‘That’s fine, Dada. You were what, five, when you left here? I understand. And then the power cut happened at the worst possible time. But look, I think this road will take us back to the station. Maybe it’s not even especially far, because who knows how much time we lost wandering in those lanes? We could be just ten minutes from the market, and less if we run.’
When he doesn’t reply to even this exciting possibility, I try another tack. The time for accusations is later. We have to work together just now.
‘Listen, what if we make Baba promise to bring all of us, you, Didi and me, because I want to see it too, to this house as soon as possible? He’ll definitely know the address, and we can come during Thamma’s visit. That way she and Didi will also be here.’
And I underline what I’m implying, just in case it isn’t clear: we have to return to the station immediately and, unless he has any better ideas, mine is the route we’re taking. And even if there’s a flaw in my reasoning and this isn’t the station road, it’s our best chance to meet a passer-by or a rickshaw that could set us straight. We absolutely can’t find his house today. You hear me, Dada, we absolutely can’t find your house today. We had our chance and now we’ve run out of time. Baba will bite our heads off if we keep Thamma waiting close to eleven at night, and that is why I’m leaving, whether you’re coming or not.
For about thirty metres I walk in my chosen direction (following only intuition, no guiding star or any kind of reliable clue), looking regularly to see if Dada is following me. What I want to do more than anything is run, but I can’t, not until I’m certain he is coming, even though I’ve proclaimed the fact that I will stick to this road unless a very persuasive alternative comes along. Despite my deep frustration, I cannot desert my brother, who is just as lost as I am. Or I should rephrase that, because even in that state, I’m dimly aware (pun intended) that he is lost in many more ways than me. I only want to achieve a physical goal: to retrace our steps and return to a place where Baba and Thamma will definitely be waiting for us, albeit with the most monumental of scoldings, especially when Ma hears what happened.
But Dada, who remains before the factory gate in silence for several more seconds before he begins to walk behind me, is trying to get somewhere he cannot go. Even the childhood house wasn’t really it, although it would have certainly triggered some happy memories. Right then, for the briefest of flashes, a strange image comes to me of his life as a jigsaw that’s always missed one crucial piece at any given time. He’d only had both his parents perhaps right after birth, which doesn’t really count. Then Baba met my mother, and he and Didi just had their Ma. When they had their father again — I mean by their side all the time, as I had always taken for granted with my parents — it was because their mother was gone.
Now that he is finally following me — although never catching up; there’s still twenty metres between us — I begin to jog to see if he’ll respond, hoping to up our pace shortly to an all-out run. But Dada doesn’t pick up on my cue. He continues to walk as if reluctant and distracted and, despite wishing to, I don’t yell out and force the matter. After all, very soon the time would become immaterial, and the direst of consequences unavoidable. Perhaps ‘in for a penny …’ is what I’m thinking, although I still want to spare our ailing Thamma too much worry.
We carry on at that pace for thirteen minutes, because I do finally look at my watch once more when we reach the end of the road. My plan has gone unchallenged, and my brother has followed me without protest, although throughout he refused to run. The power cut continues, but we never deviated from this road, and didn’t lose our way again. Oddly for a thoroughfare, we didn’t come across one person during our walk, but only now does the reason become clear.
My theory wasn’t wrong. A factory is usually well set up to receive and dispatch supplies and products, and this road is definitely one of its connections. There probably is, as I’d envisioned, a similar road leading from another gate directly to Howrah station, but this one, the one we’d happened upon, had led us with impeccable logic to the bank of the river.
We’re determined to sleep in shifts, so that we can move as soon as the power returns, but also to keep a watch for (other) intruders and animals (snakes, bats, stray cats and dogs, owls, rats, everything really; Dada even says, with no trace of it being a joke, that there might be jackals living in the factory compound). I hate to admit I was the one who let the side down. I know I was awake at least till 12.50, because that was the last time I looked at my watch: Dada had put in the first shift for an hour from half-past eleven. I hadn’t slept a wink even though it had been my turn to rest, partly from an unwillingness to lie in the thick dust — I’d been trying to close my eyes while seated against the wall — but also from an especial horror of rats. I kept recalling pictures from classic stories in the illustrated Moby Books series, of characters imprisoned in dungeons and ship holds, but in particular The Man in the Iron Mask and The Count of Monte Cristo. Hence we’re still talking when Dada returns my watch to me and walks over and dusts off one of the large tables with what seems like an equally filthy curtain. He invites me to join him there: at that height in the middle of the huge workshop we’d have slightly more of an advantage over any fauna that wandered, or slithered, in. Twenty minutes later we’re both asleep, my head somewhere near Dada’s waist, the rest of me curled like a comma.
Between the muddy river bank and the factory, or between looking for another road to the station in the dark and a factory that Dada knew well from his childhood, we’d both chosen quite readily. It would be our shelter just until the power returned. Of course we were afraid that others already slept there, but that, I pointed out, might be useful too. They could tell us the way to the station, and we would immediately set off. In fact, I’d hoped there were people who sheltered in the factory by night, just for this reason.
But both floors of the main building that Dada led us to had seemed empty. Eventually we’d decided on the first floor, because it put a winding wrought-iron stairway between us and any other visitors, and also gave us a better view of the street lights and houses outside.
When I wake up, Mickey Mouse tells me it’s 6.39. We don’t need the power back on any more. I realise it was probably the honking of car and rickshaw horns that had awakened me. There is a tap Dada remembers, set into the wall right beside the main gate, which is how we’re able to get some of the dust off our clothes, arms, faces and hair. A passing thelawala looks at us curiously but immediately tells us that the quickest way to the station is to take the third left turn off this road: there is an electrical shop on that corner, he helpfully adds.
The third left turn seems plausibly wide, and Jayanta Electric Stores is exactly where we expected to see it, but when I notice some ladies preparing for a puja at a small cream-and-red pandal up ahead, I tell Dada that I will double-check the directions, just to be sure. Dada remains outside the pandal, while the woman I speak to confirms that the station is straight ahead. I notice two of her friends supervising the putting up of a large red banner for a blood-donation drive (my assumption about a puja was mistaken). It’s 7.11 a.m.
The woman might have noticed some of the dust that Dada had missed brushing away on my hair and clothes, because she asks me if I’m coming from home. I say no, but my brother and I are meeting our father at the station, and our grandma. She asks if I’d like to take a rickshaw. I politely decline as I turn away: if it’s only five minutes we’ll be fine.
It turns out to be the last kind thing anyone says to us for a long time. And that was far from being the worst of it.
You know how people often say ‘… and nothing was ever the same again’ about a particular incident and, truth be told, you feel they’re slightly exaggerating? Well, our walk that night, at first merely to kill an hour, then to help Dada locate a piece of his past, and finally in vain to find our way back to Baba, really did change everything for our family. (Although now I’m aware that my brother would pro
bably object: ‘And what exactly changed for you, Abhi, except perhaps for the better?’)
No, I’ve not left anything out. No one was hurt, abducted or worse. Baba spent those nine hours shuttling between the railway police station, Thamma’s bedside in a hastily arranged station retiring room, our promised rendezvous point on platform 14, and an all-night public phone on a grocery-store counter from which he was trying to keep Ma calm and assure her it was pointless to rush to the station with our sister. Again, not an enviable position to be in, and one for which the two of us were entirely to blame, but nobody’s heart stopped beating. Nine dreadful hours to be sure, and we were absolutely sincere in our vow that nothing like this would ever happen again if only Ma and Baba would drop their subsequent, resulting plan, which more than anything felt like an enormous overreaction.
Because within forty days, just before the new year began, Dada would be dispatched to a boarding school near Ranchi, four hundred kilometres away from us (God knows what favours Baba called in to achieve this in the middle of a school year), and Didi to a girl’s school in Hazaribagh, a further hundred kilometres from her only brother.
Baba and Ma insist to us that it is a collective decision, that we brothers are clearly bad influences on one another, and that they would simply never allow such a misadventure to occur again. The matter must be ‘tackled at its root’. Apparently — and this Dada and I had never realised until it is pointed out to us — this is the worst in a series of joint misdeeds on our part since he and Didi had moved in. This is genuinely news to me: I had truly believed, two years into living together, that we were all getting on rather well, and that Ma was happy looking after us. Now I learn that two boys out on the streets for hours each day, usually on their bikes, ‘spurring one another on to riskier dares’ (Baba’s words) has been a constant strain on Ma’s nerves, and that she has never felt Dada trusted or listened to her as a mother, no matter how hard she’d tried.
Something about my parents has changed and hardened with this one silly incident. In their zeal to discipline us, they’re entirely overlooking the most — no, two most — significant aspects of what happened. The first had struck even a nine-year-old who wasn’t at all enjoying being led through endless dark alleys in a totally unknown town — that Dada had suddenly seen an opportunity to briefly draw close to his mother, or at least to a place where she had lived. And second, that two brothers hadn’t, and couldn’t have, deserted one another once they realised they were lost. Staying together through the night until they could safely return had easily been the more loyal, and also sensible and mature, course of action. But my impassioned arguments for the defence fell on unhearing ears.
‘No, what would have been sensible for a boy who hasn’t been in Howrah since he was five was to never leave the station in the first place. Ashim would have done better to run back to platform 14 and ask your father the address first. Then at least he would have known where he was going.’
‘And Baba,’ I asked, turning to him, ‘you would have allowed us to go? Honestly?’
‘I would have promised to take you all another time once I knew how much he wanted this.’
In another hard-to-credit act of parental pragmatism, Didi is initially offered the option of remaining in Calcutta with us. Her peaceful nature has never caused anyone any worry, and she shouldn’t have to disrupt her studies in Class 9, but she chooses to move to Hazaribagh to be closer to her brother. Just as I chose to stay with him even as we ran into one bit of bad luck after another — the power cut, the empty streets. Why was such loyalty so hard for my parents to understand?
And where is Didi going to live in Hazaribagh, or Dada, when he isn’t at boarding school? This is the most unexpected part of the utterly unnecessary ‘solution’ that Ma and Baba patch together (to the problem that never was), given that a large part of the yelling and crying that went on for days and the round-the-world guilt trip that Dada and I were sent on was to do with Thamma’s health and what we had subjected her to — they are going to live with her! Yup, shake your head: Didi is going to live with our grandmother full-time and finish school in Hazaribagh, while Dada will be a boarder a three-hour drive away in Namkum, near Ranchi. Because that’s how important it is to separate the two of us immediately, for our own wellbeing, for my mother’s sake, and even for my grandmother’s loneliness apparently (at one point we’re told).
During the night itself, I had decided that after having screamed at him, I wouldn’t speak to my brother for four days, as a protest against what he had put us through. By midnight, sitting there on the factory floor, while he took his turn watching the door and the windows, I was upset enough to inwardly raise the period of sanctions to a week. As things turned out, we were never more united than in the five weeks before they separated us, on the 29th of December. Not once did I feel that I should pin all the blame on Dada as I’d originally planned to; insist and emphasise that every part of leaving the station had been his idea, for his reasons, and that my fault lay only in not decrying the stupidity of the plan from the outset and simply refusing to go along.
OK, I wasn’t a parent yet, and was only nine at the time, and as a thirty-seven-year-old father today I certainly wouldn’t dismiss my parents’ anguish quite so airily, but all I could think at the time was: grown-ups must be crazy! There is no call for anything so drastic. It was just a hasty idea that ran into bad weather. Nobody was out to hurt anyone or cause worry or be deliberately, maliciously naughty. In fact, we were both pursuing a noble objective, because it was obvious how much Dada was missing his mother. I said all this and much more to my parents over and over in different ways — about how it proved that our family was actually working in the sense of two brothers staying loyal to one another — right up until the day of Dada and Didi’s departure: in front of them, when I was alone with Ma, at the dinner table, even on my tenth birthday in early December as we were all together absurdly pretending to celebrate at Kwality restaurant. That was what I asked for as my present: please cancel your plan. It’s so unnecessary, such a massive misreading of what we intended. Why not send me to boarding school as well as him? Why not send me instead of him, if the objective is merely to separate us? Why send anyone at all? Why didn’t Ma ever tell us how much our being on the streets worried her? How can something be your last chance when you didn’t even know you were running out of chances?
The only grown-up to emerge out of this with any credit was our sixty-four-year-old Thamma, who at least volunteered to be part of a solution once it was obvious my parents had closed their minds. And when I called that witness to the stand at probably fifteen different dinnertimes, she never once claimed that our undeniably reckless actions that night had pushed her to the brink of dying. Not even close. So, Baba and Ma, it isn’t really about her, is it? No further questions, Your Honour.
The trouble with this particular case was that Your Honours were also the prosecution and the governing regime, which utterly lacked the necessary separation between executive and judiciary.
Anyhow, a failure though my campaign was, that is how I remembered it, at least until the second half of this year. Which was when I finally learnt, well over a quarter-century later, that despite everything he’d seen and heard, all my pleas and outrage and attempts to show solidarity with my much-loved siblings, my older brother had kind of held me responsible all these years for their permanent banishment from their father’s home.
Section I
CHRISTMAS
Lena
Abhay bcc’ed me into the email, which is why I’m able to share it. His intention was for me to jump in with any obvious things he had left out, but I could tell he was also pleased with the fool-proof comprehensiveness of his own list.
He had produced almost as thorough a checklist at the time of Ashim and Tulti’s visa applications in September, not to mention several endless Skype chats (with lots of frozen pictures and bad connections) between the brothers, with both holding printouts of the
form as they’d gone through it question by question.
Dada, feeling ready for take-off? Print this out to keep in the same folder as your tickets and passports. Yes, it’s every bit as valuable
First of all, do make your own specific list of whatever else you need to carry: these are just the obvious essentials. Passports, return ticket printouts, travel insurance printouts, credit and ATM cards, dollars and rupees, any essential medicines you might need on the journey, our Wellington address and phone number for the landing card, and of course a pen to fill in forms at either end of the flight. No money or documents should ever be in your checked-in baggage, always on your person, in a wallet or folder or jacket pocket, which, once you’re on the plane, is put safely out of sight in your carry-on bag. I usually place my bag back to front and upside down in the overhead bin, but that’s just my unnecessary paranoia
While I remember, vital for Tulti’s journey, a couple of new storybooks as well as two drawing or activity or puzzle books along with markers or colour pencils to entertain her, especially during the airport waits after you’ve done the rounds of the shops If you have apps she likes on your phone or tablet, they are great too. These are also useful on the plane, but hopefully she’ll sleep well on the long Auckland leg, and there will be movies and cartoons and TV-show episodes to watch as well. The books are for when you want a break from screen time
Keep a small tube of toothpaste (under 100 ml) and your toothbrushes in your seat pocket, and one entertaining book for yourself as well. And for you one spare pair of underwear, one extra pair of socks, one spare sweater, and one spare T-shirt or shirt in your carry-on bag, just in case your luggage arrives late, which I’m sure it won’t but it can happen. And likewise a complete spare set of clothing for Tulti (perhaps even two of everything), including of course something warm to put on in Auckland because don’t forget you’ll be getting in at a quarter to midnight.
The Man Who Would Not See Page 2