by Anuradha Roy
That morning, however, he had barely stepped off the tonga when a man sprang from nowhere and flung himself headlong into the dust, clutching one of Amulya’s ankles as if it were the edge of a precipice. Trying to drag his foot away, feeling one black sock lose its grip around his calf, Amulya looked down at the back of the man’s head. Until the man raised himself from Amulya’s polished, black-leather pumps there was no way of telling who it was.
“Let go, arre baba, kindly let go,” Amulya snapped, “What’s the matter? Can’t you get up from there!”
“You’re my father and my mother, Sa’ab, you are everything I have in this world! I have nobody else!”
Amulya thought he recognised the man at last from his voice, although it was tear-cracked and distraught: just a few days before, as he had entered the bottling room in the factory he had heard the same voice say, laughing, “The old bastard hasn’t come poking his nose here today. Think he’s dead?”
The man who had spoken was scratching himself under his dhoti.
“These shrivelled-up, thin ones go on for ever,” his companion had said.
“Then we’ll live a hundred years, won’t we?” the first man had chuckled.
He had stopped as Amulya entered. Amulya had not smiled. He found it difficult to attain any kind of easy familiarity with his workers. Impossible to say, “Arre Ramcharan, and how is your son? Is your wife still away in her village? Sure you’re not chasing any pretty girls now her back’s turned?”
Amulya tugged his foot out of Ramcharan’s grasp. “What is the matter, Ramcharan?” he said, his voice curt. “Stop all this weeping and wailing.” He fitted his brass keys one by one into the three Aligarh padlocks on the factory door, entered, hung his umbrella on its customary hook, and then, turning towards Ramcharan, noticed for the first time that they were not alone.
There was a woman standing a little away from the door, her dark skin set off by the grubby yellow of her old sari, her sun-paled hair straggling out of its bun. She was slender and young, little more than a teenager, with a smile that seemed to lose its way when Amulya looked in her direction. He recognised her. He could never have forgotten the face of the girl who, at that harvest dance in her village two years before, had given him the purple passion flower from her hair. But where was the vivaciousness he remembered, the glow of her dimpled face, the teasing laughter? This woman had a famished look, the kind stray, starving bitches feeding pups often had. She held a small bundle in her arms, so languidly Amulya thought it might fall any minute. When it moved he realised it was a baby.
“My son got her pregnant, Sa’ab, she says, and she arrived this morning with the baby … it can’t be true … my son is married, he’s a good boy, he has children of his own, but the coward wouldn’t even come out of our house to throw her out … what am I to do, Sa’ab? If I return her to the forest those jungle people will slaughter us for this with their sickles … they’ll excommunicate her for going with an outsider … she says we must take care of the baby … but what are we to do, Sa’ab, we are poor people, we already have eight mouths to feed and one salary, and what will our relatives say!”
Ramcharan’s voice rose and rose until Amulya said, “Quiet! Be quiet!”
Ramcharan sat on his haunches in a corner of the room and, burying his face in his knees, began to moan, “They’ll kill us … they’ll kill us all if we send the baby back.”
Amulya flipped through the order book and his diary. Decided there was no help for it, he would have to write off the day. He scribbled instructions for his accountant and then, with the woman and Ramcharan squeezed alongside the tongawallah in the front, he sat at the back watching the road give way to fields and then scrubland as they clattered to the Christian orphanage mission beyond the edge of Songarh.
That evening he returned home well after dusk and washed off his day-long deposit of sweat, pouring mug after mug over his thin, nutcoloured body, sighing with relief. He walked out of the bathroom in a soft, unstarched dhoti and kurta, feeling something within him unfurl at last. He knew his daughter-in-law would have left him a large cup of tea and some food. Amulya ate alone, gazing down the room that ended in a full-length, stained-glass window in the east, a window he had positioned thus; he sat at a round table with brass lion paws at the ends of its legs, a table he had bought at an auction. As he chewed, the knot inside him seemed to loosen, and the anxiety of the day’s events began to recede.
After he had drained his cup, he wandered into the garden. Now, where there had been weeds and bathua, there grew a soft carpet of doob grass. The kitchen garden was dark with the enormous, olive-coloured warts of jackfruit clinging to the sides of the tall trees. Green coconut clustered far above and sometimes the afternoon quiet exploded with the noise of their falling. The saplings had seemed tiny when they were planted, impossible to imagine those twigs with four or five leaves storing the power to soar thirty feet. Their branches now jostled for space, and the sky was barely visible through the canopy the leaves had created high above.
In the shadow of these trees was a low swing-seat, and it was here that Amulya came that evening, as on all others, after he had walked all around his garden. Usually he inspected each tree in turn, noting every new bud, every yellowing sapling that had given up the attempt, every cutting that had begun to hold up its head. He would look at them tenderly, wanting to stroke and pat them as if they were pet animals. He had created a garden where there had been wilderness. He had cleared weeds, planted fruit trees, flowering shrubs, and creepers. He had not been indiscriminate, however. He had disdained the flamboyance of pink kachnar, the rich orange of tecoma. Instead, he had planted his garden with flowers that would gleam white in the darkness and scent the night-time air. His only concession to colour was low bushes of the yesterday-today-tomorrow, the Franciscea hopeana he had found with great difficulty, which turned from purple to almost white over three days, perfuming the air around it. The rest of the garden had pure whites: a spreading Magnolia grandiflora, its petals creamy against shining green leaves, the snowy blooms of Jasminum pubescens tumbling over the well area, and a Jasminum sambac to provide scent and flowers for Kananbala’s gods. A few gardenias. Two shefalikas, which he thought of as Nyctanthes arbortristis, that let fall showers of their small, scented flowers – orange-stemmed, but that brief appearance of colour beneath white petals was pardonable as a kind of poetry. Against the wall he had put Cestrum nocturnum, said to harbour snakes, but Amulya was willing to risk poisoning for the fragrance of its white sprays of flowers.
That evening, though, he failed to notice that the buds on the gandharaj were beginning to open and that the mango would very soon burst into flower. He could think of nothing but that tiny bastard baby swaddled in a torn, brownish sari, and of its mother, who had stopped it crying by wrapping her sari around it and putting its mouth to her breast with an ease that seemed born of weeks rather than days of practice. She had been apathetic, almost sleepy, until the time came to part with it. And then she had begun a series of gasping, high-pitched sobs that had lasted throughout the tonga ride back from the far-off orphanage into town. Now, hours later, it was still her sobs he heard, not the birdcalls of dusk. He had gazed stoically at the road as Ramcharan hissed, “Shut your weeping, you stupid woman!” while the tongawallah had spoken throughout the ride only to his horse as if oblivious, or disapproving, of his passengers and their unholy errand.
I’ll have to look after that baby, Amulya said to himself, settling into the garden bench, taking out his pipe and hunting in his pocket for matches. There’s no other way. The fees … better remember to tell the office to pay the orphanage on time. Then he wondered if he needed to add the business of the fees to his will, stipulating that it should be paid for as long as required. He made a mental note that it had best be done. No need to tell anyone at home about the child though, not even Kamal. No need to expose them to something so unsavoury.
From the upstairs verandah Kananbala could see the whit
e of his cotton kurta, smudged in the fading colours of the evening. She never broke into his evening solitude in the garden, but that day, powered by some urge she could not have identified, she went towards him, barefoot on the grass. He did not see her come, and when she was before him, asking, “What are you thinking?” he looked up as if bewildered by her presence. It took him a moment to focus on her face, his eyes at first as startled as if he were looking at a stranger. Then he replied, “Oh, it’s you. What is it?” And then, as she said nothing, he returned to mapping out the financial arrangements for the orphan, sucking on his pipe as he visualised the columns of his bank book.
Kananbala stood there a minute or two, and then turned to walk back to the house, wanting Amulya to call out to her, half expecting him to. But he did not. She looked back once at his still, angular frame, a shadow on the garden bench, lost to her. He might as well have been one of his trees, she thought, walking away. The few hundred feet separating the upstairs verandah from the garden bench became a vastness impossible to cross.
* * *
In October that year, they had their first house guests after a seven-year interval. Relatives were visiting from Calcutta for the puja holidays: there was Amulya’s cousin, his wife, and three children. Kananbala, unused to visitors, had spent all of September planning for their arrival. She was more anxious than eager, she discovered, but could not admit it to anyone. Amulya would have said, “You’re always complaining. You say you’re lonely, then when visitors come, you say you don’t want them.”
So Kananbala complained to herself. More and more, she found solace in talking to herself. She found she could effortlessly become two people and have conversations that sometimes went on a whole afternoon.
There was an additional worry. The relatives had come with a marriage proposal. Nirmal was twenty-four now, and he had just got himself a job in the district college teaching history. It did not pay very much, but it was a government college, and besides, he was the son of a reasonably wealthy man, which made him an eligible groom.
“Why put off something that needs doing? He’s old enough. What’re you waiting for? I tell you, Amulya, gentle, shy, good girls are as hard to find as …” – Amulya’s cousin was picking at the fish on his plate – “as good, fresh river fish in Songarh!” He laughed at his little joke, then, noticing no answering smile, explained in a conciliatory tone, “Boudi’s cooking is wonderful, but what can you do about the fish you get here? It just is not the same as … ”
“Yes, not the same as fish from the Ganga,” Amulya said, trying not to sound testy. The visit was nearing its end and he had heard the fish commented upon several times.
“Nihar’s niece – you remember Nihar, don’t you?”
“I remember.”
“Well, Nihar’s niece – is her name Shanti or Malati? – Shanti, yes, Shanti – she’s sixteen, and from what I hear, a pleasant, home-loving girl. I met her a few years ago, pretty girl. And what a house her father has, on a riverbank. Beautiful! It’s a well-to-do, good family, same caste as us, naturally. Nirmal could not pick better … this tomato chutney, it’s good, but I think there’s nothing like chutney … ”
“Made from Calcutta’s green mangoes? Yes, I agree,” Amulya said.
The cousin looked a little unsettled, but only for a minute. “If you like,” he continued, “I’ll go back to Calcutta and make some cautious enquiries. What do you say? I’ll write to you as soon as I find out what they think. Then Nirmal can go off and see the girl. I can go with him, it is Nirmal’s wedding after all!” The cousin drank a glass of water with noisy satisfaction and rose.
“But this place you live in,” Kananbala’s visiting sister-in-law said later that evening, picking up a shingara and biting into the warm crust, “I don’t know, but I couldn’t live here – in Songarh, I mean. Yes, I know, it’s clean and empty and Calcutta is dirty and crowded and noisy. But the crowds and noise keep me alive! It’s so soundless here, I thought for a moment I’d gone deaf!” Kananbala’s sister-in-law looked in her direction and said, “And I don’t think it’s doing you much good either.”
“What can I say?” Kananbala replied in a hurry, to deflect the threatened analysis of her health. “I know you can buy shingaras in shops everywhere in Calcutta now, but not here. In Shyambazaar I’d have had someone run down the lane and conjure up a feast from all the sweet shops. Here Manjula and I make them.”
“Oh well,” her sister-in-law said contentedly, “They are delicious, and home-made is always better, isn’t it? I tell you, we can buy everything, but catch your brother agreeing to eat a shop shingara or cutlet. He can smell anything stale a mile off.”
Kananbala felt confused, simultaneously put down and complimented. She got up and shook out her sari. “Manjula,” she called out from the head of the stairs down towards the kitchen. “Bring some more shingara if you’ve finished frying.”
Already, it was twelve days since the visitors had come. The Songarh ruins, they had declared, did not compare with the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta, nor the forest with the grand Botanical Gardens. The ridge was too tiring to walk to. At Finlays they chuckled over its provincial selection. “What would this Finlays say to Hogg Market, eh?” Amulya’s cousin had asked his wife, and then said to the puzzled sales boy, “Never heard of bandel cheese? B-a-n-d-e-l cheese? No?”
Soon, they had run out of things to do and spent the holidays sequestered in Dulganj Road, exhausting even their fund of gossip about relatives. Confronted by her visitors’ boredom and scorn, Kananbala had begun perversely to long for the solitude of her daily life.
The fortnight ended, and it was time for the visitors to go. Two tongas had been called for four o’clock. Amulya and Kamal were to go to the station along with a servant carrying a hamper of food for the overnight journey: dinner and breakfast had been packed, and an earthen pitcher of cool water. There was some confusion when one of the horses was discovered to be lame. A servant went in the other tonga to get a third.
As they waited, Amulya’s cousin said to Kananbala, “Boudi, I will send you a picture of the girl as soon as I reach Calcutta. I’m sure you’ll like her. I know your household, she’ll make a perfect daughter-in-law. Shanti is her name, I’m sure … sings well, cooks well, and has lived a secluded life always. So unspoiled. Not like our Calcutta girls. And as for this rascal,” he said, chuckling at Nirmal who stood looking at the empty road, willing the tonga to appear, “he needs someone to keep him in line. I will make all the arrangements!”
Kananbala retreated upstairs after the tongas had left, and stood at the window with the remnant of her smile of farewell. As she turned away, she caught sight of herself profiled in the shining teak front of the cupboard. Her head was invisible, lost in the elaborate carvings that began halfway up its doors. Headless, the body was that of a stranger, grotesque in the bumps that it was made up of: a large – no, hillocky – bump of a chest, an almost equally bulbous curve at the stomach, and then the falling away of thin legs beneath a cotton sari.
Kananbala turned to the mirror next to the cupboard. When had that double chin settled there? When had the chin sprouted those two hairs? When had her skin turned the colour of her husband’s tobacco? She stared at the reflection, feeling herself grow breathless, her throat contract.
* * *
Their visitors had, in the manner of all visitors, made a detailed note of their appearances. “You’re growing fat already, Kamal, that’s quite a paunch you’ve got yourself, eh? The first sign of wealth and ease!” they had observed in one direction, and in another, “My goodness Amulya, the sun has blackened you so much you’re invisible in the dark!” But it was their comments about his wife that had touched a raw nerve in Amulya. He had overheard their sister-in-law saying to Kananbala, “Didi, I had only heard from here and there that you’re not well … but look at you! You seem a hundred rather than fifty! Of course you were always dark, never had your mother’s fair colour, but look at you now! Skin like d
ried-up leather, and is it your scalp I can see through your hair? Songarh’s water is bad, I know, I can see half my hair’s fallen out in just two weeks here! Come to Calcutta with me and I’ll look after you, I really will. Oil massages, cream and flour for your face, baths in rosewater … when I send you back Amulya Babu will think he has a new bride!”
Amulya remembered a time when Kananbala was petite and pretty, with curling hair that refused to be pinned down, and heavy-lidded, lustrous eyes she lined with kajal morning and night. She would race up the stairs at Shyambazaar – those were steep, old-fashioned stairs, dark and undulating – she would run up the stairs two at a time balancing bell-metal plates of food and once even a harmonium – always too impatient to wait for the servants to do their work. A time when she would step out to the terrace to watch him walk down the narrow lane towards the house and ask as soon as he arrived, “Did you remember to get my lace?”
And now? It took no time to digest his relatives’ comments. He could hear them in his head for days after they had left. He realised that over the last two months he too had noticed changes in her, and not just in her appearance. All these years – setting up the factory, building the house, planting the garden, the busy years – of course he had not forgotten about Kananbala. “How could I,” he thought, “living with her every day of my life since I was nineteen and she sixteen?” But it was true, he admitted: just as your tongue obsessively returns to a painful tooth rather than a healthy one, now that Kananbala did not seem quite herself, he seemed to be thinking about her all through the day, even at work.