We entered P. C. Banerjee’s shop on the way; I went in because he had entered the shop. He bought a women’s watch worth more than 300 rupees, gave me the box, and said, ‘Present for madam.’
I had already become cautious so I said, ‘She already has a watch. What would she do with this one? Wear a watch each on either wrist?’
‘Please choose something else, then.’
I considered and said, ‘No need.’
Padam’s face became dark and full of hurt. It was as if it were evidence that he really did revere me.
‘They said you were about to publish a novel. I heard you even read out excerpts. Was it published?’ he asked momentarily, full of hope.
‘A collection of short stories is also being published,’ I said.
‘Sir, how much will you need?’ Padam opened the zipper on the bag hanging from his hand and looked at me. The large bag was full of currency notes.
‘No need—somebody else is publishing it,’ I said. ‘It is writing that bleeds you dry; publishing is nothing difficult.’
Padam nearly wept right there.
But even I couldn’t be any more cruel than that, so I said, ‘Send me a camera later.’
‘Buy a Rolliflex sir, or buy a Yashica.’ He grinned with joy and shoved an entire bundle of cash into my pocket. ‘You can get one for a hundred and fifty rupees in Burma. Everything is cheap there.’ He sought to flee. ‘I have to go, sir. Please give madam my regards, and please wire if you are coming to Manipur. I have to go. Namaste.’ Padam rushed away.
Not a whole year has passed since and Padam has returned to my home. He is in the next room, with the others, making selroti for Tihar. I cannot refrain from writing down the story that he just told me. But I should only write factual descriptions; I will not touch upon the ‘truth’ in them. If I smother it with my perspective, and if I confine it within meanings that I provide, it will not remain the story that Padam experienced. I don’t want to be bogged down in a story today in the name of empathy.
‘Why did you quit the NCC job?’ I had asked Padam earlier.
‘When I was working with the NCC in Manipur, there was a Lushei tribal named Yashu,’ Padam said. ‘He’d always come to me and say, “Pshaw! Why would you keep your job? What’s there in it? Two hundred rupees a month at most. I can earn that two hundred in one minute.” And, in truth, he always had a bag full of money. He’d get drunk, crumple up new notes and scatter them. I had to pick them up and keep them. Whenever I got off work, he showed up at two in the afternoon, took me to the cinema or sightseeing, dined me, spent his money like anything. And, while conducting parades I also thought—this is a worthless job! A hundred and eighty six rupees for the entire month! I don’t want this damned job! And so I quit.’
‘Did you then open the Darjeeling Hotel?’ I asked.
‘And the hotel did so well!’ Padam, who now looked pale and thin, said with astonishment. ‘There were more than sixty of just college students who kept a regular tab for their meals. And, everything was so cheap in Manipur. Nearly hundred and fifty chickens were butchered each day. Never kept account of butter and eggs. I made seven thousand rupees in just three months. If I had continued running the hotel, I would have a lakh rupees now.’
I was a little fed up of this talk of thousands and lakhs. ‘And you quit that?’ I asked him.
‘But all of this was bound to happen,’ Padam said to himself instead of replying to my question.
‘What trade did you take up then?’ I repeated.
‘Smuggling marijuana, selling it in the black market,’ Padam said.
Marijuana! Black market! I must have shouted—where did you find such company?
Padam smiled a little. Didn’t speak for a moment. ‘They’d come to the hotel. Many businessmen.’ Padam continued to relate his story. ‘They’d come, stay at the hotel. Eight, ten of them would shut themselves in a room on the top floor and play cards all day long. Would chat with me. When I listened, I realized that some of them were smugglers of opium and marijuana. They carried bags of money, arranged in stacks, tied with red rubber bands. When they said, “You just need a little bit of courage to make it rain cash,” I thought they were saying that to me. There was one who smuggled goods from Burma into India. I left somebody else in charge of the hotel and went with him into Burma.’
‘Without a passport,’ I reminded him.
‘Got arrested in Kalaura.’
I had told myself that I would look up Kalaura on the map, but it appears I forgot.
‘Many Burmese, Gorkhalis and Assamese travel back and forth here. I don’t know just how they got to me! I was detained for two months. Later, they were very nice about letting me go. Not only did they release me, I got a six-month permit to travel through Burma after spending just a hundred rupees.
‘I reached Mandalay within eight days of being released. A man only needs courage. God has indeed made this world for man to enjoy. I had a reference in Mandalay so I straight away went to Jasraj Rai. The old man had once been a Lieutenant Major. What a splendid life that man lives. I had about twenty-five thousand rupees on me. And everything is so much cheaper in Burma. A Relay bicycle that costs four hundred rupees here is just one…’
‘Not Relay—Raleigh!’ I corrected.
‘Seven O’Clock razors were two paisa apiece. Roamer watches were sixty rupees. I bought as much as I could and stored everything at the old man’s. The old man’s men had the job of taking everything across the border. I was living it up there while the goods made it to Garo Hills here. My job was to spend money all day and…’
‘And get drunk?’ I asked.
‘No, sir. The Lieutenant Major has a daughter,’ Padam said and became quiet.
‘What about her?’ I tried to give him the chance to overcome his shyness. ‘My job was to drive around in the old man’s jeep all day with that daughter. I adored even the way Latika wore the Burmese dress. Did not know Nepali, spoke a bit of Hindi, but mostly just Burmese talk.’
It was a deep blow that he had suffered. Knowing that, I changed the topic.
‘Did you reach Manipur safely?’
‘With that fifteen thousand sir, I had earned fifty or sixty thousand rupees. I had taken to heart that I would go and settle in Burma. I had been teaching Latika a bit of Nepali in the six weeks of my stay there. If you had agreed then to look after my hotel in Manipur, I would have by now…’
I too felt my conscience prickle.
‘After returning from here, I went to Calcutta. From there, I went to Silchar with marijuana. There is an old grandmother who lives on Elgin Road in Calcutta, at the far corner of the Shambhunath Hospital. I had bought four large water jars to carry marijuana. I went to the grandmother’s to seal the jars with shellac wax. I stayed at the Grand Hotel, but in this line of work, I had to store the goods at a different hotel under a different name. In the night, I packed the jars tight with marijuana and sealed them. After sealing them I poured a bit of water into each jar: I was bringing back Ganga water from Brindaban.’
Padam had a good laugh. ‘If anybody had asked?’ He would mutter a few phrases, he said, in Assamese and Lushei.
‘Everybody got inspected at Pandughat. Nobody checked me. Four jars of marijuana—through! Once we reached the other side on the jeep, all the Assamese kept nagging me for Ganga water. They’d come with bowls and bottles in their hands. I lied to them for no good, I thought. Only after I stood up and shouted at them did they stop asking me for Ganga water.’
‘How much did you make?’ I asked.
‘Seventeen hundred was the rate,’ he explained. I didn’t understand.
‘The second time, I smuggled marijuana from Biratnagar. I stayed below at Jogbani. A merchant arranged the deal. When I reached Badabazaar in Calcutta with three maunds of contraband the merchant’s jaws dropped. Apparently nobody had managed to get more than a maund at a time before that. I went there with three whole maunds of it. You don’t deal in cheques in this busines
s. My hands tired from hauling around a bag of cash the entire night.’
Then he addressed himself just as much as he addressed me—‘But, in this line of work, everybody gets caught after two or three trips.’ He had become a particular stripe of a superstitious man. But, in that moment, I couldn’t counter that superstition either.
‘For the last time, I took marijuana from Sylhet to Calcutta. I spent all of my capital to bring twelve maunds of weed. Packaging in rubber-paper started a week early. Soaked the weed in milk and packed it. I found the hotel a nuisance and had already sold it; sold it for cheap, too. I would get scared. I told myself many times, “This is the last time I do this—this is my last time. I won’t keep up this treacherous trade.”
‘The stuff got nabbed before reaching Calcutta.’ Padam had become incapable of showing any emotion or even comprehension.
‘I got away by claiming that the goods weren’t mine, but it was a death blow!’ Padam managed to wring out these words.
‘It seems I made a futile escape on an aeroplane. Reached Shivsagar, Lakhimpur… then reached Biratnagar. When I saw dark and pale marijuana plants standing two feet tall in the farms I felt like embracing them and weeping with them, crying with them. I felt I would get something back. I stood there and cried, watching the plants. Then I found myself in Kharsang. Only then did I come to my senses.
‘But… I don’t know why, but I went to Manipur again. Reached there after dark. I ran into an old man from Khumoi whose life had been ruined after he was caught and jailed for being in the same line of work. He had already heard the news about me. “In this line,” he said, peering at me through his drooping eyelids, “In this line you don’t get caught the first time or the second time—you get caught the third time. I got caught on my third trip; Chital got caught; Harip got caught. Everybody gets caught the third time…”
‘It was only then that I understood how utterly devastated I had become.’
After saying this, Padam even stopped rubbing vegetable shortening into the rice flour. I heard a quiet, sobbing hiccup escape from his chest.
I said with the intention of providing him with something to aspire towards, ‘You lost a turn, you haven’t lost your entire life. You’ll reach Burma again someday, you’ll meet that girl, and you can elope with her to Garo Hills.’
‘What do I have to show for myself in Mandalay?’ Padam asked me. ‘There are better-looking men working as drivers at her place. Men better educated than me work as clerks for the Lieutenant Major. Back then I had money, which I don’t have any of anymore.’
I remembered Padam asking for two rupees in the morning.
‘Padam—don’t get distracted any longer. Think of the past as a nightmare and forget everything. I will find you a job in a shop somewhere. Earn a living through a job, just like the rest of us.’
‘Pshaw! What’s there in a job!’ he immediately said and, oblivious of the rest of us, became lost in his thoughts.
In Limbo
Now the girl’s father spoke with great restraint and severe effort.
‘I’m meeting so many of you, from far-flung corners, here, today—and such gentlefolk, too—because of this girl—she is my chhori, my eldest daughter. It is a good thing to make each other’s acquaintance, there is no harm in it, but to meet for the first time under circumstances like this is ill met. But we have to somehow make arrangements for these two—this girl, and this boy, my jwain. I have accepted him as my son-in-law—since my daughter has already spent ten whole days in this house I have no choice but to accept him as my son-in-law—and we have to arrange for them to spend their lives together.
‘Perhaps I have erred in saying that to meet under circumstances like this is ill met, and for that I beg your forgiveness. Neither have I travelled here today to speak so rudely. Among us Nepalis, a girl’s father never goes about searching for his son-in-law’s home. But I have put aside my honour and pride, and I have come to the man’s house like a dog. The reason—my love for this girl. Perhaps you have daughters and sisters, too. There is the proverb—which our elders surely forged from experience and knowledge—the needle in the corner eventually moves to the middle of the room. Perhaps some of you have been in a similar plight before, or perhaps you will go through something like this in future, because this thing called a daughter, it seems to me, is nothing but a hive of worries and blame.
‘On Wednesday of the week before, my sister-in-law’s husband called me at the office, down at the Pankhabari Tea Estate, and gave me the news—“Kumari hasn’t been home since yesterday. I hear she has eloped, with a Gurung boy of our community. Your sister-in-law finally gave me the news this morning. She didn’t even tell me the evening before. I thought she was home, so I didn’t ask after her, because she usually always stayed in. But daughters do leave the home one day, after all…” When I heard the news, it made me somewhat glad, but also a bit sad. “Is this why you took Kumari up to Darjeeling?” I scolded him. Then I became angry with myself. Kumari had become upset with me over something trivial and left the estate to go and live with her aunt. Every event since that incident must have neatly fallen into order to arrive at this accident.
‘But I am a father, and my heart worried. On the morning of the third day, I left Pankhabari and arrived here at Kumari’s aunt’s. The Gurungs and the Chhetris have mixed from a long ago, and there is no tradition among us Chhetris to take back our daughters who have eloped. My daughter will live as her fate keeps her. But look at us—for three whole days we didn’t get even a word about her! We felt very humiliated, but we swallowed our anger—if we were to go to the police and the courts, she would still be our daughter, and he our son-in-law. I kept berating my sister-in-law. I said, “How could you have so blindly let her go with a Gurung savage?” It has been some days since the estate has buzzed with gossip—that the head clerk Raya-babu’s eldest daughter is married now, and that she eloped with a college-educated boy. Here, before you, I am a simpleton from the tea estates, a hick who doesn’t know how to speak, an idiot who forgets everything he had thought he would say to you. But back at the estate, I have esteem; I enjoy quite a bit of respect and, because of the respect I have earned, this motherless girl also had respect. When I didn’t hear any news for three days—again, mine is a father’s heart—I started imagining all sorts of things, I started worrying about this and that. What if they don’t like my daughter? What if they throw her out of their house? My mind and heart were smothered under anxiety. And, as you can see here, it was just as I thought it would be.
‘When, after eight whole days, nothing was heard from the boy’s side, I arrived in Darjeeling early in the morning yesterday. It is a tea estate owned by Bengalis and, as you know well, it is impossible to get even a day off. But I came. When I saw that my daughter’s whole life was in disarray, I came to make arrangements. When I got here, I asked my nephew if he knew jwain’s house here and he said, “I know it.” Then I told him to hurry and take a letter to his cousin. I hadn’t written anything much to my daughter in the letter. Perhaps jwain’s father has kept the letter—you can ask him for it and read it. I had said, “Between six and nine in the evening, come to your aunt and uncle’s home, just you and your husband. You don’t have to bring anything. I’ll give you both tika and bless you.” That was all I had written. We waited through the evening. We prepared whatever food we had at home, and we waited for them. Eight o’clock, and then nine o’clock, and still they didn’t arrive and I went outside and walked around to check; whenever someone approached down the road I would imagine it was them. I’d worry that it would be embarrassing to be seen out in the yard, waiting for them, so I’d hurry into the house. And it was nine o’clock, then ten, and eventually it was midnight. I cried alone that night. A man doesn’t cry in pain or fear, but he cries out of shame.
‘I was returning to the estate by bus at eight o’clock in the morning today. Everybody accused me of fleeing to the estate. The bus was taking me away, but my heart kept
running back to this place. When our bus reached Ghoom, when more people climbed on board, I was startled. Let it be, my daughter’s life and happiness are bigger than my honour, I thought, and I got off the bus. The bus fare, already paid until Kharsang, went to waste. I caught a jeep coming in this direction and returned here. Here I am now, standing before you like a dog.
‘Jwain’s mother just now explained that the delay yesterday was because you had to wait for jwain’s elderly uncle, and I accept that. You couldn’t come yesterday, and that is all right, because I then had to come here myself, and now we have become acquainted. I am sure yesterday’s humiliation and sadness hasn’t made me weaker; I have forgotten that thought too. And now I have seen jwain; he is of the gentlemanly type, and I am happy, not just outwardly, but I am very happy on the inside. I have seen your home, and I have already told my daughter that her life will be spent well in a household like this. You have shown me hospitality. You were all also singing and dancing in the room outside. Everybody believed that a wedding was taking place. It was only in the hearts of the family members here, in the depths of my heart, and in the tears in this girl’s eyes that the truth was known.
‘I had said that I wanted to bless the bride and groom with tika. You barred my hand. You said that jwain’s uncle had died this year, and that tika wouldn’t be possible. The reason you give is correct—a death in the family does bar tika through the following year. But if that was the case, why was jwain’s mother in such a hurry to bring her daughter-in-law home? Not only did she send other women to talk to chhori, she herself went three or four times to fetch her. If you had waited, you would have earned the time to get to know the girl better, and all of this would have happened only after the boy had also come to like her. Now, it must be as if you can neither swallow nor spit out what you have chewed off. As for me—I am in no place to either take her home with me, or leave her here. I took her mother’s honour as my own, and kept it intact even after her death. But now I see the daughter, whom I raised with all my love and affection, is about to be discarded like rubbish. Chhori, it is because you carried your destiny in your own hands, according to your own wishes, that your fate is now like that of a dirty scrap of paper. If you had trusted your father with it, you wouldn’t have been in this plight.
Long Night of Storm Page 9