Silverfish, page 15
‘Listen to her,’ Milan turned to his friend, his smile a marriage of mockery and admiration. ‘She’s already learnt how to talk like rich people. Enough to get by. I’ve seen the pictures in the consulate libraries. The buildings and the campuses look more like royal estates!’
‘The credit must go to the photographers rather than the architects. It’s nothing like that, Milan-kaku.’
‘I’ve heard they have the most incredible libraries and museums. And that they pay absurd money to enlarge their archives. The Bodleian, right?’
‘The Bodleian’s in Oxford actually. The Widener at Harvard is very good, and also the Newberry Library at Chicago.’
‘Yes, I’ve seen some pictures. The British Library, the New York Public Library, they really value books over there, rare books and archives…’
‘They care about history because they don’t have much of it.’ The thought was hard to contain, hard not to float away on. ‘Here, we are overrun with it, like weeds, so we don’t give a damn!’
But quickly, he checked himself.
He looked at her, his eyes lit up. ‘I have something that might interest you.’
In his breathless excitement, he had failed to note the leap in the conversation he had brought about. That was his natural pathway. But suddenly the silence in the room seemed tangible. A street vendor’s cry resounded in the distance – there is, of course, no real silence in Calcutta, not for a moment.
His friend looked at his face with a curious frown. Certain that he now had the desired attention, he savoured the silence for a moment, and spoke.
‘It’s an old manuscript. I think it goes as far back as the mid-nineteenth century. Even before the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign in India.’
He paused for a moment.
‘I got hold of it through quite a strange twist of fate. But let all that be.’ He paused again.
‘Would you know anybody in America who’d be interested in buying it?
‘It’s an amazing fragment of history. And an important document in the development of Bengali prose. You should see the handwriting, the spelling and syntax, even the quality of the paper – it’s all from a lost world. Someone should write about it, get it in the papers. Sometimes I have trouble believing that it has been lying where it has, all these years.’
There was a longer pause. The vendor’s cry moved farther and farther away, became faint.
‘It’s a collector’s dream!’
Milan had come back from Atin’s house full of the tremors of promise, skirting the still-sleepy dogs of the city, the roar of the traffic rising with the minutes in the main streets. Would the morning tell the rest of the day!
‘Goodness, where’s all this dust come from?’ Gautam had sniffed and wrinkled his nose as he’d entered the room with the tea.
The core of the must in the air had been clouds of dust particles dancing in the column of sunlight across the room. Swirls came to life, thicker, denser than usual. Quickly, Gautam’s eyes fell on the papers on Milan’s table, the rich coating of dust graying the sheets. ‘What are you reading, baba?’ he asked as he perched the teacups on the study table, moving a pile of papers and books to make room.
Milan looked up. It was almost nine o’clock, and the sun was stronger outside the window.
Gautam’s cup had its handle broken. He had to cup it between his palms, the way young children held glasses they were afraid of dropping.
‘Oh, nothing.’ Milan closed the lid of the box. ‘Tales of yore!’
‘The manuscript pages from Sabeer’s house?’
‘Yes, that one.’ Milan took a sip of the tea, stared absently at the wall. ‘Quite a period piece. At least midnineteenth century, I’d say.’
‘Really?’ Gautam said, his eyes flitting towards the clock on the wall. It always ran about half an hour behind time, and Milan knew his son did not want to be late in his office, even though it was a government office. Few people ever arrived on time in government offices in Calcutta.
Yes. Can cause quite a stir, I think. I was speaking to Shirin today at Atin’s house. If we can get it into the papers, bring it to the attention of collectors. Maybe abroad.’
You really think so?’ Gautam’s voice was matter-of-fact, his mind still elsewhere. Suddenly, a childlike intensity burst forth in his words, touching Milan like a gust of sadness. ‘Do you think it could get us some money?’
Milan’s eyes moved away from the cracked walls of the room, floated towards his son’s face, lit up by the morning sun through the windows.
He’d been a late arrival in a late marriage, in a life where everything had run late. He had married Ila in his late thirties, the earliest he could have afforded after arranging for the marriages of two elder sisters and settling various debts, various needs with years of a meagre schoolteacher’s salary. Their only child had come when he was well passed forty, and it was probably just as well. He’d managed to put away a little bit of savings by then.
Gautam’s birth had the same fragility as the marriage that had led up to it. The same touch of unreality that had defined the marriage of a refugee-boy from East Bengal flung westward with the Partition. On Milan’s first visit to Ila’s house to meet the prospective bride, he had been accompanied by a distant cousin from the Hooghly district he had met only twice before, and Joydeb-babu, the portly manager of the mess where he lived. No father or close uncle to meet the girl, evaluate her caste and horoscope, her skin-tone and her kitchen-skills, to consume the syrup-drenched sweets and fried goodies served with care. Would the girl’s family even take this match seriously?
It had been hard to tell. Nor had Milan felt a dash of romance in the affair, in the direction of the spindly young girl, enveloped in a drooping sari perched at the corner of the bed opposite the row of chairs offered to the groom’s party. It wasn’t the time of life when one thought of romance. One was settled, life’s many duties taken care of, and marriage another duty that needed to be settled, to give way to a string of fresh duties soon after the shehnai had stopped its mooning music and the last guests bidden farewell to. There had also been the strong odour of snuff coming in wafts from Joydeb-babu seated right next to him, and he’d found grains of tea leaves at the tip of his tongue, as the tea had been imperfectly sieved.
Who’d have known that snuff would contain the germs of his first dash of feeling for his wife?
In the middle of an ice-breaking conversation about the respective merits of baked and fried sweets, a fullblown snuff-induced sneeze had sent Joydeb-babu’s flabby body into tremors and wispy granules of snuff flying across the room to settle on the right sleeve of Ila’s father’s kurta, washed clean for the grand occasion. There had been a pause in the conversation, but Joydeb-babu, unaffected, had simply reached out for another sweet on his spacious plate.
Tremors had also passed through the end of the sari draping Ila’s face. A faintly musical suppression of laughter, causing blood to congeal at the tip of her nose, ear-ends, maybe, had awakened Milan out of his stupor that had been unhindered by Joydeb-babu’s trumpet-blowing sneeze.
Finally, Ila’s father had looked embarrassed.
The few real moments in an unreal marriage, followed by the making of a family that seemed to him sometimes less than real.
Tobacco granules in bed. Tea stains on his shirt-front. The loss of pens under the mountain of paper on his desk or leaves of cauliflower at the bottom of his grocery bag, tardiness in picking a spot in the mile-long line at the government-run ration-shop for rice, oil, flour, sugar. The pills for his high blood-pressure, his ancient companion. Ila was exacting about these and more, all eighteen years she had inhabited his life, the spindly girl who had let out tremors of laughter at Joydeb-babu’s snuff-powered sneeze that delicate afternoon. But she’d exert her rules with as few words as possible, with the shrinking quietness of her nature that she’d left with her son. And the grocery and the tobacco-granules it was for her, the wife with perpetually turmeric-stained fingers and beads of sweat on her brows from the heat of the clay oven in the kitchen, one who never expressed any curiosity about Milan’s job or what kind of school would be best for Gautam. All that was the world of men, and best left to them.
Milan had named the boy Gautam after the great Buddha, the Enlightened One. Ila had liked the name right away.
A sweet-natured boy, he was, ever since childhood. Like the great renouncer of the Saka dynasty, he’d had to give up some precious things early in life – not by choice, as the Blessed Prince had, but by the quirk of fate – his mother, at a young age and dreams of higher study at the age of twenty.
He’d done quite well in college. But then the Energy Board job had come along, and it had been a government job, and Milan had retired with a meagre pension, with no savings.
Gautam never complained. Work moved in a rusty rhythm at government offices everywhere in this country, much more so in the state offices in Bengal. The dullness of the long hours there had to be soul-destroying, as corpse-like as the sad pay slips which reflected the state’s dying economy. So he worked overtime, always, almost every day of the week, to add a handful of rupees to his regular salary.
Sometimes Milan suspected him of taking a quiet pleasure in his job. Submerged within his silence was an ability to enjoy anything to which he put his mind. Milan could see him sitting behind his desk in the Energy Board office, even though he had never visited him there – seated all day long, without the relief of cigarettes, the anodyne of petty clerks, delicately mindful of the infinitesimal responsibilities on his shoulders of a tiny cog of the state machinery, in filing away figures of paid bills and unpaid dues, the inky solidity of figures copied on pages of massive notebooks, even the soft flourish of the ‘sevens’ and the ‘nines’ on the scripts of book-keeping.
Sabeer had hated his job at the science college lab with a mute passion, the mindless fiddling with chemical and test tubes of which he’d understood precious little, but such derision wasn’t to find a place in Gautam, howsoever deadening the job seemed to his father. His desk was, in all likelihood, neat and scrapless, clean of tea stains and cigarette burns, all flotsam of paper filed away with the care with which a mother’s favourite boy combed his hair after a bath.
‘Imagine finding such a thing at Sabeer’s house.’ His eyes rested on the mahogany box, caressed its wooden surface.
Milan looked at his son’s face, bright with spirit and laughter. He hadn’t changed. Not one bit. How could he? He hadn’t grown much, not many years had passed since he was a coddled child of his mother. He looked thin, very thin…Ila would have complained. Did a motherless child always miss out? On care, food, rest, and what else? Was he still too young to come back from a nine-hour workday, day after day?
‘There were amazing books and magazines at Sabeer’s house. His father’s stuff, of course.’ Milan said.
‘Has Sabeer left for Dubai yet?’
‘On Tuesday. He went to Bombay first. He was supposed to meet the people from the placement agency there.’
‘Did the right thing to leave. There are no jobs here. Nothing will happen in this bloody city.’
The helpless spite, the hopelessness made him so adult-like. It was at such moments that Milan realized how soon childhood had become a luxury for him.
‘Unless they change something big. Like more private firms, maybe. By the way, baba,’ excitement rose in his voice, ‘there’s an important meeting in the office today. A private house has made a bid for part ownership of the board.’
‘Which house?’
‘The Lakhotias. Suresh Lakhotia is supposed to have great plans about revamping power supply all over Bengal.’
‘Will they raise your salaries?’ Milan’s tone was half-serious, half-mocking.
‘I’ve no idea.’ Gautam took the empty teacups in his hands. ‘Baba, I have to run. I don’t want to miss the ten o’clock bus. I’ll tell you what happened in the evening.’ He paused at the door. ‘Don’t forget your blood-pressure pills.’
For a few minutes, Milan stared at the trail of the rapidly disappearing figure at the door.
Old packing boxes had crowded the space near the door. Giant boulders thick with dust, insects, mites.
Milan had kept staring. Unknown to himself, he’d been smiling. And then he’d reopened the lid of the mahogany box.
A miracle!
What wealth lay hidden in the frayed edges of the brittle yellow sheets, several missing, damaging order, the seamlessness of the reading experience, of immersion into an archaic word.
He’d looked up from the pile of manuscript pages. They seemed treacherous, under the jaundiced hue, the frayed edges, the corners bitten off by silverfish, the gaping holes eating up words and phrases halfway in between.
Under the cracked glass of its dial, the old wall-clock showed ten-thirty. Gautam’s bus, the 2B weighing down under the bursting crowd of commuters, had now made its way to Chowringhee, inching past the endless, jammed traffic of central Calcutta. Gautam might have finally found a place to sit for the last ten minutes of his journey. He would get down in another few minutes, sweat-stained, tired already, and at the end of a longish walk he would be just on time for the beginning of his shift at his office.
Beneath the thickened layer of dust on the coarse parchment, there had been deceit.
There were damp patches on the wall of the room, hints of fungal growth from the ceaseless drip-drip of rainwater through leaking drainage pipes on the terrace. Large cobwebs straddled the wall behind the framed picture of himself with Ila, taken shortly after their wedding. A large crinkly spider lived behind the photo frame.
How could he expect the silverfish, the dust to tell the truth? Great chunks of time stood like the frayed edges of the sheets, to crumble into invisible dust at the touch of a finger. The touch and the smell revealed nothing but the deceit of it all.
Wind blew in through the window, and the tropical heat of midday with it. Great swirls of dust rose on the windowsill. Another summer afternoon was drawing closer. In this city cut across by the tropic of cancer, it was a daily inferno.
A miracle indeed! The touch and the smell of oldness, of oblivion, revealed nothing but the deceit of a miracle. Who were these people? What were their strange loves and lusts and sorrows, with the aroma of fragrant oil on flowing tresses of black hair, behind the barred lion-gates?
Wealth lay hidden in the frayed edges of the brittle yellow sheets, several missing, damaging the order, the seamlessness of the reading experience.
Behind the cracked and stained glass of its dial, the arms of the wall-clock were now well past ten forty, which meant it was now almost ten past eleven. The clock was a lot like him – getting on in years, losing the strength of its sinews, rust eating the filaments of the spring that kept it alive. Every morning, Gautam would wind its mechanical spring with his hand for about two or three minutes, pushing hard against the rusted inertia of the heavy old metal. That was supposed to get it going for another twenty-four hours, one more cycle across its chipped face, but by noon every day it would inevitably lag behind in the days’ race, as if it had already spent the shot of life pumped into its arteries in the morning. Fortunately, it was rather exact in its loss of time – half an hour always, give or take a few minutes, and for the rest of the day one knew the time simply by adding half an hour to what it showed.
They had often thought about getting a new clock, one of those newer ones which ran on battery. But it always occupied a place at the end of every month’s list of things to get, after the essential groceries, the rent and the money to be put aside for Gautam’s daily expenses – his bus fare, four rupees every day to his office and back, and the five rupees for his lunch. For several months they’d been talking about the new clock, but in the end, either something urgent always came up, or it seemed like a bit of a luxury before some other thing that seemed to have a greater claim, like insecticides for the bugs that made a night’s sleep impossible, or an asbestos awning over the window to keep off the monsoon rains, medicines for Milan that kept rising in cost as fast as the blood-pressure they were supposed to keep in rein. Milan didn’t mind the old clock terribly anyway; it had been with him for as long as he could remember, forty years maybe, and its face, gathering grime and cracks and stains over the years, had come to take almost a human form on the wall. It was, after all, just a matter of adding half an hour, and what difference did half an hour make in his life these days?
With half an hour added, it was time for him to set out for the school district office in Gariahat. The very thought of it made him sick… the crowd, the anger and bitterness, the long wait in musty rooms, barren over these past eight days, the nightmarish bus ride home stamped over by a thousand feet and breathless under human weight. But he had to do it. It had been eight months now that his pension cheques had suddenly stopped coming. Some bureaucratic mess. After four months of waiting and fruitless enquiries at the school, he had realized that unless he kept on going and nudging the officials in the school district office, his file would be pushed away under the dust and weeds of the system. Several of his friends and former colleagues who went through the same sudden drying up of pension had advised him that this was the only way to make sure that he would see another government cheque to his name ever again. Nothing was going to happen on the first day, of course, or the second…or the fourth, for that matter, this was the government of West Bengal he was dealing with, but at least he might be able to put some grease in the rusty machine of bureaucracy.
He riffled through his papers on the study table, picking up the letters, the application forms, the photocopy of his voter’s identity card, and his wallet. He looked inside. There was only a ten-rupee note and some loose change. The last couple of months he had to ask Gautam for his personal expenses, and this month he had to take out some money from his account. It had been the last thing he wanted to do. It was a very small fund, saved for emergencies. But there was no choice, how far could push his son?
