by Anuradha Roy
When two months had passed without answers to my several letters, I went to my wife’s town to try to persuade her to return. It was a pretty place, grown from village into town by virtue of a few large houses. One of these relatively large houses belonged in part to my father-in-law, Barababu. I had not told my wife I was coming. I had not known until I got on the train that I really would go. I was, to tell the truth, a little apprehensive about her mother, her loud-voiced, belligerent aunts, and her father.
I decided to walk from the station to her house, although it was a fair distance. It would give me time to settle my thoughts. Besides, I liked the walk through the emerald-lit, mango-fringed road. Parts of it were bordered by ancient terracotta temples set in groves of tall, old trees. The other side, halfway down the road, had a deep pukur as large as a small lake, filled with moss-green water in which you could, if you sat still, see the shadowy forms of fish gliding about.
My father-in-law lived in a jointly owned family home, a sprawling set of rooms connected higgledy-piggledy with verandahs, courtyards and walkways. In the early days I had often lost my way in it. As I approached the green door set in the lemon-coloured walls of the house I sent out a prayer to the gods in the temples I had just passed. The door opened into the first courtyard, a big one bordered by a wide, cool, shaded verandah on all sides, where the family’s Durga puja was organised every year. I had seen it thronging with laughter, noise, incense smoke and people, but it was empty and quiet now, on a mid-summer morning.
My wife’s family occupied rooms in the next courtyard, up a short flight of stairs. As I ascended the stairs, I came face to face with my wife’s elder aunt. She shrank as if I were an assassin. I smiled and began to bend to touch her feet, but she hurried past saying as if to herself, “Oh Ma, the water tap must be open and flowing, I must rush.”
When I reached the set of rooms belonging to my parents-in-law, I paused outside, removing my slippers. Through the insect-mesh of the door I could see my father-in-law reading the newspaper at their round marble table. I could not see my wife or son. I coughed and knocked on the door. He looked up. He saw me and did not smile, saying instead, “You’ve come?”
I walked in and sat down beside him.
“How are you?” I tried.
“Are you really concerned about my health?” he said.
“I wrote many times, to say I would come and pick them up, but got no answer,” I said, deciding to set aside the pleasantries.
“What do you expect?” he said, heated. “My daughter finds out she has to live in penury because you are supporting another family, and you keep pictures of strange women in your cupboard, and then you expect her to come back? Which self-respecting woman would?”
“I am not supporting any other family,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm. “I don’t know what you have heard, but that’s not true.”
“Isn’t it true you have bought a large property in another town?”
“Yes, but … ”
“Did you tell your own wife about it?”
“No,” I said. “But … ”
“And isn’t it true that this house belongs to some old family you know, with a father and daughter?”
“You don’t understand … ” I began.
“Enough!” he thundered. “I understand everything! You locked up all your money in this house; you did not sell it, who knows why? Everyone says it is because you want to support this other family. And meanwhile, what about my daughter? She has to move from her own house, sell half the things we gave her for her wedding, and live in discomfort in rented rooms. What more do I need to understand?”
“Can I speak to her?” I said, my voice as loud as his by this time.
“Do you think she wants to speak to you?”
“Let her decide that.”
“Come back once you sell that house,” he said in clipped tones. “That is the only thing she asks. Meanwhile, there is no need to speak to her.”
“My son,” I said. “Where is my son?”
“Come back for him when you’re fit to be a father,” he said, and took up his newspaper as if I were no longer in the room.
I got up angrily from my chair and went to the door. As I bent down to put on my shoes I saw my wife standing at the side door of the room. She had been listening to our conversation. I started towards her, but she drew back, almost as if she were frightened. She opened her mouth to say something, but then a shadowy form passed the opened door beyond her and she seemed to jump. Quickly, she turned away, retreating into the other room.
I retraced my steps to the front courtyard. This time it was not empty. My son was playing on the verandah. With him was another little boy. They were about the same age, almost three. My son had a pebble in his little fist. He carefully laid it down and then got up and walked to the edge of the verandah, picked up another pebble from a pile and laid it next to the first.
I stared, mesmerised by the intricacies of the game which occupied him. I forgot the existence of the other boy and the servant woman who was sitting by them. My son looked up at me once and then went back to his game. I couldn’t tell if he was sulking or did not recognise me. When one of his pebbles rolled off the side of the verandah, I stooped and picked it up. He laid out his tiny palm, pink and creased, the palm I had loved to hold to my nose, blow on, tickle.
“Golu,” I said, wheedling, “Goutam, look who’s here! Your Baba!” I smiled, holding out my arms.
“His name is Akshay,” the servant woman smiled. “Call him Akshay and he’ll come.”
I placed the pebble in his palm and closed his fist. He looked at his fist with a frown and tottered back to his game.
I strode out of the courtyard, feeling loops and loops of barbed wire tightening around my heart.
I sat for a long time that day by the side of the town’s pond, staring at the date palm and banana trees that shadowed the water at its edges, the steps which disappeared into the water, the two shiny brown boys who were splashing in and out at the other end. When it was time for the evening train, I got up, shook out my clothes, and walked away.
FIVE
In the early days of my marriage, I found the idea of separation and solitude frightening. There was one particularly bitter quarrel my wife and I had – I forget the cause – and in the end I had stormed out of the house saying, “I’m not coming back”. When I did, hours later, she was not at home, although it was late in the evening. I remember how a quiet pit of fear had opened inside me as I thought, This time she really has gone back to her parents.
Now that our separation was real, curiously I felt no fear, and after those first bad months I even began to feel a guilty contentment. I came back after work to the empty room on the roof. I cooked some daal and rice, and having eaten it, sat alone on the terrace feeling the city throb below me while I looked up at the stars from my little oasis, drinking rum, feeling the familiar languor spread by degrees to my fingertips. If I went to the parapet of the terrace I could see the trams moving like lit caterpillars, pinging the wires above, and the squares of yellow lamplight in the houses around me. Three floors down was the road, where I could see the busy shadows of anonymous pigmy people on errands I did not need to know about.
My solitude was absolute. I spoke to labourers and contractors and building owners during the day, but apart from professional talk I had no dealings with anyone at all. My neighbours side-stepped me, thinking me an evil man who had not only driven his wife away, but who also drank. This did not bother me. On the rare days I was overwhelmed by my solitude, I went to a crowded Muslim restaurant in Dharmatolla and ate rezala and roti, soaking in the clamour along with the grease.
Everything seemed to have become much simpler. I had the space to think or to daydream. I bought books again, after years, and began to read. On impulse, when I was walking past a market one day and saw some music shops, I went in and bought a bamboo flute with a rich, resonant timbre. I managed, after several attempts, to pla
y the Sibelius melody on it. My terrace was immediately transformed into Mrs Barnum’s garden and I felt as if Bakul were listening to me from some dark corner.
When winter came and the mosquitoes disappeared in the cold, I put my cot out on the terrace and lay there as I drank, looking up at the black, sooty, half-lit dome of the sky. One such night I saw a shooting star and returned in my mind to the flaming trail of light Bakul and I had seen in the sky years ago. What if it had been a spaceship? What if its space people had touched her and me with their magic that evening, with their rays or vibrations? Changing us forever?
Perhaps I should go and surprise Bakul in her marital home in Bombay. But what would I say to her face to face? What if she looked cold and distant, as she sometimes did, and asked why I had come?
If she did, I would make an excuse, say work had brought me to Bombay.
She would make polite conversation and might even give me tea. We would talk about Bombay, the potato prices, her husband’s job, then say goodbye. Her baby (she must have had one) would begin to wail. She would say she had work to do. Her husband would appear and ask her who I was.
I would go to Bombay on the train the next week. I would make an excuse, say work had brought me there, and Bakul, eyes dancing, would say, Lies! You came to see me! Admit it! I would pull her to me and it would feel as if there had been no years and no other people in between.
I would go to Bombay, and as I stood somewhere on the street trying to puzzle out where her house was, Bakul would tap me on the shoulder. I would start to say I’ve come to work and she would interrupt, I knew you’d come looking for me one day.
I smiled to myself in the dark and took out the sliver of mica that stayed with me in my wallet these days as a Songarh keepsake. I lit a match and watched the mica flicker in its flame, then lit my cigarette with it.
Downstairs, the forlorn son of the drunken man called out “Baba? Baba! Where are you?” as on every other night. His voice faded and then returned, faded and then returned again. And then stopped.
* * *
Two years passed this way. I was beginning to find more and more independent work. Aangti Babu, all said and done, had taught me the trade, and now I was a tough businessman. I could intimidate people into abandoning their houses. I could bribe government officials with ease. I could bully labourers into carrying more headloads than contracted. I could hold back payment from shrivelled-up, starving workmen if they missed a day. I developed a nose for buying and selling property and an ear for gossip about old mansions that had begun falling apart. I was making more money than I knew what to do with. I sent a generous monthly amount to my wife. Each month, along with the money, I wrote a brief letter: what work I was doing, the weather. For some time I had thought our separation would be temporary, and she would return, forgetting our last bad year. I had never intended driving her away, never imagined I would lose my son, and that she would be embittered enough to change his name. My letters were never answered. She had always been a diffident and reluctant writer, her alphabet round, childish, pressed hard into the paper. The thought also crossed my mind that perhaps my father-in-law, seeing I had ignored his ultimatum, was withholding both letters and money from my wife and she knew nothing of them. If that were so, my betrayal must to her have seemed too terrible for forgiveness.
* * *
I did not want to work with Aangti Babu, but I had no choice, for our work had become closely intertwined over the years. He, for his part, did not pass up any opportunity to taunt me. One day, as I left his room, he said, “So the house in Songarh did not, after all, come at a bargain price, did it?” Then he chuckled in that nasal way he had. “When will you put it to use, Mukunda? Are you a businessman? Or Mahatma Gandhi?” His eyes seemed smaller in a face that had become obese and pouchy. The years of betel chewing had stained his teeth and lips beyond redemption. He drew breath with a wheeze these days.
I thought it best not to answer him. The Songarh exchange was some years in the past now, and I had tolerated this jibe many times. Instead, I left him with a short, “I’ll be back next week, have to travel.” I stepped into the reception – Aangti Babu had prospered and made himself a reception area – and started collecting some papers from my former table that occupied one corner of it. The room’s single, brown-upholstered sofa was occupied by a grey-haired woman who sat with her head in her hands. She had not been there when I had gone into Aangti Babu’s room an hour before. She did not look up when I rustled my papers or chatted to the tea boy. When her head jerked downward in a sleepy nod, I realised she had dozed off. Despite being asleep, she kept a vigilant hand on a chipped purple trunk beside her. It was painted with red roses and green leaves, a pattern that I felt I had seen before – but then such things were common enough. I wondered what she was doing there; one hardly ever saw women in Aangti Babu’s office. I stopped whatever noise I was making so that I would not wake her, and left the building.
Minutes after I had stepped out of the door into the elbowing, sweaty rush of the street, I heard someone calling and then a hand clutched my elbow. I turned with a protest ready on my lips to see a thin, elderly man in glasses. His clothes looked worn and the bag on his shoulder was an ordinary cloth jhola. His bald head gleamed with sweat. I thought he was a party worker of some kind, and said, “Dada, I am in a hurry.” I did not want to stand there being told the benefits of being a leftist or a Congressman, not then, though such conversations often amused me.
“Don’t you recognise me, Mukunda?” the man said with a smile.
The puzzle of his face melted into place. He had shaved off his beard and that made him look completely different, but now I knew.
“Suleiman Chacha!”
Even as I said the words, I wanted to turn and run, run as far away as possible from him, and from the little woman in the waiting room with the purple trunk.
“Shall we sit and have some tea somewhere?” Chacha said. “Your Chachi is so tired.”
* * *
We did not want to talk in Aangti Babu’s office, so we picked our way through the squalor of Bowbazar’s street market in search of a suitable place. It was at its busiest: vegetables, fish, flowers, rickety chairs, birds in cages, trinkets and toys, all spilling at our feet, vendors shouting each other hoarse about the perfection of their wares. We kept losing sight of Chachi, then finding her again. I banged their trunk against people’s knees in the crowd and pretended not to hear the curses that followed. Finally we found with relief one of those little restaurants that line the streets all over Calcutta, the ones with wooden benches and greenish glasses with bubbles in them. Three such glasses stood on the greasy table before us, steaming with tea. Chacha and Chachi were eating dhakai parathas, but I felt nauseous looking at food. Did they know what I had done? Did they know I had bartered away the house they trusted me with? That it was being demolished even as we sipped our tea? The thought was insistent, but I could not bring myself to raise the subject.
I barely heard the things Suleiman Chacha said about East Pakistan and how difficult life had been there at first, and how much he had missed Calcutta. “I remembered strange things, bhai,” he was saying. “You know, the ships’ horns at night in the docks, hooting in that spectral way. I had never really noticed them when I lived here and my ears ached for them there. And the school, the children. I had thought I was tired of their stupidity and the bullying of the older boys, but I began to wonder, did Monohar eventually clear his exams? Did Sudip ever learn to spell Nizamuddin? Did Aslam migrate to East Pakistan or did he stay on in Calcutta? And that bookseller I went to on College Street, did he recover from his eczema? Nothing there seemed right, although if you come to think of it, Rajshahi is not that far … it’s home, isn’t it? It may be a hovel, but if it’s your home then you can’t stop longing for it.”
We asked for more tea. I wondered when they would bring the topic up, or should I?
At last he said, “We went to our old house, of course.” And
after a bite of paratha he continued, “We went there straight from the station. Your Chachi was all agog, even though I kept warning her nine years had passed and things change.”
Chachi said, “You look a grown man now, I would not have known you in the street.”
I stared at my glass of tea. Chachi reached across the table and touched my cheek saying, “Look at you, so thin, your cheeks have gone in. And your clothes! Aren’t you married? Doesn’t anyone look after you? We wondered sometimes.”
“You never wrote to me,” I said. “Why did you not write?”
Suleiman Chacha smiled in the gentle way I remembered. “Arre bhai, Mukunda,” he said. “You have no idea what was going on. Often your Chachi and I did not know where we were going to sleep that night, or where the next meal would come from. I tried so hard to get a job, but they didn’t want schoolteachers there, especially of history.” He laughed. “I’ve become an assistant in a watch shop. Still working with time, you see, a historian of sorts!” He laughed again.
“What about your family?” I said, trying not to sound as if I resented him for returning, though at the time that was how I felt.
“What could we have expected,” he said in a resigned voice. “Everyone told us to occupy any empty house whose owners had fled. But that didn’t seem right. What if their owners returned, just as we thought we’d come home to Calcutta? We never thought we would stay there for good, so we kept living in rented rooms here and there. The family house turned out to be too crowded to give us space.”
“Family house!” Chachi said with scorn and glared at her tea as she adjusted her sari in the righteous manner women do sometimes. “What family? What house? They looked at us as if we were usurpers … even when we visited.”
Chacha said, “We went looking for our house – and there is just rubble. The space looked so big, I hadn’t thought the old house was so large.” His eyes were too apologetic to meet my own. Although the crime was mine, it was as if he were the criminal and my sins had become his.