by Anuradha Roy
* * *
Going across the Hooghly that evening, caged by the soaring steel girders of the bridge, surrounded by a mass of strangers too busy to notice me, I felt as if after many months under observation I had been set free – of wife, child, parrot, home. For a while I was alone, a man who might do anything with his life. I looked at the river and allowed myself to linger over the memory of the pond at Mrs Barnum’s. I thought of the saltiness of Bakul’s lips, the cut-grass scent of her breath came back to me, the hard shoulder blades under her blouse, her hair which tickled my nose and made us laugh.
I had chosen an upper berth so that I could lie and think my thoughts in solitude. The train was surprisingly empty given that I was in a third-class compartment, normally packed to rubbing sweat on sweat. Today, there was only one other man in my compartment of four berths, a large, walrus-moustached man in a dhoti, with a folding table, a plant in jute sacking, two tin trunks, and a pink-eyed white rabbit in a hutch that he fed with leaves and sliced carrot as soon as he came in. I observed him for a while, then when the train gave a thudding jolt and at last pulled out of the platform – delayed by an hour – I closed my eyes, shut him out, and lost myself to Mrs Barnum’s lily pond. If I tried hard enough, I could shut out the wedding card I had seen earlier that day and fill my mind with Bakul playing the flute, then kissing me on the eyelids as I protested. I could almost smell her hair, her soap, and that talcum she had used the evening she cooked dinner for me.
But my compartment was pervaded by another smell, and now the moustached face was beside me saying, “You must be hungry, Dada, the train is late. Would you care for some poori and aloo and achaar?” He spoke in Hindi. The smell of the foods he mentioned permeated every particle of air in the cabin. The mustard oil of his mango pickle all but coated my tongue.
I refused and frowned, shutting my eyes again. I could hear sounds of the man’s contented chewing and slurping. It must be past eleven, I thought, why is he eating now, on an overnight train? But of course people felt the need to eat the instant they got onto a train.
The thought occupied me for a moment and then the despondency that had overtaken me that afternoon had me in its grip afresh. I closed my eyes and saw Bakul’s impish smile. I smiled sadly into the darkness. How must she have looked at her wedding in red and gold? Had she thought of me? Had she managed to tie her wild hair back so that she looked like a demure, conventional bride?
“Dada,” the man was saying, his face bobbing near mine. “The lower berth is empty also, why not come down? I feel uneasy sleeping alone down here when the other berth is empty and the train is so empty.”
“But I am in the same cabin,” I protested. “Please go to sleep, you are in no danger.”
The man beamed and said, “At least you are awake, that gives me some peace of mind. I tell you, I cannot sleep so soon in trains. I have to talk, for some time I have to talk. Dada, what is your name? What do you do?”
I looked at his eager face. He was leaning against my bunk, his elbows providing him support as he stood in the swaying train, his face only inches away from mine. Impossible to turn away and lose myself in my daydream again.
“I’ll come down,” I said. “If that makes it easier for you to sleep.”
“And do you live in Songarh?” he continued, helping me to lay out my sheet on the wooden bunk next to his.
Without waiting for a reply, he said, “I’ve been there now for fifteen years. First I was in the timber trade, now I am in mica mining, you know mica?”
I nodded.
“During the World War, that was when I started, mica was in great demand then. Then it faded away when the British lost interest. But now after Independence, when we are ruling ourselves, we are exploring mining everywhere. The British did not care. Did they care?”
“They didn’t care,” I repeated after him.
“Panditji cares,” he said. “He is nation-building – temples to modern India, mines, dams – all this he has promised.”
He took my lack of interest for disagreement and said, “I know, you Bengalis are very anti-Panditji, you say Nehru is bad, and you say Gandhiji is bad. When Gandhiji was killed and the killer was Maharashtrian, I was amazed. Not a Bengali? See, you too are annoyed at the mere mention of these two leaders.”
“I am not annoyed,” I said. “Forgive me, but I’m very sleepy. I’ll sleep now.”
“Right, you are right,” the fat man said, pulling a sheet over his head. “It’s late, and we must sleep.”
Air swept in through the window, cooler than before. All I could hear, now that the man had gone to sleep, was the clack-clack of the train rushing me towards the newly married Bakul – and her husband.
The man’s voice said into the darkness, “Are you asleep, Dada? I am sensing you’re not.”
I sat up, resigned. He sat up too, and from his pocket dug out some sweet supari which he offered to me. He spoke about his wife and how she disliked Songarh. He spoke about their childlessness. “It is making me even more devoted to the Mrs, Dada, we have no-one else,” he said. “But who will look after her when I am dead, who?”
“She may die before you,” I said, touched by his sentiments, but wanting him to shut up.
“A few years ago, I almost died,” he said, his voice less ebullient. “Shall I tell you the strange thing that happened to me? You know mica is not found deep in the earth, you do not have to drill mines, it is close to the surface. It is lying about all shiny and waiting, just a few feet below. I was camping in the middle of wild land not far from Songarh. What year was it, now let me think … can’t recall, but maybe fourteen years ago, around 1940. I was camped there, wild emptiness all around me. No wonder my wife worries for me. All night I hear foxes and owls and strange sounds I can’t place. My adivasi labour is all half drunk or doped, sitting or sleeping by their fire. It is late, but not very late. It is probably early evening, but we are very tired because we have just ended a day begun at dawn. I am resting in my tent before dinner and then, commotion! Commotion!”
“What happened?”
“I rushed out to see. My labourers were all speechless with fear, pointing at the sky. I look up, and what do I see, Dada? What do I see? It was a spaceship.”
“A spaceship?”
“Space. Ship. That is it. Something strange flying in the sky. At that time we didn’t know what it was. We wondered: was it a shooting star? Was it a problem of vision? But no, it was circular, it was glowing, and it was floating above our camp, coming down towards the earth.”
He paused and chewed on his supari for a while.
“My labourers are praying and shouting. They will suck out our souls, these are people from heaven they say. I too, I am scared, the ship is now very low, and we can see it is neat and oval and it is not a star or anything like that. But I have to be the leader, say Calm down, men, calm down! All around us the forest has gone quiet. But everything is lit bright in white light from the spaceship. There is a low humming sound in our ears, like a vibration. At that time I knew no more about spaceships than my men, I thought it was a chariot from heaven that had come to take us.” The man paused and, with glugging sounds, drank water from a bottle he held about four inches above his open mouth.
“Then?” I said, impatient to know.
“Then? Nothing. It floated near us for some time and then it rose and went away. I met many people later and asked them, Did any of you see this thing that we saw that night? Nobody, nobody saw a thing. People started to think of me as a little, you know … ” He tapped the side of his head with a forefinger. “If my labour had not been with me and seen it too, I would also think I am … ” and he tapped his forehead again.
When I woke up in the morning, the train had already been standing at Songarh station for a while. The fat man and his rabbit were gone. If not for the lingering odour of mango pickled in mustard oil, I would have doubted both his existence and that of the spaceship. Had Bakul and I seen what the man had seen
that time, long years ago in the starry field? Was it as many as fourteen years ago? In my mind the image of that evening – the light in the sky, Bakul’s proximity and our shared terror – was so vivid it seemed as yesterday.
* * *
Outside the station was the familiar rank of tongas, their horses and their drivers hooded with shawls. Although it was already hot and uncomfortable in Calcutta, here on Songarh’s high plateau surrounded by forest it was only the end of a chilly spring, and I shivered when my tonga gathered speed and air on the slope down to Dulganj Road. I had decided I would not waste time going to a hotel first. What if I narrowly missed her?
The tonga turned the corner into Dulganj Road. It was empty in the half-light, with the sky still struggling between night and day at the western edge while the east was bloodshot. I was reminded of standing out on the terrace on a Saraswati puja dawn one cold January many years ago, waiting for Bakul and her relatives, not allowed to enter the puja room during the prayers. I paid off the tongawallah some distance from the house and heard it clopping away. I was alone on the road, but for two labourers huddled near a tea shop in mud-coloured shawls. I could almost hear the dew dripping from the leaves and grass in the profound peace of the dawn. Somewhere a tentative brainfever bird was trying out its voice, unused since winter. I noticed that the roadsides were piled at intervals with shining slabs of mica. Until my companion’s discourse of the night before, I had hardly noticed it. I picked up a tiny sliver of mica and put it into my pocket as a charm.
I walked in the direction of the house. My feet dragged. I was not able to think any more of what I would say to Bakul when – if – I saw her. The man in the train kept winking and grinning at me, tapping his forehead. I reached the gate and looked in. There were no obvious signs of a recent wedding – no tent up in the garden, no piles of folding chairs, no rubbish from the feast. Perhaps the ceremony and the dinner had taken place elsewhere, not at the house.
I put my hand on the latch, and at the same moment a window opened on the first floor of the house, first one shutter and then the other. I could see a flash of orange as Bakul leaned out to open the second shutter. I thought I caught a glimpse of loose hair and a corner of her face. Something flashed in the first rays of sunlight that must have been gold.
Before she could see me, I wheeled around and hid next to the wall, my heart thudding against my chest hard enough to stop my breath. When I was sure she was gone from the window, I walked away, then half ran from Dulganj Road, past Mrs Barnum’s house, past the new houses, past the tea shop with the peasants – now four of them, not two – past the corner where Nirmal Babu’s office used to be. I could not think rationally about leaving without seeing her, speaking to her, when I had come so far. I had come to see her, but to encounter her as someone else’s wife? I could not bring the journey to its logical conclusion.
* * *
There was nothing for me in Songarh, but I could not bear to go back to Calcutta. I stayed on in the cheap room I had booked myself into for the next couple of days, lying in bed, alternating between a dead, stunned doze full of troubled dreams and long wakefulness. I did not want to eat or get up. I felt as if I would not be able to move my body from the bed even if I tried, as though it had a separate, stone-like weight I would not be able to heave out. I did not want to bathe or brush my teeth. I did not care that, with barely any savings, I could scarcely afford to pay for a hotel. I was cold in Songarh without winter clothing, so I lay shivering under a threadbare quilt all day, refusing to open the window to let in the sun.
I felt as if, having been loved, I had now been cast into the dustbin of the unloved; out of the cool shade into the putrefying sun, out from shelter into the wilderness. I knew well enough even in that darkness and confusion that Bakul was blameless, yet I felt as if she had abandoned me.
* * *
I am not sure how long I stayed at the hotel. It felt an eternity of misery. Eventually I dragged myself home, too tired and disoriented to make up excuses to trot out to my wife.
When I opened the staircase door and reached our terrace, the first thing I noticed was that Noorie’s cage was open and she was not in it. The terrace stretched out barren and empty in the sun without her.
The next thing I saw was that our door had its big brass lock on it. When I went down the stairs to the neighbour with whom we usually left the key, she gave me a strange look and handed it over with a note. She shut the door on me without a word, which was unusual. My wife and I always made fun of her garrulity.
“I am going home,” the note said. No more. She had not bothered to seal the folded square of paper within an envelope to keep our neighbours from gossiping.
My wife could not have taken Noorie to the village with her. She must have thought that leaving the cage door open would allow the bird to fend for herself. But how could that tame parrot have found food? She must have stayed in the cage, cowering in a corner as she used to after Suleiman Chacha left, not daring to fly out, waiting for me to arrive with green chillies and fresh water.
I fiddled with the cage and looked around for Noorie, making the chucking sounds she responded to. I squatted in a corner of the terrace, feeling the baking midday sun burn the soles of my feet. I knew it was futile. There would be no familiar flash of green. No claws would dig into my shoulder, no beak would nibble my ear and search through my hair, consoling me with squawked obscenities.
Above me, in the dirty, grey-blue Calcutta sky, rapacious kites wheeled around and cawing crows hopped along the parapet mocking each other.
* * *
I let myself into our room at last, wondering what had made my wife go away like this. She was used to my travels, and certainly to trips as long as this one. Why should she have thought this time any different?
The room looked tidy and settled, as if she had taken her time over leaving. On the table by the window, in a neat pile, were Suleiman Chacha’s books, our small, old radio, and the worn exercise book in which she kept conscientious household accounts, recording every matchbox and kilo of rice that she bought.
Within the account book was the picture I had torn out of the magazine at the doctor’s that day, and Bakul’s wedding card.
Later, from a clerk at Aangti Babu’s, I came to know that my wife had visited the office in my absence. After all, he was a distant relative of her father’s, apart from being my boss. I could not ask Aangti Babu what had transpired, but I supposed she must have been worried by my disappearance and gone to ask him when I would be back. What could he have told her that made her leave like this? She had never travelled alone before. Usually she went to her parents’ once a year, at Puja, and I would drop her off at her village home.
Aangti Babu probably hadn’t been able to resist the opportunity to be malicious when my wife went to him for news of me. I could imagine the scene: Aangti Babu twisting the blue- and yellow-stoned rings that cut into the flesh of his fingers, pumping my wife for information in his high voice. He must have deduced from her ignorance about Songarh that I had not told her of the house I owned there.
“My child,” he will have said, “men are so terrible, they really think womenfolk don’t need to know all this. Don’t blame your husband, he’s trying very hard to make his business work. It’s a shame you’re having to lead a hard life now, it will all change some day! This house of his in Songarh, which belonged, I discovered, to his old mentor and his young daughter, well, such a house is not easy to sell, is it? Sentiment! Doesn’t that count for something? I met them, they are such estimable people, and such a beautiful, flower-like girl, you would have warmed to them instantly.”
I was guessing all this of course. Despite my suspicions, I could not antagonise Aangti Babu. Too many of my contracts depended on him, and I had to continue taking on his overseeing work as if nothing had happened. He said nothing either. I may have been wrong. Perhaps he had tried to cover up for me, and my wife had jumped to her own conclusions.
When she ha
d not returned after a fortnight, I began to miss my boy more and more. I wrote her a letter enquiring about her plans. Did she want me to come and fetch them in the next few days? After that I would be busy for some weeks with a new contract. The letter went unanswered.
* * *
It was a month or so later that I went out for a walk and actually took in my surroundings. The heat was less fierce. I could sense moisture in the light breeze that touched my skin. It was a soft feeling, like a passing feather, a breeze that made me feel as if I had a soul that could unfold and stretch. I sat on a railing by the footpath, in the shelter of a dilapidated bus shed. The day had darkened to an unnatural early twilight. The sky was low with purple-grey clouds that seemed too heavy to stay afloat. In a little while the expected deluge began and I closed my eyes in relief and gratitude as the thundering sound of rain drowned out the twittering of the late evening birds. The leaves on the roadside trees turned shiny green, and dipped and drooped with the water. For a little while, in the drumming rain, anything seemed possible.
The last few weeks had been the darkest time of my life: when I sat alone on that rooftop, day after scorching day, absorbing for the first time that Bakul was no longer mine. She was in a strange city, in a new home I could not visualise. In bed with a man whom perhaps she loved. When I managed to push this thought away, another would come to prey on me: I worried about Goutam’s skin allergy and what care he would get in my wife’s village. I longed for his milky, baby smell and piping voice. He must miss me so much, I thought, he must ask for me every day. When I pushed this thought away, yet another came to prey on me: Noorie, starving, being torn to pieces by other birds or cats as she tried to find me, find food.
I felt incapable of paying attention to anything else. The room on the terrace grew unloved and dusty, I threw off my clothes into a heap on the floor and wore them unwashed the next day. I must have smelled bad – there was no-one to complain save the milkman who came daily because I did not dare tell him there was no longer a baby who needed the milk.