My Mother's Lover and Other Stories

by Sumana Roy

  I hate archives.

  But if there’s anything I dislike more, it is the overload of information that I force myself to carry inside my head.

  The teeth in the steel jar cannot be innocent. I know too much. Friedrich Pfeffer, a dentist, was Anne Frank’s ‘roommate’ in Amsterdam. He used to treat the inmates of the house for ‘bad breath’ and other dental problems. Did he keep the extracted teeth of the Frank family in this jar?

  A part of me is aware that I might be hallucinating, but that is suppressed by the stronger urge to believe. I find the two parts of my self at war. This is the effect of history, of it coming to us in corrupt versions – everything is speculation. This is the country of Walter Benjamin – his ghost attends every seminar and conference here. Just yesterday, I heard a woman say ‘Angelus Novus’ a few times. She read out quotations in German. The English translation moved like an ant through my head, from left to right.

  A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

  ‘His mouth is open’ – are his teeth visible, or have they been extracted?

  History here is more alive than men. It is a disease, an epidemic. I am scared that I might have been touched by its contagion.

  Am I turning mad?

  Where is Paulina? Has it turned her mad?

  ‘Paulina,’ I scream, running towards the sky. I think it’s her, standing on the edge of the wall, about to take flight, as if she were the angel of history. ‘Paulina,’ I shout again. ‘Whose teeth are these?’

  Although she doesn’t answer, I can hear her say them. ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Paulina, you’ll fall down. Get down from there. Please.’

  She doesn’t respond.

  I throw the teeth at her. Or are these only pebbles that I’ve been imagining as teeth? Are they peppermint tablets?

  ‘Have you gone mad?’ she shouts back, rushing towards me, braving the shower of teeth. ‘Have you gone mad?’ she says again.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I say, as if I were History. Or Benjamin about to swallow morphine. Aren’t both the same? I’m not sure.

  Beside the Madman’s House

  ‘Madness is the acme of intelligence.’

  —Naguib Mahfouz

  EVEN NOW MY FRIENDS use the old description to give directions to my house: ‘Right beside the madman’s house.’ My parents too, when explaining the location of our house to courier boys, will use the same phrase: ‘Right beside the madman’s house.’

  It is evidently easy to spot landmarks – a shop, a temple, a school, a restaurant – but how is a stranger to identify a madman’s house? From the time I began to get a sense of things, I would look at the house and wonder how different it was from ours. The same sloping asbestos roof on a single-storeyed house, a patch of ground leading to a confused pair of stairs that took one to its insides through a lazy verandah – our house was painted blue, the colour made gentler by rain and time; the madman’s house was painted… It must have been painted once upon a time, but it was now almost impossible to tell its colour. Was its colour a giveaway then, to the madness of its resident?

  I still remember this. One morning – I think it was in 1986, when I was in the sixth grade – I woke up crying from a dream. My parents, who usually paid no attention to our dreams, all their energies being spent on how to survive a month in a couple of thousand rupees, stopped by my bed.

  ‘Why are you crying?’ my father asked.

  I didn’t know that I was crying. And so when my mother asked me the same question, I turned to look at my sister sleeping beside me. She wasn’t there.

  I told them why I’d been crying in my sleep. The madman next door was giving directions to someone on the phone – ‘Right beside the mad person’s house.’ He was calling our house a mad person’s house.

  My parents looked slightly disturbed about my dream, but soon explained it in their characteristic matter-of-fact manner: ‘Like the night is the opposite of day, what happens in our dreams is the opposite of what actually happens in our lives.’

  Later, I tried to remember what the madman looked like in my dream. That was because I had never seen the madman. But I couldn’t.

  All through my childhood, he was the tourist attraction – my friends would ask to see him when they came for my birthday parties, as if he was a magician or joker whom my parents had paid to entertain us. ‘Where is he?’ they’d ask, pointing at the house. They’d all leave disappointed, as if a ghost hadn’t kept an appointment with them. A few times, when I’d ask them to yet another birthday party, they’d ask, ‘Will we get to see the madman this time?’

  This made me angry, as much with them as with the madman. Living next to a haunted house would’ve been easier – people wouldn’t have come with the complete assurance of sighting a ghost. There’d have been a little mortgage of fear too, and the disappointment would’ve been annotated with a sense of relief. But a madman? Why, why did they want to see a madman?

  Apart from a skinny man in rags who pretended to be a traffic sergeant at the crossing near Panitanki More, I hadn’t really seen a madman. I didn’t know whether he was really mad – my friend Ankur, who sat next to me in class, told me that he was actually a ‘spy in borrowed uniform’. Although those rags didn’t resemble the police uniform, I believed him. So I spent the first few years of my life knowing nothing about madness and mad people. Whether it had identifiable characteristics such as vitiligo or birthmarks or a particular kind of pimple or a permanent fever I didn’t know.

  What I did know was something that my mother taught us – it was wrong to call a madman mad.

  My sister, always argumentative, wouldn’t accept that instruction. ‘Why? You say I have a fever when I have a fever. Why can’t we then…?’

  My mother ignored such inconsequential rebellions. As long as we passed in Maths and English and didn’t have lice in our hair, she remained unaffected.

  And then in grade six, I discovered the first madman. He was in our History textbook. I was surprised that the writer had ignored my mother’s instruction – they’d called a madman a madman. And it was no ordinary madman – the madman was a king. His name was Muhammad Bin Tughlaq. But our History teacher did not spend a minute on talking about his madness. Only his mad actions were enumerated – we even had to rote-learn them for our exams, that he was called ‘a mixture of contradictions’ (though I wrote ‘a mixture of contraries’ in my exam paper!). I was angry – for I was old enough to realise that characteristics of madness were individual-specific, that Tughlaq’s madness would be different from Akbar’s, if the latter was mad at all. How did one identify madness then?

  The specialised field of madness was reiterated in an idiom that surrounded me – ‘Send them to Ranchi.’ In Ranchi was a sanatorium for the mad. Shiraj, a classmate, had heard about the ‘electric treatment’ there – that those who were mad had two electric wires which fed their heads with voltage. This piece of information energised our imagination but scared us equally. We knew that we didn’t want to be mad.

  ‘Why don’t they take the madman to Ranchi?’ I ask my mother one day.

  She’s in our tiny prayer room, offering nokul-dana and water to the gods and goddesses – everything is shrunk in this room, its size, the size of its residents, the utensils in which the food and water are serv
ed, the length of the garlands, the tiny bodies of the worshipped, as if heaven, where the gods lived, was a version of Lilliput-land. My mother pretends not to hear my question. She always does this, when she’s in that room, relinquishing powers of speech and hearing as soon as she enters it, as if God wanted worshippers to behave in that manner.

  I ask, again.

  She makes a gesture with her face that I can’t understand. The prayer room is like Ranchi, I think, though I haven’t seen the latter – it turns people who enter it into strange creatures.

  By the time she comes out of the room I am impatient. ‘What does the madman look like, Ma?’ I ask.

  ‘Who?’ She is walking towards the kitchen, her wet feet leaving imprints on the floor. It is cold, and she is walking on her toes, so that the floor is stamped with only a pair of three marks each.

  Do madmen walk like that? I wonder. I’ll get all my answers out of her today, even if it means being scolded. ‘Who else? The madman, the madman in that house.’

  ‘There’s no madman anywhere,’ she says. ‘There’s mustard oil in a steel bowl next to the soap dish in the bathroom. Rub your legs with it. Look at them – scaly, as if chalk was falling off a blackboard!’

  I hate how secretive my parents are, how they never share their adult worlds with us, my sister and me, but are angry if we keep secrets from them. But not anymore, I decide. ‘You have to tell me what the madman looks like,’ I insist.

  ‘Don’t be mad,’ she scolds me gently, ‘why are you obsessing about a madman?’

  I get angry with her use of the word ‘mad’ for me, but I am decided, I won’t let it get in the way of my answer. ‘It’s part of our school project,’ I lie without thought.

  ‘What?’

  ‘We have to write about a madman we know.’

  ‘Really? Which subject is this for? I’ve never heard anything as ridiculous as this!’

  ‘History,’ I say, thinking of the mad king Tughlaq.

  ‘History?’ Her voice is slightly softer now. It’s possible that she’s beginning to believe me. ‘But why would your History teacher – what’s her name? – give you such a project?’

  ‘How would I know?’ I say, and then thinking hard – very hard – I add, ‘She said that we must find out histories of people without histories.’ I wasn’t making this up completely. Mrs Ghosh, our History teacher, had actually said that on Teacher’s Day – ‘When you grow up, you must write the history of teachers like us. You must ask why there is no history of a single teacher in the History books you read.’

  ‘Oh, really? And what are your friends doing? Surely there aren’t as many madmen in Siliguri as there are students in your class?’

  ‘Please tell me what our madman looks like, Ma.’

  ‘There are no photos of him in our albums…’

  ‘But you’ve seen him, haven’t you?’

  ‘How would I know?’

  ‘How would you not know…’

  ‘I came to this house after he’d become mad. Like you, I’ve only heard about his madness,’ she says, as if that is explanation enough.

  ‘Do madmen become invisible after they become mad?’ I ask.

  ‘Don’t ask stupid questions. Now go and bathe.’

  It was eventually my Music teacher who took me to see the madman. Perhaps he had no choice. He was teaching me Raga Bhairav – ‘Jago mohan pyare.’ I was too young to know the near-uselessness of words in Hindustani classical music, that one could repeat the same phrase over and over again and never really reach the end. I, however, practised with the sole longing to reach the end. It was more tortuous than physical sports, athletics and track events in school, in all of which I came last. I hated singing to beat and tune. I had no use for the song – addressed to ‘Mohan’, one of the many names for Krishna; it was meant to wake him up. I didn’t understand most of the lyrics that followed the first line, and I thought them redundant – if I sang close to where someone was sleeping, the person would wake up anyway! The rest of the song was therefore unnecessary.

  But there was My music teacher, trying to get me to sing to tune. I wanted to ask how a sleeping man – so what if he was God in this lifetime! – could be bothered whether I was singing in tune or not. But I was only twelve years old.

  ‘Dha. This dha is different. Listen to me,’ he’d say, playing it one more time for me.

  Like the raga, the singing session seemed never-ending. I tried to pour my voice into the dha, but it spilled over. I just couldn’t get it right. My stomach complained in hunger. It is possible that its dha was more tuneful than what was coming out of my throat.

  Suddenly, I heard the sound of things breaking, the noise drowning my teacher’s dha at last. I ran to the window, my teacher to the door. ‘It might be my bicycle tyre … it’s burst,’ he said, slightly embarrassed, as if he’d farted.

  It might have been the sound of thunder, for lightning was scratching the sky. I turned back to say that to my teacher. But he was gone.

  And so I stood by the window, looking at the madman’s house. Things were falling out of it like spit from an old man’s mouth. Perhaps the kitchen had caught fire, because pots and pans and plates and ladles were storming out of it on to the ground. But there was no sign of smoke at all. Then pillows, then towels and bed sheets, then a bucket and plastic mug, then things I couldn’t identify, tiny things (they might have been medicines) and then books, one after the other. This continued for a long time, an unending procession of books landing on their stomachs on the ground, some of them breaking their spines. The energy was so infectious that I was tempted to throw the harmonium out of my room exactly like that. I might have, had it not been so heavy – I’d have blamed it on the madman later.

  My music teacher had returned to the room. ‘I went to check my bicycle downstairs. The tyres are fine. But…’

  Disappointed that he hadn’t left yet, I decided that I had to get rid of him somehow. My sister and I had done that once – she’d thrown stones on our tin roof and mugs of water on the pathway, and I’d told him that it was a hailstorm and that he should probably leave early, in case it grew worse. Unable to think of anything, I began to play the harmonium. Fast, very fast, so that my fingers slipped from the keys and it seemed that the harmonium would either cry or collapse. Accompanying it, inside my head and ears, though I hadn’t orchestrated it, of course, was the sound of things being thrown from a little while ago, an unexpected accompaniment. Together, the sounds created a kind of claustrophobia – it made me want to throw up, I couldn’t be sure what it did to my Music teacher.

  ‘Stop,’ he shouted.

  Although I’d been waiting for him to say that all afternoon, I couldn’t stop. It was as if the keys of the harmonium were playing with my fingers and not the other way round. I’d lost control. Was I pretending? Even now, when I think back to the moment, more than thirty years later, I cannot explain what’d happened to me. I still remember the sound – my finger slipping on dha, pressing it again and again, like a mountaineer slipping and falling off a slope but not giving up. Repeating something, the same note, for instance, I learnt that day, creates not boredom but cacophony.

  ‘STOP!’ he shouted.

  But it was beyond my control. I can’t remember anymore whether I was pretending to do this, of being unable to stop.

  ‘Stop, stop, stop!’ He was now saying the word in English, either to amplify the sense of emergency or perhaps because he thought my English medium education would make me more alert to the word.

  But I did not – could not – stop.

  ‘Are you going mad too?’ he said. He meant those words – the fear showed on his face, it wasn’t just the casual use of ‘You are mad’ or ‘pagal.’

  ‘Too?’ I wanted to ask but probably didn’t. I can’t remember exactly now.

  I do remember that he looked ill. ‘Do you know why someone goes mad?’

  Before I could shake my head – I didn’t know, of course – he was answer
ing the question. ‘When they lose sur and taal – for man is a composition of notes and beats, both moving together, though they might not look like it. Just as our hands and legs move in the same direction, or even the heart and our eyes, though their coordination might not be visible to us, our happiness comes from being in tune, of everything inside us being in tune with its outside. That is why you must sing in tune…’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because no madman sings in tune.’

  I had, at last, found one characteristic of madmen. That they couldn’t be singers. Happy with this piece of knowledge, I asked, ‘So there are no mad singers?’

  ‘You’re so young, so innocent. How do I explain? All artists are mad. Without madness there’d be no art, no song, no dance, no writing. Who lets out such sounds from his throat and tries to match it with an imagined perfect note? Only a singer! Who moves their body and hands and feet and eyes like that? Not a normal person. Only a dancer can!’

  I wasn’t interested in any of this. Did this mean that the madman next door was a dancer? I cannot say why the figure of the magician who’d shown us games in school came to me. ‘So it’s like being a magician? All the magic is in the magician’s hands. Where is the madman’s madness?’

  ‘It’s invisible,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘How do I know why? It’s like love or God or hunger, I suppose … I don’t know why! Don’t ask me questions like a mad person.’

  ‘How will we identify madmen then?’

  ‘Why do you need to?’

  I didn’t answer. I had no answer. I couldn’t be sure whether madmen were actually harmful or dangerous for those who were not mad.

  ‘Can you identify a singer by looking at him?’ he asked.