by Anuradha Roy
“He got his degree in Scotland,” Bikash Babu told his sceptical listeners. “They think very highly of him. He was here for several days and examined the problem – oh, he was at the riverbank at all sorts of odd hours, with complicated instruments. He thought such a massive river changing course cannot be stopped. But he said that at its current rate of movement, the river –”
“These engineers,” Ashwin Mullick sniggered. “Do they know geology as well these days?”
“ – will not endanger the house for the next two generations.”
“A fine house it is,” Potol Babu said, noticing Bikash Babu’s face grow darker. “A fine house that future generations will see and admire. That Burma teak central staircase, those great Roman columns, the Belgian mirrors, that billiards room! There is no equal in Manoharpur – except Ashwin Babu’s wonderful home, of course.”
They fell silent, each irritable for a separate reason they found hard to identify. Ashwin Babu suspecting a slight, knowing his house was newer and had a staircase of mere brick and marble, not Burma teak, because of one fatal moment’s economising; Bikash Babu knowing people saw him as an old eccentric who needed to be placated; and Potol Babu wondering if he had sounded craven when truly he admired the architecture of both houses.
The afternoon sky dropped lower over the three, the warm air clasped them closer, damp and unbreathable, like a sweaty embrace. A fat, turquoise-coloured fly killed itself in the dregs of the tea.
* * *
As the smell of roasting corn scented the afternoon air, the women who were bent in their rice fields, the children squabbling in the hard-earth courtyard of their small school, their teacher brandishing his cane, the egrets poking about for food, all paused and looked up at the sky. Every day it came down a little closer. Today, its high, flat blue had swelled and darkened. It had become warmer, the air more palpable, more inert. It smelled of moisture.
Shanti lay looking out of her window, unthinkingly caressing her stomach, picking at jamun that multiplied into more purple berry shapes against the sides of her silver bowl. From her window she could see sociable tufted bulbuls trilling to each other from different branches of the bakul tree. The tree had now reached the first-floor window. What a little tree it had been, Shanti thought, when she used to water it, a young girl wandering the unruly garden looking for pretty weeds. She rolled the jamun around the bowl with her fingers and picked a fat, gleaming one to suck on, anticipating its acid hold on her throat.
Bikash Babu sat in his room downstairs, a book on his lap. He was not looking at the lines in the book but at the thin, white ones on the polished red floor of the study. They looked innocuous, like chalk outlines drawn by an untidy child and left unwiped. But he knew it was the water. It had soaked through the earth, crept up the roots of the house that burrowed deep in the soil, and was now leaving a damp trail on the red floor. At the edges of the rooms the water was spreading dark, irregular shadows, which made their way up the walls, puffing the plaster up as if there was something behind trying to get out. Bikash Babu did not need to touch the patches again to know they felt clammy, like a sick forehead, and cool like a dead one.
Some time early in the evening, the trees began to bend and sway, and a fresh breeze that smelled of sea and weeds, earth and distant places, rummaged through the papers on Bikash Babu’s bureau, moved like a spirit through the still curtains, disarranged strands of hair on the sleeping Shanti’s head, and banged the verandah door shut.
Kripa the maid, chewing a paan on the verandah and looking with a vacant post-meal gaze at the expanse of leaden sky over the river, saw a distant cloud that grew dark and bulbous, gathering speed and force as it rushed across towards the house. Before the tobacco in the paan had even begun its work, the cloud covered the sky. The surface of the placid river shimmered and then shattered as water hit water. The wind gathered strength. The coconut palms at the house’s side bent like mad women with wild hair trying to touch the earth. Somewhere nearby something crashed and fell.
The servant boy went up the stairs two at a time, trying to restrain the rebellious saris drying on the roof on clotheslines strung from end to end. He yanked them off and bundled them onto his shoulders, stopping only to lean over the parapet and call down to Kripa, “Look, the rain!” It got heavier as he ran down, each drop big enough to make a flower shudder and droop with the force. Sky and river had merged.
By the time it had been raining for three days, people were commenting on how heavy and relentless it was, unnaturally so. The thatched roofs of mud huts had flown far away in the wind and the lightning streaking across the fields had scorched a whole clump of supari trees.
Bikash Babu called the servant boy and the gardener to the verandah. His mild face was distorted by a scowl. “Don’t any of you notice anything?” he roared. “Can’t you see the armchairs are standing in water?”
They looked at their toes.
“What are you looking at the floor for now? Remove them! Put them inside! Their legs will rot. Here,” he said, starting to lift one of the heavy chairs, not making much headway.
“No, no, Babu, what are you doing?” the gardener exclaimed, rushing to the chairs, shouting in turn at the servant, “Come along, boy, they won’t go in on their own!”
The chairs were large and heavy. They reclined back, far enough for a comfortable siesta. The servants struggled under the weight.
By the end of the week, the carpets had to be rolled up and put away. Bikash Babu began to wear his dhoti a little higher, exposing a length of thin, smooth calf. Shanti tried not to stare when her father came upstairs and sat down on the edge of a chair beside her, distracted by his thoughts.
They looked out of the window and then, as people do, spoke together.
Bikash Babu was saying, “How are you feeling? If only your mother were alive, I would not be worried.”
Shanti was saying, “Baba, do you think the house is in danger?”
“Why should it be? Is it built of clay?” Bikash Babu sounded sharper than he intended. “Haven’t you seen with your own eyes how strong the walls are? Don’t you remember how the workers’ solid iron tools broke when they were trying to take down the old kitchen wall?”
“I was just thinking,” Shanti began, “maybe we should move to … ”
“There is nothing to think about,” Bikash Babu cut in. “Every monsoon we go through this nonsense. As did my father and grandfather. In a week or two the rain will lessen and then the water will go down. Just a few dry days in between the rains will be enough.”
Bikash Babu scraped back his chair and left the room for his lunch. Shanti turned her face into her pillow. The first six months of her pregnancy she had been on her feet almost all day. Now she had migraines that split her face in half and made her want to wrench her head off. Her skin was stretched taut, shiny and thin, like tissue holding back a tide. If she pricked herself with a needle, she thought, her insides would drain away. At night she had dreams that made her afraid to go back to sleep. Some nights the snake-headed bangles her mother-in-law had given her tightened noose-like around her neck and she woke up, heart racing, still hearing her mother-in-law’s voice in her ears, saw her mouth curled with contempt as she repeated that word again and again. “Whore,” she spat out, her dark face twisted, “whore, go sing in the streets.” Another night Shanti saw Nirmal sinking into the river, bit by bit, calling out to her in desperation. “Pull me out,” he shouted. “Give me a hand, call someone.” He looked up at her beseechingly but, unable to move, she stood and watched the water wash over the top of his head, flow over it, flow past the house, carrying in it a red hibiscus.
Shanti made herself open her eyes and look at the alert-eyed bulbuls on the bakul tree to empty her mind of the images that crowded it.
Kripa was serving fish to Bikash Babu in the dining room. She was older than him by a few years, and so thought she had the right to say what she pleased. “A few days more and you won’t have to buy the f
ish, they’ll just swim onto your plate.”
Getting no answer, she continued, “I’ve had to put so many bricks under the stove to raise it above the water. I’m cutting and chopping on a table, can’t squat on the floor any more. At my age, is it possible to work standing so long?”
Bikash Babu was grim. “What’s the point of grumbling?” he said, “What am I to do? I’m not causing the rain, am I? And where are we to go, abandoning our house? It’s just a matter of a few weeks.”
“In a few weeks,” Kripa said, “I’ll grow scales and fins. I tell you, I’m here because of that poor girl, frail as a flower, motherless. If her mother were here … ”
She returned to the kitchen, feet making eddies in the water on the floor. Turning to look at Bikash Babu, she muttered, “Lord knows how he can eat like a stork, picking at the food with water up to his ankles.”
* * *
It rained on.
Over the sound of drumming water, Kripa heard a scream, her name in the scream. She ran up the stairs, hearing the twisted calls of “Kripa-di, Kripa-di!” come closer. Upstairs she found Shanti clutching a table for support, mesmerised by a puddle between her feet, her sari damp. “What is happening to me, Kripa-di?” Shanti moaned. “What’s coming out of me?”
Kripa shouted down to a servant, “Run, boy, where are you? Go and get Jonaki’s mother!” The servant boy hitched up his dhoti. Jonaki’s mother, the village midwife, lived beyond the paddy fields and the village pond, a difficult distance to cover in driving rain. He ran to get an umbrella. Not much use against the sheets of water cascading from the sky. Even so.
Kripa hurried to the study where she thought she would find Bikash Babu. There was nobody in the room, yet she stood transfixed. The lowest shelves of books were only half visible through the muddy water which seemed to be gaining height before her eyes. A sheet of paper glided by, the writing on it shivering before the ink streamed out, spreading a swirl of blue. A leaf floated past the legs of the armchair. Upon the table were two pictures, one of Shanti and one of her mother. They smiled down at the water, serene. Kripa picked up the pictures and waded out in despair.
She came face to face with the servant by the stairs and looked at him in horror.
“Still here, you fool? How do you think the baby will come if you just stand here? Go and get Jonaki’s mother!”
“But the river,” the boy croaked. “It’s broken its banks. If I step out, the water is up to my neck. Our ground floor will be completely flooded now.”
Kripa ran up the stairs again, gasping. Her knees ached. Midway her right knee caught so agonisingly she had to stop and clench her teeth till it unlocked. She came across Bikash Babu leaning against one of the pillars of the upper verandah, staring at the swollen river. His eyes had retreated deeper into his head. The skin around them looked warty. Kripa did not see any of it. For the moment she forgot a lifetime of trying to cultivate deference towards her employer. “Now look where you’ve got us!” She was not speaking but screaming. “Obstinate as a stuck cow in the middle of the road! What’ll we do now? Didn’t I say we should have gone away! Now look at that flood, and the baby on the way!”
“The baby,” Bikash Babu repeated.
“Don’t you even know poor Shanti’s started her pains? A month too soon! Do you notice nothing? And nobody can get out for the midwife. Did you expect me to remember how to deliver a baby?”
Bikash Babu had turned away and was looking out again. His thin cotton kurta was transparent with rainwater, skin shining through it in patches where it stuck. “The river will drown the house today, it’s broken its banks, it’s finding a new path,” he said in a murmur. She could hardly hear him over the drumming of the rain. “Can you hear its roar? Can you feel its power?”
Kripa tried to interrupt, then gave him up and began to hobble back to Shanti.
“The river will make this house its own. What are these grand houses but arrogance? My grandfather would boast of the Italian marble. That marble will be the river’s bed now. Fish will swim in and out of our finest teak shelves and nibble our ivory figurines. Frogs will lay eggs in our English porcelain, water snakes will twine our pillars. The windows will fall off and flow down to the sea. My grandfather’s bust will stare into weeds, the ink from our papers will colour the water black, moss will ooze out of burst bedding, beds and chairs will float out like boats, the rooms will lie empty for fish to breed in them.”
Sharp lines of rain shot into the verandah. The breeze soaked his clothes and his spellbound face. His lips moved unheard. “The arrogance,” he whispered, “the arrogance.”
FIVE
The clouds that had collected and exploded over Manoharpur two weeks before had hardly paused over Songarh. There had been just enough rain to fill the shallow pond at the fort, to wash dust off the trees and to make the earth breathe a warm, moist breath. After the brief rain stopped, Nirmal went to his college and Kamal and Amulya to the factory.
The house quietened as always after the men left for work. The flurry of hot water for baths, breakfast, the last-minute ironing of clothes over, the house seemed to sigh with relief at emptying, and there was a lull before the sounds of grinding and frying and other kitchen work began. The gardener could be heard drawing water from the well for the plants that were shrivelling in the late summer heat. The rope squeaked and screeched one set of notes as it went down and with a different monotony as it came up. The maid quarrelled with one of the servants in a corner of the courtyard. Manjula finished her daily argument with Gouranga about how long the fish had been dead before he had bought it. Then she went to the kitchen, cursing, “Not a soul to help me cut the vegetables any longer, Shanti gone, and other people ill … you numbskull, grind the mustard with the green chilli, with green chilli!” In a little while the oil hissed and sputtered with vegetables and fish. Time passed. A bael fell with a thud into the garden. Gouranga tottered out and picked it up to make sherbet out of its orange, aromatic pulp.
At last Manjula finished anointing her face with cream and flour and went for a second bath.
The doorbell rang.
Gouranga opened the door and leapt away from it. It was Larissa Barnum, followed by her khansama, in grey uniform, complete with tarnished brass buttons and grey cap.
“Ask them!” she ordered.
The khansama said to Gouranga, “Where is your Mataji? Memsahib has to see her.”
The servant stammered, “Upstairs, but … ”
“What is he saying?” Mrs Barnum demanded.
“ … she does not see anyone.”
The khansama translated.
“What nonsense,” Mrs Barnum exclaimed. “I need to see her. If she is upstairs, I will go to her.”
And that was how 3 Dulganj Road had its first British visitor, a visitor who reached the bedrooms upstairs. Mrs Barnum darted curious glances around the first Indian home she had ever been in as she went up the dark stairwell that opened into Amulya’s stained-glass verandah and led to his bedroom. Her heels clattered on the cool, hard floor. Manjula, hearing the unfamiliar sound in the bathroom through a cascade of water, wondered what it was, then returned to her iron bucket and mug.
Mrs Barnum swept into Kananbala’s room and trilled cheerfully, “Well, here you are, we meet at last!”
Kananbala, startled, leapt up and exclaimed, “Oh Ma, what’s this?”
“Tell her,” Mrs Barnum ordered the khansama, who was hovering at the door.
“My memsahib would like you to come with her for a while, please,” the khansama said in Hindi. “It will not take long.”
Kananbala understood Hindi, though she did not speak anything but Bengali. She looked at the khansama and Mrs Barnum in speechless surprise. She had not left the house for what seemed like forever, let alone with strangers. It was impossible. She said so.
“That is absurd, quite absurd,” Mrs Barnum said, and walked up to Kananbala. Firmly, she took her arm, trying to lead her out of the room. “Don’t
worry,” she said in a reassuring voice. “It’s only across the road, there’s nothing to worry about. You’ll be back before anyone knows. D’you realise we’ve known each other for ages and never met?”
Kananbala looked up at Mrs Barnum’s smiling, confident face bobbing considerably above hers. What strangeness! Her clothes, the colour of her skin, the way she walked, shoulders thrown back. She noticed Mrs Barnum’s earlobes were long and pierced with green stones, that her front teeth were stained yellowish, that she smelt of roses and smoke. Kananbala had looked at Mrs Barnum so many nights and evenings separated by road, window grill, and distance that to have her so close seemed a revelation. Impelled by some irrational force, Kananbala felt she could not stay in her room any longer. She felt as if she could do anything at all, anything to get out of the house. She looked down at her sari, not one of her going-out ones, and smoothed it, saying, “I should change … ” But nobody heard her anxious murmur.
Mrs Barnum, dropping Kananbala’s arm, was standing at her window, the same window at which she had seen Kananbala every night looking out, waving to her. She examined the view from that window towards her own house across the road, the bougainvillea at the gate, the window upstairs, curtained against the world, the portecochère. How much had Kananbala seen that night, Larissa Barnum wondered. How different it all looked from this side of the road! Then she heard a muttering of voices behind her and called out to the servant, “Shoes, get her shoes, joota, joota!”
Kananbala divined what was required and went and slipped her feet into the good, wine-coloured velvet pair that Amulya had got her once from Whiteways in Calcutta, a pair she had never worn. She walked through the verandah, down the stairs, out of the gate and onto the road, suffused with an unreality that made her stagger. The light was too bright, the trees too tall, the road too long and smooth. She had not been outside the house before dusk for months. For months, she had seen the world outside from her window, or by evening light when Amulya took her to the garden to make her walk. She stumbled again. Mrs Barnum held her elbow and said, “There, it’ll be alright, it’s just strange at first. What bastards, to lock you up.” The khansama thought it best not to translate everything.