THE BLUE BEDSPREAD
‘In the detailing of lower-middle-class urban life, Jha is nothing short of brilliant. He reminded me of things I had forgotten . . . The stories within the narrative (a millworker’s obsession with his pigeons, the journey of a rural woman into urban drudgery as a housemaid) are told with conviction and grace’
Jerry Pinto, Literary Review
‘Mesmerizing. An unnerving, erotic puzzle that works through exquisite and excruciating glimpses. It uncovers a secret intimacy, a haunting mix-up, between violence and love, yearning and beauty and fear . . . I admire the way Raj Kamal Jha gets under the skin, behind the eyes, even into the hormones of his characters. And the prose is searingly simple with a beautiful edge of immediacy. It struck me as that rare treat: a truly unusual read’
Andrea Ashworth, author of Once in a House on Fire
‘He has a talent for affecting and immensely descriptive language, thick with poetry; a keen and observant eye . . . He has an intuitive feeling for the wistful fleeting and sensual nature of memory, and the book is full of intensely evocative and lyrical passages, describing small moments that magnify the fickle nature of time and memory . . . watch out for this exciting new writer’
Sunil Badami, Sydney Morning Herald
‘Raj Kamal Jha knows how to take us by the scruff of our clichés, lead us down seemingly predictable paths, and then swerve sharply sideways’
Ophelia Field, Times Literary Supplement
‘An incredibly powerful and original voice. It was like a symphony in words’
Mariella Frostrup
‘The Blue Bedspread is important because it is authentic in its voice, in its depiction of the internal sensibility of a culture that is enervated, exhausted, driven by pain and despair and joylessness to the very edge. From that edge comes a re-affirmation of strength, a revalidation of joy’
Namita Gokhale, The Hindu
‘Most striking is the spare, sometimes bleak yet tender evocation of Calcutta, this congested “city of twelve million names” through images of rain, flood and snowfall, and an insistent attention to light. It is this sense of a city, with its undertow of violence redeemed by love and imagination . . . that gives the book its grace’
Maya Jaggi, Guardian
‘The Blue Bedspread is written in a style which is intimate and full of stillness. The story itself is deeply compelling and shocking’
Colm Tóibín
‘Jha’s writing is fluent and he displays a keen eye for Calcutta life’
Phil Whitaker, New Statesman
‘If you want to get ahead of the literary game this year, practise getting your jaws around the following syllables: Raj Kamal Jha . . . precise yet bewitching prose’
Peter Popham, Independent on Sunday
THE BLUE BEDSPREAD
Raj Kamal Jha was born in 1966 and spent his first eighteen years in Calcutta. He returned to the city in 1992 as an editor with the Statesman, He now lives in New Delhi, where he is an editor on the Indian Express. The Blue Bedspread won the 1999 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book (Eurasia).
First published 1999 by Picador
First published in paperback 2000 by Picador
This electronic edition published 2009 by Picador
an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd
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ISBN 978-0-330-47450-4 in Adobe Reader format
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Copyright © Raj Kamal Jha 1999
The right of Raj Kamal Jha to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
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Contents
FIRST STORY
POLICE STATION
CREMATION GROUND
FATHER
STAMMERING CLINIC
ONE RUPEE
GARDEN CHILD
BLUE BEDSPREAD
SUNIL GAVASKAR
MOTHER
WHITE WASHBASIN
SNOW FALL
SISTER
DEAD PIGEON
NIGHT GAME
DURGA PUJA
MATERNITY WARD
MURDER MYSTERY
GIRL TALK
A CIRCLE
VISITORS
DOMESTIC HELP
CABLE TELEVISION
AMERICAN DREAM
BROTHER
ALL ALONE
DIAL TONE
STRONG WIND
THE HIGHWAYMAN
EIGHT WORDS
For my father and my mother,
Munishwar and Ranjana Jha
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank:
My agents Gillon Aitken and Emma Parry, for their kindness and their patience.
The team at Picador, including the publisher, Peter Straus, for having the faith; and my editor, Mary Mount, for helping me improve this book.
Pankaj Mishra, for being there.
Shekhar Gupta, Editor-in-Chief, The Indian Express, for giving me the space.
Sujata Bose, my first reader and love, my partner in everything.
Sometimes I have to console myself with the fact that he who has lived a lie loves the truth.
– Ingmar Bergman, The Magic Lantern
FIRST STORY
I could begin with my name but forget it, why waste time, it doesn’t matter in this city of twelve million names. I could begin with the way I look but what do I say, I am not a young man any more, I wear glasses, my stomach droops over the belt of my trousers.
There’s something wrong with my trousers. The waist, where the loops for the belt are, folds over every time, so if you look at me carefully while I am walking by, on the street or at the bus stop, you will see a flash of white, the cloth they use as lining, running above my belt, peeping out.
There was a time when I would have got embarrassed, tucked in my stomach, breathed deep, held that breath. Or even shouted at the tailor, refused to pay the balance, bought a firmer belt, tightened it by piercing the leather with a few extra holes. But now, why bother.
All that matters is you, my little child, and all I want at this moment is some silence so that you can sleep undisturbed and I can get over with these stories.
I will have to work fast, there isn’t much time.
They are coming to take you soon, the man and the woman. They will give you everything you need; they will take you to the Alipore Zoo, to the Birla Planetarium, show you baby monkeys and mother monkeys; the tiny torchlight, shaped like an arrow, that flashes, darts across the huge black hemispherical dome. They will make faces at the monkeys, you will laugh; they will tell you where Jupiter is, why we have evening and why we have night.
And then, after several summers and several winters, when the city has fattened, its sides spilled
over into the villages where the railway tracks are, where the cycle-rickshaws ply, if you grow up into the fine woman I am sure you will, one day you will stop.
Suddenly.
Something you will see or hear will remind you of something, missing in your heart, perhaps a hole, the blood rushing through it, and then like a machine which rumbles for a second just before it goes click, just before it begins to hum and move, you will stop and ask: ‘Who am I?’
They will then give you these stories.
The house where we are, the room in which you sleep, is on the second floor. From the veranda, you can look down on the tram wires; the street light, the yellow sodium vapour lamp, is a couple of feet above you. If you strain your eyes, you can see dead insects trapped in the plexiglas cover. How they got in, I don’t know.
Across the street, there’s an oil refining mill that shut down after a workers’ strike long ago. But its owner, I guess, had some of his heart still left so he continued to pay an old man to look after the dozen pigeons he kept in a cage near the entrance. Half of them are white, the rest are grey, and at least twice every day I stand in the veranda, nothing to do, watching the birds in the cage, fly around and around.
White and grey, white and grey, like tiny clouds blown across a patch of imprisoned sky.
We are on Main Circular Road, which connects the north to the south of the city, the airport to the station, and right through the day buses and trams, trucks and taxis keep passing by, making so much noise that it’s only now, well past midnight, that the ringing has stopped in my ears: the horns and the brakes, the angry passengers asking the driver to please slow down or stop, bus conductors coughing and spitting, jangling the bells, shouting their destinations in between.
Now it’s just the opposite, silence sits in one corner of the house, when I move my head to the right, when I move it to the left, I can hear my chin graze my collar, the sound of its stubble, I can hear my breath, even the crick in my neck, some muscle being pulled, perhaps some bone rubbing against some other bone, I am not a young man any more.
I am not going to type since the noise may wake you up, the paper being rolled in, my clumsy fingers pushing the keys, the ring at the end of each line, the paper moving up, the page ready to be rolled out.
And somewhere in the middle, if I wish to erase a word or add a letter, fix a comma, I will have to use the All-Purpose Correction Fluid. This means more noise: I will have to shake the glass bottle, open its cap, pull out the brush, let the white drop fall and then blow it dry with my lips. What if the bottle slips, falls on the floor?
At this hour, every sound gets magnified, every ear gets sharper.
I’ve heard that there are some babies who sleep undisturbed, even on Diwali evenings, dreaming silently to the noise of Catherine wheels and chocolate bombs. And there are some babies who wake up at the slightest of sounds, whose ears are like little funnels made of something like gossamer, ready to tremble, to catch anything in the night. A dog barking a dozen houses away, the wind blowing through the garbage dump, the ceiling fan, the tap dripping in the bathroom, the man beating his wife in the upstairs flat.
So where do I begin?
With you, the baby in my bedroom, on the blue bedspread, no taller than my arm, your tiny fingers curled up, the night resting like a soft cloud on your body. I shall begin with the phone ringing late at night, the police officer telling me that you have come into this city, unseen and unheard.
And once I have told you this story, I shall tell you more, as and when they come. I shall retell some stories, the ones your mother told me, even those which she said not in words, but in gestures and glances. Like that of the black and yellow Boroline banners catching the wind on Durga Puja day; the dead pigeon, its stain carried all across the city; the albino cockroach hanging, upside down, from the bathroom drain.
Or that evening in the maternity ward, when she stood in the room, your mother, in the hospital’s oversized nightdress, looking out of the window at the street lamps being switched on, one by one.
We shall visit all these places, I shall hold your hand, open all those rooms that need to be opened, word by word, sentence by sentence. I will keep some rooms closed until we are more ready, open others just a chink so that you take a peek. And at times, without opening a door at all, we shall imagine what lies inside. Like the murder, the screaming, a red handkerchief floating down, just as in the movies.
In short, I will tell you happy stories and I will tell you sad stories. And remember, my child, your truth lies somewhere in between.
POLICE STATION
‘I am sorry, sir, your sister is dead.’
The telephone rings late at night, it’s the Superintendent of Police, Lake Town, B Block, Calcutta 700089, Mr M. K. Chatterjee.
‘I am sorry, sir,’ he says, ‘your sister is dead.
‘We found your name written on four pages of a book she brought with her to the hospital. There was no one with her when she came in. In her admission form, she didn’t write anything except her name. She was pregnant.’
I listen, I tug at the telephone cord, watch my finger push through its black spirals.
For years, I have been waiting for news of my sister. I have made up mornings and evenings, invented entire telephone calls from police stations in the night, I have looked at the crowds on TV, wondered whether it’s she who walks in the top right-hand corner of the screen. Or when it rains, is she the one with the umbrella?
No, not the one with the red umbrella but the one with the black, a man’s umbrella?
Sometimes, in what seems like a dream, I see a marble palace, which looks like the Victoria Memorial, where she sits on a wrought-iron bench in the garden, one leg crossed over the other, regal and lonely. Swans glide past her on the grass, white against green against the blue of the sky.
‘The baby is alive,’ says the police officer. ‘It’s a baby girl.’
What do I say?
I look around, nothing has changed. Through the window I can see two men waiting for the last tram. There’s a circus in the city.
All trams have black and yellow posters plastered onto their coaches, I have been watching them all day: Rayman Circus, Tala Park, Three shows, One, Four and Seven p.m.
Each poster has the same woman, a small woman in a tight-fitting shining dress balancing herself on a rhino’s back. And a tiger smiling, its face ringed with fire.
‘Are you there, sir?’ asks the police officer.
‘Yes, I’m here,’ I say.
‘Do you know who the father is?’ he asks. ‘We would like to inform him. Can you tell us something about her?’
I can tell him what I am telling you: the swans, the umbrella and the TV screen, but I don’t.
‘I haven’t seen her in a very long time,’ I say.
He doesn’t ask how long. ‘It’s very hot,’ he says, ‘we can’t keep the body for long. If no one comes, we have to give the baby up.’
‘Who will you give the baby to?’ I ask.
‘There’s a man and a woman, a childless husband and wife, waiting for three weeks.’ He pauses, I can hear him breathe, I wait.
‘Police rules are police rules, sir,’ he continues, ‘but I can relax them a bit. It’s very late in the night and I can’t call them up. You can keep the baby for a day. If you decide not to keep it, I will call them.’
‘Thank you,’ I say.
‘But you have to come down to the hospital tonight, we can’t keep the body, it’s very hot in here.’
It’s hot, although it’s December.
A full four months after the south-west monsoons have swept across the city, curved towards the Himalayas, winds laden with rain, wet and heavy, crashing against the foothills, the Oxford University School Atlas hung across the blackboard at school, more than twenty years ago, I can recall the oceans, the cities, a town called Genoa in Italy.
It’s supposed to be cool now, that time of the year when your skin begins to dry, when you rub p
omade on your elbow so that it doesn’t wrinkle into a knot. One more month and on some nights in January it will get cooler, cold, so that you have to wear socks at night. But this year it’s hot.
Across the road, at the bus stop, the yellow light from the street lamps falls onto the garbage dump. It’s so far that I can’t make out what it’s falling on, I can only imagine: cracked plastic buckets, tufts of hair from the combs in the neighbourhood, women’s hair, tangled and knotted, some dry, some oiled. Scraps of newspaper, fish bones, vegetable peels. Nothing new, it’s been the same all these years, except that by now some of the clumps of hair have begun to grey.
‘You know the way to the hospital, I hope,’ he says.
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘Please come straight to Emergency. We will be there with the baby,’ says Mr Chatterjee. ‘How will we recognize you?’
‘I am not a young man any more, my stomach droops over the belt of my trousers.’ What more can I say?
‘Where?’ says the taxi driver. I tell him the name of the hospital, I tell him Emergency.
‘Anyone sick?’ he asks. I say no, he doesn’t hear, he doesn’t notice, there’s a black, earthen idol of a Goddess above his dashboard, two incense sticks burn, their heap of ash trembles when he changes gears.
On Grey Street, near Khanna Cinema, we take a right, past Ultadanga, the bridge, the vegetable market. The taxi’s windows are rolled down, there’s no one at this hour except empty wooden cots on which vendors sit every morning. I lean back and look out. High above, I can see the suburban railway station, just two platforms, the white neon sign of the Waiting Room glowing all alone. A local train sleeps, eyes wide open, stuck on the wire-mesh of the engine.
At the hospital entrance two touts run towards the taxi, they bend down, run a couple of yards, look at me. Admission? Emergency? Post-mortem? Death certificate?
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