Behind him roll the plots of empty West Bengal Housing Board land, several dug up, some covered with barbed wire wrapped around sheets of corrugated tin, others with tiny hills of black stone chips, iron rods and bags of cement.
Something brushes the nape of his neck, he brushes it off. It is a black ant, now wriggling in his palm trying to flip over and crawl through the gap between his fingers. He raises his palm to his face, blows the ant away, watches it sail across the night to land on a leaf, unharmed. And it’s during this moment of distraction, lasting barely fifteen seconds, when his eyes are off the window, when the ant is in flight, that the scene shifts as if in a movie.
Father beats Mother.
The curtains continue to rise and fall, the wind still blows in a steady breath but now Father is standing close to Mother, the book still in his hand. The child watches the hand rise, Mother not move, the book come crashing against her head. She lurches back, half stumbles, balances herself. Father steps back, doesn’t throw the book at the wall, just lets it fall. His hand now free, he moves closer, pulls Mother up by her hair.
In the garden now there are several sounds: the chair being pushed and then toppling over, the screech of the table’s legs against the floor, Mother’s bangles cracking and both Father and Mother crashing against the table lamp, their shadows flitting across the wall and then flowing into the ceiling.
And then, as suddenly as it began, it’s all over. Silence rushes in to fill the cracks in the night.
Father is gone and Mother, perhaps, is still there lying on the floor. The curtains, as always, rise and fall and the child continues to look at the window, this time bent and curved, through the water in his eyes.
I could tell you more about the child, more about that night, what happened when the child returned to his room. How long it took for him to fall asleep and when he did, what dreams did he dream. But those are frills, details needed merely to fill the blanks of my memory.
As of now, however, let’s not waste time, let us look forward, perhaps a few months later, at the child as he lies on the upper berth of an express train speeding through the night, knowing full well that this is one night his mother is safe.
For, although Father still looks menacing, the newspaper in his hand, his elbows inches away from Mother’s feet, he cannot touch her. There are other passengers in the coach, many still awake; there’s the vendor with his ballpoint pens walking up and down the aisle and it’s this heavenly comfort of strangers which the child covers himself with. Like a soft, warm quilt in January.
Someone switches off the overhead lights but that doesn’t seem to matter. He can hear the shuffle of feet as someone walks to the lavatory. He turns over to look at the hollow of darkness below, between the two rows of berths.
When his eyes adjust, he can see, in the pale shadows cast by the suitcases and the trunks stacked below, shreds of newsprint, soft-drink straws, groundnut shells and smudges of water on the floor. Across the aisle, a middle-aged man is looking through the-window, eating something out of a paper plate, his white plastic water-bottle with the blue cap swaying in gentle arcs from the hook above.
Outside, night rushes by broken only by the silhouettes of trees, near and far, fast and slow.
I could end the story here but that would leave it for ever trapped in the past, incomplete and purposeless.
So let’s imagine that the child grows up, leaves this city, travels to faraway places, meets people, falls in love, gets married and returns to live perhaps in that same house with the tiny garden in front.
Let’s make the house older, but not sadder, although large chunks of it have cracked, marked by long jagged lines, green and brown, caused by the rains in July and August. Across the street, the plots of land are in full bloom, rows and rows of apartment buildings, each with its little window, little balcony and a fat black water tank.
And in the evenings when they switch the lights on in these apartments, when these countless rectangles of light overpower the gathering darkness of twilight, let him sit in the same black chair, his legs raised on the same black table.
He reads aloud to his wife; outside, their child lies on his stomach, in the garden, staring at the window, his elbows making two hollows in the damp earth, his fingers pressed like sepals against his face. The curtains billow in the wind, Mother laughs and interjects, while in the other room, the television keeps talking to no one in particular.
They have an argument, their voices rise. And this time, Father gets up, puts the book on the table, his shadow on the wall, walks first to his wife, kisses her on the nose, she makes a face, smiles, and then he walks to the window, calls out to the child, pulling his little family into a world he has only now begun to explore.
BLUE BEDSPREAD
The bedspread was ten feet by nine feet, dark blue, almost purple, but over the years it had faded until it was bluish-white, like our breakfast of milk and cornflakes. When we returned from school in the afternoon, we would lie on the bed, Sister and I, our cheeks pressed against the thick fabric, our eyes fixed along the surface, imagining we were looking at the sky. And that the discoloured patches were clouds.
At night we turned off the lights and before our eyes could adjust to the darkness all around my sister would switch on the bedside lamp. Its shade was made of cane and through its slats the light fell in a hundred specks on the bedspread making our black sky shimmer with stars. Sister would then lean over and spin the shade, making it revolve slowly around the light bulb so that the stars would begin to move in huge orbits across the bed.
We did this every night except when the bedspread was due for washing, once every ten days. Then it would lie in the red plastic bucket in the bathroom, drowned in mugs and mugs of water and soap. My sister and I took turns visiting the bathroom to look at our sky, crumpled and wet, jammed into the bucket so hard we were afraid the clouds would crack.
In the morning the soap suds would have disappeared leaving the water a dirty brown and Bhabani, the maid, would hitch her sari above her knees and begin pounding the bedspread with the wooden mallet I often used as a cricket bat. That booming sound, reflected off the walls of the bathroom, was our morning music to which we waltzed through the arduous rituals of preparing for school. When she was done, we would help her carry it up to the terrace, the bedspread all wet and gleaming like the velvet curtain of a cinema hall, and we left for school safe in the realization that when we would return, our sky would be back, fresh and clean.
I don’t remember how long my sister and I went on with this little secret game. She was fourteen, I was ten, and it was on our ninety square feet of fabric sky that we first kissed and, later, touched each other in what then we thought were the wrong places. And it was this daily theatre of pleasure and fear, played out on our blue bedspread, that carried us as if on a wave from one night to the next.
For a moment, after we had bolted the door, nothing seemed to matter. Neither Father sleeping in the adjacent room nor Mother staring at us from a giant photograph behind the lamp, two dead cockroaches trapped in its glass frame. Just the stars caressing our bodies, lying still in the darkness, the only sound our two hearts, and sometimes a Bengal-Bihar cargo truck rumbling by.
And then one July evening, when it had rained right through the day, our secret was laid bare.
I returned from school drenched, my exercise books wet at the corners; my shoes cold and heavy, like the tiny black boats fished out of the river. Sister spread the books out on the bedspread, turned the fan to maximum, dried my hair with a towel and propped my shoes on either side of the gas stove. By evening, the books had dried, their pages flapped in the fan’s draft. The shoes had begun to steam, making the house smell of leather and rain when Father came home drunk and laughing.
Whenever Father was drunk and laughing, he would do stupid things: once, he took a kitchen knife and flushed it down the toilet. The knife got stuck, the water stopped flowing and for two mornings before the plumber arrived S
ister and I kept our legs crossed as we prayed hard hoping that we didn’t spoil our pants. Later, that was to become one of our few family jokes: if we could hold our shit for two days, we could hold down anything in the world.
At other times Father would hide Sister’s sanitary napkins so that she was forced to borrow my handkerchief. Sometimes he would become violent and shave himself with neither soap nor water until he bled. It was at those times that we got frightened. My sister was a strong woman; she would grasp his shoulders and shake him, sometimes even slap him hard. He would then start crying and slowly slide down the sofa; his eyes would remain half-open and he would fall asleep.
That evening when Father came home Sister was away. She had gone to the British Council to return some books which were long overdue. Father smiled and said he wanted to see me naked. ‘Let’s see how grown up you are now,’ he said. At first, I thought it was yet another of his drunken jokes, but then he stood there in the middle of the bedroom, the smile melting away, and told me that he knew what Sister and I were up to at night. If I didn’t undress, he said, he would tell Sister all about it. Or better still, make us sleep in different rooms.
I kept listening, the battle had been lost, I kept staring at the patches of rain on the wall: a rabbit with an ear missing, a dog its tail.
Maybe I should have protested but that afternoon, with Father drunk and laughing, with Sister gone and my only secret lying suddenly exposed, I closed my eyes, undressed and on Father’s orders lay on the blue bedspread.
It was cold, the rain from the exercise books had seeped into the fabric. I could hear the sound of cars splashing the water in the potholes outside, I could hear the minibus conductors shout their destinations: Dum Dum, Howrah, Entally, Roxy Cinema.
Someone laughed from the street outside; I think I shouted, I’m not sure. Even if I had, my scream wouldn’t have gone beyond the places where buses go.
What happened later is split, torn, and then welded together, as if in a dream. I fell asleep; I remember that when I woke up, the buses had long gone, the rain had stopped leaving the street gleaming like Sister’s hair. I stood in the tiny balcony overlooking the street, I can recall crying.
However, what I remember more than the tears is the view of the street lamps through water-filled eyes: the white neon light bent and curved, split into its component colours. Through the blur of that spectrum, I could see the oil mill across the street, soft and diffuse as if in a magazine photograph. The red flags strung across its entrance drooped limp and wet in the rain. I must have stood there for quite some time since my legs had begun to hurt. I was also beginning to panic: I hadn’t done my geography homework.
By the time Sister announced that dinner was ready, the tears had dried. At the dining table, I tried to hide behind the glass of milk watching Father and Sister eat silently. I wanted to shrink, climb up the glass and dive down to its bottom, swim in circles, let the milk’s whiteness fill my body, wash the stickiness and some blood away.
‘You don’t have to go to school tomorrow,’ Father said, standing at the sink washing his hands.
‘You look unwell,’ he said, lighting a cigarette, walking up to the table and holding me close. I could hear the dinner in his stomach, my heart pressed against his groin.
That night, my sister didn’t switch on the bedside lamp. And with all the stars locked in the blackness of the bedroom, we held each other tight. The bedspread was dank from the rain, stained and crusted where the come had slipped off my legs. But my sister didn’t seem to notice as she lay, not speaking a word, her red shirt rolled up to allow my lips to shelter her nipple, my chin to rest on the small pillow of her breast and my hands pressed, warm and soft, between her legs.
We could hear Father snore in the next room, the rattle of the windows whenever a huge Bengal-Bihar cargo truck rumbled by. Light from the street filtered through the frosted glass panes making Sister’s hair shine. I could feel the rise and fall of her breasts, hear the gentle rush of her breathing.
She had fallen asleep, so I withdrew my hands, rolled her shirt back to her waist, pulled the covers over her and snuggled close. She turned in her sleep but she didn’t let me go and my head came to fit exactly in the curve of her neck, her arms came to rest across my back.
I lay there awake, staring at the darkness so comfortably nestled between our bodies, allowing it to wash my eyes, lull me to sleep. And although my body still hurt, where Father had put his entire weight on that evening, I kept drowning in a stream, a river and then an ocean of happiness.
That night happened more than twenty-five years ago. I have embellished Father’s heavy breathing, my muffled screams, with adjectives in my mind. I have made Father’s trousers black at one time, blue at another; changed that rainy evening to a hot summer morning. Or when I have felt like it, I have made it pour that night so that Sister and I, locked in embrace, can hear the drops drum against the window.
As for my sister, she walked out of home when she was nineteen with someone I hope she loved.
For quite some time, several years, I missed her as if I had walked out of an operating theatre, cured but with something missing, something that had been an integral part of me, the absence of which I would feel every waking moment.
And then, slowly, like sunrise on a winter’s day, it dawned on me, cold and clear, that perhaps my sister had to run away for me to carry on. Because, in a way, it was essential that one of us should leave never to return. It saved both of us the discomfort and the pain of sitting together as adults and talking about everything except those nights on the blue bedspread, that July night on the blue bedspread, moments that were key to our survival and yet better left untouched and unsaid.
On certain rainswept nights, when I lie in bed, I can see Father standing in the rain outside, his hair all wet, the water streaming across his face. He looks half his size, gone is the fat around his waist, the furrows in his forehead. Instead he looks weak, lost, like a child left stranded in the blinding rain.
I want to open the window, ask him to come in, change his clothes and cover him with a blanket. I want to tell him that what happened happened and it’s been selfish of me to keep using him as an excuse for failures of my own making. Or as a subject of my prose. I want him to help me understand why he failed as a father and how could so much hatred and pain have gracefully coexisted with so much love and joy.
But when I look at the window again it’s too late, Father is gone, leaving behind the rain pouring out from a dark Calcutta night, I can see it streak across the halogen lamps, tap on my window, gurgle around the Municipal Corporation tap.
I close my eyes hard, imagine my wife asleep by my side, my only child awake reading a picture book, or my two children silently conspiring in their bedroom. And I hope that my sister, wherever she is, is safe and has children of her own and when they sleep at night, maybe she sets the stars free once again and their heads come to fit exactly in the curve of her neck.
SUNIL GAVASKAR
Every family has its moments. When the lights in the house dim or brighten, depending on what looks the best, when music begins to play or silence slips in, depending on what sounds the best.
If it’s June, a cool wind begins to blow, clouds cover the sun deep within their folds. And if it’s January, the sun sets later than usual, your lips don’t chap, you can take off your socks, touch the floor with your toes.
People talk in laughs, think in smiles, and for that moment, even if it lasts only one second or one minute, there’s happiness spread all around, like chocolates. You can take as much as you want, stuff your pencil box, squeeze some into the hole of your sharpener, even between the pages of your textbooks. And there will be lots left.
Some will stick to the walls, the furniture, some will fall under the bed, in those corners where eyes never reach so that when the moment has passed all you need to do is to search in the right places, keep your ears open for the rustle of the chocolate’s wrapping paper, your nail
s overgrown, so that when you have to chip it off the walls, you can.
This is the story of one such moment.
But because this happened on a September night long ago and because this is December and in a couple of hours it will be day, we will have to twist a few things to get it right. So I will have to tell you to close your eyes; if the wooden slats in the window cannot keep the sun out, you will have to cover your face so that your eyes rest in the dark hollow of your arm.
This should cut the sunlight off, make it easier for you to imagine that it’s night, that all the lights have been switched off in this house. Except for one, the table lamp in the room in which I sit, writing.
Because this was Father’s room.
Keep your eyes closed and when no one’s looking, when you have imagined enough so that the darkness fills the entire room, open your eyes and you can see, at the foot of your bed, a tiny yellow line.
It’s very faint, it’s coming from Father’s room and it takes a distinct shape only when the wind blows and the drapes part. It’s then that the line lengthens, even bulges in the middle.
Now, let’s get the sound right. Outside, the traffic is thin, once in a while, something passes by, maybe a truck, an empty bus, washed and ready. You can hear the fan tonight but imagine that it’s the sound of someone breathing. There may be other noises but let’s hope they don’t distract. Like a leaf falling, or one of the pigeons in the cage moving in its sleep.
Inside the room, Father is sitting at his table, he hasn’t changed his office clothes, the white striped shirt, crumpled, falls below his belt, his trousers are still on, a line of mud crusted on the black fabric, near his ankles. He has unfastened his zip, about one-third, just to relieve the pressure.
The Blue Bedspread Page 4