by Anuradha Roy
He began to make notes in his diary; it would help, he thought, to understand exactly what was happening, systematise it a little. He chose a page that was for a Sunday and so would not be required for work, and made observations in his angular, jerky handwriting:
K shuffling rather than walking. Yesterday saw her holding wall when going down stairs to kitchen. Asked what matter. Said dizzy, unstable, knees weak. Seems healthy, but complaining of being ill.
Saris looking crumpled or stained, with turmeric etc. Unpleasant. Told her last night, and she said, Do I smell?
Notice lips moving even when she thinks she is alone. Talking to herself? Disturbing. Also fingers move restlessly, on furniture, her own body etc. even when she is spoken to, as if writing something all the time. Try to decipher, but impossible. Complaining less, but more silent. Does anyone else notice? How to ask?
Entries of this kind crowded the page for Sunday. The next page said: Ordered coconut oil, 25 gallons; paid Salim; order book up to date, orphanage payment made for this month. And so on. Wednesday had just one word scrawled across the page: Doctor.
Amulya called in the physician, who checked Kananbala’s blood pressure and asked her about constipation and gas. He tested her knees and made her walk in a straight line across the bedroom floor. In the end he turned to Amulya and said, “Nothing wrong, sir, nothing at all. Simply in the mind. Ladies get bored in small places. Madam needs amusement!”
“Maybe you should find something to do,” Amulya remarked grimly to her as the doctor’s tonga clattered away. “All this comes from having too much leisure.”
“But I work all day,” Kananbala said. “Do you know how much I have to do to keep this house going?”
“That’s not enough,” Amulya said. “You should do something else. Why don’t you cultivate a hobby? Sew? Knit? Draw pictures? Look at Brahmo women: they read, play the piano, talk about anything under the sun, just like men.”
“Would you let me do all that Brahmo women do? You don’t even let me go alone to Calcutta. Kamal has to go with me – or even Nirmal. And they never want to.”
“You’d never be able to go on your own. I send them with you for your safety.” Amulya pushed his feet into his slippers. “Tell me,” he continued in an indulgent tone, “can you find your way anywhere? You may be fifty, but you’d still be a lost little girl on the roads of any big city, what with your Shyambazaar at the other end of Howrah Station. Come now, tell Manjula to bring me a cup of tea.”
He put his pipe into his pocket and walked out to the garden.
* * *
A month after the relatives had left, there arrived an envelope thicker and stiffer than usual. Inside were two sheets of blue notepaper closely scrawled upon, and a photograph. Amulya handed Kananbala the picture and began to read the letter. As she looked for her spectacles, which she had still not got used to, he exclaimed, “What a coincidence, the girl’s father used to be my uncle’s lawyer before he retired! He helped him win that Pukurbari case.”
Kananbala brought the picture of Nirmal’s prospective bride into the wavering yellow circle of lamplight she was sitting next to. She reached out and raised the wick a little and put on her glasses.
Amulya said, “Apparently that house they have in Manoharpur by the river is like a palace, and this girl Shanti is the only child. There is no mother, and no other brothers and sisters. It’s good when a girl doesn’t have too many relatives.” And, after a short pause and the satisfaction which comes with finding the right word, “Uncomplicated.”
Kananbala examined the photograph in the light of the lamp. It was an oval face that could have been a little less bony. The girl’s hair was pulled back in a plait that returned in a snaky curve over her shoulder to the front of a simple, narrow-bordered sari. Not the latest fashion in either hairstyle or clothes – though, Kananbala thought, I hardly know what the latest fashions are. There was nothing remarkable about the face except its thoughtful expression and the eyes which seemed a strange, light colour, she could not tell what. The irises unusually large, filling up the eyes; the lashes overlong. The gaze was slightly unsettling because of the straight, thick brows that pressed down on the eyes. Kananbala wondered if the picture had been touched up in a studio.
Nirmal was almost eight years younger than his elder brother, an autumn flower, more precious to Kananbala for being late. She still caught herself examining his every feature in as much loving detail as she had when he was a baby. Where Kamal had turned out rather nondescript, ill-humoured, dyspeptic, and already showing signs of jowls, the sharp lines of Nirmal’s face, his quick movements, his air of irresponsibility and a sudden, noisy laugh which made his eyes dance, convinced Kananbala she was not being biased when she felt he had grown into a handsome man. She knew mothers were not supposed to have favourites, but it was Nirmal who came straight up to her room first from school, then college, and now from work, to tell her stories of all that had happened during the day. He would do nothing without consulting her first, and their dependence on each other was absolute, this she believed.
She looked again at the picture in her hand, the picture of the woman to whom Nirmal would belong. She felt too tired to think about it all.
“Let’s see the picture,” Amulya said, reaching out. “What do you say? I think Nirmal should be sent off to see the girl. I have a good feeling about this match.”
Just as you did about Songarh, Kananbala said to herself.
* * *
Nirmal married Shanti in March 1928 . The wedding was in Manoharpur. The bride’s father, it was said, had roused himself from years of isolation to invite all his forgotten relatives and the neighbouring villagers. He lit up the riverbank with a hundred and one oil lamps. From a week before, shehnai players sat in bamboo machans at the entrance to the house, playing their pipes. Bikash Babu disliked the shehnai’s wail, but was determined to fulfil every conventional expectation the groom’s family might have. The groom’s party – Amulya, Nirmal, Kamal, and Manjula – left Songarh on the overnight train to Calcutta. They were to join up with other relatives there and then take the train to Manoharpur in a merry, festive group.
Her prospective daughter-in-law’s magnificent house, its wooden staircase, its mirrors and chandeliers, its riverside setting and splendid garden were to remain a story for Kananbala. Though some women disregarded such superstitions, she knew as a good mother that her presence at his wedding would only bring Nirmal bad luck. So, heeding tradition, she stayed back, alone in Songarh with the household’s two servants and three temporary cooks, resigned to custom but anxious and feverish, preparing for the wedding party to return. For the two weeks they were away, she did nothing but order the servants around, have food cooked, and ready the house with an energy she had to dredge up from her past. She rose early and went to bed exhausted every night. The rossogullas had to be creamy enough to dissolve on the tongue, the salty snacks crunchy enough to be heard in the next room. There had to be great quantities of everything. The Oriya cooks hired from Calcutta were instructed to cook the best lobster they had ever made. The fish was to be brought from Calcutta on the overnight train, packed in ice. She made lists of things she needed to remember.
In quieter moments, after the servants had locked up for the night and left her alone with the drowsy maid, she pulled out her jewellery box and began to put aside all the ornaments from her own trousseau that she would give the bride. She lingered over her heavy gold bangles with the snakeheads that she loved, with their solid round feel and emeralds for the snakes’ eyes. Nirmal’s wife must wear them. She held the bangles in her hand and tried them on one last time before setting them aside.
The night before the wedding party was to arrive, an owl’s call interrupted Kananbala’s half-awake dreams. She was breathless and thirsty and tangled up in the bedsheet when she awoke. It was dark outside, but she felt the urge to step out of the house and go to the forest.
As if sleepwalking, Kananbala rose from her
bed and sidestepped the maid who slept on the floor. She opened her bedroom door and went down the stairs. At the front door she came upon a heavy padlock on a chain. The older manservant, Gouranga, was sprawled before it, snoring. She had forgotten how securely the front door was locked each night. She tried to think where the key was kept – the servant’s waist, of course. She remembered the side door and half ran to it, but that was locked too.
The stillness of the night, punctuated by the owl’s hoot, cracked open with a roar: the lion! The lion no-one else could hear! She ran up the stairs, forgetting to shuffle, and went out onto the roof.
At last she was out in the open, black night, under a nail-paring of a moon, looking into the shapeless gloom of the jungle. The lion roared again. No owl or fox answered it. She stayed there, her mind crowded out with thoughts that allowed her to think nothing, till the horizon paled and the first bird sang.
* * *
Nirmal and Shanti were given the room at one end of the top-floor terrace, the only one on that side of the roof. They spent their first night together on a bed prickly and damp with the traditional flowers, the noise and ribaldry of their visiting cousins seeping into their sleep. In the cold hour just before dawn, Nirmal found, half awake, that he and his new bride had curled up against each other for warmth. He gathered courage and kissed her on the forehead. Shanti slept on.
Soon after, a thunderous knocking made Nirmal throw Shanti’s arm away and run to the door. Shanti sat up, surreptitiously wiping eyes sticky with sleep. When Nirmal opened the door, his mother rushed in.
“Come on, it’s late,” she exclaimed, “Can’t you see the sun high up in the sky? Your father will be back from his walk soon.”
“Ma, it is only … “ Nirmal peered at the clock on the wall, “ … five-thirty!”
“Don’t argue,” Kananbala snapped. “The house is full of relatives. They will all be up soon and do you want to be caught still snoring? There is so much to be done!”
Nirmal looked in amazement at his mother, who had now begun bustling about the room, tidying up. He saw his mother picking up and beginning to fold the sari Shanti had let fall on a chair the night before. Next to it on the floor were the clothes he had worn, his silk kurta and dhoti twisted up and thrown in a corner as if he had been in a tearing hurry. His embarrassed gaze went to the bed with its crumpled sheets, the two pillows on it bunched close together, still indented where their heads had been and, all over the room, the squashed flowers that had begun to smell of rot. He could not look at Shanti who, he saw from the corner of his eye, was making futile attempts to mimic her mother-in-law’s efforts to clean up.
Before he could stop himself, he said, “There’s no need to do all this, Ma, you never clean my room, so just let it be! I’ll do it later.” He wanted to bundle his mother out and slam the door on her. He wished he lived on an island far away from his family, his parents, his cousins’ sly glances waiting downstairs.
“My grown-up son, already telling me what to do, a day after his wedding!” Kananbala said with a mocking smile. She swung around to Shanti, who had now begun to smooth out the bedsheet and brush off the flowers. “Shanti Bouma, go, have your bath, the water is hot. The servant can’t heat it again and again.”
She turned to Nirmal. “You too, have your bath, go to the downstairs bathroom. And send Manjula up. Manjula will show you where everything is, Shanti. She will bring you downstairs for breakfast when you’ve finished.”
Kananbala stood by the door sentinel-like, watching as Shanti rummaged for the keys to her new cupboard. Then, in a confused moment when she felt she was regaining consciousness, or emerging out of deep water for a lungful of air, she saw Shanti’s growing desperation: at her new home, at the new people around her, the new man who was her husband, at her distance from her father and from everything she had known, at her failure to find the right key. In Shanti she glimpsed herself at sixteen, the morning she had woken up with Amulya next to her, bony, unknown, overnight her husband, a man she had only glimpsed through her veil the evening before at her wedding. Tenderness surged through her, transforming her scowling face. She went across to Shanti and took the keys, picking out the one that was needed. In the gentle voice she kept for children, she said, “You’ll soon know your way about, and then things won’t seem so strange any longer.”
Shanti had been stoical throughout, even at the leave-taking from her father, her room overlooking her river. But at Kananbala’s unforeseen sympathy she felt her lips tremble, and before she could stop herself she had buried her face in her sleep-crushed sari and burst into tears.
* * *
Two weeks later Kananbala sat waiting as usual for Nirmal with his evening tea. The house was empty of wedding guests save for one lingering relative. Things were beginning to return to normal, but not quite, Kananbala knew. Nirmal had begun to return home earlier, even though his job was a new one; what must his students think, Kananbala wondered, seeing Nirmal slip out of college half an hour or even an hour earlier some days? Surely the boys he taught, clever fellows only a little younger than him, were making fun of their teacher who was in a hurry to be home with his new bride?
As every evening, Nirmal came to his mother’s room first and sat chatting with her. But she could see his heart was not in the tales he was telling her about his day. He was sitting on the edge of the chair, as if settling into it would commit him to more time. He stole glances at the clock on the wall in the corner and then, half rising, said, “I’m tired, I need a bath,” before he fled to his room. From the evenings that had gone before, Kananbala could predict he would not be seen again until dinner time.
The terrace was a darker, emptier stretch that night. Kananbala walked to its end and stood at the low parapet. From here, she could almost look into the Barnum house, where lights blazed from every window and the lawn filled and emptied and filled again with people holding glasses. Beyond the house, in the memory of the day’s light, the ruins of the fort were still discernible to those who knew it was there. She walked back across the terrace to the room which Nirmal and Shanti occupied. It had long French windows, four of them, giving onto the terrace. The venetian blinds were as tightly shut as sleeping eyes.
Kananbala pushed open the door. Nobody in the house knocked; besides, it was only seven-thirty, no time for locked doors.
Nirmal was on the bed, his head half in Shanti’s lap. She was singing something, her fingers in Nirmal’s hair, her face close to his. Her sari had slipped off her shoulder.
They looked up as Kananbala entered and, startled, moved quickly away from each other as if to say that they had not been touching at all. Shanti stopped singing mid-syllable. Wide-eyed, she sprang off the bed and then turned away flustered, busying herself with something near the dressing table.
“Ma,” Nirmal said after pause, “we were about to come down.”
“No need for you to come,” Kananbala replied. “But Shanti, it is time you started helping us with dinner.”
Kananbala woke the next morning, heavy-limbed, yet hollowed out by the dark space within her. She could scarcely lever herself from her bed, exhausted by her night-time battles. The ceiling had pressed upon her, iron rafters and all, and then the serpentine posts of the bed, fleshy and pliable, had tried to choke her. She had been jolted awake, gasping for breath, her heart pounding. Looking across the bed she realised it was not the depth of night, for Amulya’s space was empty: he had left for his walk and so it must be dawn.
She thought of the relative who had stayed on after the wedding, a cousin they called Chotu-da. They were finding it difficult to get rid of him, although he was a doctor and everyone expected him to be a busy man. He was rotund and garrulous, waiting for mealtimes and sleeping in between. Kananbala decided to put aside her distaste for him and tell him some of her symptoms.
Chotu-da pressed a stethoscope to her chest, admiring afresh the soft, enveloping bulk of her bosom.
“Only palpitations, normal at your
age,” he pronounced, at the end of what Kananbala thought was an unusually long examination of her lungs and heart, “And maybe a touch of gas. Tell Amulya to get you fruit salts. Or maybe something from his famous factory – he has a cure for everything, doesn’t he?” Chotu-da laughed. His round, jocund face gleamed with sweat, his eyes bulged behind thick glasses. He wondered why he was hungry so soon after breakfast.
“Perhaps,” he enquired in a careless tone, “Manjula could make me some sherbet, and … such fresh air, in these parts. One never feels this way in Calcutta.”
“Even the rice tastes better, doesn’t it, Chotu-da? One just can’t help oneself!” said Kananbala in a flash of her old impertinent self, the one she thought had dried up for good.
The doctor gave her a wary glance, but then thought he had heard wrong: the woman was looking as harmlessly preoccupied as she always did. He rose to go. He thought he would wait in the verandah for the sherbet, hoping it would come with a little something.
“I ought to leave,” he said to Kananbala. “My practice must be suffering. But you have not been letting me go! And this child!” He chuckled at his young son, who was hunched outside at the table glowering over a book. “He’s got so fond of you!”
He showed his topaz ring to the boy and said with the growl that usually accompanied this ritual of his, “See that’s the eye of a tiger I hunted and killed in the forest last night. The other eye is still in the tiger’s head. Both the eyes can still see, and they find naughty boys!” The boy, now nine and lost to make-believe, looked at his father with disdain.