Silverfish, page 14
Passing the seedy bars and restaurants and stray dogs that sniffed at trudging heels, Milan was full of enthusiasm while telling the story of the celebrated Firinghi Kali temple – that built by the Portuguese man – or Firinghi, as white people were called those days – Anthony who wrote ballads in Bengali and worshipped Kali.
He really didn’t care whether the young man was paying enough attention, content with the occasional ‘awesome’, ‘cool’, and ‘incredible’ that flowed from his direction.
Incredible it had been indeed! He was no believer, though his scepticism had mellowed since his college Marxist days, but the history of it all, the beauty and the pathos of it all! The nineteenth century, it had been. British India. The European man named Anthony had saved a Bengali woman from being burned at her husband’s funeral pyre – the barbaric medievalism of widow-sacrifice. He’d married her, and started living a life that was browner and more Bengali than one homegrown. And he wrote poetry – heart-touching, lyrical verses in the best of Bengal’s folk traditions, next to which the best of the bauls – the local troubadours – paled into mediocrity. What humanity, what word-weaving!
‘Amar khuda je, Hindur Hori she…’
‘It means “He who is my God is also the Hindu’s Krishna.” All gods one, in the goodness of our imagination.’ He went on haltingly but with passion, the paucity of the right English words hardly a stumbling block. ‘Mister, nothing could be better message for humanity at that time, when dogma and fundamentalism were building strong walls…strong walls, I say, in peoples’ minds. What is God but betterment of all people, peace and harmony for all. That is why we invent religion.’
Anthony became a famous kobiyal – the performing, singing, word-duelling folk poet who won over the most closed-minded of Hindu fanatics, triumphing over lyric-fights, song-battles, becoming a legend. Anthony Kobiyal. Just imagine! A white, red-faced Firinghi from over the seven seas!
He and his wife were both devotees of the goddess Kali. He built a Kali temple for her. This is the famous Firinghi Kali Temple.
It was a dingy little room on the pavement, at the end of their ten-minute walk, right next to the daily path of the uncaring pedestrian. Shoulder to shoulder with warehouses, small time office buildings, shoe shops run by Chinese immigrants to the city. A large banyan tree had grown dense shoots in front, on the slice of the pavement before, and next to it a street vendor sold chilli chicken and north Indian chappatis with curry.
‘His wife died in a fire, a mysterious fire. And after that, Anthony Firinghi left. He was never seen again.’
For the moment, he had forgotten that the unruly-haired youth with the massive backpack had surged ahead in the small crowd that always gathered before the temple, shaking his hand one last time. The crowd was the usual mix of casual passers by and stauncher devotees, with ailments to be cured, jobs to be aspired to, unborn children to be had. Coins clinked, flung on the large copper plate kept for donations. The familiar smell of incense sticks, red joba flowers, moist earth rose in a little halo, as always in Hindu temples. Over the temple was a carpenter’s shop, and wood-pulp and paint lined the giant cracks in the façade of the building.
He had looked at the half-crumpled five hundred rupee note thrust in his right fist with the unease of meeting an unexpected, honourable guest.
The trinity of the hammer, sickle and the star looked bluish and ghostly in the moonlight fallen across the limecrusted wall outside the window. The state legislature elections had taken place a couple of months ago. But the campaign graffiti stayed on, their desperation fading under gathering dirt and moss, sometimes covered under posters advertising new movies or magical cures for impotency. But for the most part they would remain, fainter, fainter, till another election drew close and the cracked walls received a fresh layer of whitewash, fresh canvas for the communist trinity, always the trinity, because this was a communist neighbourhood and painters of the Congress palm or the BJP lotus might just get their bones broken if they stepped in here.
He stubbed out the cigarette on the windowsill and walked over to his writing desk. Moonlight had streamed in through the window, making the contours of the old furniture, the endless boxes and stuffed cotton bags visible through the night. He could make his way through the dark here. His body knew each nook and crevice of the room where he had spent the last thirty-seven years of his life. Standing close to his writing desk, he turned on the little reading light.
In the next room, Gautam seemed to turn in his sleep. His light snores had stopped for a moment.
The sixty-watt bulb had shed a watery yellow light on the pile of papers and books on his desk. It was nothing like when he had endless student papers to grade, and yet it was a mess. A collection of poems by the poet Bishnu Dey lay there, a book he’d been rereading after several decades. Galleys from his own book of Bengali short stories had been sent by the small press in College Street. He had gone through a few pages, despairing, as before, at the poor quality of the printing paper and the flaws which the manually operated letterpress always scattered in the text.
He opened the lid of an old, handcrafted mahogany box with a curved silver handle. This was the most expensive inheritance from his family that had remained with him, one of the few things they could bring with them in the haste of fleeing a riot-ridden land that was now a foreign country.
The jaundiced hue was weaker on the sheaf of handwritten pages that lay inside.
Pages of a kind one never saw these days. Brittle with age and dust, and the corners were frayed, the sides eroded by silverfish that had also bored holes all over the sheets. It was an unruly heap, broken papery corners jutting out under one another, the edges eroded into a range of shapes, like maps of different countries. The ink had faded, and yet, in the weak light of the reading lamp, one could make out the rows of Bengali letters in a beautiful hand.
Handwriting as pretty as pearl, as they used to say to describe the labour of love in an age when a handwritten letter or a manuscript was something of a finished product.
What could it be but a miracle?
To think of its age was to lose oneself in a cloud, a hazy swirl.
A misty window to a world forever lost, not just to time, but to the turbulent, destructive history of the nation. And the strangest of voices!
Gooseflesh had risen on his arms when he’d first seen these yellowed sheets a week ago. The fading letters showed archaic spellings, a different Bengali language, almost.
They deserved a light stronger than the pallor of the quivering sixty-watt bulb drooping over his study table, pouring the watery yellow through the veil of cobwebs. Or the musty cubicle in a decrepit house near the Sealdah railway station, tied up with piles of old magazines, bug-bitten, cockroach-caressed, the mould growing like cancer on the walls around, above. The violence and the tragedy of the years that lay farther away, the sadness of it all.
Carried over, inside this mahogany box, they echoed the tired life around. There were patches of mould along these walls too, cancerous spots that spread corner to corner, trying to spread out to the roots of the growing banyan tree outside the window, its empire of fissures. Younger, weaker layers of dust coated everything in the room, deepening with every waft of midsummer from the city’s air through the rusty windows. A faint smell of urine and cooking, and rotting garbage from the street melted into tropical heat, creating the familiar air that hung on to the corners of the room, the passage outside where water from the bathroom and droplets of evening showers flowed into streams from the kitchen.
Too many stories never left this place, got buried under layers of dust and the death of memory. There were always the journeys in crowded buses, hours with students who never cared, tea in the morning and the afternoon in tiny earthen cups at roadside stalls, weary chat with the regulars, the coldness of bureaucracy, more tea, a cigarette or two, breathlessness, a dull ache in the chest. A voice unheeded, uncared for. A pit in the memory so deep that flakes of paper, frayed edges, turned into powdery dust, the food of silverfish, the ornament of faded ink, far from sunlight, the air, crisp and clear, heavy and petrol-fumed. There would be screams, shouts, violent demonstrations of protest, radical parades, but no one would ever know, the voice would go back to the powdery dust of frayed edges, the earthen cups of tea in the morning, in the evening. The mouldy patches would grow a little more, just a little more, till they had eaten up the whole wall as in cancer.
Days would pass by, and the years.
There had to be stronger light. Louder, crisper words, afloat in confident accents, bright bold letters printed in well-lit space. More and more words devoted to the words that none heard, the ranting voice mocked by unsympathetic students, the faded words coming off in powdery flakes. The warmth of recognition, a fluidity that helped clear all cobwebs, all the roots that spread the cracks in the cornices, the façades of the dilapidated house. It should touch souls. Here. And out there, far away.
How many days after the clearing of dusty paper-flakes did Atin give out his niece’s happy news in the teashop next to the abandoned offices of The Calcutta Gazette?
After two cups of tea, much jubilation, many eye-watering reminiscences, his mind had flitted back to the faded words in the archaic script, the obsolete spellings. For a moment he thought of Sabeer’s dead father, the end of a dream, young Sabeer’s…the launching of an unknown future in the Middle East. But other things blocked out the story of origins.
Words. He had only words to rely on, and his rusty limbs, their aching motions, the infectious power of his beliefs, his sickening enthusiasm, great airy arcs drawn by his bony, vein-straddled hands that spoke along. One had to speak at Naran’s tea-stalls, through the long evenings, to the weary regulars, retired employees of The Calcutta Gazette. Standing inside the crowded bus, one could turn one’s head around and speak to the crushed, sweating fellow passenger about the miracle of the faded words on powdery dust. He could step out of his room in the morning, knock on the door of the ageing Yogesh Dey, smell the ailing phlegm in the air inside his room, open the mahogany box in his hand, draw out warmth on Yogesh-babu’s leathery, million-creased face.
He could sit here and take out his own sheaf of paper, five rupees a sheaf at the corner grocer’s, wrench out further words about the powdery dust inside, the precious obsolescence of the spellings, further words that would die in the same airless interior of their birth.
But Shirin was coming to Calcutta. She was already here, tired and asleep after a long flight. Or maybe tired and awake, her nerves frayed by the benumbing differences in the world’s time zones.
The little girl had grown up, come a long way.
One who cared about the shape and texture of words, even when they perished in caverns of mildew and lost memory, the dead bodies of silverfish encrusting the inside of once-smooth mahogany. Human stories, of forgetfulness in giant unfriendly castles, the stale flavour of tea in the squashed-limb crowd of eveningtime city buses. The archaic syntax under the faded ink was far from her, and yet near enough. One who was coming from afar to reclaim those faraway stories, those nearer to her breath, under the folds of her skin, the stories locked in vacuum over the decades, centuries, tied up with old magazines that reeked of suicide, of distance from the turbulent history of a nation.
He closed the lid. He turned off the reading light. Wan moonlight flooded the lines of poetry on the table.
He could turn his head around and speak to the crushed, sweating fellow passenger about the miracle of the faded words on powdery dust. Or he could tell her about it, through the clearest, crispest words he could create, the most passionate arcs his hands could draw in the air. She had the mind. And the soul. She would travel with him, into the musty depths of the mahogany box, the frayed sheaves, the decades that no one had known to pass, the miracle of a century.
He would meet her after seven years. Did she remember the stories of the old man in the vat? Of how he had failed to swallow Milan-kaku’s shoes?
He went back to bed. The sheets smelled stale and unwashed, and had a strong hint of tobacco even though he never smoked in bed.
Tomorrow could be the beginning of a new life.
The stronger light could burst forth, the louder, crisper words, afloat in confidence, bright bold letters printed in well-lit space, the rays of insight cutting through the densest film of cobwebs, the dance of cockroaches over the death-dry air, the brittleness of pages in vacuum – maybe even wealth, of passage into a world of alien lights and sounds, across the oceans. Even the scratching of petty itches, on fatigued flesh.
Some relief for Gautam from the daily overtime work. The purchase of a new double cylinder for cooking gas. Maybe even hire a maid from the slums down below to do the washing and the cooking.
They had to come out of the jaundiced aureole of the weak bulb stooping over them, the smell of death that had clung to them for so long, the cancerous patches of mould that formed their horizon. The stale flavour of tea in the mouth on an empty stomach. The flakes of paper had to come back together.
Shirin must have forgotten the old man in the vat.
Several hours later, there was much to cool his strained nerves, the light of day, a cup of tea, the airy wholeness of the living room in Atin’s ancient house.
Something about her, he couldn’t tell what, made him think she might not have lost the tales of the vat, its dusty cobwebs that turned golden in his yarns, the old man who crouched inside. Something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Maybe the way she flung the scarf of her salwar-kameez around her neck, or the familiar way her smile creased along a face that had filled out with the years, it was hard to tell.
How did it feel to be back home after being away for many years? What scraps of memory had life stirring in them, kindling the light of home again? Voices of people, faintly cracked with age, crinkly smile along faces with deeper furrows, a quivering presence on the rickety wicker chair in one corner?
Wasn’t there so much else? Surely there was. Over two hundred years old, tucked away in a narrow north Calcutta alley, the house had mellowed in a smoother, more spacious way than its contemporaries, fermenting in the feudal aura of a large, extended family with slowly disintegrating branches. The heavy wooden furniture with strange, archaic curves, the armchair made by the inmates of Alipore jail, the varnish of its armrest, a worn, shiny patch after endless friction with human skin, clothes, teacups. Walled-in shelves like large concrete caverns filled with musty paper, the view of blistered red earth just outside the threshold of the door. Much else and more, even the little altar of clay and metal icons of gods and goddesses enshrined by the lady of the house in one of the shelves – unchanged, surely, ever since she must remember it as a child.
But what could wipe away the difference in time and space as the familiar posture of good old Milan Sen on his favourite wicker chair in the corner, next to her uncle’s prison-crafted throne? Milan-kaku, as they’d all been taught to call him since childhood, her uncle’s oldest, closest friend.
People seemed the same when you saw them every day. A human being could look unchanged, for years and years, unless a storm brought them down, like a heart attack or the loss of a child, which could bring the long shadow of death to hang over their heads, curl into dark circles under their eyes. But if you saw someone after several years, maybe even one, the changes stood out, like tiny clumps of moss on the slippery earth of a courtyard. The smaller blessings of death, never so far away, that we reap by the day, the month and the year.
He wondered if he seemed to have aged as much as one would have expected in all these years, even though this year he had turned sixty-six. True, his short-cropped hair had far fewer grey streaks than her uncle’s, and his fragment of a moustache – made halfheartedly in the style of Clark Gable, fashionable in the fifties – was without any grey at all, with the youthful touch of Kali mehendi or some such dye, as she would know, surely. The cotton hand-crafted bag, Shantiniketan style, with the long loop flung around his right shoulder, that had become his signature, hanging limp touching the floor like a starved python, empty of the mass of paper, magazines and books with which she must always remember it.
After seven years, was the familiar smile and the old posture more of an anchor into the old, cozy world than even the known contours of archaic furniture, the ray of sunlight falling through the rusted mullions on the floor?
‘Come on over here, dear.’ He sat up to the creaking protests of the wicker chair. ‘When was the last time I saw you? It must have been six or seven years ago.’
‘You missed her when she came for a month a couple of years ago.’ Atin said. You were in Shantiniketan that summer.’
She came and touched his feet. Growing older, away from the old-world shadow of the ageing house had perhaps stolen the comfort in many habitual rites, stooping to touch the feet of an elder one of them.
‘Bless you, my child.’ He touched the top of her head lightly. ‘May you continue to prosper.’
‘Milan-kaku, you look great. Next to you, uncle looks old.’ She spoke as she sat on the couch.
‘But of course. You never know with these writers. Sharp about uncovering new springs of life at the last place you’d think!’ Her uncle rose to the banter. ‘He has a great new dye for his hair and moustache though!’
‘Oh, let all that nonsense be, Atin.’ He said, without looking at his friend. ‘The American glow is around you all right. Cleaner air, I suppose.’
‘It’s okay. I guess I’ve adjusted to the lifestyle over the years.’
And a professor, too. You’ve really come a long way!’ ‘Isn’t that amazing?’ Without pausing for her response, he turned to Atin. ‘She goes to America from India and teaches English.’
Well, this country was under the British for over two hundred years.’ Her uncle said. ‘English is part of our life.’ But he had already returned to his daze.
‘So you are a first world professional now! And they say American universities are the richest in the world.’ ‘Academics are the worst paid anywhere, Milan-kaku, even in America.’ She laughed lightly. ‘But this happens to be a research university. So it’s enough to get by.’
