‘Suddenly Meher Ali, the madman, was shouting, “Keep away, keep away! All is false! All is false!” I saw that it was dawn; the chaprassi was giving me the mail; the cook was salaaming and asking what he should cook today. “No,” I announced, “I can’t stay in this palace any more.” That very day I moved all my things to the office. The old clerk Karim Khan smiled slightly when he saw me. Annoyed at his smile, I said nothing to him and settled down to my work.
‘As the day wore on, the more distracted I became. I wondered what point there was in going anywhere. Tax-assessment seemed pointless; the Nizam and his government meant little; everything coming and going and happening around me was wretched, worthless, senseless!
‘I threw aside my pen, slammed my ledger shut, and quickly climbed into my pony-trap. As if of its own accord it took me to the palace, arriving as dusk fell. I rapidly climbed the steps and went in.
‘Today everything was still. The dark rooms seemed sullen. My heart was swelling with repentance, but nowhere was there anyone to speak to, anyone to ask for forgiveness. I roamed around the dark rooms blankly. I wished I could find a musical instrument, sing a song to someone. I would have sung, “O fire, the insect that tried to flee you has returned to die. Have pity on it now, burn its wings, shrivel it to ashes.” Suddenly two tears fell on my forehead from above. That day thick clouds had gathered over the Arali hills. The dark forest and the inky Shusta seemed paralysed with dread. But now, water and land and sky shuddered; and a lightning-fanged storm unleashed itself through distant trackless forests, roaring and howling and rushing hither. Doors in the palace slammed; huge empty rooms boomed with a note of despair.
‘The servants were all at the office; there was no one to light the lamps. I distinctly felt, on that cloudy moonless night, in the jet-black darkness of the rooms, that a woman was lying facedown on a carpet at the foot of a bed, tearing her unkempt hair with tight-clenched fists; blood was pouring from her pale brow; sometimes she was laughing fiercely and hysterically; sometimes she was sobbing wildly; she had ripped off her bodice and was beating her naked breasts; the wind was roaring through the window, driving in rain that soaked her to the skin.
‘The storm went on all night, and the weeping too. I went on wandering through pitch-black rooms in fruitless remorse. There was no one anywhere; no one whom I could comfort. Who was it who was so distressed? Where was this inconsolable grief coming from?
‘Once again the madman was shouting, “Keep away! Keep away! All is false! All is false!” I saw that it was dawn, and Meher Ali even on this storm-swept day was circling the palace shouting his usual cry. I wondered now if Meher Ali too had at one time lived in this palace; even though he was mad now and lived outside, he was daily lured by its monstrous stony charm, and every morning came to walk round it. I immediately ran up to the madman through the rain and asked, “Meher Ali, what is false?”
‘He gave no answer, pushed me aside and, like a wheeling bird transfixed by the leer of a huge snake, continued to shout and wander round the palace, continued to warn himself over and over again with all his might, “Keep away! Keep away! All is false!”
‘Dashing through the rain and storm like a man possessed, I returned to the office. I called Karim Khan and said, “Tell me what all of this means.”
‘The gist of what he told me was this. Once upon a time the palace had been churned by insatiable lust, by the flames of wild pleasure. Cursed by those passions, those vain desires, every stone now hungered and thirsted, strove like a vampire to consume every soul who came near. Of those who had stayed for more than three nights in the palace, only Meher Ali had emerged, with his wits gone. No one else till now had escaped its grasp.
‘I asked, “Is there no escape for me?”
‘The old man answered, “There is only one way and that is very hard. I can tell it to you, but first I must tell you the ancient story of one who lived there, a Persian slave-girl. A stranger and sadder tale was never heard.” ’
At that moment, the coolies came and told us that the train was coming. So soon? We rolled up our bedding, and the train arrived. A sleepy Englishman stuck his head out of a first-class compartment to read the name of the station. ‘Hello,’ he shouted, recognizing our companion, and he let him into his carriage. We got into the second class. We never found out who the gentleman was, and we never heard the end of the story either.
I said, ‘The fellow took us for fools and was pulling our legs; he made the whole thing up.’ My theosophist relative disagreed, and our dispute caused a rift which was never healed.
Thoughtlessness
I had to leave my homestead. I shall not tell you directly how this happened, only indirectly.
I was the native doctor in the village, and my house was opposite the police station. I was as intimate with the Police Inspector as I was with Death – aware, therefore, of the torments inflicted on humanity by Man and by his Protector.1 And just as jewels and bangles, worn together, enhance each other, so the Inspector drew financial benefit from my interventions and I from his.
Yes, my friendship with Lalit Chakrabarti, Police Inspector, experienced fixer, was very special. It made me almost as vulnerable to his repeated suggestion that I and a spinster relative of his should marry as she was herself. But I could not bear to subject Shashi, my only daughter, motherless though she was, to a stepmother. Every year moments defined by the almanac as auspicious for a wedding passed by. I watched many worthy and not so worthy grooms climb into palanquins, and all I could do was join the groom’s party, eat wedding-feasts in other people’s houses, and return home with a sigh.
Shashi was twelve – nearly thirteen. I’d had some indication from a certain well-placed family that if I could get together a decent sum of money, I’d be able to marry her into it. And if that could be accomplished, I would then turn my attention to my own matrimonial arrangements.
I was brooding one day over this pressing need for money, when Harinath Majumdar of Tulsi village came to me in a state of desperation. What had happened was that his widowed daughter had suddenly died in the night, and enemies of his had written letters to the Police Inspector insinuating that she had died from an abortion. The police now wanted to examine her dead body.
The shame of this on top of his grief for his dead daughter was more than he could bear. I was a doctor, and a friend of the Inspector: surely I could do something?
When the Goddess of Prosperity wishes to call, she comes sometimes through the front door, sometimes through the back. I shook my head and said, ‘I’m afraid it’s a complex matter.’ I cited a couple of bogus precedents, and the trembling old Harinath wept like a child.
To cut a long story short, Harinath had to beggar himself in order to give his daughter her proper funeral rites.
My daughter Shashi came to me and asked me pitifully, ‘Father, why did that old man come and weep before you like that?’
‘Run along,’ I said crossly. ‘That’s no business of yours.’
The path to finding a groom to whom I could give my daughter was now smoothed. The wedding-date was fixed. She being my only daughter, I planned the wedding-feast elaborately. I had no wife, so kind neighbours helped me. The penniless but grateful Harinath laboured for me night and day.
On the eve of the wedding – the day when bride and bridegroom are dabbed with turmeric – at three in the morning, Shashi suddenly went down with cholera, and quickly grew worse and worse. After every effort, after hurling bottle upon bottle of useless medicine to the ground, I rushed to Harinath and fell on my knees before him. ‘Forgive me, Dādā,’ I cried. ‘Forgive me for my sin! She is my only daughter. I have no one else.’
‘What are you doing, Doctor Babu, what are you doing?’ said Harinath, greatly perplexed. ‘I shall always be indebted to you! Don’t kneel before me!’
‘I ruined you, though you had done nothing wrong,’ I said. ‘Because of my sin, my daughter is dying.’
I started to shout to everyone, �
�Oh, I ruined this old man, and am being punished for it! God, God, save my Shashi!’
I seized Harinath’s sandal and started beating myself on the head with it. The old man, greatly embarrassed, snatched it back from me.
The next day at ten o’clock, with the turmeric still on her, Shashi bid farewell for ever to this world.
The very next day after that, the Inspector said, ‘Well, why don’t you get married now? You need someone to look after you.’
This kind of callous disrespect for a man’s grief would have shamed even the Devil! But I had fallen in with the Inspector on so many other occasions that I could not bring myself to speak. How my friendship with him stung and shamed me now!
However pained the heart, life has to go on. One has to turn one’s full energy again to the normal effort of finding food to eat, clothes to wear, wood for the stove, laces for one’s shoes. In intervals from work, when I sat alone in my house, I would sometimes hear in my ear that pitiful question, ‘Father, why was that old man weeping before you?’ I rethatched Harinath’s tumbledown house at my own expense, gave him my own milch-cow, and redeemed his plot of land from the money-lender.
Unbearably grief-stricken, alone in the evenings and sleepless at night, I could not stop thinking: ‘My tender-hearted daughter – even though she has escaped this life – has found no peace in the next world from her father’s cruel misdeeds. She seems to keep on returning in distress, asking, “Father, why did you do that?” ’
For a while I was in such a state that I found it impossible to ask poor people for fees for medical treatment. If any young girl was ill, I felt it was my Shashi who was ill by proxy; I saw her in all the sick girls in the village.
The village was now awash with heavy rain. Fields and houses could be reached only by boat. The rain started early in the morning and went on all day.
A call came to me from the zamindar’s office. The zamindar’s boatman would not stand any delay and was agitating to leave at once.
Formerly, when I had to go out in such weather, there had been someone to open my ancient umbrella for me and see if there were any holes in it; and an anxious voice would ask me over and over again to be careful to protect myself from the damp wind and lashings of rain. Today as I looked for my umbrella in the empty, silent house, I paused for a moment to recall her loving face. I looked at her closed bedroom and wondered why God had arranged – for a person who gave no thought to the sorrows of others – such a supply of love. As I passed the door of that empty room, I felt a deep ache in my chest. But then, at the sound of the zamindar’s servant irascibly shouting for me, I quickly suppressed my grief and went outside.
As I climbed into the boat I saw a small canoe tied to the police-station ghāt, with a farmer in it, soaking wet, wearing only a loincloth. I asked him what was up, and he told me that last night his daughter had been bitten by a snake – the wretched man had had to come all the way from a distant village to report it. I could see he had taken off his only garment to cover the dead body.
The impatient boatman from the zamindar’s office untied the rope and we set off. At one o’clock I returned to my house and saw that the man was still sitting, soaked, with his knees huddled up to his chin; the Inspector Babu had not yet appeared. I sent him part of my midday meal. He refused to touch it.
After eating quickly I again had to set out to see the patient in the zamindar’s office. In the evening when I returned the fellow was still sitting, in a nearly catatonic state. When I questioned him he was scarcely able to reply; he just stared at me. This river, village and police station; this drenched, cloudy, muddy world; to him it was as hazy as a dream. By repeated questioning I learnt that a constable had come out once to ask him if he had any money tucked into the loincloth. He had told him he was very poor – he had nothing. The constable had said, ‘Wait, you rogue, sit and wait.’
I had often seen sights like this before, and never thought anything of them. But today I could not stand it. My Shashi’s plaintive, silenced voice seemed to throb through the entire rainy sky. This speechless, daughterless farmer’s unendurable grief seemed to beat against my own ribs.
The Inspector Babu was sitting comfortably on a wicker stool, smoking a hookah. An uncle – the one who had a daughter to dispose of – had recently arrived with me in mind: he was sitting on a mat and chatting. I burst in on them like a storm. I bellowed at them, ‘Are you men or monsters?’ and banged my whole day’s earnings down in front of them saying, ‘If you want money, take this: go to hell with it. Give that fellow outside a break now. Let him cremate his daughter.’
The love between the doctor and the Inspector, which the tears and torments of many others had nourished, crashed to the ground in that storm.
Not long after, I myself was on my knees before the Inspector, praising his greatness and bewailing my own stupidity; but I still had to leave my homestead.
The Gift of Sight
I have heard that these days many Bengali girls have to find their husbands through their own efforts. I have also had to find mine, but God has helped me. Maybe this is because of my many vows and pūjās to Shiva, from an early age. I was not yet eight years old when I was married. But my sins in an earlier life stopped me from acquiring my husband fully. Three-eyed Mother Durga took away my two eyes. For the whole of the rest of my life she denied me the pleasure of seeing my husband.
My baptism of fire began in childhood. Before I was fourteen years old I gave birth to a dead baby, and I myself came close to death. But if a person is fated to suffer sorrow, she is not allowed to die too soon. A lamp that is meant to burn long has to have enough oil: it mustn’t go out until night is over. I survived my illness, true, but whether through physical weakness, or mental distress, or for whatever reason, my eyes were affected.
My husband was at that time studying to be a doctor. With all the enthusiasm of a student, he leapt at a chance to try out his medical knowledge. He began to treat my eyes himself. My elder brother was at college that year, studying for his BL. He came to my husband one day and said, ‘What are you doing? You’ll destroy Kusum’s eyes. Let a really good doctor examine her.’
‘If a good doctor came,’ said my husband, ‘what new treatment could he give? I know about all the available medicines.’
My brother grew angry and said, ‘So I suppose there is no difference between you and the top man at your college?’
‘You are studying law,’ said my husband. ‘What do you know of medicine? When you get married, and have to go to law, say, over your wife’s property, will you come to me for advice?’
‘When kings fight,’ I said to myself, ‘ordinary folk had best keep out of the way. My husband is quarrelling with Dādā, but I’m the one who will pay for it.’ I also felt that since I’d been given away in marriage, my brother and his friends no longer had a right to intervene. My sorrow and happiness, health and sickness were all in the hands of my husband.
Relations between my husband and brother became rather strained over this small matter of medical treatment. My flow of tears, already copious, now became even heavier – with neither my husband nor my brother understanding the true reason.
One afternoon when my husband was at college my brother suddenly appeared with a doctor. The doctor examined me and said that if care were not taken my eye-condition might get worse. He prescribed a new set of medicines, which my brother immediately sent someone to fetch. When the doctor had gone I said, ‘Dādā, I beg you, don’t interfere with the treatment I am following at the moment.’
I had been in awe of my brother ever since childhood: to speak to him so bluntly was an odd thing for me to do. But I knew well that no good would come of the treatment that my brother had arranged behind my husband’s back. My brother, too, was probably surprised at my boldness. He was silent for a while, then said, ‘All right, I shan’t bring a doctor again, but please try the medicines that are on their way.’ When the medicines arrived, my brother explained how I should u
se them, and then left. Before my husband returned from college, I took the bottles, pill-box, brush and instructions and carefully disposed of them in the well in the courtyard of our house.
As if out of grudge towards my brother, my husband now treated my eyes with redoubled vigour. He changed medicines from one day to the next. I wore blinkers over my eyes, or spectacles; I put drops into them, or smeared them with powder; I even put up with the foul-smelling fish-oil he gave me to swallow and which made me want to vomit. My husband would ask me how I was feeling and I would say, ‘Much better.’ I even tried to persuade myself that my tears were a good sign; when the streaming stopped I decided I was on the road to recovery. But before long the pain was unendurable. My vision was blurred, and I was writhing with headache. I could see that even my husband was downcast. He was finding it difficult to think of a pretext for calling a doctor after so long.
‘To set my brother’s mind at rest,’ I said, ‘what harm would there be in calling a doctor? He’s becoming so unreasonably angry – it’s upsetting me. You can carry on treating me, but a doctor can be brought in too, for form’s sake.’
Selected Short Stories Page 29