Start of new podcast series

I have been urged and prodded to start telling stories anew on the internet. I am using both YouTube and Spotify to post the files. I shall decide after some time whether to keep both or just one of them. I welcome all my readers here to try them as I go along, and let me know their opinions, along with suggestions for further posts.

The Youtube link to the first podcast is 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vyi0l3unlx0&ab_channel=SuvroChatterjee 

You can find the latest by typing in Goppoguchchho (spell correctly!) on YouTube, or even by just typing in Suvro Sir or Suvro Chatterjee.

while the Spotify link is 

https://open.spotify.com/show/4D4LsEQTuGZ8asubC2OKq5.

Note: You can write comments on Youtube. Also please 'like' the posts if you will. And subscribe... that's how I'll know that my audience is growing. 

As I go along, you can help me by spreading the word in your own respective circles on the Net.

P.S., Friday, April 11th: The second podcast is up there on Spotify. Click on this link. And please let me know whether you are having any problems with accessing it, along with your reactions/comments.

P.P.S., April 16th: The Spotify channel is temporarily suspended. Continue to listen to podcasts on my YouTube channel only (just type in my name) - usually there will be a new one every Friday :). 

A new story, after ages

[There is a story behind this story. I wrote a number of short stories in the nineties, just to see whether I had lost the creative faculty since the days when I wrote If winter comes. Some of them were much appreciated by those I read them out to. Then the source seemed to dry up. For close to twenty years I haven't written another story. I started on this one in early 2020, and then lost track and stopped halfway. I don't know what gears and relays clicked inside my subconscious, but shortly after watching Jai Bhim I sat down at the keyboard and finished the story at one sitting last night.

I shall be glad to have thoughtful and observant comments. But don't bother to write in if all you can say is 'Good one Sir'!]

A thief’s story

‘Some of the strangest people are drawn into the detective dragnet from time to time’, remarked Dr. Mitra, almost sotto voce, staring into the dregs of his drink.

Priyanghsu’s ears pricked up at once, though. ‘I thought that that net was full of holes?’ he asked with mock innocence. He rarely lost a chance to needle the old man.

‘Don’t get fresh with me, young feller,’ growled the ex policeman, who had retired ten years ago as an Inspector General with the state police. ‘The vast majority of felons get arrested through routine, methodical, laborious police work, not through the smart tricks of the private sleuths that you read about in pulp fiction. And we’re cleverer than you think. If a lot of criminals get away, it’s because we’re not given a free hand…’ his voice trailed away, as if he was recalling bitter memories.

Some of us had smelled a story. Anish hushed Priyanghsu up, and said, ‘You were talking about strange people, Sir?’

That ‘Sir’ was unusual, and it made Dr. Mitra swivel a suspicious eye at him. But he didn’t seem peeved. ‘Care to get me another drink?’

We were a motley group of friends, some going back to high school, who gathered at one of our houses once every weekend, or at least tried to, for the traditional sort of Bengali adda. On an average evening nine or ten attended. There were doctors and lawyers, bankers and engineers and journalists among us, and we were all in our thirties or early forties, except for a well-heeled restaurant chain operator in his mid-fifties, and of course ex-IG Mitra, who was the senior most member. We told one another stories, cooked group dinners and had a few drinks, helped one another out in times of trouble. Mostly we told stories.

Crossing his dhoti clad legs (he had always dressed in uniform or jeans and blazer in his professional days, he had told us, but lately he had become fond of dhoti and kurta), Dr. Mitra pulled his favourite bolster close and nursed his second drink meditatively. ‘Oh, yes, a strange lot indeed,’ he murmured. ‘There was a bank officer like you once, Priyangshu, who had taken up tantra on the sly, and we nabbed him before he could put his plans for making a human sacrifice into effect’. Priyangshu looked startled, and vaguely guilty. He was going to mumble some sort of protest, but Dr. Mitra ignored him and carried on. ‘Then there was a transporter who had started blackmailing a movie starlet in the hope that she would get him a role in one of her forthcoming films, convinced that he needed just one break to become a hit. There was an airport manager who was helping sleeper terrorists to get in and out of the country because he was convinced they could make it a better place to live in. And then there was the rich man who hated rich men…’

‘That’s odd,’ I ventured. ‘Why should he?’

‘How much do we understand about the workings of the human mind, dear boy?’ shot back Dr. Mitra. ‘Do you want a philosophical argument or a story?’

‘Story, story,’ we cried in unison, and he seemed to be mollified.

*****

‘There was a spate of rather odd robberies from the houses of affluent and well-connected people in the city about thirty years ago. At first they were too minor to be reported, and if reported, we didn’t seriously bother to investigate… we often let things slide that way, you know; we always have too many things on our plate not to have to prioritize of necessity.

‘I was DC crime branch in the metropolitan police in those days. Eventually too many reports of the same sort began to pile up on my assistant’s desk, until he was forced to draw my attention to them. There didn’t seem to be much of a pattern, except that the thieves never stole cash, and usually not even jewellery, only things that were of great intrinsic worth to the owners themselves – small family heirlooms, art objects, presents or awards given on very special occasions, that sort of thing, things whose loss would hurt badly, because they couldn’t be replaced. Usually they couldn’t even be sold off, because it would be too easy to trace the source. So what could be the motivation? And the cases were scattered all around the city, some even in the well-appointed suburbs, or so the reports from many different thanas indicated. Nor could the aggrieved parties recall anyone in particular who had a serious enough grudge against them to do this sort of thing just to spite them. In every case the domestics were picked up, interrogated, the usual threats and blandishments wielded, to no avail. They were obviously not just innocent but plainly bewildered. The crooks were skilled professionals, that much was for sure: they virtually left no trace, no clues that help your Sherlocks so much…

Eventually one or two of the robbers slipped up, so they were arrested on suspicion. They were too clever to be caught red-handed, though, and the stolen goods were never found. We did all we could short of giving them the third degree (which you can’t do in the case of such relatively petty crimes anyway) but they were tight like clams; not a loose word slipped from their lips that could give us a lead. We could only surmise by and by that they were in someone’s employ, someone who paid them very well and had somehow even otherwise earned their complete loyalty, so that they would never squeal on him. Someone who had money and cunning and a very strange reason to keep doing what he was doing.

It occurred to me that the only way we could eventually find some sort of trail was to keep inquiring about someone, any one person in particular, whom all the victims knew, who had at some time or other visited them at home and come to know them well. Think about how slow and arduous that kind of investigation can be, how annoying to both sides. Talk about looking for a needle in a haystack. Eventually the needle did begin to waver in one particular direction, but it was all too uncertain to merit a search warrant, let alone an arrest. It would have probably come to nothing, and we would have given up in despair and turned our attention to more pressing things, if the mastermind didn’t eventually show his hand himself. Some of his recruits, if we may so call them, were ill in custody, or their families were suffering, and he was careless in sending them help, careless enough for us to be able to set a tail on him.

This tail was a cat burglar who had turned informant in exchange for a greatly reduced sentence. He came to us one day with the tip that someone who seemed to fit our speculative description – rich, unsocial, secretive, and had sometimes been a guest at the houses of several of the victims – was looking for a man like him to carry out a robbery. It was a framed doctoral certificate in the name of a steel tycoon, scion of a fifth generation business family with high political connections, a man who liked to be seen hobnobbing in intellectual circles and was ashamed of his little secret, namely that he had dropped out of college. The detective in charge wired the informant when he went to receive instructions, but it was only from an intermediary who named no names and only specified a drop location. Even the drop was collected by a slum boy who was barely out of school, and when we nabbed this kid with the stolen article on him, his mother went berserk, and that brought the big fish into our net at last, because, silly and large-hearted as he was, he couldn’t bear the thought of a poor little boy being beaten up in police custody for his sake. In exchange for an immediate release of the boy with no charges, he volunteered over the phone, made from a pay booth, to come clean, but far away from police precincts. So the detective met him and took him home, though it was highly irregular, because the man did not seem to fit the regular image of any kind of criminal at all. And that is where he told his strange story.

*****

This Mr. Sarkhel (the name is obviously fictitious) was a most unprepossessing man, pushing fifty, thickset, his skin rather dark, his hair gray and balding, walking with a slow stoop, and talking with a slight stutter. There was a thick black mole on his right cheek. When he arrived in the detective’s house, he was dressed simply in dhoti and kurta … rather as I am now, but made of rougher material, and old fashioned, polished black pumps. He was visibly ill at ease, and yet there was a strange air of quiet pride and self-possession about him. It took the police officer some time to make him relax, and then he gradually grew voluble. It was an autumn evening, growing dark, and as he spoke from his shadowed corner, his voice seemed to become disembodied.

‘How can we be sure you are not covering up for someone else?’ he was asked.

‘Come on, detective babu, why should I?’, he smiled,  ‘I’m sure you have noticed a pattern in the thefts – the pattern of no pattern at all if you like – and who else could possibly stand to benefit from my confession?’

‘Well, then, what persuaded you to give yourself up?’

‘I told you, the most important thing was that I couldn’t bear to live with the knowledge that someone else, and a child at that, was going to suffer for my sins. Besides, it was a long drawn out folly anyway, and I had begun to grow tired of it. I would have stopped by myself soon enough, I think. There are other, better games to play…’

‘What made you start on this so-called game?’

‘Oh, I was angry, and I wanted to cause a little pain to some people whom I had come to despise deeply.’

‘That won’t do, you know. I need details. Start from the very beginning.’

‘What details do you want to know? It’s tied up with my whole life’s story, and that would be too long and boring for a busy man like you.’

‘No no, I have time enough, go on. Tea?’

He hesitated a little before launching on his tale, as if marshalling his thoughts. ‘Sir, my father was a primary schoolteacher in East Pakistan. He revered education, and instilled a passionate love of books in me. But our family was uprooted during the furious upheaval shortly before the war of liberation for Bangladesh. We had to cross over the border in a panic stricken hurry, my parents, little sister and I – I was 17 then – and arrived in Kolkata almost in the clothes we stood in, with no money to survive on for more than a couple of months. We found shelter in what was then called a refugee colony in the suburbs. My father had to start life anew in middle age, vending fish from door to door, while my mother became a cook in rich men’s houses.

Within a couple of years my father became too ill to keep on earning a halfway decent living. That is when I decided to quit school and step into his shoes to keep the home fires burning. I was determined that my mother shouldn’t have to work as a domestic help for long, and that my sister at least should get a proper education. – she’s a senior nurse in a government hospital now Sir, married to a drugstore owner who is a keen amateur actor on the side, with two lovely children; I hope you won’t drag them into this mess I have made. Please Sir.’

‘We shall see about that. You should have thought of such things before you put yourself into this mess, as you call it. But go on…’

‘Well, Sir, I sold fish from door to door like my father, but I kept my eyes and ears open. I gradually got to know the ins and outs of the bheri – fish culture – business, and the kind of profits one could make in it. If only I had a bit of capital to start off, I used to daydream.

Fortune smiled on us when I was 22. I won a big lottery. Out of the blue I had nearly ten lakh rupees in cash, and that was a lot of money in those days. I put it all into the wholesale fish trade, found a patron who was getting too old to do the dog’s work, and slogged at it night and day, put my heart and soul into it, all the while living as frugally as I could. Business is a great deal about luck too, and I was lucky. I won’t bother you with the details, Sir, but in fifteen years’ time I owned two of the largest bheris in Bengal, and have now branched off into the trawling business, exporting shrimp from Vishakhapatnam. I also invested well into the nascent housing boom in this city, and that paid off handsomely. I have multiplied my initial investment several hundredfold.

By that time my father was gone, and I had married off my sister and got married myself, and moved in with my mother into a large, well-appointed villa in one of the posh new outskirts of the city. That is when I began to develop an urge to be accepted by the élite of Bengal. And that is when I had a series of very nasty shocks.

I did all the things people do: getting a good address, liveried servants and several nice cars, club memberships, rubbing shoulders with prominent politicians in exchange for hefty donations to party funds, attending thousand-rupees-a-plate celebrity parties (this was the early nineties, remember, said Dr. Mitra in an aside), the works. I was naïve enough to think that that would give me an entrée into high society. But it wasn’t too long before it was brought home to me that all I was getting was cold disdain from the high and mighty – and even more so, by their spoilt, useless, snooty wives and children! My wife was a plain housewife, rustic in their eyes; we had not gone to famous schools, we spoke broken English haltingly, we had no family history to boast of, our money was new money, still smelling of sweat I suppose, we hadn’t seen Paris and Rome, London and New York, so we just hadn’t managed to arrive. Our receptions were poorly attended, and our invitations rarely returned by anybody who didn’t owe me a favour in the line of business. There came a point when I began to thank God we did not have any children, who might have suffered even worse at the hands of these snobs.

What made it all the more galling was that I began to notice how ignorant most of these so called ‘high-class’ people were, how poorly read (I have read a lot, Sir, believe me, even if mostly in Bengali, and I know something about art and music too), how ill-mannered, how contemptuous of the weak and the poor, how uncharitable unless there were photo ops – in a word, uncivilized, by the standards of civilization my father had drilled into me. Their conversation was mostly banal and superficial, no better than what you get to overhear in roadside tea stalls. Yet they despised me for my caste, for the colour of my skin, for my indifference to overvalued branded products, you name it. At the same time, they were not at all ashamed, indeed they boasted in their own circles, of how they kept adding to their piles by cheating and bribing all and sundry – tax authorities, employees, customers, the media, low level government functionaries, their own in laws. Worst of ironies, these extremes of social prejudice and discrimination were not only tolerated but actually considered normal and eternal in a state that was ruled by a party that called itself communist, that preached equality and brotherhood!

These people who barely noticed me and scoffed at me behind my back gradually drove the iron into my soul. Little by little this mad desire to hurt them where it would hurt badly took possession of me. What could I do to get some of my own back?

Call it childish if you please, or mean or stupid or whatever, it doesn’t matter now. It occurred to me that the only thing that would hurt them was to lose the trinkets they so dearly prized, so loved to show off – a trophy here, a medal there, a degree, a citation, an heirloom with a story, things of that sort. I didn’t care for them, they had no value in my eyes any more than they did in the marketplace, but I figured it would give me a kick to hear of them mourning their petty little losses. So I began to list people I had visited at home, things I had seen, things I would like to remove from their owners. And then I got in touch with people who could get them for me. That part was easy; in your so called underworld, I have a lot of people in my debt for one thing or another. You know the rest of the story.

What are you thinking, Sir? Do you intend to turn me in? Do I deserve to have my name, my business, my family ruined, and spend much of the rest of my life in jail?’

There was a long pause. The detective sahib was thinking. ‘You know it’s not as easy as that. You asked for a private interview, without a recording of the conversation, and I have kept my word. So now I have no confession, and even if I did, it would be my word against yours, with no corroborating evidence unless you lead us to your hoard, which you have probably long disposed of anyway – I’d credit a man of your intelligence with that much. No one will come forward to bear witness against you in court, you can hire the best lawyers, and they would claim ‘framing’, I know that and you know. At best it would be a long drawn legal battle, and the police might end up with egg on their faces. I am sure you calculated those eventualities before you decided to see us, didn’t you?’

He smiled a slow smile, his eyes hooded. ‘Why did you bend rules to see me and hear me out, Sir, may I ask?’

It was the detective’s turn to be uncomfortable. ‘I had personal reasons to be interested. Let’s leave it at that. Talk turkey – are you willing to stop pursuing this hobby of yours once and for all? Do you give me your word?’

‘Does my word count for so much with you?’ his voice was solemn, with a slight tremor in it. ‘I swear by my dead father then.’

‘Let us leave it at that. I shall write up this interview as a meeting with an obviously harmless crank whose story didn’t hang together, and that will be it. Case closed, unresolved.’

The detective stood up, and so did the ‘thief’. They shook hands solemnly before the visitor was shown out. He said ‘You don’t have to drop me anywhere Sir. I’ll take a bus to where my car is waiting for me. You didn’t ask for my name, address or phone number; you didn’t take my photograph, so please do me one last favour: don’t have me tailed home.’

The host nodded. He thought he heard a muttered ‘Thank you’ before the visitor vanished, out of his life forever.

‘No similar case of theft was reported to the city police for all the rest of the years I was in the service,’ concluded Dr. Mitra.

*****

A long silence, while we finished our drinks, and Mitra’s glass was refilled. Then Priyanghsu, idiot as he is, had to blurt out: ‘That detective was uncommonly sympathetic to this weirdo of a thief, wasn’t he? Could it be that he was none other than…?

‘Ask no questions and you will be told no lies,’ cut in Dr. Mitra. ‘Need to know, son, need to know. But yes, my father was a poet who died ill and hungry, because he was an ardent lifelong socialist, the idealistic sort the politicians rejected and forgot once they tasted the loaves and fishes of office. Now I must bid you good night.’

Tales from bygone days, part two

I have always been fond of dogs (and they have by and large reciprocated the feeling – as I have often said, any dog which doesn’t like me has something wrong in its character!), and only the fear that I will become stuck at home round the clock, all year round, has prevented me from having several of my own. Maybe I will, someday, when I am at last surfeited with travelling for pleasure. But dogs have sometimes got me into trouble. In my early teenage days, I used to go to a coaching class to learn how to play the guitar. I rode across several streets on my bicycle, the guitar box slung from one hand – how empty and safe the streets were in those days, and how unworried my parents! – to my tutor’s house for an hour’s practice once or twice a week. He had a huge young female Alsatian called Lucky. Being childless, the couple adored and doted on her like a human child. Lucky and I fell in love with each other. Her favourite way of greeting me was to lie in ambush behind the potted plants, imagining I couldn’t see her, and the moment I pedalled into the little garden, she would fly out and pounce upon me with a loud ‘Woof!’ More often than not I would fall off with her on top of me: heaven knows why I didn’t break an arm or the guitar. More than one passer-by gasped, imagining I was about to be torn to bits, but she would only lick my face wet and then turn around and brush it off with her soft, bushy tail, before trotting into the drawing room behind me. Then she would fool around the room, distracting both my tutor and me with her antics, until he scolded her out.  While we settled down to play, she would wait outside until she thought we had forgotten about her, then with infinite patience she would slowly make her way back, slinking past the curtain, under the sofa, until she was just below my feet, her wet nose tickling the back of my ankle and making me laugh. Believe it or not, my tutor got so jealous by and by that he eventually made excuses for not being able to carry on with the classes and cut me off.

Countless people have asked me if I believe in ghosts, have met true godmen, or have had a supernatural experience. I have always been mildly curious about such things, but fortunately or otherwise, never been edified. A few odd things have happened, though. The one that comes to mind right now happened during the school trip I organized – for the first time in St. Xavier’s Durgapur – to the Garhwal Himalayas, in December 1989. One crisp wintry afternoon, the whole troupe, around thirty odd I think, pupils and teachers included, had just finished lunch at the famous Dada-boudir hotel in Hardwar. The entire crowd had stomped out and were loitering about in the pleasant sun, leaving it to me to pay the bill, I being the treasurer for the team. I had just scanned the bill and put some sounf and sugar in my mouth prior to counting out the money, when a quiet bass voice spoke in my ear: ‘beta, khaana khila do’ (son, stand me lunch). I turned around to see a sanyasi on the threshold of middle age, tall, dark and sturdily built in saffron and with a shaven head, a jhola and blanket on his shoulder, stout cudgel and lota in hand, looking calmly at me. Now I must mention at this point that I have always been an agnostic at best and a scoffer at worst when it comes to ‘holy’ men: I never visit temples if I can help it, and have never gone to see a babaji or mataji. But there was something in those eyes… I grant you that it could have been a mere trick of hypnotism, but in broad daylight, and on a crowded roadway, with me distracted and busy as I was… it seemed those eyes told me that far from asking me for a favour, he was bestowing a huge favour on me. I nodded at the man behind the counter, indicating that he should add one more meal to the tab – evidently he was quite used to such things, so he didn’t bat an eyelid – and the sadhu walked in without so much as a backward glance, let alone a word of thanks. Yet he left behind a man feeling deeply grateful. I have done countless acts of charity before and after, to the tune of vastly larger sums, but I have never felt that way again, alas.

The same friend who had once played the surgeon on me took me on a most memorable trip across Bihar during my college days, in the course of which we visited Munger and Bhagalpur (I wrote an article in The Telegraph about a most interesting octogenarian wildlife enthusiast who was my namesake and whom I met in Bhagalpur during that trip. I remember the live python loose in his house, and the only parijat flower I have ever seen in my life carefully preserved in his collection). I stayed in his tumbledown house in his ancestral village for a few days. Many, many impressions of that trip are forever etched in my memory. Tasting wild honey freshly drawn from a hive – it goes down your throat like fiery liquor – finding out how hard it is to catch a chicken if it is allowed to run free around a large compound, listening to the Ganga lapping at her banks all through a moonless night as we lay on the ghat in a cannabis induced stupor. That was the only time I saw a baby leopard being dragged at the end of a leash by a forest guard, and the only time, too, that I was entertained with haanriya and homemade snacks (a mix of different kinds of lentils soaked in water and flavoured with salt and pepper) in the middle of the night by the womenfolk of a Santhal family in the courtyard of their own cottage while the men slept away blissfully. Someone among the men with me, a local, assured me that the women were in no danger: they were all armed with knives and knew how to use them, they could move like lightning, and any man who tried any hanky panky might not live to rue the day. I have always respected women like that, and it’s a pity I rarely meet the like in our cities. Strangely enough, though, one of the most memorable of those experiences was something that might come as an anti-climax after the things I have already mentioned.

We were staying in my friend’s country home in a small village close to the Bhimbandh Wildlife Sanctuary.  The same place where he had warned me the previous night to be careful while stepping into the makeshift toilet in the backyard, because apparently all sorts of snakes used it now and then as a comfortable refuge. Nothing untoward happened, of course, and the next afternoon I plunged into the pond alongside to take a refreshing dip. It was surrounded by taal (palm-) trees, I remember, and the water was muddy and opaque. Except for a dove or two whistling drowsily, the surroundings were quite silent. Well, so I took a deep breath and dived in, meaning to cross the little pond underwater. However, in the event I couldn’t, because I felt an immoveable barrier across my path, into which I gently bumped my head. It was big and hard and – hairy! I lifted my head above water, gasping, only to look into the slightly bemused eyes of a buffalo with enormous horns. He had been taking a dip too, and I had surprised him. We just looked at each other quietly for a few seconds; the buffalo did nothing, just kept staring at me without rancour, until I decided it was prudent to back off. I am dashed if I know why I am recalling this little incident so many years later and laughing over it…

There have been nearly three thousand page views since I put up my last post, but hardly any reactions! Whereas so many people have told me, by email, whatsapp, phone and face to face, that they enjoyed reading it. Why not here? As I have said, I write primarily for myself (and Pupu), but it would be nice to see comments from people whom I have managed to entertain, if nothing else.

Tales from bygone days

I have been going voraciously (all over again!) through the priceless works of James Herriot while simultaneously watching the once-famous TV-series All Creatures Great and Small on youtube – someday there will be a blogpost on these themes too – and wondering how he did it: how he remembered all those quirky little details from more than twenty five years ago and wove them together into such fascinating tales. I have thousands of little memories too, but they don’t hang together to make whole and meaningful stories! Which is why I feel so uncomfortable when Pupu goads me to start writing them down. In order to make me hunker down and get on with it, she even took the trouble to write out a short list of anecdotes she has herself heard and enjoyed over the years. So let me see if I can make something out of it…

Our department of  Economics at Jadavpur University has always harboured more than a fair share of nutcases. Some arrived that way, some went round the bend over the years. The reasons were many and various. For a few, at least, it was burning too much of the midnight oil that did it. One of my own classmates used to photocopy whole books as soon as any professor wrote out a list of recommendations, and assiduously stored the ever-growing pile in a special room, resolved to start reading them all together in the last few months of the undergraduate course (today’s pampered semester-oriented kids won’t be able to imagine this, but we had to read the entire course for the final examination at the end of the third year). We watched her with growing alarm, and then the inevitable happened: when the terrible finals were knocking at the door, we heard that she had attempted the impossible, suffered a nervous breakdown, and been forced to give the exams the go-by for that year. And I remember a senior, bearded and nice and wild-eyed, mild-mannered but evidently never all there – pity I have forgotten his name – who manfully struggled through the written part of the master’s finals, but lost it during the interview. We were loitering in the sun-drenched corridor, chatting about what was waiting for us, when one of the professors on the interview board rushed out, looking more harried than we had ever seen him before, and begged some of us to go in and rescue him (or maybe them from him). Apparently he had already been on a knife edge when the interview began, somehow answered one or two questions sensibly, but then blown a fuse: on hearing the third question he had gone into a sort of trance, and when the profs, imagining that he had either fallen asleep or was unable to answer, tried to prod him a bit, he had started rocking vigorously in his chair with a leery expression on his face, all the while chanting in a sing-song voice ‘jani kintu bolbo na, jani kintu bolbo na’ (I know, but I won’t tell you)! We had to coax him gently out and take him home. Heaven knows what eventually happened to him. How’s that for a little story?

I have heard Richard Castle yell after his teenage daughter going out for a late evening in the city with friends, ‘Don’t do anything that I would have done!’ I understand his feelings exactly, because over and over again I have done horrible things which make me shiver now when I remember them, and there is no doubt at all in my mind that I survived only because my guardian angel knew that I was destined to die another day. You have already read Fool in the sea on this blog, I suppose: here are three more that I can vividly recall.

During those college days, I often travelled from Kolkata to Durgapur by ‘local’ trains to save money, but whenever I felt like splurging, I took either the Black Diamond Express at dawn or the Howrah-Asansol (now Agniveena) Express in the evening. I have lost count of how many times I travelled on those trains, but a few trips I do remember. There was this one morning when I was coming home on the Black Diamond. It goes without saying that I had boarded a second class unreserved coach, and it was chock full of passengers, many of them with mountains of luggage, trunks and holdalls and all. A few minutes before the train would enter Durgapur station, I had jostled my way through the crowd towards the door opposite the platform: I had hardly any luggage, and I figured, young and lithe and silly as I was, that jumping off the train on to the tracks would help me get off much faster than fighting through so many people on to the platform. As luck would have it, I was leaning from the door, not even bothering to hold on to a rod or handle, when someone from behind, pushing his way ahead with an enormous tin trunk in tow, shoved me hard with it in the back of my knee. You know how the leg buckles involuntarily when you are hit like that? Well, the next moment I had crashed down on the adjacent railway line, and as a hue and cry went up on the platform opposite, there I was on my back, looking up dazedly at the sky, time seemed to have stopped, and the wheels, one after another in endless succession, were clattering past me, inches from my right hand. I got off with nothing worse than a few bruises and feeling like an idiot, but it isn’t the kind of memory that is easily erased.

There was a certain year – probably 1983, when I was twenty – when I suffered from carbuncles all over my body, from the bottom of a lower eyelid to a knee. Seven or nine in all, I forget. God, the way they hurt and bled, I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. Some of them were eventually cured by pills, a few were excised by doctors under local anesthesia, but one of them, the one on my left hip, I tackled myself alongwith a friend. I remember it had been giving me no end of trouble (I used to carry a cushion to college to sit on, and it frequently turned red by the time I came home – deucedly embarrassing, even if you discount the pain and the inconvenience) – and late one night, after we had been drinking heavily, we decided to get rid of it ourselves. Believe it or not, all we did was to numb the area with an icecube, put a pad of rubber between my teeth, and used nothing more than the scissors, scalpel and tweezers from a ‘biology box’, if you know the sort of thing, all perfunctorily dipped in boiling water and swabbed with Dettol. We scraped the whole ghastly thing out, while I screamed bloody murder at my friend the surgeon, then we lapped on a lot of Nebasulf powder on the gaping wound (not even stitches, because neither of us was confident enough with a needle and thread), put a rough bandage on it, drank some more and fell asleep. Next morning 90 per cent of the horrid pain was gone. I did take a Tetvac injection and a massive dose of antibiotics afterwards, but I don’t think any physician would recommend the process, unless you are on the battlefield, or have been bitten by a poisonous snake amidst some wilderness. And I most certainly wouldn’t like to do it again.

The same year – or perhaps it was the next – I made a holiday trip to Barajamda with an elderly friend. A young cousin of his lived there, working for Durgapur Steel Plant at the local iron and manganese mines. The tiny town is located on the Odisha-Jharkhand border, and can be reached either from Chakradharpur or Rourkela. It is (or at least was then-) surrounded by dense forests teeming with wildlife and tribal people, mainly Ho and Santhals. Look it up on google maps if you will; it is a stone’s throw from hamlets with interesting names like Bolani, Barbil, Gua, Kiriburu and Meghataburu; the Simlipal Wildlife Park is not too far away. One day the cousin, who was only a few years older than me, took me on a motorbike trip to the little town of Noamundi across the Saranda forest. The Tatas have been running an iron mine there since pre-independence days, and they have a nice club on a hilltop which DSP officers sometimes used as a watering hole. We enjoyed ourselves rather too long, so the shadows were lengthening when we set off for the return trip, and we were only halfway through the forest when it became pitch dark. And I mean that literally: townsfolk will never know what real darkness means. When my friend stopped for a few minutes and switched off the headlamp, I couldn’t see my hand before my face; and when he switched the light on again, we saw a long queue of tribals, both men and women, black as ebony, wicker baskets and axes slung on their shoulders, returning on foot from the day’s work in such uncanny silence that you had to rub your eyes to make sure you were not seeing things, their eyes glowing in the light like those of any wild animal’s. Eerie feeling, I can tell you.

So anyway, by the time we had reached the edge of the forest and could see some lights twinkling in the valley beyond, we had to stop, because I was desperate to relieve myself. My friend had barely turned off the engine when he heard a muffled noise very like a sneeze, and whispered, ‘What was that?’ but I was already heading towards a large boulder by the roadside. Then there was this truly heart-stopping moment when the boulder got up and started lumbering towards me, as tall as I was and three times as wide. Brother Bruin, probably drunk on mohwa or shivering with a malarial fever, had been dozing when our approach had rudely awakened him, and he didn’t like my intention one bit. He wanted to take a swipe at me, I guess, but I didn’t wait to find out. My friend only yelled ‘Suvro, bhalook, pala!’ (run, it’s a bear) kickstarted the bike and zoomed off, leaving me running desperately after him with nary a backward glance. Usain Bolt would have been hard put to catch me that day. The biker stopped only after he had gone almost a kilometre, and a truck was coming up the other way. You can imagine how I swore at him, but all he said was that in such circumstances it’s always every man for himself. I have never forgotten that lesson.

Just a few of the rather extreme things that have happened to me, but they might give you an idea why, like Harry at the end of Book Seven, I have had enough thrills to last a lifetime. 

shotto bagher goppo

পুপুরানী যখন খুব ছোট্টটি ছিল তখন একবার দাদু দিদাকে নিয়ে চিড়িয়াখানা দেখতে গেছিল। সেখানে কেঁদো বাঘের চেহারা আর রকম সকম দেখে তো তার চক্ষু স্থির। বাড়ি ফেরা অবধি তার শান্তি নেই, কতক্ষণে বাবাকে গিয়ে খবরটা দেওয়া যায়।  তারপর যখন সে চোখ পাকিয়ে ইয়া বড়া হাঁ করে 'হালুম!' বলেছে তখন বাবা কি ভয়ানক রকম ভয় পেয়ে গেছে তা দেখে তো সে হেসেই কুটিপাটি।বাবাটি যে তার এতবড় একটা ভীতুর ডিম এ'খবরটা তার এতদিন জানাই ছিল না। অতঃপর বেশ কিছুদিন ধরে চলল তার এই বাবাকে ভয় দেখানোর খেলা।  তারপর একদিন বোধ করি তার মায়া হল, তখন সে বলল, 'বাবা, তুমি বাঘ দেখতে যাবে? ভয় নেই, আমি নিয়ে যাব সঙ্গে করে।' 

কথাটা অবিশ্যি ঠিক অমনি করে বেরোল না - পরিষ্কার করে বলার মত বয়স হয়নি তো। বাবাকে বুঝে নিতে হয়েছিল।  ক্রমশ পুপুর খেয়াল হলো, এখন থেকে তার নাম হবে 'শোত্তো বাঘ'। বাবা তাকে রাতে ঘুম পাড়াবার সময়ে গান গাইত তো, তারপর কবে যেন একটা শোত্তো বাঘের গল্প বলে ফেলেছিল, সেই থেকে পুপুর নেশা হয়ে গেল, সে খালি বাঘের গল্প শুনবে। বাবা যত তাকে এটা ওটা অন্য সব গল্প শোনায়, সে ভোলবার পাত্রী নয়। টুনটুনির গল্প, বুদ্ধু ভুতুমের গল্প, আলাদিনের গল্প, সিনডেরেলার আর ঘুমন্ত রাজকন্যার গল্প, সব শুনেটুনে শেষে বলে, 'এবা-র একটা বাঘের গপ্প  বল, ভালো বাঘ, শোত্তো বাঘের গপ্প।' বাবা পড়ল মহা মুশকিলে। রোজ অত নতুন নতুন ছোট্ট বাঘের গল্প কোথায় পায়? শেষটায় একদিন নিজেই গপ্প ফেঁদে বসল। .....

ছোট্ট বাঘটা ছিল খুব ছটফটে। সকালের আলো  ফুটতে না ফুটতেই তার গুহা থেকে লাফিয়ে খেলতে বেরিয়ে যাওয়া চাই। ঢের বন্ধুবান্ধব তার, তাদের সঙ্গে নিয়ে সে রোজ নিত্যনতুন জায়গায় খেলতে যায়। মা তার প্রায়ই বলে, বেশি দূর যাসনে খোকা, গুরুজনদের কথা অমান্য করিসনে - কিন্তু কে শোনে সেসব কথা? অত সাবধান হলে সব মজাটাই মাটি হয়ে যাবে না? অবিশ্যি সর্দারিতে তার প্রানের বন্ধু মোট্টুরাম হাতির ছানাও কিছু কম যায় না। তার সঙ্গে সব খেলাতেই আছে, আবার বড়দের মত সমানে পিছন থেকে টিকটিক করতেও ছাড়ে না। এমন বিজ্গের  মত সব উপদেশ দেয় যেন তার নিজের বয়স তিনকাল গিয়ে এককালে ঠেকেছে। ছোট্ট বাঘ খুব বেশি দুষ্টুমি করলে বলে 'দাঁড়া, তোর বাবা ঘরে ফিরলে বলে দেব।' বাবাকে ছোট্ট বাঘ একটু সমীহ করে চলে কিনা! তাতেও কাজ না হলে তখন ব্রহ্মাস্ত্র প্রয়োগ করে- 'আমার দাদুকে বলে দেব কিন্তু!' ব্যাস, ছোট্ট বাঘ এক্কেবারে ঠান্ডা মেরে যায়। না হয়ে উপায় কি? বুড়ো সর্দার দাদু হাতি হলেন গিয়ে জঙ্গলের রাজা। পাহাড়ের কোলে কাকচক্ষু অতল হ্রদের ধরে দাঁড়িয়ে ঢুলুঢুলু চোখে দুলতে দুলতে তিনি শুঁড় দোলান, জঙ্গলের সকল জীব প্রয়োজনে তাঁর কাছে সাহায্য বা আশ্রয় চাইতে যায়। তিনি যখন মাটি কাঁপিয়ে বিশাল দুই দাঁত বাগিয়ে ধীর পায়ে হাতির পালের আগে আগে চলেন, তখন বাবা বাঘ, যিনি কাউকে ভয় পান না, তিনি পর্যন্ত রাস্তা ছেড়ে দিয়ে ছায়ার মত ঝোপঝাড়ে ঢুকে যান। সেই দাদু হাতির সামনে আসামী হয়ে দাঁড়াতে হলেই হয়েছে আর কি!

তাই বলে যেন মনে কোরো না যে মোট্টুরাম হাতির ছানা নিজে একটি হাবাগোবা নিরীহ ভালোমানুষ! মোটেই না - মাথাটা তার ভারী ঊর্বর, আর বদমায়েশি বুদ্ধিতে ঠাসা। নতুন নতুন খেলা বানাতে  যেমন সে ওস্তাদ, বন্ধুকে ভয় দেখাতে আর পিছনে লাগতেও তেমনি। (ছোট্ট বাঘ আমাদের ভারী সরল কিনা, তাই তাকে বোকা বানানোও খুব সহজ, এটা আবিষ্কার করতে মোট্টুরামের বেশিদিন সময় লাগেনি।) একবার শুঁড় দিয়ে মৌচাকে ঢিল মেরে নিজে মৌমাছিদের খেপিয়ে আগেভাগে সরে পড়ে সে খোকা বাঘকে যারপরনাই নাস্তানাবুদ করেছিল; সে বেচারা মৌমাছিদের হাত থেকে পালাবার পথ পায় না, কামড়  খেয়ে একসা হয়েছিল, অনেকদিন লেগেছিল গায়ের ব্যথা জুড়োতে। আরেকদিন একগাছি আখ এনে মোট্টুরাম তাকে চিবোতে দিয়েছিল, বলেছিল 'তুই তো মাংসের হাড় খাস কড়মড়িয়ে, এটাতে তোর একটুও অসুবিধে হবে না, খেয়ে দেখ কি দারুন মিষ্টি!' সে বেচারা আখ চিবোতে গিয়ে কি বিচ্ছিরি নাজেহাল হয়েছিল কি বলব। আখের ছিবড়ে গিয়েছিল দাঁতের ফাঁকে আটকে, চনচনে মিষ্টিতে তার ওয়াক আসার মত অবস্থা, কতদিন ধরে যাচ্ছেতাই গন্ধটা এমন নাকে লেগেছিল যে মাংস খাওয়াটাই বন্ধ হওয়ার দাখিল। সেবার মা তাকে এয়সা বকেছিল যে কি বলব। 'তোকে বোকা পেয়ে মোট্টুটা যা খুশি তাই বোঝায় আর তুই উল্টে ওকে জব্দ করতে পারিস না? কি ভ্যাবাগঙ্গারাম তৈরি হচ্ছিস রে তুই!' 

জঙ্গলের ভিতরে যেখানে খুব গাছেঘেরা অন্ধকার আর চুপচাপ, ছোট্ট বাঘকে নিয়ে মোট্টু সেখানে একদিন খেলতে গেছিল। খানিকক্ষণ ময়ূর আর খরগোশ আর হরিণবাচ্ছাদের ভয় দেখিয়ে হুটোপাটি করে দুজনেই ঘেমে উঠল, জঙ্গলের মাথায় তখন সুয্যিঠাকুর আগুন ঢালছেন, গরমে প্রাণ আইঢাই। পাশেই গভীর কালো জলের পুকুর, কচুরিপানা ঠেলে মোট্টুরাম তো অবলীলাক্রমে নেমে গেল তার মধ্যে, ঘাড় পর্যন্ত ডুবিয়ে খানিকক্ষণ আরাম করল, তারপর উল্টোদিকের পাড়ে উঠে এক হাঁটু কাদার মধ্যে দাঁড়িয়ে শুঁড়ে করে জল ছিটোতে লাগলো নিজের গায়ে। ছোট্ট বাঘ বেশ হিংসেভরা চোখে তাকিয়ে দেখল। 

কি আর করে - জলকে তার বড্ড ভয়, নাহলে সেও নেমে পড়ত কখন! তো হয়েছে কি, একটা কাঠবেড়ালীকে তাড়া করে সে তো উঠে পড়েছে পুকুর পাড়ে বিরাট অশ্বত্থ গাছটার ওপরে। কাঠবেড়ালিটা তরতর করে এ-ডাল সে-ডাল হয়ে চলে গেছে একটা অতি সরু ডালের ডগায়, সে ডালটা আবার পুকুরের ওপর অনেকখানি এগিয়ে রয়েছে, তার পিছনে পিছনে ছোট্ট বাঘও গেছে এগিয়ে, তারপর বেগতিক দেখে কাঠবেড়ালীটা দিয়েছে নিচের ডালটা তাগ  করে এক লাফ। বেখেয়াল হয়ে ছোট্ট বাঘও ঝট করে দিয়েছে সামনের থাবাটা বাড়িয়ে - কাঠবেড়ালী তো পালিয়েছে, ওদিকে সে টাল সামলাতে না পেরে একেবারে ঝপাং করে পুকুরের জলে। পড়ে প্রথমেই একপ্রস্থ নাকানি চোবানি। হাঁকপাঁক করতে করতে কোনক্রমে জলের ওপর মাথা তুলে দেখে মোট্টুরাম পাড়ে দাঁড়িয়ে দিব্যি নিশ্চিন্তে মজা দেখছে। ছোট্ট বাঘের সেই বিপদের মধ্যেও ভীষণ রাগ হয়ে গেল। 'দাঁড়িয়ে দেখছিস কি হতচ্ছাড়া? ডুবে যাচ্ছি, আমায় টেনে তোল!' ও হরি, তার চ্যাঁচানি শুনে মোট্টুরাম হেসে গড়িয়ে পড়ে যায় আর কি। 'এই পুকুরে ডোবার মত জল আছে নাকি? উঠে আয় নিজে নিজে!'

রাগে গশগশ করতে করতে প্রাণপণে হাত পা ছুঁড়ে পাড়ে উঠে সে তো মোট্টুকে এই মারে তো সেই মারে। তখন মোট্টুরাম বলে কি, 'সব বাঘেই জন্ম থেকে সাঁতার দিতে পারে, জানিস না? নাহলে তুই জল থেকে উঠে এলি কি করে?সাধে কি তোর মা তোকে বলে ভ্যাবাগঙ্গারাম!' - সত্যিই তো! আবার সে নিজের বোকামির জন্য বন্ধুর কাছে অপদস্থ হলো। যাক গে, এই বলে সে নিজেকে সান্ত্বনা দিল যে, বিপদে পড়ে নিজের একটা সহজাত ক্ষমতা তো জানা হয়ে গেল? আর কখনো জলকে ভয় পেতে হবে না, সেটা একটা মস্ত লাভ!

She(y)

আস্তে আস্তে স্তব্ধ দ্বিপ্রহরে আকাশ ঘন কালো মেঘে সজল হয়ে উঠলো, চারিদিকে নিবিড় স্নেহভরা প্রশান্ত অন্ধকার ছেয়ে এলো, ভারী স্নিগ্ধ গা শিরশিরে একটা মৃদুমন্দ বাতাস এসে সর্বাঙ্গে হাত বুলিয়ে দিতে লাগলো পরম যত্নে; জানালা দিয়ে দেখলেম, মাধবীলতা কেঁপে উঠেছে অনির্বচনীয়  সেই স্পর্শে - তখন দেখি সে নিঃশব্দে ধীরপদে এসে ঢুকেছে আমার একলা ঘরে।  কতকাল বাদে দেখা, তবু নতুন করে চিনতে হলো না; সে তো কখনো আমায় ছেড়ে যায় নি, শুধু আড়ালে সরে ছিল এতদিন, আবার আবরণ ঠেলে বেরিয়ে এসেছে আজকে, এই তো। 

চুপটি করে বসলো আমার পাশ ঘেঁষে। অনেকক্ষণ চোখের পলক পড়ে না, নির্বাক চেয়ে আছে মেঝের দিকে, নিশ্বাসের সঙ্গে বুকটি শুধু থেকে থেকে ওঠানামা করছে, এতটুকু চিত্তচাঞ্চল্য প্রকাশ করে ফেলেই বুঝি লজ্জায় জড়সড়। তারপর উঠে গেল জানালার কাছে; গরাদে হাত রেখে নির্নিমেষ চেয়ে রইলো নিরুদ্দেশের পানে; দূরে তালগাছের পাতা সরসরিয়ে বাতাস এসে লাগছে ওর আঁচলে, সারা গায়ে ঢেউ খেলিয়ে ভিজে চুলের গন্ধ মেখে এসে মৃদু তিরস্কারের ঝাপটা মেরে যাচ্ছে আমার মুখে। 

নীল বিদ্যুত তীরের মত আকাশের বুক চিরে মুহুর্তের জন্য ওর মুখখানি উদ্ভাসিত করে, আমার বুকে শেল দিয়ে নিঃশেষে মিলিয়ে গেল; আরো ঘন অন্ধকার ঘরটাকে আষ্টেপৃষ্ঠে জড়িয়ে ধরল আবার। তখন যত দেখলুম তার চেয়ে ঢের বেশি অনুভব করলুম, সে ভীত হরিণীর মত ত্রস্তপদে এসে আবার বসলো আমার পাশটিতে। মাথাটি ঝুঁকে পড়ল আমার কাঁধে। সেই অন্ধকারেও তার অতলস্পর্শ কালো চোখ  দেখতে পেলুম, তাতে টলটল করছে দুটো মুক্তো। তারপর ঠোঁট নড়ল, বুকের মধ্যে তার বুকভাঙ্গা প্রশ্ন শুনতে পেলুম - 'তবে কি তুমি ভুলে গেছ আমায়? আর কি তবে আমাকে তোমার দরকার নেই?'

মুখে কথা সরল না, চোখের পলক পড়ল না, শুধু অন্তরাত্মা অবধি তোলপাড় করে হাহাকার উঠলো - 'আছে, আছে, তোমাকে আমার দরকার  আছে আজও। তুমি ছাড়া এ মহাবিশ্বে আমার কেউ নেই, আমি একা, আমি অনন্যগতি, আমি তোমারই।'

তখন চোখের মুক্তো ঝরে পড়ল, তখন কালো অন্ধকারে আলোঝলমলে অনাবিল স্বস্তির হাসি তার ঠোঁট থেকে উপছে পড়ে আবার আমার ঘর উদ্ভাসিত করে দিল, তখন পরম তৃপ্তিতে দুহাতে আমার গলা জড়িয়ে সে মুখ লুকোলো আমার বুকে। আমি তাকে টেনে নিলেম গভীর আলিঙ্গনে।

তারপর বৃষ্টি নামল। আস্তে আস্তে সে আবার মিলিয়ে গেল পঞ্চভূতে। - তার চুলের অন্ধকার মেঘের গভীর কালোয়, তার অঙ্গের সুবাস ভেজা মাটির গন্ধে, তার চোখের জলের স্পর্শ খোলা জানালা দিয়ে আসা বর্ষণস্নাত দমকা হাওয়ায়। আমার কাছে পড়ে রইলো শুধু তার গলা থেকে খসে পড়া ফুলের মালাখানি। 

[My first ever post in Bangla. Written 23 years ago. Those who can see a great deal of Tagore here need not be surprised or suspect a coincidence - this was at a time I was immersed in him for a couple of years at a stretch, translating some of his works. The more interested and diligent of my readers might care to find out and tell me just which of his little essays inspired this one...]

Yearning

Some people have been reading my short stories, and asking for more. Here is one I wrote (or rather composed orally, dictating in class, when they told me the board examination paper had asked them to write a story titled ‘Yearning’) back in 2001.

He said he’d come to see me again, the last time we met, and he will not fail me.

He was a very young soldier, tall and strong, with a firm jaw line, when I first set eyes on him. And he had such eyes – eyes that could flash with fire one moment and melt with kindness the next. A captain in the army, I learnt later, but the night I ran to him for help I knew him only as the kind and brave afsar sahib who alone could rescue me from the clutches of the ugly and pitiless demon who was taking me away to hell. And the sahib changed my life forever that night, in more ways than one.

I was a slip of a girl then, hardly fourteen, a dreamy country bumpkin, supposedly pretty, whom her poor and unloving uncle had sold to an oily, smelly, leery, bearded stranger for a fistful of rupees. I was being taken away, fearful and uncomprehending and feebly protesting, to the great city of Mumbai. The stranger had dragged me into a train, given me a paper bag full of dry grams to chew for dinner, and gone to sleep in a drunken state, after telling me he bore me no ill-will; this was just his line of business: he would put me aboard a ship at Mumbai and it would carry me to a faraway foreign land whose name I’ve forgotten, where I would become some rich man’s slave. My captor was soon snoring away peacefully, confident that I was too scared and too stupid to run away. But I had seen the military sahib at the station where he boarded the coach next to mine, and as I sat alone by the window, staring blankly at the darkness rushing past outside, a desperate plan began to form in my head. Twice in the night, when the train halted briefly, I saw the sahib getting out for a stroll on the platform. Twice I hesitated; the third time I rushed out and fell at his feet, crying piteously for succour.

In a trice he had pulled me up roughly by the arms, and demanded an explanation for my strange behaviour. People were staring at us, though the platform was almost deserted at three in the morning. I could see that he was baffled and embarrassed, but he was too innocent to disbelieve me, and too kind to throw me back to the wolves. He told me to take him to the bearded stranger. We got back into my compartment just as the train began to move. Inside, he shook the man awake. Bleary-eyed and frightened by the military uniform and flashing eyes, the rogue apparently confessed to more crimes than he need have, thus putting himself at the sahib’s mercy. And then the sahib made a deal with him – he would be allowed to go free if he agreed to let me go with the sahib without strings attached. God help me – I still feel ashamed to remember the dirty grin with which he waved me away, a grin which made the sahib very angry and red in the face.

He took me to Mumbai. He had no relatives there, he told me; he was just passing through on his long journey back to his frontier post after a month’s home leave – the best he could do for me was to put me up in an orphanage, seeing that I refused to go back to my uncle’s. And so it was that I became an inmate at a destitute girl’s home run by some Christian nuns. They would look after me till I was 18, and try to teach me to look after myself afterwards. The sahib left a little money with them – he was not a rich man, but I knew that he had done all he could for me. I worked hard at learning a trade at the Home, and waited and dreamed and prayed. The sahib came back a year later. He seemed glad to see me, and proud to hear of the progress I had made at learning how to make wickerwork furniture. He left some more money in a bank account for me: money that I could use to set up shop on my own after I came of age. Was he not going to come back any more, I asked. He said he would, and there was a look in his eyes that told me I had a right to hope. He left me an army address to contact if I desperately needed him – his place of posting was secret; no letters were allowed. And I couldn’t read and write at that time anyway.

I am 24 now, and running a small but satisfactory business of my own. My uncle’s family is only too glad to see me these days, and they often urge me to get married. Idiots. I must wait, go on waiting. After six straight years without communication, I wrote to the address they had given me. They wrote back, politely regretful, informing me that the gallant captain had fallen fighting for his beloved country during an incident of cross-border shelling. But of course that can’t be true, can it? He said he’d come again to see me, the last time we met, and he will not fail me.

That’s it. A very short, short story.

A lot of people will find it trivial, or overly-sentimental, or otherwise unimpressive and unmemorable. I don’t want to hear from them. A precious few will feel a very deep, deep resonance inside their hearts, because they too have felt like this, occasionally or very often, and as keenly, as inconsolably. Not necessarily for a lost love in the romantic sense, but for missing parents, or children, or spouse, or student or teacher, even. They might let me know. It is about the same kind of missing someone who is lost or who will never come that I wrote Natalie and Sorcery too. So did Tagore with Kabuliwallah, Postmaster, Aapod, Ak raatri, Samapti, Ghaater Kotha… and many others I could name. It could be yearning for God Himself, when one has realized that all human relationships are ultimately fake, or merely conditional upon mutual convenience (the Bard says, 'most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly'!): ‘e milon toma bina kotha achhe hey ishwar’, and also ‘amar shur guli paye choron, ami pai ne tomare’…

"If winter comes..."

When I was going up to class 12 (in St. Xavier’s Collegiate School, Calcutta), they sent me to participate in a ‘creative writing’ competition at Loreto House, which was almost next door on Park Street. I went without any clear idea about what I was supposed to do: after all, what was special about ‘creative’ writing? Wasn’t all writing meant to be creative? Anyway, several of us from different schools were assembled in a hall, and a girl came over to write three topics on the blackboard, out of which each had to select one. I have no memory of what the other two were, but as soon as she wrote ‘If winter comes…’ (first half of a famous line from Shelley's immortal poem), a flashbulb seemed to go off inside my head – the classic Eureka moment – and I literally saw the whole story full-blown in my mind’s eye. For the next half hour I was scribbling furiously, dead to the world, just copying out the story from my mental screen as it were, and then I submitted the story and walked out, leaving the girl gaping after me. No wonder: the time allotted was, I think, three hours, and many of my fellow-writers had just stopped chewing their pens and started writing slowly and laboriously, visibly bereft of ideas. Thus “Natalie darling” was born: the story of a young geologist cum KGB agent in late 1970s USSR who is sent off on an urgent mission to Siberia, leaving his sweetheart behind in Leningrad, and who survives an accidental and global nuclear holocaust out there in the freezing wilderness, the only human left alive on the planet, who spends his last months and days and hours scribbling letters to his lost beloved, even as his radioactivity-contaminated body falls slowly apart.

Our team coordinator was waiting breathlessly outside, and asked the obvious question. I remember I answered, with the overweening arrogance that only teenagers are capable of mustering at will, that if the judges were literate, I was sure to win first prize. Which is what I did, in fact, but Natalie brought me much, much more. When a year later I went to Jadavpur University and tried to introduce myself to some of the girls I had just met, several of them simpered ‘Oh, we know you, you are Natalie darling (sic)!’ Let us pull a delicate veil over all that has passed in the intervening decades, but even today I can bring tears to the eyes of many a girl by reading out the same story.

I don’t know why I suddenly wrote about this. But the story has a bizarre sequel. Many years after I wrote it, while I was a schoolteacher, I had to deal with a story by the renowned science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke called History Lesson. It gave me goosebumps to see how uncannily similar his basic storyline was to mine (though there wasn’t any love interest or any poetry in his version). I had never read that story before, and surely Clarke couldn’t have read mine. So maybe in the world of creativity the selfsame ideas occur to entirely unconnected people at different times and places?

Debarshi's sequel to my old story

I wrote a sort of ‘story’ a very long time ago, and posted it here in 2007 (More on the lonely mind). Now young Debarshi, who is himself in his early twenties, a whole generation removed but still stirred by what I wrote, has penned his own ‘sequel’ to that story. I reproduce it below, just as he has written it.

More on the lonely mind (continued...)

“I carved the angel in the stone, till I set him free...” goes the famed line, doesn’t it? I am too drowsy to even think straight, let alone reason. One has to find a reason to think, or is it the other way around? Auroras of colour have started exploding like supernovae in my blurred field of vision, heightening my senses, putting me to sleep in this dark world of the senses, where all other fellow beings wake. My chemical romance has started, as I have begun to see my life through the kaleidoscopic vision of my inner eye. Someone has applied a red-hot poker to my very innards, and as I start twisting in pain, I catch myself in the mirror, with a contorted grin. I yelled out loud, demanding to know the identity of the apparition. “It is you, my dear. It is the likeness you have fashioned yourself into, and not the one you should have. Allow me to carve out the real you!” came back the answer. The glass shattered and the mirror cracked from side to side – of course it would, seeing as my hurled vase had found its target. Love built us, and pain shapes us, does it?

You rest your feet on the worn out, moth eaten pillow and stare at the ceiling, lost in thought. The endless stream of demands has finally died down, and you are left all alone with only your poor self for company. The thought gnawing at your mind now starts off as a furious tirade between two opposing factions, conceived in unity and separated by will – the head and the heart. “You must be yourself...”goes the debate. The frames per second rate of the movie playing itself out in your head are too fast to decipher. You let yourself go with the flow. Torn pages flying about, dusty walls, heavy metal, a lot of sound ensuing masking the innate fury, train journeys to nowhere, dying neon lights, dishevelled and shabby clothes, hours of boredom, and watching that ridiculously idiotic television set as if your life depended on it – images fly past, and you grow tired and weary of this world of distractions that is hell-bent on tugging at you with each passing minute.

Visions swimming past, reels changing tack continuously, all these provided me some meaning to this conundrum called Life. Now, they only seem to be the flashbacks of a fool. The chemist could help me out, you say? I laugh it off with a shrug of the shoulders, copying every move from a stereotypical alpha male you all like so much. The Eternal chemist does not even provide me euthanasia for all my prayers. I clutch the pillow tighter to my chest and try to doze off. Sleep will finally overtake me and send me off to a land where defeat and disappointment are accepted as natural precursors and successors to glory. In this madhouse, how does one even keep sane?

I have dreamt of corn-fields awash in the mellow moonlight, of picking up pink shells on the sun-kissed shores and listening to the sound of the old, old sea, of snow-capped peaks and valleys of lush foliage, of snowflakes and the emotions they imbibe in the eyes of all, of dark alleyways with a coffee-house at each turn, of lonely men in a pub sharing their stories as works of beauty which happened to someone else, of arched corridors and the delightful smell arising from old books with dog-eared pages, of stirring, soulful music which makes me free from myself, and of unending tales like the ones of Scheherazade. How can you sleep? You try to bury your head deeper into the pillow, and will yourself to give in to the lovely goddess of Sleep – how she entices you, with promises to play out all your sub-conscious fantasies! Pardon me, I am no Freudian, and so do not get your hopes up. All your defeats, the hypocrisy that masks our lives, the roles you keep on playing – drop the pretence, and be yourself in your own garden of memory, where sun-drenched acacias lend you shade, where the bluebells, germander speedwells, flash smiles at you, willing you to remember, remember your true self, so that you might not forget. Hey, you creep about in your own garden, stealing furtive glances at all others who wander into your memory! It is a dream, alright? How hard it is to be oneself!

You jerk yourself awake, splash water onto your face, grimacing as the cold reality hits you. You are what you have done, and what you will do. Humans are funny: they label this simple stochastic process as a law. You catch sight of yourself in the mirror, and it reflects the state of your soul, instead of yourself. Chaos ensues in your heart, and yet you search for peace! You finally realize that another evening has passed you by – Time is a harsh mistress. Let go of all of your fears, your expectations and start living! – You say to yourself. What’s that shrill trill? It is the beastly mobile phone, with your newest distraction widget, a caller photo flasher application. How can one plaster such fake smiles on their faces? As you start talking nineteen to the dozen, your voice fades away, and your dreams trail away; they realize the futility of a lost battle. Why can you not live between the wondrous moments that ensue between the two wing beats of the fly of Paradise? Searching for permanent happiness in a transitory, surreal, vanishing world, you realize that maybe your heartstrings are out of tune. How does one listen to this tune, amidst the deluge of cacophony? You sleep over it, and you know, your pain will soon be over. Maybe that’s why we realize all our lives, and unravel the mysteries, when we sleep forever in peace. My spirit is away on a wing and a prayer, free from itself finally!

Story sequel

This is a post with a difference, in the sense that I didn't write it. Some time ago I had tentatively posted the first part of a story in the making, and got disheartened with the almost complete lack of response. It turns out, however, that someone was deeply interested: my old boy Debarshi Saha (a student of engineering, too) has taken the trouble to write the conclusion of that story in his own way. I have pasted the thing as he wrote it below. Goes without saying that both he and I will be glad to read comments about how it went down...

PART-2

These people are incomprehensible; and yes, also frightening! How do you account for the wordless language that binds me and my customers together? No matter how strange the request, how varied the tastes, I never disappoint them. Earlier, when I was a novice, my customers would praise a certain seller and his lip-smacking recipe, and advise me to be more like the individual. Those days were strange- me combing the streets of this town to find the elusive recipe that would entice his customers away from him, finding it, and perfecting my art; Now, I come up with improvisations frequently, and love to deliver to my customers the tangy taste that lingers behind- and keeps bringing them back to me frequently! Over the years, I have learned to love them all- Yes, I love the bespectacled banker who is always in a hurry, the little girl who gives me an impish grin, the young couples who always fiddle about with their mobile phones, and even the schoolboys who chatter like magpies- I love them all. I have learned to live with the condescending sneer directed by some towards me, the mournful air assumed by hapless lovers, the happy smiles some bestow towards me, and the gasps uttered by some on finding my paani-puri too spicy!

I often look wistfully at the temple gates, and catch myself feeling equal, at par with everybody else, in front of the Creator- who, strangely enough, was the one who ordained me to be different from my fellow-men! Is Life one never-ending cruel joke? I have spent many seasons in the sun, spent countless hours trudging down the water-logged roads to home, getting drenched in torrential outbursts, but still, I have held onto Hope, maybe the most beautiful thing of all. Walking down lonely and dark roads, with only the stillness of the surroundings to keep me company- I have been able to hear my own voice for once, in this industrial town, where most people are stone-deaf. I remember the day, when, as I was wending my way back home along a dark alley, I witnessed an accident. The man was flung from his scooter like a rag-doll, which skidded and thumped onto the wall, sustaining serious damage. He hadn’t accounted for the careless patch of oil left behind by some callous tanker, which led to this disaster. I remember rushing to his side, and cradling his head in my arms- He looked up at me beseechingly, with eyes that wanted to live, out of a socket that had begun to bleed. I hysterically screamed at the top of my lungs, rushing towards a nearby shop for help- and after that, the moments seem to have gone by in a flash. He was helped onto a private car, and whisked away to a hospital- by the kindly owner of the shop. I returned home, and spent the rest of the fateful night tossing and turning about in bed, thinking about the fragile gift of Life, which we all possess; but so few of us cherish! I remember going down on my knees and thanking God profusely, clutching my wife and son tightly to my chest.

The next day, I went about my work as usual and I remember thinking, “I wonder if he’s all right. Let no man die before his time has come.” I do not remember all the details, but I remember the motorcycle that halted at my stall, the person who jumped off it and embraced me like a brother! The flush that filled my cheeks and the wave of joy that ran through my heart- sent my pulse racing, when I learnt that the person was the victim’s son, and that his father owed his life to my timely action, and that he was now on his way to recovery. His father had wished to see me, and so I accompanied him to the hospital- in the midst of Life we are surrounded by Death, aren’t we? The man was a private construction contractor, who offered me a daily job as a worker- an offer I refused, and wished to pass onto my prodigal elder son, who had returned home with an empty pocket and a heavy heart, rife with evil habits. He gladly accepted, and I returned home feeling on top of the world- Little did I know the evil design that Life seemed to have fashioned with the fabric of fate.

A fool and his money are soon parted; a drunkard and his life are soon parted too. Intoxicated with country liquor, my son fell to his death from 5 storeys above while trying to climb onto a precariously constructed porch. This happened six months after that day, and has been a memory that haunts me to this day. I cannot begin to assuage my grief still; as the thought torments me every waking hour- Did I send him to his death? He was my flesh and blood, and I will always love him, no matter what. I wanted him to be a man; he ended up a corpse. I wanted him to work hard with his hands and tools; he drove the nail not through the plank of wood, but through my heart. I attempted to drown my sorrows, partaking of the same victuals that pushed my son towards his death- As I stumbled back, with every drunken step leading me towards home, I started thinking; Was I better off dead, or a quitter? I had hoped a few drinks would help me forget him, but after one too many, I started shouting his name all over town, with slurred verses and blurred vision. I have put all those days behind me, with my wife’s love, care and support in those dark times. But, all I wanted was words, his words; and all I heard was nothing.

I now have a radio to keep me company- the foot-tapping, peppy beats of popular numbers that the garrulous radio jockeys belt out are a big hit with my younger customers. They affirm Life and its endless stream of energy, as do marriage halls bedecked and adorned with streamers and flashing lights, venues for the banquets hosted by Life. I have started saving money to arrange for my younger one’s marriage, so that his child will be born, not into a world of bleak landscapes and squalor- but into a world where he might have a chance to live his life. In my childhood, I wanted to be like Mohan, my neighbouring grocer; like Birju, the village fisherman- and then I never became any of them. I would want him to go back to my village, far from the madding crowd, and live a simple, yet happy life. Do I aspire too much for my family? I close my eyes for a moment and the moment’s gone, while all my dreams pass before my eyes with curiosity at my naivety. Had I not yet learnt my lesson?

Anything you do in Life might be insignificant; but it is very important that you do it- because no one else will. All we are, is, dust in the wind, a drop in the endless ocean of Time, the same old song- still, we are humans, albeit divine beings having a worldly experience. None of these words are mine, but the wisecracks by the inquisitive author, who happened to frequent my stall once and still does now, though nowadays he doesn’t linger that long- my stories are getting over quickly! Upon hearing my story, he remarked that a story worth remembering was a story worth narrating. He struck me as the sort of fellow, who, having endured snide remarks from his bourgeoisie friends, was impatient to exhibit an understanding of Life, far beyond his years. Well, he badgered me with questions and “read my eyes” for a long time, when at last he came to his best & final offer of letting me finish my story! How I loved him then, even as I started searching for answers- for becoming the hero of the story, the poor hero whom everyone loves but no one wants to emulate!

I proudly brandished the faded, smudged old sepia photograph of me and my family- the only one proof of our lives - kissed it, held it to my heart and said, “Tell them, let everyone know, that I lived a very happy life and died a very happy man. Tell them, living Life was the happiest moment of my life, although I didn’t know it!” If any of you read this story, or if he ever writes it- do stop by my stall to stare at Life, otherwise you might miss it altogether. My daydreams have transformed my beloved town into a town of signs and spectres; my experience with Life has left me with a map of society’s rituals and mores, and my photograph, with the story of one man’s broken heart.

PART-3

Hello everybody! This is the first time that my muse has granted me permission to reveal myself to you all, who might be reading his story. I couldn’t bring myself to accept the fact that the calluses on his hands, the way of feeling under-rated and unappreciated, the twinkle in his tired eyes when he laughed, were not enough to make him unhappy, to take away his courage, when he looked into my eyes and proclaimed himself to be a very happy man. I flung down my pen and stared at the ceiling, thinking to myself the same thought that would come back to haunt me again and again. You know the riff of a tune, the strains of a violin, and the whiff of the melody in a song that plays over and over in your head- this was the thought that pulled at my very heartstrings, when I realized that maybe Happiness was something you could only pursue, and never reach.

I attempted to visit him many more times, but he never set up his stall near the temple gates again. I wrote nine letters, five of which I put in envelopes, and none of which I posted- he was a man, who carried his home about in his very heart. I resolved to forget about him; He was just another man I had known, among the anodyne sea of acquaintances I had. But I never could. He taught me to keep fighting and to live, something I had never known. Whenever I snuggled into my cosy bed on a chilly night, whenever I sat down at the table to partake of a sumptuous meal, whenever I watched happy people milling around me, I remembered him and his eyes. He had the audacity to dream when Life seemed to be one un-ending nightmare; he had the tenacity to keep dreaming when he should have stopped hoping. Life had not granted him a field of dreams to till; he still had the courage to smile back at Life, when Life frowned at him. But, I did not tell you all this to serve as a mere homily- I wrote down all this so that you all could live your lives, before it is too late. It is never too late to live, is it?

[The paani-puri seller went back to his village, and set up an elementary school, with just two students- his younger son and Mohan the greengrocer’s son. Moved by his efforts, the villagers chipped in and built their school brick by brick. His younger son would go on to become the first graduate from their village, with the help of an NGO that received a letter from a certain individual. Coming back to the village, his son re-modelled his father’s dreams into the first school for his village and neighbouring villages- he named it in memory of his father, and dedicated its mission to the spirit of a brave heart, his father. His grandson would become the first doctor to receive the President’s medal for extraordinary services rendered to his countrymen. The NGO nominated his son as their President, and continues to serve many more fighters across the country. It all started with the letter from the author, who sent his friend’s life story to the NGO. He would go on to publish many more novels, after numerous initial rejections, and eventually win the Sahitya Akademi award. In his emotional acceptance speech, he would affirm that every beauty of Life, and Life itself, deserved a novel. He had dedicated his first published novel to the spirit of his friend, who taught him to live luminously betwixt the two legions of darkness.]