5

It was him. Sixteen years had passed, but Arati recognised him immediately. Even if her mind had any doubt, her body knew who it was. Half of her wanted to run away or turn invisible; the other half was already racing across the busy road and slitting his throat.

And then her insides collapsed in disbelief, and it was only because she held on to the electricity box in front of her that she remained upright. She was utterly sure this was Ramesh, but her head was spinning at the insane thought that he had been here perhaps all this time, just a few kilometres from her, not in Mumbai or Delhi or at least Ranchi or Siliguri as she had imagined him in countless visions, but at an ordinary sweet shop on Vivekananda Road, just over there, wearing thick glasses like an old man and filling up a pot with an order of what looked like ledikeni.

You stole my daughter from me, and this is all it led you to. Working at this nothing shop, and you didn’t even feel the need to move somewhere far away. You were so certain I’d never find you?

If Manasa had not been present at each moment inside Arati’s head, guiding, commanding, restraining, soothing her, and even more, if there wasn’t another wish to claim after this one, Arati would surely have used the cut-throat razor she had brought along in her purse, perhaps the only thing of Ramesh’s that she had kept in the house in the hope of precisely such a re-encounter.

I emailed Shivani again the following morning, offering another meeting whenever she liked, if she could accept there was no other ‘Chandra Sir’.

Just before I sent the message, I had the idea of including my editor’s email. ‘Please write to Chaitali. Ask her who really handles the column.’

Shivani didn’t write back until a couple of days later, but that very afternoon a second person announced to me that she had supernatural powers! Arati, who works in my house and prepares my meals (along with helping me look after my sister’s empty flat nearby), told me the staggering news that with the goddess Manasa’s help she had located Ramesh.

I mean staggering that Ramesh had been found. ‘Manasa’s help’ I just took as an expression, and in her first telling Arati in fact didn’t share the full story of the wishes granted that night. But I had known her for seven years, so recognised the significance of this sighting. One evening in July 2001, when a twenty-one-year-old Arati had returned from work, no one had been home, and no one had ever come back. For a long time she feared there had been a road accident, but no such report turned up. Basically, one day when their only daughter was three months short of one, Ramesh had taken little Tuntuni from what had seemed like a happy home, and never returned. Nothing else was ever confirmed. There were sightings in different parts of Calcutta reported to police by their informers, or by people who had seen the photographs in the newspaper, but none led to a result. This was the reason why Arati had grown so sure Ramesh had fled somewhere distant.

I briefly hated myself for what I was about to say. If the stakes had been any lower, if she hadn’t been risking crushing disappointment, I would have happily gone along with her conviction.

‘Arati, are you sure it was Ramesh? You haven’t seen him in sixteen years. I’m certain there was a striking resemblance, but it’s highly likely …’

There was not even a hint of crumbling. In fact, she looked disdainful. ‘What do you think? Are there any other faces I have been seeing this entire time?’

It occurred to me that twice within twenty-four hours I’d been implicitly accused of trivialising someone’s deepest beliefs. Not a great look for a supposedly empathetic agony columnist.

‘In that case, if you’re so sure, we can go right now to the police. I’ll drive you. They’ll have him in no time.’

‘Na, not until Manasa says so. She still has another wish to grant me.’

And that was when I learnt about the pond that had emptied three nights before, and the vision that followed, and how, without any other clue in the world, Arati had known exactly where to go to see Ramesh first thing on Tuesday morning. Manasa had been guiding her, of course, just as she had promised.

Which was why we couldn’t do anything until Manasa’s next appearance, in case it angered her or unwittingly interfered with her plan for the second wish to come true.

‘But what if the second wish is meant to follow from the grasping of the first? Perhaps Manasa wants the police to shake the truth out of Ramesh.’

‘She will tell me if that is the case. Probably tonight itself.’

I sat across from Arati with a corner of the dining table between us, watching her features turn to stone, trying under the cover of my silence to rationally reconstruct what I’d just heard. What had really happened? Which was the right order for the pieces to come together?

Anything that made some sort of sense, without needing the intervention of a deity!

For example, what if Arati had been walking along Vivekananda Road on some other business on Tuesday morning and suddenly spotted Ramesh, and then retrospectively felt she had been led to him, and this fused in her mind with a dream she’d had the previous night of Manasa appearing to her from the bottom of her neighbourhood pond?

Or else — a random sweet vendor’s resemblance to Ramesh had triggered an unimaginable shock inside her, and Manasa is the deity to whom she is clinging so as not to be swept away in this sudden storm of reawakened sorrow?

We were silent for only a few seconds, but suddenly Arati’s face went from pride and certainty to a state of absolute grief.

I reached over immediately to hold her hand, and when that proved useless I knelt and embraced her. What she said again and again, inconsolably, was: ‘Manasa-Ma, why didn’t you come sooner? Why did you take so long?’

Her belief hadn’t crumbled: she was grieving how long this deliverance had taken.

When she asked me, several minutes later, if I would come with her right away and see Ramesh for myself, of course I couldn’t refuse.

At this point, even though they happened only two days apart (and despite the unexplainable event I had experienced first-hand, CCTV footage of which would certainly exist from the cameras of several establishments on Park Street), you’ll have noticed that I made no connection between the powers being claimed respectively by Shivani and Arati.

Believe it or not, my blindness would continue for days.

Until it was too late for at least one desperate person.