by Anuradha Roy
I did not want to buy a new house straightaway. Whatever money I had, I wanted to put it into a construction business, and because most of my money was locked up in the Songarh house, there wasn’t much to spend. I was worried about how much money would be available to me once I started work on my own. All I could think about was economising, so I wanted to rent something small in an area we could afford. In the end I rented two rooms in a house in Shyambazaar. There wasn’t space enough to swing a cat in there. It was a slummy area. Open drains, shared bathrooms which were dirty. We had to stand in a queue for the lavatory each morning. Then the men and children bathed at a tap in the courtyard while the women waited their turn for the solitary bathroom. There were about eleven tenant families. Street shops surrounded us. Right outside our bedroom a stall sold pakoras all evening, and the oil fumes smoked up our room if we opened our single window. By night there were crowds of drunken men milling about near the stall. Every day, from the chicken and mutton cutlet shop next door, we heard the terrified squawks of birds being slaughtered, followed by the smell of frying meat.
Then one morning my wife went into the lavatory and found that the child who had been before her had left a pile of mustard-coloured turds on the floor. My wife had squelched them.
“On the floor,” she screamed. “What kind of children do people bring up that leave shit on the floor!”
“Ooooh,” the mother of the child called out in a high voice, “my, my, aren’t we lucky to have Queen Victoria herself staying with us! Used to a mansion, isn’t she?”
“You watch what you say, Nakuler Ma,” my wife yelled in a bellowing, heavy voice that I could hear from the first floor and did not recognise.
“And what will you do? Throw us out? Husband’s a big landlord, isn’t he? Runs a big business. Very high and mighty, aren’t we now?”
Another woman joined the fray and said to my wife, “Come on, a child’s leavings aren’t impure. Haven’t you heard? A baby’s pee is pure Gangajal. You’re a mother yourself, why should you mind?”
We moved house two weeks later, as soon as I had found another place, this time around Kidderpore. It was on a busy street slashed in different directions by tramlines. All evening and all day we could hear the clanging of trambells and the honks of buses below. Far into the night, when it was still and dark and even the trams had stopped, we would lie awake listening to the forlorn cries of a boy calling out for his drunk father. “Baba, Baba? Where are you?” he would call in a high voice that came from different directions as he walked the streets looking for his father. Then, long minutes later, he would stop shouting; perhaps he had found his father lying in a stupor somewhere and dragged him home. We would fall into tired sleep at last and wake to the sound of crows cawing and the trams clanging up and down once more.
It was one room, and a makeshift kitchen, but it was away from everyone else and there was a bathroom of sorts across the roof. I hung Noorie’s cage on the roof, by the window. She seemed to screech less than she had in the poky Shyambazaar rooms. My boy could be put out on the roof on a blanket with his toys when there was shade. He gurgled with delight again. After what seemed a lifetime of never hearing the end of it, I found the new quarters had calmed my wife down a little, perhaps only because of the constant exhaustion to which our new life had subjected us, and I began to look for work.
* * *
The reprieve was brief. My wife had from the start been sceptical about the real reason for the sale of the house; now my father-in-law began to appear on our doorstep every few days to poke and pry and reinforce her qualms. The early happiness in my marriage began to dribble through my fingers as inevitably as water in a cupped palm.
Barababu had married his daughter to me because of my prospects. Despite my parentless background, despite there being no information about my caste, my father-in-law had liked – or accurately calculated – my property and prospects enough to hand her over. He did not like the change in our circumstances any more than his daughter did. “We may not be well off,” he said to me more than once, “but we kept our daughter like a maharani. She’s not used to all this hardship you’re putting her through. And why?” It was latent hostility that I sensed in him more than puzzlement. I had long suspected I had been attractive to him as a prospective son-in-law more because of Suleiman Chacha’s house than for any qualities in me.
“It’s only temporary, while I set up the business,” I said.
“But why should there be this problem with money? That’s what I don’t understand,” he badgered me. “You’ve sold a big house in such a good locality, you should be rich! Instead you’re stingy about food and I don’t see you landing any contracts. Malini says you don’t even buy fish every day any more!”
“I have the money from the sale tied up in certain investments,” I said tight-lipped, turning away to put an end to the conversation. I began to find the very sight of my father-in-law, making his way up the stairs to our terrace room, wheezing and groaning, insupportable. Everything about him began to irk me: his overlarge nose with its hairy nostrils, his receding chin, his long-lobed ears over which he looped his dirty sacred thread when he washed his hands at the tap, and most of all the way his daughter and he spoke in whispers, darting looks in my direction. After he left and my wife repeated his questions to me as if they were her own, I said, “You don’t understand about business, keep out of it and let me do what I think is right!”
“You’re always shouting at me.”
“I’m not shouting. And I’m trying to tell you something simple. Let me do my work. Don’t interfere, don’t bother me. Do I try to tell you how to cook or bring up Goutam?”
“It’s not just this time,” she continued as if she had not heard me. “I only have to speak for you to snap my head off. If I ask you to come and eat, you start shouting ‘Can’t you see I’m working, can’t a man work in peace.’” She stormed out of the room muttering, “Since my speaking about anything annoys you, I won’t speak, you wait and see.”
Long silences would descend over the house, dense, tense hours broken only by the thin wail of the baby. I would leave in a huff and go and sit by the river on the Strand and watch the boats go past, emaciated boatmen pushing poles into the water to manoeuvre their old boats. Even they were happier, I thought. They knew what their work was, they earned their food and drink. Perhaps they were lucky and had no wives. At times I was racked by self-loathing at my duplicity, at the way I was making my family suffer, but I felt – I knew – that the course of action I had taken was the only possible one. Sitting by the river one day, watching the trams go past on one side and the boats on the other, I yearned with such intensity for the time I was unencumbered and light-hearted, walking the Maidan with Arif, talking of books and girls, that I almost walked into the river in despair. Arif’s Lahore was in a different country now, as was Suleiman Chacha’s Rajshahi. They were in the past – all my friends were. I was utterly alone. How had contentment deserted me? Why was I so overcome with dissatisfaction? Was it worth anything, this changed world in which I had lost a wife and gained only a longing for something so remote, so far in my distant past?
* * *
Six months passed without much change. My wife and I spoke, but we rarely talked. Her once-smiling face had assumed a rigid sternness. She lost her temper often. My child had become cranky. He had a long attack of some skin allergy that could not be diagnosed and I found it difficult to scrape together the money for his doctors and medicines. All night he kept waking up, wailing and sobbing and scratching patches on his body and scalp that went an angry red. To see him suffering tore my heart in two. The room on the roof was a heated box in summer and to sleep on the terrace was to have a symphony of mosquitoes around us. My father-in-law had been right; we could not afford to eat the things we had been used to.
It was not as though I had not been trying. I got little bits of work as an overseer as I waited for business opportunities that never came. Often, Aangti
Babu handed me these odd jobs with a sarcastic, smug air. But now that I was in theory an independent contractor, I was without his monthly salary, and uncertainty clouded our days. In the weeks when I had nothing lined up, I would say I was going to work and leave the house to walk around the city, sleeping on the benches in the Maidan, eating jhaal muri and not much else. Around me, tall chestnut horses munched the soft, green grass and boys in whites ran about with ball and bat shouting to each other in breaking voices. I would feel myself uncurl a little, borrow some of the pleasure the horses took in their grass, the boys in their game. In the cool dark beneath a tree I would lie cradling my head in the crook of my elbow, looking at the world from beneath and wondering if it had a place for me.
Things had to improve, I told myself. Everyone said businesses took a long time to start up. I would soon save enough to make the kind of investments that would take me to where Aangti Babu was. At times I found myself fantasising about building a little house for Nirmal Babu and Bakul in their garden, and selling off the rest of the property. Surely they would understand my necessity. At other times, on the more miserable days, I would decide to sell the Songarh property back to Aangti Babu as anonymously as I had bought it. If he still wanted it. But then if I got a few months of work overseeing somewhere, I discarded that thought. Sometimes I got work as a subcontractor outside Calcutta, in smaller towns, and being away from home gave me some relief.
Every hour of every day through all those days, I thought of Bakul, the yearning yielding to calmer thoughts sometimes, at other times causing a frenzy made unbearable because it could not be spoken. I knew I had lost a wife, but I knew too that she was at home with my child and that all these contrary things together were now inescapably my life. It was the futility of it, I think, that prevented me even trying to write to Nirmal Babu or Bakul. The knowledge that they were safe because they were in my house sustained me through it all, but if I wrote to them, what could I possibly say?
* * *
When we had a little extra money some weeks later from these subcontracts, we took Goutam to a specialist for his skin allergy. My wife was more sullen than usual. We waited without speaking for the doctor to call us, knowing we would quarrel if we spoke. He was the kind of doctor who has magazines in his waiting room, and I picked one up. It had a picture of a beautiful woman on the cover. I turned the pages, not reading, not looking with any attention at the fantasy life its pages revealed. Then I stopped on one page at a small advertisement for cold cream. I looked at it closer, with disbelief. The face with the perfect pink complexion looked very like Bakul’s.
Those days I often caught myself looking with hope and expectation at a particular back or shoulder on roads, buses, trams, when from a distance it seemed to belong to Bakul. When the woman turned and I saw the face of a stranger instead, my disappointment was disproportionate. This picture came closer than any of the others I had mistaken for her. It was not Bakul in every respect. The hair was too tidy. The skin was too pink, and she never smiled like that. I could not see her crooked tooth either, or perhaps it was on the other side of her face.
“What is that you are looking at with such attention?” my wife said in derisory tones. “Pretty woman, isn’t she?”
“Oh, nothing,” I said, turning the pages, feigning indifference. I had not realised my wife had been studying my face.
“Every woman is pretty when she doesn’t have to sweep and swab and fill water all day. Then men think of them as apsaras.”
“Come along,” I said, impatient. “Can’t a man even look through a magazine without criticism? Do you know how you sound?”
I had just returned from a fortnight-long, hot, wearying trip sorting out problems at a site for a government school, where I had stood for days on end in the blinding sun. I had come to the doctor’s almost straight from the station. I felt unprepared for squabbles with my wife. But she was full of suppressed rage, having had to cope with our ill, cranky baby all that time alone. She would not stop.
“Hmph. Men turn strange at your age. I know that. Binu’s mother was telling me she found bad pictures on her brother-in-law’s shelf, under his clothes. And imagine, he is a forty-year-old father of two. Hari, Hari,” my wife exclaimed. Then she shifted in her seat, moving the sweaty baby to her other shoulder. “I don’t know how long we’ll have to wait for this doctor. And what’s the use? None of them have been any good.”
“He’s the best skin specialist in Calcutta,” I said. “Where else can we go?”
In the flutter that occurred when the doctor popped his face out of his room and told us to enter, I managed to tear out the page from the magazine and put it in my pocket. Even if it was not Bakul, it felt as if I had her closer to me with that picture in my pocket. I could look at it at leisure.
After we returned home and put the exhausted baby to bed, I slid the picture into my cupboard beneath papers and bills where my wife would never notice it. I washed myself at the tap on the terrace and then, bare-bodied and refreshed, went to find something to wear. The cold mugfuls of water that I had poured over my body and head had made me regain my temper. “Is the food done?” I called out to my wife as I crossed the hot terrace on tiptoe, “I’m hungry, haven’t eaten home food for a whole fortnight!” My few clothes, now looking quite worn, were in a washed pile at the foot of the bed. I tossed them aside one by one, looking for a kurta thin enough for the still, sweaty day.
My wife called out from the kitchen, “Are you there? The rice is done, come and eat.” She was repentant after her earlier tirade, and solicitous.
But now I could hardly breathe, let alone reply. My hands trembled. I sat on the bed to calm myself, not noticing the pile of clothes beneath me.
I heard her say, “Just like you to take your time after forcing me to hurry the food, and now I am waiting with the hot rice, and me up since dawn and unslept half the night with this squalling child … ”
Buried underneath the pile of clothes I had found a letter, put there by my wife while I was away. It was no more than a hurried scribble in Nirmal Babu’s hand which said, “I’m sorry, this is sudden, but I hope you and your family can come. It won’t be complete without you. There are still two weeks. We will talk when you are here, and I will tell you all the details.”
The letter was folded around a stiff card printed in the obligatory red with the usual stain of auspicious turmeric on one corner.
It invited me to Bakul’s wedding.
The wedding had taken place the day before, when I was on the train back to Calcutta.
I stared at the card longer than I knew, and though my vision had clouded over, what the card said was clear as daylight. Bakul now was a married woman.
* * *
A white heap of rice steamed before me, one side of it cascading with yellow daal, the other side still pristine. A bowl with one small piece of fish in a red turmeric gravy, a green chilli topping it, stood by my plate. My wife sat beside me, her fingers deep in her heap of rice, which was already half gone.
“What is it?” Her voice startled me out of my thoughts. “Home food not to your taste after all? I even managed to get fish.” She looked hurt more than annoyed, and this shook me out of the stupor induced by the wedding card. I broke open my rice pile and began to mix a part of it with daal. In honour of my return, there was a vegetable as well. We never had all this at a single meal these days; she must have saved her household money over the period I was away.
“I’m tired,” I said, putting the first bit of food into my mouth. “It catches up unawares. Hours in the sun, the chaos of travelling, shouting at labourers all day.”
With my first mouthful I began to feel my throat stop. I had to cover my mouth with my palm to keep the food in and make it go down. My wife had turned her attention to deboning her fish. Her head was bent, and where she had sat cross-legged on the floor beside me before, now she adjusted her position to hunch closer to her plate.
“It’s even worse,” I sai
d, “because I have to travel out again tonight. Not a moment’s peace.” I put my left hand on the floor to feel its reassuring stability and coolness as I spoke.
“What?” she exclaimed. “Out again, tonight? Where to? You said nothing about this before!”
In the minute I spent sitting on the bed after opening Nirmal Babu’s letter, I had digested the fact that Bakul’s groom was from Bombay: the card made that clear. That meant she would leave Songarh soon after her wedding. How would I ever see her again after that? I had to see her before she left – if indeed she was still in Songarh.
I had decided to leave for Songarh by the night train. I did not stop to work it through, to give myself a rational reason for going. It was an incontrovertible fact, a given: I had to go, I had to see Bakul once more before she left my life for good.