by Amitav Ghosh
Once, a long time ago, there were a few toddy palms on a patch of land behind Bhudeb Roy’s house. They were rented to a toddy-tapper, and they yielded a fair income every year.
But one year the toddy-tapper refused to pay rent any longer. His toddy-pots were empty every morning, he complained, and he earned nothing from the palms any more.
That was an eventful year. Bhudeb Roy married Parboti-debi and brought her to Lalpukur that year, and it was at about the same time that Shombhu Debnath first arrived in Lalpukur.
The toddy-tapper was a drunken old man, but shrewd. Bhudeb-babu, he leered, if you wanted some, why didn’t you tell me? You’ll hurt yourself climbing those trees.
Bhudeb Roy, red-faced: What do you mean?
The old man, nodding towards the curtains which had screened the consummation of Bhudeb Roy’s nuptials, whispered conspiratorially: Bit dry, is she? He was hurled out of the house.
But no one else would rent the palms, either. It became common knowledge in the village that the pots which were hung up in the fronds to catch fresh toddy at night were usually dry in the morning. But there was nothing wrong with the palms – the nicks in the trunk oozed fresh milky toddy through the day.
It became a deeply shameful matter for Bhudeb Roy. He was bombarded with tips on wife-rearing. Everybody was full of sympathy: he was too soon married to be driven to drink by a wife. Bhudeb Roy could only gnash his teeth. It was true that he could not always understand his Parboti, but she was as gentle a woman as any in the village.
Bhudeb Roy decided to solve the mystery. He bought a huge torch in Naboganj and one night he waited up in his room, nervously holding on to Parboti-debi’s ankle. He discovered something that made the blood stop cold in his veins.
Late at night, in the furry blackness before dawn, an eerie noise wafted out of the toddy palms and curled around the house. It was like a hoarse wail; a high, gliding, sobbing wail. Bhudeb Roy’s joints melted. He jammed his mosquito-net tight under his mattress and put a pillow over his ears.
Parboti-debi watched him with a smile. It’s like the night calling one, she said, isn’t it?
Bhudeb Roy, astonished: Have you heard it before?
Yes, she said. I hear it every night. She smiled. At the time she was pregnant with her first son (he of the incipient moustache and old man’s paunch). She was an imposing figure then, very far from the wispy, harassed woman, stooped with fecundity, that she became later. She was erect and tall (taller than Bhudeb Roy), fresh-faced, with hair which shone like painted glass. She had a low, rich-timbred voice, very pleasing. It was said that she used to sing once. But Bhudeb Roy had put a stop to it: No shrieking in my house; besides you need your strength for your children.
Why didn’t you tell me about the noise? Bhudeb Roy said.
You didn’t have a torch, she said, smiling limpidly.
After that Bhudeb Roy slept with two pillows over his head. One night he woke to find Parboti-debi gone from his bed. The room whistled with the jagged echoes of that distant wailing. Biting his knuckles Bhudeb Roy crept to a window and shone his torch out. It fell on Parboti-debi, in her white night-time sari, stock-still in the mango grove behind their house.
Bhudeb Roy decided that something had to be done. Wails were bad for pregnancies. So he decided to hire Bolai-da, who was on leave from the Army, to investigate the mystery with him.
It was a mistake. Bhudeb Roy discovered too late that Bolai-da’s real love was gossip.
Bolai-da was thin and painfully bandy-legged even then, but it was only much later that his face twisted mournfully sideways, like soggy cardboard. At that time, because he was the only soldier in the village, nobody doubted that he had the courage of a pride of lions. He could look a Sardar-ji in the eye, people said. A real one, with a proper turban and everything. He had once knocked over a seven-foot, mustachioed and bandoliered Pathan. The wails would shrivel, everyone agreed, at the very sight of Bolai-da.
The stories gave Bhudeb Roy courage. He armed Bolai-da with a wooden club and bought new batteries for his torch. Then he locked Parboti-debi into their room and told her to shut her ears and pray if the wailing started again. She looked very distressed, and Bhudeb Roy was flattered by her concern. But she said nothing.
Bhudeb Roy and Bolai-da wrapped themselves in blankets and went down to the mango grove to wait. With eerie punctuality, in the awful blackness of the last hours of the night, howls wafted through the mango grove. Bhudeb Roy pushed Bolai-da. Bolai-da pushed Bhudeb Roy. Coward, said Bhudeb Roy. I thought you’d knocked over a seven-foot Pathan?
To tell you the truth, Bhudeb-babu, Bolai-da said through chattering teeth, a bus I happened to be on did it.
They held each other’s shoulders and crept forward, towards the palms. They were no more than a yard or two away when the wail suddenly soared and splintered into a comet of high notes. Bhudeb Roy leapt backwards. Somehow his feet entangled themselves in a creeper. He fell with a shriek.
The wails froze into silence. Then they heard a voice, a disappointing, all too human voice, slurred but perfectly comprehensible: Come up, come up before it finishes.
It was Bolai-da who recovered the torch and shone it into the palm. He spat on the ground and smiled at Bhudeb Roy. Bhudeb Roy did not see him, for he was crouching in the undergrowth, his head between his arms.
Bhudeb-babu, Bolai-da said, you can come out now. It’s only Shombhu Debnath.
He shone the torch into the palm. Shombhu Debnath was clinging to the top with his knees. He had one arm wrapped around a fan-shaped leaf for support. In the other he held a toddy-pot. All he wore was a strip of a cotton gamcha around his thin, angular waist.
Bhudeb Roy’s jaws worked convulsively. He coughed, for he had grass in his mouth. Shombhu Debnath? he spluttered. What’s he doing here?
Drinking God’s milk, Shombhu answered, and singing.
Bhudeb Roy exploded: What?
Raga Lalit of course, Shombhu said, surprised. What else could you sing at this time of the night?
Come down here with that pot, Bhudeb Roy roared.
Why? The toddy’s fresher here. Closer to God. It ferments nastily when it gets down to earth with men and money.
Thief. Bhudeb Roy flung himself at the palm. Thief, thief, petty thief.
Next day he had all his palms chopped down. That was the only time he had ever destroyed a source of income.
It was generally felt that Bhudeb Roy was wrong. Shombhu Debnath was no thief. If he were, why would he sing while he was up in the palms? Besides, everybody knew that if they found a few emptied pots in their palms they had only to ask Rakhal to be paid their price (though, of course, only if Rakhal happened to have money that day).
People who had known Shombhu Debnath and his family in Noakhali used to say that he had always been like that: restless, unpredictable, fond of heights. A little mad, too: that was why he sang.
Only those who did not know him well were surprised when he first disappeared at the age of twelve from the quiet, reassuring huddle of his father’s and uncles’ and cousins’ huts on the edge of the Noakhali mainland opposite Siddi Island, where the Meghna becomes the Bamni before flowing into the sea.
His family, like all the Debnaths, were weavers of coarse cotton. They wove thick white cloth, checked lungis, coarse cotton gamchas, and suchlike in great bulk. It was mere drudgery: throwing the shuttle one way and another for years without end until their spines collapsed. It was not much of a technique, and Shombhu mastered it while he was still a child. His mother was not at all surprised when he vanished. She had known; she had seen it in his hands. He had beautiful hands, long-fingered and strong, quicker than the eye, and always restless.
But even she had no inkling of his plans. Nobody did, for Shombhu had set out to do the impossible.
As a child Shombhu, like all the other children in his hamlet, had heard tales and legends about the Boshaks of Tangail, near Dhaka. Everyone knew the legend of the Boshaks: for centuries they had ruled conti
nents with their gossamer weaves. But it was not only for their weaving that they were legendary; it was also for the secretiveness with which they hoarded the trade and craft secrets of their caste. A Boshak could no more teach an outsider than another man could give away his family’s best land. The few outsiders who learnt from them disappeared into the fastnesses of their families – they married Boshak girls, lived in their houses, ate their food, and surrendered every memory of their lives outside. And if there was anyone against whom every glimmer of an opening in the Boshak defences would be clamped shut it was a Debnath – a despised weaver of coarse cotton.
Twelve-year-old Shombhu Debnath found a way of breaking the formation. He walked from his village to the ferry port of Shahebghata and found a boat to take him up the Meghna and down the Padma to Tangail. There, passing himself off as an orphan, he found a place in a Boshak master-weaver’s family, in a hamlet outside the town. He worked with them for years, for nothing but his food and a few clothes. He learnt to size and to warp; with the master-weaver’s sons he learnt the secrets of punching Jacquard index cards. He learnt the intricacies of their jamdani inlay techniques. He even learnt to make the fine bamboo reeds which were the centrepieces of their jamdani looms, the only ones which could hold fine silk yarn without tearing it. That was a skill few even among the Boshaks could boast of, for it was the preserve of a wandering caste of boatmen and bangle-makers called Bédé.
And he learnt their songs, melancholy, throbbing songs of love and longing. They all sang, he and the master-weaver’s sons and everyone else, they sang as they worked in their tin-roofed shed, each at their own loom, taking their beat from the rhythmic clatter of fly-shuttles and the tinkling of needle-weights hanging on Jacquard looms.
Shombhu forgot his hamlet; he had no family left but the master-weaver’s.
But it had to end. One day the master-weaver met a merchant from Noakhali. That day, tears pouring down his cheek, he confronted Shombhu with his secret. Shombhu fled that night, straight back to Noakhali, towards the safe circle of huts that had suddenly been resurrected in his memory.
But the master-weaver’s tears had burnt his curses into Shombhu’s flesh. Shombhu paid for his treachery – the dreadful, corroding price of a wasted secret.
He arrived in his hamlet with the gift of fire cupped in his palms and found that his world preferred its meat raw. We know what we know, they said when he tried to teach them the secrets of jamdani, and we want to know no more. A crow falls out of the sky if it tries to learn peacockery.
Shombhu, too, had his burnt books.
That was when Shombhu first began to frequent the branches of toddy palms. Soon he stopped working altogether. Then one day he disappeared again. This time his family were relieved.
He left the hamlet with a group of singers – wanderers who spent their lives journeying from one village to another, living on alms, dancing and singing of their love of Sri Krishna. They taught Shombhu what they knew of the rudiments of music: the moods and the hours, the ascending and descending scales of a few basic ragas like Bhairavi, Asavari, Desh, Yaman Kalyan, and Lalit. But the lessons never lasted very long. His teachers usually lost interest halfway. Technique was immaterial to them; all their bhajans and songs ended in the same ecstatic chant: Hare Rama, Hare Krishna; Krishna, Krishna, Hare, Hare.
Then one day, long after the convulsions of the decade had swallowed his family, Shombhu appeared in Lalpukur, with an ailing wife, and incurably and thirstily hoarse. Some people in the village recognized him and helped him a little for the sake of his vanished family. He cleared a patch of land and built himself a couple of huts, at a marked distance from the rest of the village. He even built himself a loom. His wife recovered long enough to bear him a son. But her strength failed her the second time, and she died bearing Maya.
Shombhu almost stopped working then. He wove barely enough to keep them alive. When Rakhal was about eight, he taught him to weave the coarse cotton of his ancestors, and let him cope as best he could. All the help he offered him after that was the encouragement of an occasional, hoarse Jaijaiwanti. Maya listened to him, and when she was barely knee-high, and already wise with poverty, she thought ahead to her wedding day and decided that a hoarse Jaijaiwanti for dower would fetch her no husband. So she decided to ask Toru-debi, for theirs was the house nearest to their own, for a job – anything at all.
Shombhu, wounded to the last ragged edge of his proud poverty, forbade her: Shombhu Debnath’s daughter a servant? But her womanly courage and worldliness were proof against him, and she had her way.
In revenge, Shombhu Debnath thundered Bhairavi from the tree-tops and would not speak to Balaram.
But Balaram watched him, especially when he heard that he had stopped weaving. Balaram could only guess at the wealth of his skull, but even at a distance he felt a theory stirring …
Balaram had not told Gopal the whole truth. Alu’s was not the only organ he had identified. Alu was just one part of the pattern he had conceived. The other was Shombhu Debnath.
Shombhu Debnath was tall, spectrally dark and skeletally thin. He was usually nearly naked, with only a thin gamcha wound around his waist, displaying proudly the corded muscles he bore all over him as a legacy of his years of weaving and wandering. His face was his own hoarse crescendo in Bhairavi, a stumbling sweep, lush-lipped and full-nosed, pouring in a broken glade from ridged cheekbones at the corners of his eyes; the eyes blood-red but lustrous, the forehead soaring uneasily to a crown of knotted hair, coiled snake-like on top of his head. That was his own little bound rivulet, he liked to say, a pale echo of the Jatadhari’s Ganga.
I know what you are, said Balaram after the interests of science and the discovery of Alu’s mechanical organ had lent him the courage to force himself on Shombhu Debnath and his looms.
What? said Shombhu suspiciously.
You’re a teacher, said Balaram. That’s why you must take our Alu to be your apprentice.
Shombhu laughed: I haven’t taught anyone except my Rakhal, and in Naboganj they display his cloth when they want a laugh. I haven’t woven in years.
That’s why you haven’t woven, Balaram said, serenely sure. You’re not a weaver; you haven’t the right organs. Everything about you goes to prove that you’re a teacher.
To prove that he was serious he pulled five ten-rupee notes out of his trouser pocket and slapped them into Shombhu’s hand. There, he said, the price for your head – your first fees. Shombhu shook his hand, aghast, but the money clung to it. Static electricity, said Balaram. Sri Krishna’s leela, said Shombhu. Divine play, but not for a mortal man to question.
That was how Alu had his wish and arrived in Shombhu Debnath’s courtyard one morning, no more as a visitor, but an aspiring apprentice, spick-span, oiled and eager. But it was not to be as he had imagined: no welcoming embrace from the Master, no words of craftsmanly wisdom. Shombhu Debnath smiled to see him, a grimace of a smile, baring his hookah-blackened teeth, and said: No more peace here. Then he picked up his hookah and wandered gurgling into the bamboo forest.
Imagine Alu: fifteen now, stocky and broad-shouldered, in blue shorts, his head still huge but the bumps a little smoother, standing forlorn in a courtyard, listening to the fading gurgles of a hookah. The courtyard is not large as courtyards go, but tranquil, shaded by an overhanging jackfruit tree. It is a simple square uthon of beaten earth set between three huts. The huts are large, cool rooms, four walls of clay, covered by a thatch of bamboo and straw, arched over like upturned boats. One is Maya’s, one shared by Rakhal and his father, and the smallest serves as a kitchen. At the far end of the courtyard is an open shed, a sloping thatch roof, held up by bamboo poles, under which Shombhu Debnath’s two fly-shuttle looms are set in waist-deep pits. Rakhal is sitting at one of those looms. He sees Alu’s disappointment and calls out sourly: Do you think he’ll ever teach you? Do you think he knows how to teach? Look how he taught me. Go back while there’s time. Don’t waste your life here. Rakhal i
s thinking of his own youth and strength, wasted at the loom, when he could be at a kung fu class in Naboganj instead.
The forest did not yield up Shombhu Debnath that day or the next or the day after. Eventually it was Maya who became Alu’s first teacher.
First, she taught him to starch yarn: tedious foul-smelling work, days spent hanging yarn up to dry after dipping it in pots of congealed rice starch. Then she taught him to wind the starched yarn on bobbins, with a spinning wheel: children’s work – spin the wheel with one hand, hold the yarn taut with the other, making sure that it winds evenly. Dreary, dreary work. Even the speed with which Alu turned out perfect oval bobbins – more than a hundred a day, many more than Rakhal could use – was no consolation.
Where was Shombhu Debnath? Where was the Shombhu who had once sat on the stoop of his hut and talked into the night about the cloth he had heard of in the master-weaver’s shed in Tangail? Of abrawan muslins as fine as mountain springs, invisible under the surface of the clearest water; shabnam muslins, which when spread on grass melted into the morning dew; cloth which was thin air, fifteen yards of it no heavier than two handfuls of rice, and yet denser than the thickest wool, with four hundred warp threads to the inch. Shameless, shameless insubstantial cloth, nature’s mirror, carrying on its conscience the curses of the exiled princess who, swathed in thirty yards of it, had stepped into her father’s court, for all the world to see, mother naked and beautiful. Where was that Shombhu Debnath?
When, when would Shombhu Debnath begin to teach him?
Never, said Maya, rocking back on her heels as she squatted beside Alu, watching him at the wheel. Rakhal’s right; he’ll never teach you.
Alu’s hand slipped, and next moment his fingers and the wheel were wrapped in a tangled cat’s-cradle of yarn. Mortified, Alu began disentangling the yarn. Maya watched him, sucking her lip. Then she hissed: What’s the use of your learning this? This is real work; you’ll never be able to do it. Go back to your school and your books.
Alu had most of the yarn wrapped around his open palm. He bit through a knot and spat out the metallic sharpness of dye and starch. Do you hear me? Maya said. Go back home; this is real work. You’ll never learn to do it.