by Anuradha Roy
To end this story: this was the only instance, to my knowledge, when Aangti Babu made a loss. The old retainer to whom we had spoken turned out to be playing a double game. He had apparently taken earnest money from five parties before Aangti Babu, showing all of them forged documents. By the time anyone found out, he had disappeared. Nobody could report him to the police because they had broken the law by trying to buy the property from him. Aangti Babu seethed and cursed, but there was little he could do. Neither he nor anyone else knew where the original deed was, without which nothing could be bought or sold.
I was for once delighted that a deal had been a hoax, and not in the least discomfited by my disloyalty. I felt happy to think the house was to remain as it was, serene by the river, untouched.
In a few days the house became just one among many others, and I forgot all about it as I immersed myself in preparations for another demolition.
* * *
A few months later, Aangti Babu called me early into his office. He had told me the previous day that he would need to see me first thing in the morning, so I was ready, my heart uncomfortably loud, my forehead damp with fear. I tried to reconstruct the week that had gone before, the days immediately preceding, and could think of no mistakes I had made in my work.
It was business he wanted to discuss. He asked me to sit down. I had always stood in his room, and continued to stand, my head a little bent, deferential and attentive. He looked up at me, irritable, and said, “Can’t you sit when I tell you to? I’ll get a crick in my neck looking up and talking.”
I lowered myself into a chair as Aangti Babu stuffed a paan through his betel-red, flaky lips.
“Listen carefully,” he said. “You have to handle this on your own, so take some notes and remember what I say.”
I looked around for paper and a pencil, furtively so that Aangti Babu would not comment on my lack of readiness. But he did not bother, having shut his eyes, joined his fingers to make a pyramid, and begun to talk.
“This is another big house, a little bit like the riverside one we went to some months ago,” he said. “It has a lot of land, and it’s in a locality we think will prosper. The town is a small one now, but I’ve been told there is a good chance of it becoming district headquarters in a year or two.” He opened his eyes and startled me with a question. “Do you speak Hindi?” he enquired.
“Yes, yes, I grew up outside … ”
“Alright,” he replied, shutting his eyes again. He had never been interested in knowing anything personal about me. I was used to it and expected nothing different.
“The house is owned by two brothers. There is a dispute.” Aangti Babu smiled to himself, his eyes still shut. “There always is. Or how would we make a living, eh? One of the brothers has sold this house to me,” he continued. “He needed money – failing business, large family, all the usual things. Now the problem is this.” He opened his eyes. “Are you listening?”
“Yes, of course,” I said.
“Then say something now and then,” Aangti Babu said, eyes narrowed, before shutting them again. I began to mumble a response at the end of each sentence. The fan whirred and creaked above us, paddling the still air. The morning had turned oppressive. Sweat pasted back to shirt and shirt to chair. I looked with longing at the covered glass of water on the desk, but did not dare. My pencil was slithery with the sweat on my hand.
“The house was owned by both brothers. The one who has sold it claims he tried to persuade the other to sell and has even given the other his share of the money. Hah! The old story!”
“Huh,” I agreed.
“Anyway, that’s none of our business. The older one had power of attorney over the younger because … oh, I forget the details. The older one has sold it using the power of attorney. So legally we are absolutely alright.”
“Then … ” I said in a murmur.
“The younger brother is refusing to move out. Oh, it’s fine, we’ve dealt with this kind of situation before. I got a better price from the older brother because there is this problem. And this one is easy … the younger brother, I mean. He’s not a tenant. He’s signed his rights away. All you need to do is to tell him to go, remove himself, leave the house … persuade him.”
“Persuade?” I said, nonplussed. “Hasn’t the older brother tried to do that already?”
Aangti Babu opened his eyes in sudden fury. I saw the bags under them were grey and red blood vessels snaked their way through the whites.
“If I were your age, I’d jump at this and not ask stupid questions,” he snarled. “It’s just that I am too busy to go and attend to this business. Do you understand?”
“No, no, I mean, yes, of course,” I stammered.
“Persuade him to leave. Understand? I’ve got Bhim and Harold there doing the normal things: banging on doors at night, ringing their bell and vanishing, breaking a window or two. It hasn’t worked. I want you to go there. I want an empty house. If you have to cut his water and electricity … if you need to frighten him … But no police. Don’t get into trouble with the police. Just get him out.”
Aangti Babu found a notepad and wrote a few lines on it. He wrote laboriously, hissing under his breath the words he was inscribing. I heard what he was writing before I saw it. When he was done, my hand, which did not seem to belong to me any longer, reached for the slip of paper. Aangti Babu’s handwriting was neat and rounded, like a child’s. The note confirmed what I had heard, but still the stubborn recesses of my brain refused to let in the information staring at me.
* * *
I walked out of Aangti Babu’s room feeling unconnected with my limbs. I was in the office, yet not in it at all. My ears had begun to whistle as if I were all at once weak with fatigue. When the tea boy clattered a cup on my table and said, “What, have you gone deaf? Here’s your tea,” I looked at it for long minutes, as if I did not know what a cup with hot brown liquid meant. Throughout the day I did the things I had to, but almost without knowing what I was doing.
At home, my wife startled me when she touched me on the elbow as I stood in the jasmine-scented darkness of the verandah, my mind racing ahead of my body. At dinner, seeing my untouched food, she exclaimed, “If this is what landing some responsibility does to you, just stay an assistant all your life, that would be better for all of us.”
At last the day of my departure arrived. I did not know what I had packed or how I got there, but some time in the afternoon, long before the train time, I found myself in the milling chaos of Howrah Bridge, staring at the barges that creaked along the flat, muddy river. People collided into me and cursed as they passed, ant-like beneath the towering metal arcs of the bridge. Trams clanged by, reduced by the crowd and the bridge to mechanical toys. I walked along looking at the river and one barge that had an orange and green tattered flag fluttering from its prow. Beside me the superstitious were bowing and whispering prayers to the Ganga.
I felt speechless and prayerless, my mind in turmoil.
Twelve years after Nirmal Babu had sent me away from Songarh to Calcutta, I was going back to Songarh. Aangti Babu had bought my old home from Kamal. I was to evict Nirmal Babu from the house I had grown up in.
And Bakul. I was to evict Bakul.
THREE
I sat by the window, my hair tossing in the wind. Outside, shadows rushed backward into the moon-pearled night. The breeze that came through the open window was warm, but still it dissipated the stuffiness of the overheated, third-class, metal compartment. Beside me, on the next bunk, a hunched form lay asleep, snoring in a rumble, then exhaling with a whistle. From above, the arm of another man drooped down almost into my nose. The train seemed to be chugging along with my thoughts. “Bakul, Bakul,” each turn of its wheels said as it rushed over the plains of Bengal towards the hilly plateau of Songarh.
For all these years I had not allowed myself to think of her because it would open gates to misery that I knew I didn’t have the power to shut. I never let my mind draw her
picture: her turned-up nose, her always-wild hair, the down on her thin cheeks, and her eyes, like pools of river water, which stared rather than looked. From the time I was six and she about four, we had been together. On cold winter mornings we would watch our breath mist and mingle, in the heat of summer afternoons we would throw buckets of chilled well-water at each other and squeal with delight. When Bakul first menstruated, it was to me she came running, alarmed, excited, voluble – I was sickened and horrified at the blood stains, thinking she had somehow hurt herself. We were each other’s secret-sharers, we were two orphans who had found refuge.
We had no sense of our lack of other friends. Perhaps it was unnatural. A boy and a girl, so intimate, not even related. It must have bothered people, although we were joyously oblivious of their concerns.
That is why I was sent away of course – I understood that now, as a father myself. But at that time, when Nirmal Babu told me he was putting me in a school in Calcutta and that I would have to leave Songarh, my mind had no room for reasons. Poets talk metaphorically about broken hearts, but I know that mine was broken then. I felt it cracking, a physical pain, a knife in my ribs, when Nirmal Babu told me I was to leave and repeated it when I did not believe him. When I asked why, on the way to the station – just once, I never asked again – he smiled in a way I knew to be false and said it was for a better education and to take me away from being ordered around by others in the house. That night when I was thirteen, and the world was ending as the train bumped and jogged me away from Bakul and Songarh, I had to bite the blanket so that Nirmal Babu would not hear me cry. I made up my mind: I would never go back to Songarh, never speak to him again for tossing me around from orphanage to Songarh to Calcutta – a game of badminton and I the shuttlecock.
Once he had put me in the school, Nirmal Babu paid the fees on time, wrote me letters a few times a year and twice came to see me. I especially remember the first of those visits, seeing him in the corridor, Motilal the peon saying to Nirmal Babu, here is your boy, and I looking but not looking at his shapeless bush shirt, his big toe poking out from a clumsy sandal, his loose trousers, his gaunt face oddly eager to please. We walked out across the heat-deadened playing field and through the school gates in an awkward silence punctuated only by polite questions from him. He realised, as I did, that plucked out of Songarh’s spaces for casual companionship, where there was no need for conversation, we were both at a loss. We tramped through the Indian Museum and walked past the Geological Survey, heat curling out of cement footpaths, driving ticklish trickles of sweat down our backs, Nirmal Babu asking if I’d like ice cream between holding forth on the Gandhara and Kushana periods as I trailed a few feet behind, keeping back the question I wanted to hurl at him: “Why did you give me a home and then throw me out of it?”
I lay back on my hard wooden bunk now, staring into the darkness. I was being sent back again to Songarh, a lifetime after being sent away. Except that I was a shuttlecock no more, rather an arrow tearing through the night to do harm.
* * *
The man in the next bunk began to let out phlegmy snores. I was far too agitated to sleep. I could think of nothing in particular, yet my head was crowded with so many thoughts that there was no place for them.
Mrs Barnum. I had not thought of her for years. Was she still alive? She had decided to sketch me the minute she saw me. “Sit still,” she had exclaimed, pointing to a big blue-cushioned chair and scrabbling around for her pad and pencil. “What bones! Boy, what is your name?” When she showed me what she had drawn, it was a boy with an angular face, large eyes, dimpled chin and a nose that was a little too long for the face. “That’s not like me at all,” I had thought, though I did not dare to say so. Bakul had begun to laugh when she saw the sketch and said, “Yes, that’s just how he looks. Funnyface!”
Would I see Mrs Barnum too, I wondered. How would it be, even if years and years had passed since she caught me prying in her bedroom? How could I have snooped around as I did then, especially after the way she had educated me with whatever books she had in the house, her encyclopedias, her Women’s Weekly magazines and romances? I remembered the first of her monthly birthdays, spooky affairs to which she summoned spirits and told our futures. She was festive in a full-length lace gown and tiara, darting from place to place, stroking my cheek in passing. She had clapped her hands. “Music!” she had exclaimed. “You children must have gaiety and music!” She had picked up the bell by her side and shaken it until the sound pealed out. After five minutes, we heard the khansama come up the stairs wheezing.
“Yes, Madam?” he said, his obsequiousness ostentatious.
“We must have music, khansama, put on the record, that record!” She settled back into her chair, eyes closed.
The khansama shuffled up to the dusky alcove at the far end of the room, where a brass-horned gramophone stood. There was a record in place already, a black disk we could see from our chairs. He dusted it with a corner of his shirt, wound up the gramophone and put a heavy needle on it as it began to rotate.
We sat rigid in our chairs as sound snaked out from the player. I could recognise none of it as music. It began with a tremendous noise that sounded like a tree falling or a ship crashing into ice. Then it became almost silent. If I didn’t have sharp ears I would have thought the music had ended. But then it became once more loud and menacing, a huge mix of discordant sounds rising and falling. I kept expecting some singing to start, but there was no human voice. I imagined in the music the dramatic, solitary snow peaks Nirmal Babu talked about, gigantic open spaces and tiny rivulets. The music would swell, then melt down and once or twice I half rose from my chair thinking it had ended, but it started again. I looked at Bakul for help. Mrs Barnum’s eyes were closed and a smile touched the edges of her lips. All of a sudden the music dwindled. For a few seconds I thought with relief that it had actually, at last, ended.
This time the silence was broken by the thin sound of a flute. I recognised flutes. In the orphanage we had played them too, and I had a flute of my own that I had bought at a fair. But this one sounded like no other. It was only after I met Suleiman Chacha and whistled him the tune that I came to know what it was – the “Finlandia” by Sibelius, he told me, music from very far away.
Whenever I thought of Bakul later in the Calcutta school dormitory, creaking in my charpoy, swatting mosquitoes, I thought of her with that music, in that house, by the lily pond where I had swum with her, where I had felt her lips crushed against mine, felt her peach-sized breasts through the wet cloth of her thin, summertime frock, her mouth pressed on mine and then away, her hands inside my shirt, and then fumbling in my shorts that seemed to have come alive. In moments of fantasy I used to dream of setting sail with her, charging through black seas and sparkling icebergs to the end of the world. I felt I could almost hear the flute that stilled the icy waves and wondered if Bakul heard it too.
The train to Songarh sped on. I had not thought of my wife or son since leaving home. But this did not occur to me at the time. When the real reason for the journey nibbled at my mind, I pushed it away.
* * *
So much had changed in Songarh in the years I had been away that I could find no familiar landmarks and grew more and more confused on my way from the hotel to Dulganj Road. Everything looked meaner, smaller. I was used to Howrah, which I thought the most enormous, grandest, busiest station possible; Songarh’s two-platform station reminded me of the mofussil towns I visited with Aangti Babu. Finlays had peeling paint, a signboard hanging askew, and stiff, pointy-breasted mannequins. I could see that the small shops that lined the single major road sold cheap, tawdry things. There were some new streets and buildings, however, and I misdirected the tonga many times until we had a quarrel over the fare and it was past five when I finally stood before the door of 3 Dulganj Road. Once my home.
I had fantasised in the train that I would stumble upon her, surprise her alone, but Bakul was not in the garden, nor was she by the well. I w
alked through the empty garden to the front door. I took a deep breath, ran my fingers through my combed hair, reached out for the familiar brass knocker, then realised it was no longer there. On the wall by the door, I found instead a switch for an electric bell. When I pressed it, somewhere far inside I heard an answering tinkle and the bark of a dog.
My heart had begun to beat uncomfortably. I tried to slow down my breathing, wanting to be calm and coherent. I looked back at the garden to distract myself. A madhabilata was in full flower on one of the walls. It had not been there before – a pink flowering intruder in a garden of whites. The mango trees had grown and small, green fruit were visible even at a distance. The sun was still hot and high in a stark-blue sky.
The door had not opened. Enough time had passed for me to ring the bell again. I pressed the switch harder this time.
As soon as the bell rang, I heard an agitated voice above the frantic barking of the dog; it came from just behind the door.
“Who is it?” It was a young boy’s voice.
I almost replied, “It’s me,” as I had always done years before, but then remembered and said, “I … my name is Mukunda.”
“I can’t open the door. I don’t know who you are.”
“Listen, I have to see … ”
“I told you, I can’t.”
I could feel sweat tickle my scalp and bead my forehead. My fresh blue shirt had started to stick to my back. Annoyance at talking to a door and having the dog bark on at me made me shout:
“Look, whoever you are, I have to see Nirmal Babu and I am not going until I do. Where is he? If you don’t let me in I’ll just climb over the courtyard wall.”
There was a brief lull in the barking. Then the voice, which had a slight tremor, now said, “You can’t scare me. You can’t climb over anything. I won’t open the door. And the dog bites.”