Fern Road

by Angshu Dasgupta

  There was a phase when he could stay afloat, and he could propel himself forward, but his arms and his legs moved as if they belonged to four different people. He would watch his mother wistfully as her lithe form scythed through the water with infinite grace. He wanted to be like her, in the water and out of it. He can’t remember if it was that year or the next when he was finally able to keep up with her.

  They went swimming every weekday, a few hours after lunch. Orko would pretend he was a baby whale swimming alongside his mother. He would follow her as she swam up and down the length of the pool. Sometimes he would peel off and swim on his own, for he was now the grown-up, and his babies wanted to play. So they swam together, by themselves. Underwater. Across lanes. Diagonally. In no particular direction at all. They would continue to swim, Orko and his pod, till his eyes burned from the chlorine and his fingertips shrivelled up like forgotten grapes. In the end, his mother would drag him from the pool and into the changing rooms, with its panels of varnished wood topped by a line of frosted glass that glistened with condensation. They showered in neighbouring stalls. His mother hummed in the shower, and sometimes, when Orko recognised the tune, he would hum under his breath. They usually emerged together, because Orko turned off the shower when he heard his mother do the same across the panel that separated them. She had a towel on her head and another around her torso; Orko had just the one towel. She whisked him away to a cubicle and wiped him dry. He dressed himself, and she combed his hair. Then, he ran to the swing set in the playground.

  On the swings, he learned that he couldn’t move forward without going backwards first. He soared, like a kite, then swooped down. Soar again. Swoop. He was a bird with no name. He had a bright orange beak, and his feathers were a brilliant white. He longed to break free and fly away. He was always a little disappointed when he saw his mother as he soared in the air, her large jute bag slung over her shoulder. He liked it when she wore pants, because he wore pants too. They usually ate ice cream. Orko liked strawberry, his mother – butterscotch. They walked down the driveway, a stream of cars coming at them, windows rolled up. A few blasted their startled horns at them; the rest just drove past as if they were invisible.

  The last time Orko went swimming, they got off the tram and walked into the club, like they always did. They walked along the driveway, hand in hand, Orko to his mother’s left, away from the cars that whizzed past them. Just as they were about to go into the changing rooms, Orko felt a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘I’m afraid he can’t go in there,’ said a voice. It was a woman’s voice – stern, like his Bangla teacher’s.

  ‘But he always comes in with me,’ said his mother. ‘He’s only seven!’

  ‘I don’t know about that – I can’t let him into the ladies’ changing rooms. He needs to go down there,’ said the woman, pointing down the hallway. ‘Around the corner.’

  Orko was sure that it was a misunderstanding and that his mother would clear it up, but she fished out his swimming trunks from her bag and walked him to the door around the corner. ‘Gentlemen,’ it said in block letters, red, like the crosses painted on the sides of ambulances.

  ‘I’ll be in the pool,’ she said, as she motioned for him to go in. ‘Don’t jump into the pool if you can’t see me.’

  Orko hesitated.

  ‘You’re a big boy now. It’ll be all right. You’ll see,’ his mother said, her fingers combing his unruly hair to one side.

  Orko was about to push the door open when it swung outwards, almost hitting him in the face. A man strode out in his swimming trunks, a gold chain around his neck and a gold watch on his right wrist. Orko made his way past the man. There was another door down a short flight of stairs. Orko opened the door, expecting to find the showers to his left and a neat row of cubicles to his right.

  Inside, there were no cubicles. Instead, there was a large hall, lined with benches. The smell reminded him of the doctor’s chamber where his mother took him for his shots. There were boys and men everywhere. Two boys laughed as they dried themselves. A young man slapped another on the back. Two men were completely naked. One of the naked men had hair all over his body – on his chest, on his neck, on his knuckles, on his ears, in his crotch. His penis looked shockingly large. He walked about nonchalantly, in no particular hurry to dress himself.

  The noise was deafening. Orko wanted to run away, but he couldn’t, because he had to be a big boy, and big boys didn’t run away. He looked over his shoulder before taking off his T-shirt. He wrapped a towel around his torso, gripping the edges in his armpits. An older boy took off his underwear and stood completely naked, as if to show Orko how it was done. That was when Orko felt the presence. Although he couldn’t see it, he was sure that he was being watched by a creature much larger than he was. It smelt of disinfectant. He realised that he couldn’t see colours anymore; everything was a shade of grey. He became convinced that this invisible creature, much larger than him, had sucked the colour away. He wondered if he himself had turned grey, when he realised that he couldn’t raise his arm. He couldn’t move. He could barely breathe.

  The naked boy wrapped a towel around his midriff and sauntered off. It was some time before Orko could move again. He hurriedly put his clothes back on. His T-shirt was inside out. He ran from the changing rooms. He didn’t stop to fix his shirt because he was scared that the creature would come after him. He ran towards the swimming pool, where the sky was blue. Surely the creature couldn’t suck the colour out of the sky.

  He waited near the footbath for his mother. When she arrived, in her navy swimming costume and yellow cap, Orko rushed to her in tears. She lifted him up, his head nestling in her breast as he sobbed uncontrollably.

  ‘What happened, Orko? Did someone hurt you?’ she asked. Her voice sounded like it did the time when he had come home all bloodied after a tumble from the swing in the playground. He could smell her over the chlorine.

  Orko remembers that as the moment when he realised that something was horribly wrong. He had always thought that when he grew up, he would be just like his mother. He did not want hair all over his body, in his armpits, in his crotch. He didn’t want to walk bare-chested from the swimming pool, water dripping from his hairy knuckles. If that was how it was going to be, he’d rather not swim.

  ‘I don’t want to be a big boy,’ he said. ‘I want to be like you.’

  It was the morning of Orko’s eighth birthday, and he had spent the night at Urmi’s. They were in her room, playing, when her mother came to fetch him. ‘Your grandfather is here,’ she said.

  Amiya, his maternal grandfather, was at Urmi’s doorstep. Orko was surprised when he didn’t wish Orko a happy birthday, and he was a little disappointed when he discovered that his grandfather hadn’t brought a present.

  ‘We have to leave right away,’ Amiya said to him, ruffling his hair.

  ‘Can Urmi come with us?’ Orko asked.

  ‘Another time,’ his grandfather replied.

  They rode in the back seat of Amiya’s big black Humber. Orko can’t remember who was driving. They were at the crest of a bridge when his grandfather told him that his mother was gone, that the gods had taken her away.

  This didn’t make sense at all, because Orko’s mother was big and strong, and the gods were tiny, made of brass. They sat on the shelf by his mother’s dressing table. They couldn’t even feed themselves. How could they possibly take his mother away?

  ‘You’re lying,’ he said to Amiya. ‘Ma is much bigger than the gods.’

  That was the only time Orko saw a grown man weep.

  The next thing Orko remembers is visiting Amiya at the hospital. He remembers thinking that his grandfather’s body had deflated, like a balloon. When Amiya tried to smile at him, only the right half of his mouth moved. Orko’s father told him later that part of Amiya’s brain had stopped working. The doctors said that he had suffered a stroke.

  Two

  The years following his mother’s death are a blur, l
ike a playground seen from a whirling carousel. Breakfast with his father; the ride on the school bus that seemed to finish before it began; books tumbling out of his schoolbag and climbing back in; pages upon pages of notes in his wobbly, indecipherable hand; a different bus on his way back, on a shorter route; Sudeshna, his aunt, at the bus stop, carrying a white umbrella with black polka dots, come rain or shine; lunch with his grandfather, napkins tucked into their collars, lest they soil their shirts. His aunt never ate with them. She said it was more convenient to eat after they had finished.

  After lunch, Amiya napped in his armchair while Sudeshna saw to Orko’s studies. She taught him long division and multiplication, and she insisted that the tables of thirteen must be recited without the assistance of mental arithmetic. She made sure his homework was done, and she checked his school diary for notes from his teachers. She taught him cursive writing, her hand wrapped around his own tiny hand, guiding the pencil over the dotted lines, making sure he didn’t stray or stutter. ‘Cursive writing,’ she said. ‘All civilised people write this way.’ Orko could bear it only because he knew that, soon, his grandfather would be awake.

  Not given to the banalities that other grown-ups resorted to, Amiya never asked Orko stupid questions. What did he have for breakfast? What did he learn at school that day? Who was his favourite teacher? What did he want to be when he grew up? Amiya either knew the answers to all those questions or he didn’t think they were of any consequence. He never asked Orko to sing Rabindra Sangeet or to recite a poem he had learnt at school. After his stroke, his words didn’t come out right, and this was a source of constant exasperation for Sudeshna. Orko, on the other hand, had no trouble understanding his grandfather. He clung to every slurred word, wide-eyed with wonder as his grandfather told him stories unlike any he had read. Try as he might, all he can recall about the stories is that there was magic where he was least expecting it.

  Beside the TV in his grandfather’s house was a signal booster. ‘It’s a magic box,’ he said, when Orko asked him what it was. It sat by the TV, and it was no larger than a loaf of bread. It plucked pictures and words out of thin air. Every afternoon, they watched television from Bangladesh, Amiya’s erstwhile homeland. Orko loved the cartoon shows, and he thinks his grandfather did too, because he remembers his grandfather humming the theme from ThunderCats.

  On Thursdays, Nandan had the afternoon off, and he would arrive shortly after lunch. In the summer, they usually went to the planetarium, or they watched a movie together. Sometimes, when it was really hot, Nandan took Orko back to his office. ‘Let’s do our homework together,’ he would say, with a sheepish grin. Winter afternoons were spent outdoors. Sudeshna packed them a picnic lunch, and Orko went with his father to the Botanic Gardens, or the zoo, or the maidan. Sometimes they just went to the lake.

  It was a Thursday, near the end of November. Orko and his father sat astride a bench by the side of the Dhakuria lake. A large plate between them, made from dried sal leaves pinned together, hosted a steadily diminishing stack of sandwiches – some ham, some cheese. It was a bright, pleasant afternoon. Orko followed the languid progress of a rowboat as it made its way across the lake. A man was rowing; a woman sat in the passenger seat, facing the man.

  ‘I’ll tell you a story today,’ said Nandan. ‘It’s the story of the biggest boat ever made by mankind.’

  Orko kicked off his sneakers and settled in, cross-legged, on the bench.

  ‘It’s 1912. Southampton dock,’ Nandan started. ‘Do you know where Southampton is?’

  Orko shook his head.

  ‘In England,’ said his father. ‘With great fanfare, a ship sets sail. It’s a luxury ocean liner, the greatest ever built. Its builders have even gone as far as calling it unsinkable. It’s headed for New York, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.’

  Nandan fished out a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. He lit one, cupping his hands to shield the flame from the gentle breeze blowing across the lake.

  ‘The first four days of the voyage are uneventful. It’s on the last night that our story begins. The sky is black, the stars shining through with a brilliance that neither you nor I will see in our lifetimes. Through the vast blackness of sea and sky, the cold steel hull cuts across the surface of the water.’

  Orko remembers wondering if his father had read the story in a magazine and learnt it off by heart. The sentences didn’t seem like they were constructed offhand, on a November afternoon by the side of a lake.

  ‘The hull is thicker than any the ocean has known before. It conceals a sophisticated system of chambers and air locks, combining to contain the ocean, should it sneak past the ship’s first line of defence. On this dark, formidable platform, there appears a row of brilliant lights. Set a little above the first, another row of lights appears. And another. Five. Six. Seven.’

  By the time the last row of lights came on, Orko was on board.

  ‘There’s a swimming pool,’ Nandan continued, ‘bigger than the one at the club. There are staterooms and dining halls; in these halls are well-dressed men and women, young and old. Cheeks are pressed together in greeting. Lithe hands gloved in white are kissed. The ship has its own band, and they play on as couples dance on the ballroom floor. Below decks, man and machine combine to keep this giant on schedule. The engine room is gigantic. The boilers are the size of small lorries. The sailors who keep them ticking along are lodged three or four to a cabin the size of our bathroom.’

  Just as suddenly as he found himself aboard the vessel, Orko was again a spectator. He was cheering from the sidelines as the behemoth steamed across the North Atlantic.

  ‘Speed is a strange thing,’ Nandan said, as he screwed the lid back onto the bottle of tomato sauce. He crushed the plate and threw it into the waters of the lake, before Orko could point out that there was a dustbin just behind him. ‘It’s perfectly safe for a car to be going twice as fast as the Titanic was that night. If you turn a corner and find a fallen tree in your way, you brake. The car digs its heels in, and in the blink of an eye you’re at a standstill. All you need to do is back away, turn the car around, and that’s that. If a dog bolts across the road, you just turn the steering wheel a little bit, for a fraction of a second. The dog is still alive, and you’re on your way. It’s between you, your car and the road. There’s something solid for the tyres to hold on to. You brake, the wheels lock, the rubber burns against the tarmac. Your car loses energy. You stop. A ship, though, is a different beast.’

  Orko knew how propellers worked. ‘I know that,’ he wanted to say.

  ‘It’s almost like running a country,’ Nandan continued. ‘The captain can’t just ride with his hands on the wheel, stepping on the accelerator when he wants to go faster, swerving if another ship appears out of nowhere. Everything has to be plotted and planned well in advance. A ship like that will coast for a couple of kilometres after the captain gives the command to stop. In fact, he can’t even see far enough to brake in time to avoid a collision.’

  A collision. That was the direction in which the story seemed to be headed.

  ‘It was a grand occasion, whichever way one looks at it. It was the biggest, grandest, most invincible machine ever built. Every evening was a celebration. There was champagne, and there was music. There was dancing, and there were fireworks.’

  ‘Have you ever been on a ship like that?’ Orko asked his father.

  ‘I wish,’ said Nandan, a faraway look in his eyes. ‘The Titanic careens through the night. There’s the schedule to meet. In addition to being the largest and the grandest, the Titanic aspires to be the fastest across the Atlantic.’

  Nandan gazed into the distance past Orko. He looked like he was trying to decide how to advance the story.

  ‘And then?’ Orko asked, his impatience getting the better of him.

  ‘The North Atlantic is chock-full of icebergs,’ his father said. ‘A few ships radio warnings to the Titanic, but because it’s unsinkable the captain isn’t particularly
worried. As far as the captain is concerned, he is running a tight ship, keeping a diligent watch, marshalling his troops well. The boilers are running at full blast, feeding the ship’s engines, keeping the passengers warm in the smoking rooms. The dining is fine. The passengers are happy; some are going home, while others, like the Titanic, are on their first run across the Atlantic. For each passenger and crew member, it is a momentous crossing. In the crow’s nest, though, is a crewman who has no binoculars.’

  The sun had disappeared beyond the curve of the earth, but Orko couldn’t see any stars. He heard distant strains of music. It was impossible to pick out the tune, with the cold wind blowing his long, golden hair across his face. There was no one else in sight. The water looked dark and forbidding.

  Night fell in the blink of an eye. The moon was conspicuous by its absence. More stars were twinkling than Orko had ever seen, casting their shadowy light on him from the depths of time. The Titanic, on the other hand, was just a glittering mass of wood and metal, invisible even from the new moon.

  ‘The ocean is sure to see ships mightier than her, but tonight belongs to the Titanic. It’s going to be quite a night.’ Nandan paused, his eyes settling on a bench on the far side of the lake.

  Orko heard a bell as a popcorn seller wheeled his bicycle past their bench. He wasn’t hungry. He still could taste the ham and the butter on his palate. He could do with a drink – maybe a glass of cold water. The sky was a giant inky canvas, the stars still points from which he couldn’t look away. He shivered when a gust of ocean breeze blew at him. The sea was aglow with an otherworldly light. It was green. Orko grasped the railing and, looking past it, saw luminous streaks below the surface of the ocean, running together, from here to eternity, as if he were on a footbridge over a railway yard, with a distant locomotive shining its light on the tracks that passed below his feet.