by Ann
‘Your friend left some time ago I’m afraid,’ she said. I stared at her. ‘If you recall my dear, you did tell us you’d be moving into furnished accommodation when your friend left.’
In the end they agreed to let me have the room for one more week.
I was ill all the next day. I stayed in the room trying to eat soup but I couldn’t keep anything down, not even water, and if I closed my eyes and concentrated I could hear a far-away buzzing, like a noise at the end of a corridor. I wrote letters to W.B. (‘Please forgive me and take me away from here’) and tore them up. When the maid came in there was a row about the state of the sheets, but they can’t get rid of me now until the end of the week. I made them change the bed. In the end I was so frightened I decided to go and see Dr. Alexandre and find out why I was this ill.
It was quite late when I arrived at the clinic. A strange woman came out of the common room wiping her mouth on a paper serviette, and walked off down the passage without speaking. There was the distant sound of a tray being dropped in the kitchens. I had the impression that things were going on here much as they did during the day, but at a reduced and much duller pace. I went to the rooms I knew, one after the other, hoping I would remember how to find Dr. Alexandre’s office. The waiting rooms were unlocked: I sat in one of them for a bit, touching the familiar plastic bed-sheet with my hand and turning the hot water on and off in the little sink. Later I stood in the dark in the garden in case I could see the office from there. But a bluish light came from under the treatment shed door, so I went back in.
By now I couldn’t remember where anything was. I went downstairs and tried a door with frosted glass panels, but it was only an empty linen cupboard. While I was in there I heard someone coming. One of the blue bodies had got into the passage and was drifting towards me, pale and bemused-seeming under the downstairs lights. It kept looking back over its shoulder, blundering into doorways, and entangling its limbs in the heating pipes which ran along the walls. The crippled girl came round a corner and began to urge it along impatiently.
I stared at her in surprise. I said, ‘I didn’t know you were having treatment.’
‘You aren’t allowed down here,’ she said. ‘Go back upstairs before someone finds you.’
The blue body bobbed gently between us, waving its hands about in the air like a policeman directing the traffic. It touched her face; examined its own fingertips. It was the exact image of her, molded in cool blue jelly. She pushed it away.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I can’t seem to find the doctor. Perhaps you could help me. I feel rather ill.’
She looked at me like a stone. ‘Patients aren’t allowed downstairs after nine o’clock,’ she said. She drove the blue body out of the linen cupboard, where it had been trying to thrust its head in among the pillow slips, and started to man-handle it through a door further along the corridor. I followed her and stood outside watching. She had to struggle with it physically to keep it moving. Her hair fell into her eyes. Once she got it into the room, which was similar to the one in which Dr. Alexandre’s assistant had shown us our first blue body, she dragged it on to a table and lay down next to it. It stared inertly at the ceiling for a time, then slowly turned to face her. One of its legs slipped off the table. She put her arms round it and tried to get it to press itself against her, encouraging it with little clicks of her tongue.
When nothing happened she got off the table with an irritable sigh, went to the door, and looked up and down the corridor. No one was there. Then she got back on to the table again. This time something seemed to happen but before I could see what it was the blue body fell off the table, pulling her down with it. She began to shout and scream with pain. I went closer and saw that they were partly joined together along their legs. The blue body had penetrated the muscles of her calves. She was flailing about, calling, ‘Push us together! Help!’ The blue body stared at the ceiling, opening and closing its mouth.
‘What are you doing?’ I said.
‘For God’s sake!’ cried the crippled girl. ‘Help us join back together!’
I backed away and ran upstairs to the common room and sat down. Later that night there was a lot of coming and going, and I heard Dr. Alexandre and his assistant shouting in the passages.
When I first came here it was like a picture painted on a sodden, opened-out cardboard box. I remember the train slowing down between garden fences from which dangled bits of rag; and convolvulus spilling like white of egg out of a rusty old car abandoned in a scrapyard. Some of the soldiers said goodbye to us; most of them went silently away up the platform. All I want now is to stay in this room sleeping and reading. The maid says very politely, ‘Could you go downstairs for a bit, miss, we want to give the place a thorough going over.’ They know they will be getting rid of me tomorrow. W.B. will come and fetch me. We are going over to France, where he has heard of a man who has had above-average success with a new chemical.
Last night, listening to the barges full of conscripts being towed up and down the river, the men singing their mournful songs, I thought: ‘Places are not so easy to escape from.’ I will never go back to Agar Grove, but I see my own blue bodies everywhere. Spawned in the violence and helplessness of the treatment shed, shadows of myself cast somehow by rays that no one properly understands, they bob and gesticulate dumbly at the edge of vision. How many times have I said, ‘I would do anything at all to be cured!’
Now that I have done everything I feel as if I have been complicit in some appalling violation of myself.
The Discovery of Telenapota
Premendra Mitra
Translated into English by P. Nandy
Premendra Mitra (1904–1988) was a renowned Bengali poet, novelist and short-story writer. He was also an author of Bangla science fiction and thrillers. He was born in Varanasi, India. His work was first published in the Bengali journal Probasi in 1922. He experimented with the stylistic nuances of Bengali prose and tried to offer alternative linguistic parameters to the high-class elite prosaic Bengali language. His science fiction work was considered by many to be brilliant and innovative. He wrote a series of stories around a ghost-hunter named Mejokarta, considered classics of Bengali ghost stories. ‘The Discovery of Telenapota’ (1984) is a subtle and atmospheric tale of an almost imperceptible crossing over into the weird.
When Saturn and Mars come together, you may also discover Telenapota.
On a leisurely day, after hours of angling without a catch, when someone comes and tempts you, saying that somewhere there is a magic pool filled with the most incredible fish anxiously waiting to swallow any bait, you are already on your way to Telenapota.
But finding Telenapota is not all that easy. You catch a bus late in the afternoon. It is packed with countless people and by the time you get off, you are drenched in sweat and dust-smeared. Actually you are even unprepared for the stop when it comes.
Before you even know where you are, the bus disappears in the distance, over a bridge across the low swampland. The forest is dense and dark, and night has arrived even before the sun has set. There is a strange wind that blows, an eerie quiet. You will see no one anywhere. Even the birds have flown away, as if in fright. There is an uncanny feeling, a strange dread slowly rearing its head out of the lonely marshland.
You leave the main road and take the narrow muddy track that winds into the forest. After a while, the track gets lost in the thick groves of bamboo.
To find Telenapota you need a couple of friends with you. You will be going there to angle. What their interests are you have no clue.
Your first problem will be mosquitoes. They will arrive in hordes and you will try to scare them away. Failing, all three of you will stand and look at each other, wondering what to do. And slowly it will grow quite dark, the mosquitoes will become more insistent and you will wonder if it would not have been better to get back onto the main road and catch the return bus.
Just then a strange noise will startle you. A noise fr
om that point where the mud track loses itself in the forest. Your nerves being on edge, you will imagine this phantom scream coming from the dumb forest and you will immediately become tense and perhaps a little scared as well. And then, you will see in the dark a faint lamp gently swaying. Slowly a bullock cart will amble out of the dark forest.
It is a small cart. The bullocks are also very small. They will all seem dwarf-like, and yet the three of you will climb onto the cart and huddle together in the dark interior where there is only room for one. The cart will return the way it came. The dark, impenetrable forest will yield a narrow tunnel that the cart slowly enters. The bullocks will move forward, unhurried, as if creating with each step the path they slowly tread.
For some time you will feel terribly cramped in the dark. But slowly you will drown in the depths of the blackness around you. From your familiar world you will enter another. An unknown mist-clad universe, bereft of all feeling. Time will stop dead in its tracks. And then, suddenly, a howl of drums will wake you. You will look around you and find the driver of the cart furiously beating an empty drum. The skies will be full of countless stars.
You will ask what the matter is. And the driver will casually tell you that this din is to drive the tigers away. When you wonder how one can scare away tigers by just raising a racket, he will reassure you that these are not real tigers. They are panthers; and a stick and a drum are enough to keep them at bay.
Tigers! Within thirty miles of the metropolis! Before you can raise your eyebrows, the cart will have crossed a wide moor lit by a late moon. Ruins of deserted palaces will gleam in the phantom moonlight. Lone colonnades, broken arches, the debris of courtyard walls. A ruined temple somewhere further down. They will stand like litigants, waiting in futile hope, for the recording of some evidence in the court of time. You will try to sit up. A strange sensation will once again make you feel as if you have left behind the world of the living and entered a phantom universe peopled only by memories.
The night will be far gone. It will seem an endless dark in which everything lies stilled, without genesis or end. Like extinct animals preserved in museums for all time.
After a few more turns the cart will stop. You will collect your tired limbs and climb down, one by one, like wooden dolls.
There will be a strong smell in the air: the stench of leaves rotting in the pool just in front of you. Beside the pool will stand the feeble remains of a large mansion, its roof caved in, walls falling apart, and windows broken – like the battlements of a fort, guarding against the phantom moonlight.
This is where you will spend the night.
First, you will find yourself a room, somewhat habitable. The cart-driver will fetch you from somewhere a broken lantern and a jug of water. It will seem to you ages since someone had walked into that room. Some futile efforts have been made to clean it up and the musty odour will reveal that this was a long time back. With the slightest movement, plaster will peel off and bits of rubble will fall on you from the roof and the walls, like angry oaths from a resident spirit. Bats and flying foxes will shrilly question your right to stay there for the night.
Of your friends, one is a sod and the other would have snored through a holocaust. Your bed will be hardly ready before one of them hits the sack and the other the bottle.
The night will wear on. The lantern glass will gather soot and the light will softly dim. The assault of mosquitoes will become unbearable. This is the blue-blooded anopheles, the aristocrat who carries malaria in his bite. But, by this time, both your companions will be in worlds of their own, far removed from yours.
It will be hot and oppressive. You will take a torch and try to escape to the terrace, to beat the heat. The danger of the staircase giving way will scare you at every step. But something will draw you on, irresistibly. You will keep on climbing till you arrive.
On reaching, you will find the terrace in ruins. Trees have taken firm root in every crevice, every nook. As if they were fifth columnists, making way for the inexorable advance of the forest.
And yet, in the wan moonlight, everything will look beautiful. It will seem that if you searched long enough, you would find that inner sanctum of this sleep-drenched palace where the captive princess has been asleep through countless centuries.
And even as you dream of such a princess, you will notice a faint light in one of the windows of the tumbledown house across the street. And, then, you will see a mysterious shadow walk up to the window. Whose silhouette is it? Why is she awake when everyone sleeps? It will baffle you: and even as you wonder about it, the light will slowly go out. Was it real? Or did you see a dream? From the abysmal dark of this world of sleep, a dream bubble surfaced for a while, floated silently in the world of the living, and then suddenly melted away.
You will walk down the staircase carefully and fall asleep beside your friends.
When you wake up some hours later, you will find morning already there, with the delightful chatter of birds.
You will remember what you had come here for. And very soon you will find yourself sitting on a broken, moss-covered step beside the pool. You will cast your line into the green waters and wait patiently.
The day will wear on. A kingfisher perched on the branch of a tree beside the pool will occasionally swoop down, in a flash of colour. A snake will emerge from some crack in the steps and slither slowly into the water. Two grasshoppers, their transparent wings fluttering in the sunlight, will keep trying to land on the float of your line. A dove will call out from the distance, its lazy notes will bring on a strange ennui, as your mind will wander far and wide.
The reverie will break with the sudden ripples on the water. Your float will gently rock. You will look up to find her pushing away the floating weeds and filling up a shining brass pitcher. Her eyes are curious; her movements unabashed and free. She will look straight at you and at your line. Then, she will pick up her pitcher and turn away.
You will not be able to guess her age. Calm and sorrowful, her face will tell you that she has already walked the pitiless road of life. But if you look at the thin, emaciated lines of her body, you will think that she had never grown out of her adolescence.
Even as she turns to go away, she will suddenly pause and ask you what you are waiting for. Pull hard, she will say. Her voice is so mellow and tender that it will not surprise you that she should have spoken to you, a complete stranger, with such familiarity. Only the suddenness of it will startle you and, by the time you pull the line, the bait would have gone.
You will look at her somewhat abashed. And she will then turn and go away with slow, unhurried steps. As she walks away, you will wonder if you saw the hint of a smile breaking through her sad, peaceful eyes.
Nothing will again disturb the loneliness of the afternoon. The kingfisher will fly away. The fish will ignore you. Only a strange feeling of unreality will remain. How could she have come to this strange land of sleep?
And then, after a long while, you will pack up – a little disappointed with yourself. When you return, you will find that the news of your fishing skills has preceded you. You will ignore the wisecracks of your friends and ask them how they knew you had fared so poorly.
Why, Jamini told us, the tippler will reply. She saw you there. Curious, you will ask him who Jamini is. You will learn that she is the same person you saw beside the pool, a distant relation of your friend. You will also learn that you are going over to her place for lunch.
You look at the ruins across the street – where you had watched last night’s silhouette framed by the broken window in the wan moonlightand you are surprised by its wretched condition. You had not imagined that the veil of night, now stripped rudely by the harsh daylight, could have hidden such an ugly nakedness. You are even more surprised to know that Jamini lives there.
It is a simple meal. Jamini serves it herself. Looking at her now, closely, you are struck by the tired sorrow writ on her face. It seems as if the mute agony of this forgotten and lonely
place has cast its dark shadow across her visage. A sea of infinite tiredness swirls in her eyes. You know she will crumble slowly, very slowly, with the ruins around her.
You will notice there is something on her mind. You may even hear a faint voice calling from a room upstairs. And every now and then you will notice Jamini leaving the room. Each time she comes back, the shadows lengthen on her face and her eyes betray a strange anxiety.
After the meal is over, you will sit for a while. Jamini will first hesitate, and then call out in despair for the other side of the door: Manida, can you please come her once? Mani is your friend, the tippler. He will go to the door and you will hear his conversation with Jamini quite clearly, even though you have no intention to eavesdrop.
Mother is being difficult again, Jamini would say, in a troubled voice. Ever since she heard you were coming with your friends, she has become quite impossible to handle.
Mani would mutter irritably: I suppose it is because she imagines Niranjan is here.
Yes. She keeps saying, I know he is here. he hasn’t come up to see me only because he is embarrassed. Go, fetch him. Manida, I don’t know what to say. Ever since she went blind, she has become rather difficult. She won’t listen to anyone. She is always angry. I am sometimes scared she will collapse and die during one of her fits.
If only she had eyes, I could have proved to her that Niranjan is nowhere around: Mani would reply, somewhat annoyed.
A shrill, angry scream will come from upstairs, this time more clearly audible. Janimi will beseech him: Please come with me once, Manida. See if you can make her understand. All right, Mani will reply a bit roughly. You carry on; I’ll come.