Silverfish, page 21
There were other people outside the door, staring at the commotion inside. Manoj was there, and the other boy who had left with him, and there were a few more.
‘Utpal Bardhan is the member of the West Bengal Legislative Assembly from our constituency.’ Milan tried to muster firmness in his voice, but he knew himself that it was just a show. ‘As a citizen living in his constituency, I have every right to petition him for my grievances.’
Indra thumped at the desk with such violence that some of the papers fell to the floor. ‘Oh, cut it out! I’ve left your crappy classroom many years ago, you’ve forgotten perhaps, and don’t explain to me what an MLA is and what is his duty. I do this for a living.’ Anger made him sweat, and Milan thought for a moment that he saw foam in the corners of his mouth. ‘We know very well that you didn’t even vote for us. Do you think Utpal Bardhan needs a stupid old schoolteacher like you to win elections?’ He seemed to assume greater control, spit out the next words in disdain. ‘And don’t think we don’t know how close you are to starving.’
The veins on Milan’s temples were ready to burst. He felt more eyes behind him, piercing his back, in hot liquid contempt. He rose, a ringing pain shooting through the entire left side of his body.
‘Well, I see it was a mistake for me to come here in the first place,’ he said feebly.
‘Just get the hell out of here.’ He heard Indra muttering as he left the room. And then, he raised his voice high enough for Milan to hear him clearly.
‘You can go and ask your favourite student for help. That dead bookseller’s son. If that sorry sonofabitch is still alive somewhere.’
Milan froze in his tracks. But he had no strength to turn around.
He entered his room, turned on the light. The clock on the wall showed seven-fifty.
It meant twenty minutes past eight.
He sat on the chair near his bed. The walk up two flights of stairs had tired him, put him out of breath. His throat felt dry, and lumpy knots tightened in his chest, like massive, dried up balls of phlegm shuffling around, cutting off air-passages.
Blankly, he stared at the clock on the wall. It seemed to be the only object in the room, growing larger by the minute, coming closer and closer, staring back at him. It’s tick was loud and rusty, spaced out almost as exactly as the beating of his own heart.
He wanted to drink some water. But he was too tired to get up. He was drained of energy, unable to move his limbs, his shoulders. He could only stare at the clock on the wall, the rusted, colourless metal of its body, the cracked, stained glass of its dial, through which its face looked cloudy at points. Or was it his own sight that had become blurred? He couldn’t tell. How many years had the clock been there, on that very spot on the wall? Twenty? Thirty? It was past remembering. Behind it, he suddenly realized, there might be a clock-shaped spot on the wall that was free of the dust and stains that had misted the rest of the wall, on the bare spots of its skin uncovered by photos, calendars, bookcases. A drier, cleaner spot maybe, or cluttered, thicker dust with the home of a large crinkly-legged spider.
Sounds of many people’s voices floated up from the streets, boisterous and angry, full of the excitement of the day. Men and women from the garment factory slums who had marched with the protestors, returned home, quenched, the hardship of their protests with country liquor. It was going to be a noisy night, full of fights and revelry, songs and curses.
But they were down below, in another world. Here in the airless, damp-smelling room, silence seemed to hang heavy in lumps, like the thickness of fungal spots spreading on the walls, dark and diseased in the pale yellow light of the lone electric bulb in one corner. The only sound was that of the rusty clock, growing louder by the minute, larger and louder, its cracked face closer to his own.
It had gone on like this all day, alone, in the dark, shuttered room cut off from the outside air. It had gasped around noon, getting out of breath, its aged spring giving way, running behind even the snail’s pace of time in this stagnating city. Had it gone on like this? Like this, exactly? Was it the old man on his deathbed who got just a little more excited to see a second soul in its locked room, panting louder, trying to reach its fellow, touch his sweat-dried face?
The thought was dreary, like a vile growth that slowly wiped out everything in space and in time, the hours spent out in the city, the days behind him. The years. The clock had ticked along, sun and rain, protest and jubilation, with the medicinal shot in its heart every morning, from him in the past, his son now. It had known little of the outside air, life, dust.
To think of it as one’s fellow, as oneself, was like death.
He pulled himself up on the chair, in a sudden act of force. He had to move his head around, out of the sad arc gulped down by the looming face of the clock, pour life into his limbs. Get up, drink water.
His Shantiniketan bag had slipped off his shoulder in the sudden jolt. The loop of the bag lay loose around his wrist, the large, paunchy body flopped down on the floor. Everything inside had spilled out. The few forms, the typed letters had slithered away, along the dust of the floor.
The folder had made a light thud as it had fallen, hitting the ground on its bony spine. The folder with Calcutta Energy Supply Corporation emblazoned in the corner. Yellow manuscript pages had slipped out, pages with frayed edges, like the borders of ravaged countries. Edges had broken off on the floor, flinging tiny shards of brittle paper, yellow dust mingling with grime on the floor.
A flash of pain shot through his choked breast, gradually spreading along his entire body like a trickle of tears. For a moment, he stared at the heaped up pages of archaic handwriting scattered on the dusty floor, lying like garbage.
Lovingly, he stooped down, picked up every page with care, an effort which quickened his breath. Putting them back into the neat pile they had been, he placed them on his lap. He caressed the frayed edges. Carefully, very carefully, making sure that his touch didn’t rub off further pieces from the brittle pile. He turned the pages.
Dreamily, he entered where he had left off, hours ago.
My vanity had to be brought to dust along with the last light of my life!
What a death-dance it has been, not at the feet of the gods, but at the altar of your lotus-pure life, my child.
Of the young body that lies drained of life by British bullets.
My mother-vanity that had dared to think that I knew you, sensed the secret courses of your life, the contours of your nature that had confused everybody so, disappointing your noble family, the noble forefathers, growing up into the soft-featured, sickly young man that I loved. Till the shower of bullets had seared your body, bewildering your high-born family, all but me who had cradled and suckled you, loved you, cheated you, learned from you, and had thought, with pride that now lies in shards, that your mysterious life was no mystery, not to me.
Yes, I feared the unknown, the unknown with vague contours, the smell of burnt metal and blood in the air, the fear of muffled whispers in your room, the faces that hid from the sunlike moles, unshaven, unwashed. I feared your pain as you looked at me that day, spoke about your mother’s hurt, looked away from me; I have known the abyss of fear when you’d leave the house for weeks, this iron-walled house that has held me prisoner through the decades.
The edges of my arrogance dulled ever so little that day two years ago, listening to your wispy words. ‘My heart breaks too, when I look at my mother.’ In your distant eyes, I couldn’t see myself, no trace at all in those eyes that had looked away.
Not before you had arranged for Suhasini to come to me did I come to know the mother whose pain had drawn that sigh from your chest. It was far greater than me, this Swadesh, this wide-stretching motherland of ours, leaning like dawn-mist over my blinded eyes, vanishing into nothingness. I suppose she’s my mother too, even though ever since I’d been netted and brought away from the mother-soil of my village, I had never seen a trace of her outside the high-arched walls of this mansion, beyond the distant skylines from the terrace.
You loved me too.
Loved me deeply, from the daybreak of your life when your cheeks crinkled in laughter or worry – you were a serious child, always – through the years of my desolate widowhood when you’d dash into the prayer-room to spoil the game of my worship with the game of your mischief, throwing your loving, restless, un-bathed and un-purified arms around my prayer-shrunk, fast-shrivelled body. You loved me through the months you brought the written words back to me, through the endless days and nights and weeks you never came home, killing me in my worst fears that loomed true and black and colossal in the distant horizon. But love had not withered away even in those dark days and nights and weeks.
Why else would you send home the mother of your comrade-in-arms to me, one of those comrades who had risen from dust to hold the weapons alongside princes like you? Why would you send her over to our house, as she had wished to come, as my personal maid? What else but love for a mother back home, suffering in the dark? To send the woman who knew the goings-on in your nightly gang of muffled whispers and weapons wrapped in grimy rags, the woman who also, like her childhood playmate whom she’d never forgotten, had lost her son to this burrowing fraternity of matted hair and hunted eyes? A compassionate, far-sighted woman, a long way from the perky fourteen-year old who had taught me to climb trees like a cat. A clear-voiced mother who knew more about the storms of change outside than poor cloistered me.
She was different, so very different, from the wildfruit-picking, quick-limbed, restless teenager, this tall and shadowy woman who’d slipped back into my life. But I could stretch back my memory and see the seeds of this alien fortitude in that roughskinned teenager’s refusal to nurse a limb bloodied from a hard fall from the tree top, the stubborn drought in her eyes after blows had rained on her bony spine. My mind went back, time and again, to those red-rimmed eyes and the ugly burst of tears that had shocked me so that fateful afternoon of our doll’s wedding, an initiation by fire to a life of peril ahead. The expulsion out of those colossal gates at the tip of a bloodied whip, with a broken, dying father, a mother blinded by a trail of panicked siblings, dumped in the fishermen’s quarters by the river, amidst a lifetime of stench and filth and disease. The death of her father within a few days, more to the humiliation than the blood-thirst of the princely whip and wild brickbats that had extracted the price for ill-service to his lordship. The loss of siblings to the gaping appetite of cholera that broke out in an epidemic in the city a couple of years later, digging its fangs the hardest on the poorest and the most crowded slums such as the fishermen’s shanties where a stake to life was an accident at best. Growing up on the scariest edge, beyond which lay the deepest fall, the squalor and the poverty and the perils of everyday, but, bless her heart, in freedom! Freedom to live or die as she chose, and she chose to live, live in a way that made her past adventures on steep treetops and sunburnt terraces look like a pleasant smile.
Suhasini had told me all, much of it that very evening, on the dark terrace, night knotting up in the city below. On the same terrace on whose burning floor we had once played recklessly, looking for pebbles to fling down at the pond below; for the pickle which had lured us with heavenly aroma. We had stood on the same spots years and years ago, on its rapidly cooling floor at the coming of dusk, the chilled, breeze-afloat words passing between two long-lost friends, stifling our breath, stalling the flood of passion at getting each other back after three decades.
She’d brought back to life the lanky, night-skinned boy from the forest tribes of Bengal who, in his middle teens, had picked up arms to join his clan’s uprising against the British. Now in the city, his Bengali halting at best, he’d brought the breath of a freedom unknown to his paler-skinned countrymen, city people better tamed by the white rulers. He was in his late teens when he met Suhasini, then in her early twenties, several years into the hard and perilous life of the riverside shanties, her soul growing more and more hardened by the day. The boy from the moist earth and deep forests of ancient Bengal, I can never remember the alien sound of his name, awakened my childhood playmate, the smouldering anger in her soul, to the rule of white men that had ripped our land apart. They were drawn to each other only as free souls can be, and in her words I had seen the free rein of will and desire that I was only to know from books.
She told me of the rape and plunder of our land by foreign rulers, the untold violence that had passed me by as I remained inside these gilt-edged walls, the storms and tornadoes brewing in the horizons of the land of which I never had a whiff as I lay pining for a waft of air to breathe in. Leaning on the walls on which we had once perched our dolls, I had poured out a frantic stream of questions. She had told me, of the little pockets of resistance against British rule that had been sprouting in our land, the British rule that had meant nothing to me, even in the appearance of the civil surgeons and magistrates that had graced our household, and the titles they had bestowed on the lords of our family, the resistance that had no meaning to me as I knew nothing about the rape and the plunder, gold-chained as I had always been.
Close to three decades ago, on the blistered grounds of this very terrace, on this very corner near the tall lightning rod, Suhasini had revealed the mysteries of pickling unripe mangoes; how a dash of mustard oil and green pepper added just the right touch of sin to it. I heard the tingly, restless voice of the adolescent girl all over again while she stood right here, speaking of the atrocities by British magistrates in the countryside, their aiding and abetting ruthless local landlords who held their subjects by their whips and the fangs of bloodthirsty dogs. The girl harried sick over the count of cowries won in roadside games came back to me while the shadowy woman whispered to me the greed of British taxes, rules to grow only cash crops that pushed the farmers to the brink of starvation.
What a life she’d had, Suhasini!
The free bird in the gold cage, flung from it to the deepest abyss of penury and death and illness, then into the ring of fire – her dark lover sprung from the night-loins of the country’s earth. He had come to the city to join the secret brotherhoods sprouting there, in the wrestling clubs and the youth groups in city neighbourhoods, men who were forming bands that had vowed death to the greed-blinded plantation owners and magistrates, even the viceroy who lived behind the seven gates of heaven in his palace in Calcutta.
At long last, Suhasini taught me the meaning of the rag-wrapped gun I’d seen lying in your room, a meaning that had eluded me for ever till my childhood friend came back to my life.
Your treacherous love had come alive as she’d described your excitement upon discovering Suhasini’s castaway connection to this household. Suhasini, the mother of your comrade-in-violence, Sushil, her dream-frail kinship with your poor mother sleepless at home, many, many years ago, before you had arrived in my fourteen-year old body, a strange friendship forged in the wilderness of the mango grove and over the weddings of dolls. Young Sushil, Suhasini’s love-child with her forest-hued partner, who’d grown up facing death every day, learning to crush his wails as his father carried him on his back, meeting his comrades in the slow-forming youth societies in the city and in the villages, Sushil who had revolution in his very bloodstream. ‘There is so much about my mother that I learn every day!’ you had told Suhasini, smiling. And yet I know that there’s precious little that I know.’ Why is it that you never had my vanity?
Are mothers always so vain?
Or was it my lot alone, the vice of the gold shackles that stifled my life? Suhasini was a mother too, but one teetering on the edge of life always, with a son and a lover who knew the stench of death far better than I ever would; she had knowledge I could never touch. I came to meet you anew through her, through her words whispered in the corners of the widows’ quarters. Did you put your life beyond my nightmares, my child? How was I to dream that the tumultuous debates in your college groups had moved from conflicts between different schools of philosophy to questions as to whether the struggle to overthrow the British was best done through political agitation or firepower? Suhasini knew about your aversion to bloodshed, be it of the enemy. She knew of the young men who’d travelled across the oceans to the very den of the British lion, to other cities strewn over the continent, forming shadowy knots of simmering violence with youth from all over our motherland.
I, too, came to know how you and your group were swayed by the need to shed blood. A cursed day it was, the day I lost my child to the violence in the hearts of men. It doesn’t take away anything from the red cloud over our land, from your blood-crusade, that none of it meant a thing to me. Sacrilegiously, I reached after the words and letters, sentences outside my reach; you know that, my little teacher. But that had been the only violation that I had dared to attempt; the only blasphemy that I had carried out to perfection. Save that, my life, my ears and nose and eyes, the wind of my soul, the very reason of my being, had curled around the plaiting of ornate hair-braids, the laying of flower patterns in rice-paste on the courtyard floor, the lotus footprints of goddesses across thresholds, the cooking of fifty-bowl delicacies for my lord, lisping the endless names of endless gods in the flower-drooping prayer room, bathing the infinite gold and silver and brass images in holy Ganga water, stacking up sacred weights of my good karma for the everlasting mortal life, the blessed afterlife of my husband, my son.
All my riches were the slice of sky over the open courtyard, snatches of the windswept sun-scorched terrace, a fluttering life between thresholds, the forever thinning memory of a cobblestoned road awash with flower-petals outside pillars and lion gates that had terrified a twelve-year old heart many, many decades ago.
