After Lakkhi’s husband’s painful demise, she returned distractedly to the fold. In two months, her timings were awry again; midday when it should have been ten o’clock; then later than midday. And she deftly smuggled a little companion into the room adjoining the kitchen. At first, only his voice could be heard — high-pitched, pointed, intermittent, making no kind of sense; then I caught glimpses of his wispy figure.
I realised I’d seen him before. He’d been smaller then — Lakkhi’s grandchild, who’d come with her before on a couple of visits. He was still small for a four-year-old, and I was drawn to his high spirits. The boy, whose name was Raja, brought out the vagrant in me; I’d go off in the middle of my writing to investigate his whereabouts.
Raja was flattered by my attention and made a big show of avoiding me. We began to understand, after a week, that his appearances weren’t going to be exceptional — they’d be the norm, for he was arriving at our flat every day with his careless-seeming grandmother.
He was very dark: what Bengalis call kuch kuche kaalo or “extremely black”—his late grandfather’s complexion, apparently. He had an undernourished, springy agility and bright eyes. Lakkhi had no choice but to bring him along for now. Her younger daughter, Raja’s mother, was mentally challenged — that much we knew. She’d been married off six or seven years ago with the usual transactional resolve that Indians have — that life, sociability, and procreation must continue regardless, that marriage is a simple counter to the untoward. Husband and wife produced this child: further evidence of marriage’s primordial normalcy. Then, as husbands will, the man vanished. The younger daughter returned to Lakkhi, abstracted and strangely discontented. She had little awareness of or interest in Raja. He, in the meanwhile, had begun to go out on excursions, and Lakkhi found the mother in one place and the boy in another. She fretted; but she had the cooking to do. So she began to bring him to our apartment and deposit him in the kitchen.
He was a clever boy and, once he got over his shyness, full of a specious bravado. It was extraordinary to hear him in the kitchen — disrupting a place of work.
“Are you going to put him in a school?” I challenged Lakkhi. It may have slipped her mind.
“Yes, I’m looking for a place for him, somewhere I can keep him while I’m here,” she said in her characteristic way, suggestive that every decision she has to take, including removing food from the fridge, is onerous.
“A place you can pick him up from on the way back, or a place he can stay in?”
“It would be best to pick him up,” she said, again with that tortured look.
“Then it should be somewhere around here,” I said, gesturing vaguely at the haute bhadralok vicinity of Ballygunge. “I have a school in mind.”
I had a stealthy feeling my efforts would come to nothing — I’ve noticed, from a review of past actions, that my attempts to help people are usually oddly thwarted, by a combination of circumstances and probably by an overestimation by me of the wider world’s receptivity to my ideas. This prior knowledge didn’t keep me from calling Tim Grandage, who lives in my building. I know Tim slightly, but I’ve been aware that his school for orphaned children — fortuitously located in the very area we live in — is regarded by all as a genuine success. What a good place it would be for Raja, for both disposing of the problem of this boy and giving him a future — and also for giving Lakkhi a relief from chores other than cooking. Tim, however, was in England; he’d be back, I was told by his flat’s caretaker, after the Pujas. Ironically, I was just barely getting used to not being in Norwich and embracing the season’s new-found calm. Otherwise, now, I’d be teaching students as it grew dark, or sipping on an americano at Starbucks.
“I’ll pursue this when my friend returns from England,” I told Lakkhi. She nodded moodily and continued to scrape the potol, or rinse the moong pulses, or cut the chhana into little squares.
Raja began to lose his shyness. At first, it was an unconscious shedding of inhibition after lunch, when there was a lull in kitchenly activities, and an abnegation of power among those who ruled over the apartment — my parents withdrawing into nap time; I into writing; my daughter not yet back from school. Normally difficult to inveigle from the kitchen, Raja emerged in the drawing room and took over the furniture. He was quickly lost in a daydream; he’d sit on the divan or on the sofa and spend his time in one or the other posture, either with a leg in the air, or half-lying against a cushion. He was a little parody of a despot.
After eight or nine days, he was wholly not in awe of me, and as interested in my whereabouts as I’d been in his — possibly more interested. His new lack of regard and presumptuous four-year-old friendliness were my doing. I had “encouraged” him. My reasons for fraternising with Raja were selfish; I found him hilarious. Besides, “all things can tempt me from this craft of verse.” In the midst of writing about the city, I was susceptible to distraction. And now, in a manner of speaking, he was all over me. He was a tough and single-minded taskmaster: just as we demanded timely meals from his grandmother, he wanted constant diversion from me. As with my mother’s and R’s view of my work, Raja wasn’t convinced that a man sitting around with a notebook and pen was seriously occupied. I was most probably doing nothing. His way of hinting to me that he was available was by coming straight to my room after Lakkhi arrived (she was now keeping pretty erratic times), smiling vaguely, and clicking on his palate with his tongue, producing a soft, insinuating sound. When I mimicked this to R, she fell about laughing; but to me it was becoming tiresome, something which I at once looked forward to and dreaded. Familiarity was also beginning to make him provocative, and test how much of the upper hand he could gain. He had to have ownership of the remote control (irrespective of whether the TV was on or not), transporting it, like a courier, from room to room; but he also claimed, in his limited, blithe pidgin, that his TV was bigger than ours. Besides, he had his eyes on the cheap English biro with which I pursue my writing, making off with it on impulse; I hadn’t sufficiently appreciated that he had his own pen, and, in our tussle to retrieve our rightful paraphernalia, I’d sometimes take his pen and upset him deeply — but briefly, as he still had no understanding of prolonged deprivation or lack. We became a kind of exasperating drama to the maids, who felt I was ineffectual and said: “You must holler at him properly.” At the peak of our interfaces, they’d pick him up, and remove him, ignoring his scandalised cries, from my room; but he was like some sort of spring, and in five minutes he’d bounce back, ebullient, making the soft clicking noise in his mouth. I began to lock my door, which I never like doing.
The Pujas ended, I kept calling Tim Grandage’s flat and speaking to the caretaker, but Tim showed no signs of returning. Meanwhile, Lakkhi’s hours were becoming unacceptable, she was arriving close to late lunchtime, and was unrepentant and had no explanation but “I’m thinking of giving up work. I can’t take it any more — after all, I’m fifty years old.” “You’re more than fifty,” I informed her. “I’m forty-nine.” I was secretly astonished at how old I was. I would probably die one day in Calcutta — which, anyway, was as I’d planned it: that I mustn’t, by mistake, die abroad but live and spend and maybe bring to a close the second half of my life in India. It just happened that India, at this point of time, was Calcutta. Maybe most of us, without knowing it, have plans of this kind. I’m reminded of César Vallejo, who states it baldly, as a prophecy: “I will die in Paris, in a rainstorm, / On a day I already remember.” That second line—“On a day I already remember”—is shrewd, and it speaks to exactly what I have in mind — that, when it comes to such matters, the future and the past, memory and speculation, are hopelessly mixed up and devoid of chronology. Vallejo actually managed to die in Paris despite being expelled from France in 1930, eight years before his death. But his poem is meant to voice the classic melancholy of the exile with finality — for Vallejo was born in an impoverished Peruvian town. In my case, my aim — whether or not it works out — is to eventually draw my days to a close at home. After twelve years in Calcutta, I realise this notion of “home” is an invention: that, though I was born in Calcutta, I didn’t grow up here, and don’t belong here. Each year, I suspect I’ll begin to understand this city better, be more at ease with it: and every year I find this is less true.