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Long shot of a dirt trail with scrub and small trees on either side. A figure is walking briskly with something in his hands. He slows until he stops completely. He looks straight ahead for one moment and then continues to walk briskly again.

Close-up of the man’s face. He is agitated, even worried.

Medium-shot of the man moving along the path which turns right to disappear from view. The dirt trail with its scrub and small trees is left behind.

Jibananda had not had a proper meal for two days and it was his body’s right to feel weak under the blazing summer sun. But he had been trained to keep his body in its rightful place. One thing that he wasn’t trained for, though, was an unscheduled return home. Home was a door that opened to a courtyard with a low-roofed two-room house on one side, next to a mangoless mango tree. Further on, next to a lemonless lemon tree, was a hut that served, depending on the circumstances, as a spare room for spillover guests, a goat shed, a place where all the farming tools could be kept. Home was, for all that he had been through in the last year and a half, the place where he could return and pick up from where he had left things hanging. And those things now, in memory, seemed happy and comforting—both qualities associated with habit formation.

The life he had been leading the past eighteen months was a deliberate digression. A life of action; a ‘revolutionary’ life. Oh, he was stricken with laziness, tiredness and cowardice even now. But he stayed the course despite this because he had realized that driving out the Mussalmans—driving out smallness and banality from his own life—required much more than energy and courage, those twin over-rated qualities. What was needed, in fact, was to keep everyday life at bay for some time, to temporarily suspend it, and this state could be attained only if one created new habits. Over the last several months he had done just that. In a way, Jibananda had been picking up new habits so that he could, one day, happily collapse into the old ones.

A girl came out of the farthest room of the house and stopped to lean on the trunk of the mango tree. Jibananda’s sister. He had expected her to create a ruckus in her usual loud and unbridled manner. But she kept leaning on the tree instead, staring at the bundle that her brother was carrying.

‘Dada, whose child is that?’

Jibananda had practised the entry he would make, making some rehearsed ‘spontaneous’ remarks about how his sister had shot up since the last time he had seen her. He had imagined that after that initial exchange, he would then quickly hand the baby over to her. But he kept standing there, still outside the shadow of both the house and the mango tree, holding the infant wrapped in a flimsy red cloth and looking at Nimi. He felt awkward, deciding not to look around with pretend-nostalgia as he had earlier planned.

‘He was … I found him left there, stranded under a tree.’

The lemon tree that his wife had planted some years ago had grown in the distance. Trees come in handy during awkward moments. He thought he would say something about the tree, but he held back. It would be pointless to talk about the lemon tree at that moment. All he saw now was his widowed sister, teenaged into maturity, taking the bundle from his hands and telling him to sit inside, in the shade. As he drank some water, his throat making the sound of a vessel bobbing out of a tankful of water, Jibananda felt the fear that he had been dreading since he started his journey. It was the fear of feeling at ease, of the awkwardness suddenly lifting. The fear of not going back to finish unfinished business and staying home.

Mussalman tyranny was far from over. In fact, apart from a few raids that had made the enemy realize that there was one force with one cause behind the attacks, the land was still firmly under the foreign yoke. A famine had led Jibananda and many other young men to recognize what had been staring at them all the while: effortless subjugation.

Jibananda quenched his thirst and hoped to look adequately changed and man-like before his sister. He would tell her to take care of the baby, not lose hope and expect his return soon. He would also tell Nimi to tell her sister-in-law, his wife, that she should not worry and that he would be back soon. That was his plan. As was the only concession that he was willing to make: giving in to her demand of carrying a knapsack with some muri moa and a small brick of gur in it. All that didn’t happen. Nimi demanded that he have a proper meal at home.

It was when he was still protesting with some mumbles that Nimi called out, ‘Boudi, look who’s home! Dada’s …’

Terrified, Jibananda jumped up, almost tripping himself on his dhuti front, and grabbed his suddenly prancing sister who had balanced the baby in her stick-like arms and pushed her against the lemonless lemon tree, covering her mouth with his hand. Without thinking about the consequences of what would happen if the baby slipped out of Nimi’s arms, he clamped down the ‘mmmmm’s seeping out of his sister’s arrested mouth. He kept his hand there for a brief moment, all the time it took for him to realize that his visit could not really be kept a secret from Shanti.

Even as Jibananda gave up and moved away, Nimi looked at her brother with eyes that had aged all too much all too soon. She looked down at the squalling child and then again at her bestubbled brother-stranger. Pulling the end of her white sari tightly around her while deftly balancing the baby on her hip, and facing the blazing sun, she said, ‘Dada, you must see Shanti. She’s your wife. I’ll tell her that you’re here and get you some lunch. You can then do what you want.’

Jibananda wanted to look at some more things, discover some changes as his sister walked away. But all there was to see were things that had already become familiar again in the last few minutes. If they had withheld their inherent power of evoking extreme nostalgia when Jibananda walked into the courtyard, they unleashed this power now that Nimi had uttered Shanti’s name.

The house on his right was standing as neatly as it had done when he left it. The raised threshold space outside the two rooms still bore decoration marks from the last pujo—the second that Jibananda had been away from. The leaves of the mango tree did not move in the heat, which was something totally normal. The last time he had seen it bear a single fruit was when both his parents were still living. The lemon tree in the distance had grown, but a tale of fruitless growth there too. In effect, nothing had changed.

Nimi returned alone. It was as if the strained encounter between brother and sister had not taken place at all. She chirped on about the neighbours, the village, Shanti. Rakhsit had become a father four months ago, which ‘actually dispelled all those rumours that he had a problem down there’; Padma had got married to this bloke from a nearby village without her father arranging any wedding ceremony; old hag Indubala had once again been driven out of Harihar Pandit’s house by his wife for ‘corrupting’ her grand-niece, and this time she couldn’t be found. Jibananda held back a sigh. His eyes were still darting about in the direction of the lemon tree and the hut next to it.

As he polished off the meal before him—dal, daalna, rice and jackfruit—he recognized the luxury of leading two lives. For the duration of his meal and Nimi’s train-rattle gossip, he guiltily thanked the preoccupations of his other life—the need to raid, to plan new raids, to work at the belief, the conviction that gives structure to the most smoky and insubstantial of things. Each descent on a group of Mussalman soldiers did not result in success. But it moved his life some distance away each time from the twittering boredom and rural idiocy of Nischindipur. The public life with the Brothers made Jibananda melt into a crowd, giving him a purpose other than just reading out the scriptures, shaking a bell and thrusting out brass-handled lamps for people to stain their palms with the heat and smoke of the flames and rub it on their heads like unani ointment. The life with Shanti, with Nimi and with the never-changing trees also had a meaning. But it was the kind of meaning that the act of snoring has—air passing through a narrow passage, so make what you will of it.

He was not allowed to forget the unsaid promise he had made Nimi before his meal. Jibananda emitted a sharp, short burp while his sister poured water on to his hands at the base of the trunk of the mangoless mango tree. As he wiped the water off his face first with his hand and then with the wet gamchha tucked between the bars of the nearby window, he had no memory of the last plan sketched out by Bhabananda and the others of driving Alivardi Khan out of the country. Instead, he was completely occupied by the sight of the white-sari-clad woman emerging from the faraway hut. Her sari was not wrapped around her like Nimi’s was. She was wearing it in a manner that suited a proper woman, with the right stretches and folds.

The house, the two trees, the hut and the courtyard tilted under the sun. Shanti looked older, quieter, but her dark eyes, now at the closest of quarters, gave the game away.

‘Bande Mataram,’ Jibananda uttered to cover his rush of breath.

She kissed him once on the lips, holding his face with both her hands as if aware of the possibility that it could dissolve any moment. And then she released him.