by Anuradha Roy
Kalpana, lanky and slouching, had a penetrating voice, a tight bun, straight thick eyebrows, and a dark moustache. She leaned a sloping shoulder on the door as she waited for Meera and said to Kananbala, “How’re you, Thak’ma, thought up any juicy swear words recently? How about dung-faced donkey? Or grease-nosed sister-fucker?”
Meera breathed in deep, said nothing, and continued with the tricky bulge of the dome, erasing a line that had come out wrong.
“Arre baap.” Kalpana turned a wide-eyed look of make-believe astonishment towards Meera. “Everyone’s too busy today,” she observed, “drawing things that have been around for hundreds of years. What with people spending all their time wandering here and there at ruins and temples, I suppose I don’t need to wash clothes and keep house either!” She wiped her face with an ostentatious swipe of her sari and sat down on the floor, staring at Meera, whose pencil wobbled under her sarcastic gaze.
Mukunda appeared and fidgeted by the door. “Manjuladi wants you in the kitchen,” he said.
Meera scowled at him. “Tell her I can’t come just now,” she said. “I’m doing something. Is it possible in this house to get any of my own work done?”
“Oooh, your own work!” Kalpana’s voice was mocking. “You have a lot of your own work these days!”
Meera’s forehead began to throb. She saw the maid looking her up and down, saying but not saying what everyone thought: that Meera was a glorified maid too, one with an education, a maid who was aspiring to the master, a widow who had begun to dream up an impossible future.
She pushed her chair back so hard as she stood up that it fell. Her sketchbook and pencil dropped to the floor unregarded. Mukunda looked at her face and edged away. Meera went up to Kalpana, who stood in a hurry.
“If you can’t speak with some decency,” Meera said, “don’t speak to me at all. Do you understand?”
Before the maid could reply, a quaver came from Kananbala’s direction: “And who is it you’re fucking these days, Meera?” she was saying. “Who is it you’re fucking? Who – is – it – you’re – fucking?”
Meera whirled towards Kananbala, horrified. Kananbala’s eyes were invisible behind glasses on which the morning sun shone. Her smile was sweet and denture-less. She repeated the words in a sing-song, absent-minded tone, rattling one of Mrs Barnum’s tins to keep time. Kalpana guffawed. Meera rushed out of the room, tears stinging her eyes. She could not, could not, continue living in Songarh. She must leave. Anywhere would be better than here. She would go to her brother and beg for shelter, she would look for a job in a city, anything but this nightmare.
She ran to the middle room and sat on the edge of her bed, shoulders tingling again with that familiar pain. Her life had boiled over when she wasn’t looking. What did I expect, she thought, remembering one of Manjula’s sayings, that I’d sprinkle cold water onto hot oil and not get burned by the sputter?
She became aware after a while that her breath was a noisy wheeze. Where’s my trunk? she panicked. Where’s the trunk in which I brought my clothes when I came here? The thought began to grow and cloud her mind. She got up and looked under the bed. She tried the attic in the long room. She could not make out its familiar mustard colour among the shapes huddled there. Frantic, she rushed up the staircase to the loft, but it wasn’t there either. As she came down the stairs, she encountered Kamal going into his rooms. He smiled at her with the new smile he had manufactured just for her.
Meera ran down the stairs, hand sliding on the banisters. Nirmal was coming up and paused at the landing to let her pass. “Where are you rushing to?” he said, sounding eager, but she did not pause.
She stopped by the door to slip her feet into her chappals and let herself out. There was a heaviness in the air, the stillness that comes before a downpour. She began to walk with rapid steps. As her distance from the house grew, she stopped and looked up at the louring sky.
There was a sudden sharp slap on her face, of wind. It gathered force and buffeted her sari. The tall trees at the edges of the fields bent double, surprised by the squall. Dust gathered into ochre clouds and rushed towards her. She covered her face with the corner of her sari and screwed up her eyes. Above her, the tin-coloured sky cracked and warped with lightning. The gulmohars glowed an intense orange, gathering the half-light. She felt the first drops of rain on her arms and the sweet, brown smell of water meeting dry earth. It came down faster. She removed her aanchal from her face and looked up at the sky, holding her face up to the rain, shutting her eyes against what was already a torrent. Under the trees sheltered a few straggly clumps of people who looked at her in amazement.
Something unlocked deep inside her as the rain fell on her face, and into the earth next to her, muddied her sari and gritted her slippers with dirt. In some other place, where nobody knew her, she would start all over again. She would leave as soon as she could. She would get away to a big city where nobody knew her. She would make room for herself.
Already the rain was tapering off, leaving only the damp earth smell which wiped out all memory of the smouldering days that had gone before.
* * *
It had been only about six months since Nirmal’s return to Songarh, and the serenity he had thought was his to keep had scattered over the past fortnight, leaving in its place a profound disquiet. Smoking his fourteenth cigarette of the day, he rested his elbows on the parapet of his roof, listening to Mrs Barnum’s piano which even from this distance was violent and lonely and sad. The crashing notes were reassuring, a sound from long ago, unchanged since his childhood. He wished he was a fossil responding to geological time, creaking, calcifying, hardening, going deeper and deeper into a rock-face or river-bed, metamorphosing over thousands of years from flesh and blood and marrow into stone; better to be a fossil than human, on the cusp of some painful new development almost every day.
In the years since Shanti’s death he had grown so accustomed to solitude that he had lost the ability, perhaps even the need, for friendship. And now, all of a sudden, Meera had told him she was going away to her brother.
“Going away,” Nirmal had repeated.
“Yes.”
“When will you be back?”
“I … he wants me to stay, he says there’s a school near his house, I could teach drawing … or something else. His wife is lonely too and my mother wants me as well.”
She had wrapped her sari a little tighter around her, taken a last look at the ruined fort and turned away from the dogs still tangled up in her sari, pawing her for more food, rolling over in delight at seeing her again. “I just came to see the pups one last time, I have to leave tomorrow.”
“They’ve been waiting for you every evening,” Nirmal had said. “They couldn’t tell why you’d stopped coming, they kept looking towards the path thinking you’d appear.”
“I know,” Meera had said. “How could I have made them understand? I was thinking of them too, but it wasn’t possible to come.”
“I can’t understand!” Nirmal had burst out. “Why this sudden decision to go? Couldn’t you stay a little longer so that –”
Meera had stopped him mid-sentence. “I have to go,” she had said. “It’s all settled.” She had started to walk away, then stopped to say, “If you could carry on feeding the dogs, just until the puppies are older … ”
Sleeping or awake, Nirmal thought the same thoughts. What had changed? Had he done something to make Meera leave? Had he suggested anything inappropriate? Was she offended that he had brought fish for her to eat? Surely not! Was she afraid of the new-found ease of their proximity?
He was not just bewildered about Meera. His mind swung between her and Mukunda; he felt unable to free himself from them. Again and again he remembered the time he had first gone to Mukunda’s orphanage because he had nothing to do, the whim of a pleasant winter morning – he had thought he would go and see the boy his father had left money for in his will – and he had returned with Mukunda, all of six years old.
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br /> Manjula had opened the door to Nirmal that distant afternoon; behind him was the boy. He had a thin face with a dimpled chin, greasy hair, large eyes bright with curiosity, and curly, long lashes, like a girl’s. He was in a blue shirt that looked as if it belonged to someone much older than him, his shorts came down to well below his knees.
“This is Mukunda,” Nirmal had explained. “I have brought him home.”
The argument over whether or not to keep Mukunda had continued for two or three days. Nirmal had refused to give in. The boy was too good for the orphanage; they taught them very little, fed them even less and beat them if they disobeyed. After all, our father wanted him looked after. He must be given a place, a life.
“What, in our bedrooms?” Manjula’s voice trembled with rage. “Do we know what caste he is? He could be any caste, he might even be a Muslim. I will not stand it. Hari, Hari!”
“I’m not sending him back,” Nirmal had insisted. “He can stay in my room.”
“Your room! That’s in the middle of the house. I will not allow any such thing. I will not.”
There was a compromise. The boy would stay, but in the outhouse. Would he be scared? Nirmal had asked him, and Mukunda had flashed a brilliant smile. “Me scared? I’m not scared of anything!”
And now Mukunda had to go. Kamal and Manjula had won the long battle.
In bringing Mukunda to the house, he had been whimsical, Nirmal thought. Now he was going to turn him out with equal arbitrariness. He would disguise it, of course. Do it on the pretext of sending him to a good school in Calcutta. He would take care of his needs and comforts. He would tell Mukunda it was for his future, to broaden his world, give him new opportunities.
But Nirmal could not disguise it from himself. He had brought in the child when it was convenient for him, and now that Bakul was growing up it was no longer convenient.
Nirmal chain-smoked and paced on the terrace and longed for the time before he had returned to Songarh, when he had slept in his low-slung camp cot, separated from the open sky only by the canvas of his tent, too tired by day-long work in the sun to think or worry or feel.
He had only wanted to study earthquakes, he thought, not be their cause.
* * *
Meera was ready to go. All her things had fitted into the trunk with which she had arrived. Her train was to leave in an hour. Mukunda had gone to fetch a tonga to take her to the station. She walked from room to room, checking if she was leaving anything vital behind.
Someone touched her arm. She turned around, suppressing a scream.
“What’s the matter?” Manjula said, “I just wanted to … ”
“Oh, Manjuladi.” Meera sat down on the nearest bed with a thump. “You startled me.” The touch of Kamal’s hand on her back was never far.
Manjula looked over her shoulder to make sure nobody was eavesdropping and took a small bundle from her waist. She opened it and held it out to Meera.
“What’s this?”
“Just keep it,” Manjula said. “You never know when you might need help, a woman always needs something to fall back on.”
Meera opened the bundle. In it was a thick gold chain and six bangles. They felt heavy in her hand and glinted in the darkened room.
“I cannot,” she said. “I can’t take this.”
“Don’t fuss,” Manjula said in an urgent whisper. “And don’t say a thing, I haven’t told anyone about this. Just pack it away quickly. Gold is a woman’s parent and husband when she has neither. Look, here’s Mukunda coming up the stairs.” She gave Meera’s hand a quick squeeze.
Meera watched her go and was stabbed with the certainty that Manjula knew. She must. She must know what her husband had done.
But there was no time for thought. Mukunda had arrived with a tonga. As Meera got into it, she looked back at the house. It seemed a little smaller, or perhaps the trees had grown since the first time she had seen it all those years ago. The paint had begun to blacken in patches, and she could see a little peepal begin to send out its leaves from a crack in the upper floor, near the parapet she had leaned over so many times to look out at the ruins. She wondered if she would ever see it again. She wondered if she felt sad or afraid or relieved.
Opposite, a window at Mrs Barnum’s creaked open and they heard a voice call out, “Bye bye Meera, and see that you come back now and then!” Then the window slammed again and only the clucking of a hen broke the afternoon quiet.
* * *
Meera sat in the train and watched Mukunda shuffling about on the platform outside, nothing to say, yet unable to leave until the train did. She wondered what errand she could give him to ride over the waiting time, but there was nothing; the station was not metropolitan enough for a magazine stand, and she had food. Each time she said, “Don’t wait Mukunda, go home,” he smiled and replied, “What’s there to do, Meeradi? I’ll watch your train leaving.” Around him people jostled and pushed. He seemed thinner outside the house, or perhaps, Meera thought, I haven’t looked at him properly for ages. He was in a shabby, blue, oversized shirt darned roughly near one shoulder. Meera felt something inside her wrench at the sight of the darn. He must have darned it himself, this old hand-me-down shirt. She wished she had bought him some clothes before leaving. He had been withdrawn, his ebullience smothered the last few days. Ever since he had heard of his own impending departure for a new school in Calcutta, he had even stopped playing with Bakul.
Now he would not look at her, standing there in his patched-up shirt, tracing the dirt on the platform with his slipper. She wanted to reach out and hold him.
“You and I came here, to the house, the same year, and now we’re leaving for new things the same year too,” she said. “You’ll go to a good, big school, see a big city, become a real scholar! We’ll meet again, won’t we?” She put her hand out through the train’s window to touch his cheek, but the train had begun to move. “Look after yourself, Mukunda,” she cried out, feeling a sob in her throat, not knowing what she was crying about, her eyes wet. “Come and see me sometime, come and see me sometime soon.”
Nirmal rushed into the station a minute too late, just in time to see Meera’s face, striped by the bars of the train’s window, recede from view.
* * *
A fortnight later, another tonga came to the door, a different set of luggage was piled into it, and Nirmal and Mukunda left for the railway station in a cloud of dust. Bakul trailed back into the house after they had gone. She paused by the well, and by the mango tree. She kicked a pebble all the way to Mukunda’s old room, could not enter it for the pain of seeing it empty, then wandered back inside, going from room to room, almost breathless with the terror of knowing she would not find Mukunda. When people died, you did not see them again. She had never seen her mother – it was so, it didn’t hurt. But to know Mukunda was not dead, that he was alive, and going further and further away with every turn of the tonga’s wheel. To know he was alive but far away in a different world, doing things she could not visualise, making friends she would not know. Forgetting her by and by, stopping even to think of her. To know that he would begin to forget what she looked like. To think that she would not hear his voice every day, close to her ears. To know that today could have been just a normal day, like any other, when they’d have wandered the garden, and played and talked. To think that yelling “Mukunda!” in the general direction of the well or his room would no longer bring her an answering shout.
Bakul went from room to room, trying to subdue the scream that was building up inside her. She would not cry, she would not give the grown-ups that satisfaction. She would never speak to her father again. Couldn’t he at least have waited for the promised Manoharpur holiday before sending Mukunda away? “No,” her father had said in that impersonal way he had. “The dig’s just started, I can’t go on holidays now. I have to go to Calcutta on work next week, and I’ll take just Mukunda this time. We can go to Manoharpur later. We’ll go together, this isn’t the last time you�
�ll see him, Bakul, be sensible.”
Wasn’t it? She knew it was the last time, she knew she would never see him again, and if she did, it could not be the same. Mukunda knew that too, though neither of them had said anything that morning as they lay on the grass in the garden. Bakul’s frock had picked up reeds and thorns, stubborn burrs which Mukunda had tried to loosen, squinting at them in frustration. She decided she would not wash the frock in which she had spent that last morning with Mukunda. She would keep it as it was, in a corner of her cupboard, and the thorns would remind her of him.
On the windowsill in the tuition room she noticed something. She picked it up. It was a thin, long, bamboo flute. Mukunda’s flute; he had bought it at the Songarh mela a few years before. He had learned to play strange little tunes on it. How could he have forgotten to pack it in his brand-new trunk with his brand-new clothes?
Bakul sat on the windowsill and stroked the flute, running her fingers over its ridges and holes. She put it to her lips as if to play it.
Then she raised the flute and hit herself with it on her open palm. She looked at her palm, then hit it again. She hit it again and then on and on, as if in a trance, until her palm went red and blistered and her skin split.
PART III
THE WATER’S EDGE
ONE
“Look, a skeleton!” one of my workmen exclaimed.
However busy I was, and however many buildings I was building, I always supervised each one’s first day of digging. That day I sat on a tin folding chair on the building site, shaded by my usual large, black umbrella by then so worn out that the sun came in through its many minute holes as if through a salt cellar. The week before we had cleared out the last of the debris from the crumbling mansion we had demolished, and work on the foundations of a new building had just begun. I had been arguing with my manager about some detail in his accounts when I heard the workman’s voice: “Look, a skeleton!” After a pause I heard another labourer snort with disappointment, “Hah, just a dog or cat, Nandu, carry on.”