In the winter, they spent every Saturday afternoon on Urmi’s terrace. They brought puffed rice with them, and a stack of Enid Blyton’s books. They sat there on the terrace, the bowl of puffed rice between them, embroiled in separate adventures with a boy detective called Frederick Algernon Trotteville (Fatty to his friends). Fatty was brave. He was brilliant. He was cheeky. They both adored him, and they fought over him.
‘He’s my best friend!’
‘No, he’s mine!’
‘Prove it!’
‘I’ll give him all my toys.’
‘He won’t like your toys. He’s a boy. Then we’ll see who he likes better.’
‘Then I won’t let you play with my toys.’
That shut Orko up, because he hated his toys – a handful of dinky cars, a golliwog, a panda, a stack of jigsaw puzzles, a replica of Big Ben. Urmi’s room, on the other hand, was a wonderland. There were dolls everywhere – princess dolls, a grandma doll, a baby that cried if you pulled the pacifier out of its mouth, and a little girl doll with her own bicycle. Every time Orko thought he had seen all of Urmi’s dolls, a new one would emerge from under the bed, or from the top shelf of her cupboard. There was a doll’s house whose roof came off, so they could rearrange the furniture. There was a kitchen set, with a gas stove, a pressure cooker, an array of pots and pans, and a dinner service. There was a tea set – a tiny teapot, with matching cups and saucers, a milk jug, and a tray, made of plaster, laden with biscuits and scones. When they tired of the dolls, they would turn the study table into Toadstool House. He had to be Noddy. She always got to be Big Ears, with his magic spells.
At the time, Urmi was a little bigger than Orko, and often he would wear one of her frocks over his own clothes. Sometimes they were princesses, and they had just run away from an ogre who had kidnapped them from their father’s castle. Sometimes they were fairies, jealously guarding the idyll of their village. Sometimes they were just themselves – Urmi and Orko, playing snakes and ladders. He couldn’t give up all of that because of a silly fight over a boy in a book.
‘We can share him, can’t we?’ he asked, in conciliatory tone.
‘Hmph,’ said Urmi, as she turned a page.
That was when the crow appeared. When he landed, his wings were in a tangle; they flapped about messily as he teetered on the edge of the parapet around the terrace. After he had gathered himself, though, he was the very embodiment of grace. He pranced and he preened, picking out bits of detritus lodged in his feathers. His lustrous beak shone in the afternoon sun. They named him Fatty, after their hero. He was cocky. He was fearless. He was beautiful.
They didn’t know where Fatty lived, only that he knew they would be on the terrace every Saturday with treats for him. They loved the way Fatty cocked his head, a little leery at first of the feast laid out for him by the inscrutable humans. He would then peck away daintily at the puffed rice. When it had all disappeared, he would cock his head again to see if they had anything more for him. He would strut about, cawing at them, before flying away to his perch in the giant gulmohur tree by the parking lot.
Fatty kept them company through that winter. He seemed to know when to come looking for them.
‘Do you think he can count to seven?’ Orko asked Urmi one day, after Fatty flew away.
‘Don’t be silly. Crows can’t count.’
‘How does he remember to come every Saturday, then?’ he countered.
‘Well, I don’t know,’ said Urmi.
‘What if he comes every day?’
One Saturday, when Fatty failed to appear, they decided he had gone to France with his parents. They waited eagerly for him to return, but he never did.
The last time Orko went to Urmi’s flat was a few weeks ago. He was at her front door, and just as he was about to ring the bell, he heard Urmi’s voice.
‘That ungrateful brat,’ she said. ‘I never want to see him again.’
‘You mustn’t be cruel to him,’ her mother said. ‘His mother is gone, and his father chooses to live here, instead of moving in with his parents. Please, be nice to him.’
Orko shrank away from the doorbell. He tiptoed down the stairs and ran back home.
That morning, Urmi had announced to her friends that she was moving to a different school after their board exams. It was an elite girls’ school, and Orko’s mother was an alumna. Orko was jealous; it wasn’t fair – why did Urmi get to go to his mother’s school? How could she brag about it, knowing that he couldn’t follow her there?
‘You’re such a show-off,’ he said to her. They didn’t speak for the rest of the day.
Although Urmi is his best friend, Orko has always been jealous of her. It started when they were six years old, maybe seven. There was a dance recital at their school, and Urmi was one of the dancers. Orko wanted to be in the dance, but their class teacher told him he couldn’t. The dance was only for the girls. She encouraged him to try out for the play the boys were putting on. Orko pleaded, cajoled and threw tantrums until his teacher relented.
On the day of the recital, the dancers were dressed in white sarees with red borders. They had flowers in their hair, the leaves and tendrils painted onto their foreheads in sandalwood paste. They pranced, they twirled, their bodies moving to the rhythm of the music. Orko was dressed in a green shirt and a pair of brown corduroy trousers that didn’t fit, because they were borrowed for the occasion from an older cousin. His part was to stand, with his arms apart, and hold as still as possible. He was a tree, flowerless, devoid of life. After the dance, the boys in his class named him ‘Palm Tree’, after Tagore’s poem of that name. They called him that all the time. He had to beg them to stop. Urmi didn’t partake in the teasing, and Orko was grateful.
Now, Orko can’t help but wonder if Urmi refrained from teasing him because her mother had asked her to be kind to him. He didn’t need her kindness. He is glad they live here, in the enclave. He can’t bear the thought of moving in with his father’s family.
Orko’s paternal grandparents live in a large house with a lawn in the front and a vegetable garden in the back. His grandmother and grandfather live on the ground floor, in separate rooms. His uncle, his aunt and their two children live on the first floor – Robi is two years older than Orko, Ria a month younger.
When he was younger, Orko and his parents went to the house every Sunday. The family ate lunch together. Orko’s grandfather sat at the head of the table, flanked by his two sons. The children sat at the other end. Robi sat facing his grandfather, with Ria to his right. Orko sat opposite Ria. Two chairs remained vacant.
They always sat this way. Orko’s mother and his aunt served everyone individually, while his grandmother supervised the kitchen staff.
There was no conversation during meals. ‘Charm, chew, masticate and swallow,’ his grandfather would say. They would start their meal only after Orko’s grandfather had brought the first morsel of rice to his lips. The bitter gourd, and the dal, followed by a vegetable, followed by fish. It never changed. Nothing ever changed in that house.
When they finished, a servant cleared away the used plates and set three places, for Orko’s grandmother, his mother and his aunt. Sometimes Orko and Ria lingered. Maybe they would get a handful of potato fritters, or overhear conversation about their new cousin, just born, in a foreign country, seven oceans away. Maybe they would learn that a wedding was to take place, or that their cook was going to be a grandmother, yet again. Sometimes the women let them stay, but on most afternoons they were shooed away.
After lunch, they had to be very quiet. The grown-ups retired to their rooms for a siesta. Orko’s father still had a room in the house. The room was sparsely furnished, with a queen-sized bed, a writing desk and an armchair. Buried in Orko’s memories is a faded picture of his mother, sleeping on that bed. He can’t be sure how old he is in the picture. He can’t remember if they spent the night, or if his mother was taking a siesta like the rest of the grown-ups.
Orko’s father isn�
�t in that picture. Perhaps he was in the living room, reading. Once, when he was about seven or eight (he can’t remember if it was before or after his mother’s passing), Orko had followed his father into the living room after they had finished lunch. Nandan settled into his favourite armchair, with a book he had picked out from one of the many bookshelves in the room. Orko sat in the chair that was beside his father’s. He remembers that he was very quiet, and he didn’t move or fidget. His father looked distinctly uncomfortable, his brow furrowed. He flipped through the pages of the book for a while. Then he shut it and placed it in his lap. ‘Why don’t you go and play with Ria?’ he asked. Orko ran out of the room and up the stairs. He remembers looking for Ria, and not finding her. There were four bedrooms on the first floor, and all the doors were shut.
Orko wanted to run away, but to do that he would have to go past his father in the living room. It was summer; the terrace was out of bounds. So he did the next thing that came to mind. He shut himself in the bathroom.
It was a large bathroom, one of two on the first floor. It was the bathroom with the red mosaic floor. The mirror was set too high on the wall, so he turned a bucket upside down and stood on it. He switched on the shaving light. His face shone yellow.
By the mirror was a cabinet, and that was his first time opening it. Inside, among shaving paraphernalia and packets of hair colour, was a stick of eyeliner. He took the black pencil and drew little studs onto his earlobes. He parted his hair in the middle. It was an improvement, but he still wasn’t happy. His hair was too short.
There was a tube of toothpaste on the ledge by the washbasin. He wanted to squeeze all of it out into a squiggly snake on the floor. He didn’t, because he had done that once, and his mother had made him clean it up, all by himself. He squeezed out a drop on his finger and licked it with the tip of his tongue. It tasted horrible. He rinsed out his mouth, then ran out of the bathroom to look for Ria again.
In the winter, Ria and Orko spent these afternoons playing hopscotch on the terrace. In the summer, they were at loose ends – they played made-up games, or told each other stories about princesses and dragons. That afternoon Ria was nowhere to be found. Unlike her older brother, she didn’t have a room to herself; she shared her parents’ bedroom. Perhaps she was asleep with her parents.
Orko pretended that it was the dead of night, and that he had broken in. He tiptoed about the first floor, looking for treasure that he might plunder, but he was so bored that he decided to make his escape via the terrace. He ran up the stairs, only to find the door locked. He sat there, by the unyielding door, and tried to think of ways to make his father stop hating him.
When he came back down the stairs, his aunt was by the bathroom door. Orko’s heart skipped a beat. He had left the light on, and the tube of toothpaste was still on the floor.
‘I love your earrings,’ his aunt said, smiling at him as she switched off the light.
Orko sometimes wished Ria lived with him and his father, in their flat. Try as he might, he can’t imagine living in that big house with all those people and their laundry list of rules and regulations. He would rather eat with the women, but in that house no one ever asked children what they wanted to do. When Orko went there with his father, Nandan turned into a completely different man; Orko struggled to reconcile this stranger with the father who lived with him and cared for him.
If Urmi’s mother knew all of this, she certainly wouldn’t think that Orko would be better off in his grandfather’s house. He bristles with indignation, because he doesn’t want concessions just because he has no mother. He does not want to be fed to the gills, and he does not care to be friends with someone who is being kind to him just because her mother said she should.
Orko is at the Kalighat crematorium today, with his father, his uncle, his grandfather and a handful of other men, most of whom he has only met occasionally. There’s conversation, about politics and about the partition of Bengal. He could believe that they were at a wedding reception, if it wasn’t for the body of Jatin-dadu, his great-uncle, laid out on the rough-hewn bier a few feet away.
They’ve been waiting here for almost an hour now, on these concrete benches just outside the cremation hall. There’s the distinctive crematorium smell in the air; after his first visit, Orko wrote about this smell in one of his notebooks, calling it the smell of death. Now, he thinks it was lazy shorthand for a complex bouquet of odours – there’s the smell from the ovens, of course, but there’s also the smell of burning incense, of tuberose and, strangely enough, of spoiling food. It isn’t the smell of death, because the deaths that have brought the mourners here have occurred many hours ago.
Orko doesn’t want to be here. His cousins aren’t here. Robi is exempt on account of his ongoing school board examinations, Ria because she is a girl.
‘He was your grandfather’s oldest brother,’ Nandan said when Orko tried to talk his way out of coming. ‘You’re supposed to show up when a family member dies. How would you feel if you had to bring my body to the crematorium all by yourself?’
Orko’s aunt Sudeshna, his mother’s sister, once told him that he had been too young to have gone to the crematorium with his mother’s body. She insisted that he was in the room when they finally took his mother away. Orko has no memory of this. He tries to picture his mother’s hearse, making its way to Kalighat. The mobile greenhouse carrying the body leads the procession. The family follows in white Ambassadors, scattering marigold petals and puffed rice to mark the path of the final journey. Just as the body is unloaded from the carriage and lined up for cremation, the scene fades away and he finds himself face to face with Jatin-dadu’s body.
He can’t imagine his mother’s body, her nostrils and ear canals closed off with cottonwool, surrounded by callous, unfeeling men who are waiting impatiently to cast her into the oven. He closes his eyes; the voices fade away; images swirl, dreamlike, half-real, blue. He’s six years old. They’re swimming, Orko and his mother, in the ocean, where no one will find them.
‘I never want to go to the crematorium again,’ Orko declares at breakfast the next morning. None of his friends have ever been to the crematorium. Very few have even seen a dead body. His father responds with an aphorism about life and death and escapism, but Orko isn’t really listening.
‘We’re all going to die,’ his father continues. ‘You must try not to be horrified by the process.’
Orko pictures a grown-up version of himself, sitting on the concrete bench at the crematorium. He is with yet another dead body. His manner is laconic, and he’s completely at ease with the atmosphere of death around him. He participates actively in stultifying conversation with his kinsmen. He shakes his head, but the image refuses to fade.
‘What is it?’ his father asks.
‘Nothing,’ Orko replies.
He remembers visiting Jatin-dadu with his parents, many years ago.
‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ the old man had asked him.
‘I want to be like ma,’ Orko replied, stealing a glance at his mother, seated across the room. It took some prodding from his father before he understood that he was being asked an entirely different question.
‘I want to drive a train,’ he said eventually.
Jatin-dadu let out a guffaw. ‘You’re very young. You’ll figure something out when you’re older. You could be an engineer, like your father. You could even be a doctor. The possibilities are endless.’
Orko didn’t want to be like his father. He didn’t want to go to the university every morning, with a steel tiffin box and a battered leather briefcase, wearing dark trousers and a full-sleeved shirt, white, with stripes so fine you couldn’t see them from a few feet away. He wanted to drive his train with the wind, through tunnels and paddy fields and forests and along the seashore, for days on end, drinking from a bottle of Thums Up, lunching on sandwiches (cheese and tomato, like his mother made).
He knows now that he isn’t going to be a train driver, and he i
sn’t going to be like his mother. He still doesn’t want to be like his father. He wants to fly, like a bird. He wants to learn how to play the guitar. He wants to dance, alone, beneath a starlit sky. Most of all, he wants to swim.
Orko’s earliest memory is of drowning, almost. He remembers the shock from the cold water as it gave way to his flailing body. He gasped and he spluttered as the water closed in around him, gurgling in his ears. When his toes made contact with the floor, there was a deafening silence. He couldn’t see anything for the bright blue all around him. He knew, instinctively, that no one could see him – he was all alone, at the bottom of the pool. He began to scream, but the water rushed into his lungs, and he thought that he was going to die.
Those terrifying moments are benign now, frozen in a series of still images, black, white and blue. His mother’s hands in his armpits, the sweet sensation of air rushing into his lungs, treading water, forgetting to and sinking again, his mother’s voice, an incantation in a forgotten language.
The memories are still available for immediate recall. He can smell the chlorine, and imagine the texture of his shrivelled fingertips. He remembers his mother’s voice, coaxing him out of the water with the promise of ice cream. She held him, telling him he’d been very good, and that one day he was going to be a great swimmer. The smell of lavender talc fought the caustic odour of chlorine as she ushered him into the ladies’ changing rooms. Afterwards, she took him to the ice cream booth and bought him a strawberry ice cream, in a waffle cone. They walked out of the club and boarded a tram. His mother fished out her coin purse from her large shoulder bag and counted out change for their tickets. The conductor declined to issue a ticket for Orko, telling his mother that her baby didn’t need one. Orko remembers saying that he was not a baby – he was occupying a whole seat, and he knew how to swim.
Fern Road Page 2
