A Play for the End of the World

by Jai Chakrabarti

  Mr. Pal received their hugs and reciprocated with kisses. “Let me introduce my beloved, Mrs. Aditi Pal, and my little ones, Avik and Priya.”

  “Please, please come inside,” said Mrs. Pal, who was at least a decade younger than her husband and more attractive, with her aquiline nose and queenly cheekbones.

  For a moment the wariness Jaryk had felt dissipated, though a darker feeling took its place. Would he ever have what Mr. Pal had? He joined the Pals in their living room, which was spacious but lacking in furniture. As lunch was prepared, everyone sat on pillows around a marble table. Mrs. Pal kept her head covered, ran in and out of the kitchen, and began to cook something that reeked of pepper and spice. “Smells delicious,” he said, though spicy food had always felt like a burden on his tongue.

  Aditi Pal drew her sari close to her hips but gave him a cautious smile. Her husband sat on a wicker mat reading the paper, rocking a little as he read. With his free arm, Mr. Pal worked a hand fan to create a breeze for Avik and Priya.

  “This flood of men-women-children,” he said to Jaryk. “They will be the ruin of us. Surely even Americans know this. First we have peasants revolting in Naxalbari, wanting their own plot to till. Now, since Bangladesh is its own country, there are Hindu immigrants from across the border. Just like the Naxals, they all want their own land, but where is the room?”

  Jaryk didn’t respond. He’d heard the news, at first, as if it were the weather report of a foreign country: the year before, March of 1971, Bangladesh found nationhood; people fled, either into or out of the country. In the streets, there was murder and there was celebration. The New York Times covered all of it, but mostly on page 12. It wasn’t till Misha became serious about their India plan that he’d begun to pay more attention.

  “But enough politics. I hope you are feeling free here. I have hosted Americans before. They come with long hair. Ask about dharma. Is that why also you are here? For religion?”

  “No, I’m not much for God,” Jaryk said. “And I’m not really American.”

  “But your last name, don’t mind, I saw it on your luggage, is Smith. Is that not American?”

  He remembered that winter when he and Misha had crossed over from Europe into the country that had seemed till then to be only a fable—America—where an officer with too little time on his hands had asked him to state his name and Jaryk had glanced at the man’s name tag and repeated it back, thinking a new last name key to a new life. The officer had blinked at hearing his own name but had complied, writing it into history: Jaryk Smith, originally from Warsaw, Poland, arrived in the United States of America, Mar. 1946.

  “When I came to America, I chose my own last name,” Jaryk now explained. “Smith sounded right for the job. Originally, I’m from Europe.”

  “Oh,” Mr. Pal said, seeming a little deflated by the news. “Perhaps then you are here for business? We see European men in suits, more and more, these days.”

  “No, it’s not that, either. The truth is that I’m a fakir, an every-year wanderer.” Behind Mr. Pal’s questions, he could feel the tide of a stranger’s curiosity, so with every question, he felt himself tightening. With Mr. Pal, there was no reason to go beyond the polite give-and-take.

  “Ah, I see, a fakir.” Mr. Pal announced the word, the profession, with great seriousness. “Please note, Mr. Smith, I am not only a taxi driver. I am also a graduate of Calcutta University. Honors in philosophy. These eyes—” Mr. Pal took off his glasses— “are so poor because of the many books I have read in my time.”

  Jaryk lumbered over the information. Mr. Pal had airs and he drove with his face too close to the windshield, as if he were getting the hang of the road, but what did Jaryk know of Indian cab drivers? What did he know of India, for that matter? But he said to Mr. Pal, “I assumed as much. You struck me as a scholar from the first.”

  As Mrs. Pal brought out the meal, the children grew quiet. Mr. Pal passed him rotis and bowls of lentils and scooped the first pieces of chicken onto his plate. “You are our honored guest,” he said.

  Jaryk had little experience eating with his hands, so he watched Mr. Pal attack his chicken with thumb and forefinger before he tried it himself. There was an added flavor this way, but it was messier and more time-consuming. While Mr. Pal lent a certain dignity to the process, Jaryk’s wrists were soon stained with the turmeric-infused sauce. He tried to use his left hand to clean the right, but it didn’t help. No problem, he told himself. When in Rome.

  “Have you decided how you shall tour our beautiful country?” Mr. Pal asked.

  “I’m going to Shantiniketan,” he said, searching for a napkin.

  “Shantiniketan?” Mr. Pal said. “It’s a little remote, but I suppose there is an appeal because of Tagore’s school. Also, the natural surroundings.”

  “And what shall you do there?” Mrs. Pal said.

  He didn’t want to talk about Misha with strangers. Instead, he said, “I’m going to see a play. The Post Office, by Tagore.” As soon as he said it, he felt a tightness in his throat. How remarkable that he was finally in the land of Rabindranath Tagore! He’d read the man’s poems over the years, back in his youth performed one of his plays.

  “Ooh, Baba, I know that one,” Avik said. He raised his arm as if he were answering a question at school. “It’s about the boy Amal and everyone who comes to visit him because he can’t ever leave his house and he has all these visitors and he thinks the King is going to visit him and in the end the King sends a messenger, but he still dies.”

  “Oof, Avik, you are too much energy,” Mrs. Pal said.

  “But you are coming all this way,” Mr. Pal said, “to see a play by Tagore?”

  “That’s right,” Jaryk said. “And of course the nature, too.”

  Mrs. Pal murmured something about the cleanliness of the air at Shantiniketan, but when he looked at her, it was as if she did not believe him. He sensed disapproval. It must’ve been how she’d narrowed her eyes at him, as if squinting might ferret out the truth. She reminded him of another woman, also a caregiver, someone who scared her children as much as she loved them, who, it was so rumored—and he had believed it with his whole heart at the time—could read a misbehaved child’s thoughts. Ah, Stefa, he thought. Old mother of mine. He hoped to see her in the next life.

  Jaryk stretched his arms and permitted himself a yawn. “Would you show me to my room?” he said. “I feel I’ve been awake for days.”

  * * *

  ………………

  The concrete foundations of the Pals’ house were exposed on the third floor, where beams pointed to the sky without the benefit of a roof. As he lay on a cot in the open air, Jaryk fell into sleep feet-first. Cobbled stone at his feet, he relived his first vision of Warsaw. It came in fragments, as if memory had slid a sponge over Grzybowski Square, where the donkey carts hurried their produce. He could smell the berries and the grapes, which were turning, which the seller announced as “just perfect” though no one was fooled, not even the most pious with their side locks in the wind counting time. There was Pan Doktor standing in the middle of the square, bathed in autumn light.

  Soft hands brought him back to the evening sun of Bengal, and he looked up to find Mrs. Pal nudging him gently. It was the first time he’d studied her face. She was delicately featured, with thin lips and queenly cheekbones, and were it not for her large, ungainly eyeglasses, he might have considered her beautiful. He shifted his attention to the insides of her palms, the lines stained with years of turmeric. When she pinched his shoulder, he began to discern her words.

  “Your face,” she was saying. “It burns. Also, it’s well past supper time.”

  He must have slept for hours. He touched his nose and felt the heat rising from the flesh. His forehead throbbed as if someone had poured hot soup over the temples. Tomorrow, his sunburn would hurt. His face, the length of his exposed ar
ms.

  “Wait,” she said. “There is an Ayurvedic solution.” She left the room and returned with a jar in hand and her two children. “Priya, Avik,” Mrs. Pal instructed, “put the healing cream on Uncle.”

  At first both the boy and the girl giggled, but after they checked their mother’s expression, they set to work. Avik took the jar from his mother’s hands and shook it. The mixture was gelatinous, the texture of frozen coconut oil and the color of ripe mustard, and there were seeds on the surface of the balm that seemed to move of their own volition, from one side of the mixture to the other. Priya took the jar from her brother and poured a dollop on Jaryk’s forehead. It cooled him; he felt it down to his feet, as if the girl had actually touched a cube of ice to his heels, but no, she was rubbing it studiously over his face, while her brother was applying the balm to his arms.

  “You have many muscles,” the boy said, approvingly.

  The Pals left, and he fell back into a dreamless sleep only to awaken again around midnight. Someone had arranged a mosquito net above his mattress; he could hear armies of insects just outside of the nylon mesh. By his pillow, there was a tomato sandwich he devoured in three bites.

  When he ventured out of the Pal house, he took his flashlight, but he didn’t need it. The pale, squalid moon supplied enough illumination for him to read the name stickers on the rusted bicycles the Pals had chained to a coconut tree: Priya, Avik, and separate ones for Mr. and Mrs. The cloudless sky encouraged the rhythm of dimming and flickering stars. He walked toward the faint light in the distance. On either side of the road, there were farms of long-eared corn and rice. When the wind picked up, he could hear the air course through the corn stalks before it touched his skin. The wind cooled his sunburn, but behind the breeze was the promise of tomorrow’s deluge.

  The phone stand was a kilometer up the road next to the municipal hangout, and even at this hour several bare-chested men milled about, pinching tobacco out of a rusted jewelry box. The whole area smelled of late-stage banana and burnt rice.

  It would be afternoon in America, and the woman he loved would be working her caseload, or she might be stopping for tea, a ritual she allowed herself no matter how busy the day. He had left her a letter and nothing more. “Don’t do anything stupid,” she’d said, and he hadn’t listened. Here he was now—on the island of his mistakes.

  Her anger was quick to rise. Her tiny body, its lovely bones, her perfect red fists. She’d never struck him, though he imagined that’s what she’d do when they next crossed paths. “Things change, Lucy,” he said to no one in particular.

  The men who passed the tobacco around gave him a look, and he thought that he didn’t mean what he’d just said: “Things change.” He didn’t mean it in the slightest. He had been born on the eve of the greatest war, and if you took apart his mind you’d find a map from one continent to another, uncover new ways to describe hunger and the fear of the dark woods where he’d hounded out his eleventh year of life—but this much could be said: he didn’t, for even a moment, believe he’d changed. He was still the same boy who could run faster than the whole village. So what if he had more scars? His history had surrounded him the way Stefa’s quilts had warmed his shoulders, but he believed that none of it had made him a different man.

  “Sorry to disturb you,” Jaryk said to the men. He wouldn’t try to call Lucy now; he doubted if she’d want him back.

  * * *

  ………………

  When Jaryk awoke the next morning, he found the Pals’ children beside his bed reading Misha’s guidebook, a red glossary of Indian sightseeing, backpacker-style. Misha had written in Polish on nearly every page, and in the margins Jaryk had discovered a whole itinerary of desires. On the back cover Misha had planned a route from Shantiniketan to the hill station of Darjeeling, then back again to Shantiniketan, where they were to be honored guests in the performance of the play; but the morning of their flight, Jaryk hadn’t shown up at the airport. His phone had rung a dozen times, but he’d remained in his apartment.

  Surely, Misha had been furious, storming through the queues with his wounded pride, eventually finding his seat, with the one next to him empty. He’d never been able to say no to Misha, but India—and time away from Lucy—had seemed out of the question.

  Mrs. Pal had saved him the trouble of coping with an Indian breakfast. He was given a plate of toast and boiled eggs in silver cups.

  “From the elder chickens,” Mrs. Pal explained, pointing toward a shed in the back of the house.

  As Mrs. Pal retreated into the kitchen, Mr. Pal greeted Jaryk and explained he’d risen early for his morning exercise. He said, “Yoga for the body is also yoga for the mind.”

  Jaryk showed him the guidebook’s map of West Bengal, over which Misha had written “Start Here.” “How far is it to Shantiniketan?”

  “From here, by car, in the traffic of this country, which is as predictable as what Indira Gandhi will do next, I would say, excluding unusual obstructions and stops for sightseeing and so forths, it would be about five hours.”

  “Could I bike there?” Jaryk asked.

  “As in bicycle? What on heaven for?”

  “Even if it takes days, I’d prefer that.” He’d experienced a moment of nostalgia remembering the old, rusty two-wheeler from his youth; what’s more, being on bicycle would give him time to dwell on Misha’s passing. He’d try to understand the weave of his life without his friend to guide him, maybe even understand something about Lucy, why he’d left the only woman he’d ever loved.

  Mr. Pal seemed shocked by his line of reasoning, but he accommodated Jaryk, showing him a route that ran parallel to but still avoided the main thoroughfares. He drew stars next to hotels where Jaryk could spend the night, and they negotiated a price for Mr. Pal’s own sturdy bicycle.

  “The hotel owners are my friends,” Mr. Pal said. “I will call for you in advance.”

  When Mrs. Pal discovered he’d be leaving them, and by cycle no less, she spoke to her husband in a stream of rapid Bengali. “This is madness,” she then told Jaryk. “Consider yourself more carefully. Mr. Pal can arrange by car.”

  “Thank you for your hospitality,” Jaryk said. “But I should get going.”

  The children watched solemnly as he tied Misha’s suitcase onto the back of their father’s bicycle. No one spoke as he checked the tire pressure and greased the chain with a bit of mustard oil. He felt buoyed by the promise of solitude and the journey that lay before him. He shook hands with Mr. Pal and mussed little Avik’s hair.

  “Remember one thing,” Mr. Pal said. “Our people are basically nice except when they are not. Do your best to be kind. All the hotel owners will help you, and for the others, chances are good.”

  Mrs. Pal handed him lunch in an earthenware container. When Jaryk protested that he couldn’t carry any more, she found a way to secure the container with the knot that held the suitcase in place.

  “Goodbye,” he said.

  “God bless,” the Pals said as one.

  * * *

  ………………

  It felt like a kind of flying, the dawn and the house of the Pals behind him, the wind gusty at his back, the few morning cows inching out of his way. He pedaled furiously on the quiet dirt road. The suitcase, which at first had felt like an extraordinary burden, became weightless the faster he went. He passed the municipal dump with still-burning cigarettes in the slew of trash, passed the rice fields with their canals of rainwater, passed the few shanty huts that had survived yesterday’s deluge, and then he found himself, once more, at the road to the city. He followed Mr. Pal’s directions and turned right onto the Koshba bypass, a major thoroughfare he would need to remain on until he reached the less traveled village roads. At this hour, there was little traffic. In the middle of the road, a man pushed a two-wheeled vegetable cart with eggplants balanced against squash and pyramids of
cucumber. A column of scooters swerved their way past. By the side of the road, bamboo burned. The farmers in the fields paused, mid-motion, scythes raised, reins dropped, just to stare. At first he waved back, but it seemed nearly everyone, including the group of schoolboys who passed him one by one on bicycles, were intent on staring. He wished he had a hat. As he pedaled, the rice fields merged into suburban housing—rows of nondescript gray plots that reminded him of pictures he’d seen of postwar Polish developments.

  Around seven thirty in the morning, less than an hour into his trip, the traffic picked up. Alongside taxis already full with passengers, buses entered the bypass. Rickshaws with garishly painted rears honked and sped. Pedestrians ran across the street. They were cursing at him, but he couldn’t go faster. He’d already shifted to the side of the road, but no matter how little space he occupied the buses managed to squeeze right next to him, so that he could smell the breath of the passengers leaning their heads out of the windows to gawk, then the diesel in a plume of exhaust. It wasn’t until a bus fendered with the words “MAKE NOISE” ran him off the road that he questioned his plan: jet-lagged, alone, equipped with no more language than what was in the back of the guidebook, and facing traffic like he’d never seen. But the nearest stop on the Pal itinerary was still an hour’s ride away, so he angled his bicycle back onto the road and resumed his slow progress, pedaling so carefully he could’ve reached for the cups of tea being served at the kilometer markers.

  It was almost nine o’clock when he neared the turnoff to Calcutta proper. He would need to cross through the Howrah neighborhood before heading north. It was a massive intersection with a concordance of Ambassador cars and rickshaws and motorcycles all elbowing for room. Perhaps, if he’d been in a taxi, he would have marveled at the chaos, but as it was, he could only do his best to avoid the zigzag of vehicles. One motorcycle began to tail him, honking. He looked back at the driver to say “It’s not my fault,” but couldn’t get the man’s attention. In the middle of the intersection, a policeman in a white uniform stained with turmeric and pollution tried to direct the traffic, but the blowing of his whistle was little more than another noise.