by Sumana Roy
‘I’m making Maggi for you,’ she said, like only an enthusiastic twenty-four-year-old can, someone who’d had an opportunity to be of some use for the first time in her life. And then making her sit up on the bed, she began gathering her hair towards the back of the head. The underside of her feet was stamped by dust – she’d stopped wearing plastic hawai sandals.
‘Nooooo!’ screamed Mrs Chakrabarti as if she’d been struck by a bullet.
‘Ki holo?’ said Matri, embarrassed of her youth, her lack of experience.
‘I can’t have Maggi – I don’t eat anything from plastic packets.’ She was shaking, as if on the verge of a moment where she’d cease to be.
Matri receded from her desire to be good – she wanted to run away and complain to her mother-in-law and cry.
Taking the comb from Matri’s hand suddenly, she screamed, ‘I don’t use that plastic comb anymore! Where did you find it? I use a wooden comb, and when I misplace it, I don’t comb my hair at all. Why did you let plastic touch me? I will die now!’
Matri ran away in fear.
No one had visited her since then. They weren’t even sure whether she lived in that house at all – for no lights were switched on in the evenings. How were they to know that Mrs Chakrabarti had stopped switching on the lights because the switches and switchboards were made of plastic?
No one could quite say who it was that took Mrs Chakrabarti to the hospital. They later speculated that she might have walked to the nursing home by herself. The doctor, who had once looked after her sister Mohua but now avoided her for her refusal to take medicines that came in plastic vials and containers, might have felt pity and admitted her in. He didn’t realise that he was making a terrible mistake.
Once in the nursing home, Mrs Chakrabarti refused to let saline and any other medicine be administered to her. The reason wasn’t hard to guess – they came in plastic bottles and would enter her body through tiny plastic pipes. She would allow neither a catheter nor an oilcloth to be spread under her. And, of course, no injections and blood tests – there were the plastic disposable syringes.
Though no one was physically present there, they knew of the last conversation she had. It was with the doctor.
‘Why are you doing this to yourself, Maya?’ he’d asked. He knew she’d stopped eating almost completely – there was nothing, almost nothing, that didn’t come inside a plastic container or packet anymore – rice and dal, oil and spices, vegetables and meat; in fact, she’d told him about a rumour that China was now producing plastic rice and eggs in its factories.
‘Because I’m Maya,’ she’d said feebly.
No one could say what he’d said in response, but they knew her last words: ‘Everything is made of plastic now. Everything except Maya. How can Maya be made of plastic?’
In the ‘Cause of Death’ column, the doctor wrote ‘Plastic’. When his assistant looked at him, he added a line: ‘Unnatural death caused by trying to avoid natural death.’ Dissatisfied with the formulation of that reason, he struck it out twice with black ink and wrote again: ‘Plastic.’
The New Provincials
‘I’ve always been famous. It’s just no one knew it yet.’
—Lady Gaga
LOOKING AT THE PHONE on waking, Shubhro yawned to push the remainder of his sleep away from himself, as if it was a blanket that had become unnecessary with the change of season. The light from the phone fell on his face in the early morning darkness of the room – it stained his skin a sleepy blue and made him look like someone in a movie. If Shubhro had known that, he’d have been happy. He was a performer. He played Shubhro every moment. On the phone screen was a new Facebook post from Deep Mukherjee. Embarrassed that he did not completely understand what it meant, he clicked on ‘like’. Then he read it again. He’d be like Deep Mukherjee one day. This trigger for daydreaming was interrupted by his mother blowing the conch. Oh, it must be Thursday – Thursday already? he calculated. Thursday was Lokkhi-bar, when Lakshmi was worshipped with fanfare, with sweets and a surplus of devotion.
Shonkho bajiye tomaye ghar-ey enechhi
Shugondhi dhoop jeley aashon petechhi…
Esho maa lokkhi bosho ghar-ey
Amar ghar-ey thaako aalo korey.
His mother had begun muttering the panchali – tales of good wives being rewarded by Lokkhi. She knew the words by heart, but reading them from a book through her foggy glasses made her feel important. She prided herself on being almost identical to the ideal woman described in the panchali. Lokkhishri – it’d become an adjective for the good, kind and domesticated woman. This was the only book she’d read in her life – she was grateful that there was at least one book about an ordinary woman like her. All the other books, unread as they were, seemed to be only about important people. That word came to her in English even though she did not know how to read the Roman script. Important people, successful people. She didn’t like them.
Shubhro saw her – actually a part of her, her hands folded in prayer – through the gap between the curtain and the door. In the background was the damp green wall he’d seen all his life. He hated it. It signified to him all that he wanted to reject about his life – the poverty and the lack of sophistication that he’d unfortunately been born into. He believed in self-fashioning, he was his own artist and model, he’d turn himself into someone as attractive as Deep Mukherjee.
He moved his eyes away from the corridor that his mother was filling with her chants and incense sticks to the walls in his room. That was the first thing he’d done after getting a job – getting the walls of his room painted, not cheap lime-wash but with Asian Paints and Jenson & Nicholson. Even the names had gravitas, the sound of elsewhere that he wanted for his life. The conch was blown again, thrice. It irritated him. How stupid his mother was. Lokkhi’s days were gone. It was the time of Deep Mukherjee.
Leaving the pink-and-purple painted room – three of the walls were pink and one purple, as it was in the catalogue – he came to the bathroom. His father, who’d been trimming the sharp ends of his moustache with a tiny pair of scissors, one that seemed older than him, hurried out. The small rectangular mirror that he’d hung from the bathroom door fell to the floor. It seemed as nervous as the aged man. Shubhro’s parents were scared of him. God had been kind, he’d given them a son. And not just a son; he’d given them a son they didn’t deserve, far too smart and educated for them. They felt it most in his proximity. He made them nervous, and they made mistakes they wouldn’t otherwise.
‘Why don’t you shave off your moustache?’ Shubhro asked his father.
His father took it as an instruction and replied, ‘Maybe...since you say... But it’s an old friend. I’ve known it even before I knew you.’
The past again! Shubhro hated this urge to give everything a history. Shubhro hated history – it was a monster, it was biased against people like him. It only cared for ancestry and pedigree. He didn’t have a moustache – no successful man in the world today had one. He’d shaved it soon after it’d appeared on his upper lip. Successful people were clean shaven – the Ambanis and Sachin Tendulkar and Salman Khan. It was the first step towards success, and he’d taken it.
Everything since then – he was twenty-seven now – had gone according to plan. Everything except the problem with language. He’d identified this early too, that language was the new caste and the new class, that how one spoke and what one said decided how the world saw – and rated – him. But he wasn’t scared. It was only language, a thing that could be learnt and mastered, not a face one couldn’t change.
He shaved before brushing his teeth – that he kept for the end. The leftover smell of the toothpaste made him feel polished. He pushed the air out of his mouth occasionally, and it made him feel different from those around him, men he imagined as clerks and daily wage labourers or, at the most, school teachers. He was an assistant professor at a government college, the only one from Balurghat who’d managed to crack two difficult examinations in suc
cession to get the job. The gravity of the job had made the ‘assistant’ redundant – relatives and acquaintances said he was a ‘professor’. He’d stopped correcting them. It was, after all, only a matter of time before he became a professor – a PhD degree and fifteen years, that is all it took.
What was complicated was mastering the language that people like Deep Mukherjee spoke. He’d studied at the same university as Deep, and covered the same syllabus in school, but neither of these had taught him to speak this language. The grammar books – Brighter Grammar, PK De Sarkar, Wren and Martin – he’d gone through again and again; texts too, Shakespeare and Milton, Donne and Defoe, Tennyson and Browning, Yeats and Eliot, Woolf and Lawrence, Auden and Spender and, in the Special Paper, Achebe and Rushdie. None of these writers wrote in this language; their writing gave pleasure, this new language created bewilderment. He kept the bewilderment to himself, not just from his colleagues in college but from the world – for Facebook was a universe that he’d created for himself, sending friend requests to people he found in the bibliographies of books and essays he read, sending messages of appreciation (always the same message to everyone) to scholars from Europe and America he found commenting on mutual friends’ posts. He was a soldier, he was building a bridge.
Today, he’d write a letter to Deep Mukherjee, invite him for a seminar and, after his acceptance, he’d request Mukherjee for help to go abroad, and if that wasn’t possible, to at least help him get a research paper published in England or America. UK-US, UK-US, tick-tock, tick-tock – he was in love with the way people like Mukherjee used the acronym.
The wind rushed in from the mustard fields – was it the smell of cow dung or a co-passenger’s vomit? Shubhro stood up to close the window. His hair, set carefully by his fingers and a wide-toothed comb, was being blown away. He wanted to get into the examination hall with students, particularly the girls, admiring how the hair fell on his forehead.
It was true that Balurghat was changing, he thought to himself as the bus braked through the streets. There was a crowd in front of Big Bazaar. A balloon-seller so early in the morning? Three balloons – red, green and yellow; the rest were air-filled cut-outs of Chhota Bheem, Doraemon, Ben Ten and a few more characters he couldn’t recognise. He blamed his parents – how they’d never bought him any of the comic books that children in the cities read. His childhood, once happy, seemed impoverished in retrospect – no Archie, no Enid Blyton, no Nancy Drew. He’d read them later, but it was like comfort food. There was a time for conditioning, for impressions to solidify to taste and the instinct for taste, and that time had gone. He regretted it often – if only he’d been his parent, how well he’d have raised himself. But there was still time – that was the best thing about time, about how generous it was, how some of it always remained, not just for the living but also for the dead.
The bus was filling up. He felt like he was watching a video. He’d seen something called a ‘time lapse’ video once, a camera recording the blooming of a bud into a flower, time on speed. The bus was filling up like that, the seats being taken, the sounds and smells amplifying. And just as the bud wouldn’t become a flower until all its petals had bloomed, the bus wouldn’t start until it had filled up completely. He waited, like a cook waiting for the gravy to come to a boil.
He took out a book from his bag. The energy in that action cheered him – he was the only person in the bus who’d be reading. He felt educated – that was more important to him than being educated. Deep Mukherjee had once posted a photo – was it of England or Germany? – of his co-passengers reading on the metro. Why was there no such culture of reading in India? he’d asked. Now Shubhro felt like he was one of them, the cultured and the enlightened, the book reader. It was an accident that he happened to be on this bus and not the Tube. That would change soon. It was only a matter of time.
Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life. A fat book – was it this and not the bottle of water that was adding to the weight of his bag? He’d have to teach it next semester. Why had the Syllabus Committee chosen such an obese book? He’d mentioned it to the Head of the Department once – ‘It’s a great book,’ the man had replied, as if greatness must be measured in size. Eighty chapters! What was it? An encyclopaedia of provincial life? What was there about provincial life that needed so many pages? Ignoring the epigraph from Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy, thinking it to be a show of unnecessary information – not self-aware enough to realise that this was a mark of the provincial’s life, the inconsequential display of knowledge – he read the first line. Twice. He couldn’t make much sense of it.
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible – or from one of our elder poets – in a paragraph of today’s newspaper.
He hadn’t read the Bible. He’d read Paradise Lost. He didn’t know the Italian painters – was Michelangelo Italian? Picasso? How did it matter? It was as useless to him as Archie comics and Nancy Drew. What did Nancy Drew look like? Mona Lisa? Leonardo da Vinci – he knew the name of one Italian painter at least! Comforted by that thought, he studied the sentence again, telling himself that he couldn’t afford to read every sentence thrice, particularly in a book of eighty chapters. His eyes chose two words from that long sentence – provincial fashion. What did it mean? He studied his clothes. Brands, he declared to himself. Everything except the muffler – no, he would teach himself to say ‘scarf’ instead of ‘muffler’ – which his mother had bought from Siliguri’s Bhutia market. No, this wasn’t provincial fashion. He was wearing the kind of clothes that wealthy actors wore in their movies. He closed the book. He’d read it later, in the examination hall.
The phone stirred in his pocket. The noise had drowned its beep. A Facebook notification. Deep Mukherjee had ‘liked’ his comment. He read his words again, with pride.
Yes, the subaltern can speak, but only on Facebook.
If only Spivak had seen this – was she on Facebook?–it’d be worth more than even his PhD degree. Just before he was about to leave the page, he saw someone’s post about weekend plans. The phrase spoiled his mood. It made him feel deprived. What exactly was a weekend? Many things had been imported to this country, to small towns like Balurghat, but not this thing called a weekend. It was an invention, and as useless an import to poor countries as the bathtub.
He felt sad without reason. The memory of taking an online quiz came back to him. How many of these 100 great books have you read? 63/100, said a student from Delhi University. 72/100, declared a girl who’d studied at Jadavpur University. He’d read only 18 of them – they were the ones that had been prescribed on the university syllabus. He hadn’t even bought a hundred books in his life. And there was no public library in Balurghat. How was he expected to read them? Privilege. He said the word really loud in his mind, as if he were shouting a cuss word. (He remembered the time when he’d shouted the word out at home and his mother had come running, assuring him that she’d kept his favourite part of the fish, the lyaj for him. Privilege, he’d told her, not lyaj, the tail, and she’d returned to the kitchen feeling illiterate about the name of some fish in English.) Not one to be cowed down by such invisible bullying, he calculated with all his might – 82 more to be read; if he began today, as he just had, and finished a book a week, he’d need about one and a half years. It wasn’t impossible at all – he’d cut down on his sleep, an hour borrowed from there, and another from Facebook.
Was Middlemarch in that list? He’d lost the link now; it didn’t matter. He’d have to read the novel anyway. How else would he teach it? With that sense of utilitarianism pushing him, like a tongue through a bubble
gum, he opened the novel again. And again the first line. Okay, Miss Brooke was very beautiful. Couldn’t George Eliot have just said that? He read the second half of the line, the words after the semicolon (he hated semicolons – they were useless, like speed breakers).
...and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible – or from one of our elder poets – in a paragraph of today’s newspaper.
The impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible. Now, it was this phrase that stuck in his head. He’d ignored it before, from an amorphous sense of guilt, the guilt of an underprepared examinee, but it was sticky, like a cough in the throat. The last nine years of a life in literature, first as a student and now as an academic (that word pleased him – it was a prop, a make-believe halo that he took off only when he went to sleep), had taught him the value of the quotation. It was more powerful than name-dropping. Facebook was full of quotations, from books and essays. When he came to it first, three years ago, his mind had likened these to medals of honour on an army man’s uniform. He’d asked his father, a clerk in Hili High School, about all the quotations he knew. A few everyday proverbs, that was all. How the world had changed – his father had gone through life without needing very much, not clothes, not quotations, but here he was, when everything seemed insufficient.
He’d hidden the ambition even from himself. But now, that wispy phrase, ‘the impressiveness of a fine quotation’, had made him aware of the desire – he wanted to be the creator of sayings that people would quote to validate their thoughts and arguments. He felt a philanthropic urge – to be useful to people in debates. To have his thoughts held between quotation marks – that was the greatest respect one could pay a scholar; no, a person. He temporarily forgot all his difficulties with learning quotes for examinations, how he’d relied on three dots to cover up for his memory, forgetting words and phrases. He was working on his doctoral dissertation. Below every page was at least one footnote. For nothing was it called a footnote. The words wouldn’t walk to the next page without it. In them was the display of hard work, of learning, of a family of ideas and thinkers with whom one was claiming a relationship, in them was an acknowledgement of gratitude. All this he understood, but what he didn’t was the obsession to attribute every thought to someone who’d come into the world before him. Though they called it plagiarism – thievery – what it actually meant was that no one would take responsibility for their thoughts – someone had said it before him, he was just quoting people, it wasn’t really his fault.
