The Blue Bedspread

by Jha, Raj Kamal

  Like lonely lovers often do, I kept thinking things, I conjured up worlds where we were husband and wife, we had taken a house, all for ourselves, with a tiny garden in front.

  And for quite a while, every day, I kept drawing and redrawing the same scene, filling it out with colours and noises.

  It’s evening and I am sitting on my chair, my legs raised on a table, I am reading aloud to her. Outside, our child lies on his stomach, in the garden, he’s playing with a twig, a leaf, an ant.

  And while he is playing, he keeps staring at us, through the window where there are tall white curtains billowing in the wind.

  She laughs at something I have read and I tell her, ‘Let me finish and then you laugh as much as you want to.’ She laughs again, I get irritated but I know it’s time to call in the child since it’s getting late and we all are eating out tonight.

  So I close the book, get up, walk to my wife, and we both go to the window and call out to our child, we can see him drop the twig, look at us, smile, and we can hear his feet on the steps, he walks into our arms.

  It’s a scene I have squeezed into fiction now, best played out only in our minds. For if she had said yes that night, if we lived in a house with a garden in front, I might never have been in this neighbourhood, I wouldn’t have been here when your mother came on that April night, you wouldn’t have come to this city.

  STRONG WIND

  No one noticed.

  It was seven in the evening and the wind was so light that no one saw the curtains rise and fall a fraction of an inch. No one heard, above the noise of the double-decker buses and the trams, the taxis and the trucks, the leaves tremble in the topmost branches of the banyan tree across the street.

  No one stood in the balcony and looked below, through the iron grille, to wonder why the garbage heap was quivering as if some strange animal, small and wild, were trapped inside.

  Why bits and pieces of trash, the lighter ones, had begun to break free and move in small circles at first and then slowly in large spirals until one, a slip of paper, reached the tram tracks in the middle.

  Surely, someone out there, on the street, across the Hooghly, on the Howrah Bridge, someone in this city of twelve million people, must have noticed it.

  Or even felt it.

  Certainly, some tired passenger, on his way home from work, standing on the footboard of the tram, his copy of the newspaper or his imitation leather suitcase flapping like a bird against his knee, must have felt a sudden draught against his face.

  Or a little child staring out of a bus window must have pushed his hand out, just like that, and felt the wind run through his fingers. And when his father told him, ‘Don’t do that, it’s dangerous, pull your hand inside,’ the child must have turned his face away, embarrassed at the reprimand in public, and then just as he turned his face he would have felt the wind in his hair.

  But then in this city, even a child, at times, doesn’t notice the wind.

  She will run away tomorrow.

  She has prepared for it. For the last three years, she has been walking to college, saving the money her father gives her for the bus fare and for tiffin. She prefers notes, not coins, it’s easier to keep the notes in the Bata shoe carton she uses as her make-up box. With the lipstick, the three shades of nail polish, and four pairs of earrings.

  Using differently coloured rubber bands, she separates the one-rupee notes from the twos, the fives and the tens. She doesn’t count every day, like Silas Marner she’s read about, she just keeps putting the notes in their respective bundles. She knows what she will wear tomorrow: the blue skirt with a white top with tiny blue stars. She wants to look good but she doesn’t want to get noticed. He will wait at the College Street intersection.

  She has got it all worked out, she will get up in the morning, wait for the newspaper man to throw the paper into the house, wait for her father to read the editorials, finish his tea, go for shopping. The thick wooden door makes a lot of noise so when Father leaves she will not shut the door behind him.

  She will wait until she hears the sound of his footsteps change, from the sharp clap clap of rubber on stairs to the gentle shuffle shuffle when he reaches the landing. Then, two or three minutes later, she will pull the door gently, keeping it slightly ajar so that when the time comes, no one will hear, no one will notice.

  But first she will wait for the maid to go into the kitchen, begin breakfast, she will wait until she hears the kettle being put on the gas stove, the click of the lighter, the pop of the flame. And when she is staring at the oil in the pan, watching the sides curl up, the first bubbles rise to the surface, she will run away.

  With the notes stuffed at the bottom of her bag, all of the three thousand rupees, covered with some of her clothes, the nicer ones, she will walk into the waiting taxi and leave what has been her world for the last nineteen years. Never to return.

  The wind picks up. It lifts the blue plastic mug from the garbage heap, tosses it two to three feet, lets it roll into the drain where it comes to rest against a brick. It whistles through the banyan tree, slips in through the cracks in the window, lifts the curtains, topples the wooden doll on the television set, the two tiny glass ducks in the showcase, cracking one beak.

  Bhabani is standing in the kitchen watching the oil snap, the wind teases her hair, blows the onion peels across the floor, dries the sweat on her back. Father is sitting in the living room, back from work, leaning over to untie his shoelaces. He rolls his grey socks to his ankles before pulling them off, the wind blows in through his toes.

  I sit on the bed, my khaki schoolbag half open, the wind catching the corners of the Oxford University Atlas. In front lies my geography homework, the outline map of Italy waiting to be filled up. Genoa and Rome as little black dots; the Adriatic Sea in blue, I begin colouring the sea but the wind grows stronger, the waves rise, the map turns over, flaps against my felt pens, I use the geometry box as a paperweight.

  I can hear Father in the bathroom, the flush, the water being sucked into the drain, the splash as the mug falls into the bucket. Moments later, the flick of the bathroom switch being switched off, Father’s wet Hawaii chappals slapping against the cement floor as he walks into the dining room to listen to the nine o’clock news on his Philips radio.

  I hear the wind rattle the windows, bang them shut.

  But no one notices. She skips dinner saying her stomach hurts. She goes to her room, lies down in her bed and closes her eyes. She has to get a good night’s sleep since it will be a long day tomorrow. She’s not scared, not nervous although she’s never lived on her own before, never lived outside her house.

  Over the last few days she’s felt an energy in her body, in her hands, her eyes, her legs, the source of which she doesn’t know. So while she does, on the surface, all that’s expected of her to do, she is also building her future far away from this house, with the man she thinks she loves.

  She slips into half-sleep, hears the first drops of rain fall into the blue plastic mug that lies in the drain.

  It rained for three nights and four days. The wind snapped the tram wires, they hung dangerously low, just a few feet from the water which by now covered the fuse boxes of the lamp-posts. The flood, the first in more than twenty-five years, swallowed everything that came in its way: the garbage heap, the shanties on Amherst Street and Kalighat, two girls on College Street, an entire bus near Outram Ghat, all the benches in the park near St Paul’s School.

  On the second day, they brought the boats out, swaying under the weight of kind men and women. The taxi didn’t come, couldn’t come, she didn’t run away.

  She ran away only three days later when the water was gone leaving behind a layer of silt that draped the city like a fine blanket, creased and folded where people walked, stomped their feet. The sun came out, the Corporation worked overtime to clean the manholes, all clothes in the city were dank, a musty smell hung in the neighbourhood and she walked away, this time into the night, when everyone
was asleep, with a man I hope she loved.

  As for me, I just walked around the house between long periods of sleep. School was called off and I re-did the map of Italy, this time more carefully. There was not much to do in the kitchen since the stock of vegetables ran out, we ate biscuits, puffed rice and kept listening to the radio. The announcers couldn’t come to the office so they kept playing the same music again and again. We slept for long hours in the afternoon, listening to the water outside and in the evening, came out in the balcony and watched the dying sun bounce off the sheet of water that stretched as far as we could see.

  We have let the present fill us up, we have pushed the past to whichever corner it can. We have told each other about those three nights and four days when the floods came to the city. About how she couldn’t run away and how I ate biscuits, did my geography homework and listened to the news on the radio. And although there’s nothing common in our experiences since then, nothing that we can call shared, both of us know that both of us noticed the wind and we knew, long before the world did, that it was a strong wind.

  Perhaps, it was this that finally brought us together, even if it was for a day and half a night.

  THE HIGHWAYMAN

  ‘I’m scared,’ she says.

  ‘Of what?’ he asks.

  ‘Of the baby in the bathroom.’

  ‘What baby?’

  She has told him this story many times but he says he always forgets. So she begins again.

  His ink was red, a smooth, glistening red; his paper was white. And when he finished writing a page, it looked like a picture postcard. Of a miniature garden, in a foreign country, covered with snow and red flowers.

  Every day, except Sunday, I would go to him, with my exercise book and a red pen, so that he could write and I could take some of these picture postcards home. He was my English Literature tutor, I was in school when there wasn’t much literature to teach or learn.

  So we kept reading our favourite lesson, the poem called ‘The Highwayman’, and although it was an easy poem, I knew it by heart, I knew what it meant, I always asked him to read it out to me.

  The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas, the road was a ribbon of moonlight upon the purple moor. And the highwayman came riding, riding, riding, the highwayman came riding up to the old inn door.

  I called him Sir, he didn’t charge us anything. Sir worked as an accountant at a bank in the city; why he taught me, I don’t know. Once he said he liked reading poems and stories. He lived in a two-room house, about ten minutes on foot from our neighbourhood, with his wife and a three-year-old baby girl.

  Every day, after we were done with our lessons, the homework questions taken care of, he and his wife would go shopping and ask me to take care of the girl until they returned. So for the next half-hour or so I would become part sister, part mother. I would make up stories, tell her about kings and queens, about the prince who went out one day into the forest, about the trees that go wisha wisha wisha at night.

  Once I began telling her about the highwayman, the moon in the sky, the old inn door, but the night frightened her, she began to cry. So I made the highwayman funny, I made him into a clown jumping up and down a yellow-coloured road.

  Sometimes we played a game with her shirt. She always wore shirts with Mickey Mouse on her chest. We found that by tugging at her shirt, holding it a certain way, Mickey Mouse would smile. Or laugh, sometimes, even cry.

  When I left for home every evening I would see her stare at me from inside the living room, her tiny hands pressed to the bars of the window that opened to the street, her face screwed up with what I think were tears. Maybe as soon as I turned the bend at the end of the lane, she rushed straight back into her parents’ arms, I don’t know. Maybe she never thought about me when I was gone. But when I reached home it took me at least fifteen minutes to settle down, to put her away from my mind before sliding into my familiar world of dinner plates crashing against the wall.

  ‘What was Sir’s wife like?’ he asks.

  ‘She was sweet but she never really talked to me,’ she says.

  ‘What did she do when Sir and you were studying?’ ‘I don’t know.’

  I forget the exact sequence of events that night but what I remember is the voice of a woman crying. It was winter since the fan was still, I could see cobwebs across its blades, my little brother asleep by my side, a blanket covering us both. It must have been very late since I couldn’t hear anything from the street outside, the pigeons in the cage must have been asleep. The last trams and the buses must have gone, I could only hear the chiming of the clock in the living room. And a woman crying.

  I climbed down the bed, rubbed off some of the sleep from my eyes, stood behind the drapes, looked into the living room.

  Sir is talking to my father, who has one hand on his shoulder. Sir’s wife is standing in one corner, trembling. I can hear her cry like a baby. On the table, in the centre of the room, is a small white bundle, smelling of Dettol.

  I walk closer to the bundle, no one asks me to stop, no one seems to have noticed that I have entered the room because no one asks me to go back to my bed and go to sleep.

  The baby’s eyes are half open, her hair wet, her face white as if someone has sprinkled an entire can of Cinthol powder. Her tiny arms stick out of the pink towel that drapes her body, one on each side, her fingers are curled. She’s wearing a frock I have seen: a blue frock with Mickey Mouse smiling on her chest, its ear pressed against her heart.

  She is dead.

  ‘How did she die?’ he asks.

  ‘I don’t know. I heard later that she was in the hospital for a few days, some virus had entered her brain.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Sir picks up the bundle, lifts the arms and tucks them in.

  ‘You want to come?’ he asks me.

  No one protests, Sir’s wife is still crying, although now silently. Father is now standing in the veranda smoking, looking at the empty street, the tram wires glinting in the dark.

  I say yes.

  There’s a rickshaw waiting outside. We trundle down lanes, past people fast asleep on the streets, a cow sniffing at a garbage heap, past the sweet shop with one shutter missing.

  I want to ask what happened but I know it’s too late, I can feel the baby’s legs press against my elbows. Sir is staring into the night in front of him, above the rickshaw-wallah’s shoulders.

  We cross tram lines, shudder over cobbled roads, meet one broken Calcutta Milk Van tottering down the road. Sir’s watch says 3 a.m. We smell the river from a distance, the sludge and the smoke. At this time, there aren’t any funeral pyres burning, just a cloud of smoke from those that have burnt in the evening, this cloud mixing with the fog.

  The man behind the counter is fast asleep. Sir knocks at the wooden board propped up outside, he wakes up, gives him a slip of paper to sign something on and then calls out loud. A boy pops up from the shadows, like a ghost, leads Sir to the steps of the ghat.

  ‘Get her,’ he says. And the rickshaw-wallah hands me the bundle; the baby’s head rests against my chest, she isn’t heavy but still my arms hurt as I hold her, dead, a cold wind blowing the smoke into my eyes.

  ‘Come with me to the steps,’ Sir says, and he takes the bundle from my arms. The boy leading us, we walk down, there’s a dirty moon in the sky. The river is one big black table top glistening in the dark.

  Far away, I can see the steamers bound for Gangasa-gar, their lanterns flickering. The wind tears the fog and the smoke in patches through which I can make out the dark shapes of the Howrah Bridge.

  Sir walks into the river until the water reaches his chest, he lets the baby go, there’s a splash, the ripples reach my feet, drench my slippers. And she is gone, sucked in by the Hooghly.

  We wake the rickshaw-wallah, the journey back home begins. Nothing has changed, we pass the same people sleeping on the same pavements, past the same cow sniffing at th
e garbage, past the sweet shop with one shutter missing.

  At home, Father is ready with a bucket of steaming water. You have to take a bath, he says.

  Sir and his wife leave. And at around four in the morning, with an albino cockroach staring at me from the drain in the bathroom, I am naked and wet, my periods have begun, my tears mix with the water and the grime, I can smell the smoke in my hair, I can see the water, mixed with the soap, my blood, glide past the white cockroach. Into the city’s drains that pump themselves into the river where the baby lies fast asleep.

  ‘How do you remember all this?’ he asks. ‘The cockroach, the water in the bathroom, after so many years?’

  He can feel her shiver, he puts his arm around her, he can feel the warmth of her breath, the softness of her body, they snuggle close.

  ‘I saw it first on the night of our wedding. And then several nights.’

  ‘What did you see?’

  ‘I saw the dead baby.’

  ‘What do you mean, you saw the dead baby?’

  No, not the dead baby. But its footprints. It must have been around three or four in the morning, you were fast asleep since I lifted your arm, placed it on the pillow, switched on the lights and went to the bathroom, and despite all this you didn’t move even an inch.

  The bathroom was dry and just as I stepped in I switched on the light and there they were. Tiny footprints on the red tiles. At first, I didn’t even notice, I just switched on the light and then went to the blue bucket. When I bent down to fill the mug, I saw it.

  Footprints on the tiles, four little dots of water and a tiny patch, the imprint of a tiny foot. The prints were in pairs as if a baby had dipped its feet in water and walked all around the bathroom. I could count about a dozen of them.