Silverfish, page 24
Gautam had lost his job.
The Calcutta Energy Supply Corporation was headed for a largely private management under the house owned by the Lakhotias, and they had started cutting personnel.
Did it explain the strange behaviour, the lies? Oh, nothing much, just a lot of stress at work for days in a row. He’s a good worker, and they keep piling work on him, poor thing. Even uncle, happy and full after the wedding dinner, had been a little confused at his friend’s brusqueness. And the restlessness, the anger spurting out at unguarded moments. All her life, she had known him to be a calm and patient man, a study in contrast next to her louder, excitable uncle. What else had he hidden during that half hour conversation with her, the last one in his life?
What about the red tape at the pension office? Had they cleared as easily as he’d claimed that night? He had been emphatic, almost vengefully, and had brusquely elbowed the topic aside. Who could say what he had on his mind?
Who knew what his day had been like, at the dusty buildings of government offices all over the city? No one would ever know.
They had waited in the lobby of the nursing home. They had rushed to the place closest at hand, a seedy little place owned by a local doctor who had made a fortune from private practice and was now preparing to run for a place in the state legislature in the coming elections. He rarely showed up there anymore; the nursing home, too, bore the musty air of neglect. The walls were damp and patchy, and flies buzzed freely in the corridors. Knots of people, neither related to any patients nor anyhow linked to the clinic hung around near the door, the corridors and even the doctor’s offices. Someone had told her that they were from the political party from which the doctor had earned his electoral ticket. A few others were from other organizations, charities, sports clubs and people from the local community. With elections coming closer, the nursing home was heating up.
They’d been waiting in the lobby, on the few benches lined up along the walls of the corridor along which the few nurses and doctors passed, and the nondescript hangers on, occasionally a few street urchins. The usual smell of clinics, the sterile medicinal odour had here mixed with a medley of others – newsprints and reams of paper and fresh paint, human sweat and stale tea – all from the nooks of rooms along the hallway where the owner’s election machinery was at work. Stained steel trays were carried all around, balancing small glasses of tea, and the faint whiff of cigarette smoke stole its way into the air from time to time.
It was strange that she had to wait in that dazed space, in the midst of its chlorine and tea smell, in silence punctured by loud arguments down below, just a week before she was to leave the country, settle back in her life across the oceans. It was a strange space to be in, after having evaded its claims oneself for seven years, pushing it into the smoky realm of telephone calls and emails and a handwritten letter once in a while. Strange to be here not for a family member, but for one who had become no different from one as far as memory would stretch, like the rickety wooden chair in the corner of her uncle’s room where he always sat, smiling quietly as her uncle rattled off jokes that she sensed to be outlandish even before she was old enough to understand them as such. The quiet, smiling face was in the nooks of her child memory, like the earliest objects taking shape in her consciousness.
Anybody who shaded one’s memories as early as that could melt into a near lifeless materiality, the shiny, discoloured patch on the armrest of the prisoner-crafted chair, a machine-medley of smiles and voices and quirky gestures. Growing older was another name for casting family farther away, and the bevy of faces that lurked around the fermenting architecture of the old family home. Milan-kaku had never quite let that happen. Of course, he had remained ‘uncle’s closest friend’, seated forever on the wicker chair in the corner of the room, the long Shantiniketan bag trailing his body like a stuffed python, but there had been real words behind the quiet smile, real responses to a growing sense of self, over the many years.
Real stories. Of different breeds, changing forms as she grew older. The oldest furry animals were stories about the old man in the vat, in the fearsome dungeon under the stairs of their house, who was really a lonely retired soul abandoned by all, and how he wanted to bring people in there not to chew their bones but for a little company, to chat a while, partial to children because he loved them the most. Stories about how he’d been standing near the door of an empty tram, waiting to get down at his stop, chatting with the only other passenger in the car about the afternoon’s soccer match between local rivals, East Bengal and Mohun Bagan. Realizing upon getting down that the soccer enthusiast had gently picked his wallet off his pocket, very probably during his demonstration of his favourite half-back’s deadly tackle which at that time he had feared would precipitate the enthusiast on the rough pavements of Calcutta from the moving tram!
He had more laughter in him than the loud guffaws and the outrageous jests of her uncle could pop, laughter of a quiet smoky kind, spilling over from time to time, even making strange sense in her growing mind. Laughter he wound and wound around his quick-spun yarns, and the slow-born ones.
Years later, as a college student, she heard stories about bright young students of major Calcutta colleges throwing their lives away for the blood-spilling, extreme communism, Mao Zhedong-worshipping Naxalites who wanted to bring about revolution through bombs and guns, how they were hounded down by the police, shot down like dogs, or smuggled across the seas by influential families to California and New York where they opened successful businesses or became corporate executives, entertaining old friends in their beautiful suburban homes in their old age, reminiscing over single-malt scotches about blood-splattered bodies in College Street, all another life now!
Lines sometimes he would read them out from his short stories.
The honeyed nuts had arrived, and with them, a choice of drinks. Sparkling water, Coke and Pepsi, Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi, orange-tomato-cranberry juices, coffee and tea, decaf, beer, wine and spirits.
Yes, she would like a drink. Tomato juice, please. Thanks.
The young man on the aisle seat balanced a small bottle of red wine on the tray before the flickering images of a Jackie Chan movie on the small screen in front of him. There were still near nine hours to go before they landed at Heathrow. Would they talk, chat beyond a couple of friendly words? For a fraction of a moment, her mind seemed to wander, flit around it, look at what had to be an absent stare on her face. Not a great invite to an animated conversation.
They had entered the tiny cubicle of the Intensive Care Unit a couple of hours later, when the young doctor had brought the news that he was out of his coma. Gautam went in first. Uncle followed after a few minutes, and she had crept in behind him.
Hidden under the I.V. stand, and the elaborate clinical paraphernalia, he’d looked as remote as people did on the deathly whiteness of hospital beds, no more, no less. He couldn’t move his limbs, but he could lisp a few words, parts of them, and you had to guess the rest.
The doctor had allowed them ten minutes.
Perhaps everybody had noticed the pale light come into his eyes as he saw Shirin, half-hiding behind her uncle, who looked whiter than his bedridden friend while in shock. She wasn’t even sure that it was her place to be there, at a moment such as this. Who’d rightfully owned the share of the precious ten minutes could have been a looming question. But except his son, the patient didn’t seem to have any family around.
In a halting jumble of eye and lip movements, soft words, he had asked for his bag. His words had been like a whisper, but there’d been silence in the ICU, and they had their eyes riveted to his lips.
‘You bag is fine, baba.’ Gautam had assured him. ‘They picked it up from the road and it’s in the office downstairs.’
He wanted it, right then. Suddenly, he had been almost clear, intense and incisive, from under that tangle of machinery entwining him.
Half-reluctantly, Gautam had left the room.
Her uncle had stepped closer. Sensing his movement, Milan-kaku had looked up, smiled up wrinkles around his mouth.
‘How are you feeling, Milan?’ Her uncle couldn’t keep the heaviness from his voice.
Milan-kaku had just nodded, the furrowing smile alive on his face.
At that moment, her uncle had lost it. ‘What’s all this, Milan? Why, you have high blood-pressure and…’
She couldn’t help but step ahead. She’d touched her uncle’s arm. ‘Let all that be now, uncle. Let Milan-kaku get well first.’
Gautam came back with the old Shantiniketan bag. He hadn’t slung it along his shoulder like people usually did when they carried one of these bags, but held it in his hands, half-awkwardly. He looked unwilling to claim its ownership, planting as much distance with it as he could while his hands touched its coarse cotton fabric.
She’d never seen the bag apart from Milan-kaku’s body, slung across his shoulder, hanging bloated and unwieldy next to his legs, resting on his lap as he sat on the wicker chair in the corner of uncle’s room.
Away from him, it looked sad and homeless.
Milan-kaku had whispered more words, floated more gestures towards the bag’s unwieldy contents. The file inside the file.
Gautam had pulled out the file. Deep brown, glossy surface. Calcutta Energy Supply Corporation.
‘Shirin,’ The words had stumbled on an impassioned march to clarity. ‘Keep… keep with you.’ His face had looked faintly choked, and his eyes smaller, contracting under a strange pressure. ‘This story… it goes a long way.’
For a moment, she had felt puzzled. But then she’d looked at it again. Gautam had opened it, and a pile of frayed-edged, yellowed sheaf of paper lay in the plastic case inside.
Gautam had looked puzzled, full of questions, but had kept silent. Her uncle had had a despairing look on his face, as if he had given up trying to figure out what was going on. But he too, had the good sense of keeping quiet.
‘You’re not going anywhere, Milan,’ he had said after a few seconds. ‘We’re waiting right outside, and we’re taking you home.’
Milan-kaku had smiled at him, like he’d been indulging a moody child.
Shortly afterwards, the doctor had shuffled them all outside.
Back in the lobby, she had looked inside the Shantiniketan bag. It was strange to hold it, very strange. It must have been several decades old, probably an acquisition in his early teaching days, perhaps shortly thereafter. It had the musty, cottony smell she’d always linked with him in her mind. The coarseness of the fabric was partly the way it had been crafted, the knotty waves of cotton entwining it, but it had smoothed over the years, the colour faded, not unlike the indistinguishable patchwork on the façade of old houses, the cracked cement. Loose threads of cotton stood out from corners, and it seemed that the whole bag would come off its seams if they were pulled hard enough.
The medley inside had been stranger.
A slim volume of poems by Octavio Paz, translated into Bengali, several forms relating to different government offices, the payment of pension, a chit with the address of a Sabeer Rehman in Oman, several copies of a typed letter addressed to officials of the school district office.
They had left the nursing home around two in the morning. Gautam had stayed back. Her uncle had wanted to stay back as well. She and her father had to force him to come with them.
He had been in and out of consciousness for the next two days. She’d been to see him once more. That time, he’d been unconscious, still in the ICU, entangled by the same set of delicate machinery.
He had died three days before she was to leave.
It had been around seven in the evening, and they had all rushed to the nursing home. In the end, it had been a cardiac arrest. But his brain had never regained life, either.
Strangely, there wasn’t much she remembered after he’d died.
It was like a buzz of actions, of a different kind, filling up of forms, a few people from the neighbourhood and many from his school, some distant relatives, a handful of flowers, the copy of the Gita on his unmoving chest on the pale nursing home bedclothes. Without the I.V. equipments, he looked bare, reassuringly normal.
In the middle of the blur of movements, whispers and tears, something had stayed in her mind like a bruise that refused to heal.
A big-boned man had appeared out of nowhere, and his disdain had been dry and cold. He had come up to them, asking them to remove the ‘body’ soon, as the seat needed to be vacated for other patients. They’d never seen him before, and he wasn’t on the nursing home staff. But he had shown up suddenly, moved around with an arrogance and a bunch of followers as if he had an ancient, primal claim on the place.
‘The body can’t be here all day.’ He had spoken gruffly to Gautam, who’d been a little confused and slow, making the arrangements, getting the paperwork released, arranging for the transportation to the crematorium.
People had been calling the burly bullish man ‘Ghoshda’.
Somebody had said that he was one of the stalwarts from the local party office.
Indrajit Ghosh. That was his name. They had free run of the nursing home, as its owner was running the elections on the party ticket.
What else was there to remember?
Her co-passenger flashed her a polite smile. She realized that she’d been staring at him, without having realized it.
She smiled and looked away.
She opened the folder on her lap. The dusty pages looked strange on the seat-tray, next to the neat triangle of the British Airways paper towel, the unopened bag of honey-roasted peanuts. The little translucent paper cup, holding tomato juice, shapely cubes of ice. Jackie Chan was still knocking out villains a few inches away, on her co-passenger’s screen.
She looked at the archaic handwriting. It was beautiful, but it took a few minutes to get used to the script, the spellings.
But she was there soon enough.
Suhasini must have seen it coming. She saw everything ahead of time, the nosy imp! She clamped a palm over my mouth and whispered, Just dance along ahead on your toes, bonehead, don’t rest your feet at any spot for long! See, like this.’ And there she was, the sinister midsummer pickle-fairy, flitting across the sea of fiery concrete in little dance-moves, her callused, tree-climbing feet just showering a trail of toe-kisses on the scorhed blisters. After a few minutes, you can walk normally. Your feet get used to it.’
I had no choice – the lure of pickled mango lingered ahead – but to follow her dance lessons. I have to say, though, that I felt silly in that frantic toe-hop over fire. I was twelve, and no buffoonery of that sort should have felt stupid, but I was also a married woman, and not just anywhere, in the most prestigious family of all Bengal. The most learned Brahmins and priests in the land had sat for hours chanting arcane Sanskrit hymns before myself, my family and the sacred god of fire, decked in finery that cost millions. I had even appeared before the British district magistrate, had been rebuked time and again for my rustic ways, my childish joys, held numb before the rows of grimacing, betel-leaf chewing older women-faces instructing me never to laugh, not to smile or let the veil slip off my face before any man other than my husband. Twelve, yes, but a awkward twelve to hop along on toes.
And did Suhasini know it! Oh, that girl could sprinkle a wound with salt just as deftly as on sun-shrunk mangoes, she sure could. ‘Kamal, you know what you look like? A tadpole caught in the mud!’ She flitted gracefully ahead of me, and was resting halfway to the middle of the terrace…
If wishes were blows, Suhasini would have fallen ten times over, rubbed her giggly, sunburnt face in the fiery concrete…
‘Just you wait!’ I chased her and she flew, like a bird that had perched for a moment on the terrace wall, and I tumbled and jingled, and kicked fire beneath my feet, but suddenly the music entered my movement and there I was, flitting along the scorched concrete like a busy little squirrel, just the way Suhasini had danced her way in, around, all over. We screamed in joy and clamped our palms over our lips, let our feet suck in the tamed fire, hugged each other.
‘Chicken or lasagna?’ The polite voice of the hostess asked her, again. ‘Ma’am?’
Dust swirled around her, and a haze of sunlight, tiny arrows of it, chasing the silverfish out of their hiding nooks. She struggled to listen to the voice above her.
‘Chicken or lasagna, ma’am?’ The woman in the rust-orange sari was polite, and patient, very patient.
‘Lasagna.’ Back to the tinkle of silver and glass and crisp words, she smiled an apology. The screen before her charted the progress of the plane. There were six more hours to Heathrow.
There will never be world enough, and time, something inside told her as she cleared a tiny spot on the tray for the lasagna.
The brittle pages had taken up most of her space. And they were going to take much more.
More space than these skies could offer.
About the Author
Saikat Majumdar is an Assistant Professor of English Literature at Stanford University. Born and raised in Calcutta, he has spent the last decade studying and teaching in the US and Canada, and now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
First published in India in 2007 by
HarperCollins Publishers India
Copyright © Saikat Majumdar 2007
ISBN: 978-81-7223-713-4
Epub Edition © July, 2015 E-ISBN: 978-9-3511-6059-5
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Saikat Majumdar asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
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