Orko never was a brilliant student. Sometimes he feels incredibly fortunate for having come this far without a stumble. He has always paid attention in class, and a few hours of study before the annual examinations have been enough to see him through. This year, though, his luck seems to have run out. The texts seem incredibly dense, and his notes are so erratic that they’re completely useless. He’s more than a little unnerved as he reads through the pages from less than a week ago. Therefore, say the three terse dots stacked in a pyramid, the left-hand side of the equation equals the right. It ought to make sense, but it doesn’t.
He’s sure that everyone else in his class is better prepared than he is. They seem to have a sense of purpose. Most of them have already decided that they’re going to study science after their board examinations. He, on the other hand, hasn’t been able to make up his mind. His father is of the opinion that he should study humanities, and Orko can’t help thinking that this is because his father thinks he’s stupid. Bodhi, Urmi’s brother, is studying to be an engineer at an elite institute in Kanpur. In Bodhi’s higher secondary class, all the boys were in the science section. In the humanities section there were seven girls – and, according to Bodhi, they were all dolts. They were studying humanities only because they weren’t offered science, and it didn’t matter, because they were just killing time in the school system, preparing themselves for the marriage market.
Orko didn’t agree with Bodhi’s assertion. Nilanjana wanted to study fine arts, and Bodhi’s own sister wanted to study history. They certainly weren’t idiots, and he had never heard them speak about getting married. He’d said nothing to Bodhi at the time, because he was sure Bodhi would put him down with a clever remark, and he would feel extremely stupid for having spoken his mind.
He pores over the scribbled minutiae in the pages of his notebook. This is his third pass this morning, but it still doesn’t make any sense. Years ago, he sat at this very table, his aunt by his side. She was teaching him that the angles of a triangle added up to a hundred and eighty degrees, and he remembers the ease with which she went about proving it. He can hear her in the kitchen now, filling a vessel from the faucet – a kettle, by the sound of it. He leaves his books on the dining table and sidles up to her.
‘Are you making tea?’ he asks.
‘Yes, I am,’ she says. ‘Would you like some?’
‘Yes, please,’ Orko replies.
Although Orko has always lived with his father, he has often thought of Sudeshna as his guardian – the grown-up who saw to his homework and bought him new clothes before the pujo. When he was in her charge, he was often infuriated by the fact that nothing seemed to escape her notice. Now, she’s alone, with no one to take care of, and he wonders how her life might have turned out if the twin catastrophes of her sister’s death and her father’s illness hadn’t brought her back to Calcutta. She used to be the head of the biology department at an elite school in Dehradun. His father once told him that her students were terrified of her, and Orko remembers wondering how his father knew this.
If Sudeshna hadn’t come back to Calcutta, Nandan would probably have moved back to his parents’ home in Hazra. Orko would live there too, with Robi and Ria, taking the school bus home, eating his meals quietly, efficiently, like a food digestion device – charm, chew, masticate, swallow. In a few years, he would be expected to be an active participant in the stultifying conversations about cricket and politics when they sat down to tea. He would probably have to share Robi’s room, and that would be horrible, because Robi’s taste in music is appalling, and after he has been to the toilet there’s always a few drops of piss on the seat.
They bring their tea to the dining table in the hall adjoining the kitchen. Of the six windows, just one is open. Outside, it is almost noon; in the room, the light is soft and golden, like sunset in winter.
Sudeshna heads back into the kitchen and returns with a biscuit tin. This tin is in Orko’s earliest memories. He remembers his mother, at the coffee table on the balcony, struggling to prise the lid open. Sudeshna opens the lid effortlessly and sets it down by Orko’s teacup. This was his grandfather’s place at the table. Time warps, and he’s ten again. His grandfather’s enamelled bowl; the brass tumbler in the shape of a tulip by its side; the pale green napkin that Sudeshna tucked into his grandfather’s collar when they sat down to lunch.
‘You’re having trouble with your studies,’ his aunt says, just as the clock finishes announcing that it is now noon. Her tone is neutral, and Orko isn’t surprised that she knows. He has been sitting at the dining table all morning, flitting between his mathematics textbook and his sketchy notes. ‘I know,’ he says. ‘I’m trying my best, but none of it is making sense.’ He’s surprised, because he has never admitted this – even to himself.
Sudeshna places her palms on the table, side by side. She draws them apart, as if smoothing over the creases in an imaginary tablecloth. Orko follows the tips of her fingers as she lifts her hands off the table and clasps them together.
‘You remind me of your mother,’ she says. ‘You’re so much like her that it’s uncanny.’
Orko is taken completely by surprise. His aunt hasn’t spoken of his mother in years.
‘What do you mean?’ he asks.
‘She was brilliant,’ she says. ‘But something came over her just before her matriculation exams. She would sit here, at this table, her books open in front of her, and I could tell that she was struggling. I tried to help, but it was as if she didn’t hear me, or see me, or comprehend a word I said.’
Orko can’t imagine that his mother ever struggled with her studies. She was the one with all the answers. She could never be as lost as he feels now. ‘I’m not brilliant,’ he retorts.
‘You are,’ his aunt says. ‘You’re just like her, and I’m afraid for you.’
A strange emotion takes hold of Orko. It’s almost like happiness, but there’s an edge to it, and it cuts him, like the edge of a page of a new book. He lifts his teacup with both hands and brings it to his lips. The teacup is warm and he cups his hands around it.
His aunt watches him with a look of mild amusement. ‘Each time I tell myself that I’m imagining things, you go and do something like that,’ she says. She has a faraway look in her eyes. ‘A spitting image,’ she says under her breath. She sets her cup down, and it strikes the saucer with a hollow metallic clink.
‘When she was your age, she began to grow apart from her friends.’ Sudeshna stares at the surface of the table as if the story of his mother’s life were inscribed upon it. ‘She spent hours by herself, scribbling in her notebooks. Once, we were having dinner, right here, at this table, and she looked completely out of it. Baba asked her if everything was all right, and she burst into tears. She cried until she was gasping for breath, just like you were yesterday.’
Sudeshna looks at Orko again, and he feels a little unnerved. He feels as if she’s analysing him, picking apart every action, every mannerism.
She fidgets with the end of her saree. ‘I still don’t know what the matter was,’ she says ruefully. ‘In fact, it was around that time that she stopped confiding in me. She spoke only when spoken to. This went on for months, and then she ran away from home.’
Sudeshna glances at Orko fleetingly, and he knows that he appears less surprised than he should be – his mother had devoted several pages in her notebooks to her elaborate plans to run away. He himself has considered it, but he could never muster the courage.
‘Where did she go?’ he asks.
‘I don’t know. She wouldn’t say.’ Sudeshna looks like she’s trying to remember something that happened many years ago. ‘She wanted to grow up in a hurry,’ she continues. ‘When she was twelve or thirteen, I had just started college. She would dress up in my sarees, my earrings. She would spend hours at my dressing table, trying on different shades of lipstick. She would read my books, and when she spoke to my friends you wouldn’t imagine that she was six years younger than me.
’
Orko tries to picture his mother as a young girl, trying on her big sister’s clothes. Instead, he sees himself at his aunt’s dressing table, in the mauve saree he took from his mother’s wardrobe. He’s so embarrassed that he closes his eyes.
Sudeshna takes his hand in hers. ‘When she was pregnant with you, she was sure you were going to be a girl. She was going to call you Orkopriya. She used to say that she would give you all the things that she couldn’t have.’
‘Orkopriya…’ Without meaning to, he says the name aloud. He likes the sound of it.
‘You were a beautiful baby. For the first few years it didn’t even register that you’re a boy. She would dress you in the pinafores she wore as a toddler. Sometimes she put a flower in your hair when she took you out for a stroll. She absolutely adored you, and that’s why, I’m afraid—’
‘Afraid?’ Orko asks tentatively.
‘—that she hasn’t been able to let go of you.’
Sudeshna looks distraught, and Orko is a little unnerved. He has never seen his aunt lose her composure.
‘What do you mean?’ he asks, but she goes on as if she hasn’t heard him.
‘When you were twelve, I saw you at my dressing table. You were wearing maroon lipstick, and you looked just like her. That’s when I began to suspect that your mother’s spirit is still with you.’
Strangely enough, Orko isn’t embarrassed about the fact that his aunt saw him wearing her lipstick. He wants to tell her that his mother’s spirit was not to blame; he did that even when his mother was alive. The first time his mother caught him with streaks of burgundy lipstick around his lips, she sent him to the balcony behind their kitchen, where he sat, quietly, for a period of time that seemed unbearably long, worrying that she was never going to talk to him again. He was relieved when she called for him from the kitchen. She told him that lipstick was for grown-ups, and he mustn’t play with her lipstick again.
On the wall, a few feet to the left of the kitchen door, is a photograph of Orko’s grandmother with her two daughters. In the photograph Sudeshna is a young girl, and his mother is an infant in her mother’s arms.
‘I told your father to go to Gaya, with her ashes, to set her free,’ Sudeshna says, her gaze fixed on the photograph. ‘I even offered to do it myself, but he wouldn’t let me. He said it’s all superstition, and that there’s no such thing as a soul.’ She looks like she might begin to cry. Orko reaches for her hand, but she draws back and brings the drape of her saree to her face.
It is difficult for Orko to imagine his mother as a disembodied soul, trapped in an urn of ashes. He looks away, at the pendulum of the clock on the wall. He wills it to stop swinging for just a moment, but it’s relentless, its ticking louder than he can bear. He doesn’t know what he believes anymore.
‘How did she die?’ he asks his aunt. ‘What happened to her?’
‘Cardiac arrest,’ his aunt replies.
He has heard this answer before, and he doesn’t believe it any more than he did the first time he heard it. A twenty-nine year old heart doesn’t just stop beating.
They sit there, for the longest time, in a silence punctuated by the ticking of the pendulum clock. The clock has hung above the kitchen door for as long as Orko can remember, and he has never paid it any mind. Now it seems alive, an active member of the household. The rhythm of its pendulum drives him to distraction.
‘I think I’ll go for a walk,’ he says.
‘Yes, you do that,’ his aunt replies. ‘When you’re back, we’ll work on this together.’ She gestures at the books strewn on the table. She appears calm and composed now. She begins to clear away their empty teacups, and Orko wonders if he imagined their entire conversation.
‘You’re going to do very well,’ Sudeshna says in parting. ‘Your mother stood first in her class.’
Outside, the sun is a feeble glow obscured by a mass of clouds that looks like it has been painted onto the sky. Cars honk impatiently at no one in particular. A man and a woman pass Orko, the man’s arm around the woman’s waist. They walk at a leisurely pace, and Orko follows them listlessly, dragging his feet. The woman looks over her shoulder. Their glances meet, and Orko feels acutely embarrassed.
He prepares to cross the street, but the wall of vehicles seems impregnable. He waits impatiently for a lull in the traffic. Bumpers collide, and an altercation ensues. Orko ambles across to the footpath that skirts the lake. He climbs over the waist-high fence and lands softly on the yellowing grass. He can’t see anybody else on the grounds. The horns from the cars on the street grow distant. He walks aimlessly along the shore. He passes a few benches until he comes to the one beneath the gulmohur. The bench is squat, backless, its concrete surface pockmarked with little craters, the brickwork showing through the deepest of them. Surprisingly, the bench is warm.
He lies on his back, beneath the dull grey sky. A sparrow flashes across his field of vision. He can hear crows in the tree behind the bench. Two, maybe three. They talk, back and forth, over each other, and then they fly away, beating their raven wings against the grey afternoon.
In all these years, Orko didn’t really believe that his mother was dead. It didn’t seem plausible, and there were too many holes in the story that he had pieced together from everything he was allowed to know. Two nights ago, as he read her notebooks, he became convinced that she was alive. Perhaps she was living with Indrajit in the badlands of Bihar; perhaps she was a schoolteacher, like his aunt used to be, living by herself in a sleepy town on a high mountain. Perhaps she was going to come back for him one day, when the things that drove her away were in the distant past. Of course, all of that had just been conjecture – wishful thinking, even. In contrast, Sudeshna’s anguish was so real that he could almost reach out and touch it.
That anguish hangs about him, like a foul smog, and he finally begins to accept that his mother is dead. She really is gone. She isn’t coming back for him. For a moment, he feels as if the wind has been knocked out of him, and when the moment passes he’s finally able to picture his mother’s body laid out on a rough-hewn bier, her ears and her nostrils closed off with cottonwool. He wonders if there is an essence of her that has existed from the beginning of time, and continues to exist, even after her body was consumed by the giant oven at the crematorium. Was it possible that his mother was wafting about in the ether, watching over him? Was she disappointed that he was not Orkopriya?
His thoughts scatter, disjointed, incongruent, devoid of meaning. Orko imagines himself against the grey sky, spiralling downwards like a bird of prey. There is a mutilated body laid out on the pockmarked bench, its face ripped away, its limbs laid out like the limbs of a discarded rag doll. The body is dressed in the clothes he is wearing now, but it is not him.
Six
It’s almost eleven in the morning when the doorbell rings. Orko knows that it’s his father. He continues to sit at the dining table, pretending to study.
‘Orko!’ his aunt calls out. She is in the bathroom, by the sound of it. ‘Will you get the door, please?’
Orko shuffles to the door reluctantly. When he came to stay with his aunt a week ago, he wasn’t really looking forward to it; everything in this house still reminded him of his grandfather. Over the past week, though, he has thought about his grandfather only fleetingly, and he has discovered how it feels to have a conversation with a grown-up who laughs, and cries, and becomes angry or regretful about things over which they never had any control. Besides, for the first time this year, he feels confident about the board examinations. He has a set routine, and his aunt is an excellent teacher. He has learnt more in a week than he did in the entire school year.
‘How have you been?’ Nandan asks as he comes through the door. ‘I’m sorry I had to stay away for longer than I planned.’
‘That’s okay,’ says Orko. ‘How is Kabul-dadu?’ he asks, even though his father told him over the phone that he’s better now.
‘He has been discharged from the ho
spital,’ Nandan says. ‘He should be up and about in a few days.’
‘You left him all by himself?’ Orko retorts, his tone sharper than he intends it to be.
‘Well, Tenia is taking care of him,’ says his father. ‘Besides, your exams are just around the corner, and I have missed a week of classes.’
Orko is unnerved by his father’s presence. ‘Mashi!’ he calls out to his aunt. ‘Baba is here.’ It’s Sunday, and Nandan has brought with him the bags they use on their weekly trip to Gariahat market. When he called last night, he did say that he would be here this morning, and that they would go to the market together, but somehow Orko didn’t quite register that this meant he was going back home today.
Sudeshna emerges from her bedroom. She smells of Neem soap, and her hair is wet. ‘I’m glad your uncle is better now,’ she says to Nandan. ‘Orko has been a very good boy. We’ve done quite a bit of studying together.’
‘That’s good to hear,’ says his father, eyeing the periodicals stacked on the shelf by the sofa.
It irks Orko when his father or his aunt speaks of him as if he’s an infant. Of course, it’s true that Orko has been fine. In fact, he hasn’t felt so calm and collected in months. Just a week ago it had seemed to him that he was going to fail his board examinations. Now he thinks he’s going to get by without too much of a struggle.
‘I could do with some tea,’ Nandan says, picking up yesterday’s newspaper from the coffee table.
‘Well, I don’t have your fancy Darjeeling,’ Sudeshna replies. ‘I can fix you a cup of my daily poison.’ It is as if the words are a part of a different conversation, one that Orko doesn’t know the beginning of.
‘That’ll do just fine,’ says Nandan, and he folds the newspaper to the editorial section and settles into a chair.
Orko can’t think of anything to say to his father. He’s feeling much better now, but he doesn’t say this to Nandan, because Nandan doesn’t know how he was feeling before he came here. He paces between the kitchen and the living room, unable to sit still.
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