by Anuradha Roy
I looked into the tumbled earth and, within a tangle of bleached weed roots, I saw an almost perfectly preserved brownish skeleton of what must have been a dog, with the mouldy remains of a blanket and an aluminium dish from which it must have eaten all its life. I sat on a stone next to the grave filled with disproportionate grief for this dog I had not known, for the family that buried its dish and blanket with it because they could not bear to part the dog from its possessions. I thought without reason of the children that may have pranced around with the dog in that vanished mansion’s garden.
There was a house once whose garden I knew, every last tree, and where the stairs had chipped away and which of the windows would not shut. The ophthalmologist asked me once, “Do foreign bodies ever interfere with your vision? Floating black specks?” And I thought, not bodies, houses, and not foreign, ground into my blood.
“Shall we carry on, Babu?” the labourer had enquired after a bemused pause. The sight of me sitting practically in the dirt next to the dog’s grave had startled him.
I could not imagine shovelling the dog out with its things like the rest of the rubbish we were daily heaping into trucks and sending away.
Eight families now live in slabs, one on top of the other, over those bones and the dish, which I planted deep in the foundations. They know nothing of it, naturally; skeletons have no place in new apartments.
People are afraid of ghosts in old houses. I know it’s the new ones that are haunted, by the crumbling homes they replace. Old houses don’t go away. They lurk crumbling and musty, their cobweb-hung rooms still brooding over the angled corners of shining new kitchens and marbled bathrooms, their gardens and stairwells still somewhere there in the elevator shafts.
Left to myself – despite my profession – I would let old houses remain exactly as my memory told me they always had been. Termites would write their stories across ceilings and walls, their wavering lines mapping out eventual destruction. Once the termites had dissolved the houses, returned them to the earth, a natural cycle would be complete.
I know all about houses and homes, I who never had one.
I am Mukunda. This is my story.
* * *
Other people have fables about their naming. My grandfather called me Nachiketa, they may say, and then my father changed it to Arjun. I have none. Who named me? Why did they give me a Hindu name? I have no answers to these questions. Perhaps Amulya Babu, who I have been told placed me in the orphanage that supplies my earliest memories of the world, gave me this name on an impulse when asked to fill out the official form. Perhaps my mother, whoever she was, had always thought that if she had a boy she would name him Mukunda.
People have stories too about their physical features: well into old age, they debate if they have their father’s nose or mother’s chin. Are they tall because their grandfather was? And will their children inherit their family propensity to insanity or baldness? Of all this, I am free. I admit I spent some years of my childhood scanning strangers around me, wondering if the map of their faces would show me a way to my lost parents. But not for long. Among parent-owning boys, I began to feel a sense of freedom as I grew up: they had a hundred things forbidden them, I had none. I could make myself as I pleased. I was free of caste or religion, that was for the rest of the world to worry about. I felt released from the burden of origins, from the burden of belonging anywhere, to anyone.
* * *
In college, my friend Arif and I did pull-ups from the branch of a mango tree, I to get broad shoulders, Arif to become taller. Arif’s hair had thinned, but he was so muscular he looked menacingly strong, like a short, bald boxer. In truth he was too gentle, sweet-tempered, and squeamish to smash a cockroach with his slippers. We were friends because we were both outsiders: I, provincial, casteless, wealthless; he a Muslim. I was taller than Arif so I liked walking next to him, my thatch of hair combed back in a puff, my new belt with a rearing unicorn buckle gleaming at my waist. I had two loose, white cotton shirts which I wore with the sleeves rolled up, and we would saunter along Chowringhee together, stealing looks at Anglo-Indian girls in skirts, wondering how to begin a conversation. Despite our city-boy airs, we were too shy and nervous to begin speaking and the Roxannes and Lisas slid past, animated, not noticing us. We lit cigarettes, feeling looked at as we exhaled. We tried to appear jaded, but we gaped at Calcutta as if it were a foreign city.
In this way we both reached our eighteenth birthdays, his date and month certain, mine whatever I wanted it to be. It was 1945 and we had both finished our Inter. I had no precise notions about the future, but the world of work and earning my own money began to beckon me like a spell. All my life I had lived on charity. I had not been aware of it my first few years in an orphanage, but the next few, in Nirmal Babu’s family, I had felt it as keenly as a blister that the rough edge of a slipper keeps rubbing. At eighteen I determined that I would never depend on anyone again. I knew that Nirmal Babu wanted me to study further, but I knew equally that I would not. As soon as I got a job, though just a poorly paid clerkship at a tannery, I stopped collecting the interest on Nirmal Babu’s fixed deposit. I wrote Nirmal Babu a brief letter saying I had passed and he did not have to send me extra money any longer. I gave up my room in the college hostel and left no forwarding address.
I cut my ties with Songarh as once it had with me. I was now alone in the world. No solitary pilot in the clouds, no climber on the point of a peak, could have felt my combination of vertigo and euphoria.
* * *
Now that I had finished college, I began to look for lodgings and meals. Get a wife, the boys at the hostel chuckled, a rich one, aren’t you an eligible groom, you casteless bastard. Arif was about to leave Calcutta, having landed a job as an accountant for a rich relative, a textile manufacturer in Lahore. Two days before he was due to leave, we went for a long walk through the streets of Calcutta, heading in a pleasantly aimless fashion towards the house in which he was a lodger. It was a still sort of day, and heavy clouds were beginning to collect. A thread of light streaked through the sky now and then, and the low rumble of distant thunder reached us after a minute’s pause. We had idled in the green of the Maidan, eaten a plate of kababs and rotis on the street in Dharamtolla and then meandered towards College Street. Arif was looking into the window of a bookshop while I stood facing the street, saying to him, “Hurry up, I think it’s going to rain.”
It was then that I saw them standing on the pavement across the street, Nirmal Babu holding a cloth bag in one hand, his face thinner than I remembered, his hair higher up his forehead than before. Beside him, a girl who must have been Bakul. She looked like Bakul but for the sari, I had never seen her in a sari – if she had turned a little to the left I would have seen her face. I stared across the rush of traffic and people. I willed her to turn towards me. I had only to cross that wide road crowded with moving cars and stumbling people and I would be next to them, saying, “After all these years!” But how could it be that I had seen them and they had not seen me? They looked away instead, towards the other end of the street. Sometimes they spoke to each other and Nirmal Babu looked at his watch.
I turned to Arif. “You go on to Suleiman Chacha’s, I have to … ” I could still see Nirmal Babu’s tall head bobbing across the street. Just above him hung a sign for Cuticura Vanishing Cream, rusted and askew, the pink-faced model peeling paint. Behind him a line of bookshops, books tumbling out of them onto the pavement. I started to cross the street, pausing in the middle to let a tram pass. It stopped before me like a wall. I cursed it for stopping just there, just then. But it had, for passengers, I thought stupidly. That’s it – Nirmal Babu and Bakul were looking the other way waiting for their tram, and now it had come. I ran as it began to move. From the outside I could make out Nirmal Babu shuffling around in the men’s section, looking for a seat, and Bakul’s face in the women’s section, just a few feet from mine. I opened my mouth to call her, maybe I even did, for it seemed to me that for a mo
ment she peered out, as if looking for someone, but then the tram began to move, she turned away and I fell back.
“A 23!” Arif said, looking at the receding tram. “Why didn’t you call me, it would’ve gone direct to Suleiman Chacha’s … Hey Mukunda, are you listening? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”
“It’s nothing,” I mumbled. “We’re on the wrong side of the road, couldn’t have reached it in time even if we’d run.” Instinct had made me rush towards them, but that moment outside the tram, seeing them not seeing me, wondering if they wanted not to see me, stirred my old bitterness about the way I had been cast out of their lives.
* * *
Suleiman Khan was Arif’s landlord – Arif was a lodger in his house, and we both called him Suleiman Chacha, deferring to his age. When we reached his house after our day-long stroll, he was reading his newspaper, his parrot nibbling his shoulder. Chacha’s face was hidden behind the Statesman, but I sensed his eyes upon me now and then. When I was about to leave, he spoke. It would be lonely for them without Arif, he said. They had always had a lodger, before Arif there had been others. Would I like to live in Arif’s room?
He was hesitant. The words came stumbling out and stood there between us, growing in the silence. It was almost presumptuous of him. I was perhaps the only boy in the college who visited Arif at home and ate there with him. Visiting was bad enough, but living there! It was unheard of for a Hindu to live in a Muslim’s household, especially in those times, when people could talk of nothing but whether the country would be fenced into Hindu and Muslim pens, India and Pakistan. If it were, which would I choose? I did not feel much of a Hindu, or anything at all in particular, with my origins such a matter of speculation and hearsay. Instead I had the offer of a roof over my head. I must have begun to smile, for I saw Chacha smiling at me, and then at Arif, who slapped my shoulder and said, “It’s not the hostel, Mukunda, you’ll have to civilise yourself!”
Suleiman Chacha had offered me a home when I was about to become homeless. Did he perceive my need because he sensed he too would be homeless soon? Did he know then that by the next year mobs would roam the streets looking for kills, that he would have to come home before dark every day? There must have been some hint of prescience in his spontaneity with me, or else why did he offer his home to me, a near stranger?
I brought my trunk and moved into Arif’s room. They would take no rent and gave me two meals a day. They had no children, they said, and they had a big house. They had never taken rent from Arif either. I was astonished by their generosity and knew that I could never match it.
* * *
Suleiman Chacha was a teacher of history. He had for many years taught at a run-down school in Baghbazar, and although the school had the reputation of being a rowdy one in which the boys seldom came to class, they trooped into Suleiman Chacha’s. Chacha knew not only about the emperors, but also about their concubines, slaves, wives and generals. His classes often went beyond the set forty minutes as he chatted about the households, bazaars, roads, doctors, schools and peasants of times past. Most of the other teachers were only too happy to have a class after Suleiman Chacha’s because they had about twenty minutes less to teach and could blame it on him, although some, jealous of his popularity among the boys, had complained to the headmaster that he did not teach by the syllabus and left students unready for examinations. But the headmaster was perhaps under Suleiman Chacha’s spell as well, and did nothing to rein him in.
On many sultry, dark evenings at his house, as we sat out in the verandah waving mosquitoes away with our handfans, I too listened spellbound to Chacha talking of Jahangir’s library, or of Bahadur Shah’s last melancholic journey to Burma. For Suleiman Chacha the past was always in the present. In this he reminded me of Nirmal Babu, who used to measure time in centuries rather than minutes and seconds. Music reminded Suleiman Chacha of what Tansen sang for Akbar, kababs provoked a story about Lord Clive’s khansama, a painful boil he had on his knee made him chuckle about slanging matches between the vaids and hakims of medieval times. As he spoke, clearing his throat often, I not only saw the past before my eyes, I could even smell and hear it. Yet when I tried to repeat his stories to anyone, they never sounded the same.
In appearance he was not imposing. He was a short man, barely reaching my shoulder. His hair had fallen out early, leaving him with a bald scalp that shone with the perspiration that is Calcutta’s gift to its citizens most of the year. His beard was neat, though sparse, and his bony, longish face was sheltered on either side by overlarge ears whose lobes almost reached his jawline. His only striking feature was his eyes, which were a luminous grey, shadowed by eyebrows that with their very luxuriance compensated for the paucity of hair on his head and chin.
Chachi and he had been married very young, and by the time I came to know them, her habitual manner with him was a kind of exasperation. She berated him, sometimes loudly, sometimes in mutters, for everything: for letting his bathwater go cold on winter mornings; for forgetting to give the milkman her instructions; for filling up the house to such a point with his books; for his visitors coming too early and leaving too late. Chacha listened to her with a twinkle in his eye, and when she paused he said, “Come, Farhana Begum, it has been so long since I had a scolding, have I strayed into the wrong house?”
Their house, though situated in a shop-crowded gulli, was an airy one, with two floors and a small patch of dusty ground that had a mango and a lemon tree. Chacha had inherited it from an uncle who had died childless. The house had little furniture, and it was very clean, but you could see that the coverings were threadbare and the curtains had an infinity of darns that showed against the light when the sun shone through the windows. They could afford just one fan, and it was run only in the afternoons and at night in the large middle room.
There were reasons for their ascetic existence. Chacha’s pay was meagre – when were schoolteachers ever rich? – but also, if ever there was spare money, he could not resist spending it on books and music. Each time he came home with a new or secondhand book or record, he would creep upstairs trying to hide it in his clothes, while Chachi, detecting it by his demeanour, would cry out, “Again! You’ve done it again! Wasn’t this the month for a new kurta? Do you know that the children make fun of you at school for your clothes?”
“Aha, Farhana Bibi, but I had been looking for this book for months, and just as I was about to board the bus, I saw it on the stack and then bargained … I had money left and bought some nice bangles for you, but in all this, do you know I missed my bus and … ”
“Don’t tell me all this rubbish, I don’t want to know!”
He would turn to me for support, “This is a brilliant book, bhai, read it and tell me, tell your Chachi … ” He would hand me the book to look at, then snatch it back in a few seconds to open it and smell the pages. If it had a beautiful engraving on the title page he would show it to me. He would remove the dust jacket and finger the gilt embossing on the spine, and by then, having forgotten all about Chachi’s scolding, would go to her saying, “See, Farhana, see what beautiful lettering there is!”
Chachi would leave the room, but we could hear her muttering in the kitchen and each time she passed us. By dinner time, though, I would find the hot roti going first to Chacha, and at night there was peace as he read his new book and she darned clothes, humming old tunes under her breath, and I paced up and down wondering what to do until Chacha looked up with a frown and said, “Can’t you sit still? Read that book I gave you last week.”
* * *
I was nineteen and had lived at Suleiman Chacha’s for a year, though I cannot remember the month or day or season, only irrelevant details about that day. For example, I recall I had eaten bread with tea that evening. I rarely had bread to eat as it was more expensive than rotis, but that day I happened to walk past my old school, the one Nirmal Babu had put me in after Songarh. The bakery next to the school was still there, and the smell of fresh baking which
had tormented me through my school years still filled the lane. I could not stop myself; I spent all the change in my pocket on a cylindrical loaf of fresh bread. When I returned home with the bread in my hand, Suleiman Chacha said, “Now we have a rich lodger! Time we took some rent.”
Chachi said, “If you wanted bread so much, why didn’t you say so? I thought you liked my rotis.”
I took out the yellow Polson’s butter I had bought as well – even more flamboyant an expense – and toasted the bread on their electric ring. To this day the smell of fresh toasting bread makes me feel faintly nauseous. I handed them the thick, crisp, brown-edged slices soaking in salty yellow butter. Chacha dipped his into hot tea.
Chacha’s feet were in soft old chappals indented with toe circles. His kurta-pyjama was worn out, with several stitches loose. We were sitting as usual in the wide verandah in the last of the daylight. There was some noise from far away, a few explosions of firecrackers, and Chacha said, “Someone celebrating something.” He lit a cigarette and exhaled with a sigh. I could smell the smoke, pleasantly pungent. Despite the noise, a quiet contentment spread over the verandah, as if we were nestling in a translucent globe that fended off the world. The cups, the saucers, the faded purple flowers on them, the faint aroma of tea, even the chips in the old gilt edging on the saucers, all seemed to have a perfection that made me unwilling to touch anything and mar it. In the west, the last fragments of orange in the sky deepened to a luminous pink.
After we had finished the loaf and drunk all our tea, Chachi wrapped the remains of the butter in its paper while I went up to the roof to smoke.
My match remained unlit. In the distance, ringing the horizon, was an incandescent necklace of terrifying beauty: the city had been set on fire. Orange flames leapt, subsided, started somewhere new. The sky had turned an eerie red. I could hear a distant, monotonous roar broken by the odd high-pitched scream. Another of those explosions and I realised they were not firecrackers at all, they were probably bombs. An oily pall of smoke hung over the sky, smelling of hair and flesh and burning rubber. Although I knew I was too far away to be in danger, I felt a fog of fear rising within me and obliterating everything else. I knew something larger than I could comprehend was pacing out there in the darknesses between the firelight, something my instinct told me would change things forever.