Engrossed in my thoughts, I suddenly heard Bina’s voice, “A penny for your thoughts.”
I replied immediately, “I’m going to Darjeeling.” It sounded discordant even to my own ears.
“Why?”
“Just like that – on a holiday.”
“When?”
“Early next month,” I said.
“Which means very soon . . .”
“Very soon . . .”
Bina suddenly stopped and said, “Let’s wait, they’ve fallen a long way behind.”
There it was. Since I was off to Darjeeling in a week, why break the routine for the remaining few days? My daily visits continued, and the promenade to the lake became a regular feature too. Bina’s sister was the most enthusiastic about them, running into people from the neighborhood every day and leaving us to chat with them. Bina and I walked a little, sat a little, sometimes speaking, sometimes silent. We discussed many issues those days by the lake, and, amazingly, discovered we thought alike on most of them.
On the first of June, Bina said, “When are you going?”
“Going? Where?”
“So you’re not going to Darjeeling.”
To hide my embarrassment I explained unnecessarily. “Yes, of course I’m going – just that I’m attending to an important case right now, so . . .”
“You’re definitely going?”
“Definitely.” The more I said it the more my obstinacy grew – yes, I had to go.
Bina looked at the waters of the lake for a while and suddenly said, “No, don’t go.”
“Not go? What are you saying?” I could feel the tremor in my own voice.
“No, don’t go,” Bina said again. “You don’t know – they’ve really – fixed everything . . . for the twenty-ninth – but I cannot – I cannot marry that court officer in trousers . . .”
Her description didn’t make me smile, for I regularly dressed the same way, doctors had to. I said severely, “Not everybody looks as good as Ramen in trousers, but that doesn’t mean . . .”
Bina took the words out of my mouth, “But that doesn’t mean this idiotic character . . .”
I spoke like her guardian, “Should such a thing be said about a respectable gentleman?”
“So, why doesn’t the gentleman stay a gentleman? Take my word for it, none of what they’re expecting will actually happen.”
“But surely you have to get married.”
“Why must I?”
“You’re not a child – you know perfectly well . . .”
“You think so too!” said Bina, and gazed at the water again. I looked in turn at her eyes and at the water. They seemed similar to me; black and white, bright and moist.
Suddenly Bina turned to me and said, “No – I cannot – you mustn’t go – you must save me.”
“Me? How can I save you?”
As soon as I asked, I knew the question was meaningless; Bina had answered it long ago!
Ramen was the first to arrive on hearing the news. He leaped in the air, embraced me and spun me around, tipped the servants five rupees each – then left in a whirl and returned an hour later, in a whirl. Handing me an emerald ring and a sari with silver work on it, he said, “Here’s your pre-wedding gift. Don’t forget to visit the Duttas in the evening – they’ve just got back.”
Mr. Dutta smiled when I met him. “What’s all this I hear?”
“So it really turned out to be the ‘new nest’ for you,” said Mrs. Dutta.
“So I see. The new nest for the new guest – it even rhymes,” joked Mr. Dutta.
“Of course it’ll match. The match that they’ve made will now ensure that.”
The couple continued in this vein for a while, and I laughed like a fool, red with embarrassment.
The days passed in a whirl. On the one side were the sharp verbal darts from the two future sisters-in-laws – here too Mr. Dutta found a rhyme, pointing out that brave hearts attract verbal darts – while on the other was the business of finding a new house, buying things needed to set up home. Ramen went everywhere with me, arranging everything. I’d never have been able to do it all myself. And then – and then what else but the arrival of June twenty-ninth? I went to the new house. Ramen had been there since morning – he was the sole representative from the groom’s side, and I still recall the exhilaration shining on his handsome face. Suddenly I felt a little sad too. It was he who had aroused Bina – and I was the one she had ended up with. Was I, then, just someone who was conveniently available? Had it been someone else at hand instead of me, would the outcome have been the same? Perhaps even that court officer in trousers? After our wedding, I had asked Bina about this and she replied, with that air particular to a bride, “Uff!” Later, she added that she wanted to laugh when she thought about the scene she had created because of her infatuation with Ramen. Wanted to laugh? Already? On the chance that she had not married me, after a few months would she have – but it was ridiculous, why think of all these alternatives, life with Bina had turned out to be perfectly happy.
The doctor’s testimony was received with excitement. The contractor might have been feeling drowsy earlier but as he heard the tale of The New Nest he laughed loudly several times, and even on the well-formed lips of the man from Delhi there appeared a faint line of amusement. Only the writer seemed lifeless, silent, with his hands in his pocket, his head lowered, but he was the first to speak when the doctor stopped.
“This was a matchmaking story, not a love story.”
“All right,” said the Delhi man. “Now we’ll hear the love story from you.”
“What time is it?”
“Nearly three.”
“Nearly three? How long the night is! How terribly cold! No news of our train yet?”
“None whatsoever.”
“Then let’s try for some sleep – even in our chairs won’t be too bad.”
The contractor spoke in a voice hoarse from having been up all night. “Nothing doing. You cannot escape. It’s your turn now.”
The writer stood up abruptly, taking his hands out of his pockets and rubbing them together, then rapidly pacing around the room a few times. After this little show, he sat down again and said, ill-temperedly, “Love story? When it’s as cold as this? Fine, all right.”
Chapter Five
. . .
THE WRITER’S MONOLOGUE
All three of us fell in love with her: Asit, Hitangshu, and I. In the old Paltan area of Dhaka, back in 1927. The same Dhaka, the same Paltan, the same overcast morning.
The three of us lived in the same neighborhood. The first house in the area was called Tara Kutir. Hitangshu’s family lived in it; his father was a retired sub-judge who had made a lot of money and built a huge house at the head of the main road. Tara Kutir was the foremost house in the neighborhood, in all senses: the first and the best. Gradually, many more houses sprouted on the land that used to be infested with grass and burrs, but none of them could match up to Tara Kutir.
We arrived some years later, when the roof to Asit’s family’s house was being laid; Asit had arrived second, just before me. There was a time when ours were the only three houses in the old Paltan area; the rest of it was uneven ground, dust and mud, yellowish green frogs soaking in ankle-high monsoon water and plump, wet, green grass. The same Dhaka, the same Paltan, the same overcast afternoon.
The three of us always stuck together, as much and as long as possible. Every morning Asit would wake me at dawn, calling “Bikash, Bikash,” standing near the window at the head of my bed, and I would rise quickly and join him outside. Inevitably I’d see him waiting on his bicycle, one foot on the ground – he was so tall that my elbow hurt when I put my arm around his shoulder. Hitangshu didn’t have to be summoned; he’d be waiting already by their small garden gate, or sitting on the low wall. Then Asit would ride off on the paved road to school, engineering school, while Hitangshu and I would roam around, hand in hand. The wind smelled of something, of someone, I can sme
ll it still, I can remember something, someone.
Afternoons, the three of us would often go into town on two bicycles, sometimes for cutlets at Ghosh-babu’s famous shop, sometimes to the only cinema hall in town, sometimes to the riverside with packets of peanuts. I never learned how to ride a bicycle, despite my best efforts, but I took many a ride on those two-wheelers, a burden sometimes on Asit, sometimes on Hitangshu, on long journeys, standing or sitting behind them. Many evenings were spent in the fields of old Paltan, sitting or lying on our grass sofa, small stars piercing the sky, thorns piercing our clothes, the lantern on the front porch of Hitangshu’s house piercing the dark and shining dimly, at a distance. Hitangshu couldn’t spend much time with us in the evenings; he simply had to get back home by eight, as his family ordered. Neither Asit nor I was bound by such stern directives: we’d sit there in the darkness, call out to Hitangshu softly on our way back, and he’d interrupt his studies to covertly exchange a few words with us.
So the three of us were in love with one another, just as all three of us fell in love with someone else, back in Dhaka, back in old Paltan, back in 1927.
Her name was Antara. It was a rather sophisticated name for the Dhaka of those days. But nothing about her family suggested Dhaka, so why should their daughter’s name smack of it? The gentleman was extremely westernized – or so we felt then – while the lady dressed in a way that made people mistake her for a young girl from behind. And as for her daughter, their daughter, what can I say about her? She strolled in the garden in the morning, sat with a book on the veranda after lunch, went for walks on the road in the evening; practically brushing past us, her voice could be heard at times – back in Dhaka, in ancient 1927, when it was not easy to even catch a glimpse of a girl, when a portion of a sari behind the closed doors of a carriage was a hint of heaven – and here was this girl, whom we would see in a different sari each day, and who was named Antara on top of that . . . We did not have the ability not to all fall in love with her.
But it was I who discovered her name. I had to sign for the bread every day, and one day I saw a new name in clear Bangla script on the bread seller’s register: Antara Dey. I looked at the register for a while, was possibly late in returning it, and then checked with Hitangshu in the evening, “What’s her name, Antara?”
“Whose . . .” But Hitangshu understood immediately and said, “Possibly.”
Asit said, “They call her Toru.”
Toru! There must have been at least two or three hundred Torus in Dhaka, but at that moment I felt, and I realized Asit felt too, that the language had no word sweeter than Toru. Hitangshu, of course, had to say something flippant and knowing, for the subject, or subjects, of our conversation were tenants of the ground floor of his grand house; unless he had more on the family than we did, he wouldn’t be keeping his advantage over us. So he wrinkled his long nose and said, “From Antara to Toru – I don’t like it.”
“Why not, I like it very much,” I raised my voice, though my heart fell.
“If it was up to me, I’d have called her Antara.”
What audacity. What temerity! He’d have addressed her, and that too by her name! My face reddened with the heat of protest, and I was marshaling some sharp expressions in my mind, when Asit suddenly said, “Me too.” Traitor!
We would have these small quarrels quite frequently. There wasn’t a day when we didn’t talk about her, and there wasn’t one conversation where the three of us were unanimous. She had been in a blue sari the other day, did she look better in it or the purple one? When she’d been walking in her garden that morning, was her hair in a ponytail or down? The other evening, when she’d sat on the veranda with paper and pen, was she writing a letter or practicing arithmetic? We would contend over such issues at the top of our voices. The biggest argument was over a strange topic: did her face resemble the Mona Lisa’s a lot, slightly or not at all? I had just seen a print of the Mona Lisa and shown it to my friends; suddenly the words escaped from me one day: “She looks a lot like Mona Lisa.” We expended many words on the subject without coming to a conclusion, but the good thing was that we started referring to her as Mona Lisa. No matter how much melody there was in Antara, how much sweetness in Toru, the three of us couldn’t possibly refer to her by the same name everyone else used – devising another name which nobody else knew was almost like coming into possession of her.
We’d tell Hitangshu quite often, “You’re bound to become acquainted, it’s the same house, after all,” and Hitangshu would blush at this suggestion of intimacy and say, “What rubbish!” Which meant it could happen, and we used to speculate a lot about this, though we had accepted nevertheless that none of this would happen, that it was all talk, idle talk.
One evening, the three of us were on our way back from the Ramna River, me perched behind Hitangshu on his bicycle. We were chatting peacefully on that desolate path when Hitangshu suddenly stopped talking and wobbled on his cycle; I was about to be thrown off, and trying to regain my balance I clutched at the collar of his shirt, which made him scream in pain, and finally I found my feet again. We heard a deep baritone just then, speaking in English, “Take care, young men!” Mr. Dey stood before us, we saw, along with his wife and daughter. Asit had his bicycle turned at an angle, one foot on the ground, a heroic expression on his face.
“Really, you must . . .” as Mr. Dey spoke, his eyes set on Hitangshu. “Oh, it’s you. Keshab-babu’s son!”
I watched as Hitangshu stared stupidly at his father’s tenants.
“And them? I see the three of you together always. Friends, I assume? Wonderful. I like the company of young men, you must visit us sometime.”
They continued on their way. We stepped off the road and lay down, side by side, flat on the grass. A little later, Asit said, “What a to-do! Hitangshu got nervous, didn’t he?”
“No, no, why should I be nervous? Just that the brakes . . .”
“Never happened before, and it had to happen now, just as we ran into them.”
“Fine. So what? I didn’t hit anyone or fall over anyone. Just that I tried to brake suddenly . . .”
“No, no, you got off fine, only your face looked funny. And as for Bikash . . .”
I snarled as soon as my name was mentioned. “Shut up. It isn’t funny.”
“I think she smiled a little,” Asit still didn’t relent. (There’s no need to explain who he was referring to.)
“I give a damn if she did,” shouted Hitangshu, but the shout was more like a sob.
“Did you see, Bikash? Was it like the Mona Lisa’s smile?”
“Don’t make fun of what you don’t understand.” My voice broke. I couldn’t sleep well that night, remained half-dead for two days more and heartbroken for seven.
Still, setting aside our collective chagrin, Asit was undoubtedly the street-smart one amongst us. He kept saying, “Why don’t we pay them a visit?”
“Are you out of your mind?”
“Why? Mr. Dey asked us, didn’t he?”
Eventually even Hitangshu and I came to agree that Mr. Dey had indeed asked us to visit, practically invited us; he would be extremely pleased to see us, not visiting would be tantamount to showing disrespect. We became increasingly concerned with preserving his status. Every morning we would decide, “Today,” every afternoon we would say, “Not today.” Sometimes we saw them in their garden, on cane chairs; sometimes we saw a car parked outside their gate and realized that Mr. Das, the only barrister in town, was visiting them; sometimes we concluded from the lack of visible activity that they weren’t home. Once in a while we saw Mr. Dey alone in his garden, reading the newspaper. These seemed like opportune moments but our feet stopped moving just as we approached their garden gate, Asit’s not as much as Hitangshu’s, Hitangshu’s not as much as mine; a little nudging and whispering, and eventually we walked past Tara Kutir, toward the main road. Most of the time we felt our visit would annoy them, and immediately we’d argue, why be annoyed, and why we
re we hesitating so much, didn’t people visit people! We were neither thieves nor scoundrels, all we’d do was visit, take a seat, make conversation, leave – that was it!
It was an overcast day, with a slight drizzle. They seemed to be home. The first to enter after pushing open the tiny gate was Asit: tall, fair, handsome. Then came Hitanghshu, serious, bespectacled, gentlemanly. And behind them, the diminutive me. We crossed the garden to the front porch, wondering if we should call out, what we should say, and so on, when Mr. Dey himself pushed aside the curtain and joined us on the veranda. Clamping his teeth down on his thick pipe, he grunted, “Yes?”
Even vivacious Asit was taken aback at being addressed in this manner. “I . . . we . . . we dropped by – you’d said . . .”
Mr. Dey recognized us in the fading light. “Oh, it’s you. Well . . .”
Asit said again, “You had asked us to visit.”
“Oh yes, yes, of course . . .” he coughed and continued, “come in, come in, all of you”; parting the curtain, he stood aside to let us through, but we just stood there.
“In you go.”
Trying to enter, Hitangshu tripped on the doorstep of his own house and trod on my toe. It hurt terribly, but what could I do but keep quiet! Dirtying the shiny floor with our muddy shoes, we stepped forward. What a beautifully decorated room, we had never seen anything like it. A Petromax light was burning. Mrs. Dey was seated on a sofa in front, knitting, and further inside, on a chair pushed up against the wall, was our Mona Lisa, her eyes on an enormous blue book on her lap.
Mr. Dey said, “Sumi, these are the three musketeers of old Paltan. This is Keshab-babu’s son, and these . . .”
Hitangshu introduced us. “This is Asit, and this is . . . Bikash.”
Mrs. Dey smiled and said, “Are the three of you friends? How nice. We see you every day. Do sit down.”
We threw ourselves down on a long sofa, side by side. Mrs. Dey called, “Toru.”
Mona Lisa raised her eyes.
“These are our neighbors – and this is my daughter.”
My Kind of Girl Page 8
