As for us, we are the family in the middle, so we spend the entire day in the balcony. Father in his black wedding coat which goes all the way up to his knees. My sister in her blue coat, my oversized red socks folded near the toes so that I don’t trip. Mother, wrapped in the Kashmiri shawl, rests her head against Father’s chest, he wraps one arm around her for the first time in my life and Sister and I turn the other way, slightly embarrassed but very happy as Mother reaches out and draws us to her. We can smell the mothballs in her shawl as she tells us the story of how she got up last night and heard the snow, like a piece of cotton wool sliding down the face of a mirror.
She tells us the story for the tenth time but it doesn’t matter and we all laugh, Father holds Mother closer to her, my sister puts her hands in mine and we hold on to each other, the air trapped between our clothes, asking all the gods we know not to let the snow melt.
White in the dark.
Sarah Parker
You’ve been crying for more than five paragraphs.
You began when we stood in the balcony watching the children play with the snow, tying their old red ribbons around their snowmen’s necks, painting cricket balls black for the eyes and the ears. The TV was down, there was nothing to do, you cried and you cried.
Don’t worry, the police officer had told me. Newborns often cry at night, just like that. It doesn’t always mean they need a feed. Let them cry for a while and they usually go back to sleep.
You haven’t. What do I do?
Maybe I should hold you in my arms, my left hand below your head, my right arm underneath your back, your ear against my heart, and take you to the balcony. Show you, through the iron grille, the oil mill where the red flags still droop, where the pigeons stand fast asleep. And maybe if we are lucky, we can see some of them, white and grey patches in the night, their heads turned the other way, their beaks buried in their backs.
We could also stand where your mother stood once upon a time and watched one pigeon die. But it s very dark outside and they say that at this time of the year, late November, dewdrops keep falling from the sky. I could cover you with my handkerchief but then there are sodium vapour lamps on the street. Your eyes will hurt.
The nurse at the hospital has given me a pacifier but she said to wait for a couple of weeks, use it when she’s strong enough to move her lips. So I shall wait.
I’ve read in foreign magazines about things that may help you fall asleep. Tapes that play the music of the womb, mattresses that move up and down as if they have your mother’s heart inside. But I don’t think we get these things in the city.
I could try Toy Centre on Park Street, they say that shop gets its stocks from London, sometimes from Tokyo.
There’s some milk in the fridge but it’s too cold and by the time I warm it, you may slip into sleep again. I could take vou to my study, the room where I’m writing, and put you on the stack of pages that have been written. Maybe the change of place will calm you, from the blue bedspread to the white paper.
But pages flap, their edges are sharp, it’s not safe.
If only Miss Sarah Parker were alive, I wouldn’t be so helpless. Let me tell you the story of Miss Parker.
Long ago, more than one hundred years ago in fact, there was an American woman who worked out of an office of the Calcutta Municipal Corporation in Chowringhee.
When you grow up and if you live in this city, you will have to go to Chowringhee quite often. That’s where all the big offices are, government and private, the markets with fashionable clothes, the pavement vendors who sell eyeglasses in the summer, sweaters in the winter. That’s where the big movie halls are, the Everest Building is, the tallest in the city.
Chowringhee is where most of the buses and trams begin and end their journey. It’s the heart of the city and like blood, we keep rushing there, through the veins and the arteries of the streets and the lanes. To and fro, to and fro.
So that’s where there was a woman called Miss Sarah Parker. And at 7, Chowringhee, she set up a one-room office and she called it the Mesmeric Institute.
Every evening, after office hours, when everyone had gone, when it was quiet, when you couldn’t hear the horses’ hoofs any more, in those days they must have had horse-drawn carriages, she called her friends, wrote a Word on a slip of paper, folded it, put it on the table, and asked them to close their eyes.
They all closed their eyes at the same time and when they wanted to open them again, they couldn’t. It was as if the eyelids were stuck with glue, they arched their eyebrows, grimaced, blinked and blinked. But nothing. They could not open their eyes until she said the Word.
It must have been a strange sight. There was no electricity then, it must have been in the glare of gaslight or flickering hurricane lamps that she sat in the middle with her subjects all around her, in a semi-circle, all with their eyes closed, their shadows falling on the wall. And outside, the last of the horse carriages going clippety-clop, clippety-clop.
Only when she spoke that Word could they open their eyes.
Then she would ask them to raise their arms and they kept them raised, rigid; they could not bring them down until she said that Word. Sometimes she went even further. Their legs would lose all sensation, they would pinch each other, hit each other on the knees. but feel nothing.
Some of them would even roll off their chairs and fall on to the floor, some in pain, their legs gone to sleep, but Miss Parker never moved, she sat there, in the centre, looking at them until they were convinced that she had the mesmeric power.
Then she would speak that Word and everything would be normal once again. The sensation would return, her friends would look at her in admiration and fright, at each other with shame and guilt. There would be some nervousness in the air, some tension but all that would disappear in a moment as Miss Parker would laugh and call out for the drinks and the dinner.
‘Calcutta is opening its eyes,’ The Statesman said that time, ‘and in a hot climate like this, the power to mentally order people and oblige them to do our will is not to be despised.’
But Miss Parker is dead.
She was followed by a gentleman from Paris. He called himself a thought reader and he performed at the Dalhousie Institute, a man called Dr Chapagnon.
He’s dead, too.
And where Miss Parker once lived, where her house once was, there is today a vegetable market. Janbazar, behind Elite Cinema.
On nights when I return home late and there is no public transport, I go to Janbazar to take a taxi. I stand near the mound of dead vegetable peels, some green but most beginning to rot, and I can hear the noises of the night show in Elite, the shuffle of feet during the interval, the sound of the ice-cream boys shouting at tired customers, the crinkle of potato chips being eaten in the night.
If Miss Parker were alive tonight, I promise I would have gone to get her. The writing would have waited. I would have got a taxi, paid the driver extra since it s so late, asked him to take me to the Mesmeric Institute at 7, Chowringhee.
I would have woken her up and if she or her servant had refused to open the door. I would have stood on the street and shouted. ‘Miss Parker, Miss Parker, wake up, wake up.’ I would have asked her. begged her, gone down on my knees, on the street, so what if the tar tore the fabric of my trousers. I would have forced her to come with me, to step into the waiting taxi, I would have brought her to your room and asked her to write the Word, make you sleep, make you stop crying so that you wake up only when she says the Word in the morning.
But that’s not to be.
So I go back to my pages, I begin to finish the story about the night snow fell in our neighbourhood, how Mother reached out and drew us close, under her shawl, we could smell the mothballs as she told us the story of how she got up that night and heard the snow, like a piece of cotton wool sliding down a mirror, I can hear you crying.
But I write, word after word, and as each sentence comes to life, grows up and dies, your crying gets softer
and softer, it seems someone is taking you away from me, walking into the distance, so that by the time I finish the story, it’s all over, you’ve gone back to sleep, leaving behind your crying ringing in my ears like a faraway bell.
SISTER
DEAD PIGEON
(A story in two parts)
They found him in the morning, five thirty or so, hanging from a hook on the bedroom ceiling where his fan should have been. His walking stick was on the floor, the chair he had climbed on lay upturned, its four legs marking a rectangle in which his body swung gently, like that of a lamb, upside down, at a butcher’s shop.
The police came around seven, in a red and white jeep; a red light on the roof which didn’t work; a constable got up on the chair, held him tight with one hand, loosened the blue nylon rope with the other, lowered him down.
‘He’s very light,’ he said. ‘He’s so old he would have died anyway, why did he have to kill himself?’ he said.
Why did he have to kill himself?
The constable took this question and walked around the neighbourhood, to as many people as he could, but no one had the answer. No one knew where the old man came from, whether he had any relatives in some faraway village. Or whether there were some people in the city who would cry themselves to sleep that night.
So they followed the rules, as laid out in the book, typed out a notice at the police station which no one came to read. And, therefore, forty-eight hours later, they cremated him.
He was seventy, they said, no medical college needed a cadaver so old. He could even have been eighty, it didn’t matter.
It was one of the four suicides in the city that day; it would become, by the end of the month, one of a hundred and fifty. By the end of that year, one of over fifteen hundred. Multiply that by fifteen for fifteen years and what do you have left?
Nothing, the old man is gone.
Gone also is his house, it wasn’t a house exactly, just a four-wall shack, with a tarpaulin roof, beside the road, which they demolished the day after they found him. There was nothing in the room except an extra walking stick, an iron chair, clothes that smelled of his years and some pigeon feathers scattered below the bed, some underneath his pillow.
They took it all away, leaving behind nothing to mark the fact that once upon a time there lived an old man. And that for a week or so, he changed the life of a little girl, brought joy into her house and filled her little heart with some love.
Once upon a time, there lived an old man who worked in an oil-refining mill, pasting labels on tin cans, just before the oil was poured into them: bright yellow labels with pictures of Lord Ganesh, in black and red, the name of the mill in blue: Ganesh Oil Mill, Calcutta 700006.
How long he’d been doing this, no one knows, but it must have been quite a while because if you looked carefully you could see that his fingers were crinkled as if glue had dried on them and merged with his skin.
When he picked up a piece of paper, any piece of paper, through instinct and habit he made it look as if he were holding a label, he held it gingerly, between the thumb and his finger, looking all around him as if he were lost, as if he were searching for a place to paste it, somewhere, anywhere.
Just outside the oil mill, a couple of feet to the right of its entrance, were the birds. In a large cage, more like a coop, the kind you will see at the Alipore Zoo, slightly smaller, the size of an average storeroom in an average house. Three sides of the cage were walls, the fourth that faced the road was strong wire netting.
There were twelve pigeons in the cage, six grey, six white, the prettiest things in the neighbourhood. And although there were several pigeons out in the open, resting on window ledges, cooing in the afternoon, fluttering in the narrow lanes and doing pretty things like scratching their backs or sleeping, people stopped by to look at these dozen birds in the cage.
Flying round and round, grey and white, grey and white. On certain rainy days, when the sky was dark, it seemed tiny clouds had slipped into the cage each dragging with it just a little bit of the sky. And then one afternoon in 1977, the oil mill closed down. Just like that, all of a sudden.
It was the time they started painting Moral Science lessons on trucks and trams, buses and taxis. In black cursive letters:
Work more, talk less. Honesty is the best policy.
The owner of the oil mill, a heavy man in a silk kurta and dhoti, his chin glowing from the necklaces around his neck, there were at least four, drove up to the mill door that evening, stepped out of his car, and walked to the gate, two locks, one in each hand. The workers waved red flags, shouted their protests, one even spat in his direction but it didn’t matter because the owner kept walking as if he couldn’t hear; with a smile on his face, he locked the gates, put the keys in his pocket, the workers heard the clink and he began to walk back to his white Ambassador. When suddenly, he stopped.
He saw the old man in the crowd and he walked up to him, the old man, afraid, hid behind some young men, the owner put one hand on his shoulder, lowered his mouth to his ear and said something which made the old man smile. This whole thing lasted not more than fifteen seconds before he turned and walked away towards the car.
Some workers, the more angry ones, ran after the car, chased it over a distance but the car was faster. They returned, cursing the man, calling him names, they then circled the old man, asked him what the owner had said.
One young worker shouted at him. ‘Don’t double-cross us,’ he said. ‘Don’t stab us in the back,’ another said.
The old man just smiled, a sad and nervous smile, and said, no, there was no deal, the owner had told him to take care of the pigeons, to look after them, to see to it that they got fed every day and the cage was cleaned every morning.
This gave the workers some hope because it showed that the owner had a little bit of his heart still left. And no one protested, no one was against the pigeons.
But like water in the sun, this hope began to disappear, in patches, so that by the time summer slipped into the monsoons, it was gone. A team from the Labour Commissioner’s office came to inspect but nothing happened, the mill never opened.
Some workers stayed there at the entrance, shouting slogans, propped up their flags against the door, and when it was too late, when the rest of the neighbourhood had gone to sleep, they sat down, in a bunch, played cards until they fell asleep.
As the rains came, the flags got drenched, discoloured, the red turned into some pale brown, the older workers began to leave the group, in ones and twos, to look for other jobs. The younger ones waited and waited to teach the owner a lesson but nothing happened. Until one day, they too went away, leaving behind the red flags drooping over the signboard. Only two things remained unchanged and unaffected: the pigeons and the old man.
From the very first day, they fell in love, the old man and the birds.
Morning, afternoon, evening, he sat on an iron chair, his back to the road, as if in a painting, looking at the birds. When it rained, he sat with an umbrella; when it got cold, he sat with a shawl draped over his head, a small pile of wood, old newspapers, burning at his feet.
Exactly at eight every morning, when the siren from the flour mill, about half a kilometre away, went off, he would get up, steady himself with the walking stick and climb up the two steps that led to the door of the cage. He would unlock it, enter the cage, close the door behind him, pick up the broom that lay on the floor.
The birds flew around him, some perched on his shoulder, on his back, their feathers falling across his face but the old man looked as if he were walking in paradise, in the snow, all wrapped up and warm, the flakes falling across his face.
Until one day, when he walked inside, something happened, maybe a wind blew or there was something wrong with the hinges since the door, which he had pushed close, opened, not much, just a tiny crack restoring the link between the cage and the outside world, enough for one white pigeon to fly away.
Now pigeons aren’t great fliers
to begin with and this one was perhaps a young one since it fluttered for a while, hopped and then flew, only to go and sit on the tram wire above the street, looking this way and that, unsure what to do with its sudden freedom.
The old man hurried out, half-stumbling, half-walking, locked the door, stood at the edge of the pavement, called out loud to the bird. It didn’t listen, he picked up a stone, threw it, it didn’t travel far, his hands were weak, he beat his walking stick on the iron chair, the noise was loud but the pigeon just turned its head to scratch its back.
It continued to sit, its feet glued to the wire, it looked around, at the banyan tree near the oil mill, at the cage, it rubbed its beak against its neck, it preened itself. Not once did its little feet feel the tingle of the No. 12 tram from Esplanade to Galiff Street which was now just a couple of feet away.
By now, the old man was hysterical. He called out to the tram driver; someone was walking by, he stopped her, asked her to call the driver, she walked by. ‘Fly away,’ the old man shouted, ‘fly away,’ but it was as if the bird was made of stone.
The tram clanged, the old man shouted, the woman who walked by stopped and she shouted too, a crow, like an accidental ally, joined them, fluttered over the pigeon but nothing helped. The tram moved, the old man saw the pigeon fall, the white bundle drop onto the roof of the tram and then slide down, along the side, the dead pigeon, its tiny feet up in the air, its head lolled to one side.
He rushed to pick up the bird but before he could step off the pavement a double-decker bus, No. 11A bound for Howrah Station, came rushing by, followed by a couple of taxis, another bus, a truck, so that by the time the road had cleared, most of the dead bird was gone leaving a reddish-brown stain on the manhole cover, some feathers drenched with blood.
The Blue Bedspread Page 6