Silverfish, page 9
He was one of the few booksellers who stocked copies of both of Milan’s books – The Marketplace and Other Stories and Bricks and Sand: A Collection, and also the various known and unknown literary magazines where his stories had appeared, as well as numerous other obscure writers brought out by small presses in print runs of just a few hundred, sometimes.
Milan remembered, Moidul had the popular sports and film and fashion magazines strung out in rows in the front of the stall. ‘Cricket and Bollywood keep me from starving, Milan-babu.’ He used to say. ‘Once I have my stomach filled I can water weaker plants.’
A silverfish which lived with books, fed on them, watered their soil, tended to their leaves.
However, thanks to its nearness to two of the city’s major colleges, several coffee houses and restaurants frequented by the young, the starry-eyed and the radical, the back rows of Moidul’s stall never gathered too much dust. It was a cherished spot for many in the neighbourhood, and Milan himself stopped by often to browse through the new arrivals and for a few words with Moidul.
On their third day in their new home in Sealdah, Rehana had woken up from sleep to see Moidul’s lifeless body hanging from the ceiling.
Milan heard it from another bookseller. The hook in the centre of the ceiling had been bare, waiting for the fan to be installed. Mindful not to wake up his wife and son in the next room, Moidul had climbed a stool, knotted a rope around his neck, and had kicked the stool away from under his feet. Just like during executions. But Moidul hadn’t hooded his face. He had died with his eyes agape, like a dead carp at the fish market, staring at the bare walls of his new home.
Milan couldn’t say if his pain had been more than that moment that evening when he’d seen a rubble, a heap of ashes and broken bamboos, torn gunny-clothes and the last shreds of paper, on the spot where his favourite bookstall had been, and the shadow of a smiling man who smelled of old paper and dust. He had seen this the very evening Moidul’s family had moved away to Sealdah.
At the time of his suicide, Moidul was thirty-nine years old.
One of Milan’s joys these last twenty years or so had been Sabeer’s company. He had kept in close touch with Milan all these years, stopping by his house every few weeks. Once in a while Milan would find himself in the various pharmacies where Sabeer worked, not far from the Sealdah railway station, and they’d walk down to a roadside tea-stall for a cup of tea. He knew that Sabeer smoked, but he would never do so in front of Milan. He was still his ‘teacher’, and for Sabeer, it was scandalous to light up before him!
In the old tradition of the Indian guru, the teacher was a kind of a surrogate father to the student. There is no greater victory – said the Sanskrit hymn – than a defeat at the hands of a student or a son in the very arts one had taught them. The student or the son – the distinction was never important.
Milan rarely felt for the students in his school the way he felt about, say, Gautam. Gautam was not only his only child, but one of the quietest boys he’d every come across, lost in a silence most people couldn’t make much of, not even Milan or Ila. Nothing like the students in his school, choice obscenities forever hanging on their tongues, spit and catcalls wrestling at mouthcorners, the chalks they flung across decrepit classrooms and used to scribble words and phrases that didn’t bear retelling. Fights broke out often in the school compound, on the streets, and shirt-tucked knives or broken bottles were quick to claim small streams of blood, shrieks of pain, whirling violence the police and local big brothers had to rush to stop. These teenagers were as familiar with pouches of drugs sold on street corners as they were to squat bottles of alcohol, mixed up with broken pencil stubs and old, tattered copies of textbooks they sometimes possessed.
There was the odd student who tried to swim against the tide, floundering against fierce currents of crime and poverty that, in the end, always sucked them in. Looking hard, if his eyes became moist with strain, Milan could see the bottom of it, the weed of drugs and drunkenness and chains that gripped their struggling limbs, but still he could never reach across a vast gulf that was always there.
Sabeer had reached out to him in a way that brought alive the old cliché about the guru being a father. Over the years, if he thought about it, he had in fact come to spend many more hours talking to him that he’d ever spend with his only child. Gautam’s quietness was not that of the poet’s or the artist’s, it was something hard to capture in words rather, almost an outer coating of the reservation with which he met life at all moments. He had met his father’s favourite student many times, often appearing in the middle of their spirited conversations, leaving with a smile and a quick ‘hello’. Books and magazines from his father’s bookshelves had gone out to Sabeer every few days while Gautam had not even opened more than one or two books at casual moments. Ila had prepared an elaborate meal for both of them on many occasions, and Milan had nudged Sabeer towards an extra piece of fish in a way he’d often forgotten to think about Gautam. Ila would often joke about it. Milan loved Gautam the only way a man can love his only child but something in Sabeer touched him in a way that lay beyond blood.
Gautam understood it too. Ever since his teenage years he’d grown up hearing of Sabeer almost as often as he’d heard his father talk about his teaching, his books and the small social life he had. The glow in his eyes whenever he mentioned his favourite student had never escaped his son. Not that it had ever affected Gautam, or the way he loved his father. Gautam never seemed to feel jealous; neither did he ever lay a claim to the alien world his father shared with his student, so close to him in age and yet so far away in nature, and so deep in a bond with the father they sometimes seemed to share.
That day Gautam looked as shocked as never before when he had learned that Sabeer was never going to come back to the school, never to visit, even to meet Milan there.
Milan had tried for all he was worth, for days on end to get Sabeer to change his mind, enroll in another school, take the board examinations. At the back of his mind he’d long cherished the hope that Sabeer would study literature in college, maybe choose to be a journalist or a writer afterwards. The guru often had the student’s life mapped out in his mind, and none saw anything amiss with that. The memories had been hard to get over – long summer afternoons at tea-stalls near the school, walking past paralysed traffic on the streets, in the park next to the bookselling district of the city, storms rising in their tiny earthen cups of tea over parallel theatre playing to popular taste, daily newspapers and their transparent prejudices, the pitfalls of free verse.
But Sabeer had let him down. He had turned his face away from the world of education, and that was that. By letting go of the life his mentor had so clearly etched out in his dreams, he had killed a part of himself that he couldn’t summon if he wished to. He didn’t speak much about it, but flung a net of iron silence about the subject. The silence, Milan quickly realized, spoke a resistance no force could bend.
For a while Milan had hoped that Sabeer would take up his father’s trade. The love of books, he knew, was in his blood. If he didn’t study, or write, Milan had thought, maybe he would buy and sell them.
But Sabeer had vehemently stayed clear of the printed word. He had kept working at various chemist shops and labs, working through apprenticeships towards better paying jobs.
The years had passed by.
Sabeer hadn’t married. Milan had never discussed this with him. Their relationship was on a different plane, and the intimate bond they shared had never conflicted with the little spheres of silence that must linger between those who had once shared the teacher-student relation. Sabeer lived with his mother Rehana, who had aged greatly, suddenly, from the sudden gaping holes in her life, turning into a woman with a rusty mind whose memory served her poorly.
After several years, Sabeer took up a job as a technician at a laboratory run by one of the science departments of the University of Calcutta.
Then about a year ago Sabeer’s life changed again: Rehana died of a second cardiac arrest at the age of fifty-four.
After Gautam had come home that evening and heard the news from his father, his behaviour had left Milan with full of gaping questions. Gautam had been silent, unnaturally so, and his face had been bereft of shock and sadness. That had been a dinner of near-silence, one or two words about the stock of rice running out and the quandary about whether to buy kerosene oil at the government ration shop or in the black market.
But the change had been clear to Milan from the very next day. Gautam would ask about Sabeer much more often than he did before. How is he doing on his own? Near Sealdah station? What’s the rent like? Did he have to get special training to be a lab technician?
Sabeer had taken care to stay away from this neighbourhood ever since they’d moved. Gautam, overcome by the demands of his job, was unable to get away. The two never met since Sabeer left school.
But he always remembered when his father went to meet his former student, the only real student he’d had, as it were. And the questions had always waited, till the evening, late evening, sometime, if Gautam worked overtime.
Where is he planning to go?
Bombay?
Dubai would be hard, but he’ll do well if he can survive there.
It had been a slow shock for Milan to realize that it was Rehana’s death that had brought Sabeer suddenly closer to Gautam.
It was after his mother’s death that Sabeer made up his mind to leave for the Middle East. Technicians and labourers with pharmaceutical knowledge were in demand in the Gulf, and people said that the pay was good.
Milan was one of the few people who knew that it really wasn’t about the money.
Sabeer had taken in as much of this city as he could, maybe much more. He couldn’t push himself any farther.
‘The other day I’d walked over to Gray Street.’ He told Milan one day. ‘Right in front of the electronics shop, just where the lane to the college branches off.’ The exact location of Moidul’s magazine stall, nineteen years ago, a tiny patch of the neighbourhood that would forever burn in Milan’s mind. He never went that way if he could help it, and he knew Sabeer never did, either.
‘I’ve no idea how many years it had been since I’d last been there. Ten or fifteen, probably.’ Sabeer had chuckled. ‘Anyway, they’ve set up a food stall there. Chicken rolls, Chinese noodles, chilli chicken. I stood there and had a chicken roll.’
Milan hadn’t known what to say.
‘Anyway, I started chatting with the guy a little bit. It was around late evening, and the day’s business was almost over. So I asked him, sort of tactfully, how much did he have to pay to the local big brothers to do business there.’ Through the dry noise of the chuckles, a drier chill had cut through Sabeer’s voice. ‘You wouldn’t believe the amount he named. I guess it really has been a long time.’ He broke into halting bout of laughter. ‘If they didn’t burn his stall, I wonder how many times father would have to fight them over the raising of rates!’
Milan had to smile too. It wasn’t even that difficult.
‘Well, inflation works for criminals too, you know.’ He had said, his voice down to a whisper.
Sabeer had to get away from this city.
He had seriously started looking for opportunities in the Middle East soon after Rehana’s death.
Several seemingly interesting opportunities came by, but they turned out to be false leads. In the undefined, slightly dangerous world of blue-collar immigration to the Gulf, there appeared to be no dearth of hidden snags and red herrings – fraud and false promises at every step. Strange rumours spread in the wholesalers’ markets and in the shantytowns at Sealdah and Rajabazar, in the crowded railway station platforms and the hardware stores under the bridge, strange lures to the oil-rich lands beyond the Arabian Sea.
Finally, about a couple of months back, one of the more reliable job search agents brought promising news about trainee positions as chemists’ assistants in Oman. It seemed clean, no huge advance to be paid, just the first month’s salary, after everything was in place. Sabeer would have to go to Bombay first, meet some of his prospective employer’s representatives. But it was pretty much a sure thing.
A week back, Sabeer had asked Milan over to his place for the first time. ‘And you’ll stay for dinner,’ he had said.
He knew that his old teacher wouldn’t pause to think about eating a meal cooked by a Muslim.
That evening, entering the dingy rooms in one of the old houses over the Sealdah flyover had brought surprises for Milan. The memory was warm, reminiscent of a real household, cared for, a small miracle for a young man living alone. There was a cleanliness about the house. But it was also a memory, a warm, empty feel of things past, as there were signs of Sabeer’s impending departure. There were packed boxes on the floor, a large steel trunk stuffed with clothes, couple of bloated gunny bags. After what seemed like a lifetime in Calcutta, Sabeer was leaving, never to come back.
A few moments in the bare warmth of that place had brought to Milan, like a hallucinatory dream, the realization as to why Rehana’s death had brought Sabeer closer to his son who hadn’t seen Sabeer for many years.
May God take you away before he calls me.
Ila used to say that all the time.
Even if we die days within each other.
Sometimes, when Milan was lost in his thoughts, he got his pajama strings all knotted up, Ila used to come out of the kitchen, loosen them with turmeric-stained fingers, tiny blobs of mustard oil staining the white fabric of the cotton, no matter how carefully she dipped her fingers in water before answering Milan’s agitated call. Sometimes, when his mind was clouded by something in school, an impending strike of the bus-drivers’ union, a line of poetry.
He lost several pens a week. Thankfully, most of them turned up before the day was over, from the pit of the bag in which he brought fish from the market, from under the crumbly tables at Naran’s tea-stall, most often from the piles of papers and books under his desk, right at home. He could rarely remember when he needed a haircut.
He wouldn’t last one day without me going after him every step of the way.
Ila used to laugh and sigh at the same time as she spoke to her neighbours, to the woman who sold paan outside their house. To Milan.
And Bubu. He looks strong from outside. But he’s a softie within, and never wants to let his mother out of sight.
Bubu was Gautam’s name at home, but Ila used it much more than Milan did. She was wrong about her son though.
That mattered so little, however, as Sabeer’s tidiness had quickly revealed its many tiny holes. Standing in Sabeer’s room, Milan realized that Sabeer didn’t have pillowslips for his pillows, hadn’t changed the worn drapes since Rehana had changed them for the last time a year before her death. The clean corners of the house couldn’t hide all the debris of living Sabeer had missed, the tidy single man, and Milan was startled to notice things he would have never sensed in his own home. Had Rehana thought how her son would live after her life had fallen like an unripe fruit, in its sad, drooping fifties?
Did she think that he wouldn’t last a day without her?
Without pillowslips, new blinds, little pools of dust swept to awkward corners, forgotten about?
It was almost as if Gautam had been able to have a mental picture of Sabeer’s place, his life with the mounds of forgotten dust at the corners, the worn drapes that Rehana would never get to change. Milan’s mind had felt numb at the look of the jutting, weed-overgrown cornices across the stale drapes, while Sabeer prepared dinner in the common kitchen downstairs. Benumbed, he had wondered if the couple of rooms where he lived with his son still felt like home after Ila had left them. What massive chunks of past lay under their bed, in packing boxes drummed upon by rats’ scurrying feet every night, dust thick on their cardboard surfaces like overgrown grass? Old clothes? Unused rice? Silverware from their wedding decades ago? He realized that neither he nor Gautam had ever thought of checking on them, cleaning under the bed all these years after Ila’s death.
They’d lasted years now without the mother, the wife. Would Ila have called this living? Would the rats’ feet drumming the boxes every night have woken her up, sending her berserk the next morning, enlisting Milan and one of those neighbourhood boys, workless, schoolless souls, to pull out past from under the bed, sweep rat-shelters to oblivion, cleaning, sweeping, till the room smelt like a water-sprinkled, incense-fragrant worship hall in the evening? A kind of a magic neither father nor son would ever understand?
Did Gautam miss his mother more than he showed?
Sabeer had come up soon, steaming dishes carefully balanced in his hands in two or three trips from the kitchen. The dinner had been wonderful. Large slices of rui-fish cooked in thick mustard, posto, daal, goat-curry, a chutney of sour young mangoes, and rashomalai from Milan’s favourite confectioner in Baghbazar.
After dinner, Sabeer had taken Milan to the next room. It wasn’t much of a room, more like a tiny cubicle for storing things, windowless, cavelike.
But Sabeer had turned on the lights on a strange sight them.
Heaps of old books and paper had choked the cubicle, from wall-to-wall. Milan could tell that most went back decades, not only from their colour and the dust on them, but also from the dates on the covers of some of the magazines in front. They had been arranged in erratic piles, heaps of newspapers tied in stacks, old issues of Sportstar and Sportsworld, India Today, Femina, Desh, Anandolok, just about every Indian and Bengali magazine on films, sports, literature, news; heaps of books with colourless blank covers that Milan knew so well, the product of manually operated small presses, slim volumes of poetry, pamphlets of street theatre.
‘The supplies father kept at home.’ Sabeer had said quietly. ‘Whatever he had at home the day the store was burnt. He brought it over to this house.’ He stared ahead pensively. ‘I didn’t throw away a scrap.’
Milan hadn’t known what to say.
Milan remembered, Moidul had the popular sports and film and fashion magazines strung out in rows in the front of the stall. ‘Cricket and Bollywood keep me from starving, Milan-babu.’ He used to say. ‘Once I have my stomach filled I can water weaker plants.’
A silverfish which lived with books, fed on them, watered their soil, tended to their leaves.
However, thanks to its nearness to two of the city’s major colleges, several coffee houses and restaurants frequented by the young, the starry-eyed and the radical, the back rows of Moidul’s stall never gathered too much dust. It was a cherished spot for many in the neighbourhood, and Milan himself stopped by often to browse through the new arrivals and for a few words with Moidul.
On their third day in their new home in Sealdah, Rehana had woken up from sleep to see Moidul’s lifeless body hanging from the ceiling.
Milan heard it from another bookseller. The hook in the centre of the ceiling had been bare, waiting for the fan to be installed. Mindful not to wake up his wife and son in the next room, Moidul had climbed a stool, knotted a rope around his neck, and had kicked the stool away from under his feet. Just like during executions. But Moidul hadn’t hooded his face. He had died with his eyes agape, like a dead carp at the fish market, staring at the bare walls of his new home.
Milan couldn’t say if his pain had been more than that moment that evening when he’d seen a rubble, a heap of ashes and broken bamboos, torn gunny-clothes and the last shreds of paper, on the spot where his favourite bookstall had been, and the shadow of a smiling man who smelled of old paper and dust. He had seen this the very evening Moidul’s family had moved away to Sealdah.
At the time of his suicide, Moidul was thirty-nine years old.
One of Milan’s joys these last twenty years or so had been Sabeer’s company. He had kept in close touch with Milan all these years, stopping by his house every few weeks. Once in a while Milan would find himself in the various pharmacies where Sabeer worked, not far from the Sealdah railway station, and they’d walk down to a roadside tea-stall for a cup of tea. He knew that Sabeer smoked, but he would never do so in front of Milan. He was still his ‘teacher’, and for Sabeer, it was scandalous to light up before him!
In the old tradition of the Indian guru, the teacher was a kind of a surrogate father to the student. There is no greater victory – said the Sanskrit hymn – than a defeat at the hands of a student or a son in the very arts one had taught them. The student or the son – the distinction was never important.
Milan rarely felt for the students in his school the way he felt about, say, Gautam. Gautam was not only his only child, but one of the quietest boys he’d every come across, lost in a silence most people couldn’t make much of, not even Milan or Ila. Nothing like the students in his school, choice obscenities forever hanging on their tongues, spit and catcalls wrestling at mouthcorners, the chalks they flung across decrepit classrooms and used to scribble words and phrases that didn’t bear retelling. Fights broke out often in the school compound, on the streets, and shirt-tucked knives or broken bottles were quick to claim small streams of blood, shrieks of pain, whirling violence the police and local big brothers had to rush to stop. These teenagers were as familiar with pouches of drugs sold on street corners as they were to squat bottles of alcohol, mixed up with broken pencil stubs and old, tattered copies of textbooks they sometimes possessed.
There was the odd student who tried to swim against the tide, floundering against fierce currents of crime and poverty that, in the end, always sucked them in. Looking hard, if his eyes became moist with strain, Milan could see the bottom of it, the weed of drugs and drunkenness and chains that gripped their struggling limbs, but still he could never reach across a vast gulf that was always there.
Sabeer had reached out to him in a way that brought alive the old cliché about the guru being a father. Over the years, if he thought about it, he had in fact come to spend many more hours talking to him that he’d ever spend with his only child. Gautam’s quietness was not that of the poet’s or the artist’s, it was something hard to capture in words rather, almost an outer coating of the reservation with which he met life at all moments. He had met his father’s favourite student many times, often appearing in the middle of their spirited conversations, leaving with a smile and a quick ‘hello’. Books and magazines from his father’s bookshelves had gone out to Sabeer every few days while Gautam had not even opened more than one or two books at casual moments. Ila had prepared an elaborate meal for both of them on many occasions, and Milan had nudged Sabeer towards an extra piece of fish in a way he’d often forgotten to think about Gautam. Ila would often joke about it. Milan loved Gautam the only way a man can love his only child but something in Sabeer touched him in a way that lay beyond blood.
Gautam understood it too. Ever since his teenage years he’d grown up hearing of Sabeer almost as often as he’d heard his father talk about his teaching, his books and the small social life he had. The glow in his eyes whenever he mentioned his favourite student had never escaped his son. Not that it had ever affected Gautam, or the way he loved his father. Gautam never seemed to feel jealous; neither did he ever lay a claim to the alien world his father shared with his student, so close to him in age and yet so far away in nature, and so deep in a bond with the father they sometimes seemed to share.
That day Gautam looked as shocked as never before when he had learned that Sabeer was never going to come back to the school, never to visit, even to meet Milan there.
Milan had tried for all he was worth, for days on end to get Sabeer to change his mind, enroll in another school, take the board examinations. At the back of his mind he’d long cherished the hope that Sabeer would study literature in college, maybe choose to be a journalist or a writer afterwards. The guru often had the student’s life mapped out in his mind, and none saw anything amiss with that. The memories had been hard to get over – long summer afternoons at tea-stalls near the school, walking past paralysed traffic on the streets, in the park next to the bookselling district of the city, storms rising in their tiny earthen cups of tea over parallel theatre playing to popular taste, daily newspapers and their transparent prejudices, the pitfalls of free verse.
But Sabeer had let him down. He had turned his face away from the world of education, and that was that. By letting go of the life his mentor had so clearly etched out in his dreams, he had killed a part of himself that he couldn’t summon if he wished to. He didn’t speak much about it, but flung a net of iron silence about the subject. The silence, Milan quickly realized, spoke a resistance no force could bend.
For a while Milan had hoped that Sabeer would take up his father’s trade. The love of books, he knew, was in his blood. If he didn’t study, or write, Milan had thought, maybe he would buy and sell them.
But Sabeer had vehemently stayed clear of the printed word. He had kept working at various chemist shops and labs, working through apprenticeships towards better paying jobs.
The years had passed by.
Sabeer hadn’t married. Milan had never discussed this with him. Their relationship was on a different plane, and the intimate bond they shared had never conflicted with the little spheres of silence that must linger between those who had once shared the teacher-student relation. Sabeer lived with his mother Rehana, who had aged greatly, suddenly, from the sudden gaping holes in her life, turning into a woman with a rusty mind whose memory served her poorly.
After several years, Sabeer took up a job as a technician at a laboratory run by one of the science departments of the University of Calcutta.
Then about a year ago Sabeer’s life changed again: Rehana died of a second cardiac arrest at the age of fifty-four.
After Gautam had come home that evening and heard the news from his father, his behaviour had left Milan with full of gaping questions. Gautam had been silent, unnaturally so, and his face had been bereft of shock and sadness. That had been a dinner of near-silence, one or two words about the stock of rice running out and the quandary about whether to buy kerosene oil at the government ration shop or in the black market.
But the change had been clear to Milan from the very next day. Gautam would ask about Sabeer much more often than he did before. How is he doing on his own? Near Sealdah station? What’s the rent like? Did he have to get special training to be a lab technician?
Sabeer had taken care to stay away from this neighbourhood ever since they’d moved. Gautam, overcome by the demands of his job, was unable to get away. The two never met since Sabeer left school.
But he always remembered when his father went to meet his former student, the only real student he’d had, as it were. And the questions had always waited, till the evening, late evening, sometime, if Gautam worked overtime.
Where is he planning to go?
Bombay?
Dubai would be hard, but he’ll do well if he can survive there.
It had been a slow shock for Milan to realize that it was Rehana’s death that had brought Sabeer suddenly closer to Gautam.
It was after his mother’s death that Sabeer made up his mind to leave for the Middle East. Technicians and labourers with pharmaceutical knowledge were in demand in the Gulf, and people said that the pay was good.
Milan was one of the few people who knew that it really wasn’t about the money.
Sabeer had taken in as much of this city as he could, maybe much more. He couldn’t push himself any farther.
‘The other day I’d walked over to Gray Street.’ He told Milan one day. ‘Right in front of the electronics shop, just where the lane to the college branches off.’ The exact location of Moidul’s magazine stall, nineteen years ago, a tiny patch of the neighbourhood that would forever burn in Milan’s mind. He never went that way if he could help it, and he knew Sabeer never did, either.
‘I’ve no idea how many years it had been since I’d last been there. Ten or fifteen, probably.’ Sabeer had chuckled. ‘Anyway, they’ve set up a food stall there. Chicken rolls, Chinese noodles, chilli chicken. I stood there and had a chicken roll.’
Milan hadn’t known what to say.
‘Anyway, I started chatting with the guy a little bit. It was around late evening, and the day’s business was almost over. So I asked him, sort of tactfully, how much did he have to pay to the local big brothers to do business there.’ Through the dry noise of the chuckles, a drier chill had cut through Sabeer’s voice. ‘You wouldn’t believe the amount he named. I guess it really has been a long time.’ He broke into halting bout of laughter. ‘If they didn’t burn his stall, I wonder how many times father would have to fight them over the raising of rates!’
Milan had to smile too. It wasn’t even that difficult.
‘Well, inflation works for criminals too, you know.’ He had said, his voice down to a whisper.
Sabeer had to get away from this city.
He had seriously started looking for opportunities in the Middle East soon after Rehana’s death.
Several seemingly interesting opportunities came by, but they turned out to be false leads. In the undefined, slightly dangerous world of blue-collar immigration to the Gulf, there appeared to be no dearth of hidden snags and red herrings – fraud and false promises at every step. Strange rumours spread in the wholesalers’ markets and in the shantytowns at Sealdah and Rajabazar, in the crowded railway station platforms and the hardware stores under the bridge, strange lures to the oil-rich lands beyond the Arabian Sea.
Finally, about a couple of months back, one of the more reliable job search agents brought promising news about trainee positions as chemists’ assistants in Oman. It seemed clean, no huge advance to be paid, just the first month’s salary, after everything was in place. Sabeer would have to go to Bombay first, meet some of his prospective employer’s representatives. But it was pretty much a sure thing.
A week back, Sabeer had asked Milan over to his place for the first time. ‘And you’ll stay for dinner,’ he had said.
He knew that his old teacher wouldn’t pause to think about eating a meal cooked by a Muslim.
That evening, entering the dingy rooms in one of the old houses over the Sealdah flyover had brought surprises for Milan. The memory was warm, reminiscent of a real household, cared for, a small miracle for a young man living alone. There was a cleanliness about the house. But it was also a memory, a warm, empty feel of things past, as there were signs of Sabeer’s impending departure. There were packed boxes on the floor, a large steel trunk stuffed with clothes, couple of bloated gunny bags. After what seemed like a lifetime in Calcutta, Sabeer was leaving, never to come back.
A few moments in the bare warmth of that place had brought to Milan, like a hallucinatory dream, the realization as to why Rehana’s death had brought Sabeer closer to his son who hadn’t seen Sabeer for many years.
May God take you away before he calls me.
Ila used to say that all the time.
Even if we die days within each other.
Sometimes, when Milan was lost in his thoughts, he got his pajama strings all knotted up, Ila used to come out of the kitchen, loosen them with turmeric-stained fingers, tiny blobs of mustard oil staining the white fabric of the cotton, no matter how carefully she dipped her fingers in water before answering Milan’s agitated call. Sometimes, when his mind was clouded by something in school, an impending strike of the bus-drivers’ union, a line of poetry.
He lost several pens a week. Thankfully, most of them turned up before the day was over, from the pit of the bag in which he brought fish from the market, from under the crumbly tables at Naran’s tea-stall, most often from the piles of papers and books under his desk, right at home. He could rarely remember when he needed a haircut.
He wouldn’t last one day without me going after him every step of the way.
Ila used to laugh and sigh at the same time as she spoke to her neighbours, to the woman who sold paan outside their house. To Milan.
And Bubu. He looks strong from outside. But he’s a softie within, and never wants to let his mother out of sight.
Bubu was Gautam’s name at home, but Ila used it much more than Milan did. She was wrong about her son though.
That mattered so little, however, as Sabeer’s tidiness had quickly revealed its many tiny holes. Standing in Sabeer’s room, Milan realized that Sabeer didn’t have pillowslips for his pillows, hadn’t changed the worn drapes since Rehana had changed them for the last time a year before her death. The clean corners of the house couldn’t hide all the debris of living Sabeer had missed, the tidy single man, and Milan was startled to notice things he would have never sensed in his own home. Had Rehana thought how her son would live after her life had fallen like an unripe fruit, in its sad, drooping fifties?
Did she think that he wouldn’t last a day without her?
Without pillowslips, new blinds, little pools of dust swept to awkward corners, forgotten about?
It was almost as if Gautam had been able to have a mental picture of Sabeer’s place, his life with the mounds of forgotten dust at the corners, the worn drapes that Rehana would never get to change. Milan’s mind had felt numb at the look of the jutting, weed-overgrown cornices across the stale drapes, while Sabeer prepared dinner in the common kitchen downstairs. Benumbed, he had wondered if the couple of rooms where he lived with his son still felt like home after Ila had left them. What massive chunks of past lay under their bed, in packing boxes drummed upon by rats’ scurrying feet every night, dust thick on their cardboard surfaces like overgrown grass? Old clothes? Unused rice? Silverware from their wedding decades ago? He realized that neither he nor Gautam had ever thought of checking on them, cleaning under the bed all these years after Ila’s death.
They’d lasted years now without the mother, the wife. Would Ila have called this living? Would the rats’ feet drumming the boxes every night have woken her up, sending her berserk the next morning, enlisting Milan and one of those neighbourhood boys, workless, schoolless souls, to pull out past from under the bed, sweep rat-shelters to oblivion, cleaning, sweeping, till the room smelt like a water-sprinkled, incense-fragrant worship hall in the evening? A kind of a magic neither father nor son would ever understand?
Did Gautam miss his mother more than he showed?
Sabeer had come up soon, steaming dishes carefully balanced in his hands in two or three trips from the kitchen. The dinner had been wonderful. Large slices of rui-fish cooked in thick mustard, posto, daal, goat-curry, a chutney of sour young mangoes, and rashomalai from Milan’s favourite confectioner in Baghbazar.
After dinner, Sabeer had taken Milan to the next room. It wasn’t much of a room, more like a tiny cubicle for storing things, windowless, cavelike.
But Sabeer had turned on the lights on a strange sight them.
Heaps of old books and paper had choked the cubicle, from wall-to-wall. Milan could tell that most went back decades, not only from their colour and the dust on them, but also from the dates on the covers of some of the magazines in front. They had been arranged in erratic piles, heaps of newspapers tied in stacks, old issues of Sportstar and Sportsworld, India Today, Femina, Desh, Anandolok, just about every Indian and Bengali magazine on films, sports, literature, news; heaps of books with colourless blank covers that Milan knew so well, the product of manually operated small presses, slim volumes of poetry, pamphlets of street theatre.
‘The supplies father kept at home.’ Sabeer had said quietly. ‘Whatever he had at home the day the store was burnt. He brought it over to this house.’ He stared ahead pensively. ‘I didn’t throw away a scrap.’
Milan hadn’t known what to say.
