Ajay immediately nodded a ‘yes’.
That night, Ajay spoke to his own heart with some measure of philosophy and also of sentimentality: Rather than rising from clouds to find the sky, the courageous man leaps from the depths of the sea to touch it. Courage is measured by the excess of hardship. Rather than being born into the palace of a king to achieve merely a rung of progress I prefer to attain the heights by starting from the hut of a chaprasi…
In his sleep Ajay saw many shops; he was in need of a lot of milk; he went into many shops and asked for milk but none of the shops had any milk. He was still searching when he woke up.
Not many days had passed before father and son fought again. Five or six people wanting to sell their houses had been found, but because Ramlal didn’t show due haste, everybody in the family had become angry, disappointed and despondent. ‘Why would the old chaprasi think of our good?’ Ajay said before his own mother. And, neither did the mother get angry, nor did she stop him from speaking thus. Ramlal stepped forward to beat his son. The son stood with clenched fists. Ajay didn’t hold back his invective. In his rage Ramlal threw the cooked meal of rice and dal onto the street outside.
A throng of onlookers had already gathered. ‘They drive their father as if he were a servant,’ somebody was saying.
‘I am going to kill this selfish creature some day! I’ll cut his neck in his sleep!’ Ramlal shouted. ‘Then I will go to the main bazaar and climb a tall building and shout for everybody to hear, to make everybody listen: “Oh, you unlettered and poor fathers! Never educate your children! Never make that mistake! There is no bigger lie in the world than the lie that our children will study and provide for us…” This is all I will say! I will die only after telling this to the people of Darjeeling!’
Ramlal continued to shout well into the night, nursing a fire. Around two in the morning he perhaps fell asleep for a moment by the hearth. Upon awaking, he continued his muttering. From the noises in the kitchen Ajay guessed that he was making and drinking tea. His heart was also full of hurt; he wished he could ask his father for forgiveness, but something gripped his head and heart and rendered him incapable of it.
Ramlal took his shirts from the chest and tied them in a small bundle. He then folded his blanket atop it.
‘I am the one who is not good, the one who isn’t right… am I not?’ he was saying.
Narmada sat up in her bed and started crying.
Neighbours arrived and began placating Ramlal.
‘Don’t leave, Babu!’ Narmada was crying. Ajay and his mother stood to a side, seeming as if they hoped that the others would manage to stop Ramlal.
‘How can you react like this just because the children misbehave? The home always belongs to us, the parents,’ Bhaktaman scolded.
After much remonstration, Ramlal stayed.
Ramlal didn’t leave, but from that day onwards he felt that he was treated differently at home.
Gradually, the family lost interest in him. Ajay wouldn’t speak to him. The immense shame that Ramlal had put in his heart on that day was still raw and unbearable. Ajay’s mother would disappear, leaving behind cold rice still sitting over the hearth. His clothes would remain strewn all over the house. Only Narmada would wash his shirts and call him in for meals.
‘When I am not around, does your mother talk about me?’ Ramlal asked his daughter one day.
‘She doesn’t,’ Narmada said.
‘She is ashamed of being a chaprasi’s wife. Let her be a big woman and mother to the clerk Ajay,’ Ramlal said, perhaps to his daughter, or perhaps to himself.
Narmada stayed silent.
‘Fine!’ Ramlal said, looking away.
Some three days later, after hurriedly finishing his meal in the morning, Ramlal left home at around nine o’clock. He gave his daughter one rupee to keep, but didn’t say anything to anyone else.
A murder of dark crows dipped into and flew from the waters of the Mahanadi river under the Siliguri bridge. Under the Kali temple visible across the river, women bundled together the clothes that had been washed and dried, and gave them to their children to carry as they made their way homewards. But, in the sand that had roasted hot through an afternoon’s sun, some half-dozen women and a pair of old men single-mindedly broke stone for construction sites, their gazes undistracted.
Ramlal, who had dragged a sack to sit on and who was watching them, asked the nearest old man, ‘Where did you come from?’
‘I spent twenty-five years as the chowkidar at the dak bungalow in the Kalimpong forest. I have my pension now. I get eight rupees a month. It is warmer here. I broke gravel on the Teesta until recently. The work there finished, so I came here. It is easier to break the Teesta stone. It is soft, and breaks into even pieces. But the stone of Mahanadi is like heart-stone which even water cannot break. Makes the hammer jump back. See! Like this!’
‘Don’t you have children? Don’t they look after you?’ Ramlal suddenly asked.
‘I do,’ the old man breaking stone said quietly. ‘I have a son. He has finished college. But he doesn’t earn enough even for himself.’
‘It is one thing for a son to treat us as if we’re not their fathers, but when our wives treat us as if we aren’t their husbands, our hearts break,’ Ramlal talked about himself.
A woman who sat breaking stone to a side shouted to a sulky boy in his early teens who was breaking stone without putting any heart into the work, ‘Go! Go away! If you’d put your heart into breaking stone we would’ve finished by now. Go home and start the fire.’
‘Your son?’ Ramlal asked.
‘Yes. Lives with his aunt in Kharsang and goes to the school there. He is home on his holidays. I’d hoped he would help out a little…’
Ramlal called the boy to him and said, ‘Bring ten cups of tea for all of us. Bring two big loaves of bread, too.’ Ramlal gave him a five-rupee note.
The next afternoon, Ramlal was walking alone across the Baghpul bridge at Subuk. He paused in the middle and looked down through the strong English rails.
The Teesta flowed inaudibly, green and deep. So much water! Leaves swept up by the wind from the jungle around it fell into the water and quietly flowed downstream. How immense was the Teesta! How patient and tranquil! It gave succour to those who gazed at it. It could sweep away everything along its banks if it so decided, but it had determined not to do so. The heart swelled with so much joy just to look at it. He dropped all the money in his pocket to the water below. The wind didn’t let the coins drop straight, and swept them farther out over the river. All the coins made fleeting white spots on the green, flowing water. He took the rope out from his pocket and dropped it into the water. A new rope stretched slowly on the surface, then coiled into itself and was lost into the water, and again showed itself for a flash before disappearing. Now he possessed nothing. He discarded the coat. It tumbled with the force of the wind and landed upturned on the water, exposing its torn lining, and made as if to raise itself from the river. Somewhere in Ramlal’s heart was the forceful pounding of sorrow. But he really did also feel the joy of dying in the Teesta. He climbed onto the rails and said his final prayer. ‘Do not let me die as I fall, Teesta! Let me die in your waters.’
Ramlal’s corpse emerged two miles downstream, by the gates of a village. Ajay took people from Darjeeling and returned after cremating the corpse where it had been found.
On that day, he wrote in his diary: ‘We were ashamed as long as he lived. He brought everlasting shame upon us by dying in this manner.’
And, as if agreeing with the sentiment, his mother didn’t even shed a tear.
The Delinquent
I have been wanting to write many stories about the boys whom I taught. More so than students who find jobs in offices or teach at schools, I have more affection for those who find other vocations and become drivers, or clerks at tea gardens, or even run tea shops—a student has a beautiful shop on the sloping road at Poshak. While in school, they see us as men of co
urage and ideals; and, as teachers, we take it as our duty to impress it upon them, and to influence them through the lives we live. Here I am writing a story of one of my students—Padam.
Padam left high school after failing his ninth grade. I will never forget how he made me laugh on the day the examination results were published. Even in the swarm of boys milling in the schoolyard, he stood aloof, wearing a dejected face. He smiled a little upon seeing me.
‘What are your results?’ I asked.
‘Rotten, sir,’ he said. He was a well-built lad, fair of face. He wore a loosely knit yellow cardigan.
‘What went bad?’ I asked again.
‘English.’
Padam wasn’t the kind to pass English. Let alone analysis, he would get even the narration wrong. During my classes, I would move him from his seat by the window to the benches in the front of the class.
‘Only that?’ I asked.
‘And Maths.’
‘And?’
‘Sanskrit.’
‘And also?’
‘History.’
‘So you failed everything?’
He stood in shame.
I was pondering what he should do next when he volunteered, ‘Sir, I won’t study any more.’
The winter holidays started that day, and through that winter I worked on completing my novel Aaja Ramita Chha. In my determination to write a chapter each day, I forgot all about Padam’s problems. My winter, from mid-December to mid-February, was spent under a quilt amid sheets of paper. School started again. I returned much thinner. A new year began among new students and students who had returned renewed. Like a handful of other boys who had been lost, I inquired about Padam, but nobody had a satisfactory answer for me.
It must have been the month of April or May when, during the third period, as I was teaching grammar to the ninth graders, I saw Padam arrive and stand outside the door. Some twenty minutes later, when I came out of the classroom after finishing the lesson, Padam stood at a distance, still waiting for me. I felt a particular joy upon seeing him—as if reunited with an estranged younger brother.
‘What is it, Padam?’ I asked.
In his hands folded in a namaste he held a notebook, and folded in it were some papers.
‘I wanted to trouble you for something, sir,’ he said humbly and unfolded the papers. They were a couple of forms for a lottery from Uttar Pradesh; all tickets gone, sold by Padam. He had come to ask help with sending the money through postal orders and to get a letter written. I felt happy, and also tender. ‘Where did you find so many people?’ I asked with genuine surprise. ‘My own neighbours from the tea garden. Only one is an outsider,’ he said, affected by my praise.
‘How much do you make for selling two books of tickets?’ I asked him again. Padam laughed and said, ‘I get twelve rupees, sir.’ If he earns that amount every month, he will be spared his grandmother’s nagging, I surmised. I bought him postal orders during the tiffin break, wrote out all of them, cross-checked them, and finally wrote a letter and put all the papers in a registered envelope.
‘A ticket for you, sir,’ Padam took out the forms from the envelope, and he really had left one of the last tickets for me. Seeing no way out, I took the ticket and asked, ‘How many thousands for the first prize?’
‘The first prize is a lakh rupees, sir.’ He spoke with hope and confidence. ‘If you win the first prize, sir, we who sold it to you also get twelve thousand rupees.’
‘You will someday earn that much money even if you never win a lottery,’ I said to Padam.
The next month, he had similarly sold four entire lottery books. He was feeling accomplished at being able to show his achievement. And, just like the time before, there was a last ticket waiting for me again.
‘Never make anybody work without pay,’ I must have taught his class at some point, in a particular context. I suspected if this lottery ticket wasn’t a result of that.
But Padam didn’t return after this second visit. Many months passed, and I assured myself that he had found a job at a tea garden somewhere.
Early one day he came to my home in a panic. I had heard the night before that the Madhisey cowherds from the plains—to whom I had given space on my fields to build and live in a shed—had cut down the alder trees at the far end of the field. I was about to go and check when Padam arrived. The Assam Rifles were recruiting, and he, too, wanted to enroll. In a frenzied rush I acquisitioned his school certificate and wrote out a character certificate for him, and accompanied him to the Employment Exchange. He had grown taller than me, robust of body; Padam was recruited without hassle.
‘I had a student named Padam. This is how his story ended,’ I told myself while returning home and sighed with satisfaction, but little did I know that his story actually began on that very day.
Whenever I met Nepalis coming from Assam, I would ask about the Assam Rifles and, with anybody who could elaborate even a little, I would enquire about Padam.
‘He is making good progress there,’ somebody from the Rifles told me one day.
‘He doesn’t write to me,’ I unthinkingly blurted out a complaint.
‘He has become a strapping lad with the Rifles’ training,’ this was all the man added to the news before parting ways—I must have met him at the cinema.
I heard after many more months that he beat up his own captain while playing hockey, made the man’s face swell up, was imprisoned in the barracks, and that he had now become a delinquent, shirking his duties, bickering with his officers and refusing to do any work.
I thought—he wouldn’t do that if he didn’t feel more than a little bit bullied.
I heard later that Padam had left the Rifles and worked with the National Cadet Corps somewhere in Manipur.
So, he had found some form of employment. I felt satisfied.
I had a moment of panic last year, sometime around July. Confidential papers arrived from Mandalay in Burma, asking me about Padam. The moment I started reading the papers, my heart told me that he must be in some sort of trouble. I wrote—and got written—good things to the best of my knowledge, and the best I could manufacture about him, and dispatched a registered letter the very next day. But my heart was still full of trepidation. A month passed, and another, but nothing more came of it.
But Krishna Prasadji in Manipur had written back aplenty in response to my queries. He said Padam had started the ‘Darjeeling Hotel’ there. It seems to be doing very well, he had written. But there was no news beyond that.
If I were concerned with pursuing just one issue, I could give it my full attention. Events descend upon me in sudden waves.
On a Saturday, I had gone to the Nepali Sahitya Parishad to chat with my friends when a Madhisey chaprasi in a khaki uniform came searching for me.
‘Are you I.B. Sir?’ he asked in rustic Hindi.
‘Yes. What is it?’ I asked, not bothering to get up.
In broken Hindi, he said, ‘I went to your home, searching everywhere, a man on the road told me you were in the school. When I reached the school, the chowkidar said you were at a municipal meeting, there the secretary sahib said go to the Sahitya Parishad. Now, where was the Sahitya Parishad…’
‘What’s the matter?’ I said. I still did not understand what he was getting at after such a longwinded approach.
‘This Sahib sends you his greetings,’ he said and handed me a white card. It read ‘P. Nepali’ in English. I couldn’t imagine it meant Padam.
‘Where is he staying?’ I asked.
‘At the new hotel. Look at the back of the card.’
Indeed, on the reverse of the card was the address for Hotel Mount Everest, room number 46. My teacher’s instinct checked if ‘Everest’ had been misspelt. The letters were like the scratching of hens; I couldn’t discern a misspelling. I remembered making the class laugh by once calling it ‘hen-writing’.
‘Hello, sir!’ He extended his hand when he saw me after opening the wooden door to his room. I di
d not take his hand. He immediately joined his hands in namaste.
‘Namaste, sir! Did you recognize me?’
‘Namaste! You are Padam,’ I said.
He was guiding me to the grand hall. Chequered suit, a tie, pointed, polished black shoes. ‘Where did you find the money?’ I felt like abruptly asking him.
Even after reaching the hall, he continued to walk and talk. I sat on a couch with cushions. He spoke, standing up, ‘Am very busy sir. Just for two days, just to meet you sir, I came to Darjeeling. Will fly directly to Kolkata and fly back day after to Ceylon. Have no time.’
‘Ceylon is Sri Lanka. Say—Shillong.’ I said with the intention of deflating him.
‘Have started a big hotel in Manipur sir. You, madam, everyone—let’s go tomorrow. What is left in your job, anyway?’
He called a waiter and ordered coffee for both of us.
I asked, ‘What happened to you in Burma?’
‘Got into trouble sir, but survived because of your letter and a letter from the NCO at Guwahati. Got arrested in Kalaura. Had entered without a passport.’
‘And why were you there?’ The coffee tasted strange, so I said this with a grimace.
‘To do business.’ He finished his cup and looked at me. ‘If I am to do business… my eyes have opened now.’
While walking towards Chowrasta, I said to him, ‘Come, let’s go home. Eat with us before you leave.’
‘I still remember the taste of your cooking sir, but I can’t come today. Have no time. I only came to take you to Manipur. I still insist sir, come with me. I have nobody to look after all that business. After all, I have nobody of my own.’
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