by Arnab Ray
Arijit. The conqueror of enemies.
Arjun looked at the postcard. 178 Nakul Das Lane. Yes, there it was. Nakul Das Lane was a small street, wide enough for only one cycle rickshaw to pass through and one other person. On both sides were walls, broken and wet and discoloured, plastered over with rectangles of paper, black-and-white Bengali film posters, sharing space with colour posters of Sadhana and Rajesh Khanna, their lips coloured excessively red, and over them, pasted with naked aggression, posters of a white sickle against an even redder background. Mosquitoes swirled intermittently over the open drain that ran down one side, and refuse lay piled high on the other side, with crows feasting atop the garbage. A man with shifty eyes passed by, looking at Arjun suspiciously, and Arjun knew why. The Naxalite communists were on the run and going undercover and a stranger on the street might portend a police party coming and knocking on doors.
Since 1967, the Naxalites had been great for business. After they started targeting the police and moneylenders and landowners, the demand for guns all over North India had gone up like umbrellas during monsoon. The Naxalite leader Charu Majumdar’s rhetoric of ‘total revolution’ was seen for what it actually meant – the total annihilation of the moneyed class. Arjun did his bit too, for one must always prime the market, paying beat reporters of small vernacular newspapers – the ones that came out from district towns, the ones people really read – to carry stories of the Chinese flooding the Naxals with guns used by the Red Army.
Panic led to profits.
Getting a legal firearm was a mess of applications and you had to prove to some government-official babu that your life was under threat and, no matter what you said, approval was mostly impossible without baksheesh. Even a little child knew that if you actually intended to use a gun it was imperative that it be unlicensed. So people who feared being robbed – rich men and jewellers and hoarders – came to the black market.
People came to Arjun Bhatia.
Bangali loved the Naxalites too and while he didn’t mind the money they brought him, he claimed he admired their ideals. He enjoyed talking about politics more than he enjoyed talking about sex, and Arjun could never decide which of these two topics he hated more. Silence was usually not an effective shield against Bangali for he would scrub and rub till you reacted.
‘No, I don’t like the Naxals,’ Arjun had said with passion. ‘The people that raped my mother and killed my brothers and burned down our house did it in the name of religion. These people do it in the name of revolution.’
‘The Naxals don’t rape anyone, and really, have you ever read a single speech of Chairman Mao?’
‘I haven’t. I don’t need to. All I know is that these people are jealous – jealous of those who have more and they want to take it. That’s all. It’s basic human nature, to possess that which we do not own. So they take. They take honour. They take possessions. They take lives. Muslims did it in Lahore, the Hindus and the Sikhs did it in Amritsar, and the Naxals now do it here. They all have their pretty words and their long speeches, but behind it all, it’s the same thing.’
Bangali had squeaked and ranted in that whiny, aggrieved tone of his. But Arjun had not responded further because, like every time, Bangali had just not got the point.
178 Nakul Das Lane was an ancient two-storeyed house that seemed to be even more dilapidated than the ones on either side. The cement had peeled off in places, the exposed bricks looked brittle, and a little tree was growing out from the side, its roots clawed into the cracks in the walls. Arjun knocked on the front door, once and then again. It swung open, revealing a woman of formidable proportions, with flabby forearms, a huge circular face, a thick nose that somehow sat off-centre, and wearing an enormous red bindi on her forehead. She looked at him with undiluted hate while chewing furiously on what he supposed was paan.
‘Are you Nayantara Banerjee?’ asked Arjun, putting on his most official air. Old Bangali had some weird kinks if this was whom he married.
‘Is this something about that no-good husband of hers? What’s he done now? Got arrested?’ the woman asked.
‘I would prefer to talk to her, behenji, if that’s possible,’ Arjun said, keeping his eyes focused on her blue Hawaii chappals. They were enormous.
She pointed to the side of the house. ‘She lives upstairs.’ Then she measured him up and down and asked, ‘Who are you? I haven’t seen you here before. Are you police?’
‘I am a friend of her husband,’ Arjun said, suitably enigmatic, taking a step away to excuse himself from her presence.
‘Well, you tell that friend of yours to start acting like a man. Who leaves his wife and son alone in this city and vanishes for months? Phaltoo joto sob.’ She said some more things in Bangla but by that time the door had been slammed on Arjun’s face and for that he was most grateful.
It was 12.30 in the afternoon and yet the stairs were dark and forbidding. There was a patina of dust everywhere and when one breathed in, one could feel it filling up the lungs. Why did Bangali live in a place like this, Arjun wondered. Bangali made money, and he knew exactly how much that was.
He must have blown it all on women and whisky, that fool. Can’t do right by his friend, can’t do right by his family. No wonder that bastard never invited me home.
The door upstairs was open, and Arjun did not know what to do. He knocked and then coughed once. No one came to the door. Then he called out, ‘Is Nayantara Banerjee here?’ He heard the sound of the lady downstairs talking to someone, and the drip of an open tap, and that was it. No response. He peeked in and saw that the door opened into a small room, neatly arranged as a living room, with a small table, an ashtray, a few books and two small one-seater sofas. The furniture was old and had seen better days, and the sofa cover was well-worn but there was something homely and inviting about that room, and without thinking much, he sat down on one of the sofas. Leaning forward, he looked at the books and found Marx and other red literature among some Bengali paperbacks and one large picture book on Hollywood. Too much to expect Bangali to have a Filmfare or something, thought Arjun, and leaned back against the sofa. His back hit something hard and he sprung forward. It was one compartment of a wooden toy train. He kept it down on the floor, and looked to the side towards the passage, and that’s when she came in, blissfully unaware of his presence in the room, her head tilted to the side, rubbing a towel down over her wet hair.
It was the hair that caught Arjun’s eyes first, cascading down in a stream of lustrous black to her waist, which was curved slender like an exquisitely expensive vase, the kind that used to adorn their living room back in Lahore. Then his eyes shifted up to her breasts, her wet sari clinging, outlining the contours, and he could not help notice the light image of her nipples, and he realized she was not wearing a blouse but had only her sari wrapped around, and then he saw her shoulder, bare, and the prominent collarbone, then her lips, full and voluptuous, her eyes, large and liquid and burning, with a fever whose warmth he could feel even sitting there on the sofa. Arjun felt as if he were separating into two, one wanted to stride up, unfurl her sari, and then take her, pinned to the door, and the other, while realizing the totally immoral desires of the other, wanted to bolt and run down the stairs, never to return. He tried to speak, but the words evaporated on the edge of his tongue. He had rehearsed this – how to break the news, how to put the cash in her hand, and then how to leave without answering many questions. Now he had forgotten everything, forgotten why he was here and who she was. All he wanted was her, and all he felt was shame for wanting so, for he was a married man with children, and he had never ever looked at other women in this way. Till now.
Finally, after what seemed to be an eternity, Arjun stood up and turned his eyes downwards. ‘I am sorry, I knocked and then I called out your name. But…then…I…’
She stood there, near the passage, and she made no attempt to cover herself or recoil or run to wear a blouse. ‘He is dead, isn’t he?’ was what she said, and Arjun knew
the script was more different than he could have ever imagined.
‘My name is Arjun Bhatia and…’ He remembered now what he had thought he would say.
‘I know who you are,’ she said sharply and pointed towards the wall. There was a framed picture there, and Arjun had missed it all this while. It was one they had taken years ago, at a studio in Agra, because Bangali had thought it would be a great idea. There he was, Bangali, his handsome, rugged face drawn into a movie-star smile, his muscular arm thrown casually over Arjun’s shoulder. Arjun looked plain and ordinary next to him, like the hero’s best friend who dies in the first reel. He felt a keen sense of defeat. He would never be Bangali. In a way, without realizing it, he had always wanted to be like him – handsome, charming, well built and well read – and yet, there he was, a face in the crowd, one among many.
There was something else now in his heart, something he had never felt before. The desire to possess that which was not his, that which was forbidden to him. He had to have her.
‘If he is dead, tell me. No need to twist it around.’
‘Yes, he is. I am sorry.’
She leaned back on the wall near the door, and tears welled up in her eyes. She bit her lip, looked up at the ceiling, and breathed out.
‘Will you please sit here? I…I need some time to think,’ she said. ‘How did he die?’
‘One of our boys sold out. They were waiting for him. There was…’ Before he could finish his little prepared speech, she had vanished down the passage. He sat there awkwardly, wondering what to do, leafing through the books, careful not to look at the picture on the wall. All that was going through his mind was her.
‘Why is ma crying?’ said a voice from the door, and Arjun turned his head to locate its source. A boy of about four years stood there. He had curly hair and large eyes like his mother’s but was otherwise exactly like his father, wearing a pair of oversized khaki shorts. A flood of intense shame washed over Arjun for the thoughts that had been running through his head about the boy’s mother, and for what he had done to his father.
‘You must be Arijit?’ Arjun asked.
‘Why is ma crying? Where is baba?’ the boy asked innocently, nodding in response to Arjun’s questions.
Arjun had not rehearsed for this possibility. How could he explain to this small child what had happened? Did he even know what death meant?
What would have happened if he had died that night instead of Bangali? How would they have told his children? The boys, Sudheer and Mohan, were eight and five, they might have understood. Riti, his baby girl, was two. She would not.
He remembered how he had been at the age of ten. He had understood what death meant. He knew it was something that had to be taught – like counting to ten and the alphabet. And the sooner you looked at death’s face, the faster you understood life.
‘Beta, ask your mother. She will tell you when the time is right,’ Arjun said, putting on a gentle fatherly demeanour, the one that he kept for home. Arijit ran away in the direction that his mother had gone, the patter of his feet trailing away, and Arjun sat still, holding his head in his hands.
Bangali, you should have brought me to meet your family. I might still have fallen for your wife, but I would not have been able to kill you.
A week later, Arjun was still in Calcutta.
He had run away from Nayantara’s house, the piercingly sad eyes of Arijit following him as he left. But before he had left, he had written down the phone number of his hotel on a sheet of paper and kept it on the table, under the paperweight. He thought he would wait for two days for her call, and then if she didn’t, he would go back to the house and leave the money there, regardless of whether she was at home or not. He of course could have avoided all this and just left the money on the table that day. But that he just could not bring himself to do. He had to try to meet her once more.
She had called that evening itself, on the day he had met her. He had told her that he wanted to go back and give her Bangali’s share and that day he had forgotten to do it. She offered to meet him somewhere outside, preferably not close to where she stayed. He had suggested Mitra Cabin because that was the place where he had entertained clients before. It had an old-world charm with high ceilings, sooty fans and cheap vegetable cutlets, and most importantly for his purpose, private cabins, separated from the main area by curtains and half-walls. It gave a modicum of privacy in a city where there seemed to be so little of it.
He looked at his HMT watch. She was already thirty minutes late. Maybe she isn’t coming. He would just have to go to her place and drop the money off. He felt it sitting heavy with guilt in his chest pocket, all the notes wrapped into a large bundle inside a white envelope. Then the curtain moved to the side, a whiff of perfume circled him, and she came in. Large sunglasses, hair tied up in a bun, wearing a white salwar kameez, tight as if it had been sewn on her body, with a fluffy, frothy dupatta covering her chest, she reminded him of Asha Parekh in Aaya Sawan Jhoom Ke. He loved Asha Parekh. But even she paled in front of this goddess in white.
The sight of her unsettled him. In his line of work, Arjun regularly had to deal with danger – police officers, drunk on power and cheap liquor, with a loaded gun in hand and the licence to use it without consequence; murderous thakurs and their henchmen, armed to the teeth, surrounding him from all sides; state MLAs scratching their balls and then dipping their chapatti into daal with the same hand; butchers who doubled as hired muscle, sharpening knives, the grinder whirring silver sparks, and lines of severed goat’s heads, their tongues wrapped to the side, ominously staring at him with upturned dead eyes. While he knew enough to be prepared for any eventuality in negotiations, death, he knew, could come any time, from a raised voice or a change of tone to the accidental click of a gun. That is why any meeting brought with it the familiar tightening at the base of the stomach and the quickening of the pulse. He liked the feeling of fear, though, for it meant that he still loved his life.
Today he felt fear, but this was of a different kind, pleasant and yet it burned. He might be crossing a line. He might be screwing up his life. He might, as Bangali had always advised him to, be living a little.
They sat across each other for a few wordless seconds. ‘So why did you want to meet me?’ she asked in perfect Hindi. ‘Your Hindi is much better than your husband’s.’
‘Is that what you came to tell me?’ she asked with icy cool
detachment. She was sizing him up from behind her dark sunglasses, of that Arjun was sure.
He reached into his chest pocket and brought out the envelope. ‘As I said on the telephone, it is only honourable that I give his share to you.’
‘You could have left the money that day. But you didn’t. You wanted to meet me. Why?’
The curtains parted and a waiter, holding a stainless steel tray and dressed in a blue shirt and knee-length shorts and sporting a handlebar moustache, stood at their service.
‘Something hot? Something cold?’ he asked with practised eagerness, his eyes darting down to check if the couple in front of him were playing footsie below the table. That was not allowed, unless a generous tip was assured.
Arjun ordered a cup of coffee and Nayantara ordered a bottle of Coca-Cola, with a haughty ‘Should be cold. Else I will send it back.’
‘You have taken the news of your husband’s death rather well, I see,’ observed Arjun wryly, once the waiter had left.
‘Yes, I have, I guess. I mean I am drinking Coca-Cola, and I don’t look like I’m in mourning, and that does make me as heartless as Surpanakha.’ She had caught the sarcasm in his voice well enough. ‘I guess I should be banging my bangles against the wall, right, and yelling “Oh what will happen to me?” Funny, isn’t it? When women cry, it’s always “What will happen to me?” That’s the real reason, isn’t it? What will happen to me?’ She adjusted the dupatta so that the two ends hung symmetrically from her shoulders. ‘I refuse to grieve over that which I cannot change. I have too many r
esponsibilities.’
‘Very practical,’ said Arjun.
‘So is that why we are here, for you to shame me into more grief? Somehow I thought not.’ She removed her sunglasses sharply and kept them on the table. Arjun looked into her eyes and the tone of his voice changed.
‘No, that was not the reason. I agree with you, it’s better to move on. The living should not suffer for the dead.’ He remembered his father and then as he looked into her eyes again the memory faded away.
‘So you have a son? Anyone else?’
‘Only him.’ She absent-mindedly fiddled with a gold ring on her finger. ‘He is very special. And I am not saying that just because he is my son. He can do multiplication tables up to thirty and can read the Ramayana in Bangla, all by himself. And he is just four.’ Her eyes glowed bright. ‘I want him to go to St Xaviers’ or Don Bosco but I can’t afford that on my salary.’ She regained her focus. ‘I would also like to move out of that place, Babli-mashi downstairs is a dear, but the other neighbours are nasty, and that paraa is no place to bring up Tubai. Tubai is what I call Arijit, by the way. There are some nice places coming up at Ballygunje and I would like to move into a flat there.’
‘I am afraid this money won’t cover all of that.’
‘Oh no. I know it won’t. I am just saying that the money you are going to pay me every month should cover Tubai’s fees and school costs, you know, books and uniform and pencil box and all those, and rent for a place in Ballygunje. The rest I will manage on my own.’
‘What?’
‘What what?’
‘Why would I pay you every month?’ asked Arjun, frowning. Somewhere along the way, this conversation had slipped from his grasp.
‘You just spoke about the “honourable” thing to do. Isn’t that the honourable thing to do once you kill someone’s husband, that too your best friend – to at least pay some of the bills for his poor widow and son? You know, so that the living do not suffer for the dead?’