by Shobha Rao
“Did he leave a note?” Mohan asked.
“It said he couldn’t live anymore. Not as a landless man.”
“But he still had twenty acres!”
Basu looked at him with suspicion. “How do you know?”
“Because I’ve surveyed every inch of it, you moorkh.” Basu still eyed him warily. “How is Lalita?”
“She’s in mourning.”
“And the engagement?”
“Off.”
Mohan smiled, despite himself. He knew what he would kiss first: her birthmark.
It was, of course, unfortunate that the old man had to die but otherwise things were going exactly as he had planned. He had only to be patient, and wait. But once the period of mourning was over, his second trouble set in: Basu nearly skipped through the door with this latest gossip: the groom-to-be, the one who had been promised the thousand acres as a dowry, had offered to marry Lalita without it.
“What?” Mohan started.
“What selflessness,” Basu said, taking on a somber tone. “Gandhiji would be proud.”
Mohan rolled his eyes. What a bastard. He would marry her anyway. What a show-off. What was he supposed to do now?
There was no need for him to have contemplated action because the answer, in the form of further gossip from Basu, reached him a few days later. “Now,” he said, “she’s refusing to marry him.”
Mohan stared at him. “How is that possible?”
“She’s called it off. Again.”
A jolt of hope passed through Mohan. “Has she said, I mean, have you heard who she wants to marry instead?”
“Apparently,” Basu said, “nobody.”
“But how? How will she live?”
“Maybe off the twenty acres you seem to know so much about,” he said, smiling.
This was too much. Mohan set off, practically running from his cottage toward Lalita’s house. He passed the well with its flat wooden lid, ripped right through the center of the village with its one sundries shop and post office cum teahouse, and didn’t even bother to offer a prayer at the tiny Durga temple at the edge of the fields. The villagers looked on in amazement. They had never seen their timid surveyor in such a state.
Lalita opened the door. She was even more intoxicating than in his memory. The birthmark on her face was a gathering gloom. A typhoon. A pier. It was shark-infested waters. It was all he had ever wanted. “Where are your servants?” he asked.
“I can’t afford to keep them,” she said. Then she said, “Who are you?”
Mohan sighed. “I knew your father.” She looked at him for a moment before letting him inside. The house had taken on a sad, tragic air. The dais where he’d sat with her father looked forlorn, empty, as if it were a ruined schoolhouse where children had once played. Even Lalita’s face had darkened since he’d last seen her, or no, he thought, not darkened, but grown older. He felt—in this moment—the first pangs of conscience, and guilt. Maybe he should not have divided the land, maybe he should have kept it intact, and let her marry that young man. Maybe he should have let them be young together.
“See here,” he said, “why don’t you marry? Your father would’ve wanted—”
“How do you know?” she said.
“I told you, I knew him.”
She studied him. “Aren’t you that man? The one walking around with all that equipment, snooping around the village.”
“Well, yes,” Mohan said.
They stood silently, not exactly facing each other, but more facing the dais, as if her father was still there.
“Like I was saying, you should marry.”
“Who?”
Mohan thought then of the boy he’d been. And of how, at the age of five, that boy had left him. He said, “Why not the young man you were engaged to?”
“Because without the dowry, I don’t know whether he’s marrying me out of love or pity.”
“With the dowry, you wouldn’t have known whether it was for love or money.”
“Neither is as bad as pity,” she said.
Mohan looked at her. It came to him that he was in the presence of something he could not possibly understand. She was a minefield, and there he stood, unable to move. Her nose, her birthmark like the spill of blood, the memory of her damp hips, they were the waiting sorrows, no matter which way he turned. Mohan closed his eyes and thought of a map. Any map. All those lines, hiding all those lives: strung between us like hissing electric wire.
A few weeks after his meeting with Lalita is when his third and final trouble set in. A Muslim family, subsistence farmers living outside the village, had been killed. Father, mother, all four children, murdered. When Mohan heard the news he didn’t have to ask, he knew: they were killed by a Hindu mob. Since the details of the border had been released—his details of the border—the village had undergone a transformation. It was no longer a quiet farming village; it was now an angry village. The Hindus were angry that their land (though truthfully, most of it had belonged to Lalita’s father) had gone to East Pakistan, to the Muslims. They first looted the sundries shop, which belonged to a Muslim, and not satisfied with that, they resorted to slaughter.
Mohan was terrified. He was not Muslim, true, but he had been the one responsible for the necessary changes. Everyone in the village knew exactly who’d drawn the last line. He was afraid to go outside. He sent Basu to the post office one afternoon and he returned with a telegram from Mohan’s boss, D6. His name was actually Mr. Debnath, but Mohan had always thought of him as D6. The telegram said he would arrive in a week’s time for a “progress review,” but Mohan, squatting in his darkened room—he no longer lit the lantern in the evenings—knew the real reason.
He met D6 at the station in English Bazar. When he emerged from the train he was thinner than Mohan remembered. He was wearing a light blue shirt that showed rings of sweat stains under his arms, and though his shock of white hair was tousled from the train journey, his mustache was neatly combed. He did not smile when he spotted Mohan. And when he raised his hand to shake Mohan’s, his sixth finger, the extra one D6 had been born with next to his pinky finger, pointed straight at Mohan like the barrel of a small gun.
By the time they returned to the village it was dinnertime. Basu had prepared a special meal of rice pulao, deep fried capsicum with chicken, and machher jhol. They both ate slowly, disinterestedly. Midway through the meal D6 looked at Mohan. “Why did you move the border?” he asked. Of course Mohan was prepared for this question. But in that moment his mind went blank, and he sat and thought about each of the words separately, as if they were the shattered pieces of a vase or a plate that he was trying to fit back together. “I don’t recall, sir,” he finally said. D6 stared at him, and went back to mixing his chicken curry and rice. Since it had no joints, and so could not be bent, D6’s sixth finger struck against the steel plate like the light tapping of a spoon. Mohan had never eaten with D6 before; he was fascinated by it. It had a certain rhythm: the tap, tap, tapping of mixing the rice, putting it in his mouth, gathering another bite. He had always respected D6 and D6 seemed to like him well enough, but he was a quiet man, and Mohan was never really sure what he was thinking. But the finger: the finger never tired of speaking to him.
The following day when Mohan woke up, D6 was already at the table, deep in study, maps and sketches spread across the table. The village was quiet. Unnaturally so, Mohan thought.
“We’re going to the border,” D6 announced. They hired the same car as the previous day and drove a few miles in the direction of the border. The countryside in late September was dry and brown after the long summer. The Mahananda was as thin as a stream. It was still early, the sun barely over the horizon and rising slowly, like bread. A few hundred yards short of the border D6 asked the driver to stop alongside an open field. Mohan recognized the place though neither spoke as they trudged to the top of a low promontory. It faced east, and Mohan looked out across the fields and in that open air, that cool morning, he felt non
e of the guilt or dread or anxiety of the past few weeks. He felt only the Brahmaputra in front of him, and the Ganga behind him, and knew that somewhere in East Pakistan they met, well away from English Bazar and the thousand measly acres that had caused such madness. They emptied like lovers into the Bay of Bengal. He could almost hear the meeting of these two mighty rivers, the surge after surge of pure cold Himalayan runoff.
“Do you know why Manthara was the most evil of all, even more than Ravana?” D6 asked.
Manthara? Mohan had no idea who D6 was talking about. The only clue was Ravana. His thoughts raced. He strained to remember everything he could about the Ramayana: the story of Rama and Sita and the forest and Hanuman carrying the mountain was easy to recall, but Manthara? Who was she? His mind spun like a wheel and came up with nothing.
D6 was looking east again, deep into the fields. After a long silence he said, “She was Kaikeyi’s servant, Mr. Mohan, the one who was aware that the queen had been promised two boons from the king. She was the one who convinced Kaikeyi to call them in: one was to place Bharata, her own son, on the throne rather than Rama, and the other was to banish Rama for fourteen years to the forest. The king, you see, had no choice, he had to abide by his promise.” He turned to Mohan. His blue-white hair whipped in the wind and against the dark brown of his skin looked like the meeting of earth and sky. “Do you see, Mr. Mohan?”
“No, sir, I don’t.”
“She was a nobody. A servant. A humpbacked old crone. And yet she changed the course of a kingdom. Of the gods. If that is possible then we are powerless, aren’t we, against the slightest little tick in our beds.”
Mohan looked at the ground. He raised his eyes just far enough to spy the sixth finger hanging from D6’s right hand. The useless little finger that had perhaps determined D6’s destiny, he thought. He wondered what it would be like to touch it, to snap it off his hand like a twig.
“The Government of India may try you for treason, Mr. Mohan,” D6 said, turning to walk down to the car.
A shot of ice water ran up Mohan’s spine. Blood pooled in his feet. “Treason?”
“Maybe you should be tried for murder instead,” D6 said placidly. “But human life has always been worth less than land, hasn’t it?”
Mohan had trouble raising his legs. He stumbled on a branch and kept walking, blindly. Then he started running after D6, who was taking long purposeful strides, though Mohan’s were as formless and as jerky as a child’s. “But, Mr. Debnath,” he called after him.
They were back at the car by the time D6 looked at Mohan. He smiled, a wistful look on his face. “Do you see that mist over there, Mr. Mohan,” he said. Mohan turned to look. In the distance, hovering over the fields, was a thin strip of gray mist, not yet touched by the sun, so still lingering, still low and lovely. He had not noticed it before. He hardly noticed it now. “Isn’t it the saddest thing?” D6 said. “To be made of nothing? To know you’ll just burn away in the end?”
Mohan stood, looking at the mist.
The driver emerged from a clump of trees where he’d been dozing and opened each of their doors. They didn’t go to the border, as Mohan had expected, but turned back toward the village. The drive back felt far longer than the drive there. Mohan sat slumped in his seat, an expression of both shock and despair on his face. By the time they got to the village he was thinking of Lalita, of the first time he had seen her and how her arm had wrapped like an embrace around the clay earthen pot.
How long ago it seemed.
When they reached his cottage they entered through the back of the house, by way of the kitchen, and it was only then that Mohan noticed the people who had gathered outside his front door, peering in through his window. He jumped back in surprise. He stopped D6, who was still in the kitchen, and slammed the door shut.
“What? What is it?” D6 asked.
Mohan was shaking violently. He clenched his fists. “A mob,” he said. “Outside.” Sounds of shouting and banging on the front door reached them. When he opened the back door a crack, to see if the car was still there, Mohan saw that one or two of the men were making their way toward the back, and the driver had gone running. He slammed the door shut. The kitchen had a barred window in the back and through this the two men began throwing rocks. They yelled to the men in the front, They’re back here! Mohan and D6 were now pressed against the door to the front room, away from the rocks that were being flung at them. It was early afternoon and the sun glinted off the raised machetes of the men gathered now in the back. Some of the men had sticks. Mohan counted a dozen, maybe more. The rocks kept coming, and they were saved only by the fact that the barred window kept out most of the bigger ones. Mohan shielded his face, already cut and bleeding, and when he peeked through his fingers he saw the rage in the faces of the men. You’re a traitor, they yelled. You gave our land to the katwas, they yelled. They were crowded at the window, white teeth glinting like the machetes and the dark, dark darkness of their skin crowding out the light. Mohan thought of the front door but he knew, he knew that the latch door on the well was open and that if he and D6 made a run for it, they would chase them into the well.
He looked at D6. He too was shielding his face. His sixth finger stuck out of the side of his face and Mohan thought that this was what he had always wanted. A limb or an appendage or an organ that was unbendable, unyielding, attached to his body but free of it.
The mob pushed closer. The door rattled on its hinges.
Mohan had never believed that people’s lives flashed before their eyes in the moments before death, but in a way, his did: he saw his father’s friend. His heart recoiled. The men with the machetes disappeared because they, in the end, were no kind of threat. But this man—his father’s friend—he was indiscriminate. Mohan pushed tighter against the kitchen wall, felt the roughness of the sheet his face was being thrust into. No, he didn’t care. He didn’t care if you were his friend’s son, or a dreaming little boy, or a boy breathing slowly, sleeping under a thin summer sheet: he took a machete to them all.
SUCH A MIGHTY RIVER
Alok Debnath sucked on his sixth finger, dangling off the pinky of his right hand, for eighty-four years before he lost it. It was so simple: one quick slash of the knife and there it lay. On the table. Detached. It was moist and trembling, like a snail without its shell, and he looked at it with curiosity, as if it were a museum piece or an artifact that had once belonged to someone else. But it was his, all right. This recognition lasted only a moment because in the next, blood began to pour out of the raw flesh and exposed bone where the finger had once been. Even the little snail on the table was now floating in a pool of blood. Alok Debnath clutched his left hand over the gushing wound. Blood seeped through his fingers and landed on the dirt floor with the pretty plop of fat raindrops. All the blood in his body seemed to be emptying itself through its new faucet. He screamed and screamed. “Shut up, shut up, shut up,” Naagi said. Someone came up behind him and stuffed a rag into his mouth. With his mouth plugged up Alok Debnath’s eyes watered, darted around the room. Everyone—Naagi, the fat man, the little bird—eyed him nervously. Except for Rekha. Rekha just stood there placidly, voluptuously, watching him. Who was this woman? Had he loved her once? He might have—he couldn’t be sure, his mind was muddy—but he was certain he did not love her now.
* * *
It was toward the end of December, a little after the ayananta but before the children’s winter holidays, when Rekha didn’t come. He had bought her for the afternoon but she failed to show. Alok Debnath waited nervously. It was unlike her to be late; he was without doubt, in the case of Rekha, of certain things: she would brutalize him with her cruelty, seduce him with her ass, and she was always, always on time. It was nearing five o’clock; his daughter would return at six with the children, his son-in-law at eight. Alok Debnath waited by the window. The street his daughter lived on looked out onto a row of affluent houses in Taktakpur. Her husband had made money in textiles, and theirs was one of
the biggest homes on the block. But Alok Debnath cared for none of it: the big house, the money, much less his avaricious son-in-law. He sat morosely at the window of his lavish room sucking on his sixth finger and wondered what to do. He shuffled around the room, unsure what he was looking for, then he put on his coat and his scarf and his knitted hat and walked out of the door without a paisa to his name. He even forgot his keys. When he got to the end of the block he remembered: he was looking for Rekha. With this thought his mind and his spirits lifted like a kite in a strong wind, and Alok Debnath breathed deeply of the chill winter air. The scent of woodsmoke and the Ganga mingled and entered his blood, swelled his heart, and he set off again with conviction. After he’d walked about ten paces he found it was no use, his mind was dull again, but he continued doggedly. It would come to him. And it did, four blocks later: don’t worry, he said aloud and with great solemnity, “I’m coming, Sarojini, I’m coming for you.”
Alok Debnath had just turned eighty-four. It was the winter of 1976 and he was living with his married daughter in Benares. His daughter had three children but he preferred not to see them. They were noisy, they confused him, and they pulled on his sixth finger as if it was one of their plastic toys. The youngest, three-year-old Bunny, once grabbed it as she would a handful of bhelpuri and said, “Why is it all wrinkly, nanaji?”
“Because it’s old and tired from you pulling it all the time,” he said. Though the truth was that when he was alone he liked to lie on his bed or sit at his window and suck on it. It was not a new habit; he’d had it since he was a little boy. It gave him comfort, or something close to it, and for a few minutes it lent his foggy mind a rare clarity: it took him back to the days of his childhood, to memories of his dead wife, Sarojini, and lately, to an understanding of something less pleasant, less wistful, but more necessary: it reminded him that he was at the end, that the places his sixth finger took him were the farthest places—and the only places—he had left to go.