by Amitav Ghosh
Just like we did, said my father, to provoke her.
We’re not refugees, snapped my grandmother, on cue. We came long before Partition.
Mrinmoyee suddenly thrust her head out of the window and pointed to a two-storey concrete building. That’s the one, she said. That’s where they live.
My father brought the car slowly to a halt, inching it carefully off the narrow road and on to the gravel. He opened his door to climb out, but then, glancing suspiciously at the shacks and shanties on either side of the road, he announced that he was going to stay in the car; he had heard that cars were often stripped down to their chassis in places like this.
Turning to me he said: Stay here with me. I don’t want you to go up there.
There was a harsh, insistent note in his voice; I knew that he was angry with himself for having brought me there. But now I was determined to go too, so I slipped out quietly when he wasn’t looking.
Mrinmoyee led us into the building and up two dark flights of stairs. We had to stop several times to make way for groups of children who went swarming past us, chasing each other up and down the staircase, their shouts and laughter booming down the stairwell. The stairs were slippery with dirt, the bare cement walls blackened with soot and wood smoke, the wiring strung up in bright festoons, the copper exposed at the joins where the insulating tape had worn off. It was a long, matchbox-like building, not large, although it was evident from the barrack-like partitions that divided its corridors that dozens of families inhabited it.
Mrinmoyee led us to a door on the second floor and called out: Anybody in? We heard feet shuffling inside, and a moment later the door swung open.
My mother and grandmother were taken aback by the appearance of the woman who stepped out. They had been expecting someone very old, with a bent back perhaps, and a face like a raisin. The woman standing in front of us was no more than middle-aged, with thick spectacles, a broad chin, and very black hair – so black, my grandmother said later, that she must have used an industrial dye.
She looked at us in surprise, recognised Mrinmoyee, and raised a puzzled eyebrow in our direction.
They wanted to meet you, Mrinmoyee said placidly, and my grandmother quickly broke in and explained that we were relatives.
The woman understood at once who we were and how we were related to her dead husband. She smiled and patted me on the head when, in response to my mother’s proddings, I bowed down to touch her feet. But then she glanced at her crumpled sari and, gesturing with her thumb and forefinger, she said: Just one minute.
She disappeared inside, shutting the door behind her. When she opened it again, five minutes later, there was a thick layer of powder on her face, and she had changed into a brilliantly white nylon sari.
She ushered us into the room, apologising loudly for its smallness, the lack of chairs, explaining that she was soon going to move out, with her son, to a much bigger, better flat, it was a pity we had come at exactly this very moment, we had caught her in the middle of her packing …
The room was so dark there was neon light glowing inside, although it was midday. A large framed picture of Rabindranath Tagore hung on one of the walls. Under it, on a length of rope, strung up between the corners of the room, hung a dishevelled curtain of drying saris, dirty petticoats and unwashed trousers and underwear. My mother and grandmother seated themselves gingerly on the edge of a bed that was pushed up against the far wall. Our relative sat down beside them and motioned to Mrinmoyee to squat on the floor.
There was no place for me to sit, so I slipped back outside to the long, veranda-like corridor. Raising myself on tiptoe, I leant on the low railing that ran along it and looked down. I could not see the road; the corridor faced in the other direction. There weren’t any more houses behind the building we were in. The ground fell away sharply from the edges of the building and then levelled out into a patchwork of stagnant pools, dotted with islands of low, raised ground. Clinging to these islands were little clumps of shanties, their beaten tin roofs glistening rustily in the midday sun. The pools were black, covered with a sludge so thick that it had defeated even the ubiquitous carpets of water hyacinth. I could see women squatting at the edges of the pools, splashing with both hands to drive back the layers of sludge, scooping up the cleaner water underneath to scrub their babies and wash their clothes and cooking utensils. There was a factory beyond, surrounded by a very high wall. I could see only its long, saw-toothed steel roof and its chimneys, thrusting up smoke that was as black as the sludge below. Running along the factory wall was a dump of some kind; small hillocks of some black and gravelly substance sloped down from it towards the sludge-encrusted pools. Shading my eyes, I saw that there were a number of moving figures dotted over those slopes. They were very small at that distance, but I could tell they had sacks slung over their shoulders. They were picking bits of rubble off the slopes and dropping them into their sacks. I could only see them when they moved; when they were still they disappeared completely – they were perfectly camouflaged, like chameleons, because everything on them, their clothes, their sacks, their skins, was the uniform matt black of the sludge in the pools.
Our relative spotted me leaning on the railing and ran out.
Don’t look there! she cried. It’s dirty! Then she led me back inside.
I went willingly: I was already well schooled in looking away, the jungle-craft of gentility. But still, I could not help thinking it was a waste of effort to lead me away. It was true, of course, that I could not see that landscape or anything like it from my own window, but its presence was palpable everywhere in our house; I had grown up with it. It was that landscape that lent the note of hysteria to my mother’s voice when she drilled me for my examinations; it was to those slopes she pointed when she told me that if I didn’t study hard I would end up over there, that the only weapon people like us had was our brains and if we didn’t use them like claws to cling to what we’d got, that was where we’d end up, marooned in that landscape: I knew perfectly well that all it would take was a couple of failed examinations to put me where our relative was, in permanent proximity to that blackness: that landscape was the quicksand that seethed beneath the polished floors of our house; it was that sludge which gave our genteel decorum its fine edge of frenzy.
Our relative made us tea and served us Thin Arrowroot biscuits, prettily arranged in a flower pattern on a plate.
While we were sipping our tea she and my grandmother had a long conversation. She told my grandmother that her late husband had gone back to Dhaka a few years before he died in the hope that he would be able to persuade his father to move to India.
You mean he was still there then? my grandmother cried, leaning forward.
She nodded. Yes, she said. Still living in the old house.
Her husband had tried to get his brothers and sisters to go back to Dhaka with him, to bring the old man to India, but they hadn’t shown much interest. They were scattered all over anyway – one of them was in Bangalore, one in the Middle East, and the other God knew where. So her husband had gone back to Dhaka alone. He had thought they might even make a little money by selling the house if their father could be persuaded to move to Calcutta. But when he went there he found that the whole house had been occupied by Muslim refugees from India – mainly people who had gone across from Bihar and U.P.
My grandmother gasped in shock.
Our house? she said. You mean our house has been occupied by refugees?
Yes, said our relative, smiling benignly. That’s what I said. The house was empty after Partition, everyone had left but my father-in-law, and he didn’t even try to keep the refugees out. What could he have done anyway? As soon as he got to Dhaka my husband realised that he wouldn’t be able to reclaim that house – no Pakistani court was going to evict those refugees. And the old man didn’t care anyway – there was a family living there who looked after him, and that was enough as far as he was concerned. He was – you know – not quite all there; he
didn’t really care what happened.
Poor old man, my grandmother said, her voice trembling. Imagine what it must be like to die in another country, abandoned and alone in your old age.
Oh, he may not be dead yet, our relative said brightly. Didn’t I say so?
What do you mean? said my grandmother. Are you saying he may still be alive? But he’d be over ninety …
Our relative smiled and bit into a Thin Arrowroot biscuit, decorously covering her mouth with the back of her hand as she chewed.
Well he was certainly alive last month, she said. He wrote to me, you see – just a postcard, but it was definitely in his handwriting. I’d written to him after my husband died, just in case, at the old address – although we hadn’t heard from him in years. But that was months and months ago, and when we didn’t hear from him I just thought, well … But then, last month, there it was, a postcard …
Can I see it? my grandmother said eagerly.
Our relative nodded, picked a postcard off a shelf and handed it to my grandmother.
My grandmother stared at it as it lay in her open palms, like an offering.
There’s the address, she mumbled to herself; 1/31 Jindabahar Lane – it’s still the same.
She had to raise her hand to wipe away the tear that was rolling down her cheek.
I can read his handwriting! she said. He’s written: ‘He should have stayed.’
Taking a deep breath, she handed the postcard back. Then she rose to her feet, thanked our relative and said it was time for us to go now, my father would be waiting. Our relative insisted politely that we stay a while longer, but my grandmother declined, with a smile. So then our relative said she would come down with us to see us off, and on the way down she took my mother’s arm and they hung back, whispering. It was a while before they came down and my father was beginning to get impatient. But before starting the car he thanked our relative profusely and asked her to visit. I turned back to look as we pulled away, and saw her, framed by the concrete doorway, waving.
What was she saying to you on the stairs? my grandmother asked my mother.
My mother laughed in a puzzled kind of way, and explained that evidently she’d known all about us, even though we’d never met her before – she’d known exactly what my father did and where we lived. She had talked about her son: he was twenty-five now and had passed his matric, but he hadn’t been able to find a job. He was going to the bad, she’d said, doing nothing all day long, except hanging around the streets with gangsters. Could my father find him a job? she had begged.
Poor thing, my mother concluded. We should do something to help her.
Why? retorted my grandmother. Did anyone do anything to help me when I was living like that? Don’t get taken in by these stories. Once these people start making demands it never ends. Anyway, she looks quite capable of managing by herself.
My mother kept quiet; she knew better than to argue with my grandmother on that subject.
It’s not her I’m worried about, my grandmother said with a vehement shake of her head. I’m worried about him: poor old man, all by himself, abandoned in that country, surrounded by …
She allowed the sentence to trail away. When she spoke again we were almost home, and her voice was soft and dreamy.
There’s only one worthwhile thing left for me to do in my life now, she said. And that is to bring the old man home …
And her eyes grew misty at the thought of rescuing her uncle from his enemies and bringing him back where he belonged, to her invented country.
It must have been at about this time that May received her fourth letter from Tridib. She found it lying on the carpet, with the gas bill, when she got home from college and opened the front door. She knew it was from Tridib at once, because of the stamps. But apart from that it wasn’t at all like the other letters she had had from him. The others had been very thin, postcards really. But she could tell from the weight of the envelope that this one was several pages long. She was mildly intrigued, but she decided to save it up for later. She took it into the kitchen, unopened, and handed her mother the gas bill. Mrs Price noticed the envelope, and May, seeing that she had noticed, mumbled something about Tridib having written again. Mrs Price nodded vaguely in acknowledgement and turned away to check the kettle.
May heard Nick’s key turning in the front door and ran up to her room with the letter. They had quarrelled that morning, as usual, about the washing-up or something, and she didn’t want to wear herself out by quarrelling with him again. She had to be at her best that evening: she was rehearsing in a church in Kilburn with a quintet a friend of hers had got together. She slammed the door shut, flopped down on her bed, and tore the top off the envelope with her teeth. The letter slipped out of her hands: it was even longer than she had thought.
By the time she had finished reading it her face was beaded with sweat. Raising her knuckles, she found that her cheeks were burning, almost feverish. She jumped off her bed and ran down to the bathroom. Gently, almost furtively, she shut the door behind her and leant on it to catch her breath.
He had her picture on his desk, he’d written. He liked to have it in front of him every time he wrote to her. But it was awful having it there in a way, looking him in the face: there were so many things he wanted to write about, but every time that picture caught his eye, he found himself thinking of Lymington Road and Hampstead. But that wasn’t quite right either, not really accurate. He didn’t ‘think’ of Lymington Road; he could see it, quite clearly, as though he were there, with her, sitting under the cherry tree in the garden.
A September evening, for example, the end of a lovely day. There had only been one short Alert during the day, and that was around midday. It was twilight now, and the sun was already dipping behind the houses on the other side of West End Lane; soon he would have to go back to number 44 – soon, but not quite yet. So while there was still time he might as well go down to the corner and take a look at the house which had been hit by a bomb yesterday.
It was the block of flats on the corner of Lymington Road and West End Lane; a building called Lymington Mansions. He had always liked it, with its gables and its cheerful façade of red brick. But a lot of it was gone now, especially the upper parts: it had taken a direct hit. He could see a window flapping in the breeze on the first floor; it looked as though the whole frame were flapping on hinges. But there wasn’t any rubble anywhere; it had all been cleared away.
He ought to go back to number 44 now; it was getting late …
On an impulse he sprinted across the road, forgetting to look to his right and left as he had been taught. And sure enough, there was a screech of rubber somewhere to his right, followed by a furious blast on a horn. He didn’t dare look back till he had reached the safety of the pavement. A man with a big, red face was climbing out of a little Morris, glowering at him, shaking his fist.
He turned on his heel and ran as fast as he could, without looking back again. He didn’t stop till he had crossed another big road and found a narrow deserted lane to hide in. He wasn’t sure where he was, but he guessed he had run past Brondesbury Station. He had come a long way from West End Lane anyway, he was safe from the man in the Morris.
Leaning against the wall, he looked for a place to rest. There was a row of small shops running down the other side of the lane. They were all shut now. On his side there was a high wall – no, not quite a wall, it was actually the side of a large building. It was a long, blank stretch of red brick – nowhere to sit, not even a doorway. He was about to go back the way he’d come when something caught his eye – a black patch in the wall, near the end of the lane. It looked like an opening of some kind, but it wasn’t a door, he could tell; it looked more like a hole.
He couldn’t tell exactly what it was, so he decided to take a look.
It was exactly as he had thought – a section of the wall had been knocked out, leaving a jagged, triangular breach. There was something intriguing about the darkness and th
e smell of dust inside. He took a quick look up and down the lane, and when he was sure no one was looking he climbed in. There was no reason why he should not be seen climbing in, but somehow it was that kind of place.
He was inside a high, warehouse-like building. Puzzled, he looked around, trying to decide what it was. Then he saw long, curved rows of seats, all looking in the same direction, and he knew at once that it was a cinema. But now the empty seats were looking towards a hole in the wall, for a large part of the front of the building, where the screen had once hung, had been blown out – he could see two roofs through the hole. The bomb had probably exploded somewhere there, near the screen – perhaps it had looked like a part of the film. There was a deep pit in the floor there and a couple of seats were poised on its edge, crazily tilted, as though they had just tipped their occupants in.
Turning around, he saw that the gallery, projecting out over the back rows on the ground floor, was still intact. It looked as though it hadn’t been damaged at all. He found himself making his way instinctively towards it; he loved to sit in the gallery when he went to see films. He was glad this hall had one; sometimes they didn’t. He jumped easily over the few twisted seats that barred the aisle. There wasn’t any rubble; it had been swept neatly into the corners.
The aisle led him to a door at the back of the hall. He put his ear to the door, and when he didn’t hear anything on the other side, he pushed it open, gingerly. It opened into the foyer. The ticket booth was untouched – it looked as though its lights might come on any minute. He let the door go and it swung back into place, shutting out the reflected twilight. It was suddenly very dark in there. He had to feel his way along the wall towards the spot where he thought the stairs to the gallery might be. It seemed much further away than he had expected, but just when he thought he was lost, he stubbed his foot against the stairs. Going down on his hands and knees, he crawled up feeling cautiously ahead of him – he didn’t relish the thought of falling through a hole in the staircase. He felt his way around a bend in the staircase and up another flight of stairs, and then he was there, right at the entrance to the gallery, and he could see again, because the twilight was shining in gently, through the hole near the screen. The gallery was undamaged, untouched; it sloped gently away from him, the blue upholstery of the seats shimmering, like velvet, in the twilight. He fell into one of the seats, and tried to fold himself up in it – it was fun doing that in cinemas; sometimes he could even touch his nose with his knees. But today he didn’t try; instead he leant back and looked up. It was oddly exhilarating to sit back in a plush seat in a cinema and find a twilit sky looking down on you.