My Mother's Lover and Other Stories

by Sumana Roy

  Then they banged into tables and chairs and beds and water jugs and glasses and they almost fell and luckily regained balance by clutching onto the tail of a friend’s shawl. Then they stood there and let their breath crawl back into themselves. And all this because of the darkness. Then they huddled together, like it was only possible in winter in Calcutta when someone’s feet warmed another’s back and someone’s hands begged for the warmth of someone’s body. They climbed on two beds, making sure they were never completely comfortable there, their bodies always asking for a little more space than what was available, and in these peculiar postures where their bodies looked broken but happy, they cursed the enemy together. Someone inevitably knew someone whose relative had been killed in the war and then they clicked their tongues and said ‘Ish’ for the widows and fell into a silence. They were incapable of feeling the sadness left behind by war, and for this, they felt sad. A little later they felt scared because they were really not scared of the war.

  Words dried gradually, not into sleep as they’d done before, but into repetition, for what was there to talk about in such times? They were all women, scared of talking about the dead in the dark. And just when it seemed that the conversation had died, someone would mention Debdulal Bandopadhyay’s inspiring talk on the radio at half-past seven that evening and then they would begin talking again. Yes, he was right, we should donate the little jewellery we have for our country, they said; then, being Bengalis, a few of them would recite a few lines of patriotic poetry self-consciously, a few others would slap themselves in vain, not out of appreciation for those lines of verse but in a futile attempt at killing the troublesome mosquitoes. And suddenly she would ask a strange question (a habit her daughter would inherit from her), something like ‘Do you think the people in East Pakistan would be inspired by Debdulal-babu’s talk on the radio as well… and if their women would also donate all their jewellery like us? Then?’

  Troubled by the possibility of such an eventuality, they would all climb down from the bed, search for their slippers in the darkness, touch one another with their feet while doing so, until it would seem that they were kicking each other in slow motion, and then find their way to their rooms and their beds, cursing two things all the while – the darkness and Pakistan. And she, having hurt her big toe at the leg of someone’s bed, would utter the ultimate abuse that was possible, the dirtiest word that her Sarada ashram-school upbringing would allow: ‘Loafer’.

  Yes, they were both loafers, the darkness, and Pakistan.

  Then they would all pretend to be asleep until their bodies too would believe in the lie and they would really fall asleep. And just when they would be on the verge of falling into a deeper sleep, at that moment when the control of their bodies was gradually being taken away from them, at that very moment, Bishu, the boy who stammered even while singing, would shout Bo … Bo… Bomb from the first floor of the Science Hostel. His voice would fill the dark silence and they would all sit up and look at each other in the darkness: so they were dead and that was what life after death was like – owl-dark. A few of them would begin crying, mourning their own death; someone would ask, ‘What does a bomb look like?’, and another would ask, ‘Ei, are bombs made in Bombay? Is that why it’s called Bombay?’

  Everyone would fall asleep, only she’d be awake. In that darkness, she would take out the inland letters from her pillowcase and touch them. There would be the sound of paper; somehow the sound of paper always sounded different to her ears in the dark. Unable to read even her name on it – his name for her, Tooki, a Bengali child’s colloquial for hide-and-seek – she would count the number of inland letters with her fingers. Nine: one every week. Two weeks ago they had stopped coming.

  ‘How are you?’ she wrote to him, the first line of the letter, just below ‘God is Good’, which is what she usually wrote at the top of the inland letter. (She had learnt it from a friend: this wasn’t just her brief character certificate for God, but something else. It was a mark of the power of ‘O’ without which the sentence would become meaningless: ‘God is God’.) She didn’t address the letter to him. It was part of the code of a Bengali woman’s love: she could not call him by name since he was older than her. He, like other Bengali men, would be nameless to her until he’d become a father and she would begin referring to him as ‘Tirna’s father’.

  ‘How are you?’

  This was the first time she really wanted an answer for this question. The war had turned the rhetorical into a literal question. How was he? Where was he? Why hadn’t he written to her for two weeks?

  ‘How are you?’ she wrote for the third time and paused. She didn’t have anything else to tell him at the moment. Then she got up from her chair and looked out of the window. A dead crow was hanging from an electric wire. Was it, too, a war victim?

  Would this letter reach him?

  A shalik came and sat on the window sill. ‘Ish,’ the sound escaped from her, and the tiny sparrow flew away. She was superstitious: ‘One for sorrow, Two for joy…’ She would have to begin looking for the second sparrow. Otherwise, her letter would never reach him.

  Winters were so dusty, she said to herself; there was a film of dust on the window sill. She had wiped it yesterday evening but…Perhaps this too was also because of the war. The war was, after all, like a ghost, an invisible presence that did things when one was away.

  ‘How are you?’ she wrote absent-mindedly on the dusty window sill with her first finger. Then, suddenly conscious of the presence of her roommate behind her, she wiped the dust with her cotton sari and began thinking something that had never occurred to her. ‘How are you?’ What kind of a question was this and where had it come from? How old was this question in human history? What had made the first man ask this question? Wasn’t this actually a doctor’s question? Why, then, had it become a civilisation’s bird call? What made people pick up words like these and put them in history’s gizzard? ‘How are you?’ Did the two warring nations ask each other this question every morning before they began fighting?

  Perhaps this was also what the war did: it filled even the simple words with violence.

  She had many things to tell him but she would wait. After the three ‘How are you?’ questions, she only wrote one more sentence. She did not like being a student anymore, she said. She would be a better wife than she was a student. And then she signed her name: she drew what she thought was a parrot, ‘Tiya’. She did this not only because it was her nickname but because this was what she thought would be her role as a wife – to repeat after her husband, to copy and look at the world with his minus 2.25 eyeglasses.

  Then she opened her tiny Santiniketan batik-leather wallet and looked inside. Yes, it was there, just one remained from the five she’d bought. A red on white ‘Refugee Relief Stamp’, worth five paisa, that the government had recently made mandatory postage. She looked closely at the grave faces of the imagined refugees on the tiny stamp. No, she didn’t want to be a refugee, not even love’s refugee; that is why it was necessary for the letter to reach him. They were not just on her stamp, they were everywhere. The city suddenly became crowded; forced to accommodate the swelling numbers who crossed the border for a ‘future’ every day. It had become what she feared most – an ugly carbuncle.

  That was also what the war did: it changed the face and character of Calcutta forever.

  One her way to college, she looked at them from the corner of her eyes. The smoke from the clay ovens in makeshift kitchens, a life of bathing and defecation in the open, an infant at a mother’s breast, and common to everyone, a look of disbelief in destiny in every man’s eye – a direct gaze was impossible during the war. What scared her most was the abruptness of it all and the realisation of how a man’s destiny was inextricably tied to his land, how the wares of sophistication could turn into luxury overnight, and how war in winter was so much worse than war in summer. But more than anything else the war made her realise how useless she was and how utterly useless wer
e the life of a student and education, especially the arts!

  Occasionally a farmer would come to ask for money, and he, who owed his job to Indira Gandhi’s nationalisation of banks, would look at Soumen, his trade-union colleague. The two of them had, even until a few months ago, said, ‘Give the money to the agriculturist, give loans to Hariya Mahato.’ One of them would tell the farmer, ‘Uncle, what will you plant in your fields when all that lies there now are dead bodies?’ The old farmer would look at them, say ‘Jeebon’, and begin crying. Jeebon: Life. The two bankers would be surprised by the power of the illiterate farmer’s metaphor until the peon would come and tell them in a whisper, ‘His son’s name was Jeebon. He is missing…’ Then there would be another shelling and they would all bend low with their hands over their heads and crouch into the tiny leg space of the cash counter.

  There was hardly any business during the day. Sometimes, they played carrom after the lunch break, turning the wooden board into a battlefield and themselves into soldiers. Although they took turns in being ‘Indian’ soldiers one day and ‘Pakistani’ the other, the man who lost when he was ‘pretend-Pakistani’ did not feel sad after losing. But such days were rare because most often the game was left without conclusion. They would hold the striker in one hand, say ‘Wait’ or ‘Watch out’, hit the white and black round pieces into the four pockets and say, ‘See, there you are, dead’, pointing to the wooden tablets in the pockets. And just when both of them would think that the blood-red piece at the centre would be theirs, the peon would come. Someone wanted a loan or a dead relative’s money.

  War did that as well: it left all tasks, including living, incomplete.

  ‘Death certificate?’ they would ask the relative, and the poor man – never would a woman come, not even if she was the wife of the victim – would shake his head. Then they’d explain in Bengali, where it was much more difficult because the word for death in one’s mother tongue always sounds closer and harsher. How could they have found a death certificate? The doctors had all fled Balurghat. They wished they could give the money to him but their hands were tied, they said. If they didn’t follow the rules, Indira Gandhi would be very angry with them and if they did anything wrong, the banks would be denationalised again and all the money would go back to the cruel moneylenders and the poor would become very poor again. So they wouldn’t be able to give him the money, they said.

  Instead, the account of the dead man became ‘dormant’ and then ‘inoperative’ and the money went to the Reserve Bank of India.

  And the poor remained poor.

  ‘Tooki.’

  A solitary cry and then silence.

  ‘Tooki.’ Again.

  It was the Bengali child’s call during hide-and-seek, a less challenging find-me-if-you-can’.

  ‘Tooki.’

  It couldn’t be him. No one knew his nickname for her, and what use was a love-name if the world called you by that sound?

  She opened the window pretending to throw the hair that had fallen from her head and which she had gathered into an ill-formed circle. ‘Thhoo,’ she said, spitting on the mass of hair; it was a ritual of condemnation of the act of hair falling off a Bengali woman’s head. I’m spitting on you, don’t do it again, the woman seemed to be saying to the hair.

  ‘Thhoo.’

  It was him.

  She was so ashamed of herself. What had she done? Welcomed him by spitting?

  She closed the window, turned her back to it and smiled. This wasn’t an instinctive gesture on her part; she had seen a few actresses doing it – Madhabi Mukherjee, Aparna Sen, even Suchitra Sen – and she suddenly felt proud to be a part of that tradition of welcoming one’s lover by closing a window and turning her back to him. She was sure – and assured by his knowledge of Bengali films – that he wouldn’t take offence at this gesture. Rather he would know, in spite of not being able to see her, how she would behave in her room. Films and literature had that power – they could make one belong to a community without one’s active participation.

  But these days, even the war had acquired that power.

  She grabbed her cotton towel and ran to the bathroom. War or not, she needed to smell good. Perhaps he would take her to watch a film. She’d seen a poster of The Guns of Navarone on the way to college. It had come to the Lighthouse. Or was it the New Empire? She wasn’t sure. But he was here; he would find out all the details.

  She didn’t like watching these English films. When he had taken her to see Sunflower, the first film that they’d watched together, she had, at first, enjoyed the experience. It was like going for a holiday, going to places and observing details; from time to time she would look at him from the corner of her eye and try to see, in that artificial darkness of the cinema hall, what he was really looking at. She was certain that he was looking at the actress’s bare legs and hands and all that he wanted to see in women like her but couldn’t. These two parallel experiences – of watching a film and trying to guess the effect the series of moving images had had on her lover – exhausted her. But The Guns of Navarone was, she expected, a war film. It was a film suited to the mood of the times, possibly about war and fights and cannons and blood and all that she hated, but they – and everyone – needed to watch it.

  When she went to watch a Bengali film, or even a Hindi movie, she tried to dress like the main actress in the film. It made women like her happy, to emerge from the cinema hall looking a bit like these actresses, and she liked to believe that it made their men proud to be with them. But when she watched an English film and came out of the theatre, she remained unchanged. There was no actress whose style she could copy – she wasn’t like them at all and they were not like her. She couldn’t, after all, wear those dresses or cut her hair short up to the ears or walk with her chest held tight outwards. The English film did not change her at all – she emerged from the experience, her being unaffected, like a tourist.

  But then, her experience of the war was also that of a tourist.

  ‘We will be show caused,’ he said without looking at her. All six of them, for closing the bank and running away.

  It was a new word; perhaps it was a military term, she thought. Also, she thought that ‘we’ meant Indians, she and his countrymen and ‘show causing’ was something like ‘shelling’. She would go back to her hostel and stick a few more pieces of paper on the window – that would perhaps protect them from ‘show causing’.

  ‘Oh,’ she said gravely and looked at his feet. There was a film of white dust on his feet and his sandals.

  He then told her about the deserted town of Balurghat and how they – a handful of bankers – had been the last to leave the place. His family had left for Pakur, a small stony town in Bihar where his eldest sister lived in a joint family of ninety-three members; his father and his brothers, all goldsmiths, carrying gold biscuits with them in their underwear. Even the cows and the goats were dead; the tulsi mawncho in the courtyard had also been destroyed. His mother, he had heard from a relative, had stopped talking ever since that journey. No one knew whether they would ever be able to return; no one was sure whether they wanted to return either.

  He would later tell her other stories, about discovering the dead bodies of seven hundred Indian soldiers at a railway station in Bangladesh. That station was also called Hili. In brackets, however, was the important difference: this was Hili (Bangladesh), not the Indian Hili. But the story that she liked to remember was about him: he had hidden a pair of gold earrings that he’d bought for her, for their wedding, in his underwear. The sharp edges had pierced his testicles all night, making him scream in pain every time the bus jumped on bad roads. Here it is, he said putting it in her hands. He wasn’t sure whether they’d be able to get married; he wasn’t sure whether they’d be alive. ‘Who was?’ he asked her. ‘Do you know anyone,’ he asked, ‘anyone who is sure that he won’t die in the war?’

  ‘Indira Gandhi,’ she said, suddenly proud of herself.

  No, he was sure
that even she wasn’t sure.

  ‘Wear them. Let me see how you look,’ he said sadly.

  She didn’t open the thin, dark pink paper wrapping; instead, she tried to guess their design by feeling them with her fingers.

  ‘Wear them, Tooki,’ he said again.

  This nickname in his voice brought tears to her eyes. She looked at him.

  ‘They’re not dirty anymore. I washed them with soap and water this morning.’

  Both of them smiled, he allowing the smile to change into gentle laughter.

  The earrings made a little tinkling sound as she walked, as if they were cow-bells. This was his analogy and she pretended to be angry for a few moments. I’ll be your cowherd, he said, your cow-bell earrings will call me back home at dusk. (Many years later, when her daughter would ask her to recall the most romantic thing he had ever told her, she would name this incident. ‘Baba called you a cow and you think it’s romantic, Ma?’ her daughter would taunt. But it was the times – love was always a metaphor. They never told each other how much they loved or whether they loved at all. Language was all gesture, in spite of the war.)