks tapping away at typewriters and swapping chitchat, droning jokes. The large corridor-ish space in front were lined by the rooms of the officers. These days, he could tell it all even with his eyes closed.

Nausea welled up inside his throat. Everybody must know him by now, the old buffoon who came begging for his pension every day, going from desk to desk, coughing up the same sob story. He realized that he hadn’t shaved for three days, and he hadn’t even had the chance to wash his shirt for the last week, spending his days at these desks, running between them.

A snivelling interruption in their rounds of tea and gossip and newspaper-browsing.

They had a name for him, and someone here had the talent to do caricatures, mocking the earnestness in his voice, his flapping Shantiniketan bag and his slippers.

For a moment, he froze on the threshold, hesitating to cross into the hall. He felt ugly, worn out. But it had been three months without a rupee coming in. Three months of slashing at small savings. And only a walk to look forward to, through long hours under the mid-day sun, after yet another day of failure.

He walked in.

The hall looked emptier than it had at the first glance; at least a third of the employees were missing. It should have been emptier, given the scale of the rally and the rancour of the protests today. But then again, this happened so often these days that perhaps some of the employees had opted for tea and a chat at the workplace over scorched hours at the rally.

No one seemed to be laughing at him, or stealing glances at him from the corners of their eyes to store away for later hours of amusement.

Nobody seemed to notice him at all.

He walked up to the desk of the clerk who handled the pension files. Over the last several days, he had come to make some sense of the maze of bureaucracy here. A could be the appointed official for the pension files, or income tax, or licking the flap of envelopes, or whatever the government dreamt up for its clerks. To actually get it done, however, you had to first approach C who’d then ask you to come a day later and talk to D. D would, doubtless, suggest that you write a ‘letter of application’ – a mouthful of words that floated around in the hallways here like the buzzing flies – addressed to B. If the day was sunny and if he’d had a day’s relief from his constipation, B might then just be kind enough move the relevant files to A’s desk.

If you were bullish enough to approach A directly, you’d need God on your side. Without a doubt, you’d be told that this wasn’t the set of files he handled, or he didn’t have signing authority in the matter, even though on paper there wasn’t anybody else to which you could trace it all.

Over the last month, Milan felt he had met over a hundred people, all of whom seemed to sink their eyes into piles of documents or newspapers as they spoke to him, never looking up, their words a muffled murmur nudging him towards so and so in such and such department, who, when Milan got to meet them after hours and hours, more often days, sank their eyes into thicker piles of paper, mumbled that this matter was not in their hands. I only handle the southern districts. Only files for the visually impaired here, please. Nothing processed here for those who are going bald on the right side of the head? He remembered having drafted seven letters of application; he had copies of them all. He had explained his situation so many times that now he couldn’t help rattling off exactly the same words and phrases even if he tried to put them differently, whenever he had to go at it again. The waits in the dark, clammy corridor, bus stops, on the benches at the corner of the hall, long enough for him to have finished reading a whole novel, had him dozing off, near-dead of boredom and fatigue.

Now he knew the right places to go to.

He stood before the clerk’s desk. His name was Achintya Sarkar. He was a soccer enthusiast, a rabid partisan of the East Bengal team, and had two daughters, the prospect of whose marriage worried him endlessly. All this and more Milan had come to know from long waits at his desk while Achintya Sarkar slowly went through files, bantering, chatting with his colleagues four or five desks away. But his unwillingness to engage in any conversation with Milan had been complete and lasting; he relied mostly on grunts and distressingly negative monosyllables. Milan felt he needed Achintya Sarkar to like him a little bit to listen to him; maybe he would be more helpful then.

Things were going to change today.

‘Looks like no one can stop East Bengal from winning the League this year.’ Milan poured laughter in his voice, generous dollops of it ‘What do you think, Achintya babu?’

Achintya Sarkar looked up, stared at his face blankly. He had never looked so directly at Milan’s face before. Though Milan was a little vexed by the vacuous stare, he couldn’t help feeling that he had made an impact on the man.

There were only so many things a fellow never failed to warm up to.

‘Yeah, that makes sense!’ The voice that flew from about two desks away to the right belonged to a bespectacled smoker of Charminar cigarettes named Sadhan, Milan knew that too, though not his last name. ‘East Bengal has the lowest points of the Big Three this time, and four of its matches with small-fry teams have ended in draws. It’ll win the League, like India and Pakistan will become one country again!’

Laughter shot out around in acrid fumes, but Achintya Sarkar seemed too benumbed to laugh. It wasn’t just Milan’s wiseass prophecy on a life and death matter he clearly understood nothing of; it was perhaps the bizarre thought of him trying to break the ice. Thank God it was soccer! The other thing about Achintya Sarkar that stood out in Milan’s mind was that he was worried about marrying off his two daughters, who were growing distressingly into marriageable ages!

Achintya-babu, is your daughter pale or dark? Does she sing Tagore songs? My neighbour is looking for a bride for his son…There could be many nightmares!

He stared at Achintya Sarkar’s face for a while, which stared back at him. The blankness melted away, the face returning to its stone-like form holding an intent gaze at Milan.

‘I…I actually…’ Milan stumbled along, somehow. ‘Mr Basu had asked me to come today to meet him. He told me “Wednesday”. I mean he said my file would clear by today. He asked me, really. It’s in the books somewhere, surely. You can look. I don’t have a letter or anything, but he really did ask me. Surely. My name is Milan Sen, you remember me, don’t you? I was here yesterday. But Mr Basu told me “Wednesday”. It’s about my pension; you remember, don’t you?’

The stuttering, quickfire delivery made Milan breathless. He had wanted it all to be out on the table, to make his case as strongly as he could before he could be shut up and told that he had no business here. But even after the words had all tumbled out, he felt like an errant schoolboy before this man with a stare frozen on his face, who had not joined in the laughter squirting off the neighbouring desks.

‘Mr Basu is not in today.’

Not in today!

Even a couple of months ago, Milan did not know that these could be the most nightmarish words in the Bengali language. Did it make a poor nightmare next to what the word ‘famine’ had done during the fatal hungers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that had swept off whole districts, or the bloodied halo of ‘riot’ during the years of the partition of the country? Did it? Cut an aging lower-middle class man from the pittance doled out for forty years of thankless service, make him take endless crushed-limb journeys in crowd-bursting buses through scorching Calcutta noons, and fling him into a labyrinth of rusted bureaucracy. Suddenly it may not seem so outlandish. Before, ‘this is not really my area’, or even the plainer, ‘there’s nothing for me to do here’, one could beg and plead, but ‘not in today’ was a closed door – open and shut, shut, shut for the day, anyway; there’s nothing to do but turn around and make one’s way down the dank stairs as breathlessness and hunger quelled the sharp edge of stretching despair before.

He asked in a near-inaudible voice, ‘Will he be in tomorrow?’

‘How am I supposed to know? I’m not God!’

Fair enough. None less could predict government employee movements in Calcutta. The added gruffness of Achintya Sarkar’s voice did not have much to do with East Bengal’s dismal performance at this year’s League. The man hated him, hated his guts, his quick, nervous words, his soiled clothes and torn slippers and his whole crummy self!

It was the desperation that squeezed out the frantic words.

‘Three months! Can’t you imagine what it is for three months to pass for a lower-middle class household without the few rupees of pension coming in? You have two marriageable daughters, and you know how it is losing sleep over their dowries and who can arrange for their daughter’s marriage these days without a fat dowry?’

Achintya Sarkar’s face, which had almost lowered itself into the files below, sprung up like a piece of live wire and Milan realized he had pushed it again but did he have an option? The cost of season tickets for the soccer league on a middle-class salary or such like just didn’t cut it, and what else did he know about Achintya Sarkar? The shock inside him was that he had always hated the barbarism of dowry with passion; one of his own short stories, published in a prestigious magazine was about those real life incidents of housewives setting fire to themselves out of the torture and humiliation for bringing a small dowry, but today the picture of the long trek back home in the scalding sun, empty-handed must have scrambled his beliefs as if they were the toys of a moody child.

‘How would you feel if your father ran from pillar to post trying to get his pittance of a pension released from this blackhole? If you have a father, he must be my age. Please! I have my file number here, and here are the letters I wrote to the district inspector and to the pension officer; Mr Basu asked me to write it, please, you only have to check and see if my file has cleared.’

Distress, incredulity and despair had formed a red, throbbing knot in his head. For a moment, he panicked that his blood pressure, forever perched at a dangerous high, would tear open an artery in his head, cause him to stumble and fall, melt into oblivion.

It couldn’t have been the first time Achintya Sarkar had faced such a barrage. He was, after all, the gatekeeper to the chief accounts officer who dealt with the sad, dusty files of thousands cut off from their blood-stream by the quirks of red tape. But even so, his face drooped, magnetically drawn to the heap of paper below.

But he looked up, slowly.

‘I don’t know what is there for me to do here. But you can take them to Akhil-babu, in the room next to Mr Basu’s. He’s the deputy director of accounts.’ He added after a pause. ‘He’s in today.’

‘Thank you, thank you, sir.’ Relief and gratitude rose in Milan’s chest. After all, Mr Basu’s conviction about ‘Wednesday’ couldn’t have been drawn out of thin air. ‘I’ll go and talk to Akhil-babu right away.’

The middle-aged peon sitting outside Akhil-babu’s room looked eerily like Achintya Sarkar all over again, just a little bit friendlier.

‘Akhil-babu?’ he said as Milan asked for permission to enter the room, ‘He’s not in.’

Milan felt he was going to scream, but still managed a feeble protest. ‘But Achintya-babu said he’s in today!’

‘Oh, he came in all right! But he’s gone out for tea.’

‘Gone for tea.’ Milan repeated mechanically. ‘When will he back?’

‘Back?’ The peon seemed amused by the question. ‘He’s gone to the teashop across the street.’ He uttered the last sentence in a meaningful drawl.

Milan realized that ‘going to the teashop across the street’ indicated a particular lifestyle habit that he was expected to catch. It could mean Akhil-babu would come back within ten minutes as much as that one wouldn’t see him for the rest of the day. But who was up to cracking such codes today?

‘I’ll wait.’

The peon nodded absently and returned to his newspaper. Something in his tone told Milan that this wait wasn’t so absurd after all, and one might get to see Akhil-babu before the end of the day.

He walked to the end of the hall and sat on the wooden bench near the window, gently laying his Shantiniketan bag across his lap. The hinges creaked as he sat, but they seemed stable enough. He felt the arthritic pain in his legs, an old friend who seemed to have left him in the day’s excitement. A burning sensation, a bilious cloud of fire, spread wings in his stomach slowly, up along his chest and above.

The scalding summer day managed to send enough light through the window. After taking a few moments to regain his breath, he took out a folder from the bag. A nice faux leather folder. Gautam had got this for him from his office. He always remembered to keep aside little gifts and souvenirs from his office for his father.

Milan remembered the day like it was yesterday.

Calcutta Energy Supply Corporation, the logo-encircled letters said at the top right corner. Nice and hardy it was, with a glossy surface. Next to the cardboard ones Milan bought for five rupees at the local stationer’s, this was royalty. Not a single scratch on the leathery skin, Milan had been very careful never to use it outside very special, very rare occasions, like carrying corrected galley proofs back to the printers’.

Today, the inside of the folder was dusty from the loose sheets. Loose, brittle sheets thick with dust, dust that had rubbed off on the soft leathery interior. A few of the sheets had their edges broken, and they looked alien in their new habitat.

The peon coughed, and the tremors rattled the newspaper pages stretched out before his well-hidden face. Right in front of Milan’s bench were the fossils of some sort of a canteen or a tea-corner – an oven that hadn’t been used in years, a dishwashing sink cluttered with cigarette butts, ancient paper-plates and smashed earthen cups. Tucked in the corner of the office, they looked like the ruins of ancient human life – the dust-layered memories of a fire, the chatter of human voices and the clinking of teaspoons. Sitting near them, Milan felt a strange cloud of sadness come over him.

Carefully, he rearranged the first few pages. Under the trails of silverfish, the words were faded, and far away.

Finally, my turn has come.

Seventeen years of wearing rich vermilion in the parting of my hair, the bangles of iron and shell, red-bordered saris like the goddesses themselves, all blessings of a married woman.

Today, I have lost my rights to it all, till the day I die, a shrunken skeleton, blessed to rejoin my husband in heaven.

The doctor came at five in the morning, when my husband began to get worse, as if he was having difficulty swallowing, letting out his breath. Even when the doctor was called, one of my elder sisters-in-law had already placed a much-thumbed volume of the holy Gita on his chest, and had sprinkled sacred Ganga water in his mouth. Everybody knew what it was going to be this time. The doctor had come in soon; the British civil surgeon himself. No Indian doctor had ever attended to any member of this household, and it was mostly the civil surgeon who came in for serious cases like this. Ours was, after all, the richest, the highest-born family in all of north Calcutta, and the British government only tried to keep us happy.

I’d cried a lot, shed enough tears to fill all the three Venetian jugs in my husband’s bedroom. All the women of the household had been there. Sarala, being the first wife, had the pride of place at the head, and I sat at his feet, touching them, cold, lifeless and wrinkled. The others were all around him, the wives and the mothers and the aunts on the huge, ornate, Burma-teak bed that reeked of illness and old age, the phlegm-soiled sheets and the last warmth of the body; the maidservants on the floor, hitting their heads against the smooth, reddish wood of the bed-frame, on the cool marble of the floor, wailing their lungs out, like night time jackals at the burning ghats. Even the untouchable maids had been there, outside the bedroom, flopping around in the hallway. They probably had the threshold to bang their heads against, I don’t know.

My voice there had been loud and clear, like a morningtime raag, an intense, pining tune practised by a maestro tormented by his passion for his muse. They almost rose above all the other voices that were strangely united in their cacophony. I say ‘almost’ because it had been hard to beat Radhu, the dairymaid, who’d been sending out such swirls of yelling from the floor that it must have scared off every crow or vulture that had tried to perch anywhere on the roof of our mansion that day. It had been audacious of her to outcry her highborn mistresses, and she was going to pay dearly for it. Mine was, however, far more musical, like the tormented maestro asking for liberty from his cruel, imprisoning goddess. Radhu’s hoarse and masculine voice could never aspire to that.

But of course, I could wrench out that lyrical tune of tears because I wasn’t that sad at my husband’s death. I was sad, without a doubt, he was the reason behind the daub of vermilion on my head, the iron and shell bangles, my goddess-like pride. He had been all that for seventeen years, since I was twelve years old and had been brought crying into this mansion in a flurry of music and rituals. But not that sad. How deeply can you fall in love, as a twelve-year old, with a fifty-nine year old man, married when you understood nothing of it? I mean, look at Sarala. Just a few years younger than my dead, cold husband, married to him for over half a century, wrinkled and papery-skinned herself. Seated with his head in her lap, she was silent, frozen, the only one so in the room. If I’d been that sad, I couldn’t have cried either. Instead, here I was, maestro-singing, thinking of the most rotten ways of punishing Radhu, the dairy-maid, for her hoarse masculine voice shadowing mine.

A few decades ago I’d have had a different reason to cry after my husband’s death. Especially in a situation such as mine – a twenty-nine year old woman, her sixty-six year old husband’s third wife (my husband’s second wife had died long before I was married into this household), left widowed with more than half her life before her. I’d be crying, and probably with Radhu’s force in my lungs, with fear, horrible fear, because there would be no life left before me, not in another half-day. Like all ill-starred wives, I would be packed with a fresh batch of firewood on my husband’s pyre, bundled next to his cold, wrinkled body, and my tender, warm body would burn to death along with the cold flesh of my husband’s. And my cries would truly drown this time, under the drums and the cymbals, under the chanting of the hymns, under the cheering of the men, for the blessed sati, the self-immolating widow who went straight to heaven with the rising, swirling smoke and took her husband along with her.

But widow-burning was now banned by law. I wasn’t going to die, and my shrieking voice, swimming in maestro tune, wasn’t of the fear of death, only that of the cold fog of mortality rising above the body of my husband, the simmering anger at the audacity of Radhu, the dairymaid.

I wasn’t going to die, but would I live?

When I first came to this mansion seventeen years ago, a frightened, confused child, there were many things to scare me. Mine was only a middling poor rural family, far from my husband’s royal lineage, endless wealth, titles conferred by the British government. I’d caught my fifty-nine year old husband’s eye on one of his hunting trips through our village – my beauty did, especially my innocent eyes, he’d tell me later, and the long hair that already, at that age, touched my waist – and we were of a good caste, and my father an honest man. The astrologers and priests agreed that I was auspicious, that my stars looked so. And so I came in as the third wife of the second brother of the family, and brought no dowry, none to please this princely house.

What had numbed me from my very first day in this mansion was the bitter venom of my new in-laws, cast my way always, for cheating my way into this family. So what if I was pretty? Which of the wives weren’t? But they were well-born too, and brought gold by their weight when they came into this family. Even the maidservants seemed to resent me, and I know it wasn’t just my imagination. My clothes would never be washed in time; when I sat down to eat my husband’s leftovers someone would have poured water on the plates. I would get no answers if I asked, just hear giggles all around. If I ever happened to raise my voice, one of my elder sisters-in-law would come in and tell me that this was no peasant cottage but the mansion of the noblest family in all of Bengal, and I should try to remember that for as long as it was my fortune to live here.

There were many things to fear.

Why, there was my husband himself, and the pain and the fear of my nights with him, the fear I couldn’t overcome even when I was thirteen, fourteen, even though I had borne my first child by then, my darling Pratap.

There was much to fear, and there’s time yet to talk about them. But that which chilled my marrows the deepest, turned the pit of my stomach to the deepest hollow, made me throw up…

I didn’t see them for the longest time after I was married. Not that it was surprising, they stayed away from us, from everybody; they were the outcastes, the evil ones; their shadows were inauspicious, and they sneaked in and out of the nooks and crannies of the huge mansion, scraping their meals, their sad little odds and ends.

I will never forget the first shocking apparition, and now, sitting with my dead husband’s cold, wrinkled-paper feet in my palms, shrieking out the last of my breath, it all comes back like yesterday, though it had all been seventeen years ago.

They were days from another life.

I had with me the only real friend I’d ever made in this cavernous place – Suhasini, the bubbly mischievous Suhasini who made me look tame. She was only fourteen, but she had broken her bones a hundred times already, half the time jumping off from the trees of our mango grove and falling on the ground, knocking herself silly against a pillar while playing the crocodile-river-land game on the terrace, the other half getting thrashed by her mother, but what did she care? The liveliest, baddest imp of the whole mansion, stealing fruits under the noses of the gardener, shirking her chores, sneaking up on me from behind, throwing her thin arms around my neck and breaking into peals of laughter, choking me with a handful of the bitterest wildfruits thrust into my unsuspecting mouth. Her mother thrashed her in the morning and in the afternoon, cried and pleaded with her to give it a rest, and she would hang her head low and listen, and the moment her mother was gone it all seemed to vapourize like sublimated camphor over her ears.

Her mother was my husband’s first wife, Sarala’s, personal maid, and her father was one of our carriage-drivers.

Her company, therefore, could not have done much to raise my esteem in the eyes of my arrogant sisters-in-law, but thankfully at twelve, no matter how deeply their words gashed my soul, it wasn’t going to stop me from going wildfruit-picking with Suhasini.

That early summer afternoon had been hot and burning, otherwise what would be the fun of it all? Suhasini had picked some young, unripe mangoes, those tingly sour ones that burned your teeth if you bit into it raw. So we had pickled it, with mustard oil, green chillies, and salt. But the real trick was to keep the mix out in the summer sun for hours every day, till it became nicely shrunken and pickled.

We had crept up the south-side terrace, the one overlooking the river. This was a serious crime – the youngest daughter-in-law of the family traipsing all over the mansion terraces, territory left for sweepers and maids. And at two in the afternoon too, when living beings slept, ghosts and spirits danced along at unholy places like the mango grove, the riverside and the empty, windswept terraces. To tell the truth I was a little scared, not just of the ghosts but of the snoring humans down below. If they got the faintest wind of what I was doing, it would be another piercing tirade about the lowliness of my family, maybe a night without food.

But being with Suhasini was to forget one’s worst nightmares. We crept up stealthily along the stairs, running our hands along the cool marble balustrade with ornate carvings, surprised at its coolness in the midst of the summer noon, set our feet on the blistered concrete of the terrace and screamed in pain.

It was a sheet of solid fire!

Suhasini must have seen it coming. She saw everything ahead of time, the nosy imp! She clamped a palm over my mouth and whispered, ‘Just dance along ahead on your toes, bonehead, don’t rest your feet at any spot for long! See, like this.’ And there she was, the sinister midsummer pickle-fairy, flitting across the sea of fiery concrete in little dance moves, her callused, tree-climbing feet just showering a trail of toe-kisses on the scorched blisters. ‘After a few minutes, you can walk normally. Your feet get used to it.’

I had no choice – the pungent lure of pickled mango lingered ahead – but to follow her dance lessons. I have to say, though, that I felt pretty stupid in that frantic toe-hop over fire. I was twelve, and no buffoonery of that sort should have felt stupid, but I was also a married woman, and not just anywhere, but in the most prestigious family of all of Bengal. The most learned Brahmins and priests in the land had sat for hours chanting arcane Sanskrit hymns before me, my family and the sacred god of fire, decked in finery that cost lakhs. I had even appeared before the British district magistrate, had been rebuked time and again for my rustic ways, my childish joys, held numb before the rows of grimacing, betel-leaf-chewing older women-faces instructing me never to laugh, not to smile or let the veil slip off my face before any man other than my husband. Twelve, yes, but a pretty awkward twelve to hop along on my toes.

And did Suhasini know it! Oh, that girl could sprinkle a wound with salt just as deftly as on sun-shrunk mangoes, she sure could. ‘Kamal, you know what you look like? A tadpole caught in the mud!’ She flitted gracefully ahead of me, and was resting halfway to the middle of the terrace. ‘Even the tiniest tadpole has more rhythm in its legs than you. I’m just going to wait to see you fall and get blisters all over your knees.’

If wishes were blows, Suhasini would have fallen ten times over, rubbed her giggly sunburnt face in the fiery concrete, but alas, it was only me, my expensive sari dangling around my clumsy knees and the silver anklets, pretty, shiny things from the priciest jewellers in the city, jingling like the wobbly feet of a drunk dancing girl. I could just imagine Mohini-didi with her betel-nut-chewing grimace waking up from her afternoon nap to the row of the ghost of a dancing girl above, clumsy jingle on the burnt terrace. I looked at Suhasini. She had a coarse piece of cloth wound around her body, soiled with oil and dirt and I didn’t want to know what else, her legs bare to the knees, rough and chipped with old bruise marks, not a tender spot anywhere, no silver anklets to tie her down.

‘Just you wait!’ I chased her and she flew, like a bird that had perched for a moment on the terrace wall, and I tumbled and jingled and kicked fire beneath my feet, but suddenly the music entered my movements and there I was, flitting along the scorched concrete like a busy little squirrel, just the way Suhasini had danced her way in, around, all over. We screamed in joy and clamped our palms over our lips, let our feet suck in the tamed fire, hugged each other.

The maddening smell came from the western corner. There was the tall iron pole to catch lightning strikes, and the fat pillar against the wall from which the pole rose, like the rusted bone of the mansion shooting through its skull. A crack in the pillar was a cozy nest, hidden from the beaks of birds and the roving eyes of the sweeping maid but which drew in the fiery rays of the sun god during the hottest hours of the noon till he lolled down on the western sky. It held the precious mess of raw mango slices, nostril-burning mustard oil and seeds, the greenest, angriest chillies. The midsummer wind had picked up its divine aroma, cradled it in its lap, carried it above the odour of cow dung and last night’s dying jasmines and tuberoses, into our wonderstruck nostrils.

‘It’s done!’

Suhasini screamed and we danced our way, following the scented wind towards the magic nook chosen by her a week ago as the pickling nest. Ripe and ready for our watering months.

And then I saw it behind the pillars. I saw and froze in my tracks.

The noontime spirits were real, not figments of threat doled out with red betel juice, bloodlike, with poison-grimaces of Mohini-didi, Bindu-didi, who forbade noontime wanderings, and popping up to the terraces. I was going to die now, and what a horrible death would it be, pickled and chewed to a thousand pieces by the white-draped, slow-moving ghost in the corner.

It looked human, yet unlike anybody I’d ever seen. It was draped in loose white cotton, the whitest, dullest cotton there was, not a touch of colour anywhere. It stood with bare feet on the burning concrete, and had the scariest head. It was shaved closely, the scalp like a layer of black moss on the riverside boulder on which the washerwomen scrubbed their clothes. A string of blistered black beads hung around its scrawny neck.

Midnoon, deep summer. The hour of spirits. The hour when they are abroad, free roaming like birds in spring.

The drooping saliva on my tongue drawn out by the fragrance of mango-pickle was a lump of sin, frozen, unswallowable, the cruel bait for twelve-year old girls to wade through swirls of heat and dust, feet-scorching ground to throw elders’ warnings to the wind, let the blood boil in the lust for sun-shrunken green chillies in mustard oil, to float into the clutches of the white-draped spectre of silent midsummer noon, the season of death.

‘Su…haha…sini.’ My teeth were chattering even in the soul-scalding heat. ‘It’s the nooooon…time…g-ghhost. Run.’

‘Rubbish, Kamal.’ She had stopped too, but was indifferently chewing a twig, and her teeth seemed not to chatter at all. ‘It’s a widow.’

There had been no ripples in the hallway, its mouldy air and the slow ocean roar of slogan-chants outside the building.

The newspaper was spread over the peon’s face, hanging down along his upper body, across the table. It had come to rest on the face, and swayed rhythmically…up, and down…up, and down, the crisp paper crackling through the throaty sound of his snores.

The name of the newspaper and the masthead danced along with it, and Milan could make out the headlines from here if he squinted just a little bit – ‘COMMUNIST PARTIES ORGANIZE RALLY TO PROTEST IMF POLICIES…CELLULOID ICON EVADES TAXES’…and to the right, ‘EAST BENGAL LOSES LAST HOPES OF LEAGUE’.

Nuggets of absurd laughter did pickle his day, like the taste of sun-shrunken mango, like a tadpole dance on terrace-fire! He had to give up newspapers at home these last three months to cut costs, but how come he never heard of East Bengal’s sorry state at this year’s soccer league, from Jatin-babu, at Naran’s teashop? He must have. But sports was not even a passing interest but for the few years at college when friends had dragged him to a match or two. And here it was, in the front page, dancing along the light snores of the peon, mocking the acid he must have clumsily poured on the wound of the betrayed soccer-fanatic Achintya Sarkar.

Something began to worry him. Had Akhil-babu, the deputy director of accounts, come in from tea and he had not noticed? But if he had, would his peon still be dozing away? That was unlikely. But maybe he had come and entered his office and then the peon had loosened his vigil, knowing his boss wasn’t going to sneak out of the door in a while? Or worse, maybe he had come in and then had left for the day?

He stood up and tiptoed towards the office door, which was wide open. He could see the rickety fan hanging down from the ceiling, rotating through a monotonous cycle of hiccups, as if it would stop or fall off any moment. He stood at the threshold and looked inside.

No one was in. The room was a mess of papers, all over the large desk, many on the floor, flung all around by the breeze from the fan and the occasional gust through the window behind. The walls were lined with shelves, full of files, dark and dusty, each one darker and dustier than the other. Perhaps one of those files was his. Perhaps it was in the room of the director of accounts, Mr Basu, or somewhere in the hall of tapping typewriters and soccer-gossip, tucked away in some forgotten nook, trampled under an ocean of rushing feet, flung away in the storage room under the dank stairs, chewed off by rats, stained with stale betel juice, fungus from rain-damp walls. Never to be found. He could come and go as many times as he liked, crush himself through the simmering crowd of buses or plod all the way, and go from desk to desk, write a hundred applications addressed to a hundred officers and have each letter flung the same way, off the table, on the floor, till the peon stirred from his nap and cleared the floor, flinging them all in the garbage or the storage with giant rats, mildew and darkness. His file had ceased to exist, and therefore, he, Milan Sen, did not exist any more in the eyes of the government of West Bengal, the school district office, and they were merely playing a game with him, a cruel game to see if he could be made to learn about soccer and how many points the leading teams had earned in this League!

He let the door go. It swung back and forth, hinges creaking.

The peon jumped up from his doze, the newspaper crackling awkwardly, falling all over his body. He looked at Milan with reddened eyes.

‘Oh, it’s you!’ He sat up, gathering the newspaper. ‘What are you doing here? I told you Akhil-babu wasn’t in.’

‘I was just looking…’ Milan stuttered, embarrassed, wanting to slink away.

‘What’s there to look? I told you he has gone for tea.’ He thrust his face ahead, close to Milan’s baffled stare. ‘Tea, I said!’ His voice was loud and raucous, and Milan remembered he was supposed to crack the code for meaning.

Milan went back to the bench. He felt faint, even though he hadn’t taken more than a few steps.

He sat on the bench. The newspaper fell back on the peon’s face once again, and resumed its slow dance.

Suhasini was always rich with the most shocking bits of wisdom.

Wild spirit as she was, to see her stand on one leg like a happy heron and chew a dusty twig with blessed indifference while your worst fears swayed in ghastly white seemed to muddle my fever-cramped brain.

‘A widow, bonehead, haven’t you ever seen a widow before? A woman whose husband is dead. They’re not ghosts or anything. Just unlucky.’

A woman whose husband is dead! But a woman did not stay back on this sin-draped earth after her lord had left his mortal body. Back in my village I’d grown up hearing that so and so had died and his devoted, goddess-like widow had risen to the heavens with him. It wouldn’t make sense till many years later. Laws had been passed forbidding the burning of widows, but in a remote backwater village people clung to their customs with enough vengeance to throw dust on the eyes of the magistrates and collectors. No drums to drown the cries of the widow, this time her mouth was taped with rags, her limbs plastered to her burning body with the sturdiest jute ropes. And no heathen, unbelieving urbanite or the red-faced British were going to mess with their sacred customs that had been scorching live flesh for centuries!

But the noblest family of all Bengal, wining and dining with the magistrates and the collectors couldn’t do that, couldn’t trample upon the laws with such careless disdain. So it let the white-draped figures roam instead, to put the fear of the devil in the souls of twelve-year old wives about to steal the taste of pickles on sunburnt afternoons!

Laws! They’re fools if they think laws could change the world. They say that a few years back they even passed laws for the wedding of widows. Imagine that – the white-draped ghosts of the inner quarters decked in bridal finery! May the heavens smite me down before I see such a sight. Never, never, but for the face of the fifteen year old Saroj who tugs at my heartstrings so, not for her, not for a soul in this land of ours.

I had never seen a figure draped in such deathly white, or such a moss-hair head in my life. But the blackest of my fear that moment, I later realized, had sprung not from the trappings of her touchable body, but from something else. It was something about her ways, the frozen movement in her limbs, that sad hide-and-get-away, the shrinking away at the sight of human bodies, other human bodies. She seemed guilty of appearing before our eyes, guilty of being alive, and before that corrosive flood of guilt I was a pickle-thieving queen, I, who thought myself to be the crummiest thief for sneaking up to the wind-swept terrace to steal the taste of nook-nestled, sun-pickled mangoes, such a stooping for the daughter-in-law of the noblest family in all Bengal!

She disappeared quickly, and shakily I followed Suhasini to the spread out reed mat over which the woman had lingered like a shadow. There were little hand-moulded balls of ground lentils, boris, drying in the sun just like our mango-babies had been sucking up the heat and light, lightly browning, which, when deep-fried, rendered the commonest meal a pleasure. That’s what the sad creature was doing.

I’m nothing but brutally honest when I say that till this day I cannot chew a well-fried bori during a meal without the feel of that wind-swept, sun-dried afternoon, that white-draped self-hating shadow slinking away before my fevered eyes.

‘They are supposed to wear nothing but coarse white cotton.’ Suhasini had said, digging out the delicious pickled mess from the brick-hole. ‘And they shave their heads so that they look ugly.’ Their looking ugly had been a round enough end for the pickle-hungry, tree-climbing fourteen-year old, but it wasn’t till a few years later that I’d find out that the worst sin a widow could commit was to excite the forbidden flame in a male – a brother-in-law maybe, or worse. Torturing her body thus had holier ends, the nausea she should bring up in all men, who, in their cursed misfortunes laid their eyes on her, and the flowing, waving tresses had to go, to give shape to a head like the mossladen boulders on which washerwomen scrubbed their clothes.

‘And they have to be vegetarians all their lives, and are left out of most auspicious ceremonies.’ As we shared the heavenly magic of delicious sun-shrunken mangoes, I realized how far ahead Suhasini was in the lessons of life.

Seventeen years of vermilion-daub in the parting of my hair, the auspicious bangles of iron and shell, even blessed motherhood at a moaning, shrieking fourteen, locked in a high-strung duel of lung-draining shrieks with the dairy-maid Radhu – I’m a widow.

I wasn’t going to die, but would I live?

They didn’t remain shadowy figures on sun-dried, windblown terraces, but appeared now and then in the women’s quarters, slinking around kitchens, in the corner of the prayer-hall, always shaved-head, in the coarse white cotton draped over their shrunken bodies, shrunken as I saw them always, for most of what nourished our blood, delighted our tongues, were forbidden to them, meats and fishes of all kinds, a hundred other things and what did they live on but the cold wind of their movements?

And then there was Saroj.

Saroj came to our family two years after I had, much in the same way. She was fifteen during her wedding, three years older than I had been at mine. Was she beautiful! At fifteen, she was fully bloomed, and still blooming, the goddess of flowers, as her name promised. A milk and rose complexion, the longest eyelashes I’d ever seen, a face worth sculpting in marble. Like me, she came from a poor family, and needed all of her beauty and her planetary fortunes to earn her marriage to this great family. She was to be wedded to my father-in-law’s sixty-four year old brother, who, thanks to the strength of his new bride’s auspicious horoscope, was now going to live till a hundred, so claimed the family astrologer. Horoscope and the fresh fountain of youth! I didn’t quite grasp the metaphor at that time, only muddled by the grins and grimaces in the women’s quarters.

The shy and beautiful Saroj was sucked in at once to our gang of two. If Suhasini had had a tough time training me, she screamed and struck her little palm on her forehead a hundred times in despair with our new playmate. Gentle Saroj, from the day she could crawl, had been trained to become the loveliest, most docile bride and nothing else, never to raise her voice or her legs to climb the shortest mango tree even I, the clumsy one, could conquer in a leap. My rowdiness scandalized her, and Suhasini she could never even figure out! And she was rewarded at home, not only because of her softness, her beautiful docility, but for the dowry she had brought, which, if not impressive by the standards of this house, was large enough to blunt the edge of disdain flung daily at the likes of me. I don’t know if her peasant father had sold his soul or his body, but she did come in with fifty weights of gold, no less.

And she had her fifteen-year body sold and bonded to her sixty-four year old husband, but her soul was the purest, freest, and could it love! She wouldn’t climb the trees but would stand below with her sari spread out like a net to catch the fruits we plucked and threw down; she wouldn’t join us tickling, with the spines of long crow-feathers, the snoring, thunder-quaking nostrils of the napping Manada, the fattest, oldest and meanest cook that had ever lived – ‘it isn’t fair on poor Manada (poor Manada! The girl couldn’t be believed!)’ – but as we rushed to our hiding nooks and the gigantic Manada broke out of her pleasure-nap in a paroxysm of sneeze-earthquakes that threatened to bring down the house, curses that reddened the backs of our ears, and as I and Suhasini hurt our ribs from holding back our laughter behind the doors, Saroj, blood-red with scandal, would let light sparks of laughter slip out of the corners of her pretty mouth.

Joy sparkled in the heaven-blessed face under the sheen of feminine docility, little sparkles they were, but Suhasini and I knew when we saw them, and besides, we knew how to light them up. She loved dousing herself in powdery colour, the red and green and rainbow of the fragrant abeer in the sacred drunkenness of Dol, the colour festival of spring, throwing abeer by the fistful at Suhasini and myself, reddening the parting on my head, the sacrosanct symbol of marriage.

The young sun of daybreak was such an occasion of joy, on the terrace, on the marble-banistered verandahs that overlooked the mango grove. She stood there after her bath everyday, to dry her never-ending tresses of silken hair, black like midnight, the innocent vanity that she laid out across her shoulder, wetting with its damp fragrance the beautiful saris her doting husband gifted her daily. The lyricism of such moments was too rich for the stormy, tree-climbing Suhasini to stomach, and she never let go the chance of an acrid jest or two, but Saroj only smiled, smiled at me and Suhasini, there was no place for a drop of anger or hatred in that blessed child-heart of hers.

And then there were lobsters.

Mischievous Suhasini, who, heaven knows, loved Saroj just as much as I did, in her wild way, had alleged more than once that Saroj would not sink that shiny crow-feather spine into the tempting caverns of Manada’s snoring nostrils only to stay in the gigantic cook’s good books. A good name would keep alive the flow of fresh-cooked spicy lobster curried with puréed coconut that the massive Manada smuggled out of the kitchen for the sweetest new bride, the pretty creature who loves lobsters so. But of course the women of the house cannot eat like a glutton at mealtimes, no matter how much they love a dish or are hungry, not the women of this grandest of families. And Suhasini might say what she liked, did Saroj ever bite into a lobster without giving a generous share to Suhasini? And she did it knowing full well that massive Manada would have a fit knowing that her smuggled delicacies were also being fed to the carriage-driver’s daughter, the cursed imp who wouldn’t let her nap in peace in the afternoons!

But the vile ring of Saturn around her aging husband would not be kept away by all her gentleness, love and sweet smile, not for long.

Two years passed in this happiness. For two years, Saroj sang and danced with us and dried her fairy tale hair on the porch, her husband drank at the fountain of her youth – before long, I came to know what the women meant by that picturesque phrase. And then one day, in the twilight hour of the evening, Saroj ran screaming from their bedroom; nobody had heard the soft, gentle girl scream that way…

The doctor said it had been his heart.

At seventeen, the prettiest, brightest seventeen, Saroj’s life was over.

Even Suhasini was quiet for the longest time afterwards. When we went back to our games, it was never quite the same, not just because Saroj never joined us again, but because she was there, and she wasn’t. What would you call it? Many a cursed day I would ask myself, fighting a sea of tears, why didn’t they tie her limbs to her soft body and pile her up in the heap of fragrant firewood; wasn’t she pure enough to rise to the heavens with her husband, more than all those widows had in my village?

Saroj had turned into a corpse, and looking at her closely, I came to realize why the willowy figure on the terrace four years ago had chilled me so. Nobody ever saw her smile ever after, and the marble-carved face seemed to lose its carvings, melt back to the block of dead stone from which it had emerged. From the day she’d crawled off her mother’s lap she had been told that she would make a wonderful bride soon, like the goddess Lakshmi, and would spend the rest of her life in married finery. Nothing, nothing else mattered in her life, she was brought to this earth to be the heaven-pretty, soft, docile wife of a noble husband, so what if he was sixty-four? But that life was over after two brief years, and Saroj stopped living.

The day they cut off her beautiful hair, I ran away deep inside the bushes of the mango grove, a place I had dreaded forever. Suhasini saw it all, and told me much, much later. During the time the soft tresses fell under the steel of the scissors, Saroj didn’t utter a word, not twitch a muscle, and when did she do either ever in her life again? I’d cried aloud when I saw her, her head like a moss-grown boulder, draped in the cheapest white cotton sari that clung to her like on a skeleton. And it couldn’t be that her shrunkenness was all my imagination, for what did she have to eat these days now? Only the dullest food, fit for the poor on the street, no meat or fish, eggs, onion or garlic, not even a scrap of the cheapest, tiniest mourala fish, everything cooked by herself alone in the widow’s kitchen. It all stands to reason and medical science – our forefathers knew their medical sciences. I had heard a Brahmin pundit say years later that meat and fish, and spicy ingredients like onion and garlic only raised body heat, boiled one’s lusts, that which should be dead for widows, whether they be twelve or eighty. Their hair was chopped to make them ugly to men, and their lean, watery diets kept them at peace with themselves, the desires asleep for the rest of their cursed life. Just the way all colours were gone from their lives, all but white, that austere lack of colour, and might sin strike her down if she ever played Dol with the sensuous fragrance of coloured powder, as she had lost forever the daub of conjugal red in the parting of her hair.

And the fasts. In this land, women went without food for anything, anybody. The young unmarried ones fasted on ritual days to get a good husband, mothers fasted for the prosperity for their sons, mothers-in-law for their sons-in-law, and widows fasted the most. For being born under the stars that took their husband’s lives, what else? For all the sins in past lives that made one born as a woman and as an accursed widow. The full moon marks a fast day, and so does the new moon…

But why had that night been of such thunder and lightning, such omens from the skies?

At around ten at night I’d gone down to the worship hall to say my last prayers for the day, to ring the gold bell for the last few minutes, to offer the last platter of fruits and sweets to the gods and goddesses.

I’d been saying my prayers for a while before the groan reached me. Ghosts were a perpetual nightmare to me in that huge, hollow mansion, but I was assured that they wouldn’t show up in the worship room, of all places, in the midst of the most impressive army of gods and goddesses. So I sped up my chants, turned around with a palpitating heart.

Saroj was a heap of white in the corner, trembling, groaning white.

I went up to her. ‘Saroj, are you okay?’ But I got no answer from the shivering, moaning body, eyes closed, the end of the white cotton sari pulled over her head. She had been squatting on the floor like a devotee in prayer, but her body leaned against the wall. But for her soft breathing and moans, I would have shrieked blue death.

I remembered today was one of her numerous fast days, and she’d had nothing to eat since last night. She was to spend the day in prayer, break her fast at midnight with a small serving of fruits and sweets blessed by the gods.

‘Saroj, are you ill?’ I asked her, touching her trembling body through the strange white veil. ‘You know, you can eat something; it’ll be midnight in another couple of hours, and there’s nobody around. Here, have a sweet.’

She didn’t seem to sense my presence. Tremors continued to shoot through her body, and the groans. Leaning closer to her, I began to make out her words.

‘The clouds are bursting, mother, and they are bursting over our village. There’s a giant hole in the sky, and the water is spurting mad, like a pillar of rain. The clouds are bursting, mother, and they are bursting over our village. The river bloats like a pregnant woman, and the banks break under the flood, the earth, the rocks, the green shoots, all uprooted and destroyed. The rain beats through the forest, weighing down the green leaves, the heavy, fruit-drooping mango trees. And the water is spurting mad, like a pillar of rain. Put away the clothes you’ve spread out to dry, or else they’ll be heavy with water never to dry in a lifetime. Bring the grazing cattle home, or they’ll be lost in the rain. Mother, the scorched earth, cracked and dry, sucks in the water like the dying, and the crops are happy again, the shoots of paddy sway their heads in the shooting arrows of chilly water. The clouds are bursting, mother, and they are bursting over our village, and the sweet, sweet water collects in the scented leaves of the lemon plant, and stays there, in its lap, sweet, sweet, cool water, in a lemon-scented green, mother, the clouds are bursting…’

I would have sighed in relief if a ghost had appeared before me, in its ghostly flesh, but another moment with Saroj, I felt, was going to leave me unconscious. My palm on her back felt chilled, and I pulled away rapidly.

‘Mother, mother, the clouds are bursting, and water sways in the scented lap of the lemon-leaf…’

And then it struck me like lightning!

This was one of the fasts for the widows where one was not allowed a drop of water throughout the whole scorching summer day!

Saroj still lives. She did not die, did not rise to the heaven in flesh-burning flames. But does she live, really?

My turn has come, finally. I wasn’t going to die. But at twenty-nine, was I going to live?

Jagadish! Ei Jagadish!’
The loud call followed a creaking of shoes along the passageway. Milan looked up at about the same time the peon started up from his drowse. In a miracle of reflex, he sat up, took control of the crackling, unwieldy tent of the newspaper and folded it back, all within a few seconds.

Akhil-babu was a salt-and-pepper haired man of a bullish build in his mid to late forties. To Milan, however, he was nothing short of an angelic apparition. An angel back from the teashop across the street who was going to seek out his lost files.

The last lines he had read in the fading yellow sheets whirred in his brain like the rickety fan hanging from the ceiling of Akhil-babu’s office. He had no idea. But here was Akhil-babu, and he was happy to meet Milan Sen, dedicated teacher of Bengali at the Girish Ghosh Memorial High School for forty years, author of The Marketplace and Other Stories and Bricks and Sand: A Collection, stories in numerous literary magazines, many you wouldn’t have heard of, but one also in an issue of Desh fourteen years ago, yes, the story ‘The Nectar of May’.

He wouldn’t, of course, know Milan when he saw him, as he’d never met him before, only heard about him from his superiors, the writer and schoolteacher, and therefore wouldn’t know the man waiting before his office, on the bench. But he didn’t have to look at Milan like he was a faintly disgusting insect, did he?

To give Akhil-babu credit, it was half a glance, really. The next moment, he had vanished into his office. His shoes moved crunchily on the mess of papers Milan had seen lying on the floor. Whose files were they? What nameless wretches? A yawn croaked its way out through the swing door, and the cracking of fingers – the deputy director of accounts was stretching his limbs, a little sleepy after the tea-break downstairs.

‘Jagadish!’ he called out.

‘Coming, sir.’ Jagadish, the peon, had already folded the newspaper on the table before as if it had been untouched from the morning. He hurried into his boss’s office.

‘Who’s that outside?’ The words reached Milan through the wooden door that was still creaking from Jagadish’s hurried entrance. ‘What did I tell you? To keep all these people away, did I not? This is a government office, not a refugee-camp!’

‘Yes sir, but…’ Jagadish’s voice was the timid litany memorized many times over.

‘Yes sir and but sir, that’s all you have to rattle off!’ The voice rose with every word. ‘Who’s going to do the fiscal year data entry, your father from heaven?’

Jagadish didn’t seem to be too disturbed at the hamhanded invocation to his father’s soul. ‘Sir, I think Achintya-babu sent him here.’

A few decades ago I’d have had a different reason to cry after my husband’s death. I’d be crying, and probably with Radhu, the dairy-maid’s, force in my lungs, with fear, horrible fear, because there would be no life left before me, not in another half-day. I would be packed with a fresh batch of firewood on my husband’s pyre, bundled next to his cold, wrinkled body, and my tender, warm body would burn to death along with the cold flesh of my husband’s.

The lines wouldn’t leave him, the painful words in the pearl-pure handwriting, on the dust-sheathed sheets.

I wasn’t going to die, but would I live? That was another question altogether.

‘Sir has asked you in.’ Jagadish’s skinny frame loomed over him like a cloudy giant, and his voice rang out like thunder.

It was the high-arched worship hall that Milan entered, walls lined with shelves of dusty files, the threshold of beaten gold, with the eight-metal alloy icon and the rickety fan hanging from the ceiling in its death-throes, chanting the fast-day hymns in his head, hymns that would just not go away.

Akhil-babu was seated at his table, his nose dipped, true government-servant style, in the pile of papers on his desk. He looked up, raising his impassive face.

‘Yes, what is your business?’

‘It’s…it’s about my pension.’ Milan said dreamily. ‘Mr Basu told you about my case, didn’t he? Milan Sen, retired from school services, Girish Ghosh Memorial High School?’

‘Mr Basu handles a different set of files. He hasn’t told me anything about you. What exactly is your problem?’

The room had giant cracks on the walls, limecrusted, and cobwebs in the corner. Cigarette butts, stubbed like dead stunted worms, were scattered all over the table, all over the papers and files, littered by flakes of ash. The rows of files on the shelves against the wall looked dark, almost black, with layers of dust on them. They made up a thick crust that hadn’t been disturbed in decades. The fan overhead whirred endlessly, against the words uttered in the room, the rustle of papers, the sound of traffic, the chants of demonstrators outside.

How could they unearth his case here? How could anybody?

‘I haven’t been getting my pension these last three months. I wrote a letter of application addressed to the district inspector in March, but I heard nothing. Mr Basu was looking after my case. He said my file might clear by today.’ Milan felt the dream roll back as he uttered the much-pronounced sentences, the soiled phrases, the dream where he receded back to the thick black crust on the walls of the room, his body and his sad voice melting in the dusty blackness, unmoved for decades as Akhil-babu yawned and stretched his limbs and lit another cigarette.

‘But he’s not in today.’ He continued, ‘So Achintya-babu in the front hall asked me to meet you.’

Akhil-babu stared at him, tapping his pen on the table. He seemed to be thinking.

‘Please look into my file, sir. Mr Basu had said it would clear on Wednesday.’

Akhil-babu stirred from his reverie.

‘Oh, your file. No, of course there’s nothing for me to do about that. I don’t deal with the pension files.’ He returned to his papers. ‘You’ll have to come another day.’

For a moment, Milan was about to turn around and leave, climb the dark stairs, make his way through the chanting demonstrators below, begin the long walk home.

But something inside him broke this time.

In the flash of a moment, he had made his way around the large desk behind which the deputy director of accounts sat. Almost by instinct, the officer had sat up alarmed, pushed back his chair, stood up, and shrieked, ‘Jagadish!’

Working in the accounts department of the school district office wasn’t quite the life of a soldier posted in Kashmir, but once in a while a clerk or an officer had been beaten up by an irate citizen for a file that hadn’t cleared or papers that had got misplaced, bringing lives to a standstill… beaten up with a few bruises and black eyes, as if it was their fault!

And then there was Jagadish. Poor Jagadish, who had rushed into the office, surely to nothing he hadn’t seen before.

It was the flash of lightning cracking inside his skull that had broken Milan. There was going to be no ‘another day’, no ‘next week’. His file would never clear and he would never see a government cheque made out to his name; and what lay ahead but starvation? But to break into a million slimy fragments of weak, weeping flesh that flopped down on the feet of the deputy director of accounts, the dust-caked shoes, the loose end of the trousers that flapped uneasily like the wings of a chicken being slaughtered before his imploring hands.

‘Please sir, I’ve been trying to get my file cleared these past three months and I’ve been coming here now seven days in a row and I haven’t seen a paise from the government these three months and I have begged so many people from the peon to the officers, everybody tells me come another day and I have gone from pillar to post starving, starving… you know what it’s like for an old man to take the bus in this traffic and this summer heat, and today I have been walking all the way from Beadon Street because there’s such a horrible jam due to the IMF rally, walking just to meet Mr Basu; he asked me to come today because my file was supposed to clear today and I can’t take another day of this torture!’

This wasn’t so new to Akhil-babu, though it had been some time since a man of Milan’s age had thrown himself at his feet and had cried like a baby. It might be flattering to some that people in his position represented the only human face of a system that could barely heed everybody’s needs, which is why the hapless sufferers begged and threw themselves at their feet at least as frequently as they grabbed their shirt-collars and punched their faces. Sadly, the flattery was a poor illusion. In most cases petty officers couldn’t do much to grease the wheels of bureaucracy even if they wanted to, and what did they stand to gain if they could?

Akhil-babu grabbed the grovelling Milan by his arm and tried to pull him up. ‘Listen. It’s not in my hands, we just follow instructions from above. But listen, tell me about your case.’

Milan stood up, forgetting to brush off the dust from his trousers, and the spindly pain that crackled through his spine at the sudden movement.

He seated himself again, and Jagadish left the room, grinning sheepishly.

‘So which school did you say you used to teach at?’ the officer asked Milan.

‘Girish Ghosh Memorial High School, sir. It used to be a very good school in the past, many reputed people from that area had studied there, but over the years…’

Akhil-babu cut him short. ‘Yes, of course. Where is it exactly?’

‘It’s in Baghbazar, sir. Near Girish Avenue. A five-minute walk from the 2B bus terminus.’

‘It’s in the Kashipur Assembly area of the state legislature, isn’t it?’

‘Yes sir, it’s a very good area, very decent neighbourhood. And the boys were fine too, though they come from…er…rather difficult backgrounds. But the budget sanctioned by the government…’ Milan stopped halfway. If foregrounding the strengths of his school involved pointing the finger of blame at the government, this wasn’t the place to do it.

But Akhil-babu didn’t seem to have heard any of it. He had something else on his mind.

‘That’s a CPI(M) area. Who’s the current MLA there? Utpal Bardhan, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Milan was just about beginning to get a little confused.

‘Utpal Bardhan, right?’ Akhil-babu repeated, and looked at Milan meaningfully, as if expecting him to say something.

‘Yes, sir, Utpal Bardhan.’

‘So tell me, you were a teacher at the local high school.’ The officer seemed to be forced to change track suddenly. ‘You must have had close connections with the local party office?’ He paused. ‘I mean, especially during election campaigns, meetings, rallies? In fact I’d have expected you to be at the rally today.’

‘Not at all, sir.’ If the officer was looking for a picture of his dedication as a teacher, he was going to get it. ‘Many teachers did. But I had a job to do, teaching all these kids. It was my entire life’s work.’ He paused. ‘Never in my forty years’ teaching career did I ever miss a class for anything other than illness or family emergencies.’

The officer was in despair. ‘But I’m sure you helped in the writing of pamphlets for the election, rallies, protest meetings, articles in the party newspaper? You were a teacher of Bengali, and writing must come to you easily.’

‘No sir, I really didn’t have anything to do with the party.’ Turning into party-puppets and acolytes of party-leaders was an easy trap for teachers, Milan had seen much of it in his career, and he had stayed away from it. But yes, writing did come to him easily. ‘I don’t like to talk about it generally, sir.’ A shy smile appeared on his face. ‘Writing is one of my addictions, you could say. I’ve had two volumes of short stories. The Marketplace and Other Stories and Bricks and Sand: A Collection. From Broken Arrow Press, here in College Street. I had a story in Desh once, but that was a long time ago…’

‘That’s nice.’ The officer’s tone hinted that he was keen to move on to other things. ‘I’m surprised that a man of your talents didn’t become a valuable party member.’ He seemed to be getting a little impatient. ‘So do you know Utpal Bardhan?’

‘Well, yes. He’s our MLA.’

‘No, I mean do you have any personal acquaintance with him?’

Somewhere around this time, the fog had begun to lift from Milan’s brain.

‘No sir, none at all.’ Coldness crept into his voice.

‘Well, maybe you know the local councillor. He’s from the party too. Or somebody from the local party office. I know their office is near the large playground there. They have the huge Durga Puja festival there, don’t they?’ The officer now drummed his fingers rapidly on the desk as he spoke, and he seemed unwilling to look Milan in the eye.

‘No sir, I’m afraid I don’t know any of these people.’ And then he added, as an afterthought, as if after some debate within himself. ‘But people in the neighbourhood would know me well as an honest, hardworking man. Many of them are my former students. There’s also a local literary magazine…’ He looked at the officer’s face and stopped in the middle of his sentence.

Dr Biswas’s words rang in his head. Dr Biswas, the portly general physician who had an office just behind the park near his place, always spoke with a mournful song about Milan’s pressure and sugar. ‘Milan-babu,’ he could hear him now, ‘with your blood-sugar and high blood-pressure, you are a stroke waiting to happen. Never forget your medication and for heaven’s sake, never lose your temper.’

Doctors didn’t have to worry about pension from the government.

‘I’m surprised that you’ve been having this problem for the last three months and yet you haven’t brought it up with the local party office.’ Akhil-babu now seemed to be on the brink of desperation. ‘After all, you’ve been a teacher at a government-run school for close to half a century.’ ‘Well, the party office has never been one of my favourite hang-outs.’ I prefer Naran’s tea-stall, Milan wanted to add, but that would push the border of sarcasm.

Either way, the officer had had enough.

‘Look mister, you know how things are.’ He leaned forward across the table. The papers flapped under a weak breeze through the window that also carried the chant of the rally outside. For a moment, the officer’s voice almost melted into the tired chorus of voices. He continued. ‘There are tens of thousands of retired state government employees who are having problems with their pension. There are hundreds of such cases in our office alone. Many have given up, and I don’t know if they have died starving or are out begging on the streets. Others, like you, want to get their files cleared so that they can see the face of a government cheque to their name again.’

He paused, with a look of earthy grandeur.

‘You know what the situation is in government offices. So much backlog, so many files to clear, but who’s going to cut through the red tape? The British made rules a hundred years ago that haven’t been changed a whit. Those days, people popped off barely after retirement, and pension stories were short and sweet. You’d think greater longevity of people is a good thing, but more years drain the government coffers more and more. And which system runs without grease?’ He smiled meaningfully, made a despairing gesture with his hands.

‘A file such as yours, for example, has to be moved through a crazy number of desks. After teachers retire, the papers are sent to the district inspector’s office. After it’s processed there, it goes to the treasury of the school district. Papers from the Calcutta school district are sent here, and the office near Bhabani Bhaban handles those from South 24 Parganas; though heaven knows files are mixed up often enough! You’re probably wondering that this is my legitimate pension and how can it just stop? It doesn’t just stop.’ The officer looked away, sighed meaningfully. ‘Records of service are so hard to get hold of. You have taught for forty years, as you say, and I believe you. But do you know how hard it is to track down files that have this fact recorded? For all you know, they may not even exist.

‘Anyway, let that be. Those things will not change for years to come. The thing is, we just follow instructions that come to us from higher up. Nothing is in our hands, believe me.’ He spoke as if giving away the saddest secret of his life. He hadn’t forgotten Milan’s face rubbing against his trousers. ‘We get some lists. We can only look into the files of those on the list. Unfortunately, your name is not on any of the lists,’ he said. ‘If it was, I would have recognized it right away.’

Milan sat like a block of stone. ‘It’s usually easy with retired teachers of government schools. You know, most teachers have party connections.’

Milan spoke, as if waking up from a trance.

‘So there’s nothing you can do about my case?’ His voice was calm.

‘It’s not in my hands.’ Akhil-babu looked up with a baleful expression. ‘You should try talking to someone at your local party office, if you can’t meet Utpal Bardhan…’

‘I don’t think…’

‘Well, then, I don’t think anything can happen for you in this office. You can try the office near Bhabani Bhaban, near the Alipore Court. I’ve heard the district inspector there has quite a bit of clout.’

I see.’

‘But really, if you’d take my advice, I’ve heard Utpal Bardhan is a good…’

‘Thanks for your help, Akhil-babu.’ Milan pushed his way through the swing door.

Outside, on the chair the newspaper danced and crackled, nursing a softly snoring Jagadish.

Once, not so long ago, he’d have dreaded making his way back through the front hall, with its air full of cigarette smoke, gossip and laughter and the stale smell of tea, the drone of typewriters, walking down the dark, dank stairs with graffiti on the walls and little puddles of water at the landings, out in the scorching afternoon sun to face the chant of the demonstrators. He would have dreaded it all, making his way empty-handed, empty of hope.

But today, as he did all that, the arteries running past his temples throbbed with such pain that there was no dread, none at all, just a pit of blindness all around him. The midsummer afternoon stretched in a yellow haze, and the swirls of dust and white heat rising from the ground had enveloped everything, people and traffic, the scattered protestors who still chanted their slogans in a dreary monotone. But it made no difference to him. They might as well not have existed.

He walked towards the bus stop. The destination was somewhere at the back of his fevered mind, and he walked fast, almost out of breath, barely seeing anything around him.

Within a fraction of a second after the sharp pain had exploded around his midriff, he found himself in the ditch of sewage water flowing beneath the pavement. There was uproar around him, an uproar trying to raise its feeble hydra-like heads through the blue haze of the swirls of dust and heat and the pain throbbing in his temples. Slowly, the voices took on denser bodies.

‘Was he drunk?’

‘God, is he alive?’

Vigorous arms pulled him up. His right elbow was bruised, caked with blood and sodden grime, and the right leg of his trousers was soggy with the sewage water. Behind him was an auto rickshaw, with the driver standing awkwardly next to it; a lone passenger sat inside, surrounded by cardboard boxes, shrieking his lungs out. A couple of boxes had fallen on to the road, one had rolled into the ditch and had come open, some garments spilling out on to the road and in the sewage.

He had stepped out from the pavement, on the road without realizing it, and had been hit from behind by the rickshaw. The man inside was loudly demanding that he pay for the damaged goods, but after they pulled up Milan and he had taken a good look at him, his sewage-stained clothes, his blood-smeared elbow, his voice lost much of its venom.

The auto-rickshaw steered past him, and the little crowd vanished almost as soon as it had gathered. Crowds in Calcutta were like bubbles of surf; they formed out of nowhere, and disappeared into nowhere, leaving nothing but thin air.

Milan took a few moments to gather his senses, still breathing heavily, as the people around him went their ways. He stepped into a druggist’s shop on the roadside, got his wound washed in a burning anti-septic solution, had it wrapped in a bandage.

The polite, bitter-sweet voice of Akhil-babu, the deputy director of accounts kept buzzing inside his head.

He couldn’t say it all had been a surprise to him. Akhil-babu spelt out things that he was aware of – about lists and party connections and the generosity of the local politician, the big brothers of the neighbourhood. About the grease that ran the government machinery. A lifetime as a teacher in a government school brought one up facing its big, ugly heads. There were those students in their twenties, razors run a thousand times on their faces…

The absurdity of it all, the explosions of laughter at the school district office in the Banik building, the tea-sipping, soccer-chatting, typing clerks and dozing peons, what a joke he must have been to all of them these three months. The old fogey who comes here everyday begging for his pension. In the hall thick with cigarette smoke, endless chatter.

A strange old duffer, stranger after forty years’ work in a government school. What does he think government offices run on?

And well, his sense of soccer!

He crossed the street. The bus stop was a few more minutes’ walk from there.

He was still on his way to the office at Bhabani Bhaban in Alipore.

What did he expect there? Was it stubbornness, or something deep down, some bitter masochism?

Just habit?

Across the street, on the other side, there was one of those huge heaps of refuse. One could find anything there, any kind of waste this city let out. Garbage and dirty water from the sewage streamed across it, rotten food, skin and seeds of used fruits and vegetables, human waste and dogs’ droppings lay there with broken bits of furniture and huge mounds of discarded paper, cardboards, packing boxes and torn gunny sacks. Under the heat of the summer sky, the stench rose in fumes.

At this moment, the garbage dump had attracted the attention of two figures. Often there were more.

There was a man on the right, naked but for a grimy rag around his loins, knotted hair and a straggly bush of a beard, digging through the dump like a possessed soul. In the sun, one could make out the thick globs of snot and saliva clinging to his hair and his beard. As he dug deeper and deeper, he made grunting sounds, like a wolf going at dead meat.

Lunatics with no place to go, who were not dangerous enough to claim room in overflowing asylums were left to roam the streets of the city and hunt for food. You just wanted to keep a distance from them, just to be safe, more for the dirt and the stench, not out of real danger. They were not the kind who were prone to violence, though one was never sure.

On the side of the dump facing the street was a mangy, skinny mongrel who had lost most of its fur and had reddish patches all over its near-bare flesh.

Never a rare sight in this city. Sometimes they went at each other with teeth and claws.

Two bodies from the sea of ghosts that made up this city of dust, sweat and heat, jostling souls from the nether world. Summer afternoons melted them, let afloat their gooey stench all through the sunburnt air and the clouds of burnt petrol that misted over the streets like a giant unquenched thirst. It was the season when the contents of the overflowing garbage dumps rotted faster, with all the vengeance of tropical summer, sucking the spirits down its bowels.

Milan stood in the sun, waiting for the bus.

If he joined the hapless pair at the dump digging for waste from the city’s bowels, he felt, none of the people around would notice. In this city, in this season, spectres roamed free and wide, like birds in spring.

He couldn’t say it all had been a surprise to him. No one lived here for a lifetime and remained that naive.

He kept away from these muddy currents, always had. But never far enough to escape them – to pretend they didn’t exist.

By then, he had been teaching at Girish Ghosh Memorial Boys’ School for over eighteen years. It was the autumn of 1978, he remembered quite well. Sometimes, he wished his memory wasn’t so clear, not about that time of his life.

Broken Arrow Press had brought out his first collection of short stories a few years ago, and it had even been reviewed by a few dailies, two-inch columns at the bottom of the page of course, but reviews nonetheless, and they had good things to say. He had also been promoted in the school, and now he could teach the eleventh and the twelfth grades.

Grey streaks had begun to appear around his temples. Finally, in his forties, he was on his way as a writer.

It was a good time in his life, not that he had enough money, not that he’d ever had, not that he’d regretted not being able to buy better saris for Ila, fruits and fish of better quality for growing Gautam, but still it had seemed that things were looking up.

A time ripe for a nightmare.

One of his favourite students, Sabeer, hadn’t been coming to school for a few days. Not showing up for days, even dropping out in the middle of the year was nothing unusual in Girish Ghosh Memorial Boys’ School, where students came from families of factory workers, railway-station porters, servants and cooks, boys who suddenly were called to lend an extra earning hand to feed their large families, fathers who found an opening in the factory for their sons, servants who found out that their employers were looking for a full-time errand boy. In the higher grades, several of the students took shots at hustling, drug-peddling, selling goods in the black market, and the demands of those dark worlds clawed away at their attempts to thread a different life at school.

Sabeer was a little different, one of those few students who made a day of teaching a pure joy. He was passionate about the poetry of Jibanananda Das, the modernist chronicler of frostbitten winter fields and ornate, semi-fictitious history. Sabeer wrote beautifully himself, and was the editor of the school literary magazine for which Milan acted as the faculty advisor. He had done well in his tenth grade board examinations, and everybody hoped that he would shine at the twelfth grade examinations, the last one at high school, maybe even be the very first student of the school to get a place in the first division.

Sabeer’s father, Moidul, had a stall near Gray Street, selling magazines, newspapers and old books. Milan knew him well, a soft-spoken man with hesitant manners who had completed high school and was knowledgeable about the world of the small press and literary magazines, including several of the erratically published periodicals for which Milan wrote from time to time. On his way back from College Street, Milan would sometimes stop by his magazine-stall and pick up a newspaper or a magazine. Moidul always found a way to give him a favourable price.

After Sabeer had not shown up for over a week, Milan made his way to the narrow alleys near the river to his house. Sabeer’s father rented two rooms behind a warehouse near the circular railway station. They were a struggling lower-middle class, though in his better months – around the festive season in October, for instance – Moidul probably made more money than Milan. Their home was two poorly lit, mosquito-infested rooms behind a warehouse, thick with the earthy stench from the banks of the heavily-polluted river, but inside, things were neat and tidy enough to feel like a home.

Sabeer had met him at the narrow passageway that linked the two rooms to the warehouse – the entrance to their living quarters. After nearly twenty years, Milan remembered the look on his face that day.

Sabeer looked like a dog who had been starved, beaten and chained for days.

Strangely, somewhere at the back of his mind, Milan had feared something too. Sabeer was too passionate about his studies to have missed classes for a whole week.

It was clear that he had stepped out expecting danger. It was written all over his face, in his shifty eyes, the sharp movement in his limbs. Looking at Milan, he stared at his face for a few minutes, and then broke down in to tears.

Milan got the story from him in fragments.

A clique of thugs ‘ruled’ over the neighbourhood where Moidul had his bookstall, as in fact most city neighbourhoods were, by some local bully or the other, ranging from petty hustlers to traffickers in bigger substances, such as marijuana from Afghanistan, illegal arms from across the Bihar border. They targeted the vendors and shopkeepers who did business on the streets, sellers of tea and cigarettes, owners of larger outlets and franchises, even the beggars on the streets. Their main agenda was to collect ‘tola’– the toll payable to the clique for doing business in the area – be it the tens of thousands of rupees made by the large electronics franchise or the small change on the beggars’ rag. You never said ‘no’ to them. If you did, there was no telling what might happen. Your shop windows could be smashed, rows of new TV sets along with them, and it would be all put down to political violence which had spun out of hand. An unruly motorbike could crash into your little streetside stall of fried goodies, running over your feet, crushing out the life in them, and you could be left only with neighbours cursing the city’s messy traffic.

Their anger had now turned towards Moidul, who had refused to pay the new rate the clique had declared last month. His grudges against the clique had the neighbourhood buzzing for a few months; rumours had made it clear that the powers ruling those streets already had their eyes on him, what with his refusal to stock the pamphlets and newspapers of the political party said to be behind the street goons. His refusal was more determined after the blind beggar, who used to beg not far away from his magazine-stall, was found one morning, beaten badly with some blunt object, though still alive. It had been a minor conflict of interest over the spot on the pavement the beggar had for himself, but the intention had been to set an example to all in the neighbourhood by harming those who didn’t play by their rules.

After arguing with the tola-collecters for about a month, Moidul had finally paid the price. A couple of weeks later, he had arrived to open his stall one morning to find part of the stall damaged. Someone had chopped the bamboo poles that had supported the structure. It had been done quite systematically, with a sharp object, an axe probably, only the poles in front, the gunny-cloth that formed a tent in front were torn open, the magazines and newspapers plundered, garbage dumped all over them. None of the neighbours had heard anything at all during the night, not even the rickshaw-pullers who slept on the pavement nearby, they’d been sound asleep, they’d no idea who had wrecked the stall. Moidul should have been more careful with these things, and it wouldn’t have hurt him to follow the rules of the streets either.

Home was a nightmare.

An old woman, from the shanty, up early to take her holy bath in the river, had stepped into a severed hind limb of a cow, right there in the passage where Milan had met the startled Sabeer. Dark-red cow-guts lay in a snakelike pile, and the walls where the woman used to paste cow dung cakes to dry were splashed with the blood of the animal sacred to the scores of other Hindu families that made up the majority of that shantytown.

Two neighbours from these families had found the old woman unconscious near the railway lines, sticky in her own vomit and tears.

Nobody in Moidul’s family had any idea where it had come from, or at what time of the night. But in the shantytown where they lived, someone had spread the wildfirelike rumour that Moidul slaughtered calves behind the warehouse where he lived, smuggling them in at night. Like most rumours in the slums of Calcutta, there wasn’t anybody to whom they could be traced. They seemed to have come out of thin air, like the flies of monsoon.

Before eight in the morning, moans of women had seared the rows of shacks fringing the river; the children had stayed in their homes, quiet with fear. And two of the men hung around with rusted iron rods in their hands.

Two of them, Sabeer shivered while whispering, in the large knot of people that had formed outside Moidul’s house that morning. There were two men with rusted iron rods in their hands – Ramesh-kaka whose wife never cooked anything special without sending a share over to Moidul’s house, and the seventeen-year old Pilot with whom Sabeer and the other kids played cricket on holiday mornings.

There was no explanation for the mob’s malice. That morning could have turned into a bloodbath in a moment’s whim. It was just stemmed somehow by Moidul’s good reputation and the fact that his wife Rehana and he had made friends in the neighbourhood. Kuchu, the leader of the low-caste burners of corpses at the crematorium nearby had cried himself hoarse that somebody was trying to fling grime on Moidul’s name…Moidul who was one of the most passionate organizers of the local Durga Puja, and just about every other Hindu religious festival held in the shantytown.

Besides, the limb hadn’t even been chopped halal style.

If they could bear to take a look, and did they know anything about how Muslim butchers slaughtered cattle? This one was nothing but a hack job.

The rods had come down like tamed snakes, and the crowd had melted away. But there would not be any dishes sent over from Ramesh-kaka’s house, never again, and Sabeer would never spend another holiday morning playing cricket by the river. Almost nobody would speak to them. An icy patch of silence and distance had been sealed overnight, between them and the rest of the slum.

They had been to the police, who had advised Moidul to pay up whatever he was asked to and forget about it all.

The clique which terrorized Moidul’s business neighbourhood was also the campaign machine for the local political party, their loyal election-graffiti painters, dedicated poll-booth riggers, hawkers for the party newspaper which Moidul did not care to stock in his stall. It did not sell.

The very next day, a group of boys in their late teens had grabbed hold of Sabeer on the road near his home.

‘The fun hasn’t even started yet.’ One of them had said. ‘If your father tries to open his stall without paying up, the next leg hacked out won’t be an animal’s.’

Better still, they should get the hell out of that area, take their miserable lives far away, they didn’t care where, maybe to the Muslim dump of Rajabazar or Metiabruz, and he would have his bones broken if he showed his face ever again in Girish Ghosh Memorial Boys’ School.

Milan remembered he had stood still in the passage, his body drained of sensations. For that long while, the terror on Sabeer’s face hadn’t nearly mattered at all.

‘Well, before anything else –’ even after all these years, his very first words after that long silence rang out in his own head – ‘you’re coming back to school tomorrow. You’re not throwing away your career and when hooligans threaten, you want to stand up to them, not do as they say!’

Both Moidul and Sabeer had been unwilling, cramped with fear, but Milan had managed to convince them after an hour in those damp, airless rooms. Rehana didn’t want Sabeer to go back either, but Milan had been stubborn. Much too stubborn.

‘And Moidul, you go back to your magazine stall. I have some friends in the bookselling business I’m going to talk to. And before anything I’m going to the police!’

That he hadn’t been able to convince Moidul, much to his despair at the time, turned to sad, relief later on. Moidul had seen the beggar lie in a back alley near his stall, the large gaping wounds on his calves still oozing blood, two of his ribs broken – a picture which had brought up anger once, murderous anger, but now only muddled his brain, and made his hands shake painfully.

Milan had been to the local police station anyway. Today’s meeting with the deputy director of accounts had brought back those memories.

‘Let me give you a piece of advice,’ the balding, good-natured police officer had told him. ‘A piece of advice more precious than anything you can put in your bank-vault, take my word for it. Advice no one will bother to give you these days; it’s a selfish world.’ He had reclined on his chair, inhaling cigarette smoke by the lungful. ‘Stay away from matters that you don’t understand.’

Something inside Milan had wanted to spring up with rage, but something else made him quieten down.

The police officer had gone on to explain, through hints and innuendos, one clumsier than the other, that it was no easy matter for the police to go down and make random arrests as it was an intricate system, well-established for over decades, with codified rules and clauses, that let certain groups be responsible for peace and quiet in certain neighbourhoods. The magazine-seller should have known better than to mess with the system with which, after all, higher powers had also come to some understanding.

The higher powers.

It was one thing to be shocked by the freshly chopped hind-limb of a calf flung at your threshold, quite another thing to struggle against higher powers.

And their tentacles were long.

Two days after he had returned to school, a few boys had carried a near-unconscious Sabeer into the staff-room. Apparently he’d been in a brawl, two of his front teeth were gone, and his face was discoloured with blood.

Before he lost consciousness, he kept whispering, ‘They wouldn’t listen to anything, Milan-da, they wouldn’t listen to anything, Indra wouldn’t…’

Indra? Indrajit Ghosh? Milan had been confused. Indra was another student in the same class, one who disappeared from class for months at a time. Milan might have suspected him of bootlegging tickets at movie-halls, but he looked harmless enough.

The headmaster of the school had called Milan in his office.

‘We’ll have to expel that Muslim boy in the twelfth grade.’ He’d seemed afraid even to take his name, as if it’d been a vulgarity of some sort. And then with difficulty, he’d uttered. ‘Sabeer. The son of the magazine-seller. And I don’t think it’s proper for you to go to their house and give them ideas. Stay out of things you don’t understand.’

This time, the spell was weaker, and words had come quicker to Milan.

‘Sabeer?’ At that moment, the name had been just as difficult for him to utter. ‘He’s one of our best students. We’re expecting him to rank in the Board exams.’

‘Exams are the least of our worries now, Milan-babu. That boy’s mixed up with some bad elements. These types bring the school to rot.’ He looked up at Milan with unmoving eyes. ‘Teachers getting mixed up makes it worse.’

‘Sir, do you know what had happened to him, his father?’ He wasn’t going to learn, not so fast, was he? ‘His business has been…’

The headmaster cut him short.

‘Listen Milan-babu, we teach, and that’s our business. We don’t stick our noses into what happens in the neighbourhood. There’s the police for that.’

Right! Milan had laughed, almost.

The headmaster had refused to discuss the matter any further. He had made up his mind.

That day, on his way back home, Milan had been accosted by three or four boys near the park. They were all between their late teens and early twenties in cheap but trendy clothes, fashionable hairstyles. Dusk was approaching.

The boy who looked the youngest had stepped closest to him, and spoke. ‘Sir, I’d stay away from the Sabeer affair if I were you.’

Milan had recognized the boy, with a swirl of disgust surging up inside him. Indra. One of the absentee students. He’d looked harmless enough before.

An older boy had stepped ahead. His hair had been parted in the style of Amitabh Bachchan, the action movie star who was all the rage those days.

‘You are married, sir, with a growing child. And your home is in this neighbourhood, too.’

Suddenly Milan’s mind flitted back to Sabeer’s muted whispers. They wouldn’t listen…Indra wouldn’t…

He had somehow stifled the flood of anger inside him. Tears, anger, shock, sorrow. He walked away as quickly as he could.

The boys hadn’t tried to follow him. Around the corner, he just heard Indra’s voice.

‘Don’t mess with things you don’t understand, sir.’

Moidul had to leave his business and move to another part of town.

Sabeer never got to sit for his Board exams.

Later, from time to time, he heard stories about Indra. Stories that had slowly ceased to shock.

He couldn’t say it all had been a surprise to him. Not after a lifetime here.

As he stepped into the bus, a shiny ball of happiness seemed to explode inside him. Happiness that scarred one like acid.

For years after Sabeer had left the school, every day as he walked into class and stared at the empty chair where Sabeer used to sit, somewhere deep down he would realize that the voices had remained. Voices reminding him, sweetly, tiredly, threateningly, that it was all business he didn’t understand; in between swirls of cigarette smoke blown at his face, impatient tapping on heaps of student files on the table. There was a gap somewhere, even between the dilapidated school where he taught and Moidul’s bamboo-propped newspaper stall, between his rooms in the lime-crusted house tenanted by clerks and school-teachers and the shantytown warehouse near the river where the roughly hacked hind-limb of a cow had terrorized an old woman.

Even farther away, a blind beggar lay in a back-alley with the vengeance of blunt objects on his legs, his ribs, his chewed leather body.

What happened in such worlds didn’t happen in his, never mind the mould and the mildew, and the grime, and the rust around him.

With pain in his limbs, a mist over his eyes and the acid of hunger scalding his stomach, he knew today that much of that distance was fiction. It always had been.

The bus wasn’t crowded. At this hour, one could sometimes even find a seat. A couple more hours and the scuffling crowds would start to pile up in great, sweaty heaps from the other side. The long commute home.

Milan found a place near the back window and sat down. His whole body seemed to cry out in pain, as if lying on a thousand electric needles.

Would he live to see the end of this day?

Happiness, the arrogant, killer happiness, the unreality of that distance between the rabbit warren of struggling tenants and the shantytown behind the railway tracks where the stench of cow dung cakes mixed with human and dog waste. The rabbit warren where they would still take exams, pick up clerical pens – a world out of which they had finally pushed Sabeer away. Far away where he belonged, they didn’t care where, to the city dumps where peoples’ urine mingled with their drinking water and where thumb impressions went for signatures, where else?

And there was the midsummer sun, tamed somehow in the rays that could stream in through the bus window, the illusion of a breeze wafting in as the bus made its way towards the south.

The story of the prisoner, a hundred years ago, maybe more…

He pulled out the folder from his Shantiniketan bag, opened the zip. A prisoner whose fine-spun, faded ink words had been given to him unasked, at the gnarled knots of fate where his life had touched Moidul’s, and Sabeer’s. On a strange evening that had marked the end of an era. Moidul had left and had passed on this life to him, a life in yellowed, faint words that held the sad promise of riches. What would he do with such a life?

Within the dusty yellow pages, the pearly handwriting, was a trapped human who had the body of a ghost. One that none could touch. Not then, not across the years.

I must be honest with myself.

I must not ask the question as if the last seventeen years of my life, the marriage-blessed life of unbroken iron and shell bangles and rich vermilion – I must not ask the question as if these years I’ve been truly alive.

I dare not judge the romance of the marriage of a frightened twelve-year old girl with an ailing aristocrat of forty-nine, alas, as I have known no other. And yes, I was born with the beauty and the auspicious stars that bought my way into a family, as my in-laws never tired of reminding me – a family my parents could not have dreamt up. But my fortune, or misfortune if you please, was never mine alone. There were tens of thousands of women in this land whom I’ve never met, will never see ever in my life.

Some of them I’ve known well, shared their many deaths, as much as another soul can.

Rashmoni was a girl my age in my village, a daughter in a family of daughters, seven unwanted wretches of female flesh. Her poor Brahmin parents had glowed with pride when, with a few weights of gold and a sizeable sum in cash, they were able to marry her off to a Kulin Brahmin, one of the very highest castes. And he wasn’t a corpse ready for the funeral pyre either – the nine-year old Rashmoni had been fortunate enough to get a husband who was, bless him, in his early forties.

But her husband wasn’t going to take her home with him.

It wasn’t the matter of letting the bride live with parents till she turned twelve, thirteen maybe, ready for the conjugal bed, which would have been the custom. He was never going to take her home.

Rashmoni’s Kulin Brahmin husband was, by virtue of his high caste, one of the most desirable sons-in-law a Brahmin family could have. To families struggling under the weight of unwed daughters, he was a godsend. Every Brahmin family wanted him to take one of their girls – and like a dutiful Kulin, he gracefully obliged. When he married Rashmoni, he had over thirty wives, in thirty villages spread over several districts.

He didn’t need to work for a living, of course. The profession of being a full-time husband brought substantial wealth. He spent most of his year visiting his wives spread over different villages, enjoying royal treatment at each in-law’s place for about a week or so, warming a wife’s bed for those few days for which the girl waited a whole year. Then he ticked off the girl’s name in the massive notebook which contained the list of his wives and moved on to his next wife, in the village next on his way.

For months before her seven days came up, Rashmoni would apply fragrant oil to her hair, red dye to her feet, prepare to cook her husband’s favourite dishes. We would almost not see her for those seven days. And soon they were gone, and Rashmoni would begin her wait all over again. For the next year.

Back in the past, the stopping of one male Kulin heart would mean the burning of scores of women in the funeral pyre, towards the ascent of the holy spirit of the sati. Today, they wouldn’t die. But would they live?

My childhood playmate who, heavens be blessed, still waits for her seven days in the year for her much-wived husband who, bless her vermilion and iron and shell bangles, still lives, checks his list of wives, moves from village to village.

Thousands they are, tens of thousands, wedded at nine, ten, twelve maybe, reared at parents’ home till they are ready to warm their husband’s bed, ready at fourteen, tearful, bearer of children at fifteen, sixteen, bound by the thresholds of their mud-thatched hut or marble mansion, wiping off their vermilion sign of marriage, smashing their shell bangles as their husbands leave the earth, settling down for death-in-life for the remaining thirty, forty, fifty years of their lives.

And they thought they could change the course of their lives by a stroke of the Viceroy’s pen! They can pass laws till the papers in the government offices have grown yellow and brittle, but who’ll dare pronounce marriage hymns before a woman whose ill stars have burnt the mortal body of her husband? Who’ll let the hair grow long again from those shorn heads, daub their parting with rich vermilion? The British Empire may live on for ever, but what can the British queen do to change the fates of thousands in this land ruled in her name?

But I’ve been luckier than most others. I had to live with only one shoteen, just one other wife of my husband, the solemn Sarala. My husband’s second wife had died many years before I entered these giant gates, and he hadn’t bothered to take more wives. He didn’t come from a Brahmin family, and therefore wasn’t a marriage-magnet like Rashmoni’s husband, but what do rich people need wives for? He had a harem-full of concubines, not at home, but at the high-class whorehouses of Calcutta, including the dancing and singing courtesan-girls from Lucknow and Allahabad. I didn’t have to wait for seven nights a year like Rashmoni, but many a night passed when I waited with his dinner ready, waiting to eat till my lord had his food, waited till the midnight hours when I fell asleep beside his dinner, fifty courses in ornately carved gold bowls and plates, the sweets of milk and cream that I had prepared with my own hands in the lotus-etched gold bowl only to wake up to the chirping of birds with the food cold, untouched next to me. My lucky nights were those when he would remember, maybe out of a sudden whim after a sip of wine, a tune of music or at the crease of smile on a dancer’s face that perhaps reminded him of his wife back home. On such nights he would remember to send one of his servants or his carriage-driver home with the news that his lordship would spend the night at the singing girl Zarinabai’s place and that I should eat and go to bed.

I should eat and go to bed, the manservant with a drooping voice who stood behind the curtain would say, never to see my face, just to relay his lord’s wishes to me. But how could I? Foolish and sixteen and hurt, dense and eighteen and weeping, naïve and twenty-five and rejected, I would stay up the whole night, with no more of a morsel or a drop than Saroj took on her fast days, drenching the linen with my tears, or stone-cold like a corpse. Till midday came and he would be carried in by his servants, half-asleep, half-unconscious with alcohol and last night’s exertions left on my bed.

I would start my life anew by nursing him back to life.

Sarala-didi, my husband’s first wife, was past her sixties and not given to the pangs of youth. Or maybe she had learned to live with it all over the decades of marriage in this hedonistic household. She spent most of her time at worship, reading the scriptures; I spent most of mine mooning and weeping.

It hurt so much more because it wasn’t like this before, before it had hurt so bad elsewhere, a very different elsewhere.

Married at twelve, I was believed to be ripe enough to warm my husband’s bed; looking at my blooming body unable to dam the tide of youth, my husband must have urged on the belief. The stay at the parents’ place, sometimes customary if the bride be young, was skipped, and I was brought overnight, in a four-carried palanquin, to the massive marble gates of my husband’s ancestral home in the great city of Calcutta, my tears at leaving my poor parents, my childhood playmates, the banyan tree behind our little home under whose kind shade I’d grown up, the large, moist-eyed cow whom I helped milk every morning, all my tears drowned under the loud music of the shehnai, the chant of the Brahmin priest, the ceremonial ululation of the countless women of this noble household, its wives and its maids.

To be honest, to swear on my sleepless nights that my husband spent in the arms of his favourite prostitute, the nightmare of our first night together, the flower-bed night of the wedding, never ever left me, not even when I sat with my husband’s cold, wrinkled, dead feet in my palms, shrieking tearful music off my lungs.

I was sharing the bed of a strange man older than my father, and he had been saying things I’d never heard in my life, touching me in ways no one ever had. He was tender with me, but there was a nauseating smell in his breath that years later I would learn to be that of alcohol, of the fanciest, most expensive kind from overseas, from the white man’s land. A strange night of revulsion, fear, swirls of confusion, tears of nausea, it was, the like of which I had never known before. And when the stale, soulless flesh of the strange man was upon me, crushing my tender bones, pouring vileness into my blood, his heavy-lipped, nauseating mouth had stifled mine from crying out in pain, the searing, bewildering pain that I felt between my legs that made me feel I was only inches away from death, that the green, broad leaves of my favourite banyan tree would glisten in the sunlight forever in a world lifetimes away from me while I got sucked into this blackhole.

In the inner quarters of the mansion, I met the women of the house, so many of them. Many were wives like me, from the ages of ten to sixty, some the unmarried and young daughters of the family. There were the shadowy, ghostly figures who lurked behind pillars and hall corners, guilty of being alive – the widows, the ill-omened wives of men who had died of age, illness or the excesses of their lives. I cannot say I hated the women, though for the longest time in the beginning I could feel their sheen of distaste spread around me like a sick halo, for having cheated my way into a family to which I didn’t deserve to be the dairy-maid, a halo that lightened in the course of time, forgotten by some, remembered forever by some others who would now delight in my widowed misery.

My first night in this mansion, which was my second night with my husband, was no different from the first, the night of the flower-bed, just more chilling by my fearful knowledge of what to expect. After the dark pain had blinded me once again, after I’d gasped for breath but had remembered not to cry out for fear of angering my husband, I had watched his heavy, loose-fleshed body topple away from mine and fall into a deep, snoring sleep of wafting wine-breath. I’d stayed awake, wondering at the sudden change of my life, puzzling at the luxury of the surroundings, a luxury so distant that I didn’t know them as such – the mahogany bed with ornate carvings, pillars and obelisks, the massive oil-paintings on the walls, the ivory spittoon on the Burma-teak table, the gold-threaded red Benarasi sari on my own body that cost more than my father made in a year. I’d stayed awake the whole night, half-scared of falling asleep in this new, strange place, too shocked for sleep after the spasm of flesh and sweat and force on my fragile, twelve-year old body.

A spasm to which I knew my own mother would send me back if I ran from it, crying into her lap. My eyes had weighed down just a little bit when I heard the birds outside, saw the sky redden, and I was startled awake. My husband’s heaving body lay next to me, just where it had rolled away from top of me, hours ago.

I had to get up. It wasn’t seemly for a housewife to sleep till late – one of the crucial lessons my mother had drilled into me, again and again and again. I arranged my sari, stepped out of my bed, careful not to wake up my husband. I saw myself in the huge Venetian mirror attached to the dressing-table. My slender frame looked strange, almost uncanny in the massive Benarasi sari and the silk blouse from which my bony arms stuck out like dry twigs. The vermilion powder dabbed on the parting of my hair had been smeared over my face, on my forehead, a thick smudge on my right cheek, from my husband’s exercise of his conjugal rights earlier in the night. I looked like I’d been bleeding from my face, the thickness of the crimson powder closing up to my right eye. I cleaned it as well as I could with the end of my sari, and stepped out of my room, shutting it carefully so as not to wake my husband.

I had stepped into the halls and courtyards of the inner quarters, my tentative steps knowing little of the world of domesticity, of the countless women of the household, a silken jungle of a world, affection and malice, jealousy and tenderness oozing through its intricate webs, its betel-juice-stained, key-jangling, word-weaving, yarn-spinning, tear-dripping, giggling, grimacing maze.

I didn’t know what the last night’s strange violence had branded on my body that led to the stream of smiling mouth-corners, squirting giggles, gazes that travelled up and down my trembling body, saucy words flung in the air I could make nothing of.

Sarala-didi, my husband’s first wife, in her early forties then, an age when you took leave of femininity as it pleased the male no more, had appeared quickly. She asked me if I’d slept well, and then, almost saddened that she had asked, told me to take my bath and join her in the prayer-room. Nothing began in this household before a bath and prayer, not even a morsel of food was to touch your tongue. Except, I learnt later, during the five days of the month when the woman is impure, when she isn’t allowed near the gods.

Many pungent words had flown that morning, most of which, at that time I’d understood nothing.

‘Entering these gates is a fairly-tale privilege for a poor peasant girl, and it looks like our brother-in-law has been extracting his dues to the last drop.’

‘She’s a young fruit, just beginning to bud, and our brother-in-law will not stop till he has sucked the last drop of nectar… You know men!’

I’d been arranging the holy tulsi leaves on the gold plate for the offering to the gods; my head was lowered, my lips were frozen. There were a thousand things to do before I got to eat anything, and words wouldn’t thaw on my tongue.

The giggle and chatter around me didn’t sound like hymns from the scriptures.

‘A pretty face you have, and a smooth body.’ A beautiful young woman, queen-like in my dazed eyes, but with much anger, much hurt in her eyes, had spoken directly to me. ‘But we’ll see how long you can keep our brother-in-law from Zarinabai’s lap.’

My ears had been close to bursting, my head had been reeling from want of sleep, from last night’s nightmares, from the curious female eyes that had been stripping me bare, burning me like acid. Then unbeknownst to me had been Zarinabai, the lissome siren of a courtesan on whom my husband spent half his earnings from the estate, whose warm body and courtly finesse would keep my husband away from me for endless nights to come.

The queen-like woman, I’d come to know soon, was the wife of one of my husband’s brothers, who, true to the tradition of the men of that noble family, tired of their wives quickly and went back in steady fidelity to their favourite courtesans. They did so out of the spells woven by these fatal women, but also to avoid the shame of being uxorious, tied under the sari-end of the wife, not man enough to plunge oneself headlong into the real pleasures of life, from which, the wife was but a minor diversion.

‘A pretty face and a smooth body is all very well, but they will only get you so far in this house.’ An elderly voice had spoken from the other end of the worship room; I hadn’t dared to look up to see. ‘It’s all hollow unless it can bring forth a son, an heir to the family name and fortune. If your body can bring nothing but daughters like mine, you’ll earn the pity of the lowliest maid in this house.’

So I started out my life in this royal labyrinth like a squirming worm who tries to hide from everything, everybody, is ashamed of her very being and forgets about it herself except for half an hour every night when her body is claimed for pleasure. Such is life even today, except that the nightly half hour was quick to vanish after the first few months, to come back only on whims, once a month, or six months, maybe. But the plenitude around me, the riches and the luxury that cradled my life, the gold I trod on, the diamonds I toyed with, created an illusion, which lasted a while.

There were things, I’d thought, I could do.

There was, for instance, that single afternoon that I’d never forget as long I live. That afternoon less than a year after my wedding.

I had never seen a Suhasini I saw that afternoon, and I knew not what to do.

Earlier, I’d thought it was the melancholy of parting with her daughter – the mist of sadness that was inevitable in every mother’s life when the time came for her daughter to leave her house and go to her husband’s.

It was our dollhouse game, where we lived through lifetimes of motherhood. We reared our dolls, sent the boys to school, the girls to the kitchen, celebrated their birthdays, and most grandly, married them off. That afternoon was the wedding of one of my sons with one of Suhasini’s daughters. I always chose to be the son’s mother. It was much more fun, with a lot more prestige than the bride’s family. Worst of worse, they had to pay the price not only in gold and cash, but in tears too.

I still remember my mother’s face awash in them.

Suhasini was something of the leader between us, not merely because she was older than me by two years, but also due to her superior skills in things like tap-dancing over scalded terraces and seeking out the juiciest young mango. When it came to crucial matters like playing the parent of a doll, however, even in our early teens, neither of us possessed a dash of naiveté, about who was the mistress and who was the carriage-driver’s daughter. I always got to choose the dolls for myself, and anyway, they all belonged to me. Suhasini provided the ideas and the dishes, the mango-pickles, all equally spiced up on the grand occasion that were to make me and Suhasini in-laws to each other.

A grand occasion it was, full of tiny gold and silver cups, dishes and vermilion-boxes, crinkly new dresses for our dolls specially ordered from the tailors, a little ivory walking stick for the groom, a gold crown for the bride. The only loss in being the groom’s mother was that your doll got a lesser share of the finery. Which groom could stand next to his bride in a show of jewellery and gifts? But I could endure that. After all, it would all come to my house, the bride and her weights of gold and her saris from Benaras and diamonds from Golkunda, and to top it all, the real-world gift that Suhasini made to the newlyweds – a jar of the most mouth-watering chilli-pickle and twenty pearl-white cowries that she had won in cowrie-shooting games with street urchins.

The grand wedding was a game I was destined to win from the beginning.

So I didn’t think much of the tears welling up in Suhasini’s eyes, even though the tree-climbing, river-swimming, wild Suhasini was the last person on whom I could have imagined tears. She’s softening up, I’d thought, parting with one’s daughter is painful enough even for a tomboy.

‘Now Suhasini, what’s all this?’ I’d spoken, pushing her gently on her knees. ‘Okay, next time I’ll let you be the mother of the groom. Don’t cry now, the wedding hour draws close and there’ll be no wedding if it passes us by.’

Suhasini had flung my hand from her knees with a force that had sent the dolls rolling, the jar of pickle overturned. A patch of oil appeared on the white silken dress of the groom. She had hidden her face in her hands, burst out in spasms, tears that threatened to flood our dollhouse.

I was first speechless with anger, but also quick to realize that the pain eating my playmate from within was a bigger, darker cloud than the sorrow of giving away a doll-daughter.

The story came out in fragments, in between a flood of tears I’d never imagined could live inside this wild girl.

Her father, Madhav, the carriage-driver had been fired by my husband, after a hourlong whipping by the servants. Since the last few days, my husband had been getting annoyed with his driving, and repeated warnings had seemed not to have any effect on him. One early morning on the way back from Zarinabai’s place, the carriage had fallen in a pothole that came close to hurting his master.

‘He didn’t get a wink of sleep…not a wink,’ Suhasini’s words were muffled between her tears. ‘He had to stay awake, upright on his seat, night after night, my father.’

Through more muffled fragments, I got a clearer picture.

The endless waits outside the brothels and the houses of the dancing girls were turning out to be a nightmare for the ageing Madhav. When his master went in to amuse himself, there was no telling how long Madhav would have to wait outside, in the rain, cold, or scorching midsummer afternoons. There was no season or hour to the master’s wish. Nothing for him to eat or drink either, as no one remembered him in the festivities inside. And there was no leaving his post, not for a moment, there were no telling when his master needed him. Once he had dozed off in his seat, and had the hapless luck to be stirred by his master who had been the very flame of fury, standing before him, wavering in his drunken stupor. Nights passed then, with the driver sitting upright in his seat, raging his own battle against the swarming mosquitoes, fearing to doze off for a minute. He was no longer young when his body could have endured all and still have done a perfect job of whipping the horses through a smooth journey back home after the master’s near-unconscious body was carried out from the courtesan’s home.

Madhav could barely move his aching limbs, or keep his eyes open during the following mornings, driving along the potholed roads, dodging past other carriages, other unruly horses, making sure that his lordship got nothing short of the smoothest journey home. The fatal day could have come anytime, and the time it did, the left wheels of the carriage sank into a roadside ditch, causing my husband to fall from his cushioned seat, onto the wooden floor of the cabin, get a stony blow on his right knee, the daze of last night’s champagne, Zarinabai’s seductive tunes smashed in his head.

For a whole hour, Madhav had been whipped in the servants’ quarters by the goons on the estate’s payroll, with my husband’s special fishtail whip before he had been allowed to catch up on his missed night’s sleep. But there was to be no room for him to sleep in the servants’ quarters where his wife and his five children had shrieked and moaned for him till the threat of the whip had danced before them, too. Madhav was thrown out of the estate, and he had spent the last two days in the fishermen’s shanties, near the river, broken, maybe not far from his last days.

Suhasini’s red-draped, rose-and-milk complexioned daughter, my son’s lovely bride stared at me over the circle of gold dishes and plates, the scattered mess of the dowry-pickle on the floor, and I sat still for what seemed forever. I couldn’t reach out and touch my sobbing playmate. I knew not how to caress that rough, lively skin under the coarse-textured sari.

For a few precious minutes during next morning’s chopping of vegetables, I had Sarala-didi to myself in a corner of the courtyard as we minced the white coconut meat into curved, papery flakes. I told her what had happened.

‘Can’t you request him, didi, to excuse Madhav this time?’ I’d swallowed lumps in my throat a couple of times as I spoke. ‘He’s been in his service for so many years, and it’s not his fault, really.’

Sarala-didi, who had listened to the story without an expression, never looking up from the coconut shells at hand, now looked at me as if I’d been a talking corpse.

‘You’ve no idea what you’re talking about, Kamal. These are not things for us to poke our heads into.’ She whispered, looking around to make sure the next group of women were far enough to be out of earshot.

‘But didi, how can you say that? The man is nearly sixty years old, and they whipped him half-dead! Suhasini said his loincloth was soaked in blood. And now is he going to starve at this age? Didi, you can speak to him, he will listen to you.’

‘You haven’t been in this house long enough, Kamal!’ Sarala-didi stopped her work for a moment, looked at me, long and hard. And that Suhasini will be your death one day. Don’t get entangled into their lives, they are of a different kind, and there’s nothing we can do to change their fate.’

What is that I can do to change mine? I felt like asking her. My life, unbeknownst to me, had become something I had no business getting entangled in! Who would dare wipe out the tears off Suhasini’s rough, sunburnt cheeks?

I had gone back to the papery, crisp-white meat of coconuts, my words dying within me.

‘Now Kamal, look here.’ Sarala-didi loved me only as one caged bird can love another. ‘Don’t get angry, my little one, this is the way the world runs, my dear girl.’

That lesson, alas, wasn’t going to come easily to me. Or else, what am I doing writing all this?

I’d been fanning my husband at his lunch, silently, as I knew he didn’t like talking during his meals. The little peacock feather fan in my hands barely created any air, that was provided by the professional fan-pullers who pushed and pulled, like spring-run puppets, the giant hand-operated fan strung across the room. But in this land, no husband could eat his meal without his wife sitting next to him, fanning him gently throughout the meal, waiting for him to finish so that she could sit down at his plate. In a poor peasant’s house that was the only fan they could afford, while in one like ours hired men worked at bigger, fancier things. But nowhere would the rite be complete without the tender, bangle-clanging, fanning hand right above the lord’s head.

As he moved on the course of fresh lobsters cooked in coconut milk, I spoke softly, ‘There was something I wanted to say.’ My heart was beating so loudly that I could hear it myself.

He seemed surprised. I rarely said anything on my own the few hours of the day I saw him, much less during meals.

‘What is it, Kamal?’

‘Can’t Madhav be hired back? He’s old, and he’s worked for so long at this house. Poor old man, where will he go at this age to feed himself?’ I had started with trepidation, but then rushed it all out in a single breath. I was too scared that I’d stop midway, lose my words, make a fool of myself.

The carriage-driver’s blood-soaked loincloth that I’d heard about, through Suhasini’s tear-choked fragments of words, of the fishtail whip I’d myself seen hanging on the wall of the main hall, would have to remain nightmares that couldn’t find words. I couldn’t be that suicidal, not even in such a moment.

He stopped chewing, and looked up. He looked at me, straight in my eyes that dropped at that very moment. I felt sweat appear on my upper lip as I looked at that deeply furrowed face of the ageing man, pale and leathery from his lifestyle, the face to which I closed my eyes during those now infrequent nights when the heavy body came crushing down upon mine.

‘Who told you about all this?’ His voice was calm, but I knew it was the calm that shaped the eye of the storm.

I had lost my wits already, otherwise why would I make the mistake for which I was to hate myself for the rest of my life?

‘It…I…I heard from his daughter, Suhasini.’ Fool, fool, what a fool I was!

My husband had looked away for a moment, thought of something.

‘Don’t meddle with things you don’t understand.’ He had resumed his meal. ‘What’s for dessert today?’

It was one thing to argue with Sarala-didi, to shed tears before her, but you didn’t do such things with my husband. The veil of silence had finally descended on me, like a shroud.

That afternoon, Suhasini didn’t show up, as was her custom to do, holding some wildflower she had picked, mangoes she had pickled.

I had been disappointed, but hadn’t thought too much about it. The girl needed time with her broken family.

She didn’t come the next day.

Or the day after.

Soon, a week had passed and I hadn’t seen my only playmate in this cavern of a house.

This time I didn’t make the mistake of speaking to any of the women in the family.

I asked Mokshada, one of my personal maids.

‘Suhasini?’ She had hesitated a little. She knew a day didn’t pass without my adventures with the carriage-driver’s daughter. ‘Their whole family has been thrown out of the estate, my lady. They were a bad lot, the father a drunkard, the mother a thief, and the children were devils all.’ During the singsong of the last part, she had probably forgotten about my scandalous friendship with Suhasini, but she checked herself again quickly. ‘Good riddance. That girl was just bad news.’

It was fruitless arguing with Sarala-didi, out of question doing it with my husband, and why would I want do it with Mokshada, now? After it was all over?

The tearful wedding of dolls was the last I saw of my fifteen-year old, life-giving playmate.

The bus had not moved for more than ten minutes. The driver had switched off the engine. He knew this was going to take a while.

Without the tired growl of the engine, the stillness felt like death. The gasps of the motor were the spasms of hope to the seasoned commuter in Calcutta. When it’s gone, people give up. They don’t even try anymore.

A sweating man sat next to Milan, naked from waist up, with a huge, empty wicker basket on his knees. One of those hired labourers who carried cargo by the weight, a common sight in the city during the day. The man kept dozing off, his head slowly rolling against Milan’s shoulders every few minutes. It would spring back every time the bus went over a pothole or came to an abrupt halt. Sometimes, Milan pushed it back in place. But now with the bus dead still, his repose was uninterrupted.

Milan too, had given up trying to put that tired head in its place.

The world looked different when he looked up from the yellowed pages. Looked, felt, smelled, sounded different. Something in the romance of the archaic-beautiful hand, the strange, spellings and word compounds near unrecognizable at places, the alien lilt of the syntax. He had spent his life in this language, doing his chores, teaching its hidden intricacies to students, swimming in its sea of promises as he carved out his own sentences. It was an age-old wisdom of Hindustani classical music that tunes and melodies, those sylphlike creatures, were all around you, always, swimming in the air; your job as the singer was to pull them closer to you, caress them, breathe with them, let them go, pull them closer again. The come and go, the drawing back and forth made music as it had made literature for Milan over all these years, the artful pulling of the word floating around in noisy fish-markets, street-sides, on the printed page, the artful release into his own sentences, a letting-go by which they became his forever. The dusty pages held the play in the language as it had been many, many years ago, when it had a different feel, smell, colour, a texture whose distant legacy floated in the stray words by the river, on the streets for him to draw closer, caress them, breathe with them, release them into his own creation.

If this writer hadn’t existed, if these pages with the handwriting like alien drops of pearl hadn’t come into being, would he have been a different writer, perhaps just a tiny bit different?

He couldn’t deny the romance of it all. Not the platitudes that such a long-lost bundle of old sheets could bring up with silken easiness – he shivered as he thought of them, shivered almost in the fear of loss – but still the romance of the fairy tale, the romance of the past of spun gold on which people everywhere are brought up. The Calcutta of gas-lamps on the streets redolent with the fragrance of rose-attar, the bulbul birds flown for leisure, the luxuriant-fiery feudal aristocrat, the ornate marble façade, the gold-carved, ivory-knotted palanquin to carry the bride, the clap-clap of horse-drawn carriages across cobble-stoned streets where red-faced British soldiers marched past in stoic files. How could he not, he who had seen many decades of the life of this land, many turbulent decades when canons burst and blood flowed and people starved and fashion of hair and clothes changed and changed and changed till they were back to where they started, he who felt his limbs crushed in a motionless bus caught in a rally to protest the policies of the IMF, passed through dank, musty stairs in government offices where mould and mildew held their festival of death?

He caressed the page open on his lap. His finger came away with a thick, silver-grey layer of dust, dust he felt he could die for, dust which brought tears to his eyes. He touched the pages like he had never touched them before, like he was touching the brows of a loved one, touching them as the loved one slept.

He was deliriously happy.

His right shoulder felt damp and patchy with sweat from the man’s drooping head upon it.

His mind floated back to the day they had come to him, unasked, hidden, dust-encased as they were today.

Moidul, his wife Rehana and Sabeer had moved to a couple of rooms somewhere near the railway station at Sealdah. It was a lower middle-class neighbourhood of seedy hotels and wholesale markets over which the stench of rotting vegetables from the markets hung like a heavy mist, all hours of the day and night. The mornings and evenings swarmed with commuters from the suburbs milling back and forth between the railway station and the roaring jungle of city traffic, the labyrinthine streets and lanes vanishing into the world of smalltime shops, factories, dealerships in wood and spinach, and prostitutes. But the rent was cheap, and the paint fresh on the walls, and Rehana would be able to turn it into a home again, soon.

But for Moidul, life was over. He had built up the magazine stall and the trade in old books over twenty-five years, scrap by scrap, selling his dead mother’s jewellery at first, his wife’s next, working at it eighteen hours a day, visiting every newspaper office in the city, waiting for hours for a discount price, collecting the books and magazines the booksellers in College Street had discarded, building it up over the years like a man possessed till he distinguished no more between the little bamboo-propped stall in Gray Street and the two rooms behind the warehouse near the river, behind the railway station. It was no more just a living. It had been a muted love for the written word that Moidul had to give up after real life had sucked him in right after high school, the end of his road as a student.

‘People talk of loving the smell of books. I think my father even loves the silverfish.’ Sabeer told Milan one day, ‘I mean, he gets rid of them whenever he can, his trade wouldn’t survive with too many of them around.’ He had smiled. ‘But secretly it’s different, I think. After all, they live off books too, just like he does.’

He was one of the few booksellers who stocked copies of both of Milan’s books – The Marketplace and Other Stories and Bricks and Sand: A Collection, and also the various known and unknown literary magazines where his stories had appeared, as well as numerous other obscure writers brought out by small presses in print runs of just a few hundred, sometimes.

Milan remembered, Moidul had the popular sports and film and fashion magazines strung out in rows in the front of the stall. ‘Cricket and Bollywood keep me from starving, Milan-babu.’ He used to say. ‘Once I have my stomach filled I can water weaker plants.’

A silverfish which lived with books, fed on them, watered their soil, tended to their leaves.

However, thanks to its nearness to two of the city’s major colleges, several coffee houses and restaurants frequented by the young, the starry-eyed and the radical, the back rows of Moidul’s stall never gathered too much dust. It was a cherished spot for many in the neighbourhood, and Milan himself stopped by often to browse through the new arrivals and for a few words with Moidul.

On their third day in their new home in Sealdah, Rehana had woken up from sleep to see Moidul’s lifeless body hanging from the ceiling.

Milan heard it from another bookseller. The hook in the centre of the ceiling had been bare, waiting for the fan to be installed. Mindful not to wake up his wife and son in the next room, Moidul had climbed a stool, knotted a rope around his neck, and had kicked the stool away from under his feet. Just like during executions. But Moidul hadn’t hooded his face. He had died with his eyes agape, like a dead carp at the fish market, staring at the bare walls of his new home.

Milan couldn’t say if his pain had been more than that moment that evening when he’d seen a rubble, a heap of ashes and broken bamboos, torn gunny-clothes and the last shreds of paper, on the spot where his favourite bookstall had been, and the shadow of a smiling man who smelled of old paper and dust. He had seen this the very evening Moidul’s family had moved away to Sealdah.

At the time of his suicide, Moidul was thirty-nine years old.

One of Milan’s joys these last twenty years or so had been Sabeer’s company. He had kept in close touch with Milan all these years, stopping by his house every few weeks. Once in a while Milan would find himself in the various pharmacies where Sabeer worked, not far from the Sealdah railway station, and they’d walk down to a roadside tea-stall for a cup of tea. He knew that Sabeer smoked, but he would never do so in front of Milan. He was still his ‘teacher’, and for Sabeer, it was scandalous to light up before him!

In the old tradition of the Indian guru, the teacher was a kind of a surrogate father to the student. There is no greater victory – said the Sanskrit hymn – than a defeat at the hands of a student or a son in the very arts one had taught them. The student or the son – the distinction was never important.

Milan rarely felt for the students in his school the way he felt about, say, Gautam. Gautam was not only his only child, but one of the quietest boys he’d every come across, lost in a silence most people couldn’t make much of, not even Milan or Ila. Nothing like the students in his school, choice obscenities forever hanging on their tongues, spit and catcalls wrestling at mouthcorners, the chalks they flung across decrepit classrooms and used to scribble words and phrases that didn’t bear retelling. Fights broke out often in the school compound, on the streets, and shirt-tucked knives or broken bottles were quick to claim small streams of blood, shrieks of pain, whirling violence the police and local big brothers had to rush to stop. These teenagers were as familiar with pouches of drugs sold on street corners as they were to squat bottles of alcohol, mixed up with broken pencil stubs and old, tattered copies of textbooks they sometimes possessed.

There was the odd student who tried to swim against the tide, floundering against fierce currents of crime and poverty that, in the end, always sucked them in. Looking hard, if his eyes became moist with strain, Milan could see the bottom of it, the weed of drugs and drunkenness and chains that gripped their struggling limbs, but still he could never reach across a vast gulf that was always there.

Sabeer had reached out to him in a way that brought alive the old cliché about the guru being a father. Over the years, if he thought about it, he had in fact come to spend many more hours talking to him that he’d ever spend with his only child. Gautam’s quietness was not that of the poet’s or the artist’s, it was something hard to capture in words rather, almost an outer coating of the reservation with which he met life at all moments. He had met his father’s favourite student many times, often appearing in the middle of their spirited conversations, leaving with a smile and a quick ‘hello’. Books and magazines from his father’s bookshelves had gone out to Sabeer every few days while Gautam had not even opened more than one or two books at casual moments. Ila had prepared an elaborate meal for both of them on many occasions, and Milan had nudged Sabeer towards an extra piece of fish in a way he’d often forgotten to think about Gautam. Ila would often joke about it. Milan loved Gautam the only way a man can love his only child but something in Sabeer touched him in a way that lay beyond blood.

Gautam understood it too. Ever since his teenage years he’d grown up hearing of Sabeer almost as often as he’d heard his father talk about his teaching, his books and the small social life he had. The glow in his eyes whenever he mentioned his favourite student had never escaped his son. Not that it had ever affected Gautam, or the way he loved his father. Gautam never seemed to feel jealous; neither did he ever lay a claim to the alien world his father shared with his student, so close to him in age and yet so far away in nature, and so deep in a bond with the father they sometimes seemed to share.

That day Gautam looked as shocked as never before when he had learned that Sabeer was never going to come back to the school, never to visit, even to meet Milan there.

Milan had tried for all he was worth, for days on end to get Sabeer to change his mind, enroll in another school, take the board examinations. At the back of his mind he’d long cherished the hope that Sabeer would study literature in college, maybe choose to be a journalist or a writer afterwards. The guru often had the student’s life mapped out in his mind, and none saw anything amiss with that. The memories had been hard to get over – long summer afternoons at tea-stalls near the school, walking past paralysed traffic on the streets, in the park next to the bookselling district of the city, storms rising in their tiny earthen cups of tea over parallel theatre playing to popular taste, daily newspapers and their transparent prejudices, the pitfalls of free verse.

But Sabeer had let him down. He had turned his face away from the world of education, and that was that. By letting go of the life his mentor had so clearly etched out in his dreams, he had killed a part of himself that he couldn’t summon if he wished to. He didn’t speak much about it, but flung a net of iron silence about the subject. The silence, Milan quickly realized, spoke a resistance no force could bend.

For a while Milan had hoped that Sabeer would take up his father’s trade. The love of books, he knew, was in his blood. If he didn’t study, or write, Milan had thought, maybe he would buy and sell them.

But Sabeer had vehemently stayed clear of the printed word. He had kept working at various chemist shops and labs, working through apprenticeships towards better paying jobs.

The years had passed by.

Sabeer hadn’t married. Milan had never discussed this with him. Their relationship was on a different plane, and the intimate bond they shared had never conflicted with the little spheres of silence that must linger between those who had once shared the teacher-student relation. Sabeer lived with his mother Rehana, who had aged greatly, suddenly, from the sudden gaping holes in her life, turning into a woman with a rusty mind whose memory served her poorly.

After several years, Sabeer took up a job as a technician at a laboratory run by one of the science departments of the University of Calcutta.

Then about a year ago Sabeer’s life changed again: Rehana died of a second cardiac arrest at the age of fifty-four.

After Gautam had come home that evening and heard the news from his father, his behaviour had left Milan with full of gaping questions. Gautam had been silent, unnaturally so, and his face had been bereft of shock and sadness. That had been a dinner of near-silence, one or two words about the stock of rice running out and the quandary about whether to buy kerosene oil at the government ration shop or in the black market.

But the change had been clear to Milan from the very next day. Gautam would ask about Sabeer much more often than he did before. How is he doing on his own? Near Sealdah station? What’s the rent like? Did he have to get special training to be a lab technician?

Sabeer had taken care to stay away from this neighbourhood ever since they’d moved. Gautam, overcome by the demands of his job, was unable to get away. The two never met since Sabeer left school.

But he always remembered when his father went to meet his former student, the only real student he’d had, as it were. And the questions had always waited, till the evening, late evening, sometime, if Gautam worked overtime.

Where is he planning to go?

Bombay?

Dubai would be hard, but he’ll do well if he can survive there.

It had been a slow shock for Milan to realize that it was Rehana’s death that had brought Sabeer suddenly closer to Gautam.

It was after his mother’s death that Sabeer made up his mind to leave for the Middle East. Technicians and labourers with pharmaceutical knowledge were in demand in the Gulf, and people said that the pay was good.

Milan was one of the few people who knew that it really wasn’t about the money.

Sabeer had taken in as much of this city as he could, maybe much more. He couldn’t push himself any farther.

‘The other day I’d walked over to Gray Street.’ He told Milan one day. ‘Right in front of the electronics shop, just where the lane to the college branches off.’ The exact location of Moidul’s magazine stall, nineteen years ago, a tiny patch of the neighbourhood that would forever burn in Milan’s mind. He never went that way if he could help it, and he knew Sabeer never did, either.

‘I’ve no idea how many years it had been since I’d last been there. Ten or fifteen, probably.’ Sabeer had chuckled. ‘Anyway, they’ve set up a food stall there. Chicken rolls, Chinese noodles, chilli chicken. I stood there and had a chicken roll.’

Milan hadn’t known what to say.

‘Anyway, I started chatting with the guy a little bit. It was around late evening, and the day’s business was almost over. So I asked him, sort of tactfully, how much did he have to pay to the local big brothers to do business there.’ Through the dry noise of the chuckles, a drier chill had cut through Sabeer’s voice. ‘You wouldn’t believe the amount he named. I guess it really has been a long time.’ He broke into halting bout of laughter. ‘If they didn’t burn his stall, I wonder how many times father would have to fight them over the raising of rates!’

Milan had to smile too. It wasn’t even that difficult.

‘Well, inflation works for criminals too, you know.’ He had said, his voice down to a whisper.

Sabeer had to get away from this city.

He had seriously started looking for opportunities in the Middle East soon after Rehana’s death.

Several seemingly interesting opportunities came by, but they turned out to be false leads. In the undefined, slightly dangerous world of blue-collar immigration to the Gulf, there appeared to be no dearth of hidden snags and red herrings – fraud and false promises at every step. Strange rumours spread in the wholesalers’ markets and in the shantytowns at Sealdah and Rajabazar, in the crowded railway station platforms and the hardware stores under the bridge, strange lures to the oil-rich lands beyond the Arabian Sea.

Finally, about a couple of months back, one of the more reliable job search agents brought promising news about trainee positions as chemists’ assistants in Oman. It seemed clean, no huge advance to be paid, just the first month’s salary, after everything was in place. Sabeer would have to go to Bombay first, meet some of his prospective employer’s representatives. But it was pretty much a sure thing.

A week back, Sabeer had asked Milan over to his place for the first time. ‘And you’ll stay for dinner,’ he had said.

He knew that his old teacher wouldn’t pause to think about eating a meal cooked by a Muslim.

That evening, entering the dingy rooms in one of the old houses over the Sealdah flyover had brought surprises for Milan. The memory was warm, reminiscent of a real household, cared for, a small miracle for a young man living alone. There was a cleanliness about the house. But it was also a memory, a warm, empty feel of things past, as there were signs of Sabeer’s impending departure. There were packed boxes on the floor, a large steel trunk stuffed with clothes, couple of bloated gunny bags. After what seemed like a lifetime in Calcutta, Sabeer was leaving, never to come back.

A few moments in the bare warmth of that place had brought to Milan, like a hallucinatory dream, the realization as to why Rehana’s death had brought Sabeer closer to his son who hadn’t seen Sabeer for many years.

May God take you away before he calls me.

Ila used to say that all the time.

Even if we die days within each other.

Sometimes, when Milan was lost in his thoughts, he got his pajama strings all knotted up, Ila used to come out of the kitchen, loosen them with turmeric-stained fingers, tiny blobs of mustard oil staining the white fabric of the cotton, no matter how carefully she dipped her fingers in water before answering Milan’s agitated call. Sometimes, when his mind was clouded by something in school, an impending strike of the bus-drivers’ union, a line of poetry.

He lost several pens a week. Thankfully, most of them turned up before the day was over, from the pit of the bag in which he brought fish from the market, from under the crumbly tables at Naran’s tea-stall, most often from the piles of papers and books under his desk, right at home. He could rarely remember when he needed a haircut.

He wouldn’t last one day without me going after him every step of the way.

Ila used to laugh and sigh at the same time as she spoke to her neighbours, to the woman who sold paan outside their house. To Milan.

And Bubu. He looks strong from outside. But he’s a softie within, and never wants to let his mother out of sight.

Bubu was Gautam’s name at home, but Ila used it much more than Milan did. She was wrong about her son though.

That mattered so little, however, as Sabeer’s tidiness had quickly revealed its many tiny holes. Standing in Sabeer’s room, Milan realized that Sabeer didn’t have pillowslips for his pillows, hadn’t changed the worn drapes since Rehana had changed them for the last time a year before her death. The clean corners of the house couldn’t hide all the debris of living Sabeer had missed, the tidy single man, and Milan was startled to notice things he would have never sensed in his own home. Had Rehana thought how her son would live after her life had fallen like an unripe fruit, in its sad, drooping fifties?

Did she think that he wouldn’t last a day without her?

Without pillowslips, new blinds, little pools of dust swept to awkward corners, forgotten about?

It was almost as if Gautam had been able to have a mental picture of Sabeer’s place, his life with the mounds of forgotten dust at the corners, the worn drapes that Rehana would never get to change. Milan’s mind had felt numb at the look of the jutting, weed-overgrown cornices across the stale drapes, while Sabeer prepared dinner in the common kitchen downstairs. Benumbed, he had wondered if the couple of rooms where he lived with his son still felt like home after Ila had left them. What massive chunks of past lay under their bed, in packing boxes drummed upon by rats’ scurrying feet every night, dust thick on their cardboard surfaces like overgrown grass? Old clothes? Unused rice? Silverware from their wedding decades ago? He realized that neither he nor Gautam had ever thought of checking on them, cleaning under the bed all these years after Ila’s death.

They’d lasted years now without the mother, the wife. Would Ila have called this living? Would the rats’ feet drumming the boxes every night have woken her up, sending her berserk the next morning, enlisting Milan and one of those neighbourhood boys, workless, schoolless souls, to pull out past from under the bed, sweep rat-shelters to oblivion, cleaning, sweeping, till the room smelt like a water-sprinkled, incense-fragrant worship hall in the evening? A kind of a magic neither father nor son would ever understand?

Did Gautam miss his mother more than he showed?

Sabeer had come up soon, steaming dishes carefully balanced in his hands in two or three trips from the kitchen. The dinner had been wonderful. Large slices of rui-fish cooked in thick mustard, posto, daal, goat-curry, a chutney of sour young mangoes, and rashomalai from Milan’s favourite confectioner in Baghbazar.

After dinner, Sabeer had taken Milan to the next room. It wasn’t much of a room, more like a tiny cubicle for storing things, windowless, cavelike.

But Sabeer had turned on the lights on a strange sight them.

Heaps of old books and paper had choked the cubicle, from wall-to-wall. Milan could tell that most went back decades, not only from their colour and the dust on them, but also from the dates on the covers of some of the magazines in front. They had been arranged in erratic piles, heaps of newspapers tied in stacks, old issues of Sportstar and Sportsworld, India Today, Femina, Desh, Anandolok, just about every Indian and Bengali magazine on films, sports, literature, news; heaps of books with colourless blank covers that Milan knew so well, the product of manually operated small presses, slim volumes of poetry, pamphlets of street theatre.

‘The supplies father kept at home.’ Sabeer had said quietly. ‘Whatever he had at home the day the store was burnt. He brought it over to this house.’ He stared ahead pensively. ‘I didn’t throw away a scrap.’

Milan hadn’t known what to say.

‘I can’t take any of these with me.’ He turned towards Milan. ‘Mashtermoshai, I have one last request of you.’ Milan hadn’t found words to respond yet, had just looked at his old student.

‘I want you to go through them and take anything you like.

‘Father would have been happy with the last of his stock with his favourite patron.’

He laughed dryly.

‘And 100 per cent discount this time, along with the dust and silverfish.’

Milan had spent the next one and a half hours in the room while Sabeer had gone back to his packing.

The evening had uncovered its jewels slowly, several issues of older literary magazines publishing radical poetry and experimental art that had now ceased publication. An early edition of Buddhadev Bose’s novel Tithidore, two volumes of poetry by Bishnu Dey, a pamphlet of Naxalite activism, a few more of old street-theatre groups of Calcutta. Even a copy of a Bengali translation of Charles Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil, in surprisingly fine shape. He’d also picked up an issue of Sportstar with the story of the legendary Indian batsman, Sunil Gavaskar’s debut test series against West Indies. Gautam, he knew, would love it.

The strange, yellowed, loose pages had lain under a pile of men’s magazines that Milan knew Moidul used to sell to sheepish college boys.

They had been bound with a red velvet ribbon. Milan hadn’t given them much of a thought at the time. But half-absently, he had decided to take them, because the handwriting and the spellings had looked charmingly archaic, and the coarse paper was nothing like anything he’d seen before.

Sabeer hadn’t thought much about it either.

‘Father had strange collecting habits. He would go from press to press, one newspaper office to another, even show up at the larger booksellers at College Street to see what they were pulping.’

Sabeer had left the following Tuesday.

Milan didn’t know if he’d ever see him again.

At his study table back home, under the weak yellow bulb and the gasping ticks of the old, cracked-dial clock on the wall, dusty pages had begun to look different. They went back farther, much farther than he had thought at first, and the archaic word-compounds and the lilting syntax revealed a lost world on the very first page.

For a moment, he had felt confused, very confused.

Somewhere, perhaps half a mile ahead, a mile maybe, the traffic knot had started to clear up. The cars and buses ahead had starting inching forward, the slow chain of movement sent back tremors, the dead line beginning to come back to life like the massive, mottled body of a python, the head first, then through its body, its tail.

Impatient honking and an exchange of abuses sprayed the air, and the flanks of buses were thumped hard, as if they were horses and the nudge would speed them up.

It was around three in the afternoon. With luck, the bus would make it to the office in another fifteen or twenty minutes.

The near-naked man to his right was jerked awake by the engine springing back to life. As his head swayed away from Milan’s shoulders, a damp patch was left on his shirt there, along with a fine trail of spittle along his shirtfront.

Milan looked down on the pages on his lap. The weak breeze wafting in through the window ruffled them just a little.

Several lines after the point he had left off earlier were missing, the paper eaten by silverfish. But the lines became clear again from the bottom of the page.

What right do these words have to exist?
The gold and diamond and ivory around me, before my shuttered eyes, the mahogany furniture and high-arched marble halls had spun their spell on me, driven me to think for a moment that I belong to myself, that I can make a difference to anything, to the whip-cracked back of an ageing servant, the ugly tears of a playmate.

Do my words shape up on these pages, words on which ink takes a moment to dry, do these words shape up in ghostly defiance of the wheels that grind the laws of karma around me?

I was born in a family of moderately well-to-do farmers where the boys never got to know letters and numbers beyond what was necessary to carry out the business of their livelihood. And nobody had ever heard anything so outlandish as girls learning to read and write. A girl was caringly taught to draw intricate designs on thresholds and floors with the auspicious white paste of ground rice, all the arts of healthy, tasteful cooking, cleaning the house with holy Ganga water and cow dung, doing the hair of sisters and friends in diverse braids. What more did a woman need in life?

In the grand mansion of my husband’s family, in the great city of Calcutta, a woman learning alphabets was not outlandish. It was forbidden, tipping over the brink of the dangerous. It was in the city that heathen Hindus had made the British pass laws to put an end to widow burning and get widows to be married again! Things were drifting out of control once again, and there was talk about the education of women, to be sent to their schools, those run by white nuns!

Here it was not outlandish, but a much-feared reality. My father-in-law and all his brothers believed with passion that letters in a woman’s life was the beginning of the end, the last burning log in the pyre of this great Hindu civilization trampled upon by barbaric Muslims and now pawned to the red-faced British. A woman who went to school was no different from a prostitute in one of the city’s brothels.

My husband didn’t share the strong opinions of his father and uncles on this matter – I doubt if he had strong opinions on anything but fine courtesans and wine – but surely he would have been aghast if he’d ever found out what I’d been doing, behind his back, through those endless stretches of the day when I was left to myself.

It started when my Pratap, my son, was about five years old.

I took my sewing and sat in the room next to the one where his tutor gave him his daily lessons. I could hear the middle-aged man’s ritualistic voice drilling in the letters, and the child-voice of my son repeating after him. One of the maids had entered the room and upon seeing me, had been taken aback. This was far from my wing of the house and I never came here.

‘I didn’t know you were here, my lady!’

I had motioned her to silence, lifting one finger to my lips. ‘Pratap cries if he knows he is far away from his mother.’ I’d whispered. ‘I’m going to sit here and keep a watch on him.’ A lie as worse as any I’d ever uttered in my life, which, alas, called for many, many more. The soft, slightly effeminate boy was lost when he clung his little arms around me, but there were other dreams he was lost in too, none more than the hours of his lessons. He loved them so, the little honey-brat! He was fond of his teacher, the learned man from one of the new colleges I heard had opened in the city, and he loved to spend with him what I feared was his favourite hour in the whole day.

While he sat with his books, Pratap wouldn’t notice if his mother were thousands of miles away.

And the nice learned man never came to know he had two pupils; one before him and the other behind the curtains, one that he saw daily and the other whose face he’d never see. Sitting there with my sewing frozen in my fingers, I tried to become my five-year old son, that tender bundle of flesh that had been wrenched out of my fourteen-year old body, locking the cursing tongue of the proud housewife who’d said I’d never be a real wife of this grand family till I gave them a son, a true heir to the name. It was this five-year old body that I would give my soul to enter now, to lisp my way through the sound of the alphabets of this language of ours I had used like rice and air and water, break down the speech that had danced on my tongue all the years of my life.

It was a losing battle. It was something that you do at five, not nineteen, when you’ve seen too much, heard too much to unlearn the language flowing within yourself, the language of offering betel leaves to your husband after lunch, of gifting him a shy smile after getting that diamond-studded necklace. To learn it all over again through the set of the vowels and the set of the consonants, the fine shades of distinction between the similar sounding vowels, the sets of twins, twelve vowels in all, and the forty-six mind-boggling consonants, many of which I’d flung unawares at Suhasini in my impatience at her impossible tree-climbing speed, spilled around our open courtyard with Sarala-didi and the other wives in the spirited mist of gossip, the forty-six material bodies of our native language that moved its kindnesses and cruelties, the syllables of Zarinabai’s siren-song and the orders to Madhav’s back to shed blood, forty-six and twelve branches Pratap would climb up and leave me behind just the way Suhasini had years earlier, on the tallest mango-tree of our grove.

There are those sons who steal from their mother. The pots of pickles she makes and keeps in her larder, the sweets of milk and molasses and coconut in the special seasons, the toy drum he plays so annoyingly that she puts it away out of his reach. My sweet Pratap stole nothing from his poor mother; his nature was not to peek and nose around. And what need had he to steal, he who could have the world at his tiniest wish?

It wasn’t him. It was I who stole from him.

Daily after his studies were over, he would come running to me, wrapping his frail arms around my neck and repeating in glee much of what he had learned that day. I listened to his child-words more carefully than he would have thought. My Pratap cherished the new skies of the tricky vowels and consonants, the maze of numbers and stories and poems, but he loved his hour of freedom as much as the next child. He’d have his writing slate, his chalks and the books all scattered as he sat on my lap and chattered away, demanding stories and songs from me, staring at me with his large child-eyes till my heart would break with the weight of longing.

For the longest time, I had seen the slim book with the red cover.

I knew that was the magic book containing the tree of vowels and consonants. So many days had passed when I’d longed to open its pages and ask my gleeful son the meaning of the strange marks that stood for the letters, and I know he’d have loved nothing better than throw open this world to his mother. But the maids were moving around all the time; it was too dangerous.

So one day when Pratap had run off to play with his cousins in the other wing of the house, I left that room with the slim red book under my sari, held close to the sewing that never got done.

The five-year old was a sight the next day! His brows had wrinkled, and he had marched up and down in distress.

‘Mother, I can’t find my book, and my teacher will be here in an hour.’ He had rummaged his little nook of books and paper and slate and chalk, and my heart went out to the tiny wrinkles on his forehead.

‘It’s a little book with a red cover.’ Even at five, he was man enough to know that letters wouldn’t mean a thing to his mother.

‘Where did you keep it, my dear?’ Would the heavens rain curses on me for playing such a game with my boy! ‘Did you take it with you yesterday when you went to play in the south wing?’ ‘No mother, I never take my books with me when I go to play.’ That was stupid of me. ‘Oh what will I do now?’

‘Mokshada must have thrown it away while sweeping. I’ll call her right away.’ The magic-book of vowels and consonants couldn’t just have vanished in to thin air. I had to pour blame where I could before things began to look suspicious, maybe reached one of the sisters-in-law, many of whom knew my strange ways…

So I called my personal maid and cried myself hoarse. ‘You must have thrown the book away. You’ll never learn, will you? Haven’t I warned you enough to be careful, now how will Pratap take his lessons today?’

The poor bewildered girl tried to open her mouth a few times in protest, and I must say her work around the house was rather impeccable, but I silenced her with louder, angrier words than anyone had ever seen coming out of me. Even Pratap forgot his worries, looked shocked, puzzled out of his precocious five-year wits.

I concluded the matter before the drama rose any higher and got out of hand, dismissing Mokshada with a tirade of rather meaningless threats. And I turned to Pratap.

‘See what that stupid girl has done? You explain it to the tutor today, and just ask Haran-babu to get you a new book tomorrow. These things happen, what can you do?’

Why didn’t the heavens strike me down at that very moment?

Haran Munshi, one of the managers of the estate, promptly arranged for another book to be sent to his lordship’s son the very next day. Like many petty matters, it never reached the men of the household. It went just the way I had hoped.

Was there a moment of solitude in the rotten house! I’d curl up in my bed, trying to make sense of my stolen jewel, and some maid or the other would come barging in, to change the linen or sweep the floor, polish the brass and the gold or to ask what shall be cooked for my husband’s dinner. If they saw me with a book, I could just wait and see the fireworks! The scandal would spread like wildfire in the maidservants’ quarters, and then a nosy maid would toss the news around while braiding her mistress’s hair, and beyond that I couldn’t bear to think.

And what tricks would the letters play with me!

What sense would I make, staring at their squiggly arms and antennas. The sounds of the twelve vowels and forty-six consonants had come to me through the curtain, rolled over in a swirl that told me much less than I thought. Sometimes I couldn’t quite be sure if I was holding the book upside down, or if I would ever be able to match the memory of the maddening twin-vowels ringing in the heavy voice of the tutor, and then echoing in my son’s youthful throat.

I decided to take a risk beyond my dreams.

I went back to my place behind the curtains as Pratap took his lessons from the tutor. I went back there everyday as my baby would be lost without his mother close to him, carry my sewing with me, under which lay the red-hot speck of sin, the slim book of letters, the baby-crawl sentences, pictures to go along with it for the budding five-year old mind and the restless nineteen-year old soul. I would spread it out on my lap, half cover it with the sewing, and try to follow the parts that rang in the stately voice of the tutor, the clear-stream voice of my son, tumbling and faltering a thousand times, but dragging myself along.

I had to forbid the maids not to come pottering around, cleaning and going about their petty chores as the noise, the brushing and the sweeping and the annoying jingle of their anklets disturbed my son’s studies. They’d have to keep it all for the hours after Pratap was done, and his mother was done with her sewing and keeping a watch over her baby who cried so when his mother was away.

Sometimes I wished that my son would really cry when his mother was away, far in the other wing if he couldn’t hear the jangle of her keys. I would feel more like a mother then, a little less like the sinner that I was. But my little Pratap had a steelsharp strength somewhere under those folds of soft baby-flesh, and a lost daze where he didn’t know himself, much less anybody else…

And no one came, and I listened to the two voices on the other side of the curtain, and struggled with the letters, the baby-crawl sentences, and the squiggly pieces with unruly arms and antennas slowly took on a new life under the shadow of the thread and the needle, the sewing that was never done, the arms and antennas and the maddening vowel-twins, the letter which looked upside down and that which hinted the image of a scrawny aunt. All that had formed my words of meaningless affection to my sobbing friend Suhasini, the shy three syllables I uttered before my husband during dinner, the pungent words that were often flung at me in the open courtyard, during the chopping of vegetables, in the worship room.

A year went by.

It goes without saying that the story of the maid misplacing Pratap’s books couldn’t flourish beyond that one time! Not after the threats after she had so carelessly handled the slim red book of alphabets. Naturally, my collection didn’t grow beyond that one magic book whose loss had distressed my son. But thanks to her carelessness, Mokshada was relieved of her duties of going through Pratap’s books. The task of cleaning and caring for them was therefore left to me – who else would take care of my son’s most treasured possessions, just the way the cowries, dry fruits and dolls had been to his mother? Sometimes a book or two would come away with me by mistake, or I would forget the passage of time sitting at the desk while my child played outdoors and the maids had been sent away to obscure chores that would take them hours to finish. It was strange to mouth the shaping of letters on the pages, and realize I’d been telling the old fairy tales I’d known from childhood, under the neem tree of our village, on the terrace tasting pickles with Suhasini, the same tales frozen on the pages, in encrypted letters cracking out of their shells. The tales of Lord Rama, the god who had walked this land, his devout wife Sita, the bloody battle of the royal families at the battlefield of Kurukshetra, the tales I’d grown up with in the air, in the tunes of minstrels humming one-stringed instrument in the fields of the country, in the crumbling voices of the old woman of the villages. The same tales from the myths and scriptures and folktales seemed alien on paper.

But soon Pratap started going to school. As he grew older, he would spend more and more time away from me. It would break my heart so, it would. But I knew that he loved me just as much and his growing distance from me was not so much of his own choosing, but the tradition of this house that demanded that male heirs grow up under male influences, away from the weakening softness of the women’s quarters, in the hunting grounds in the country and the wrestling and fencing training in the outdoors and not listening to tall tales in the kitchen, under the moist sari-ends of mothers and aunts and sisters.

But Pratap was a question, a gaping hole for the family, even the crushing wheels of law that gyrated in this house. He would steal into the kitchen and my rooms, the fresh-faced, bubbly eleven, twelve, fourteen, fifteen-year old, shame of shame, eat his meals at my lap, throw his growing, strengthening arms around me in sudden passion. He would sit on my lap and listen to tales like he used to, the maids stepping in and rushing out redfaced, their tongues bitten in shame at having appeared before the young lord unknowingly. Who would have thought he would be here in the women’s quarters and not out taking riding lessons?

Those days, my husband spoke to me more than he had ever done in the past, always in annoyance. ‘You’re spoiling the boy, do you realize that?’ He would look at me while I looked down, at his feet and mine, red-dyed. ‘He shouldn’t sit here chatting with the women when he should be out learning the business of running an estate. Don’t forget, he’s the one to carry on the family name.’

But there was a world to which even I lost Pratap, everyday. A world where I had made the abortive bid to follow him.

It would not do justice to blame my chains, even in the days when I had sat behind the curtains and had faltered behind the quick mind and energy of my son as he leaped ahead in his mastery of the alien castles of knowledge. It would not do justice at all, as he took to words and letters and numbers, sentences and books and the mass of papers that lay aplenty in this strange castle, like a fish sucks in water through its gills. The slow breeze that wafted into the women’s quarters with news from the world outside brought the delight in the genius of my son, his quickfire mind that impressed all his tutors and his weakling body that would not live up to the demands of the wrestling master.

These days, Pratap went to school, and no excuses about how my child needed me around could take me there, outside the doors where I hadn’t set my foot since the evening my palanquin had entered them. He had his own rooms in a different wing of the mansion now. There was no need now for me to worry about cleaning and arranging his books and papers. The estate had appointed men servants to look after his comfort. My heart cried after the missed days, the missed hours and moments when I could have combed his hair, parted it neatly after his bath, spread out fresh clothes before him to wear, arrange the bowls around the gold plate and feed him. My heart cried out and somewhere in there was a tiny muffled grief for the dance of the alphabets on paper that I didn’t see anymore, the strange dance I had made friends with.

And then Saraswati, the goddess of learning and the arts sent me her blessing through her sister Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and prosperity, the goddess who was never to leave this great house.

I found it on the bronze plate in the worship room, lost in the heap of flowers and holy leaves, ready for offering to the gods. It was a slim volume – the gods didn’t think I was ready for anything bigger yet – with the sacred portrait of the goddess Lakshmi on the cover, a picture which I couldn’t but immediately bring up and touch on my forehead in a gesture of reverence. But treasures just as sacred lay inside.

Words, words, words, in neat, thick rows, in the musical roundness of the chants that brought them to life during the prayer ceremonies, words raining down on the desert of my life. The barren stretch where my other tongue, brought to life deep inside my sinister mind, had been beginning to lose its spirit, coil back to the lifeless heap from which it had emerged.

The song of the goddess Lakshmi, chanted during her worship sometimes, is the song every Hindu girl of Bengal grows up learning by rote, chanting it playfully with her playmates in games of make-believe, and then again before the house altar as an adult, gathering up her pile of good deeds to bring showers of blessings upon her family. The poetry rang in my head as I looked at the lines on the Ganga-water stained paper, the story of the goddess, her life with her Lord Vishnu, her dainty footsteps on the threshold of people’s homes on the full-moon nights of October that ushered ages of happiness and prosperity.

One of the Brahmin priests who worked in this house sent word around a few days later that he had left behind his book of Lakshmi’s ballads in the worship room. I sent word through Mokshada that I had it and it would embellish my little shrine of Lakshmi in my room from now on. May no one deprive me from the words of prayer, holy words that swirled like perfume in my room, blessing the air, the life within. Surely the noble priest could find another book?

Who dare question such devotion?

The drops were ever so rare. Words too scarce, healthy sentences, the rules of grammar and the grace and beauty of prose flung in my way; rarer and rarer as my son grew up and away from me. Sometimes when the words came, like the blessings of the gods, like remains of a meal thrown to the famine-stricken, I found myself forgetting, the meaning of one arm here, another antenna there, the secret tongue of mine brought alive by my sins lose its life, slowly, coil back to a quiet death.

Who would have thought widowhood would open up a new life before me?

‘Milan-babu…Milan-babu…over here.’

It was his name called out again and again. A chant of spirits. A chant mourning him, that pale spirit roaming midsummer Calcutta, floating away beyond touch and sound, beyond even his own senses.

Somewhere far behind, someone was calling him. As he came out of his daze, they all flooded back to him - the heat and the hunger and the humiliation of it all, the fatigue that could fling him down on the burning asphalt. Who was it calling his name?

Three young men and two young women walked up to him. Milan saw them through a vague mist, their smiles and hand-waving, the boy with the beard and the green T-shirt, the girl in a pale blue salwar suit…pale blue, was it? Two of the boys had burning cigarettes in their hands, and suddenly Milan felt a rush of panic inside him, at the thought of the red tips crushed against his parched skin, dusty shoes slammed at his knees. That afternoon, nineteen years ago, when three boys had stopped him near his school, they hadn’t touched him, but they had the strangest look in their eyes.

Tears welled up in his eyes as he looked around. There were people all surrounding him, and busy traffic. Should he try to run? What did they want with him? Had they all found out that he had slunk upstairs to the school services office, ignoring the call to boycott government business? Did they have guns? Would he live beyond the next few moments? The face of the old wall-clock in his room came back to him, the stained glass dial, the grime on its corners swam before his moist eyes, he wanted to touch the cracked glass of its face before they stubbed their burning cigarettes into his body, put a dagger through his ribs.

Milan-babu, it’s me, Sudeep.’ The bearded boy was now less than a couple of feet away from him; the words were coming from him like from within a deep hollow. ‘Are you all right?’ He glanced at his friends for a moment.
And this is Rini, Gargi, Dipanjan and Pratik, all of us from Roadblock.’

Sudeep.

And Rini, Gargi, Dipanjan and Pratik. And one boy with no name. Boys and girls from Roadblock. Of course.

The aches in his body returned with vigour. The bruised hand throbbed. Roadblock was the literary magazine that had published one of Milan’s stories in their last issue, out end of last year. A nicely produced magazine, with decent typesetting, minimal proofreading errors, without no obvious axe to grind. The cover of that issue had been by a young artist who worked in the tradition of the Kalighat craftsmen, the folk art style that became hip from time to time, the painter had a good touch. There had been a face of a woman on the cover that had even afforded glossy paper, a face among a host of other things, in a backdrop of deep black, and Milan’s name, in the list of contributors, had been entwined around the nose-ring, like those the goddesses wore. ‘Bin Laden’s Dollhouse’ – Milan’s piece had been more of a darkly comic sketch than a story. The editors of Roadblock had loved it, even though they weren’t a very political group, but they had loved the wordplay that Milan now thought was a little too cocky. And they had promised two hundred rupees for his contribution for which funds had dried up soon, but they were able to give him ten copies of the issue, and a promise of a life subscription.

‘Sudeep. Of course. And Rini and Gargi and Pratik.’ He repeated mechanically. ‘So what are you all doing here?’

Youngsters fresh out of college, all of them. Rini, he remembered, was in fact finishing off her degree in Film Studies. All in their early to mid-twenties, with the same force of belief as the angry protestor against the IMF who had stalled him earlier in the day. They raised subscriptions, pulled together the few rupees they made from private tuition, rented an old letter-press, stayed up nights to go through galley-proofs checkered with a thousand errors on poor quality paper to produce slim volumes that they hoped to sell from book fair stalls, doors of coffee houses, on the lawns of the art-film theatres of the city. Till the funds dried up, one of them left town on a job, the press closed shop.

‘We’re going over to the Alipore campus of Calcutta University. There’s this talk hosted by the university women’s caucus,’ Dipanjan said.

‘Oh, really?’ Milan looked at them tiredly. ‘About what?’

‘On the state education system. Finally something people care about!’

Yes. And there’s quite a buzz around the group of people speaking today.’ Rini said, enthusiastically. ‘Why don’t you come with us, Milan-babu?’

‘I wish I could. But this is not a good time. By the way, how’s the new issue of Roadblock coming along?’

Milan felt faintly ashamed at the fervour in his voice that he couldn’t hold back as much as he had wanted to. The forthcoming issue of Roadblock was bringing out a long excerpt from his novel-in-progress and an interview with him. It had been a nice hourlong chat with Rini and that restless, long-haired boy, Dipanjan, in the College Street coffee house, over tea and snacks, about Milan’s near-faded childhood in erstwhile East Bengal, now Bangladesh; dark days in post-Partition Calcutta where he had emigrated to after the bloodshed of 1947, work as errand boy in local shops in north Calcutta, pinching small change to pay college fees. Literary influences, slowly, lovingly picked up through long hours at the National Library in Alipore – Bonophul and Buddhadev Bose and Henry James and Colette and Pablo Neruda in translation. Forty years of teaching at the government school of the neighbourhood with erratic electricity, stolen benches and bits of chalk, students wandering in from the local slums by mistake, wandering out, quills still with life in them, an inkwell still running, a burning desire to tell a story, one’s story, the drivel of senility?

This was the only thing he was going to get in print this year, as the new editor of the arts section of the daily where he sometimes got a byline had refused to take any more of his reviews. None of the big publishing houses, of course, were any friendlier than before.

Wandering youngsters it was to be then, long-haired restless boys and girls studying Film Noir, dilapidated letter-presses in garages, would-be garages of would-be multistoried housing complexes, breathing on rupees raised at coffee houses, college caf…s, private tuition, the young artist who worked in the style of the Kalighat craftsmen, stream of errors on cheap paper, one’s name entwined around divine nose-rings on a cover that looked almost impressive.

He waited. The heat and the hunger and the throbbing around his temples had disappeared for the moment.

‘Actually,’ Sudeep seemed to stutter a bit, looking back and forth between Milan and his friends, all of whom seemed to look away. ‘We wanted to talk to you about it. But we haven’t seen you at the coffee house this last week.’

‘I couldn’t have been at my own funeral if I died one of the days this last week.’ Milan felt the beads of anger return to his body, its cruelty on his body and soul, beads rising with the mist of sweat on his arms. ‘All I’ve breathed these few days is the air of government offices. I haven’t seen the face of a pension cheque for eight months. After this week, I don’t think I want to see it anymore.’

He remembered talking about this in his interview. Who would read the five-hundred copies of the new issue of Roadblock, even if Sudeep and Dipanjan and Gargi burnt their young feet on the molten asphalt of College Street, hawking the slim volumes, who but sad souls like him who strolled around on city streets at mid-day, afternoons, looking out for new films, running after neverborn pension cheques?

‘It was actually about that issue, Milan-babu.’ Sudeep said. ‘We were wondering if you knew of any presses that would produce it. At the rate we can afford, of course you know our budget.’

Milan turned around for a second, looked at the large building that housed the government office where he was headed. There was more light here, wider roads, but the house had cavernous stairwells, dank spaces that beckoned him, in the quest of his lost pension file.

Feebly, he asked, Why, what happened to the one in Bowbazar?’

‘They’ve changed from letter-press to Xerox offset, and their new rates are absurd. Three hundred copies for the price of a thousand. And they have a bunch of new orders. Wedding cards…the wedding season is coming up. And then orders for business cards, there are a couple of computer training centres coming up in the neighbourhood. The owner told us that he will do our stuff only if we can pay competitive rates.’

Didn’t they all? Sarkar Printers on Gray Street had printed a couple of generations of poets and protest playwrights, but Pradip Sarkar, the son and the new owner wanted to leave the letterpress behind, open up an internet café and a STD booth, complete with fax and photocopying facilities. Broken Arrows Press, publisher of Milan’s short story collection, had to move elsewhere. Three old presses in Maniktala had to be sold out to make room for the new multistoried housing complex. And the cards were everywhere – wedding cards, business cards, brochures and calendars that fanned the lust of printers.

‘I know places, Sudeep, but they’re all going the same way. Shankar-babu of Broken Arrows Press gets it out of his brother-in-law’s press which mainly does labels of bottles and cans. It’s a huge favour, really, and only done for family.’ Milan smiled, raising his brows lightly. ‘I thought you youngsters had better connections.’

‘We looked for opportunities pretty much all over the city.’ Rini said. ‘The ones that are still open are asking for absurd prices.’

Sudeep said, ‘We’re beginning to wonder if we have to call it a day.’

‘It’s a shame, especially with this issue,’ he went on, ‘I think your interview was explosive. We would have gone all out in the coming book fair to sell copies. And we were also carrying a play by our new playwright, Sumantra. His play, Spindrift is a masterpiece of street theatre.’

Milan wondered where they kept the material for the press. The excerpt from his novel, his interview with Rini and Dipanjan, Sumantra’s play Spindrift, the paintings of the young artist working in the tradition of the Kalighat craftsmen. In Sudeep’s house, maybe. In his room, on his study table, under a pile of newspapers, magazines, collections of Brecht plays, heaps of cigarette ash, unwashed laundry? Tears had welled up in his eyes while speaking to Rini and Dipanjan about the forgotten days, from another life almost, of work as an errand boy in local shops, the abuse thrown at refugees to the city after the Partition, the dark struggle every day, for forty years in a poverty-stricken city school…tears not at the memories, but at the thought of a hundred, maybe three hundred people reading his words, standing near the fast-food stalls at the book fair, waiting for the bus, a handful perhaps seething in rage against the nation inherited from colonial rule, a government that always failed to deliver its promises, even seething motions of protest against the World Bank and the US dollar.

‘I’ve seen that happen before,’ Milan said. Anyway, it was a good run. Four regular issues – not bad for a litmag.’ Months would go by, Sudeep would take up a job as a medical representative in the provinces, Rini would go off to Delhi for a career in the media, Gargi would get married and be a content mother in Golpark, the nameless boys would scatter, they would have seen the last of each other; Sudeep would have to empty his room for the new tenant, his papers would go to the trash, the tear-moist words poured out one long afternoon in the College Street coffee house to two passionate youngsters would vanish in the city’s bowels, along with the pages of Spindrift, pages typed at five rupees a page at the streetside typist’s and empty bottles, cigarette ash, copies of the four issues of Roadblock that had survived the invasion of wedding and business cards.

‘We can return the transcript of the interview if you want, Milanbabu.’ Rini said. ‘It was beautiful. Maybe some other magazine will publish it?’

‘Can’t imagine who!’ Milan smiled. ‘Never mind, you might as well keep it as something to remember me by.’ He turned around and looked in the direction of the office. ‘I have to get going. You know these government offices.’

This was a waiting room of sorts, near the stairwell, across from the long corridors lined with rooms with yellow plywood walls. Rickety fans hanging from the ceilings made the kind of monotonous creaking noise that seemed to hint that summer humidity would continue till the end of time. A light whitewash had done a poor job of effacing the graffiti and fungal spots on the wall, the cracks like maps of vast, famine-stricken continents.

He had to wait his turn to enter one of the rooms fringing the corridor to meet the district inspector.

Two young men sat with a few empty chairs between them, staring at the liver spots on the wall with a kind of nervous abandon.

To Milan’s right was someone he couldn’t quite have imagined in a place like this. A boy not more than twelve years of age, probably ten. Most likely from a struggling household; his clothes were old, and his body seemed to have outgrown them. A rootless waif, with adulthood closer around the corner than it would have been in a well-cared for child of the same age, a boy who swung his legs awkwardly, thumping his heels against the legs of the chair, with a vicious glint half-hidden in his eyes.

Overhead, the fans coughed.

One of the frozen young men stirred for a second, shifted his elbow from one knee to another. Flies buzzed around his face.

The letters of application floated to Milan’s mind, the seven or eight or ten or heaven knew how many more letters he had written addressed to various officials of the school district office. He would take the hand-written sheets of paper to the typists on roadside stalls who worked on rusted Remingtons under flapping tents to shield out the summer heat, charged ten rupees a page for faintly yellowed, ungrammatical and misspelled transcription of Milan’s appeals to ‘look into his unfortunate case’, frozen in the bureaucratic formalese they had been taught to use in ‘official letters’. He would bring them up to the musty halls, up the flights of stairs again, nestling the typed pages like newborn babies that needed to be swathed in cottonwool, lay them down with hope and trepidation on the desks of chatty, tea-sipping clerks who raised a dismissive hand to acknowledge receipt, to wave him away towards another trek down the dank stairwell, on to the streets, lavish with instructions to come back on Friday by which time his letter of application would have been read through the inksmudges of gnawed typewriter ribbons. There would be copies of course, copies on inferior sheets placed under carbon paper on the cylindrical trunks of typewriters, copies with fainter inksmudges passing as letters that Milan had been advised to keep ‘for his records’. He never heard of the original letters ever again, where they went from the paper-littered desks on which he laid them down once daily, but the copies sank in his Shantiniketan bag, in its breathless darkness, nurtured by cheap folders that once held student papers. Some of his spirit had wanted to wrestle itself out through those letters, his spirit that had bent at the knee and wept, for the lost pension of an arthritic old schoolteacher who’d stood in crowded buses every day to come all the way.but the stock-phrases had stifled the tears, the broken-hearted spasms, the stock-phrases and expressions gleaned from English First Books and letter-writing courtesies – ‘I hereby request you to look into this importunate matter as expeditiously as your busy schedule will permit you…’ ‘I remain, sir, your faithful servant…’

Seven or eight or ten, twelve or fourteen, he had copies of them all. With atrocious spellings and syntax bequeathed by half-literate pavement typists that shamed him, in poor paper that would come off in flakes in days not far away, in the cavern of his Shantiniketan bag, in cheap cardboard files that once held student papers.

They would come off in flakes, vanish in the dark of their nestling nooks, just as his words of memory poured out to Rini and Dipanjan, in Rini’s rushed hand, on large sheets of paper, lay on the study table in Sudeep’s room, waiting for the letters of the press that would never come. Words and a novel-excerpt, an avant-garde play called Spindrift that would now pass into the garbage, with heaps of cigarette ash, empty bottles, junked magazines, medicine brochures. What happened to the letters he left at the clerks’ desks all these days? Sudeep’s pale ghost seemed to ask in his mind as he emptied moist reminiscences into the dump, recapitulations from the early days of an independent nation when a boy from East Pakistan had roamed the streets of Calcutta, working as an errand boy in shops, stealing passages of heart-rending beauty from moments at roadside bookshops.

Absently, he groped inside his bag for the copies of the letters. He always carried them around. Who knew who might ask for them, and when?

The feel of the hot, sweaty day was all around, cutting through the whir of the fans overhead.

His groping hand came up against a sheet of paper, and he pulled it out of the bag. They were not the copies of the letters he’d been looking for, but the form he had filled out a couple of minutes ago at the front desk. It was a form that asked for his essential information, his business at the office, whom he was here to meet.

The form lay loosely on his lap. He slipped his hand inside his bag again. He had to find the letters right now. He wished he had taken back his novel-excerpt and the text of his interview from Sudeep and Rini today.

‘You are number five thousand six hundred and sixty-five.’ The voice springing up on his right startled Milan.

It was the boy who was seated next to him.

‘My grandmother is five thousand six hundred and sixty-two. So you will have to wait till she comes out. And then those two men will go in. He will go in first.’ Even though he had lowered his voice suddenly, he had let out a glimpse of his age by pointing an awkward finger at the young man on the right, closer to the door, who had smiled nervously at the boy.

Milan’s hand had stopped moving inside the loose bowels of his bag, but he had forgotten to bring it out. Something in the quality of the child’s voice had struck him, touched an old well of despair. His accent neared that of street urchins, slum children, the ‘s’s especially, the lazy drawl too, and yet he looked more middle class than one who had tumbled out of the slums. Worse, it was too familiar. There were those children in the lower grades of his school, often from the garment factory slums near his house, the kids who played with marbles on the streets, frothed obscenities at their lips before they were old enough to understand their meanings.

‘Oh really?’ He said. Your grandmother is in there then?’

Yes. She has gone in to see the big officer.’ With the reply, the boy lifted his weight up on his arms, his palms flattened against the chair, his dusty feet planted firmly on the floor, his body swaying in the air. A small glob of snot sneaked out of his right nostril. Noisily, he drew it in with his breath.

‘So you’ve come along with your granny?’

Yes. My grandmother had her cataract operation, so she can’t see very well and I go with her wherever she goes. She holds my hand while crossing the streets.’ He corrected himself. Actually I hold her hand all the time when she is out of the house. She can’t see anything.’ ‘My grandmother was a teacher in Santharani Girls’ School. Arithmetic teacher, and she used to be very strict.’ ‘Santharani Girls’ School?’ Milan paid closer attention to the child’s half-lisping, half-literate drawl, feeling suddenly drawn into the conversation beyond a groping curiosity in the restless, almost adult-ish boy.

Yes. Santharani Girls’ School.’ He repeated, thumping his bony backside down on the chair. The two men were out of earshot. Snot had started running out of the boy’s nostrils again, and Milan saw thick lines of grime along the young folds of his skin around the neck, in his ears. His unruly hair needed cutting. Over forty years of teaching in a school, he had almost come to be observant about these things only as a woman could.

‘So what is your grandmother doing here?’

‘They are not sending her the cheques anymore. So she is speaking to the big officer and he’ll have them sent to her again.’

Your grandmother doesn’t teach any more?’

‘She used to teach, but she is too old and now cannot see very well after the operation. She was a very strict teacher and all the boys in the neighbourhood were scared of her.’ A note of pride crept into his voice. ‘They couldn’t do anything to me as they knew I live in her house.’ He snatched some newspapers and old magazines lying on the table before. Your moustache is strange!’

Milan touched the end of his slight, salt-and-pepper moustache almost unconsciously. ‘Well, you see, I’m a teacher too, and it helps to have a scary moustache so that the students listen to me.’

The boy looked at him incredulously. ‘You are a teacher, too? In which school?’

‘Girish Ghosh Memorial Boys’ School, in Baghbazar. Have you been to Baghbazar?’

‘No, my grandmother only lets me go as far as Amal’s stationery shop near the railway crossing. She says that there are kidnappers around. But I can take care of myself and screw the bastards!’

The tone of fuming, helpless bitterness was as shocking as were the obscenities on the young mouth, the soft, grimy lines around the lips that had begun to show a hardening beyond his age. Milan thought of the boys in the lower grades of his school who seemed to have strayed in the classrooms by mistake, from their slums and working class homes, scattering cracked marbles and spitballs and coarse words on the last benches, vanishing just the way they’d come. But had he ever sat so close to one, seen the unruly glob of snot breathed in and out so near his strange moustache.

‘And which school do you go to?’ He asked the boy, pretending he hadn’t heard the last words.

‘I used to go to a school near the bus stop.’ He said, with the careless abandon of a child who knows the world in terms of his familiar markers. ‘But I stopped going after my father lost his job.’

One of the young men had left the room. Perhaps he had gone out for a smoke. A couple had walked in and sat on a couple of chairs around the seat the young man had emptied. The woman was whispering something urgently to the man who stared ahead indifferently.

‘But why did you stop going to school?’

‘Oh my dad lost his job at the biscuit factory after the bastards sold it off. Now the bum just sits and mopes around, drinks our money away. Useless piece of shit, bloody Bhaskar!’ He arched back on the bony chair, stretched his arms and cracked his fingers in the way street-side workers did on tea-stalls early in the morning. ‘Do you have the money in that bag? Granny said that the hundred rupee notes had to be tied in a bundle in brown paper or they might be stolen in a bus.’ He bit his lips, looked worried. ‘Don’t tell her that I told you about the money, she’ll be mad, the old witch!’

Milan wondered if the boy wasn’t a little touched in the head. The adult ring in his voice, the carelessness with which the vile words were flung out sounded nothing like a child’s, and yet what did they all mean? Hundred rupee notes? Money in his bag? The sound of traffic was a muffled roar here, from the street outside that was one of the busiest in the city, and the boy’s restless voice seemed to recede into the background, merge into the roar outside. But the boy stretched out his hand, touched the form on Milan’s lap.

‘That’s your name, isn’t it? M-I…M, I, I’d learnt the whole alphabet in school, but I forgot. Granny is always after my ass to sit down and study.’ He ran his fingers on the sheet of paper and Milan noticed that they were rough and callused, stained with nicotine and grime. ‘But it’s such a drag and I’m too tired in the evening. She’s a schoolteacher and knows nothing else.’

‘So what do you do in the morning? Play with your friends all day?’ Milan tried to bring cheer into his voice, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the strange, callused child-hands, fingers running over the form lying on his lap. ‘What’s your favourite sport, cricket or soccer?’

‘I have no time for playing, mister.’ He looked up from the papers, and the look of disdain was clear on his dirt-smeared face. ‘I work in a factory. I used to work in a cigarette factory before, but the bastards threw me out.’ He paused, drew in his breath menacingly, spat out the words like a serpent’s hiss. ‘Suckers! Now I work in a firecracker factory. One of these days I’ll bring home a firebomb and blow it up under bloody Bhaskar’s ass.’ His fingers curled up, blood drained from his small, dirty knuckles, the fist formed was a fatal knot of flesh and bones. ‘It’ll blow his brains out, spill his guts on the road!’

‘Can you do this?’ In a moment he had loosened his fist of fury, flattened both his palms against his mouth with his elbows sticking out in either directions, and blew out air to make the most perfect farting noise. Long, gasping and diseased. The woman stopped whispering and stared scandalized at the boy, but the man would not be roused out of his indifference.

‘That’s diarrhoea.’ The boy removed his palms from his mouth. His face had reddened from the exertions, and he was a little breathless. ‘And then there’s the one out of a full stomach, say after you’ve come home from a wedding dinner…’

This time the angle between the two palms crushing his mouth was different, and so was perhaps the force of the air blown out. The fart was pining and mournful, but also shorter.

‘Those are stinkbombs. Here, can you do this one?’

The woman had now moved her scandalized stare from the boy to Milan, she thought that the boy was with him. That was some elder indeed – what other than a careless distant uncle, a pampering grandpa maybe? What if the peons and security boys threw them all out for making a ruckus in a government office?

Not on many occasions had Milan felt so thankful for his forty years at a school with its irregular stream of slum children, street urchins, staged fights in the manner of Bollywood film heroes. He’d been in a class with fifty of them, and more. One had to be gentle with them, always, and get them distracted, which was never difficult. They had the attention span of two-year olds.

‘That’s not a nice thing to do here, you see, this in an important government office and there are big officers inside. Why don’t you tell me about the firecrackers you made? You must be a very brave boy, making firecrackers and rockets and bombs?’

‘Officers, my ass.’ The boy farted through his mouth again, kicked the table hard so that the newspaper slid down on the floor, the front page awkwardly staring at the ceiling, ‘COMMUNIST PARTIES ORGANIZE RALLY TO PROTEST IMF POLICIES…MOVIE STAR EVADES TAXES’…and to the right, ‘EAST BENGAL LOSES LAST HOPES OF LEAGUE’.

‘They’re all thieves, granny says, from the prime minister to the clerk.’ The farting continued in intervals, between the words that were thrust out, carelessly, with venom. ‘The fat officer said granny would have to pay him six thousand rupees to get her pension cheques cleared. That’s the going rate in this office. No files cleared without grease in the wheel, six thousand in ready cash.’ He let out a spurt of wind after the diarrheoa fashion, as that seemed to be his favourite. ‘She had all the money I got from the firecracker factory in envelopes. But the hundred rupee notes had to be wrapped in brown paper, tied in strings.’

The paper floated down on the floor as Milan’s body seemed to lose all sensation. The form he had filled up a few minutes ago lay around his feet, surrounded by grimy slippers, the page stating his name and information and business, and need to meet the officer inside.

‘Grandpa, you dropped your form.’ The paper had caught the boy’s attention and he had stopped mouthing farts. ‘You are number five thousand six hundred and sixty-five.’

‘My grandmother is five thousand six hundred and sixty-two. You will have to wait till she comes out. And then those two men will go in. And then you, and then it’ll be those two.’ He pointed at the couple; the woman frowned and the man grinned listlessly.

‘Grandpa, are you all right?’ He jabbed his bony elbow into Milan’s ribs. It was hurtful, and brought tears to his eyes. The boy had become worried at his silence, seemingly with a familiar kind of worry that he had grown up with, spent much of his life in the midst of. ‘You’ll need the form when you go inside. And the cash, and then they’ll clear your file.’

‘Yes of course, my dear.’ Milan said. He still didn’t have the strength to pick up the form. It seemed to mock him, his own name and information, the words with which he had filled out the blanks carefully, beyond the grasp of the little boy next to him who knew things he didn’t.

‘You know a lot about things here.’ His voice was weak, almost a whisper. ‘Have you been here many times before?’

‘Oh yes, many, many times. I’ve lost count. But then granny said it’s no use coming till we could save the money, so we came again after a few months.’ He paused, pointed a finger at the door. ‘They have put new doors, the old ones were half eaten by rats, I think. And a man downstairs, near the door, used to sell pink ice-cream bars. He’s not there anymore, probably kicked the bucket. And back then they used to stamp the forms after you signed them, with a blue box inside.’ He pointed at the form, still lying at Milan’s feet. ‘It’s getting dusty. They’ll make you write a new one if this one is spoiled.’

Milan was only half listening, and he made no effort to pick up the form. The boy stooped and picked it up, placed it back on Milan’s lap. ‘You are number five thousand six hundred and sixty-five. It’ll be over an hour before you can go in. First, these two men…’

Slowly, Milan took the boy’s bony hand into his own. He spread open the fingers, looked at the lines of dirt and grime on the palm, the stains of chemicals and nicotine under the nails, in the creases of the skin. The boy stared a little vacantly, but did not pull his hand away.

‘You should go to a doctor and get these stains checked.’ His voice was a listless whisper. ‘You’re too young to be working at these factories, and these could be chemical burns. And you should go back to school. Not to the one close to the bus stop, a better school.’ He sensed tears muffling his words, and he stopped.

The boy now pulled his hand away roughly.

‘Oh I’m fine. One day I’ll bring home a firebomb and blow it up under bloody Bhaskar’s ass. I can let off a firecracker on my bare hands and they give me a rupee every time I do it, the overseers and the older workers. I can also say all of Amitabh Bachchan’s movie dialogues and they give me coins when I do. Back in the cigarette factory one guy had taught me how to eat smoke, put the burning end of the cigarette in your mouth.’ He jerked hard at the hand Milan had held, as if he wished to severe the insulted limb, get rid of it, establish his prowess once and for all. ‘You oldies are all the same, sticks-in-the-mud!’ He didn’t mean it. It came more out of the momentum of touched self-esteem, of the bitterness at being treated with affection, told what to do, lack of faith in a hand that could toss exploding firecrackers. He probably didn’t dislike Milan, had even taken pity on him at his evident lack of knowledge in official matters, such as the importance of forms.

He was about to say something. But just then, the peon came in through the door.

‘Is Amlan Nandy here?’ He asked, looking around the room.

‘I’m Amlan Nandy.’ The boy raised his hand, his small frame tautened in a formal posture, a long way from what he had been less than minutes ago.

Your grandmother is asking for you. Inside.’

As soon as the peon left, Amlan Nandy relaxed, turned to Milan. ‘I have to help my granny out.’ He stood up. ‘She’s blind as a bat, the old witch!’ He winked at Milan, and walked off.

He paused at the door, turned back. ‘You better clean up your form. They’ll want to see it.’

After he vanished, Milan sat for a few seconds, clamping his palms around his temples, his elbows on his thighs. Was his blood pressure close to a red flag? Would Dr Biswas have panicked at the sight of his little pressure pump wrapped around his arm now, at this moment? The questions coursed through his mind, but he saw them as if from behind a glass door, beyond touch, beyond feel, consciousness.

Amlan would have nudged him with his bony child-elbows – ‘Grandpa, aren’t you feeling well?’

He stood up, made his way to the door, to the stairs leading to the streets.

The form with details of his personal information and business at the state office lay at the foot of the chair he’d been sitting on. Amlan Nandy might come out of the officer’s room leading his blinded grandmother, pick it up with his grimy, chemical-stained fingers, wonder at the careless and irresponsible old man who couldn’t fart through his mouth.

He wasn’t going to look back anymore. There was only the present, the thunder of ancient streetcars, the dying call of street-vendors, the sweat-and-petrol-breathing air of summer mid-afternoon.

The past, even when less than a day old, tended to be overrun with sprouts of ungrown time, when getting a life back had appeared to be simple, like putting a few files in the bag, slipping into shoes, boarding the crowd-jammed bus. The tomorrow that lay a few hours ahead, the clear light of day that cleared knots.

The stirred dead of last night, less than twenty-four hours ago, when she had slowly, dreamily joined him, the veiled phantom, through long hours when sleep had come only in fits and bursts.

Why, he had left the bed this morning with the unwashed excitement from the night before clinging to pores on his body, the dried mucus in his eyes, the grogginess in his limbs.

Even with the sun streaming through the wooden shutters, it was as if his mind had never last night’s lingering, unreal hours.

It had been past two in the morning.

Long after the last of the drunkards had passed singing along the street below, and long after the stray dogs had let out the last of the staccato barks after their shadows, he had left his bed to roll a cigarette. Turning on the light, he had marvelled a little, as always, at how the left side of the bed had been left tidy, not slept in. The bed, crafted at a cheap carpenter’s in Bowbazar, wasn’t big, just about enough for two people. And yet, there hadn’t been a night in these seven year’s of Ila’s death when he had rolled over to her side of the bed, even in the middle of his sleep.

Nor would he roll his cigarettes in bed – that was a habit Ila frowned upon, though she rarely said so openly. Nothing as dirty as tobacco granules strewn all over the bed.

Stepping out of bed, he stood near the window, breathing in the night air of the city. There wasn’t much air to breathe in. Rows of houses stood cheek by jowl in an indistinguishable mass of pale, cracked concrete and jutting bricks where weather and smoke, limecrust and water from sewage pipes had imprinted strange graffiti. It was a patchwork of fungus and leathery banyan leaves straddling the cornices like giant cobwebs, the roots leaving a trail of cracks and fissures that had left the façade locked in a ghastly grimace. The street lamps rarely worked in this corner of the neighbourhood, and the municipal corporation never worried about them.

After rolling the cigarette he sealed the end with saliva.

Through the rusted mullions of the window, the neighbouring house, a rabbit warren of a dozen tenant families, looked ghoulish in the pale hue of the night sky. Between the wooden shutters of the windows, one could make out bricks jutting out under worn off paint, and a giant trinity of the sickle, the hammer and the star – the emblem of the communist party of India.

The cigarette was a thin, wobbly thing, near-lost between his callused fingers. But the smoke did more than relax his nerves – it seemed to put him at par with his restlessness, effacing the disturbing gap between his physical body and the excitement that had been running ahead in his sweaty half-sleep.

The excitement had started, in the real sense, over a month ago.

Atin had given him the news immediately after he sat down with his tea at Naran’s roadside tea-stall near Atin’s old office. He’d been glowing with pride. After all, not all former employees of the defunct Calcutta Gazette – or any other patrons of Naran’s tea-stall, for that matter – had a niece who had become a professor in America.

He had been friends with Atin for over forty years now, ever since their days as undergraduates at Scottish Church College in north Calcutta. The obvious differences in their backgrounds – Atin’s feudal-aristocratic roots and his own lower-middle class clerical family – hadn’t mattered much, perhaps all the more because as a proofreader in a doddery, near-bankrupt daily, Atin himself had nowhere lived up to the standards of his family, unlike his only brother, Jayanta, who, as a successful lawyer, had kept alive a tradition of affluence. He’d been going to Atin’s place – their huge ancestral house in Baghbazar – ever since the college days.

Over the years, he had seen Shirin grow up, little by little. As a child, she loved visitors. When the time came for anyone to leave their house, her screams and tears would rule the moment. For a time she had taken to hiding the shoes of the visitors so as to stop them from leaving, emptying the house a little bit.

Once, he remembered, she had thrown his shoes into the dark storage nook under the stairwell where in the old days – maybe a hundred years ago – they used to store coal. It was an empty, hollow cavern now thick with dust, aged soot, all the insects and pests these tropical weathers could conjure up. There was also this huge earthen vat – a massive round thing that belonged to the world of The Arabian Nights. Children in the neighbourhood were brought up on the myth of the old man in the vat, who delighted in the tender bones of young, naughty humans.

Shirin couldn’t have thought of a scarier world to banish Milan-kaku’s shoes. Even if they figured out where she had flung them, hair-raising fear of the dark, giant cockroaches, and finally, the utter terror of the old man of the vat had to keep anyone from trying to salvage them. The shoes were gone, dead and over, and Milan-kaku would have to live here forever. ‘I didn’t see Milan-kaku’s shoes, not all evening.’ She’d kept screaming in her high-pitched child voice as she ran up and down all three stories of the house. ‘It must be the old man in the vat. The old man in the vat!’

Staccato noises of quarrel punctured the night’s deadness from the factory shed below his house. It rose higher and higher till he could make out jagged obscenities, desperate howls and a series of dull thuds, the smashing of glass. It was nothing new. A few of the factory workers shared corners of the shed, having built makeshift shanties with bamboo, wicker and sheets of jute. Drunkenness, fights and wife-battering were part of their nights.

The old man in the vat. The change of taste from tender bones of young children to a pair of worn out, dusty shoes must be rather self-evident at six.

‘Bitch. Your mother was one, you’re another. Bitches all!’ The cops never came, of course. Factory workers? Bamboo shanties? You’re missing the brawl and the beatings, mister. Everything has a life of its own – plants, animals, river, slums, wicker-homes. Why mess with them, till there is a dead body, one dead body?

Nobody could enter the dark crevice. Those undaunted by the old man in the vat – his creators, indeed – were hesitant at the thought of knee-deep dust and grime, the thickest cobweb-forests, a million known and unknown life forms, maybe with stings, rough venomous tongues. Shirin’s choice of place had been more formidable than had been spelt out in the mistiness of her six-year old mind.

Thankfully, Hasan, the freelance handyman of the neighbourhood, had been around moving furniture in a house nearby. Atin’s electric torch, a ten rupee note, fifteen minutes of groping in the grime later, a soot-smeared, bug-bitten Hasan had emerged with the pair, between whose wrinkled leathery rings had clung fine cobwebby films.

When she’d realized that there was no way Milan-kaku could be stopped from leaving, Shirin had run like an angry wind to their bedroom upstairs. Nobody could bring her down as the guests left for the night, not to say ‘bye’. Atin’s sister-in-law, Sulata would later describe the salty wetness of her daughter’s pillow with heartbreaking vividness, though at that time the stormy exit had doubtless been to hide those very tears.

A bout of coughs floated in, through the walls, along the night air. Yogesh-babu, a widower in his eighties who lived in the two rooms at the southern end of this floor, suffered from severe attacks of asthma, especially at night. The man rarely seemed to get a good night’s sleep, and the spells of drowsiness that came had to be torn apart by rising voices and smashing bottles, just about every night of the week.

Last night, which had more light than the rending clarity of this day.

America!

He was born in British India, a few years before the Great War – the war of Hitler and Churchill and Roosevelt, of the atom bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Prime Minister Nehru’s speech of independence had come too late in the night for the teenage boy to stay up for. A good night’s sleep was a hard thing to come by, in those days of deathly chill, of fear of Muslim crowds thirsting after the blood of Hindu families, and when you got a night’s respite, you didn’t stay up to listen to speeches tearing the nation apart. Fleeing to the new state of West Bengal, he’d grown up in an India where the spectre of the British still loomed large. There was nothing above the Queen’s English, which was what the editorials in the prestigious English dailies of Calcutta forever strived towards. Rich boys kept going to Oxford and Cambridge as before, to Inner Temple and Lincoln’s Inn for degrees in law; British companies left their vestiges in Dalhousie and Lalbazar and Park Street. America had been too far away, too new, though Hollywood was stuff dreams were made of.

Marilyn Monroe and John F. Kennedy, the Watergate Scandal and Richard Nixon, one would hear more and more of America in the newspapers, and later, on the television. For the longest time India’s biggest ally was the USSR, and America, everybody knew, was a supporter of Pakistan. But even so, the madness, the whirl of liberation in the Sixties and the Seventies was a storm whose eye was America, and when the Gregory Peck look-alike Dev Anand swept the country with his hit movie Hare Rama Hare Krishna, the drug-induced haze of its glamour had looked far west, across the Atlantic.

America was rich! Everybody knew that. And in a post-war world, one of the two major poles of power. The sun had long set on the British Empire. America loaned billons of dollars to countries worldwide, sent out its fleet-footed ambassadors on magic wings far and wide - Elvis Presley’s songs, James Bond, Clint Eastwood and Richard Burton. Paperback thrillers devoured by the delinquent youth – James Hadley Chase and Harold Robbins, sex and drugs, and rock music. And then the saga of the USSR came to and end, and only one power remained.

He remembered browsing through old copies of Life and Time in the large libraries in Calcutta, occasionally in the sleek, air-conditioned American Centre Library. The skyscrapers of New York City, Niagara Falls, sunny California. The university campuses looked unreal, out of the world. The grass on the lawns was like moleskin, never an unruly tuft. Scholarship effused naturally in one such environs; or was it too cinematic, too much of a picture-postcard for anything as mundane as studies?

The row below had calmed down, and so had Yogesh-babu’s coughs. The old man must have gone back to sleep, bless him. It was almost silent, about as silent it ever got in these parts of the city. Quiet enough for Gautam’s light snores to reach this room.

The boy slept well, thank god. Night time rows from neighbouring slums usually did nothing to wake him up, not even Hindi film songs played on loudspeakers. It was no surprise. He took overtime every other day, and almost never got home from his office before eight in the evening. All he wanted to do was to somehow finish eating dinner watch some TV, and go to bed.

America came to Calcutta, too.

And it wasn’t just the crazy gyrating music they showed on the cable channels these days, the new multinational companies and brand names that had flooded the market. All along they had seen the advertisements for Ray Ban sunglasses; this time, they really came.

But it wasn’t just all that.

One had only to wander into the old British quarters of the city, in Park Street, Chowringhee, the lanes and bylanes of Free School Street, New Market. The white hole of Calcutta, it really was. The cluster of convents and missionary schools in the area had lost most of their whiteness a long time ago, but the kurta-clad, pale-bearded, long-haired American was quite a common sight there. It was nothing like the crowds of hippies looking for nirvana back in the Sixties and Seventies, but the flood had stayed in a trickle, a steady one, in the outlandishly tall, big-boned white couple holding hands in a well-browned crowd in Esplanade, garbed in hand-crafted, clay jewellery, a string of urchins trailing them.

The young man who had suddenly tapped him on his shoulder that afternoon ten years ago had looked like he’d been walking all the way from the cape of Kanya Kumari at the southern tip of the country. His blonde hair was matted with dust, uncared for. The rucksack on his back looked large and unwieldy; it was something that might have contained all his earthly possessions. He seemed the kind of person who took cocaine, who didn’t need a home.

It was in Esplanade, right in the heart of the city, on the crowded pavement outside the Orient cinema hall. He had just come out of the Income Tax Building.

‘Can you take me to Ma Kali?’ The young man had asked. The look on his stubbled face was one of deep anxiety, of loss in the whirl of earthly life.

It took him a couple of minutes to make sense of the man’s American accent, which sounded nothing like Humphrey Bogart, or Gregory Peck, neither of whom, of course, he’d ever heard mention Ma Kali, the fiery goddess of evil-destruction. ‘Kali’, too, had metamorphosed on an American tongue – it rhymed with ‘Sally’, a farther drift apart from the bloody-tongued demon-slaughterer who’d stood on Shiva’s chest.

They played a hollering game for the next couple of minutes. The real confusion began, however, when he did come to understand the words.

Like all Bengalis who went to college in the Fifties and Sixties, he had dallied with Marxism. Over the years, most of it had been lost, except the Shantiniketan-style bag – the signature Bengali leftist-intellectual look. Mooning around in College Street went along with it, as did the pittance doled out to schoolteachers by a communist government. But one never knew what else stayed on, where, how.

‘Mister, there’s no Ma Kali. Bad mumbo-jumbo. It’s idol-worship, by stupid godbelievers. Much more else to see in India.’

Nothing was more tiring than the exodus of pot-smoking Westerners to India for the search of nirvana, Hare Krishna, Ma Kali. For a moment he had gone back to the indignation of his college days, the days when Mao and Lenin had thrived on native soil, the littered pavements of College Street. But how to shock them out of the marijuana-moulded haze of godly India, the exotic Oriental pantheon? One could do worse than scream aloud the scandal of messy idol-worship.

Disappointment and confusion shot through the sunburnt redhued, green-stubbled face. Hands moved in flitting, quirky arabesques, and in the near-indignant flood that tumbled forth, he could make out a small flurry. ‘But…Ma Kali…here…bazaar…’

He realized the battle was going to be deep-rooted in ideology. America exported such fanatics too… those who awaited divine apparitions in bazaars, the smelly open-air market-stalls, in the midst of raw fish, screaming vendors, flies. But for once here was the opportunity, to change the look of India to one misguided hippie. Where did they get their brainwashing, must be the vile Hare Krishna cliques in America? The true story was of course the skyscrapers in New York, the sex and drugs and Hollywood, which even sane minds couldn’t elude. But what a poor panacea to choose – Hindu goddesses of the multicoloured Orient, Ma Kali’s dance of destruction in sweat-stained Esplanade!

‘Just savage customs, mister. Even marijuana is better. You have marijuana, no?’

The young man shot him a suspicious look, and he realized things were taking a wrong turn.

‘No, I don’t want marijuana, mister. No marijuana. I No want! But Ma Kali is just to fool people. Marijuana for the masses.’ He gasped, tired at opening his mouth to larger holes than his muscles allowed. ‘Why you come to India to see such rubbish? There’s the Taj Mahal, beautiful in moonlight.’ In his fervour of drawing attention to a more real India, he had transported the full-moon view of the marvel of Mughal architecture to a crowded, traffic-jammed, central Calcutta, at two-thirty in the afternoon. But even here, ‘See the Victoria Memorial, the Indian Museum, beautiful old architecture in old houses and temples here in Bowbazaar.’

The young man was ready to shout ‘Eureka’ at the mention of ‘temples at Bowbazaar’. Another nasal-drawled flood followed, but at the words ‘Firinghi Kali temple at Bowbazaar’, he suddenly stopped in his tracks.

There was relief, and embarrassment with it. But of course the hippies and the Hare Krishna crowd had to be blamed for his mistake.

The young man didn’t want to be guided to the goddess Kali’s divine apparition in a city bazaar. He just wanted the directions to the Firinghi Kali temple in Bowbazaar!

‘You come with me, mister.’ Relief had flooded Milan’s chest. ‘I’m going to Bowbazaar.’

They skirted past the snail-paced stream of crowd-bloated buses, the gaping abysses in the middle of the road for the construction of the city subway. Harrowing street-vendors, dollar-craving middlemen, begging urchins, all plentiful in this part of the city, all caught at a painful limbo at the sight of the unlikely pair. The backpacking blonde American tourist was the juiciest flesh of all, for a handful of dollars, for thrusting exotica for outrageous prices, even the ten rupee note handed to the bloated-bellied street children; and just as scarily mean was the paise-splitting, mean-tempered seasoned citizen, the middle-aged babu. What life spun on the streets of Calcutta, what ties clamped a dusty chappal walk with much-worn American hiking shoes!

Passing the seedy bars and restaurants and stray dogs that sniffed at trudging heels, Milan was full of enthusiasm while telling the story of the celebrated Firinghi Kali temple – that built by the Portuguese man – or Firinghi, as white people were called those days – Anthony who wrote ballads in Bengali and worshipped Kali.

He really didn’t care whether the young man was paying enough attention, content with the occasional ‘awesome’, ‘cool’, and ‘incredible’ that flowed from his direction.

Incredible it had been indeed! He was no believer, though his scepticism had mellowed since his college Marxist days, but the history of it all, the beauty and the pathos of it all! The nineteenth century, it had been. British India. The European man named Anthony had saved a Bengali woman from being burned at her husband’s funeral pyre – the barbaric medievalism of widow-sacrifice. He’d married her, and started living a life that was browner and more Bengali than one homegrown. And he wrote poetry – heart-touching, lyrical verses in the best of Bengal’s folk traditions, next to which the best of the bauls – the local troubadours – paled into mediocrity. What humanity, what word-weaving!

‘Amar khuda je, Hindur Hori she…’

‘It means “He who is my God is also the Hindu’s Krishna.” All gods one, in the goodness of our imagination.’ He went on haltingly but with passion, the paucity of the right English words hardly a stumbling block. ‘Mister, nothing could be better message for humanity at that time, when dogma and fundamentalism were building strong walls…strong walls, I say, in peoples’ minds. What is God but betterment of all people, peace and harmony for all. That is why we invent religion.’

Anthony became a famous kobiyal – the performing, singing, word-duelling folk poet who won over the most closed-minded of Hindu fanatics, triumphing over lyric-fights, song-battles, becoming a legend. Anthony Kobiyal. Just imagine! A white, red-faced Firinghi from over the seven seas!

He and his wife were both devotees of the goddess Kali. He built a Kali temple for her. This is the famous Firinghi Kali Temple.

It was a dingy little room on the pavement, at the end of their ten-minute walk, right next to the daily path of the uncaring pedestrian. Shoulder to shoulder with warehouses, small time office buildings, shoe shops run by Chinese immigrants to the city. A large banyan tree had grown dense shoots in front, on the slice of the pavement before, and next to it a street vendor sold chilli chicken and north Indian chappatis with curry.

‘His wife died in a fire, a mysterious fire. And after that, Anthony Firinghi left. He was never seen again.’

For the moment, he had forgotten that the unruly-haired youth with the massive backpack had surged ahead in the small crowd that always gathered before the temple, shaking his hand one last time. The crowd was the usual mix of casual passers by and stauncher devotees, with ailments to be cured, jobs to be aspired to, unborn children to be had. Coins clinked, flung on the large copper plate kept for donations. The familiar smell of incense sticks, red joba flowers, moist earth rose in a little halo, as always in Hindu temples. Over the temple was a carpenter’s shop, and wood-pulp and paint lined the giant cracks in the façade of the building.

He had looked at the half-crumpled five hundred rupee note thrust in his right fist with the unease of meeting an unexpected, honourable guest.

The trinity of the hammer, sickle and the star looked bluish and ghostly in the moonlight fallen across the limecrusted wall outside the window. The state legislature elections had taken place a couple of months ago. But the campaign graffiti stayed on, their desperation fading under gathering dirt and moss, sometimes covered under posters advertising new movies or magical cures for impotency. But for the most part they would remain, fainter, fainter, till another election drew close and the cracked walls received a fresh layer of whitewash, fresh canvas for the communist trinity, always the trinity, because this was a communist neighbourhood and painters of the Congress palm or the BJP lotus might just get their bones broken if they stepped in here.

He stubbed out the cigarette on the windowsill and walked over to his writing desk. Moonlight had streamed in through the window, making the contours of the old furniture, the endless boxes and stuffed cotton bags visible through the night. He could make his way through the dark here. His body knew each nook and crevice of the room where he had spent the last thirty-seven years of his life. Standing close to his writing desk, he turned on the little reading light.

In the next room, Gautam seemed to turn in his sleep. His light snores had stopped for a moment.

The sixty-watt bulb had shed a watery yellow light on the pile of papers and books on his desk. It was nothing like when he had endless student papers to grade, and yet it was a mess. A collection of poems by the poet Bishnu Dey lay there, a book he’d been rereading after several decades. Galleys from his own book of Bengali short stories had been sent by the small press in College Street. He had gone through a few pages, despairing, as before, at the poor quality of the printing paper and the flaws which the manually operated letterpress always scattered in the text.

He opened the lid of an old, handcrafted mahogany box with a curved silver handle. This was the most expensive inheritance from his family that had remained with him, one of the few things they could bring with them in the haste of fleeing a riot-ridden land that was now a foreign country.

The jaundiced hue was weaker on the sheaf of handwritten pages that lay inside.

Pages of a kind one never saw these days. Brittle with age and dust, and the corners were frayed, the sides eroded by silverfish that had also bored holes all over the sheets. It was an unruly heap, broken papery corners jutting out under one another, the edges eroded into a range of shapes, like maps of different countries. The ink had faded, and yet, in the weak light of the reading lamp, one could make out the rows of Bengali letters in a beautiful hand.

Handwriting as pretty as pearl, as they used to say to describe the labour of love in an age when a handwritten letter or a manuscript was something of a finished product.

What could it be but a miracle?

To think of its age was to lose oneself in a cloud, a hazy swirl.

A misty window to a world forever lost, not just to time, but to the turbulent, destructive history of the nation. And the strangest of voices!

Gooseflesh had risen on his arms when he’d first seen these yellowed sheets a week ago. The fading letters showed archaic spellings, a different Bengali language, almost.

They deserved a light stronger than the pallor of the quivering sixty-watt bulb drooping over his study table, pouring the watery yellow through the veil of cobwebs. Or the musty cubicle in a decrepit house near the Sealdah railway station, tied up with piles of old magazines, bug-bitten, cockroach-caressed, the mould growing like cancer on the walls around, above. The violence and the tragedy of the years that lay farther away, the sadness of it all.

Carried over, inside this mahogany box, they echoed the tired life around. There were patches of mould along these walls too, cancerous spots that spread corner to corner, trying to spread out to the roots of the growing banyan tree outside the window, its empire of fissures. Younger, weaker layers of dust coated everything in the room, deepening with every waft of midsummer from the city’s air through the rusty windows. A faint smell of urine and cooking, and rotting garbage from the street melted into tropical heat, creating the familiar air that hung on to the corners of the room, the passage outside where water from the bathroom and droplets of evening showers flowed into streams from the kitchen.

Too many stories never left this place, got buried under layers of dust and the death of memory. There were always the journeys in crowded buses, hours with students who never cared, tea in the morning and the afternoon in tiny earthen cups at roadside stalls, weary chat with the regulars, the coldness of bureaucracy, more tea, a cigarette or two, breathlessness, a dull ache in the chest. A voice unheeded, uncared for. A pit in the memory so deep that flakes of paper, frayed edges, turned into powdery dust, the food of silverfish, the ornament of faded ink, far from sunlight, the air, crisp and clear, heavy and petrol-fumed. There would be screams, shouts, violent demonstrations of protest, radical parades, but no one would ever know, the voice would go back to the powdery dust of frayed edges, the earthen cups of tea in the morning, in the evening. The mouldy patches would grow a little more, just a little more, till they had eaten up the whole wall as in cancer.

Days would pass by, and the years.

There had to be stronger light. Louder, crisper words, afloat in confident accents, bright bold letters printed in well-lit space. More and more words devoted to the words that none heard, the ranting voice mocked by unsympathetic students, the faded words coming off in powdery flakes. The warmth of recognition, a fluidity that helped clear all cobwebs, all the roots that spread the cracks in the cornices, the façades of the dilapidated house. It should touch souls. Here. And out there, far away.

How many days after the clearing of dusty paper-flakes did Atin give out his niece’s happy news in the teashop next to the abandoned offices of The Calcutta Gazette?

After two cups of tea, much jubilation, many eye-watering reminiscences, his mind had flitted back to the faded words in the archaic script, the obsolete spellings. For a moment he thought of Sabeer’s dead father, the end of a dream, young Sabeer’s…the launching of an unknown future in the Middle East. But other things blocked out the story of origins.

Words. He had only words to rely on, and his rusty limbs, their aching motions, the infectious power of his beliefs, his sickening enthusiasm, great airy arcs drawn by his bony, vein-straddled hands that spoke along. One had to speak at Naran’s tea-stalls, through the long evenings, to the weary regulars, retired employees of The Calcutta Gazette. Standing inside the crowded bus, one could turn one’s head around and speak to the crushed, sweating fellow passenger about the miracle of the faded words on powdery dust. He could step out of his room in the morning, knock on the door of the ageing Yogesh Dey, smell the ailing phlegm in the air inside his room, open the mahogany box in his hand, draw out warmth on Yogesh-babu’s leathery, million-creased face.

He could sit here and take out his own sheaf of paper, five rupees a sheaf at the corner grocer’s, wrench out further words about the powdery dust inside, the precious obsolescence of the spellings, further words that would die in the same airless interior of their birth.

But Shirin was coming to Calcutta. She was already here, tired and asleep after a long flight. Or maybe tired and awake, her nerves frayed by the benumbing differences in the world’s time zones.

The little girl had grown up, come a long way.

One who cared about the shape and texture of words, even when they perished in caverns of mildew and lost memory, the dead bodies of silverfish encrusting the inside of once-smooth mahogany. Human stories, of forgetfulness in giant unfriendly castles, the stale flavour of tea in the squashed-limb crowd of eveningtime city buses. The archaic syntax under the faded ink was far from her, and yet near enough. One who was coming from afar to reclaim those faraway stories, those nearer to her breath, under the folds of her skin, the stories locked in vacuum over the decades, centuries, tied up with old magazines that reeked of suicide, of distance from the turbulent history of a nation.

He closed the lid. He turned off the reading light. Wan moonlight flooded the lines of poetry on the table.

He could turn his head around and speak to the crushed, sweating fellow passenger about the miracle of the faded words on powdery dust. Or he could tell her about it, through the clearest, crispest words he could create, the most passionate arcs his hands could draw in the air. She had the mind. And the soul. She would travel with him, into the musty depths of the mahogany box, the frayed sheaves, the decades that no one had known to pass, the miracle of a century.

He would meet her after seven years. Did she remember the stories of the old man in the vat? Of how he had failed to swallow Milan-kaku’s shoes?

He went back to bed. The sheets smelled stale and unwashed, and had a strong hint of tobacco even though he never smoked in bed.

Tomorrow could be the beginning of a new life.

The stronger light could burst forth, the louder, crisper words, afloat in confidence, bright bold letters printed in well-lit space, the rays of insight cutting through the densest film of cobwebs, the dance of cockroaches over the death-dry air, the brittleness of pages in vacuum – maybe even wealth, of passage into a world of alien lights and sounds, across the oceans. Even the scratching of petty itches, on fatigued flesh.

Some relief for Gautam from the daily overtime work. The purchase of a new double cylinder for cooking gas. Maybe even hire a maid from the slums down below to do the washing and the cooking.

They had to come out of the jaundiced aureole of the weak bulb stooping over them, the smell of death that had clung to them for so long, the cancerous patches of mould that formed their horizon. The stale flavour of tea in the mouth on an empty stomach. The flakes of paper had to come back together.

Shirin must have forgotten the old man in the vat.

Several hours later, there was much to cool his strained nerves, the light of day, a cup of tea, the airy wholeness of the living room in Atin’s ancient house.

Something about her, he couldn’t tell what, made him think she might not have lost the tales of the vat, its dusty cobwebs that turned golden in his yarns, the old man who crouched inside. Something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Maybe the way she flung the scarf of her salwar-kameez around her neck, or the familiar way her smile creased along a face that had filled out with the years, it was hard to tell.

How did it feel to be back home after being away for many years? What scraps of memory had life stirring in them, kindling the light of home again? Voices of people, faintly cracked with age, crinkly smile along faces with deeper furrows, a quivering presence on the rickety wicker chair in one corner?

Wasn’t there so much else? Surely there was. Over two hundred years old, tucked away in a narrow north Calcutta alley, the house had mellowed in a smoother, more spacious way than its contemporaries, fermenting in the feudal aura of a large, extended family with slowly disintegrating branches. The heavy wooden furniture with strange, archaic curves, the armchair made by the inmates of Alipore jail, the varnish of its armrest, a worn, shiny patch after endless friction with human skin, clothes, teacups. Walled-in shelves like large concrete caverns filled with musty paper, the view of blistered red earth just outside the threshold of the door. Much else and more, even the little altar of clay and metal icons of gods and goddesses enshrined by the lady of the house in one of the shelves – unchanged, surely, ever since she must remember it as a child.

But what could wipe away the difference in time and space as the familiar posture of good old Milan Sen on his favourite wicker chair in the corner, next to her uncle’s prison-crafted throne? Milan-kaku, as they’d all been taught to call him since childhood, her uncle’s oldest, closest friend.

People seemed the same when you saw them every day. A human being could look unchanged, for years and years, unless a storm brought them down, like a heart attack or the loss of a child, which could bring the long shadow of death to hang over their heads, curl into dark circles under their eyes. But if you saw someone after several years, maybe even one, the changes stood out, like tiny clumps of moss on the slippery earth of a courtyard. The smaller blessings of death, never so far away, that we reap by the day, the month and the year.

He wondered if he seemed to have aged as much as one would have expected in all these years, even though this year he had turned sixty-six. True, his short-cropped hair had far fewer grey streaks than her uncle’s, and his fragment of a moustache – made halfheartedly in the style of Clark Gable, fashionable in the fifties – was without any grey at all, with the youthful touch of Kali mehendi or some such dye, as she would know, surely. The cotton hand-crafted bag, Shantiniketan style, with the long loop flung around his right shoulder, that had become his signature, hanging limp touching the floor like a starved python, empty of the mass of paper, magazines and books with which she must always remember it.

After seven years, was the familiar smile and the old posture more of an anchor into the old, cozy world than even the known contours of archaic furniture, the ray of sunlight falling through the rusted mullions on the floor?

‘Come on over here, dear.’ He sat up to the creaking protests of the wicker chair. ‘When was the last time I saw you? It must have been six or seven years ago.’

‘You missed her when she came for a month a couple of years ago.’ Atin said. You were in Shantiniketan that summer.’

She came and touched his feet. Growing older, away from the old-world shadow of the ageing house had perhaps stolen the comfort in many habitual rites, stooping to touch the feet of an elder one of them.

‘Bless you, my child.’ He touched the top of her head lightly. ‘May you continue to prosper.’

‘Milan-kaku, you look great. Next to you, uncle looks old.’ She spoke as she sat on the couch.

‘But of course. You never know with these writers. Sharp about uncovering new springs of life at the last place you’d think!’ Her uncle rose to the banter. ‘He has a great new dye for his hair and moustache though!’

‘Oh, let all that nonsense be, Atin.’ He said, without looking at his friend. ‘The American glow is around you all right. Cleaner air, I suppose.’

‘It’s okay. I guess I’ve adjusted to the lifestyle over the years.’

And a professor, too. You’ve really come a long way!’ ‘Isn’t that amazing?’ Without pausing for her response, he turned to Atin. ‘She goes to America from India and teaches English.’

Well, this country was under the British for over two hundred years.’ Her uncle said. ‘English is part of our life.’ But he had already returned to his daze.

‘So you are a first world professional now! And they say American universities are the richest in the world.’ ‘Academics are the worst paid anywhere, Milan-kaku, even in America.’ She laughed lightly. ‘But this happens to be a research university. So it’s enough to get by.’

‘Listen to her,’ Milan turned to his friend, his smile a marriage of mockery and admiration. ‘She’s already learnt how to talk like rich people. Enough to get by. I’ve seen the pictures in the consulate libraries. The buildings and the campuses look more like royal estates!’

‘The credit must go to the photographers rather than the architects. It’s nothing like that, Milan-kaku.’

‘I’ve heard they have the most incredible libraries and museums. And that they pay absurd money to enlarge their archives. The Bodleian, right?’

‘The Bodleian’s in Oxford actually. The Widener at Harvard is very good, and also the Newberry Library at Chicago.’

‘Yes, I’ve seen some pictures. The British Library, the New York Public Library, they really value books over there, rare books and archives…’

‘They care about history because they don’t have much of it.’ The thought was hard to contain, hard not to float away on. ‘Here, we are overrun with it, like weeds, so we don’t give a damn!’

But quickly, he checked himself.

He looked at her, his eyes lit up. ‘I have something that might interest you.’

In his breathless excitement, he had failed to note the leap in the conversation he had brought about. That was his natural pathway. But suddenly the silence in the room seemed tangible. A street vendor’s cry resounded in the distance – there is, of course, no real silence in Calcutta, not for a moment.

His friend looked at his face with a curious frown. Certain that he now had the desired attention, he savoured the silence for a moment, and spoke.

‘It’s an old manuscript. I think it goes as far back as the mid-nineteenth century. Even before the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign in India.’

He paused for a moment.

‘I got hold of it through quite a strange twist of fate. But let all that be.’ He paused again.

‘Would you know anybody in America who’d be interested in buying it?

‘It’s an amazing fragment of history. And an important document in the development of Bengali prose. You should see the handwriting, the spelling and syntax, even the quality of the paper – it’s all from a lost world. Someone should write about it, get it in the papers. Sometimes I have trouble believing that it has been lying where it has, all these years.’

There was a longer pause. The vendor’s cry moved farther and farther away, became faint.

‘It’s a collector’s dream!’

Milan had come back from Atin’s house full of the tremors of promise, skirting the still-sleepy dogs of the city, the roar of the traffic rising with the minutes in the main streets. Would the morning tell the rest of the day!

‘Goodness, where’s all this dust come from?’ Gautam had sniffed and wrinkled his nose as he’d entered the room with the tea.

The core of the must in the air had been clouds of dust particles dancing in the column of sunlight across the room. Swirls came to life, thicker, denser than usual. Quickly, Gautam’s eyes fell on the papers on Milan’s table, the rich coating of dust graying the sheets. ‘What are you reading, baba?’ he asked as he perched the teacups on the study table, moving a pile of papers and books to make room.

Milan looked up. It was almost nine o’clock, and the sun was stronger outside the window.

Gautam’s cup had its handle broken. He had to cup it between his palms, the way young children held glasses they were afraid of dropping.

‘Oh, nothing.’ Milan closed the lid of the box. ‘Tales of yore!’

‘The manuscript pages from Sabeer’s house?’

‘Yes, that one.’ Milan took a sip of the tea, stared absently at the wall. ‘Quite a period piece. At least midnineteenth century, I’d say.’

‘Really?’ Gautam said, his eyes flitting towards the clock on the wall. It always ran about half an hour behind time, and Milan knew his son did not want to be late in his office, even though it was a government office. Few people ever arrived on time in government offices in Calcutta.

Yes. Can cause quite a stir, I think. I was speaking to Shirin today at Atin’s house. If we can get it into the papers, bring it to the attention of collectors. Maybe abroad.’

You really think so?’ Gautam’s voice was matter-of-fact, his mind still elsewhere. Suddenly, a childlike intensity burst forth in his words, touching Milan like a gust of sadness. ‘Do you think it could get us some money?’

Milan’s eyes moved away from the cracked walls of the room, floated towards his son’s face, lit up by the morning sun through the windows.

He’d been a late arrival in a late marriage, in a life where everything had run late. He had married Ila in his late thirties, the earliest he could have afforded after arranging for the marriages of two elder sisters and settling various debts, various needs with years of a meagre schoolteacher’s salary. Their only child had come when he was well passed forty, and it was probably just as well. He’d managed to put away a little bit of savings by then.

Gautam’s birth had the same fragility as the marriage that had led up to it. The same touch of unreality that had defined the marriage of a refugee-boy from East Bengal flung westward with the Partition. On Milan’s first visit to Ila’s house to meet the prospective bride, he had been accompanied by a distant cousin from the Hooghly district he had met only twice before, and Joydeb-babu, the portly manager of the mess where he lived. No father or close uncle to meet the girl, evaluate her caste and horoscope, her skin-tone and her kitchen-skills, to consume the syrup-drenched sweets and fried goodies served with care. Would the girl’s family even take this match seriously?

It had been hard to tell. Nor had Milan felt a dash of romance in the affair, in the direction of the spindly young girl, enveloped in a drooping sari perched at the corner of the bed opposite the row of chairs offered to the groom’s party. It wasn’t the time of life when one thought of romance. One was settled, life’s many duties taken care of, and marriage another duty that needed to be settled, to give way to a string of fresh duties soon after the shehnai had stopped its mooning music and the last guests bidden farewell to. There had also been the strong odour of snuff coming in wafts from Joydeb-babu seated right next to him, and he’d found grains of tea leaves at the tip of his tongue, as the tea had been imperfectly sieved.

Who’d have known that snuff would contain the germs of his first dash of feeling for his wife?

In the middle of an ice-breaking conversation about the respective merits of baked and fried sweets, a fullblown snuff-induced sneeze had sent Joydeb-babu’s flabby body into tremors and wispy granules of snuff flying across the room to settle on the right sleeve of Ila’s father’s kurta, washed clean for the grand occasion. There had been a pause in the conversation, but Joydeb-babu, unaffected, had simply reached out for another sweet on his spacious plate.

Tremors had also passed through the end of the sari draping Ila’s face. A faintly musical suppression of laughter, causing blood to congeal at the tip of her nose, ear-ends, maybe, had awakened Milan out of his stupor that had been unhindered by Joydeb-babu’s trumpet-blowing sneeze.

Finally, Ila’s father had looked embarrassed.

The few real moments in an unreal marriage, followed by the making of a family that seemed to him sometimes less than real.

Tobacco granules in bed. Tea stains on his shirt-front. The loss of pens under the mountain of paper on his desk or leaves of cauliflower at the bottom of his grocery bag, tardiness in picking a spot in the mile-long line at the government-run ration-shop for rice, oil, flour, sugar. The pills for his high blood-pressure, his ancient companion. Ila was exacting about these and more, all eighteen years she had inhabited his life, the spindly girl who had let out tremors of laughter at Joydeb-babu’s snuff-powered sneeze that delicate afternoon. But she’d exert her rules with as few words as possible, with the shrinking quietness of her nature that she’d left with her son. And the grocery and the tobacco-granules it was for her, the wife with perpetually turmeric-stained fingers and beads of sweat on her brows from the heat of the clay oven in the kitchen, one who never expressed any curiosity about Milan’s job or what kind of school would be best for Gautam. All that was the world of men, and best left to them.

Milan had named the boy Gautam after the great Buddha, the Enlightened One. Ila had liked the name right away.

A sweet-natured boy, he was, ever since childhood. Like the great renouncer of the Saka dynasty, he’d had to give up some precious things early in life – not by choice, as the Blessed Prince had, but by the quirk of fate – his mother, at a young age and dreams of higher study at the age of twenty.

He’d done quite well in college. But then the Energy Board job had come along, and it had been a government job, and Milan had retired with a meagre pension, with no savings.

Gautam never complained. Work moved in a rusty rhythm at government offices everywhere in this country, much more so in the state offices in Bengal. The dullness of the long hours there had to be soul-destroying, as corpse-like as the sad pay slips which reflected the state’s dying economy. So he worked overtime, always, almost every day of the week, to add a handful of rupees to his regular salary.

Sometimes Milan suspected him of taking a quiet pleasure in his job. Submerged within his silence was an ability to enjoy anything to which he put his mind. Milan could see him sitting behind his desk in the Energy Board office, even though he had never visited him there – seated all day long, without the relief of cigarettes, the anodyne of petty clerks, delicately mindful of the infinitesimal responsibilities on his shoulders of a tiny cog of the state machinery, in filing away figures of paid bills and unpaid dues, the inky solidity of figures copied on pages of massive notebooks, even the soft flourish of the ‘sevens’ and the ‘nines’ on the scripts of book-keeping.

Sabeer had hated his job at the science college lab with a mute passion, the mindless fiddling with chemical and test tubes of which he’d understood precious little, but such derision wasn’t to find a place in Gautam, howsoever deadening the job seemed to his father. His desk was, in all likelihood, neat and scrapless, clean of tea stains and cigarette burns, all flotsam of paper filed away with the care with which a mother’s favourite boy combed his hair after a bath.

‘Imagine finding such a thing at Sabeer’s house.’ His eyes rested on the mahogany box, caressed its wooden surface.

Milan looked at his son’s face, bright with spirit and laughter. He hadn’t changed. Not one bit. How could he? He hadn’t grown much, not many years had passed since he was a coddled child of his mother. He looked thin, very thin…Ila would have complained. Did a motherless child always miss out? On care, food, rest, and what else? Was he still too young to come back from a nine-hour workday, day after day?

‘There were amazing books and magazines at Sabeer’s house. His father’s stuff, of course.’ Milan said.

‘Has Sabeer left for Dubai yet?’

‘On Tuesday. He went to Bombay first. He was supposed to meet the people from the placement agency there.’

‘Did the right thing to leave. There are no jobs here. Nothing will happen in this bloody city.’

The helpless spite, the hopelessness made him so adult-like. It was at such moments that Milan realized how soon childhood had become a luxury for him.

‘Unless they change something big. Like more private firms, maybe. By the way, baba,’ excitement rose in his voice, ‘there’s an important meeting in the office today. A private house has made a bid for part ownership of the board.’

‘Which house?’

‘The Lakhotias. Suresh Lakhotia is supposed to have great plans about revamping power supply all over Bengal.’

‘Will they raise your salaries?’ Milan’s tone was half-serious, half-mocking.

‘I’ve no idea.’ Gautam took the empty teacups in his hands. ‘Baba, I have to run. I don’t want to miss the ten o’clock bus. I’ll tell you what happened in the evening.’ He paused at the door. ‘Don’t forget your blood-pressure pills.’

For a few minutes, Milan stared at the trail of the rapidly disappearing figure at the door.

Old packing boxes had crowded the space near the door. Giant boulders thick with dust, insects, mites.

Milan had kept staring. Unknown to himself, he’d been smiling. And then he’d reopened the lid of the mahogany box.

A miracle!

What wealth lay hidden in the frayed edges of the brittle yellow sheets, several missing, damaging order, the seamlessness of the reading experience, of immersion into an archaic word.

He’d looked up from the pile of manuscript pages. They seemed treacherous, under the jaundiced hue, the frayed edges, the corners bitten off by silverfish, the gaping holes eating up words and phrases halfway in between.

Under the cracked glass of its dial, the old wall-clock showed ten-thirty. Gautam’s bus, the 2B weighing down under the bursting crowd of commuters, had now made its way to Chowringhee, inching past the endless, jammed traffic of central Calcutta. Gautam might have finally found a place to sit for the last ten minutes of his journey. He would get down in another few minutes, sweat-stained, tired already, and at the end of a longish walk he would be just on time for the beginning of his shift at his office.

Beneath the thickened layer of dust on the coarse parchment, there had been deceit.

There were damp patches on the wall of the room, hints of fungal growth from the ceaseless drip-drip of rainwater through leaking drainage pipes on the terrace. Large cobwebs straddled the wall behind the framed picture of himself with Ila, taken shortly after their wedding. A large crinkly spider lived behind the photo frame.

How could he expect the silverfish, the dust to tell the truth? Great chunks of time stood like the frayed edges of the sheets, to crumble into invisible dust at the touch of a finger. The touch and the smell revealed nothing but the deceit of it all.

Wind blew in through the window, and the tropical heat of midday with it. Great swirls of dust rose on the windowsill. Another summer afternoon was drawing closer. In this city cut across by the tropic of cancer, it was a daily inferno.

A miracle indeed! The touch and the smell of oldness, of oblivion, revealed nothing but the deceit of a miracle. Who were these people? What were their strange loves and lusts and sorrows, with the aroma of fragrant oil on flowing tresses of black hair, behind the barred lion-gates?

Wealth lay hidden in the frayed edges of the brittle yellow sheets, several missing, damaging the order, the seamlessness of the reading experience.

Behind the cracked and stained glass of its dial, the arms of the wall-clock were now well past ten forty, which meant it was now almost ten past eleven. The clock was a lot like him – getting on in years, losing the strength of its sinews, rust eating the filaments of the spring that kept it alive. Every morning, Gautam would wind its mechanical spring with his hand for about two or three minutes, pushing hard against the rusted inertia of the heavy old metal. That was supposed to get it going for another twenty-four hours, one more cycle across its chipped face, but by noon every day it would inevitably lag behind in the days’ race, as if it had already spent the shot of life pumped into its arteries in the morning. Fortunately, it was rather exact in its loss of time – half an hour always, give or take a few minutes, and for the rest of the day one knew the time simply by adding half an hour to what it showed.

They had often thought about getting a new clock, one of those newer ones which ran on battery. But it always occupied a place at the end of every month’s list of things to get, after the essential groceries, the rent and the money to be put aside for Gautam’s daily expenses – his bus fare, four rupees every day to his office and back, and the five rupees for his lunch. For several months they’d been talking about the new clock, but in the end, either something urgent always came up, or it seemed like a bit of a luxury before some other thing that seemed to have a greater claim, like insecticides for the bugs that made a night’s sleep impossible, or an asbestos awning over the window to keep off the monsoon rains, medicines for Milan that kept rising in cost as fast as the blood-pressure they were supposed to keep in rein. Milan didn’t mind the old clock terribly anyway; it had been with him for as long as he could remember, forty years maybe, and its face, gathering grime and cracks and stains over the years, had come to take almost a human form on the wall. It was, after all, just a matter of adding half an hour, and what difference did half an hour make in his life these days?

With half an hour added, it was time for him to set out for the school district office in Gariahat. The very thought of it made him sick… the crowd, the anger and bitterness, the long wait in musty rooms, barren over these past eight days, the nightmarish bus ride home stamped over by a thousand feet and breathless under human weight. But he had to do it. It had been eight months now that his pension cheques had suddenly stopped coming. Some bureaucratic mess. After four months of waiting and fruitless enquiries at the school, he had realized that unless he kept on going and nudging the officials in the school district office, his file would be pushed away under the dust and weeds of the system. Several of his friends and former colleagues who went through the same sudden drying up of pension had advised him that this was the only way to make sure that he would see another government cheque to his name ever again. Nothing was going to happen on the first day, of course, or the second…or the fourth, for that matter, this was the government of West Bengal he was dealing with, but at least he might be able to put some grease in the rusty machine of bureaucracy.

He riffled through his papers on the study table, picking up the letters, the application forms, the photocopy of his voter’s identity card, and his wallet. He looked inside. There was only a ten-rupee note and some loose change. The last couple of months he had to ask Gautam for his personal expenses, and this month he had to take out some money from his account. It had been the last thing he wanted to do. It was a very small fund, saved for emergencies. But there was no choice, how far could push his son?

As he picked up his wallet, his eyes had fallen back on the mahogany box.

He hadn’t the chance to go beyond the first few pages of the manuscript yet.

Inside, it is something of a dream, something of a nightmare.

Something or the other had kept coming up all the time. Not that it was the easiest thing to read!

Today, he’d probably have to spend the whole day out of home before going over to Atin’s place in the evening to show it to Shirin. Shouldn’t he have read it all once at least before that?

There would be hours of waiting in the corridors of the school district office today, on rickety benches before the offices of supervisors, long waits in the sun for the bus to come. As it had been the whole of last week. From the third day onwards he’d started carrying a novel or a book of poetry with him. He wondered if it was a good idea to carry the bunch of brittle papers. The buses were crowded, and anything could happen on the streets of the city.

But he had felt tempted. Quickly, as if fearing a possible change of mind, he had scooped up the heap of papers from inside the box, put them in a file folder, slipped the folder inside his flapping Shantiniketan bag.

In the morning, the air had smelled fresh and clean, full of promise. Even the walk towards the bus stop, and then on to the school services commission, the rally gathering its anger all around seemed less dreary. The old clock on the wall had fresh life in its arteries, showing the right time as the sun rose higher in the sky.

Now that it was close to five in the afternoon, the old clock must have lost the fresh spurt of life, crawling towards the end of the day. It happened every day, and yet the clock started its day as if it would reach home without losing its spirit.

The spider might have peeped out from behind the clock, spreading its crinkly black legs over it like the hood of death.

Was Amlan Nandy, the maker of farts and firecrackers, afraid of spiders? Even if he was, he would probably swallow one before admitting it.

The boy’s fierce words echoed in his head as he walked farther and farther away from the state government office, past the palatial Taj Bengal Hotel, the Rabindra Sadan auditorium, the St Paul’s Cathedral, on the way to Theatre Road and Park Street. This was a face of the city he didn’t see often. Part of the former British neighbourhoods it presented cleaner, broader, tree-lined avenues, foreign consulates and libraries.

There were newer showrooms for clothing, accessories and home decor, and the giant billboards on the crossings became more fascinating, more psychedelic every day. The streets led to air-conditioned markets with a sea of wares, from ethnic pottery and handcrafted saris to electronic gadgets, a sea of popular music.

He felt a sense of relief as he walked. For the first time in all these months since the drought of his pension had sucked away his peace of mind.

He walked past the shiny glass doors of the twenty and thirty storied office buildings with liveried doormen, men and women in dark suits marching in and out with sleek briefcases. The greenery on the left was beginning to approach the messier, noisier expanse of the Brigade Parade Grounds, with the tall, white monument to the martyrs in the freedom struggle looming in the distance. As he passed from sleek Park Street to the sweatier, bustle-filled roads of Esplanade, he heard the rumble of the protest rally on the grounds to his left, not very far away, and felt lost in the volume of pedestrians making their way through a thoroughfare blocked with stilled traffic.

Students in school uniforms milled around the shops, buying snacks, music cassettes, checking out the new movies at the theatres, laughing and chatting with the kind of jubilation that comes only immediately after school hours. They were on their way home, to catch a bus or the metro or cars from home waiting to pick them up, and the happy fatigue of students at the end of school day flowed all over them, in their voices, their lazy window shopping and munching potato chips.

How easily one could tell the difference between these kids and the boys at the school Milan had taught all his life! These boys and girls were from some of the most posh schools that were scattered around this area, all private schools, many of them convents run by Jesuit missionaries and Christians of other denominations, orders of priests and nuns from Ireland, Belgium, Britain, Australia and other far away places, some of them established well over a century ago. It wasn’t just the uniforms, the cuts and the fabric of the emblazoned shirts and blouses, the embossed ties and the belts, the fashionable backpacks, the CD players hanging loosely. It was also their lazy strolling through the neighbourhoods, their laughing familiarity with its shops and showrooms, movie theatres and coffee shops. It was the way they spoke English, the wads rolling off their tongues, the lazy drawl, fluid utterances of pleasure and disdain. They walked the streets with abandon, and yet they seemed to avoid bumping into the hordes of people the rally had released, the agitated mob from the rural suburbs glided by, never stepping out of the pleasant glass of vacuum, cracking a joke, absorbed in the music of the headphones around their ears.

Milan’s mind went back to Amlan Nandy, his unkempt hair that needed cutting, the globs of snot at the edge of his nose, the lines of grime around his neck and face. He could see the chemical stains on the boy’s palm, the black nicotine marks under his nails. A child who didn’t give a straw for school, wanted to blow up his father with a firebomb stolen from the factory where he slaved.

Closer home were the boys at the government-run school to which he had given forty years of his own life. The boys who seemed to have wandered in by mistake. They strayed in, lounged around the back benches, spat out at liver-spotted walls, smoked bidis and sang movie songs. The hours in the dilapidated school building did not steal from them the rare skills of letting off firecrackers on their bare hands, eating fire with the burning end of bidis and cigarettes inside their young mouths.

How would those boys look in the placid uniforms of the convent schools, gold and blue crests on the breast? Could clipped English words pour forth mouths lined with tender teeth already stained with tobacco, mouths roughened by streams of street slang tarnishing the family of foes with lurid accusations of incest?

Would Gautam have been a different boy if he could send him to one of those schools?

He walked northwards, hoping to catch a bus home from the bus stands at Esplanade if they were any to be found. But before that, he needed to eat something.

Close to eight hours had passed without any food in his stomach.

The hunger had struck along with the relief, but he needed to walk a few blocks to find a place to eat a bite.

And why wouldn’t they eat fire, pop firecrackers on bare hands? Longer hours, months and years in run-down schoolhouses, the company of books and a caring teacher or two only deepened their sense of the disparities in this world, this city. Milan’s own words, long and soft like sighs, lay paper-crumpled, messed up, in Sudeep’s room, never to see daylight, ever, breathing months and years and decades of running around as errand boys to make the meagre tuition in high schools and colleges back then, in the young nation to which he had fled. Neither popping burning cigarettes in the mouth nor letting off firecrackers on bare palms had been in fashion at the time, but surely there had been other things he had never bothered to find out? Passing the tenth grade exams had been a watershed in more ways than people usually imagined, as that had been the marker of just about the amount of wisdom he could then sell, in private coaching lessons to children, kids of fourth and fifth grade even, pay college fees without having to balance ten teacups on stained aluminum trays, sweeping shops after hours. Sensing his excitement, Rini had ordered another round of coffee, the bitter brew without milk and sugar the Calcutta Coffee House had named ‘Infusion’, and Milan’s stories had moistened their eyes further. Stories destined for the city’s garbage dump along with old newspapers and empty cigarette packets. Would life be easier without the mad pursuit of words?

A boy and a girl, somewhere in their middle teens, passed Milan close at hand. The boy’s shirt and trousers and the girl’s skirt and blouse were of the same colour, which meant that they were from the same school, and they seemed to know each other well. The boy was smiling, saying something in quick, clipped English that Milan couldn’t catch; the girl laughed softly at his words.

His thinking had slowed him down. As the couple walked ahead of him, he looked at the neatly ironed uniforms; he found himself wondering if the boy could let off a firecracker on his bare hands or if the girl could stick the burning end of the cigarette into her mouth. If they could earn coins and kudos from those around them doing so.

How early did they need to be trained to be able to pull off such marvels?

Amlan Nandy, he was certain, could do as he had bragged, flinging his bony limbs around, letting his nostrils suck back the glob of snot that kept popping out. One could see the coarse mouth, the burning cigarettes popped inside for bravado, touch the strange stains on his palms and see the effects of firecrackers there.

Was it the ugly glint of adulthood in the boy’s eyes, his callused, stained palms? The coarse words mixed in with the childish babble and the sudden power with which he had yanked his palm away? Was it that shadowy adulthood that had made Milan weigh his words? He had dropped the form on the dusty floor, but one could pick that up, brush the dust, rest it on one’s lap. Where was he going to pull out the six thousand rupees in cash, the hundred rupee notes tied in strings, wrapped in brown paper, nestling at the dark bottom of the bag? He hadn’t dared to tell Amlan Nandy that he didn’t have the cash in his bag. That would earn him disdain – the old fucker knows nothing, that is the going rate for these bastards here – comes as no surprise, he was no good at mouthing farts either, not even the long release of diarrhoea. But Amlan Nandy was right, hadn’t many of those notes carried by his cataract-blinded grandmother to the officer been earned by him, stuffing nicotine in cigarettes, firepower in crackers, ten, twelve hours a day? The colour of money he knew well, never mind the tobacco stains on it, and of sweat, and ghastly chemicals that sometimes burned holes right through Mahatma Gandhi’s face on the rupee notes. And he didn’t make up stuff, that was for sissies – okay, maybe add colour to things just a little. One could be certain that he could do as he bragged, popping red-tipped cigarettes inside his mouth, let off firecrackers on bare hands, farts through his grimy mouth, whole dialogues of action film heroes. He was the only responsible grown up about the house with whom one could share the woes of life, count on him to fill up the lacuna of six thousand rupees, take him by the hand and lead on while cataract filmed the vision in old eyes.

He walked up to the tea-stall on the pavement, looking with bruised longing at the biscuits and loaves of bread lined up along the rows of bricks along the pavement.

Maybe he was just sick of being number five thousand six hundred and sixty-five and had just wanted to drop it all at the first opportunity.

He asked for a cup of tea, two slices of bread with some spiced potato curry.

A couple of hours ago, he would have dreaded the prospect of making his way down the dank, dark stairs of the district school office, empty handed, empty of hope.

What could have changed things so fast?

What would he tell Gautam tonight? That he had walked out of the office where he might have pleaded for his dried up pension, without even meeting the officer, because a ten or twelve year old boy had talked about a bundle of notes, wrapped in brown paper, tied in strings, bribe to grease the wheels of bureaucracy?

Gautam wasn’t the one to lose his temper. Somewhere inside, Milan knew that what he did today would push many beyond the limits of their patience. But not Gautam. Milan couldn’t remember a time when Gautam had raised his voice.

But something in his son also frightened him. The twenty-four year old boy was a hard worker, a quiet fulfiller of duties. Ila’s worries about missed meals and unclean rooms were not just a mother’s ritual fretting; she had the mother’s long sight about how things would be if she wasn’t around. But Gautam wasn’t the one to leave forms unfilled, overtime pay unclaimed. None could find a flaw in his work in the spheres that claimed the energies of the man, and a man he had been, since the day he’d taken up his job, cut short his life as a student. The times when Milan missed the date of a bill or neglected the details of filing a sick-leave application, he could count on his son’s stolid disapproval. Disappointing his son, at times like these, was something he dreaded, much the way sons felt about disappointing fathers they loved.

‘You should have at least waited to speak to the senior officer.’ Simple words.

But it wasn’t even that daunting today. Today, he was just glad that he had chosen a tea-stall inside a smaller lane some distance off the main street. There were only a few scattered people seated on the layer of bricks for seats, and a small knot of young men standing on the road before, smoking, with cups of tea in their hands.

Otherwise, on a day like this, one would have to wage a war for space in teashops like this one.

It couldn’t hurt to pause here awhile, to let the sea of people make their way back to the suburbs, from offices and from the rally. He could while away an hour, maybe more here. And then he could walk over to the tram-stops in Bowbazar.

He broke piece of bread, dipped it in the curry. It tasted wonderful.

When had words come and left Amlan Nandy, the wise boy who could count his rupees with skill beyond his age? Would Rini and Dipanjan remember a senile writer’s struggle in mid-century, in a young, turbulent nation they hadn’t seen, the struggle to make words his own, pay for them with his sick blood?

Sipping on his tea, he took out the file from his bag. Calcutta Energy Supply Corporation, the logo-encircled letters said at the top right corner.

Specks of dust fell into his tea.

To think widowhood to be my moment of liberation, to think that it would bring back the power and meaning of the written word!

The last seventeen years of my life, the marriage-blessed life of unbroken iron and shell bangles and rich vermilion – I cannot pretend that I’ve been truly alive, these seventeen years.

But as the white-draped ghost slinking before my eyes that pickle-fragrant afternoon had signalled in a dark omen, my life was now but a squeezed out, bitter pip of a fruit left in the nook of the brick pillar in the terrace, forgotten by all.

I sat like a block of stone when they sheared off my tresses, took the red-bordered sari off my twenty-nine year old body, and handed me the dull-white, coarse cotton shapeless thing. When the civil surgeon had dropped my husband’s wrist and had nodded sadly, I had smashed my white-shell bangle on the mahogany bedstead, wiped the vermilion off my forehead before leading on the chorus of moans and yells. The fear of my living flesh burning in wood-fire had not frozen me; but the ritual of the tragedy had cast me in stone.

An illusion as coarsely spun as the shapeless white cotton they handed over to me to drape the sad flesh that would not rise to the flames. An illusion that came off its seams the moment I stared at my reflection in the Venetian mirror on the huge dressing table in my bedroom.

Seventeen years ago, one terror-grey daybreak after a night with my newly-wedded husband, I had seen my slender, small frame, strange and uncanny in the rich Benarasi sari, the silk blouse from which my bony arms stuck out like dry twigs, the vermilion powder, a thick smudge on my right cheek. There were rainy afternoons when I had smuggled Suhasini into the inner sanctum of our bedroom, dressed her up in my finery, and had stood with our arms around each other looking at the mirror, where we had been happy sisters in a royal household.

Today, the seams of the illusion came off brutally as I stared at the violence done to my body, the shorn hair moss-grown on my skull, the colours lost, the colour of the vermilion, the pretty red dot on my forehead, the juice of betel leaves reddening my lips, all gone without a trace.

Seventeen years ago, with the vermilion-blood oozing over my eyes by the violence of the male body to which I was given over overnight, I had had rivers of tears drenching the corners of my eyes.

Today, the tears had dried up on those very eyecorners.

I wasn’t to pleasure my body in any way, not through food, not through soft garments that might soothe my body. I was to eat a meagre diet of bland vegetarian cooking either cooked by my own hands or by a pious Brahmin. There were a hundred days now when I couldn’t touch food, or touch food before a certain hour.

And there were those special days when I had to wait for the stroke of midnight for a drink of water or a morsel of food.

I’d thought the dull drone of mantras around me, the mantras of womanhood had sucked me in. But I’d been wrong, dead wrong. The life-in-death of a widow hurt so, every wretched moment of it!

Who knew that I’d have to wait for the desert of my life, stretching out endlessly before me from my twenty-ninth year, for the most angelic friendships to bless my life again? And who knew words would come back to me through such magic, words, multitudes of them, raining down on these pages to be sucked into the mouldy caverns of time?

It was the very first day when I had to cook my widow’s meal, a meal I wouldn’t have fed to a famine-stricken beggar earlier. It was a maze of rules in the kitchen for widows, about which vessel shouldn’t touch which one, what kind of rice and vegetables could be used and which ones were impure, whether to use firewood or dried cow dung for fuel in the clay oven, what could bear the touch of a non-brahmin and what couldn’t, what kinds of metal could be used for cooking and eating, and which ones were unusable. It was an intricate web of rules which a slight flaw could tear apart. After a lifetime in the labyrinthine rituals of wifehood, I was lost again.

And were they mean! The ragged inauspicious scum of that house, the shaved-head, white-draped wives of dead husbands quarantined in the shadows of the women’s quarters, ages seventeen to seventy-five, looking out to death, for months, for half a century. The woman should kill her desire, her passion, her attachments, her reason to live once her husband’s body burns in the pyre, but don’t they die a hard death? What was going to happen to me, my clinging ties and bonds, at twenty-nine? The inevitable happened in these ghost-wings of the house. Greed and want and vanity sprouted in poisonous corners, smothered in their natural growth. There was lust to possess the name of the most devout, the most rigorous observer of penances and fasts, the closest to God, the thirst for the highest power over the maidservants, the command of the juiciest gossip from the life from which they had been barred forever.

Seventeen years ago, a shy bride of twelve out of her husband’s bed, I had sat in the middle of snarling wives in the worship room, had burned in their ironies, acid jealousy and spite.

Today, I sat in the widows’ kitchen, my lungs choking in the fumes of the dung-fire, my eyes smarting, lost in the web of rules, the play of power and vanity, the bitter, white-draped women flitting around me, brandishing their acerbic tongues and their rolling eyes, brows that rose in wonder and scandal.

Where’s your red-bordered sari, your dash of vermilion on the forehead, the jangling keys that clung to your sari-end, the pride of the wedded mistress?

They didn’t speak the words but I heard it all, over and over again, in their eyes, their wrinkled mouth-corners.

I sat in a corner on the compound, holding my head in my hands, the pain throbbing at the temples. Seventeen years ago, the tears would have been too scared to roll down; through the years they had flowed and flowed and flowed and today, they had run dry.

The palm that had rested on my hair-shorn head had had a softness I hadn’t known could live in the widows’ quarters where life had turned hard many centuries ago when the scriptures had ordained that a woman with a dead husband was a shell without life inside.

‘Let me cook your meal today, Kamal, you’ll learn things in no time.’

I had looked up with bleary, tearless eyes.

Probably because Saroj rarely spoke, shy and soft smiling as she had been, I had not forgotten the timbre of her voice even though I had seen her not more than once or twice a month these fifteen years she had been widowed.

The softness of her speech and manners had melted into the garb of widowhood, but did the hair-shorn, dead-bare face break my heart, kill my memory of a life-spilling mouth as carved on clay images in October, the lines of suppressed smile along reddened lips inside the halo of black-silk hair!

I had found my stumbling way to the one friend I had in this living afterlife, and it was a strange companionship to have on the other side of the great divide, bereft of desires, mischief, passion, anger. No climbing trees to pluck fruits, running along burning terraces to taste sun-dried pickles, but sitting in the prayer room, fasting without food or water, sapping strength from the smiling face of Lord Vishnu, from each other’s presence, breath, scent, each other’s suffering, scaring perhaps, on the wind-swept terrace in the apparition of ghosts, some pickle-thieving twelve-year old new bride as we went about laying out the little balls of ground lentils to dry in the sun, moving slowly, shadows in white draping our near-bare skulls.

Fifteen years after we had raised hell on these sun-dried rooftops and marble-damp halls, the widowed, white-draped Saroj amazed me no less than she had in the daybreak of our lives in this house. The silent, sweet-smiling fifteen year old who would drive the wild Suhasini up the wall, words never leaving her pretty, crinkly-cornered mouth, not the curses that flew like a monsoon river from Suhasini’s chapped lips at stubborn mango-tree branches. After a decade and a half, the angelic, crinkly-mouth smile had melted away from the widow’s face beneath which the river of spirit had run dry, but even now, a droplet or two would shine forth for a fraction of a moment when I touched her arm in the middle of a chat, or spoke of our old days with the wistful amusement of mothers reminiscing their children’s antics. Those three girls, they were something! And wild too! But the same calm, the same soft refusal to let words shine a torch on her inscrutable mind that had maddened Suhasini so, had remained through these fifteen widowed years of Saroj’s life. She moved, a tower of silence, among the din of wagging tongues, disputes thickening the air of the widows’ quarters, the daggers of malice slipping off her body, the tower of quiet light. The widows, many of them older than Saroj by decades, had come to be bewildered by this soft, reticent woman. A handful of them, especially some of the younger widows, had, it seemed to me, even come to grow a soft spot for her, just the way Suhasini had come to love the quiet girl she was never able to figure out. They did not shower her with fruits and cowries and wildflowers like Suhasini used to do; such heartwarming rains had no place among the widows; but I could sense a few pots and pans appearing like magic as Saroj prepared my first widows’ meal, and the jangle of harsh words had slowly faded away, though there were shrivelled souls who cursed Saroj just as much as they cursed the rest of the world.

I’ve thirsted after words all my life. Now I run to salvage them in scrawls, but I’ve never been quiet either when it came to talking. Between the two of us, myself and Suhasini, we could make a babbling brook in no time. But Saroj wasn’t like us. She spoke little, just letting the quiet elegance of her face fool people, as there was no getting through it, bless her inscrutable heart. Her silence gave people pause, softened the tone of their own voices, mellowed the rancour in the widows’ throats.

And her nature created distance. It didn’t take me long to realize that Saroj hadn’t made any real friends here. As the months passed, praying and cooking and cleaning together, laying little lentil-balls on scorched terraces, I came to see why. The shy girl of fifteen had lived for two years, through her quiet smile and the cloud of red abeer and her love for curried delicacies; she had lived through these two years in a way she never even tried after her widowhood. Not so the rest of the widows, many of who swam neck-deep in the new river of gossip and laughing malice, bereft only of a husband’s arm that they’d known once in a while during their wedded life. But Saroj had burnt herself in her husband’s pyre, burnt in all but flesh, not because she loved her aging husband but because she had worshipped him and more, had worshipped her rich wedded lot, the pride of womanhood as she had been taught since she could crawl and lisp.

Two years.

That had been all her life, whose memory she pushed away far, farther always; but she couldn’t fool me; the pickle-fragrant afternoons from those two years, with her two shocking friends, I could tell, had been the only moments ever truly alive for her. I loved her so, and love gave me insight into even that inscrutable soul! What could be there in the soft touch with which she’d awakened in this new world for the first time? ‘Let me cook your meal today, Kamal.’ It was her way of smiling at one of the very few real friends she had ever made in her whole life, long-lost, now returned to her through the worst nightmare of a woman’s life. Wasn’t I grateful to her, her soft words sprouted from nowhere, the halo she so easily wrapped me within!

The sole other speck of light in the dark of this afterlife was my Pratap.

Pratap had surprises – great misty swirls of it, for all of his family, more so for his father, uncles and the two grandfathers, death claiming most of them as he grew up; he had surprises for all of them and more as he moved on, turned into a fresh-faced seventeen year old. But to me, he had a seamless meaning never lost on me through my dark, chained years.

He was never a strong and muscular one, would never be; look at his thin, soft arms and fingers like a woman’s, long, thin ones like a woman who played the many-stringed veena. He disappointed his father and uncles so. He became nothing like the barrel-chested sinewy beasts that some of them had been in their youth, possessor of strong muscles that had drooped before long, through reckless hedonism. Pratap was a distress to the anxious eyes that watched one of the important bearers of the family name grow up over the years. He shamed them by never getting into the manly sports of wrestling or hunting. He was thin, pretty, perhaps a little effeminate boy who never thought it odd to throw his arms around his old mother even in his late teens; a little sickly even, he had those horrible fevers.

He was also turning out to be too much of a scholar for this family, indoors much of the time with his books, books which, alas, were far beyond my world now. He was the pride of his teachers, the winner of medals and prizes that got but a dry cackle from his father and uncles but lit up every corner of my heart.

They didn’t care for the books and papers and writing my boy spent so much of his days with. Not just because they found it unbecoming to the scions of kings, but deep down, unbeknownst to them, they smelled danger in them, in the books and papers, the alien fragments.

I have lived behind the massive lion gates of this great house for seventeen years.

The only stretches of sunshine I have known are the magical open courtyard and the blue emptiness of the terrace. I’ve never stepped out, never getting wind of the tremors outside, of the dust and the grime of our land outside the gates, the clip-clop of carriage horses, the scream of farmers vending their wares, the British sergeants traipsing on horseback, the red-faced, whiskered white men, droves of poor villagers migrating from famine to famine. None of it, none at all, except what came in a wild whiff on a gossip from a maid who sold milk from house to house; a minstrel singing the changing winds of our land on his one-string instrument; a gypsy woman smuggled inside the inner sanctum of the women’s quarters to vend magic potions, herbs and roots that change the contours of one’s life, crooning away in her hag-voice of the beauty and the turmoil of the world outside that never made its way past the thick walls of stone and iron that flanked the women’s lives in this great house.

These days, Pratap brought strange, disturbing views, news that upset and enthralled, bewildered my time-chained mind, shook the age-old pillars of this family.

Sometimes I heard him deep in debate with his friends, some princes like him, others from no family worth the name, dusty roadsides, poor boys with minds and words like the tips of flames.

There was talk again of the remarriage of widows, of pushing the stillborn law into life. There were more and more people supporting it, and the king of Burdwan had announced rewards for young men marrying widows. It was going to be the rite beyond imagination; hair-shorn, white-draped ghosts of women left for dead, dressed in bridal finery, the promise of a new conjugal night awakening warm blood in their long-dead arteries of desire, what a sin, my lord! And there were white nuns going begging from door to door, begging people to send their girls to their new schools, where they could learn their letters without losing their Hindu purity, without becoming heathen Christians.

Strange and upsetting views that he brought inside the ironclad sanctum of this house to raise storms, elders foaming at their mouths in outrage, Pratap arguing with passion with an ageing uncle or his father, flinging weapons of alien learning from outside the iron gates, over the seven seas, learning and ideas that had never rung out in the hundred rooms of this giant palace.

The life-altering shock came home months after my widowhood. It arrived right here, within these lifeless walls of this mansion, under the imposing arches of the prayer room unblessed by gods whose stone bodies were installed inside, whose spirit never moved the dead air in this flower-fragrant, hall.

Pratap had dashed into the worship room like the gust of wind he was, in from whatever unholy place he had been roaming around in the city, throwing his arms around me from behind, heedless as he was of my endless warnings not to touch me in impure, unwashed clothes.

Struck out of my reverie of chants of the hundred names of gods, I smiled, caressed the thin, sunburned arms that had hugged me from behind.

‘There, you’ve touched me again. Haven’t I told you a thousand times not to touch me when I’m in prayer, not without having taken a bath and put on clean clothes?’ I said it all, but could I be more thankful for the touch, crying and praying for a god who had gone deaf on me? ‘Heaven knows whatever god-forsaken places you boys roam around these days!’

Would he play games with me!

‘So your son’s dirty. Not good enough to be in the room with the gods.’ He laughed, withdrew his arms. ‘Well, I happen to know a quick route to purity!’ And then he – oh he was a handful – dipped his fingers into the brass pot of holy Ganga water, sprinkled it all over his body. ‘Well, now I’m pure, right?’

Would he fling me to the edge of despair!

I looked around the worship hall in fright, though I knew nobody was around at that time, thank heavens. Pratap’s father’s anger had spat out the blame on me, for Pratap moving far from the ways of this noble family, and the blame had spread thick in the air. Why do you think Pratap turned out the way he has? You won’t have to look far, not beyond his mother, coddling him the way no son should be coddled! If anyone saw him hugging me in the middle of the worship, making the mess with the Ganga water that he just did, the axe would not fall on him, God forbid, he’s a man and will go flitting out of doors happily, but I’d have to survive for days with harsh words and endless ironies jangling in my ears.

‘Someday you’ll be my death!’ I turned around on my seat, trying to restrain him with my hands. ‘Now that whole pot of Ganga water will have to be thrown out, you’ve touched it now, it’s bad now!’

A grin glistened in his eyes, spread all over his face slowly like the light on a full-moon night.

‘Heavens, do I scare away gods with my impurity! Ganga water purifies people in a single drop, and here I have tarnished a whole pot of it with a touch of my little finger!’

‘Well, now that you’ve done your share of damage for the day, just run along.’ I touched his chin lightly. I’d have to take another bath and start the prayer all over again anyway. ‘I have another couple of hours of prayers to do. And then I have to put new clothes on the gods. Have you forgotten what day it is today?’

Neither did he know nor did he care, the little heathen son of mine. Did he believe in God at all? He never said he didn’t…

‘I’ll never understand how you spend entire days in this prayer room, chanting the same prayers over and over again, toying with the flowers and fruits and water! Don’t you get tired of it?’ How can a mother tell her son the truth, the bare naked truth that hurts so much, eats away the inside of the soul. And how can she tell him a lie!

‘Well, you don’t believe in God, do you?’ I smiled at him, but he didn’t reply. ‘But tell me, what is there in the life of a widow waiting for her last days but the name of God? Don’t you spend hours at your books cooped up in your study?’

‘What rubbish! Waiting for death indeed, at your age!’ And then his young face crinkled again, in a thought, in a worry, just the way it used to do when he was five. ‘Mother, would you spend time reading if you could? You could then read the prayer songs instead of having to learn everything by heart.’

My eyes floated towards the little booklet of ballads in a corner of the worship room, under a heap of yellow flowers.

I could read them – or crawl my way through some of the simpler passages, smaller words. Or I could, many years ago. The frantic chase after words had stalled many years ago, and that booklet of ballads had been the last few written words that I could reap for myself. But the stretch before had been barren, and my memory had begun to play tricks with me, the words were beginning to change their airy forms back to the squiggly insects they had been, frozen on the page, out of my struggling mind.

‘What nonsense! It’s wrong for a woman to read and write. What need does she have of letters?’

Tremors ran through my voice as I said the words; I know not if Pratap noticed.

‘Mother, that’s all nothing but a bunch of superstitions. The Vedas speak of the fabled women scholars, you know that, don’t you? Women have as much right to the letters as men do.’

I knew in the deepest caverns of my heart why they all blamed me for his turning out the way he had. Wasn’t I a sinner, to wish it all on my son, the blackest, most profane dreams of mine!

But I couldn’t play this game with him, not for long.

‘And which tutor will teach this old stupid hag, tell me?’ I smiled at him. ‘If the gods don’t shoot them down?’

‘Oh mother, will you stop it? Do you know the Irish nuns have opened up a school in Bowbazar for girls?’

He was a child, wasn’t he? Did he live in this house, really, did he?

‘Pratap, women of this house don’t step out of the women’s quarters. I haven’t been out of these gates for eighteen years now.’ I was looking in the pure eyes of my son, looking straight at them, dying in shame and guilt all over again thinking of that day many, many years ago when I had slipped away with a slim, red book under my sari-end, raising frowns of worry on five year old brows, the shame and guilt he would never know about.

And then he had let out those words that I’d been waiting for, surely, in the blackest depths of my blasphemous heart.

‘But I can teach you, mother.’ He had said, looking back into my eyes.

And that’s how it all started again, the new lines of my life, crawling back into the world of sinister beauty I had tried to reach so many times, lying and stealing for it, always faltering, left behind. After many years’ blindness, I opened eyes that I never knew I had.

I had lived behind the gates of this royal palace for close to two decades. I had known no stretch of sunshine beyond the wind-swept terrace and the blue of the open courtyard, knew nothing of the ring of colours the skies outside had moved through. But they had flowed in, through the iron and stone of the walls, the layers of bricks and endless wings of empty, dark rooms. Time had moved on, and I hadn’t known when some of the hardest, heaviest bricks had fallen out, when the mould had dried in some of the deepest caverns.

My husband hadn’t been the only one who had passed away in these years. Many others had died too, including Sarala-didi, three of my brothers-in-law. The ironclad rule of the past had loosened over time. Women still didn’t go outdoors, but some of the newer brides were far less meticulous about observing the rituals and the fasts, and no one was outraged, or at least voice their objections brutally enough, as would have been natural in the older days. There were also those rumours about the increasing corrosion of the estate’s prosperity, the drying patches in its fountain of wealth; the determination of some of the younger men to stay away from ancestral lifestyles, the reckless days and nights of wine and women, hunting and travelling abroad, the most expensive prostitutes and singers of the land. They wanted different things these days. A couple of them had left for England to study law, and there was talk about young men entering high echelons of the government service, jobs long reserved for the British.

There were winds of change, even behind these high stone walls.

In the days to follow, Pratap and I sat in his study before the books I’d long lost on the way, crawling my way back through stronger and stronger sentences and intricate passages. And most wondrous of all, without trying to hide any of it. A few stinging words did fly around in the women’s quarters about a widow’s obscene wishes to flout the rules of the scriptures, but there was no one to snatch the books away from us any more.

Once in a rare moment, through a haze of smiles and tears, a confused, scared and stubborn nineteen-year old girl would float before my eyes, sitting right here, in this room, many, many years ago, hiding her only book under her sewing, groping her way through the shower of words in the next room. Once in a rare moment, maybe. But most of the time I surged ahead, through the tales and legends for children, finally to the novels of Bankim-babu, even to the forbidden Bishbriksha, the poison tree for the ruin of men, the destruction of family.

Sometimes the scrap of an unsettling memory would come back, the correct pronunciation of a tricky consonant, a strange rule of the inflection of words, a throwaway speck of wisdom on the compounding of letters and words, disturbing tremors all from a past life. I would not know what to do with the unruly scrap of memory, how to cripple it, kill its last trace, revive it in its new life without looking away from my son’s smiling eyes, the spectre of honesty in them clear as crystal.

Back in those days I would tell them that I had to sit close as my child studied, to keep him from crying out for his mother. One day he had heard it all. With the gravest face a five year old had ever had, he had looked up at me, ‘Mother, I don’t cry while studying, and I can study without you watching me all the time, you know.’ I had hugged him and said, ‘But my moonbeam, I can’t stay a moment with you far away, that’s why I sit in the next room while you say your alphabets before the tutor.’

The ways of the gods were mysterious, beyond the reach of the human mind. They had not struck me down then, not that very instant.

The tremors would come back to my voice, my eyelids would flutter; I wouldn’t dare look up to my son, but would he know anything, remember anything, what with a hundred thousand things swimming in his head!

Just the words grew in life, meaning flowed back into the strange arms and antennas.

One by one, thirteen years passed.

To think widowhood to be my moment of liberation, the ashes of dead vermilion, to think that it would bring back the power and meaning of the written word!

Would my vanity stop at that!

Instead, I create the mockery of words on paper, words on which the ink will dry, and time will wizen into papery flakes, crumble, make its way back to the dust it came from.

I steal away time from the hours I should be spending in prayer. I steal away time from those hours, sit in my bare room, a ghostly memory of the lavish, regally furnished bedroom with Venetian mirrors and mahogany dressing tables that I had as a wife. I sit in this spare-shadowed room of clear, mean lines and write these words, scouring the depths of my memory of the years within these stone walls.

They call me strange names in the women’s quarters, the wives and the widows and the maids, the crazy witch-widow who dabbles in ink and paper, steals away prayer time to sit in the maze of paper. But times have changed within these stone walls, behind the lion-gates, and no one comes and snatches the quill away from my hand. The words just swirl around like screeching bats in the dark evening air.

My name is Kamal.

My first child-lisping on paper, the telling of my name, a common one, possessed by hundreds of women in this land who would never see the world outside their doors more than a few times in their lives; a weak line drawn on water that would melt away before getting etched in its wholeness.

I am a widow.

After etching the water patch of one’s name, nothing more remains to say about oneself.

Once, I had been a wife.

The red-draped, bejewelled wife in a great family.

And then, as one practises the nuances of the past tense, it’s time to return to the past when there had been life inside this dry shell of a body, when I could show my pretty face in auspicious moments and be treasured for it, not whisked away as an ill-omened shadow.

Before that, I had been a little girl in a happy family, in a pretty village, river-nourished, grain-blessed, all green below, all blue above.

The words grow with each sentence.

From the river-nourished country to the marbled-arched city palace; matchstick-armed, scantily-dressed girl to jewellery-bedecked, vermilion-smeared bride, and back, back to brandish the intricacies of the past tense, the fresh-sprouting words on paper, words I’d swirled around in my mouth for ever and for ever. Words growing like leaves in the monsoon-moist, gangly shoots that my scribbled sentences had been, in the cobwebbed bareness of my present, time stolen from the chants and flower-offerings before the clay icons in the prayer-room.

The story of a life, a past life beyond this river of death, in the sun-warmed country of Bengal, of the softest, richest soil, cows with the largest eyes, the shadiest banyan trees, the quiet tanks and ponds, the life of forest-picnics and household chores done in tiny hands, the design of rice-paste drawn on the thresholds, the mud-moulded courtyards, the story of a life left on the other side of the great river. All growing through strings of sentences before me as if I’d been talking to my long lost mates, in the bird-whistling, cricket-whirring riversides, the windswept, pickle-fragrant terraces under the midsummer sky. The story of the rare-cobalt stretch of sky over the open courtyard in the heart of a palace of massive stone pillars and iron and silver beams, many-bricked obelisks, the open courtyard of crying, shrieking, laughing, loving, hurting, shackled women with the fragrant red dye of alta on their silver-belled ankles, the aroma of fragrant oil on flowing tresses of black hair.

Is the pain ever less?

My mind goes back to the story Pratap had told me one day, struck with shock, of the hare-lipped baby daughter born to one of the sweepers’ wives, of the despair the tiny wretched piece of female flesh had brought into her parents’ lives, the darkness in which she had been born. ‘Babu, who’ll marry a sweeper’s daughter with a twisted mouth? Who’ll look after her when we’re gone? Would she have died in her mother’s stomach!’ Six months later, as it so often happened in the families of this land’s starving, sickly millions, perhaps with an extra helping of negligence, the tiny ugly thing contracted a high fever, throwing her parents in despair. One afternoon, a week later, the sweeper turned up on my son’s doorsteps, with red-rimmed eyes, hair like a madman’s. His daughter had died, and he wanted money for alcohol, just like on New Year’s Day, festivities, births. ‘She’d have died anyway, the little wretched thing, she’d just come in our household for a few days to torture us, my lord.’

The cow dung fire of the widow’s meal for me to get drunk on, the cow dung fire like the flames leaping out of fragrant firewood that would have burned my red sari-draped, bejewelled body next to my husband’s wrinkled corpse even a few decades ago.

The ravings of a madwoman, the soft indulgence of one who lives in death, crawls closer to the real end of it all on the day of every fast, every chant of god’s name, the recording of bubbly gossip on sun-burned terraces, musty hallcorners, the claims of dowries over dolls’ weddings, the plucking of wild fruits, the words stifled up inside over years, words that can only come up on ink-dipped quill-tips in the dead silence of the stone walls around.

Half-mad gypsy women spread tall tales from village to village, spin their strange yarns across weed-infested woods, the saffron-clothed minstrel pulls on his one-stringed instruments to sing his yearning ballads across the country, through the fragrant air of this land where the songs float like a cloud of tears on a breeze. I sit between these dead walls, strain my soul dry, play my little game. I talk to the papers, the papers I soil daily with the gossip of my mind, my dreams and nightmares of the past.

I talk to them of fear.

An unknown fear clouds my mind, a fear of violence ahead, of the sharp smell of metal in the air, the fear I see casting long shadows on my son’s face, mingling with the anger and promise tightening his jaws. These past few months, I’ve only seen him a few times, but a mother knows her son’s mind when she sees him, knows of the unknown lurking inside him, tormenting him day and night.

It’s been years since he has stopped sitting with me, reading passages from novels out to me, helping me with my reading. I did not try to stop him when he started moving away from my daily life. He was a man, and a man’s world is outside the house, in the great gushing river of life outside the walls of this house. I wasn’t going to try to hold him back. After all, as much as my child loved me, I never had him close to me as much as I craved, as much as I would have, had it been a daughter as she grew up before my very eyes. My boy was over twenty-five years of age now, and I couldn’t hold him back from the world even if I wanted to.

That would have saddened me deep inside. But what I sense around the fleeting, shadowy figure of Pratap these rare moments spills a cold, grainy fear.

I see him between weeks these days, sometimes months. Often during these times, I know, he’s not in the house, as on many occasions I send for him, sometimes have a maid take one of his favourite desserts or pickles over to his rooms. The maid would come back every time with the news that the young lord was out, and that he hadn’t come back the previous night, or the night before. I’d spend my days in worry; but who’s heard of a man that loves the inside of his own house? Hadn’t his father kept me waiting with dinner ready, night after night after night? Pratap was different, sprung from the same loins but worlds apart. And yes, this was different too. With my husband, I always knew of those dark caverns he vanished into, sucked away from home and wife, into the houses of the dancing girls, courtesans, drinking houses, hunting in forests, sometimes away to the western states for weeks with his favourite concubine. I always knew them. He never tried to hide, and they were so few and so easy to name, from the dark bags under his eyes, from the smell of alcohol on his breath, from the perfume. It killed me daily inside, to lose a husband daily to the dark caverns, but it was all within the realm of the known, the age-old, the stonecast script of wives’ lots in this great house.

And it was a big house, a palace of endless caverns, endless fears and worries in times that had none of the earlier certitudes, the steadiness of yore. It was a huge many-branched tree of a house whose trunk had started breaking away, the elder men who had held it together dying, the new families in the different wings sucked in their daily whirlpool of pain, and happiness, and worry. No one had time to notice if one of its young men wasn’t to be seen for weeks, months, maybe.

Sometimes, other men would come in with Pratap, men of his age, many older, a few in their teens.

I would hear of it from the maids; sometimes I saw it myself – men who carried the same silent shadow around them, all of them. Friends who used to come before, in the earlier years had been full of robust talk, laughter and spirit as they debated matters I had never heard inside these walls – the education of women, new laws of the British, anger and unrest in distant parts of the country, of the globe, poetry and painting from distant lands, passionate, eager crystals of words that echoed and echoed again in the rooms, arguments sparked off at every corner, swirling around me as I stood on the threshold, with a bowl of sweets I had brought for Pratap, wondering at the strange man that was my son, wondering at his friends, some rich like him, some poorer than our sweepers, wondering at them, the rush of alien wind in this house, in this land.

But these new friends never raised their voices above a whisper, and they fell to a silence at the sound of footsteps outside the door. If there was passion in their voice it was muffled. One man was here for about two weeks, staying back in Pratap’s room even as my son left the house for days. He was a strange man, in his late thirties maybe, with a cheek full of unshaven beard, matted hair, never leaving the room, scaring the maids with his ways, taking his meals in the room, served by the servant with whom Pratap had left his instructions.

One of these days, when Pratap was back home for a few hours before dashing out again, alone in his room, looking like a man marooned on an island, his clothes old and unwashed, his eyes red from lack of sleep, I had entered the room, burst out in words long withheld.

‘What do you do these days, Pratap? Where are you gone for days and who are these strange men around you all the time?’ I stood near him; something in the air stopped me from touching his chin lovingly as I always did. ‘Don’t lie to your mother, Pratap, tell me the truth.’

He looked up to me, and for a moment I saw the crystal image of the innocent five-year old in his eyes, the image that vanished like lightning, leaving in its place, the tired, hunted face of a fugitive.

‘The truth, mother, is that the winds of change are coming, and this time there is no running away, for none.’ He sighed, looked out of the window, quickly packed up the cloth bundle he had before himself, pushed it inside a desk.

‘You don’t eat properly these days; you’re not home for weeks. Did you take a look at yourself in the mirror? I am really worried for you, my son.’ I cried out, but I couldn’t touch him still. There was something about him that pushed me away farther.

‘My heart breaks too, when I look at you,’ he said slowly, mysteriously. ‘My heart breaks too when I look at my mother, our mother.’

He left the room as softly as he had spoken.

He would only speak in riddles, in that tone of mystery and apocalypse, his eyes forever away. I would never get anything out of him but a congealing of fears that something loomed in the horizon, something dark and unknown.

After he hadn’t been home for another two weeks, I stepped inside his room, sensing, as I crossed the threshold, the tense knots in the air, the dank smell of secrecy, of the airless interior of closely-shuttered rooms, the whispers I’d heard echoing in this room a hundred thousand times. The maids had cleaned the room as they did every morning, but they didn’t have to do the bed, it was untouched, unslept on for many days, not a wrinkle on the tidied linen. My son’s clothes hung in the corner clotheshorse, his beautiful, rich-blue Kashmiri shawl, the silken, embroidered panjabi and dhoti he hadn’t worn for now well over a year; but they were there, brushed and tidied carefully by the servants. I walked up to his study table. There were many English books that I could make nothing of; I didn’t know a letter in that language. But there was a copy of the novel Anandamath, the tale of the armed revolt against British rulers led by the ascetics of Bengal, and a play called Nildarpan. Going through the first few pages, I realized it was something about the uprising of the indigo farmers against the British plantation owners.

‘My heart breaks too, when I look at you,’ his strange, slow words came back to me. ‘My heart breaks too when I look at my mother, our mother.’

The drawers of his desk were locked. The servants were not allowed to touch these. But I knew where he kept the keys, and I opened the top drawer.

It was chock-a-block with more pamphlets, paper, and the one below had some old clothes. With confusion clumping my insides, I had opened the third drawer. The cotton bundle I had seen in his hand that day lay there. Carefully, I unwrapped it.

A pistol lay inside, and pieces of unused cartridge.

Slowly, I locked the drawers, stepped back inside my room. A pistol, or even larger guns were not unusual in this house. I’d seen many with my husband, brothers-in-law. The servants and gatekeepers had many guns; robbers attacked rich households sometimes, and they also came handy with stubborn peasants who refused to pay taxes, I had heard my husband say many times; and of course there was hunting in the country estates. But it was the way the pistol lay in Pratap’s desk-drawer, bundled in that soft, grimy cotton rag, in that empty room of the unslept bed, of the air of thick, solid whispers still looming heavy. There was something worlds away from the massive double-barrelled gun that hung in my husband’s living room, oiled and cleaned by his servants every now and then, proud and gleaming in the sunlight. There was a slithering shadow around this gun that clogged my throat.

Pratap had never cared about guns or hunting before, my soft, fresh-limbed son, almost feminine in the curve of his mouth, the suppleness of his skin, the tenderness of the passion with which he rushed into the prayer-room and threw his arms around me.

Pratap didn’t come back the following week, or the week after. But soon one evening, my life changed again.

The sun had set about an hour before. The last of the red hues had disappeared beyond the western sky, and dark shadows had engulfed the terrace.

Even today, nearly thirty years after life inside these walls, I come away to the terrace alone when I was sad, hurt, lost to my own self.

Homing birds and strange insects had been buzzing around the sky’s dying blood-mist.

It had been eighteen nights that Pratap hadn’t come home.

I had been standing on the terrace, staring out in the nothingness of the city’s never-ending skyline, the rooftops below far away, dwarfed by the imposing height and breadth of our mansion. The west end of the house overlooked a major street, and from there faint sounds came up like an alien murmur from below, the clip-clop of horses drawing carriages, the cries of street-vendors, the music of hymns from the riverside temples.

I don’t know how long I stood there, the floor growing cooler under my bare feet, the mild heat of the early autumn day melting away into a soft breeze that carried a hint of the wildflowers blooming behind the house, near the pond. The breeze caressed my face, the fragrance wafted around my nose, and I wept, dropping my white-draped, hair-shorn head on the blistered walls of the terrace.

‘Kamal.’ The voice called from behind, and for a moment I’d thought that my mind was seeing strange pictures, bizarre streaks, a lost world.

‘Kamal.’ The voice called again. I turned around, looked back.

She stood at the door that opened down to the stairs below, a clay lamp in her hand casting a pale yellow sheen that lit up her silhouette against the darkness behind her, pouring weak colour into the dark sari on her body, her tall frame.

‘Kamal,’ Suhasini said, ‘You are still as fond of the terrace as before.’

Many worlds away, up above in the heavens, the planets and stars that shaped the courses of our lives had started blooming in the clear sky, and hugging the hard, blistered wall of the terrace, I felt I was going to faint.

More than twenty-five years later, my childhood playmate had come back to me.

The mix of bread and curry and tea made soft rumbles in his stomach, and his palms were dank with sweat, breathless, streaming sweat that felt unusual even in the middle of the scorched day.

On the brick-laden seats of the pavement tea-stall, the food had been divine. But he had gulped them down too fast, and a lump of food flung on an empty and acid-burnt stomach all day never did any good in the end. The bread had been stale, perhaps…dizzily, he now remembered that it was hard, with a slightly musty smell, out of the great glass jars with stains on them, sitting on the bamboo poles of the stall that held its merchandise. The curry had been too hot, burning like fire, splashed with ground red pepper.

He was too old for this kind of food. This kind of life.

What other kind was there?

Slow crawling cars and buses on the road made up homeward traffic at this hour. Of people returning home northward, to the suburbs, from the business districts. The stubborn traffic jam of the morning and the afternoon caused by the road-blocks and on-street demonstrations by the protestors had cleared, though the volume of traffic was heavier due to them returning home along with regular commuters, after a hard day’s work of protests and rallies and anger spewed at the Brigade Parade grounds.

The 47B Milan had found a place to sit in was in no hurry to move ahead, traffic or no traffic. These buses were not owned by the city transit authorities, but by private owners from suburbs. Badly maintained, they worked with a share of the profits going to the drivers and the bus conductors, even the helper who thumped on its flanks with a drummer’s passion, guiding it through the maze of cars and buses snailing past, bumper to bumper. They refused to move an inch without cramming the buses with the maximum of human cargo, which, at a couple of rupees a ticket, would make up the staple of their earnings, especially at this hour of the day when the commuters came home. They stopped at every stop for what seemed like hours to the exhausted passengers inside, waiting for more and more people to scramble into its aisle, the bus conductor shrieking the names of the stops on its route, mapping out its destination to potential passengers, screaming the same litany over and over again till it sounded like a hoarse parody; the helper boy somewhere on the streets, running around the pavement echoing his superior’s litany in a shriller timbre till the whole place swirled in clangour, with shrieks from other buses, sometimes rivals in the same route. The driver, sheltered from the sickened droves inside, inside a cubicle at the front mullioned off from the rest of the bus, killed the engine, enjoying a smoke or a chat with his buddies who had earned a place in the cubicle. After the stop was wrung dry of passengers, he would rev the engine, move ahead slower than a rickshaw for a few yards till the helper boy thumped the flanks desperately, bringing it to a stop again as they waited for the middle-aged woman who walked up in a leisurely pace from the other side of the street, the man who rushed out of an alley, a few more rupees of fare that the bus wasn’t willing to miss.

It was the money, surely, the few extra rupees that gathered up to hundreds at the end of the day, but was it just that? Milan had tried to put himself in the place of the bus driver, the conductor, the helper boy sometimes, often stewing inside one of these slow-moving buses, these slow-burning ovens of human breath and sweat and crushing flesh that he had known better than his home all his life. There was no end of people in Calcutta, in the throbbing, sweating, messy knot of fifteen million people, and in the evening, buses always left more behind no matter how many they stuffed themselves with, more and more people trickling along the streets, the pavements, through the narrow alleys opening up into thoroughfares, offices and shops that closed shutters, retching out more and more panting bodies, running for a few inches on the aisle of a bus to edge a foot in, to hold on to the mullions on the window as the bus moved along. It couldn’t be easy for the bleary-eyed bus conductor, the hoarse helper boy, to let the bus pick up speed just enough to beat a lonely clerk left behind on the pavement, cursing his fate, the old woman who had a long way to go, the young man who had been running two blocks to get this very bus. It was easy then to thump hard on the metal and wood flanks, signal the driver to hang on just a second, pull up the anxious passenger by the hand, shove him inside, a longer stop if it was a woman, who took more time, whose alien body would bear no touching and shoving.

Man and woman, old and young, it was amazing how the delicate hierarchies were guarded in this jungle world of pushing, shoving, cursing human cargo. Women were other animals altogether in this world, in the dog-eat-dog world of workaday commute in Calcutta which had women in no few numbers. A wrong touch on a woman’s body – in a world where all touches were wrong touches and where it was impossible not to touch, to squeeze and weigh one’s weight on another – could lead to an explosion of anger and outrage, a shower of punches and kicks and a bloodied nose, most likely. Bloody lechers, why else do they get on buses? Fragments of compassion was reserved for older men, more for older women, the public aunts and uncles, grandpas and grannies, but often at the whim of the moment. There was pain here, pain and sad veneration, for wrinkled skin and near-blind eyes, rheumatic limbs, grey hair – even when they inched their way through the hot mass of human flesh locked in a fatal embrace in sweat-stained, petrol-burnt air.

Today was one of those whimsical days when a young man had let Milan take a first shot at an emptied seat as another passenger had left it, about to get up near the Calcutta Medical College. The young man had been standing closer to the seat by a precious couple of inches, the kind of space that made or broke the prospects of a seat for the remainder of the journey, but he had paused, looked at Milan, who had flopped down lifelessly on the seat, almost, but not quite unmindful of the young man who had been kind enough not to jostle with him. It must have been the leathery skin on his face, the old limbs that wobbled like eroded wicker poles, the vertiginous swirl in which his head felt caught, throbbing, dizzy. Rules between the lines of age were far less clearly drawn than were those between the sexes, and at this hour of the day someone getting up to let someone sit at his place was a distant dream; not pouncing at meat close to one’s body was as far as anyone could dream. But something had been given to old age, even in the jungle of the evening commute. A younger man would never be so lucky, not at this hour, not ever.

Like Gautam, perhaps. His thighs and ribs crushed between a dozing young man on the right and an older man who was – unbelievably – trying to read a newspaper in this crowd, under the jaundiced light of the bus bulbs, Milan’s mind floated on air, out of the window, trying to touch his only child, somewhere in the same sea of slaving, homecoming, exhausted commuters.

The boy would get up in a northward bus at Park Street, one of the craziest, busiest crossings in the city’s business district, when the buses already had their tinny bellies bloated with people, content, dozing people occupying the seats, three where there was room for two, sweating commuters towering like vultures before them. The newcomers would have to make do with a spot near the aisle, around the bus conductor’s sylphlike body, stepping on others’ toes, drawing out curses, yells of pain. At the end of eight hours of work, the frail, timid-looking young man getting up with a hundred others at Park Street wasn’t going to get half an inch of grace through the blocked passages, no stamping anger was going to spare his tired feet. He was in his early twenties, a man, with whole in limbs and senses, one of the multitude, there was to be no kindness for him.

Milan sensed afresh the great fortune of getting a seat early on in the trip as he thought of Gautam’s slow walk home from the bus stop at the end of an hour-long journey on foot, locked in the impatient crowd of a homeward bus that seemed to move an inch an hour. He was too tired to speak, usually, wanted nothing other than to gulp down his dinner like a living ghost before some rubbish on TV and flop down on his bed, fall asleep immediately. A pale ghost of the sunny-tempered young man of the morning hours, catching a few minutes of chat with his father over tea, words hurtled from the shower, even, choppy exchanges as he dressed, gulped down last night’s leftovers before he made a scramble for the bus stop. Almost near the end of the evening, as Gautam made his slow, tired way up the stairs at home, Milan had questions to ask, a hundred things to share. But he was disappointed, always disappointed, afraid, even, of a son who seemed to be a sleepwalking stranger, who refused to look up, utter a word, recoil sharply from touch of human bodies till he went to bed and woke up his sunny self again.

Today, that wasn’t going to be a disappointment. Maybe Gautam would be talkative tonight, full of the private firm’s plans to revolutionize power supply all over Bengal and eastern India, on the wake of a new industrialization, full of the energizing news of his own promotion to a projected new division, a better pay cheque.

Drops of sweat fell on his thigh. In this sea of huddled humanity, one couldn’t say if they were trickles along his own forehead or from another’s flesh, the young man who had let him go for this seat, now leaning his weight on Milan’s knees, the men crushing him from both sides, the heaps of flesh that were others’ no more, so tight their hug.

The bus hadn’t moved for the last ten minutes. He couldn’t tell from here if it was a red light or another traffic jam with endless lines of vehicles before them.

Fine needles of pain shot through his temples.

The bus started, jerking ahead like a giant reptile waking from winter sleep. The rusty roar of the engine shook the interior, spreading in a sea of roars as engines all around started to life, fresh spurts of blue burnt diesel clouding the air. The dozing man to his left started up too, his knee bumping hard against Milan in the sudden motion of the bus.

Unawares, his right hand came to rest on his loose cotton bag, laid carefully on his thighs, the tiny space on his own body un-crushed by the crowd. In the sea of uncertain nudges and bolts, flashes of pain, he felt his body tauten, the helpless rigidity a fortress shielding the cotton bag, its little bloated belly with loose, brittle papers inside.

A tiny pang of regret shot through him at the thought of form number five thousand six hundred and sixty-five lying in the dust of the waiting room he had walked out of, hours back. He had taken some pains to fill up the blanks, telling the story of his business, name and address, wrinkling his forehead in thought, the effort to a sharper gaze at the paper. Today’s date, the hour of his arrival at the office. More words that had never made it home. More in the heap of refuse, more to the word-heap burnt with midnight oil. He should have picked it up tenderly, nestled it close to the eight letters of application he had drafted, seven of them typed by roadside typists at ten rupees a page, pleading appeals to heads of departments he’d thought would never fail to reach their mark, untangle the knots, well-chosen, well-carved words that had taken a long time to write. Forms, facts, words, none read, none given a nook on desks, in files.

He could have picked up the form from the dust, tucked it inside his bag before leaving the office.

He felt his eye corners grow heavy with tears. He dreaded returning home. He could stay in this bus forever, dying, sweating, melting under the slow-rotting flesh of the mass of people around him, in the oven of the bus that he hoped would not move an inch forward.

He was almost comfortable.

Warmth seeped from the flesh of his palm into the old, coarse fabric of the bag on his lap, into the copies of the application letters held within, the quaint pages fragile with age.

Gray Street…Lalmandir!’
The helper boy thumped hard on the flanks of the bus and screamed out the names of approaching stops, neighbourhoods.

Names that made up his part of the city, within the range of his evening walk, spot for a quick errand – the payment of electricity bills, a cheaper grocery, a bookstall for a few minutes’ browse on the way home.

A bookstall, over twenty-one years back.

Over twenty-one years, Milan had passed this spot countless times, on foot, in a bus. There was a time when he couldn’t furl back his blank stare from the corner of the pavement where Moidul’s bookstall used to be, after the little dramas of desire and refusal, horror and longing had near exploded his chest, his frayed senses – to look or not to look, past the petrol pump station that had been there for ages, the electronics shop, just as old, a café famous for its shrimp cutlets, the new, always new, even after these years, fast food stall selling chicken rolls, Chinese noodles. In the end, he always looked, just before the bus moved ahead, before he took quicker steps, past the spot behind heaps of cement, sites of roadside construction in the path of his vision. There, after all that, there was the tiniest spot, just before the turn to the main road leading to College Street, most of it taken up by the chicken-roll stall.

But one had to pass this spot many times. Many, many times. It was on the avenue that connected north Calcutta to the centre of the city. The main road through which buses ran, rallies and protest marches moved, celebrations of cricket victories and immersion ceremonies of Durga festival throbbed along. To go anywhere at all, one had to pass this place.

Over the years, as he did it again and again, the pain of the gaze had lessened, little by little, perhaps, till one day he had forgotten to look out. Probably he had been counting out the change to the bus conductor. Twenty-five more paise, and then. Chatting with a co-passenger, grumbling about the construction in the middle of the road for the mythical underground metro railway, the construction that was never to end, the metro that was never to come. Maybe he had dozed off for a few minutes, in the heat and exhaustion that never left the tropical city, not in the monsoons, not in its two months of winter.

The place had changed, too. Not just the place or the crossing, much of the entire stretch of the road running north-south. The junk heap of concrete, massive cranes and rows of pits dug into the bowels of the city had actually vanished, the makeshift shanties clogging on to the piles with them, the nomadic families who strung up a gunny cloth and a few sticks of wicker to call it a nest, right in the middle of the road, cooking and defecating and urinating there, for months and years. All that had vanished, and the shiny walls of the metro stations had shown up on either sides of the road, names emblazoning the history and the heritage of the neighbourhood, its three-hundred-year old history. Glass doors of pizza shops had come to line the pavements.

It had been a long time since Milan had looked in that direction. The crowd inside had thinned, the bus having spewed out people all the way, now a short distance from its final destination. The names hollered out were close to home, and he was to get down himself after a couple of stops.

‘Shyambazar, Paikpara, Nagerbazar…Laketown, Kalindi.’

The helper and the conductor weren’t ready to call it a day yet, shrieking out the litany of the remaining stops on the way, hoping to lure more. People got in here and there, but the flood of commuters cramming the bus had diminished, the business districts long left behind.

He would get down here often, cross the street, walk up to the little stall of magazines, newspapers, old books with yellowed covers inside. A weak sixty-watt bulb would be hanging somewhere overhead, in the maze of bamboo and gunny and wires. During the frequent power cuts that lasted hours, a couple of sooty kerosene lanterns would sit on the wooden counter like stooping old men, casting long, dancing shadows on the grinning pictures of cricketers and film stars, politicians and famine-struck, bloated-belly children, dead bodies found in sewers and ovens. The bread and butter.

‘Come on, Milan-babu, I have something special for you.’ The short, bespectacled man would stand up enthusiastically. ‘Something you wouldn’t believe they were throwing away at the National Books Company in College Street!’

He would rabbit it out from under a heap of fashion magazines, made-easy notes for B.A. examinees at the University of Calcutta.

The old, old edition of poems by Sukanta Bhattacharya, late colonial Bengal’s fiery, lyrical, youthful poet who died at twenty-one, would send a strange, warm fluid seeping through the farthest corners of Milan’s heart.

‘Published during the Second World War. He was still alive then.’ The short, bespectacled man would smile dreamily, caress the moth-eaten covers.

It was never fully clear to Milan why he even parted with his dug out treasures. How he had the heart to do so.

Or it would be an issue of the journal of experimental theatre that had ceased publication in the Seventies.

‘They were daring.’ Milan would leaf through the pages of the flimsy booklet. ‘Theatre groups these days are more like TV soaps than anything else.’ He would look up. ‘Did Sabeer tell you that he was planning to produce the play on the naval revolt in school?’

‘Yes, he was telling me.’ The man smiled. ‘That boy. He lives in a strange world all the time!’

‘Bacchu, get a cup of tea for Milan-babu.’ He would call out to one of the many street-urchins who hung out there, did small errands for a few rupees at the end of the day.

‘No, no, Moidul, why take the trouble of tea and all that?’ Milan would say, secretly looking forward to the tiny earthen cup of steaming roadside tea, maybe two, to be held delicately between the thumb and the forefinger, over the next half an hour.

As the bus sped up, Milan looked out of the window, stretching his neck as far back as he could, at the vanishing corner on the pavement he hadn’t paused to look at for years now. There was a time during the early years when he could see the tiny shanty of the bookstall there, the short, bespectacled man sitting on the stool, arranging books and magazines on the wooden makeshift counters. Humming to himself. He would never melt into air, Milan had come to believe – no matter how many years passed, how many new shops mushroomed there.

But today there was only a small crowd around the chicken-roll stall, and stray dogs fighting one another near the garbage heap nearby. The evening air streamed through them like there had been nothing else there, ever.

The ghost of the short, bespectacled man and his tiny bookstall had finally melted into thin air.

He got down at the next stop. His place was a fifteen-minute walk from there, through small lanes, narrow back-alleys.

The outrage against imperialism had left its marks on the neighbourhood. Blood-red banners with the trinity of the hammer-sickle-star of the communist party were hung up across the streets, tiny ones strung in rows like decorative pieces. Fresh coats of graffiti had brightened the walls of houses, cartoons trashing the IMF and the World Bank and American foreign policy. The day had been a heavy one, heavy and hot and tiring, and the exhaustion showed on the strings of the tiny communist party flags that had come off loose, the giant blood-garlands leaning and flapping against houses, sweeping the streets, like scattered confetti after festivities.

It was around seven in the evening. Knots of people, mostly young men, were scattered along the streets, laughing and talking loudly. Tea-stalls were doing brisk business. The pleasantness of the cool summer evening had done away with the boundaries between evening strolls and post-protest jubilation, and all mingled in a breezy fatigue.

The alley on the left hand side of the main road here led to Atin and Jayanta’s house.

Shirin came back to Milan’s mind. It was so good to see her this morning, after so many years.

A little girl who had always been a delight, every visit at Atin’s place in the evenings, ever since she could talk, walk around on wobbly legs, stare with large, unblinking eyes at the chatting, tea-sipping, smoking friends of her uncle, looking dumbstruck with disbelief at what they were talking about, as if she could follow their conversation down to the last word.

Every time, it was a real headache looking for his slippers as he got ready to leave at the end of the evening. Finally, Jayanta’s wife, Sulata, would take them in her custody the moment Milan stepped into the house, to keep them out of reach of her daughter who never wanted any guest to leave her house, ever. Sometimes, still, she would outwit them, and then Milan would have to put on a pair of Atin’s old shoes to go home. And then even the old man in the vat came to let her down, distressingly.

She had always been an intelligent, strong-willed young girl, knew her own mind better than most people her age, had more direction than unsettling adolescences usually allowed. Milan had felt no surprise this morning at the meeting in Atin’s living room, on the road before his house, at the last seven years she had spent in faraway America, at her young life, so full of meaning, strange, near alien meaning.

She spoke softly, with the smile that still belonged to the spirited child, but with the assurance of one who chose her words well, words like smooth arrows from an endless quiver, one who knew herself, the world she belonged to, which suited her to perfection.

She must know all kinds of influential people.

Milan paused at the thought.

Would she be able to help him? Put in a word with somebody? Make a couple of telephone calls, placing arguments like finely aimed arrows? Maybe write a letter addressed to a secretary or a minister she knew?

He was about to enter the lane to Atin and Jayanta’s house when he stopped, struck out of his trance.

The day must have driven him insane!

He couldn’t bother the poor girl with such rubbish. She was young enough to be his daughter, with enough on her hands already. Anyway, it was unlikely that she had strong connections in the government here…she hadn’t even been here the last seven years! It would have all been so stupid and awkward.

His house was still another ten minutes away. The very thought brought up dread and nausea. He was so tired that he could lie down on one of the stone slabs on the pavement, go to sleep, never wake up again. His head felt empty, filled only with a ceaseless reeling.

As he trudged along on his aching legs, he realized that the outlandish thought had come to his head almost as a joke – a suicidal, vindictive jest against himself, everything that made life possible around him – a casual outrage, as he no longer really cared to do anything about his pension, the cheques he would never see again for as long as he lived… he didn’t care how long that could be, or how short! The impossible hurdle before him, ringing out in the vile innocence of the eleven-year old boy’s grown up voice had hurtled him out of the door of the government office faster than he’d have reached there had he been starving for a week, and the determination of the months behind, the flurry of each day of the week before had floated away, sunk in some ignoble dust like that which had nestled form number five thousand six hundred and sixty-five on the chair he’d waited an hour on, the meaningless garbage of paper that had held his desperation, his prayers, in the neatly carved words that stated his name, his business, that he’d been a schoolteacher at…

The lightness was curious, almost scary. It cut himself from everything around, swirled around his throbbing head.

What a joke it all was! Or else why would he cross the threshold of this beautiful old house next to the park, pass through its impressive façade that was as great a landmark in the neighbourhood as the Kali temple and the fish-market?

‘I’ve heard Utpal Bardhan is a good man.’ The deputy director of accounts, Akhil-babu had said.

Maybe he could see how good he was?

Never in his life had he asked a political leader or an elected official for favours, though heaven knows someone like him could use many, and more.

Right now, he no longer cared what he did, whether strings were pulled for him or not, whether or not he saw another rupee to his name. Had he taken the tram, or a different route home from the bus stop, he wouldn’t have passed this large house with red stone façade, the massive iron door, and he might not have crossed this threshold.

But the first human face of the house promised to dispel his indifference.

Walking along the empty passage, he came up against the half-open door of a room from which voices floated out, voices of chitchat, laughter in between. In a corner of the courtyard, a group of boys were standing around a carom board, chatting and laughing over the rat-a-rat of the striker on the smooth wood. Through the half-empty door, he could make out a room full of papers, banners, posters scattered around a large desk, on the floor. A man was seated across the desk, and another was standing near the wall, examining the notices there.

And the first human voice too.

‘Who’s there?’ The man at the desk called out.

Suddenly, it wasn’t such a joke any more.

‘I’m from the neighbourhood, just across the street.’ Earnestness had crept back into Milan’s voice.

‘Please come in,’ the man said, and as Milan walked in, he got a better look at him. He looked like in his early thirties, well-built but with a hint of a paunch, a thick moustache of the kind that one rarely saw anymore. Milan realized he had seen him in the neighbourhood several times before.

‘Please take a seat. I’m Manoj, I’m with Utpal-da’s campaign team.’ He was warm and welcoming, like an eager host.

Milan held back the tears welling up inside him. He seemed nice. Had he made a mistake staying away from them? Was Akhil-babu right after all?

‘I’m Milan Sen.’ He joined his palms in greeting, a little shy, suddenly.

‘Where exactly do you live, Milan-babu?’ Manoj asked. The other man hadn’t moved from his position near the wall, but had turned around and was looking at Milan half-curiously.

‘Right across from the garment factory.’ Milan wanted to do his best to tell him all, all he wanted to know, lay out his place in the neighbourhood that, for which he knew they were responsible. Suddenly, he wasn’t feeling tired any more.

‘I used to teach at the Girish Ghosh Memorial Boys’ School,’ he said eagerly.

‘Oh, really?’ Manoj looked interested.

Milan knew he had succeeded in establishing his credentials as a respectable member of the neighbourhood community. Or at least a clearly recognizable one.

‘Actually, I came here today in regard to that. I was wondering if I could meet with Mr Utpal Bardhan for a few minutes. Just for a few minutes,’ he pleaded. ‘I’m in a deep crisis.’

‘Utpal-da isn’t back yet. He went with the protest marches in the morning,’ Manoj said. ‘But please tell me what your problem is. I’ll do my best to help you.’ He pronounced his words carefully, letting each syllable out full-formed, slowly. He sounded like someone who was used to speaking to a lot of people, making and writing public speeches, in cultured, passionate language.

‘If it’s beyond me, I’ll be sure to bring it up with Utpal-da.’ He paused, looked at Milan in the eye. ‘We’re always grateful when people in the neighbourhood come to us with their problems.’

‘It’s about my pension.’ Milan had forgotten how it felt to be with someone who cared, who was patient and understanding. ‘I retired two years ago. I got my pension for about seven months. And then it stopped coming. I waited several months. But you know what it’s like. Living costs shooting up every day, and what does an old man have when cut off from his pension?’

Manoj was looking at him thoughtfully. As he spoke, Milan sensed somewhere at the back of his mind that Manoj’s attention wasn’t fully with Milan. It was there. But not all of it.

‘I mailed several letters of application in the beginning. There was no reply to any of them, and there were no cheques to my name. I also tried telephoning. Either I couldn’t get through, or the right person wasn’t around. You can imagine my situation, sir. I have one son, he works as a clerk in the electricity board, but he’s new and he hardly makes any money. There’s the rent to pay, and groceries are so expensive these days.’

Something in Manoj’s expression made Milan cut his story short, move on ahead.

‘Then people told me to go there in person and talk to the officers. I’ve been doing that, and every day this last week I’ve been to the school district office. I’ve been running from desk to desk, meeting everybody they have asked me to. Nothing seems to work there. I’ve written several letters of application, filled out all the forms they asked me to. You can imagine, sir, I’m sixty-six years old. Every day at eleven in the morning I take the bus to go all the way to Gariahat. I barely get a place to stand. Today these protest rallies had blocked up traffic…’

He quickly checked himself. Grumbling against the communist party protest rallies wasn’t going to help him in a party leader’s house.

Pleading as his voice was, the finality of his request was vague. He just couldn’t bring himself to say more, much less to reiterate the wisdom dispensed by Akhil-babu, the eleven year old Amlan Nandy.

‘If there’s anything Utpal-babu could do, maybe call someone at the office…’

The other young man had gone back to reading the notices on the walls. It appeared as if he was half-listening to Milan’s story. Manoj continued to look at Milan thoughtfully, but didn’t say anything.

‘They don’t want to listen to us ordinary people.’ Milan’s voice had come down to a whisper. He was uncomfortable with the silence.

A light frown appeared on Manoj’s face.

‘I’m really ashamed to bother Utpal-babu with such a petty matter…’

Manoj spoke, finally.

‘You should probably speak to our secretary about this. Ghosh-da. He deals with these issues, and he knows people in the school district offices.’ He chose his words just as carefully, but Milan sensed something had changed in his voice.

He hoped they would be able to help him.

‘His office is upstairs. Go up the stairs on the right. It’s the third room on the corridor.’ He stopped suddenly. ‘No, you wait here. He might be busy. I’ll go and talk to him.’

He got up, walked around the large wooden desk between them. He moved with the artfulness of a man who organized events, ran around barking orders for better organization, before large, large audiences. But Milan noted that under cotton trousers, he had a worn out pair of rubber slippers on, like those one wore in bedrooms and bathrooms. He walked out of the door. The silent young man trailed behind him.

He didn’t know how long he had waited. He had looked at his watch after the first five minutes or so. After that, he hadn’t bothered to.

It could have been fifteen minutes. Or it could have been thirty-five.

He didn’t recognize the voice ringing out from behind, so the words sounded incongruous, sudden.

‘Well, well, look who’s here!’

Milan turned around quickly. A large man in baggy shirts and trousers was standing at the door. He was cleanshaven, with fashionably cut hair. He had one arm on the door, a little like a male lead in a high-strung Hindi movie.

Indra.

Indrajit Ghosh, his old student at the school or one of the casual wanderers in and out his class for a few years.

Milan had seen him around in the neighbourhood all these years, after he had vanished from school, pretty much the way he had appeared one day. Rumours had it that he had risen in the party ranks. He was seen at election booths, organizing party rallies, distributing the party mouthpiece, Ganashakti – the power of the people. On the few occasions Milan’s eyes had met his on the road, Indra had looked away, averted his eyes, not caring to hide the disdain.

Indra entered the room, walked around the desk, flopped down on the chair on the other side.

‘Pension stuck, eh? How could it happen to such a dedicated teacher, I wonder?’ There was a glint in the corners of his eyes.

Many students dropped out of his school. It was nothing out of the ordinary. Many of them hung around the neighbourhood, loafing around, working at small time jobs, sometimes becoming ‘community leaders’, organizing local festivities, for years and years, often growing old there. There were many like Indra, some of them joining political parties like him, either one or the other becoming good citizens, creating terror in local slums. There was no reason why Milan should have remembered Indra other than another bad egg who went the way he was always meant to but for that afternoon on his way back from school, many, many years ago.

Something about the boy’s swagger hadn’t changed. It was probably the air of casual threat that he copied from Bollywood movies. That afternoon, twenty-one years back, when the three boys had stopped Milan on his way home, the sixteen year old Indra’s hair had been just as fashionably parted. But his threatening grin had hardened over the years, had become less playful.

‘Sir, I’d stay away from the Sabeer affair if I were you.’

The bus conductor’s cry came back to his mind, the slow passage of the bus through Gray Street, the corner where the ghost of the short, bespectacled man had been, in the dim light of the yellow electric bulb. One day, the little bookstall had lain in a heap of ashes and broken bamboo poles, burnt books and magazines.

Now, they sold chicken rolls there, and Chinese noodles.

‘You are married, sir, with a child.’ They had said. ‘And your home is in this neighbourhood too.’

Much had been lost from his teaching after Sabeer left school, left books, producing plays, reciting poetry.

Milan felt the world blackening around him. The room, awash in bright white fluorescent light, scattered with newspapers, pamphlets, scribbled notices stuck to the wall, the bust of Lenin in black marble in the back, was getting lost in a nauseating swirl. He wanted to go home, suddenly, intensely.

It wasn’t a joke. It couldn’t have been. One didn’t just stroll into the local MLA’s house just because it was on the way, he couldn’t, not to ask for favours in cutting the cobwebs they had woven around people’s lives. He should have taken a tram home, turned around at the lane before, gone home through a detour, not given in the to the lure of this large-gated house with banners strung all over, banners of the hammer-sickle-star trinity.

But he wasn’t going to give in to a crook who had caused some of his worst nightmares, many, many years ago.

He gripped the sides of his chair hard, felt the blood drain his knuckles, a pain throb in his chest. He looked hard at Indra.

‘I’ve nothing to do with you, Indra. I’ve come to have a word with Mr Utpal Bardhan.’

‘So you think you can just stroll into your MLA’s house one fine evening and order him to take care of your own business you’re too pathetic to manage?’ Indra growled like a wild, wounded beast. ‘Why do you suddenly need us now? You don’t think we’ve watched you all these years? Have you ever shown up at any party meetings? For election duty? Have you ever bothered to write a line for our local party brochures, pamphlets? Do you know how active your colleagues have been? Samaresh-babu of History? Debu Ganguly of Mathematics? Even the old headmaster, Suresh Banerjee? Were you too good for us? Why shall we look out for you now?’

There were other people outside the door, staring at the commotion inside. Manoj was there, and the other boy who had left with him, and there were a few more.

‘Utpal Bardhan is the member of the West Bengal Legislative Assembly from our constituency.’ Milan tried to muster firmness in his voice, but he knew himself that it was just a show. ‘As a citizen living in his constituency, I have every right to petition him for my grievances.’

Indra thumped at the desk with such violence that some of the papers fell to the floor. ‘Oh, cut it out! I’ve left your crappy classroom many years ago, you’ve forgotten perhaps, and don’t explain to me what an MLA is and what is his duty. I do this for a living.’ Anger made him sweat, and Milan thought for a moment that he saw foam in the corners of his mouth. ‘We know very well that you didn’t even vote for us. Do you think Utpal Bardhan needs a stupid old schoolteacher like you to win elections?’ He seemed to assume greater control, spit out the next words in disdain. ‘And don’t think we don’t know how close you are to starving.’

The veins on Milan’s temples were ready to burst. He felt more eyes behind him, piercing his back, in hot liquid contempt. He rose, a ringing pain shooting through the entire left side of his body.

‘Well, I see it was a mistake for me to come here in the first place,’ he said feebly.

‘Just get the hell out of here.’ He heard Indra muttering as he left the room. And then, he raised his voice high enough for Milan to hear him clearly.

‘You can go and ask your favourite student for help. That dead bookseller’s son. If that sorry sonofabitch is still alive somewhere.’

Milan froze in his tracks. But he had no strength to turn around.

He entered his room, turned on the light. The clock on the wall showed seven-fifty.
It meant twenty minutes past eight.

He sat on the chair near his bed. The walk up two flights of stairs had tired him, put him out of breath. His throat felt dry, and lumpy knots tightened in his chest, like massive, dried up balls of phlegm shuffling around, cutting off air-passages.

Blankly, he stared at the clock on the wall. It seemed to be the only object in the room, growing larger by the minute, coming closer and closer, staring back at him. It’s tick was loud and rusty, spaced out almost as exactly as the beating of his own heart.

He wanted to drink some water. But he was too tired to get up. He was drained of energy, unable to move his limbs, his shoulders. He could only stare at the clock on the wall, the rusted, colourless metal of its body, the cracked, stained glass of its dial, through which its face looked cloudy at points. Or was it his own sight that had become blurred? He couldn’t tell. How many years had the clock been there, on that very spot on the wall? Twenty? Thirty? It was past remembering. Behind it, he suddenly realized, there might be a clock-shaped spot on the wall that was free of the dust and stains that had misted the rest of the wall, on the bare spots of its skin uncovered by photos, calendars, bookcases. A drier, cleaner spot maybe, or cluttered, thicker dust with the home of a large crinkly-legged spider.

Sounds of many people’s voices floated up from the streets, boisterous and angry, full of the excitement of the day. Men and women from the garment factory slums who had marched with the protestors, returned home, quenched, the hardship of their protests with country liquor. It was going to be a noisy night, full of fights and revelry, songs and curses.

But they were down below, in another world. Here in the airless, damp-smelling room, silence seemed to hang heavy in lumps, like the thickness of fungal spots spreading on the walls, dark and diseased in the pale yellow light of the lone electric bulb in one corner. The only sound was that of the rusty clock, growing louder by the minute, larger and louder, its cracked face closer to his own.

It had gone on like this all day, alone, in the dark, shuttered room cut off from the outside air. It had gasped around noon, getting out of breath, its aged spring giving way, running behind even the snail’s pace of time in this stagnating city. Had it gone on like this? Like this, exactly? Was it the old man on his deathbed who got just a little more excited to see a second soul in its locked room, panting louder, trying to reach its fellow, touch his sweat-dried face?

The thought was dreary, like a vile growth that slowly wiped out everything in space and in time, the hours spent out in the city, the days behind him. The years. The clock had ticked along, sun and rain, protest and jubilation, with the medicinal shot in its heart every morning, from him in the past, his son now. It had known little of the outside air, life, dust.

To think of it as one’s fellow, as oneself, was like death.

He pulled himself up on the chair, in a sudden act of force. He had to move his head around, out of the sad arc gulped down by the looming face of the clock, pour life into his limbs. Get up, drink water.

His Shantiniketan bag had slipped off his shoulder in the sudden jolt. The loop of the bag lay loose around his wrist, the large, paunchy body flopped down on the floor. Everything inside had spilled out. The few forms, the typed letters had slithered away, along the dust of the floor.

The folder had made a light thud as it had fallen, hitting the ground on its bony spine. The folder with Calcutta Energy Supply Corporation emblazoned in the corner. Yellow manuscript pages had slipped out, pages with frayed edges, like the borders of ravaged countries. Edges had broken off on the floor, flinging tiny shards of brittle paper, yellow dust mingling with grime on the floor.

A flash of pain shot through his choked breast, gradually spreading along his entire body like a trickle of tears. For a moment, he stared at the heaped up pages of archaic handwriting scattered on the dusty floor, lying like garbage.

Lovingly, he stooped down, picked up every page with care, an effort which quickened his breath. Putting them back into the neat pile they had been, he placed them on his lap. He caressed the frayed edges. Carefully, very carefully, making sure that his touch didn’t rub off further pieces from the brittle pile. He turned the pages.

Dreamily, he entered where he had left off, hours ago.

My vanity had to be brought to dust along with the last light of my life!

What a death-dance it has been, not at the feet of the gods, but at the altar of your lotus-pure life, my child.

Of the young body that lies drained of life by British bullets.

My mother-vanity that had dared to think that I knew you, sensed the secret courses of your life, the contours of your nature that had confused everybody so, disappointing your noble family, the noble forefathers, growing up into the soft-featured, sickly young man that I loved. Till the shower of bullets had seared your body, bewildering your high-born family, all but me who had cradled and suckled you, loved you, cheated you, learned from you, and had thought, with pride that now lies in shards, that your mysterious life was no mystery, not to me.

Yes, I feared the unknown, the unknown with vague contours, the smell of burnt metal and blood in the air, the fear of muffled whispers in your room, the faces that hid from the sunlike moles, unshaven, unwashed. I feared your pain as you looked at me that day, spoke about your mother’s hurt, looked away from me; I have known the abyss of fear when you’d leave the house for weeks, this iron-walled house that has held me prisoner through the decades.

The edges of my arrogance dulled ever so little that day two years ago, listening to your wispy words. ‘My heart breaks too, when I look at my mother.’ In your distant eyes, I couldn’t see myself, no trace at all in those eyes that had looked away.

Not before you had arranged for Suhasini to come to me did I come to know the mother whose pain had drawn that sigh from your chest. It was far greater than me, this Swadesh, this wide-stretching motherland of ours, leaning like dawn-mist over my blinded eyes, vanishing into nothingness. I suppose she’s my mother too, even though ever since I’d been netted and brought away from the mother-soil of my village, I had never seen a trace of her outside the high-arched walls of this mansion, beyond the distant skylines from the terrace.

You loved me too.

Loved me deeply, from the daybreak of your life when your cheeks crinkled in laughter or worry – you were a serious child, always – through the years of my desolate widowhood when you’d dash into the prayer-room to spoil the game of my worship with the game of your mischief, throwing your loving, restless, un-bathed and un-purified arms around my prayer-shrunk, fast-shrivelled body. You loved me through the months you brought the written words back to me, through the endless days and nights and weeks you never came home, killing me in my worst fears that loomed true and black and colossal in the distant horizon. But love had not withered away even in those dark days and nights and weeks.

Why else would you send home the mother of your comrade-in-arms to me, one of those comrades who had risen from dust to hold the weapons alongside princes like you? Why would you send her over to our house, as she had wished to come, as my personal maid? What else but love for a mother back home, suffering in the dark? To send the woman who knew the goings-on in your nightly gang of muffled whispers and weapons wrapped in grimy rags, the woman who also, like her childhood playmate whom she’d never forgotten, had lost her son to this burrowing fraternity of matted hair and hunted eyes? A compassionate, far-sighted woman, a long way from the perky fourteen-year old who had taught me to climb trees like a cat. A clear-voiced mother who knew more about the storms of change outside than poor cloistered me.

She was different, so very different, from the wildfruit-picking, quick-limbed, restless teenager, this tall and shadowy woman who’d slipped back into my life. But I could stretch back my memory and see the seeds of this alien fortitude in that roughskinned teenager’s refusal to nurse a limb bloodied from a hard fall from the tree top, the stubborn drought in her eyes after blows had rained on her bony spine. My mind went back, time and again, to those red-rimmed eyes and the ugly burst of tears that had shocked me so that fateful afternoon of our doll’s wedding, an initiation by fire to a life of peril ahead. The expulsion out of those colossal gates at the tip of a bloodied whip, with a broken, dying father, a mother blinded by a trail of panicked siblings, dumped in the fishermen’s quarters by the river, amidst a lifetime of stench and filth and disease. The death of her father within a few days, more to the humiliation than the blood-thirst of the princely whip and wild brickbats that had extracted the price for ill-service to his lordship. The loss of siblings to the gaping appetite of cholera that broke out in an epidemic in the city a couple of years later, digging its fangs the hardest on the poorest and the most crowded slums such as the fishermen’s shanties where a stake to life was an accident at best. Growing up on the scariest edge, beyond which lay the deepest fall, the squalor and the poverty and the perils of everyday, but, bless her heart, in freedom! Freedom to live or die as she chose, and she chose to live, live in a way that made her past adventures on steep treetops and sunburnt terraces look like a pleasant smile.

Suhasini had told me all, much of it that very evening, on the dark terrace, night knotting up in the city below. On the same terrace on whose burning floor we had once played recklessly, looking for pebbles to fling down at the pond below; for the pickle which had lured us with heavenly aroma. We had stood on the same spots years and years ago, on its rapidly cooling floor at the coming of dusk, the chilled, breeze-afloat words passing between two long-lost friends, stifling our breath, stalling the flood of passion at getting each other back after three decades.

She’d brought back to life the lanky, night-skinned boy from the forest tribes of Bengal who, in his middle teens, had picked up arms to join his clan’s uprising against the British. Now in the city, his Bengali halting at best, he’d brought the breath of a freedom unknown to his paler-skinned countrymen, city people better tamed by the white rulers. He was in his late teens when he met Suhasini, then in her early twenties, several years into the hard and perilous life of the riverside shanties, her soul growing more and more hardened by the day. The boy from the moist earth and deep forests of ancient Bengal, I can never remember the alien sound of his name, awakened my childhood playmate, the smouldering anger in her soul, to the rule of white men that had ripped our land apart. They were drawn to each other only as free souls can be, and in her words I had seen the free rein of will and desire that I was only to know from books.

She told me of the rape and plunder of our land by foreign rulers, the untold violence that had passed me by as I remained inside these gilt-edged walls, the storms and tornadoes brewing in the horizons of the land of which I never had a whiff as I lay pining for a waft of air to breathe in. Leaning on the walls on which we had once perched our dolls, I had poured out a frantic stream of questions. She had told me, of the little pockets of resistance against British rule that had been sprouting in our land, the British rule that had meant nothing to me, even in the appearance of the civil surgeons and magistrates that had graced our household, and the titles they had bestowed on the lords of our family, the resistance that had no meaning to me as I knew nothing about the rape and the plunder, gold-chained as I had always been.

Close to three decades ago, on the blistered grounds of this very terrace, on this very corner near the tall lightning rod, Suhasini had revealed the mysteries of pickling unripe mangoes; how a dash of mustard oil and green pepper added just the right touch of sin to it. I heard the tingly, restless voice of the adolescent girl all over again while she stood right here, speaking of the atrocities by British magistrates in the countryside, their aiding and abetting ruthless local landlords who held their subjects by their whips and the fangs of bloodthirsty dogs. The girl harried sick over the count of cowries won in roadside games came back to me while the shadowy woman whispered to me the greed of British taxes, rules to grow only cash crops that pushed the farmers to the brink of starvation.

What a life she’d had, Suhasini!

The free bird in the gold cage, flung from it to the deepest abyss of penury and death and illness, then into the ring of fire – her dark lover sprung from the night-loins of the country’s earth. He had come to the city to join the secret brotherhoods sprouting there, in the wrestling clubs and the youth groups in city neighbourhoods, men who were forming bands that had vowed death to the greed-blinded plantation owners and magistrates, even the viceroy who lived behind the seven gates of heaven in his palace in Calcutta.

At long last, Suhasini taught me the meaning of the rag-wrapped gun I’d seen lying in your room, a meaning that had eluded me for ever till my childhood friend came back to my life.

Your treacherous love had come alive as she’d described your excitement upon discovering Suhasini’s castaway connection to this household. Suhasini, the mother of your comrade-in-violence, Sushil, her dream-frail kinship with your poor mother sleepless at home, many, many years ago, before you had arrived in my fourteen-year old body, a strange friendship forged in the wilderness of the mango grove and over the weddings of dolls. Young Sushil, Suhasini’s love-child with her forest-hued partner, who’d grown up facing death every day, learning to crush his wails as his father carried him on his back, meeting his comrades in the slow-forming youth societies in the city and in the villages, Sushil who had revolution in his very bloodstream. ‘There is so much about my mother that I learn every day!’ you had told Suhasini, smiling. And yet I know that there’s precious little that I know.’ Why is it that you never had my vanity?

Are mothers always so vain?

Or was it my lot alone, the vice of the gold shackles that stifled my life? Suhasini was a mother too, but one teetering on the edge of life always, with a son and a lover who knew the stench of death far better than I ever would; she had knowledge I could never touch. I came to meet you anew through her, through her words whispered in the corners of the widows’ quarters. Did you put your life beyond my nightmares, my child? How was I to dream that the tumultuous debates in your college groups had moved from conflicts between different schools of philosophy to questions as to whether the struggle to overthrow the British was best done through political agitation or firepower? Suhasini knew about your aversion to bloodshed, be it of the enemy. She knew of the young men who’d travelled across the oceans to the very den of the British lion, to other cities strewn over the continent, forming shadowy knots of simmering violence with youth from all over our motherland.

I, too, came to know how you and your group were swayed by the need to shed blood. A cursed day it was, the day I lost my child to the violence in the hearts of men. It doesn’t take away anything from the red cloud over our land, from your blood-crusade, that none of it meant a thing to me. Sacrilegiously, I reached after the words and letters, sentences outside my reach; you know that, my little teacher. But that had been the only violation that I had dared to attempt; the only blasphemy that I had carried out to perfection. Save that, my life, my ears and nose and eyes, the wind of my soul, the very reason of my being, had curled around the plaiting of ornate hair-braids, the laying of flower patterns in rice-paste on the courtyard floor, the lotus footprints of goddesses across thresholds, the cooking of fifty-bowl delicacies for my lord, lisping the endless names of endless gods in the flower-drooping prayer room, bathing the infinite gold and silver and brass images in holy Ganga water, stacking up sacred weights of my good karma for the everlasting mortal life, the blessed afterlife of my husband, my son.

All my riches were the slice of sky over the open courtyard, snatches of the windswept sun-scorched terrace, a fluttering life between thresholds, the forever thinning memory of a cobblestoned road awash with flower-petals outside pillars and lion gates that had terrified a twelve-year old heart many, many decades ago.

On the hours of sky that I could steal on the terrace in silent afternoons, stray slices through my thick-mullioned windows, I’d seen no calamitous cloud looming over our land, bleeding its children, tearing open its earth, flinging its wealth across the oceans. For me, there had been no red cloud, as Suhasini had pointed out to me on the horizon in the dusk-sky that very evening, her words ringing in my head like the bells of doomsday still, my dear child.

But she had been my mother, too.

Had I been the wife or the daughter of one of the poor indigo farmers, the farmers forced by British to give up sowing the seeds of their food crops, forced to cultivate the cash-rich indigo instead, the poor farmers who had risen in arms! Maybe if I’d been in their mud-thatched huts, the huts that swayed in the wind, lost their awning in night storms sometimes, it would have been different. Maybe so. I would have still been laying flower patterns in rice-paste to make the thresholds and the courtyards beautiful, plaiting braids and cooking meals, but the storms oozing out of the red mist through sleepless nights might pound the bamboo-propped clay walls of my house so much more fiercely than it could even touch the stone pillars of our mansion, raise a flutter of the eyelids on the growling marble lions at the massive gates.

In our palace, my cage had endless bars.

There were those fifty-bowl delicacies to be prepared for my husband, to wait with them as the night rolled without his shadow at the door, just like your shadow wouldn’t lean homeward, night after night, my child of the world, many, many years later; the streams of maidservants that engirdled me like my chastity belt, the infinite names of the gods to be rolled around in my dry mouth for days and nights after my life came to its close in the cold and wrinkled body of your father going up in a million flames.

There were those bars that eclipsed the red mist of foreign oppression looming over the fields and rivers of this land, clouding your far-reaching eyes.

You had seen the mist of death lingering over the horizon of our land, sucking away its wealth from over the ocean; for me it had been a word of pride overheard while serving fish or dessert to the men of the household at their meal, an allusion to a title of prestige conferred on one of our men, a Raja or a Raibahadur. Sometimes it was the visit of the English magistrate or the collector or the civil surgeon, all great men who shared honour with the lords of our family. They were all great men to prepare delicacies for, to appear behind the curtain for polite thanks, before moving back into the inner quarters, arranging the betel-leaves to be sent out on silver trays to refresh the well-fed men.

The gold and the silver, the jewels and the marble façade, the high birth and the family name that blinded my parents, bought my body in here, past the lion gates as much as I bought my way into this sanctum by the suppleness of my skin, the curve of my mouth, the charade of good fortune inscribed on my horoscope; all that wealth and the deep layers of stucco and marble and mahogany sat heavily on my soul, smothered me for the want of air, much less the rough winds pouring out of the distant, unreal red mist on the horizon.

My withered fate had been forever crushed, again and again, by my mother’s shame at my birth, at my father’s worry over my marriage. It was crushed by the mullioned slices of sky I saw in this mansion, by the endless nights I’d sat through without food, waiting for a husband who never came, the coarse white cotton of my widowhood, the daylong dry-mouthed chants of prayer.

Now it was crushed again by the secret crusade of the bombs you sought to make in the lap of luxury, behind the innocuous façade of a garden-house, the crusade against the blood-red mist engulfing our land. Neither the crusade nor its enemy would yield an ephemeral touch on my shuttered eyelids, knowledge to my heart, the knowledge of what great march of history to which I lost my only child.

The last blow, the futile lesson that there is this great march of history which shapes and touches and shatters lives, lives such as mine too that seem to be forever locked away from the imposing view of its skyline, the touch of its rough winds, its gentle breezes, but that which swept past our windows, shattered the walls of our houses all the same. We dare not venture to imagine, shape and touch the forces behind the tumults, the towering human architects of the destiny of all, our poor fates, dare not even reach out to clear-eyed, young soldiers in that power-breathing march as you were, my child.

History, it all had been, real and grand, outside the range of my mind as these very letters had been once upon a time. Suhasini whispered the rhythms of history to me through these two years, the last two years of your life when I saw you only rarely, the last time a full six months before your death, my child, when to come home was suicide for you, to walk into the handcuffs of the police. I’d worried over the meals you’d missed, whether you were getting the care and luxury you’d been used to at home, but little did I know that you’d got yourself exiled from this house, indeed from this land, a fugitive in the eyes of British police.

What made you do it, my son, win the struggle against your principle against blood-violence, target the English administrator in the hallowed halls of the government headquarters in Calcutta?

It had been a strange outpour, of strange words, about strange things. At strange places too, strange moments, familiar places, banal moments estranged by alien words. Alien, so very alien for a mother to imagine her young son, smooth-limbed, soft-skinned, living out his days and months in the garb of a gardener in a garden-house with solemn, grey contours, with his comrades-in-arms, a life of spare vows and austere silence. The garden-house too, the playground of your fathers and forefathers, of past generations across this land, of flowing wine and sparkling chandeliers and songs of sirens, turned into a fortress of grim whispers! In the kitchen, as I cooked my meal and Suhasini chopped the vegetables for me, ground the few spices that were allowed in a widow’s broth; in those few stolen moments during the evenings as she swept the floor of my room and I sat on my bed, frozen with fear, at footsteps outside, at the bloodcurdling tales of secrecy and vengeance she unfolded the war that had claimed her son as it had taken mine. And a strange war it was, the destroyer of imagination, where the police marched in, not in the midst of a soirée of alcohol and prostitutes, but in a circle of yogis hiding the birth of fatal explosives in its womb. I’ve no shame in confessing to you, my child, you who’s now beyond mortal shame, that I’d blessed my good fortune when the gardener, the prince in exile, managed to slip away with two of his comrades in the row, taking away with them the treasure of their scripted plan and the burning wish to avenge the captivity, and alas, the quick execution of five members of the secret society! The sharp edges of the tragedy at that time had never allowed our minds to flit back to the past, the past left far, far behind, ride the crests of time’s irony, touch the solemn, ceremonious moments when we had wedded our doll-children to each other, my son always, always her daughter, myself earning the spoils of the dowry, the glorious tears of the bride’s family.

Today we both had sons, sons who could dare to enter the labyrinthine march of history, merge into its destruction. Not the fake, make-believe destinies of doll-games that we had carved and un-carved at will, with its paraphernalia of fake rituals, but real life that we never could dream of touching out of our own daring, much less dally with. The shadows of such history, its whimsical branches, came our way during the game of evening worship, the sprinkling of Ganga water, the arrangement of holy leaves and flowers on the brass pots as Suhasini waited outside, on the threshold, whispering to me between the charades of my chants.

Familiar shoe-steps creaked up the stairs. Milan’s mind wandered from the brittle sheaves. It was Gautam, later than usual. The sounds were always different from those when he left for his office in the morning, flying down the stairs, always late for the 2B that would take him to Park Street. The downhill slide was a breeze compared to the uphill climb.

After one had lived here as long as he had, it became easy to tell how many steps there would be before the person would come through the door, or knock, or fade out on the streets if going down. Seventeen steps in all, if one listened carefully…eight on the first block of stairs after coming in from the street, the turn to the left and the block of three stairs, and then the landing with the tiny window opening up to the wall of the club of local boys, like a pigeonhole of cracked glass, and then the last block that led up to the long corridor on the second floor where they had their two rooms, the last block of six stairs on whom the footsteps were the loudest, closest. But they were never soft, none of the seventeen if one didn’t get muddled in the head, trapped and loud in the dark, airless cavern of the stairwell.

The door was pushed open, and the footsteps entered the corridor, near the rooms of Yogesh-babu, the octogenarian widower. The footsteps changed their timbre here, on the damp floor, lined with spots of fine moss from the endless streams of water slithering towards the drain in the corner, water from the common kitchen and bathroom on the corridor.

They came closer, melting softer and softer on the mouldy floor, vanishing finally. Gautam usually went in to his own room, changed and bathed. Then they had dinner together.

That would be a while.

Something like the weight of gravity pulled Milan’s eyes back into the pages of the manuscript, like a sleepy body drowning in water.

She went by a new name these days – Basanti – as if I could call her anything but the name I’d laughed and cried and loved and fought with! She had come back to this house from where she and her family had been thrown out, close to three decades ago, a rag-clothed, snot-nosed, little typhoon of a fifteen-year old. A huge abyss of a house where no more than a handful of people, wives and maids had seen her for a few windy moments, running around with the shameless new bride. Two or three of that handful of people who were still around came nowhere close to recognizing her; no one, after all had bothered to give a second glimpse to the ragamuffin that had been the carriage-driver’s daughter. But we still took care as we spoke, lest people grow curious about the flood of words between a shrunken widow and a maid brought off the streets; worse, of the texture of the words, of the whisper-sewn, rag-hidden world of blood and guns and treason of which they spoke.

Around the playing fields of the lost past, the stairs to the terrace, the walls and pillars above that had, many years ago, nestled our maddeningly aromatic pickles, she told me of the handful of secret knots of people that had begun to come together in parts of Bengal; how they had pledged revenge on the English magistrate who had burned villages, whipped, killed peasants. Helping me lay out the little blistered balls of ground lentils to dry on the terrace, she told me of their plans to pour fire on the heartless white rulers who drained blood of our motherland, its sons and daughters.

My mouth dry on waterless fast days, my body slinking away like unholy shadows from the view of the living and the wedded, I got a whiff of real history. Real history that happened outside these marble walls, on the streets, over the seven seas in the land of our white rulers; even inside these very walls in the living and smoking rooms of the men of our family, through figures in the giant books and ledgers of the estate’s earnings and expenses; taxes to be levied and the feasts for the peasants, the tributes of gold to be showered on the British administrators for the sought after titles to grace the family names. Real history that flowed like a huge, raging river, changing life and landscape, far beyond our touch, dry twigs on the riverbanks, way beyond long ago, just this morning, in Atin’s room. Yet it seemed ages since. But it wouldn’t have been easier, surely, had this been the truth, the whole strange truth. Was he being stupid? But of course, what other way was there, other than trampling the fragile yellow pages, trampling them into little paper-shards? Gautam hadn’t got up to get his dinner yet, maybe wouldn’t, today.

‘Oh, really.’ Shirin sounded disappointed. ‘But did you bring it? I’d have still liked to see it.’

‘No dear, it would be a waste of your time.’ As soon as he said it, he realized that it sounded dishonest, as if he was trying to hide something. He added hastily, ‘It slipped my mind completely. It’s been such a long day, and all the headaches at government offices…’ As Shirin’s face looked more deeply quizzical, he realized the need to explain himself further. ‘I mean, it all worked out fine in the end and the pension cheques are coming soon, but there was a lot of running around to do.’

Sweat moistened his chest, under his shirt. The coolness of the summer night couldn’t touch him.

He could close his eyes and see the closet-like room in the dark, with the bony bed on which his son lay, stretched out in icy despair. Shirin was busy, and he knew how to let the days glide by before she forgot about the manuscript he had once hoped she could get a good price for, or she let it pass sensing his unwillingness to talk about it.

Did he have a choice?

‘It’s actually not that old, either. I got it from a newsstand, one of those old books and magazine shops. Couple of decades, maybe. Stray pages from a diary or some such stuff. Stuff we find in the nooks and corners of all our houses if we look. And besides there wasn’t much left of the pages.’ He realized the inconsistency of his words again. ‘I mean, it’s not that old but was probably uncared for. It was difficult even to carry it all the way here.’

He would have given anything to have gone to Rabindra Sadan today to hear her clear voice cutting through the moss, rip open rays of light. Faith and excitement in a young audience. He had nothing but lies to offer her, sad, weak lies he couldn’t help let out.

‘I thought you wanted me to look at it and find out if any collector or archivist in the States would be interested in it. I mean, you never know. Milan-kaku?’ she asked blankly, getting no answer from him.

Now that there would be no more pension cheques, Amlan Nandy’s obscene wisdom about the lump sum was a nightmare he wanted to run away from. Gautam stretched out like a tender corpse in the dark room, the thought of money, lots of it right away, was absurd and painful. But she didn’t see through his lies, did she?

‘Oh, nothing, my dear.’ His voice was stronger, clearer, ready for heartless self-mockery. ‘One gets into these spells these days. Senility doesn’t waste time setting in. Crazy whims, like ghosts clawing up your shoulders.’

The lights would never come back in Gautam’s room. Maybe he would never get up and change, wash his face. In his room, separated by the thinnest of cracked walls, if there was no pile of yellowed papers of tenderly wrought pain, how would he breathe through the days?

‘I was probably too excited about you.’ He hadn’t been as excited in years. You know, what’s there to feel passionate about in an old man’s life? The days just pass by without a ripple.’ A beautiful sentence he could put to better use.

‘Come on Milan-kaku, you’re not that old.’ Could she read his mind? You are such a beautiful writer and storyteller, still.’

‘A writer whom no one wants to publish.’ He smiled, and senility was far again, very far. ‘But no dearth of a ghostly imagination to make up stories. You shouldn’t pay attention to the things I say, my dear. Anyway, if you want to see it, I’ll bring it around some day. But it’s really nothing to fuss over.’

They heard Atin’s voice in the passageway. It was the strange mix of clearing one’s throat and coughing that old men made, often, almost always upon entering their own homes, as if that was their way of announcing their entrance. And then he said something to the maidservant in a grumbling tone, who sent back a singsong complaint.

‘Atin is back from the wedding dinner!’ Milan exclaimed. What time is it now? Almost ten! I should be going.’ He stood up.

Today, of all days, he wanted to avoid a chat with Atin. He was too close a friend, and he knew him too well.

If Shirin saw through some things, she knew better than to probe into them. But Atin would not let go once he got the wind of things.

‘Ten o’clock, Milan-kaku? That’s nothing for you.’ Shirin’s brows creased in faint surprise. ‘Isn’t it the right time for another cup of tea with uncle?’

‘Those days are gone, dear.’ He smiled, and this time sadness seeped through, and he didn’t care anymore. ‘We’re not getting younger any more. Life doesn’t hold out that well in the end.’

As he was leaving, Atin walked in. He was wearing a silken panjabi and pajama, and smelt of the fragrant paan-leaf he was chewing, the post-dinner staple at Bengali weddings.

‘Hey, where are you off to, Milan?’ he called out.

‘I’d just dropped by about some work with Shirin.’ He had no idea what Atin would make of that, but what did he care? ‘I should be going, Gautam is not very well.’ ‘Why, what has happened?’ Atin spoke, and concern hung heavy in the room, like a moist cloud. Milan wanted none of this, just to step out on the road, breathe the evening air, not see the faces of anybody he knew.

‘Oh, nothing much, just a lot of stress at work for days in a row. He’s a good worker, and they keep piling work on him, poor thing.’ How could he hide anything at all? And how would he explain anything when all was out, tomorrow, the day after? He just wanted out this minute.

‘I’ll see you at Naran’s tea-stall tomorrow, Atin. And take care of yourself, Shirin. I hope there are many more like you, and Ritu, many more…’ His words trailed into a sigh, and he turned.

He vanished into the passageway, towards the darkness of the back alley, lit by a handful of weak lamps at great, black intervals.

In the back alley, scales and heads of fish had been thrown away that morning, the day before, the week before, by the untouchable sweeper, the housewives and the maidservants of the sleepy, moss-grown neighbouring houses. They lay piled under the scraps of unleavened bread, now flaky crusts of flour, shrimp-shells, stems of eggplants and dry onionskin, lumps of solid dog turd, shattered earthen cups and plastic containers.

He walked slowly, trying not to stumble over the blisters and the potholes in the dark.

They rotted their way into the past, became the past, the weak dusty imprint of fish-scales and heads on virgin soil, decaying fishbones melting into white-grey calciferous powder, bone-dust, their untouchable fleshy profanity dissolving into the wispiness of earth-sucked pollen scattered on the grass of the garden under spurts of water out of the black marble vessel of the nymph, the winged god of love with tautened bowstrings, cruelly mischievous.

He made his way along the dim-lit redness of the virgin earth, tortured and heavy under the weight of falsehood, falsehood he couldn’t have lived without. Time kept curling back to the early hours of the day, a sunny spot a million years back, when brittle yellow pages had unfurled carelessly next to the morning’s third cup of tea.

I can see the streets through the windows, the red-hued streets I haven’t stepped out on in ten years, maybe fifteen, maybe more…

The holy ground of the shrine, the high-arched corner hall, threshold of beaten gold, the eight-metal alloy icon of the resident goddess eclipsed by the broken wall over the heap of garbage and the moss-laden bricks, jutting out, swift and magical, in the company of decaying fishbones for well over a century, the tearful joke of a space through which desire lingered. Rich dung smell, clammy vapours from chunks of decomposed turd, centuries back, fossilized, rarefied, even into the sacred incense of worship, of the eight-flame lamp swung around in worship, clouds of abir, the powdery colour bringing joy to the sweet festival of Doljatra. The rough sound of the dog scratching itself, muffled in the dark about to echo the sound of the silver bells tied to the ankles of the dancers filling up the huge courtyard, as the conjoined letters of the beautifully wrought hand cried out, next to the warming sunlight, the sweat-drenched crowd of the bus, dark, cobweb-straddled stairwells.

Close to the sheaves of cheap paper on which he had scribbled his tales, would always, as his only child lay stretched out like a young corpse in the next room, discarded like dust. There were gaping holes in the yellowing manuscript pages, holes gnawed by time, gaping holes where there weren’t any, the struggle to get out words when none would come as compound words remained too hard to master, time to scribble rubbish too hard to come by in that monster of that house with a million heads and eyes and ears.

A million heads and eyes and ears, rising from the clammy smoothness of the unpaved red earth, in between sharp blisters, pebbles and shards that could bruise the beggar’s bare feet, in between acidic clumps of grass, tufts on desert sand. Smoothness which contained multitudes, thrownaway eggshells, ancient cigarette packets, jagged pieces of glass from broken bottles of cheap alcohol.

Urine-drenched smoothness. The mangy dog’s, the litter of kittens’, the beggar’s, the untouchable sweeper’s, the drunken bum’s. Weak-watery streams of piss, aimed in spurts across patches of dry-skinned doggy bottoms, sending up hot vapours, tiny airborne droplets, floating in between dark-skinned untouchable legs, spangling parts of grubby cotton loincloths, thin threads hanging loose, the earth-soiled vomit-smeared pants of the tottering drunkard.

Red earth, tiny pockets of it, scattered in hidden corners of the city that had kept an unchanged face for decades, back when a short, bespectacled man had lovingly guarded a bamboo-limbed bookstall. Centuries of red earth on which the sorrow-caressed sisters had come down endless flights of stairs, along the carved marble balustrade, arm in arm, the end of their saris flung over their faces like veils, till they had slunk past the countless halls and rooms laid out like scales on a peaceful snake, step out on the courtyard, stand next to the sacred tulsi bower, watch the gypsy-minstrel in the vanishing light of twilight, the jaundiced hue of the holy clay lamp lit at the bower. Hours of it under the angry midsummer sun when torrents of anti-imperialist slogans seared the skies, hours spent climbing dark stairs that had sucked up the ancient redness, lead to dusty offices of rickety ceiling fans and surly, dozing clerks, earthy redness sullied by the gunpowder smell of melting asphalt. How did one sink one’s feet in it, pull one’s aching body, breathing that got harder and harder, along the blistery redness barely touched by municipal electric lights?

There were watermarks on the cracked bricks, watermarks half a century old…the indistinguishable mass of pale, eroded concrete where weather and smoke and bilge water from the ubiquitous sewage pipes had imprinted strange graffiti, the mixture of fungus and ashen patchwork and leathery banyan leaves straddling the corners like cobwebs, the roots leaving a trail of giant cracks and fissures that made the houses look like they were caught in a jawbreaking grimace, in the deathlock of jaws that broke a little more every day, every year as the trinity of the hammer and sickle and star was repainted again and again in clumsy hands on the jaws of mouldy concrete. Rainwater, cooking water, wasted soup and gravy down rust-iron kitchen pipes, faecal water from leaking, bursting drainpipes, holy water from the mythic Ganga river sprinkled daily around the house, on the shrines that nestled Shiva and Krishna and Lakshmi.

Desire rose from all, smoky, gasping fumes of it.

What did the red earth of this back alley speak of, what had it been a hundred, two hundred years back? The sad bundle of moth-eaten papers now lay in peace, inside the loose Shantiniketan bag slung from his shoulders, but they had been somewhere else, a long, long time ago. The red earth might have been the inner courtyard that lived, drenched with love and disgust and the power of the real in the pages with gaping holes, the courtyard that allowed the one slice of sky they saw for the most part of their lives, the blisters of the red earth he had trodden with dusty slippers a little girl had once hidden away, aeons ago, the smell of freshly chopped vegetables and red dye applied on women’s toes, the vermilion on the partings of their hair.

Rotting fish, sad lovers, the urine-washed earth, the hairless patch on the doggy bottom, all one could make out with old eyes, in the weak light of the Calcutta Municipal Corporation. Close by, just at arm’s length, huddled together, women swimming in gossip, in colourful saris, the widows in white, chopping huge heaps of vegetables, the plump buttocks of the eggplant, splicing words about the family’s youngest bride’s juicy marriage, slicing the thick roundels into narrower strips for curries to please the palate of their husbands and brothers-in-law. Dark patches they were, smoky, gasping fumes, breaking out into peals of affectionate, malicious laughter at the ignorance of the younger ones: ‘Did you listen to what Debi says? The last thing to do on the first bridal night…’ Silent, bubbly, happy, pensive women, in the wedded plenitude of jewellery, in the bareness of widowhood, moving along, up and down the long corridor with ornate pillars, the giant candlestands, only to remain contained within the giant warm bowels of the house which looked like the Buckingham Palace, faraway in the land of the English rulers. Over the heaps of sliced eggplant, skinned potatoes and chopped onions, they exchanged paan, the pungent betel leaf with spicy stuffing inside, the magical mouth-freshener which reddened the rictus of their mouths, turning them bright, desirable and faintly murderous, a little like the hanging tongue of the bloodthirsty demon-slaughtering goddess Kali. Life was dry without paan.

Soft grey patches of memory, melting through a century, maybe two, the tearful joke of a space, heavy with desire. Pass the paan, elder sister. Did you put intoxicants in mine? My head reels, and the condiments are too strong. I chew the betel nut and a sharp pain explodes at the back of my neck, at the tip of my spine. Sunlight, only sunlight caresses them from the giant slice of the spring sky overhead, through the drooping branches of the mango tree, holding tiny unripe mangoes in the wait of a hot, succulent summer, the promise of pickle in terrace-nooks. But only sunlight. Not for them the tropical dust of the roads outside, the noise of the screaming farmers vending their wares, the British sergeants traipsing on horseback, the red-faced, whiskered white men whom no lady of the family should let catch a glimpse of their faces, keeping them covered under the thick veil of the bejewelled Benarasi saris, droves of poor villagers migrating from famine to famine, crying babies, starving cattle with ribs sticking out, peasants and tribals rising in rebellion against the British magistrate, the indigo farmers, dying in an orgy of careless bulletshower and gunpowder. Nothing for them. Only the tender spring sunlight of midmorning, caressing the rich jewellery of the fortunate wife, the dry cotton sari, the shorn hair of the hapless widow, the bringer of bad luck to the family of rich roots.

The cursed one with the evil eye.

When would the dark stretch of red earth come to an end?

He realized he was walking slowly, very slowly, unable to see anything before him but a cloudy fuzz, struggling to breathe beyond the series of gasps that squeezed his lungs every time. Would he ever reach the end of this lane, set his feet on the main road, reach home? It was a sea of sweat he was swimming in, but he couldn’t pull a single stroke, the left side of his body was shot through with shrieks of pain. There were signs of life in this clumpy darkness, away from the pallor of light cast by the lamp-posts that stood at great intervals. A whispering couple, sitting on the steps of an abandoned house, knees touching, their voices soft, guilt-drenched, frightened. There were so few places for a couple to sit in this city, to hold hands. Sharing the steps of an old house in a dark back alley with street dogs came naturally, every evening, and the fear and the guilt with it.

As he trudged past, his old, wrinkled arms drooped with shame, but they wanted to touch the thick air of affection between the lovers, heavy with the stench of rotting fish, the fragrance of burning incense before the goddess. A few yards away, miles and miles in the foggy darkness was more life, a street-lost drunkard spread-eagled on the malodorous moisture of the red earth, clinking bottles of cheap liquor between his legs, lying on his loincloth that had come loose. His heart cried out for them all, for they all wanted paan, the spice-stuffed, spine-freezing paan, the shower of spring-morning sunlight and shelter from the galloping horse of history outside. Watermarks, the strange graffiti of fungus and bilge water and fissures could not break the homely oneness of the princely mansion that enclosed the safe dust of the courtyard in its bowels like a well-grown fœtus, safe from the famines and the British sergeants and the screeching buses, the neon-lit billboards on the Shyambazar five-point crossing.

The love melted his knees, the rheumatic knees that had roamed the city in pain, and his body touched the musty softness of the red earth, his face sinking in it, the fumes of rotten garbage and dog-turd entering his nostrils like blessing. The few lamp-posts along the lane lost their lights, like stars going out in a night that wouldn’t see daybreak, the love-whispers and the clinking of spirit-bottles became louder, louder, till it was a miasmic explosion of thunder through which the sharp slivers of pain ran amuck till they took over the sunlit courtyard and the dark alley.

As he lay on the earth, he groped to his right, feeling for his Shantiniketan bag, the shuffle of papers inside. He wished he could push the clock back five minutes, just five minutes, back in the living room with Shirin, talk to her again.

Would words come to him again, trickle through his dry mouth, through his callused fingers holding his old fountain pen?

Would words ever come, with the kindness of rains, to all those who never had them?

Home

The interior of the British Airways Airbus 330 flying Calcutta-London was always a strange mix of intrigue and comfort. Even after all these flights. The seeming vacuum of the massive, sleek cabin dotted with Indian air-hostesses in rust-orange saris. A meal very probably with tandoori or curried chicken and roshomalai, all announcements made twice – in English and in Bengali.

You could look over your shoulders, in any corner of this plane about to make its way from Calcutta to London, and not hear anything but Bengali chatter!

Looking out to the sunburnt vegetation fringing the runway, Shirin thought of the flight to follow, from London to New York. It was something else altogether, the final parting way with older memories of the familiar and the homely.

The sheen of wonder had been there, and the buzzing earblock as the plane took off from Dum Dum airport, over the dirty green of the city’s north-east. The familiar blankness settling down slowly, the captain turning off the seatbelt signs, in the end, reaching for reading in her cabin bag.

But in today’s flight, they seemed lifeless residues of habit. Her mind didn’t even hold up the usual vacuity flights alone always brought, soon after the plane had settled in its chosen altitude and hostesses had started moving down the aisles with drinks and snacks. Part of her wanted to run to that pressurized, air-conditioned emptiness, take refuge in it, but the unavoidable refused to take her in today.

She reached under the seat in front, unzipped her cabin bag. The man next to her moved away politely, trying to make room for her outstretched arms. He was a young Sikh man, beautifully dressed in light blue suit, reading the business pages of The Telegraph. She smiled at him, half apologetically.

She pulled out the folder, brought it up on her lap. Calcutta Energy Supply Corporation, it read at the top right corner of the glossy surface. The kind of extravagance government concerns in Calcutta spurted on rare occasions, centenaries and special conferences and the whim of corporate sponsorships.

The edges of the folder were overlaid with a fine film of dust. It came off on her fingers, with it, tiny bits of brittle yellow paper.

The years between one’s mid-twenties and early thirties could be so eventful. Sometimes absurdly so. Small wonder that thirty was considered a watershed. One emerged on the other side after life-changing incidents – elderly family-members dead, maybe a parent among them, nieces and nephews born, one’s own marriage, children, perhaps. It’s amazing how much seemed to actually happen during this time, she had often wondered aloud with her friends, graduate students all, some of the most crucial chunks of their lives encased in the efforts to earn the PhD. It was like holding life in the vacuum of a glass case as life around suddenly stepped on the accelerator.

During this time, her father had survived a first stroke, young ones had appeared in the family, two of her mother’s older sisters had passed away, all separated by the slightly unreal insulation of life across oceans and continents, over twelve thousands miles away. There had been those urgent international calls, at three in the morning, maybe an email, a few sad words dedicated to a departed distant relative in a half hour-long phone conversation with her mother. These days, email pictures had made it easier to spread the cheer – the image of a plump newborn flashing on the screen of her office computer, in between grading student papers and answering to committee calls. In the sunny space of her new life, death had stayed away yet – not least because almost all her friends here were young people, as full of trepidation about the future as she was?

‘I’m sorry, but Mr Milan Sen passed away fifteen minutes ago.’

The young, suave doctor, a little out of place in that messy little nursing home, had told them in the waiting room. ‘The cerebral stroke had been massive. He never came out of the last coma.’ And then, as if anticipating a painful fear on their part, ‘You couldn’t have brought him here any quicker. Unfortunately, there was no way, he couldn’t have been saved.’

A death, a five-minute walk away from her. Just around a couple of weeks before she was to leave the country.

A fatal stroke in the back alley less than a hundred yards from the living room where they had spoken, a few minutes after she had seen him walk out of their house slowly, absently.

A glossy folder with brittle, dusty pages, come to her after a long, long time, a real object held by one who was now dead, so close to his body…after years of electronically transmitted pictures, a cutting from the obituary column once maybe, in overseas mail, a smiling face faded in creased newsprint. This was different, she could sense deep down, staring at her dust-stained fingers, not daring to open the folder, to the pages inside.

The young man next to her had put away his newspaper and had fitted on his headphones. His left fingers were busy pressing buttons on his armrest, flicking the channels on the small video screen in front of him. Shirin’s eyes flitted to the flickering images that, in the space of a few seconds, rolled along the shot of a palm-lined beach and a slice of MTV and a scene from some movie with Nicole Kidman.

The heaviness of the folder on her lap brought her back. Did it feel heavier than it really was? How heavy could it be? It didn’t even have the metal pincers some folders had. The papers inside were coarse and heavy, though, heavier than the kind one came across these days.

Milan-kaku had come out of the coma for an hour or so, a few moments of that strange hour that had cast this heavy-lidded memento her way. They couldn’t be sure, who could? – but half-lisped words and the shaking gestures had been enough on several around to agree on what he’d been trying to say.

A shocking, unreal night!

A few young men of the neighbourhood had shown up at their front door out of nowhere. They lived around the corner, knew the family, Milan too – knew his face, and that he was a friend of Atin. ‘He fell down on the road’ – was all they could say. Looking over their shoulders, along the darkness of the back alley, Shirin could make out Milan-kaku’s limp body being carried by a few people. Closer up, there were a couple who’d been sitting in the darkness, another boy from the neighbourhood, a ragamuffin of an older man who smelt strongly of cheap liquor.

He had been rushed off to a nursing home nearby and the doctor had detected what they had already guessed, a cerebral stroke. High blood pressure shooting out of control, helped along by long periods of exhaustion and irregular diet. Gautam had appeared quickly, and they had learned from him of the major shock the old man had received less than half an hour ago.

Gautam had lost his job.

The Calcutta Energy Supply Corporation was headed for a largely private management under the house owned by the Lakhotias, and they had started cutting personnel.

Did it explain the strange behaviour, the lies? Oh, nothing much, just a lot of stress at work for days in a row. He’s a good worker, and they keep piling work on him, poor thing. Even uncle, happy and full after the wedding dinner, had been a little confused at his friend’s brusqueness. And the restlessness, the anger spurting out at unguarded moments. All her life, she had known him to be a calm and patient man, a study in contrast next to her louder, excitable uncle. What else had he hidden during that half hour conversation with her, the last one in his life?

What about the red tape at the pension office? Had they cleared as easily as he’d claimed that night? He had been emphatic, almost vengefully, and had brusquely elbowed the topic aside. Who could say what he had on his mind?

Who knew what his day had been like, at the dusty buildings of government offices all over the city? No one would ever know.

They had waited in the lobby of the nursing home. They had rushed to the place closest at hand, a seedy little place owned by a local doctor who had made a fortune from private practice and was now preparing to run for a place in the state legislature in the coming elections. He rarely showed up there anymore; the nursing home, too, bore the musty air of neglect. The walls were damp and patchy, and flies buzzed freely in the corridors. Knots of people, neither related to any patients nor anyhow linked to the clinic hung around near the door, the corridors and even the doctor’s offices. Someone had told her that they were from the political party from which the doctor had earned his electoral ticket. A few others were from other organizations, charities, sports clubs and people from the local community. With elections coming closer, the nursing home was heating up.

They’d been waiting in the lobby, on the few benches lined up along the walls of the corridor along which the few nurses and doctors passed, and the nondescript hangers on, occasionally a few street urchins. The usual smell of clinics, the sterile medicinal odour had here mixed with a medley of others – newsprints and reams of paper and fresh paint, human sweat and stale tea – all from the nooks of rooms along the hallway where the owner’s election machinery was at work. Stained steel trays were carried all around, balancing small glasses of tea, and the faint whiff of cigarette smoke stole its way into the air from time to time.

It was strange that she had to wait in that dazed space, in the midst of its chlorine and tea smell, in silence punctured by loud arguments down below, just a week before she was to leave the country, settle back in her life across the oceans. It was a strange space to be in, after having evaded its claims oneself for seven years, pushing it into the smoky realm of telephone calls and emails and a handwritten letter once in a while. Strange to be here not for a family member, but for one who had become no different from one as far as memory would stretch, like the rickety wooden chair in the corner of her uncle’s room where he always sat, smiling quietly as her uncle rattled off jokes that she sensed to be outlandish even before she was old enough to understand them as such. The quiet, smiling face was in the nooks of her child memory, like the earliest objects taking shape in her consciousness.

Anybody who shaded one’s memories as early as that could melt into a near lifeless materiality, the shiny, discoloured patch on the armrest of the prisoner-crafted chair, a machine-medley of smiles and voices and quirky gestures. Growing older was another name for casting family farther away, and the bevy of faces that lurked around the fermenting architecture of the old family home. Milan-kaku had never quite let that happen. Of course, he had remained ‘uncle’s closest friend’, seated forever on the wicker chair in the corner of the room, the long Shantiniketan bag trailing his body like a stuffed python, but there had been real words behind the quiet smile, real responses to a growing sense of self, over the many years.

Real stories. Of different breeds, changing forms as she grew older. The oldest furry animals were stories about the old man in the vat, in the fearsome dungeon under the stairs of their house, who was really a lonely retired soul abandoned by all, and how he wanted to bring people in there not to chew their bones but for a little company, to chat a while, partial to children because he loved them the most. Stories about how he’d been standing near the door of an empty tram, waiting to get down at his stop, chatting with the only other passenger in the car about the afternoon’s soccer match between local rivals, East Bengal and Mohun Bagan. Realizing upon getting down that the soccer enthusiast had gently picked his wallet off his pocket, very probably during his demonstration of his favourite half-back’s deadly tackle which at that time he had feared would precipitate the enthusiast on the rough pavements of Calcutta from the moving tram!

He had more laughter in him than the loud guffaws and the outrageous jests of her uncle could pop, laughter of a quiet smoky kind, spilling over from time to time, even making strange sense in her growing mind. Laughter he wound and wound around his quick-spun yarns, and the slow-born ones.

Years later, as a college student, she heard stories about bright young students of major Calcutta colleges throwing their lives away for the blood-spilling, extreme communism, Mao Zhedong-worshipping Naxalites who wanted to bring about revolution through bombs and guns, how they were hounded down by the police, shot down like dogs, or smuggled across the seas by influential families to California and New York where they opened successful businesses or became corporate executives, entertaining old friends in their beautiful suburban homes in their old age, reminiscing over single-malt scotches about blood-splattered bodies in College Street, all another life now!

Lines sometimes he would read them out from his short stories.

The honeyed nuts had arrived, and with them, a choice of drinks. Sparkling water, Coke and Pepsi, Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi, orange-tomato-cranberry juices, coffee and tea, decaf, beer, wine and spirits.

Yes, she would like a drink. Tomato juice, please. Thanks.

The young man on the aisle seat balanced a small bottle of red wine on the tray before the flickering images of a Jackie Chan movie on the small screen in front of him. There were still near nine hours to go before they landed at Heathrow. Would they talk, chat beyond a couple of friendly words? For a fraction of a moment, her mind seemed to wander, flit around it, look at what had to be an absent stare on her face. Not a great invite to an animated conversation.

They had entered the tiny cubicle of the Intensive Care Unit a couple of hours later, when the young doctor had brought the news that he was out of his coma. Gautam went in first. Uncle followed after a few minutes, and she had crept in behind him.

Hidden under the I.V. stand, and the elaborate clinical paraphernalia, he’d looked as remote as people did on the deathly whiteness of hospital beds, no more, no less. He couldn’t move his limbs, but he could lisp a few words, parts of them, and you had to guess the rest.

The doctor had allowed them ten minutes.

Perhaps everybody had noticed the pale light come into his eyes as he saw Shirin, half-hiding behind her uncle, who looked whiter than his bedridden friend while in shock. She wasn’t even sure that it was her place to be there, at a moment such as this. Who’d rightfully owned the share of the precious ten minutes could have been a looming question. But except his son, the patient didn’t seem to have any family around.

In a halting jumble of eye and lip movements, soft words, he had asked for his bag. His words had been like a whisper, but there’d been silence in the ICU, and they had their eyes riveted to his lips.

‘You bag is fine, baba.’ Gautam had assured him. ‘They picked it up from the road and it’s in the office downstairs.’

He wanted it, right then. Suddenly, he had been almost clear, intense and incisive, from under that tangle of machinery entwining him.

Half-reluctantly, Gautam had left the room.

Her uncle had stepped closer. Sensing his movement, Milan-kaku had looked up, smiled up wrinkles around his mouth.

‘How are you feeling, Milan?’ Her uncle couldn’t keep the heaviness from his voice.

Milan-kaku had just nodded, the furrowing smile alive on his face.

At that moment, her uncle had lost it. ‘What’s all this, Milan? Why, you have high blood-pressure and…’

She couldn’t help but step ahead. She’d touched her uncle’s arm. ‘Let all that be now, uncle. Let Milan-kaku get well first.’

Gautam came back with the old Shantiniketan bag. He hadn’t slung it along his shoulder like people usually did when they carried one of these bags, but held it in his hands, half-awkwardly. He looked unwilling to claim its ownership, planting as much distance with it as he could while his hands touched its coarse cotton fabric.

She’d never seen the bag apart from Milan-kaku’s body, slung across his shoulder, hanging bloated and unwieldy next to his legs, resting on his lap as he sat on the wicker chair in the corner of uncle’s room.

Away from him, it looked sad and homeless.

Milan-kaku had whispered more words, floated more gestures towards the bag’s unwieldy contents. The file inside the file.

Gautam had pulled out the file. Deep brown, glossy surface. Calcutta Energy Supply Corporation.

‘Shirin,’ The words had stumbled on an impassioned march to clarity. ‘Keep… keep with you.’ His face had looked faintly choked, and his eyes smaller, contracting under a strange pressure. ‘This story… it goes a long way.’

For a moment, she had felt puzzled. But then she’d looked at it again. Gautam had opened it, and a pile of frayed-edged, yellowed sheaf of paper lay in the plastic case inside.

Gautam had looked puzzled, full of questions, but had kept silent. Her uncle had had a despairing look on his face, as if he had given up trying to figure out what was going on. But he too, had the good sense of keeping quiet.

‘You’re not going anywhere, Milan,’ he had said after a few seconds. ‘We’re waiting right outside, and we’re taking you home.’

Milan-kaku had smiled at him, like he’d been indulging a moody child.

Shortly afterwards, the doctor had shuffled them all outside.

Back in the lobby, she had looked inside the Shantiniketan bag. It was strange to hold it, very strange. It must have been several decades old, probably an acquisition in his early teaching days, perhaps shortly thereafter. It had the musty, cottony smell she’d always linked with him in her mind. The coarseness of the fabric was partly the way it had been crafted, the knotty waves of cotton entwining it, but it had smoothed over the years, the colour faded, not unlike the indistinguishable patchwork on the façade of old houses, the cracked cement. Loose threads of cotton stood out from corners, and it seemed that the whole bag would come off its seams if they were pulled hard enough.

The medley inside had been stranger.

A slim volume of poems by Octavio Paz, translated into Bengali, several forms relating to different government offices, the payment of pension, a chit with the address of a Sabeer Rehman in Oman, several copies of a typed letter addressed to officials of the school district office.

They had left the nursing home around two in the morning. Gautam had stayed back. Her uncle had wanted to stay back as well. She and her father had to force him to come with them.

He had been in and out of consciousness for the next two days. She’d been to see him once more. That time, he’d been unconscious, still in the ICU, entangled by the same set of delicate machinery.

He had died three days before she was to leave.

It had been around seven in the evening, and they had all rushed to the nursing home. In the end, it had been a cardiac arrest. But his brain had never regained life, either.

Strangely, there wasn’t much she remembered after he’d died.

It was like a buzz of actions, of a different kind, filling up of forms, a few people from the neighbourhood and many from his school, some distant relatives, a handful of flowers, the copy of the Gita on his unmoving chest on the pale nursing home bedclothes. Without the I.V. equipments, he looked bare, reassuringly normal.

In the middle of the blur of movements, whispers and tears, something had stayed in her mind like a bruise that refused to heal.

A big-boned man had appeared out of nowhere, and his disdain had been dry and cold. He had come up to them, asking them to remove the ‘body’ soon, as the seat needed to be vacated for other patients. They’d never seen him before, and he wasn’t on the nursing home staff. But he had shown up suddenly, moved around with an arrogance and a bunch of followers as if he had an ancient, primal claim on the place.

‘The body can’t be here all day.’ He had spoken gruffly to Gautam, who’d been a little confused and slow, making the arrangements, getting the paperwork released, arranging for the transportation to the crematorium.

People had been calling the burly bullish man ‘Ghoshda’.

Somebody had said that he was one of the stalwarts from the local party office.

Indrajit Ghosh. That was his name. They had free run of the nursing home, as its owner was running the elections on the party ticket.

What else was there to remember?

Her co-passenger flashed her a polite smile. She realized that she’d been staring at him, without having realized it.

She smiled and looked away.

She opened the folder on her lap. The dusty pages looked strange on the seat-tray, next to the neat triangle of the British Airways paper towel, the unopened bag of honey-roasted peanuts. The little translucent paper cup, holding tomato juice, shapely cubes of ice. Jackie Chan was still knocking out villains a few inches away, on her co-passenger’s screen.

She looked at the archaic handwriting. It was beautiful, but it took a few minutes to get used to the script, the spellings.

But she was there soon enough.

Suhasini must have seen it coming. She saw everything ahead of time, the nosy imp! She clamped a palm over my mouth and whispered, Just dance along ahead on your toes, bonehead, don’t rest your feet at any spot for long! See, like this.’ And there she was, the sinister midsummer pickle-fairy, flitting across the sea of fiery concrete in little dance-moves, her callused, tree-climbing feet just showering a trail of toe-kisses on the scorhed blisters. After a few minutes, you can walk normally. Your feet get used to it.’

I had no choice – the lure of pickled mango lingered ahead – but to follow her dance lessons. I have to say, though, that I felt silly in that frantic toe-hop over fire. I was twelve, and no buffoonery of that sort should have felt stupid, but I was also a married woman, and not just anywhere, in the most prestigious family of all Bengal. The most learned Brahmins and priests in the land had sat for hours chanting arcane Sanskrit hymns before myself, my family and the sacred god of fire, decked in finery that cost millions. I had even appeared before the British district magistrate, had been rebuked time and again for my rustic ways, my childish joys, held numb before the rows of grimacing, betel-leaf chewing older women-faces instructing me never to laugh, not to smile or let the veil slip off my face before any man other than my husband. Twelve, yes, but a awkward twelve to hop along on toes.

And did Suhasini know it! Oh, that girl could sprinkle a wound with salt just as deftly as on sun-shrunk mangoes, she sure could. ‘Kamal, you know what you look like? A tadpole caught in the mud!’ She flitted gracefully ahead of me, and was resting halfway to the middle of the terrace…

If wishes were blows, Suhasini would have fallen ten times over, rubbed her giggly, sunburnt face in the fiery concrete…

‘Just you wait!’ I chased her and she flew, like a bird that had perched for a moment on the terrace wall, and I tumbled and jingled, and kicked fire beneath my feet, but suddenly the music entered my movement and there I was, flitting along the scorched concrete like a busy little squirrel, just the way Suhasini had danced her way in, around, all over. We screamed in joy and clamped our palms over our lips, let our feet suck in the tamed fire, hugged each other.

‘Chicken or lasagna?’ The polite voice of the hostess asked her, again. ‘Ma’am?’

Dust swirled around her, and a haze of sunlight, tiny arrows of it, chasing the silverfish out of their hiding nooks. She struggled to listen to the voice above her.

‘Chicken or lasagna, ma’am?’ The woman in the rust-orange sari was polite, and patient, very patient.

‘Lasagna.’ Back to the tinkle of silver and glass and crisp words, she smiled an apology. The screen before her charted the progress of the plane. There were six more hours to Heathrow.

There will never be world enough, and time, something inside told her as she cleared a tiny spot on the tray for the lasagna.

The brittle pages had taken up most of her space. And they were going to take much more.

More space than these skies could offer.