In one swift swarm they reached his mother’s room. Ritwik saw her, awkwardly reclined on the floor, trying to stretch out beside the low bed but failing, her jaw a fluid, mobile line involved in the painful formation of words which kept slipping away from the solid, sharp edges they unthinkingly assumed in healthy people. Her eyes were trying both to shut and to keep open at the same time, as if seeking a fugitive point of focus that kept eluding her. The elastic slippages of the words managed somehow to convey ‘pain’ and ‘head’. Ritwik barked out to nobody in particular, ‘Why are you shouting? Why are you all crowding around her? Move away, give her some air!’
It did not take long for the neighbourhood doctor, who had come quickly, to conduct a few basic tests — scratching a key on the soles of her feet, asking her, a bit too loudly and slowly, as if speaking to a retarded child, to focus on the tip of a pen which he held in his fingers and moved from one point to another in a straight horizontal line — and confirm what was already nudging darkly at the back of Ritwik’s mind: she had had a massive cerebral stroke (‘hemiplegia’ was the word the doctor used) and was to be rushed to the intensive care unit of a hospital.
There were no ambulances in Calcutta. Assuming you had a telephone in the first place, there were no emergency numbers to dial either. Although Ritwik’s childhood had been dotted here and there with the excitement of seeing fire engines rush past, a standing fireman in an overlarge helmet clanging a loud bell with a stick or pulling the string attached to it, he had no idea how it had been summoned. A phone call or someone running to fetch it? In any case, they did not have a telephone and it would have meant going upstairs to Tabbu’s flat to use their phone, so someone had to go to the bus stop, a ten-minute walk away, and fetch a taxi from the rank there.
His mother had meanwhile thrown up the chyme of boiled rice, boiled potatoes, boiled green bananas — a sure sign, the doctor had said, of cerebral haemorrhage. In popular belief it was a ‘medical’ indication that things were very serious indeed. There was a short, tense debate between Ritwik and his uncles whether carrying her horizontally to the taxi parked outside would exacerbate her condition or whether supporting her two arms around the necks of two strong men and walking her to the taxi would be more damaging. In the end, it was decided she would be walked out, supported by Pradip-mama on one side and Pratik-mama on the other, with Ritwik following closely to offer additional help should it be needed.
There was a crowd now: neighbours congregating in the balconies of nearby houses, trying, and failing, to be discreet as they looked on; the throng surrounding the passage of his mother from the house to the taxi outside (they had to shout ‘Make way, make way’ several times to ease the obstruction); and the assortment of relatives. There was Ria-mami, married to his oldest uncle, Pradip-mama; their daughter, the three-year old Munu, whimpering, not quite sure of what had happened but, with a child’s unerring nose, had somehow sniffed out that her favourite person in the household was going away, perhaps with no hope of return; Nisha, the maidservant; his mother’s sister, Mejo, who looked retreating and forlorn, whether from what had happened to her sister or from Ritwik’s sharp words a few minutes ago, he could not tell; Tabbu’s mother; half a dozen neighbours.
The taxi was one of those not unusual Calcutta ones which had two drivers sharing the business of driving in shifts. There was trouble fitting everyone in: Tabbu sat in front, squeezed between the two drivers, Pradip-mama, Ritwik, and Aritra in the back, with their mother half-carried, half-slumping. Ritwik’s three other uncles gathered around, wanting to clamber in, in a display of hectic participation. He came close to pointing out that the taxi couldn’t fit any more; besides, there were quite enough people to take care of things, but he held his tongue: it gave them something to do, a kind of focus to an otherwise unvaried stretch of the same day, day after day.
Throughout the dust-blown journey to the hospital, the second driver had his arm out of the passenger window and flailed a filthy red cloth, in all probability the one used for cleaning the taxi. This was the Calcutta equivalent of the warning wail of the ambulance. The hope that traffic in this city would stop or make way for a taxi with an insignificant red rag flapping out of one of its windows was risible and infuriating at the same time. How many people knew that a red rag meant a car carrying the seriously ill to hospital? Ritwik certainly didn’t until now.
The taxi went down Anwar Shah Road, turned right at Deshpran Sashmal Road, with its straight, uninterrupted stretch of tramlines, and made its way to Kalighat, its wheels sending up a dense cottony billow of yellow-grey dust that, mingled with the exhaust fumes, kept blowing into the vehicle through the open windows. It snagged in Ritwik’s mind as another worry: his mother really shouldn’t be breathing in such visibly polluted air at this time. The roads on either side of the tram tracks were dug up in places and it was a bumpy, convoluted ride, all straight lines from one point to another becoming two oblique diagonals taking in a distant, third point. With each jerk, Ritwik feared the clot in his mother’s head was oozing out more blood, or her frangible brain-lobes juddering with the impact and disintegrating like some delicate pudding that could barely hold its shape.
At Kalighat, the taxi took a left turn and went past the crematorium — the same crematorium where his mother had performed the last rites for his father nine days ago — on its way to the medical centre in Alipore. It was one of the busiest crossroads in the city. Pedestrians and traffic flowed into each other like indiscriminate waters; there were no demarcated spaces for either, no rules about their separation. A cow stood, calm and transcendent, in the middle of this barely moving, lawless sea of people, bicycles, autorickshaws, lorries, cars, buses, stray dogs and trams. A woman with stainless steel kitchen utensils balanced on her head shouted out her wares and tried to cross over to the other side towards Gariahat. All these registered in Ritwik’s head like separate photographs, without syntax. And above all this incessant noise of traffic and horns and human living, he could hear, as an abiding bass-line, the raucous cry of crows. He just had to shift the focus of his ears, from foreground to background, to hear the harsh, continuous cawing welling out over everything, like the slow, silent beginnings of a flood.
And now that it was all happening, how would he live? Throughout his teenage years, he had forced himself to think about his mother’s death, as if that willed act could deprive fate of the power at least to seize him with the suddenness of tragedy. It comes to him easily, the line, Readiness is all. Lying on the floor, between his mother and Aritra, his father on the pallet, night after sweat-saturated night he had taken himself ruthlessly through the worst scenarios and when it had all played out in his febrile imagination up to a point beyond which nothing, no hope, no solace, no consolation, nothing remained, he went one step further. It became a slowly forged shield through which the vagaries and surprises of events could scarcely touch him for he had already imagined and lived inside the worst.
What would life be without her? In some amorphous way he had always thought that all his happiness would come to an end with her death. But what if it released him instead into a terrifying new life, unshadowed by the prospect of her ageing and dying in slow degrees? What if that freedom was given him so early? If he could only push the inevitable away to some unspecified point in the future when he was old enough, a proper adult, he would be able to deal with it efficiently and well, but no, it really was happening now. It wasn’t the luxury of a safe mind toying with dark imaginings in terrified fascination any more. At thirteen, he thought twenty-five was the right age for dealing with Big Events like the death of a parent; now, at twenty-one, the notion of a safe age turned out to be a mirage, receding further and further into the distance as one approached a moving boundary. Perhaps there really wasn’t any safe age for loss.