The plans of the evening came, unsurprisingly, to nothing the next day. The police wanted to question the servants again, and Bishu and Uma took Priti and their few possessions and walked towards the main road, with its smoke and noise, to catch a bus to Manecktala. Priti looked curiously around her; she thought it was merely an outing. At the bus stop, Bishu said: “After I leaves you at Manecktala, I goes to see Mejda”; Uma seemed not to have heard. Today, before leaving, no goodbyes had been said to the other servants; only the money was collected from Mr. Banerjee and a signature written inside a notebook. “We’re going, dadababu,” said Bishu, and Mr. Banerjee said: “Keep well.” It was a journey from the centre of the city, Ballygunge, with its tall buildings and shops, to what was much farther away and older. The room in the outhouse had not been much, but it had been something in an area where even the rich cannot afford houses; it had given Bishu and Uma a place to stay in proximity to the lives of the well-off, to employment, and yet given them the independence for the life of their small and new family. Now that phase of their lives, which, after all, was so relatively brief that they had hardly become used to it, was ending, and another was about to begin.
Beyond Translation
THE DAKKHINEE BOOKSHOP, at the turning of Lansdowne Road and Rashbehari Avenue — it was really no more than a pavement bookstall. It stands even now, though with more than half its books gone, still doing business, but a shadow of its former self. Yet if you go down Rashbehari Avenue towards Lake Market in the evening, you can still see it, a series of cupboards against a wall, lit by an electric light, and books leaning against one another upon bookshelves behind their glass-paned doors; a wonderful bookshelf, exposed to the surrounding pavement and the traffic, as if the house around it had uncannily disappeared.
When I was a boy, and a visitor to Calcutta and my cousins’ house, this was the main bookshop in the area; although it was a good half hour away from where my cousins lived, we would trek to it on foot, either with one another, or with our parents and aunts, on certain days. Any passing car at that time and that year would have seen three boys there, their backs to the road, their heads bent.
Then we would return home with the books in our hands, adventure annuals and mystery stories, my book an English one, and my cousins’ books in Bengali. Childhood was a time when I read nothing in Bengali, and my cousins nothing in English; yet none of us really needed to encroach on the others’ territory, so rich was the store of children’s literature in both languages. Sitting side by side, we would begin to read almost immediately, enveloped in the same contentment as we read our books in different languages, inhabiting different imaginary worlds.
As we read, the routines of the house continued around us. For instance, the maid might be swabbing the floor and the stairs, leaving dark arcs on the red stone. How swift and anonymous and habitual was her task, almost as if a ghost had done it, leaving those dark, moist marks on the floor, which dried and disappeared soon after! Downstairs, my aunt — my cousins’ mother — might be overseeing something in the kitchen, while my uncle might be preparing to have an early lunch before going out to work at his small business.
We sat just anywhere while reading, suspending activity, waiting for the story or the book to finish — on the stairs, against the side of a bed, on the floor. It might be the years of the Naxal uprising outside, with young men drawn into the movement, into the spilling of blood, blood that could not be recovered, and the lane, in which both Naxal and Congress supporters lived in some of the houses, was traumatised by those years. Cries would be heard; bottles broken; far away, the explosion of a homemade device. My uncle did not know what to make of this; with his shawl wrapped around his kurta, he was both voluble and innocent; he had always supported the Marxists, but now this was destroying his business, and would drive him to the verge of bankruptcy. Then the years passed. And we still sat reading side by side, of worlds that could not be translated into each other; the changes around us came to us as sounds in the street and from downstairs, that were adornments to our consciousness.
My uncle’s business never took off; it was a failure from the start. But optimism never flagged, either. Sometimes, my aunt would come upstairs while we read, perhaps to rearrange something — a pillow on the bed — or to have her bath and do her puja, or to call us downstairs for food. I would be reading about lighthouses, boating adventures, mountain expeditions, while my cousins read about mad scientists and mysteries that Hemendra Kumar Ray had created, about holy men and the seven seas and bloodthirsty kings. Every paisa my aunt spent had to be counted; but they — my uncle and aunt — had great reserves of hospitality and tolerance, so that their worries and struggles never marked their behaviour.
My aunt — whom I will call Shobha mami — hovered around as we sat with our books in our hands; her presence brought us comfort while our minds raced with demons, usurped kingdoms, seashores, and collapsing houses. She was one of those people who have a gift with children, who draw an enchantment around them without any seeming effort; and the spell lasts all childhood. On growing up, I have not come any closer to her; it is almost as if she became someone else; and this is so, most probably, because I knew her as a child. Then, her flaws, her human failings, and the complexity of her character were concealed from me: she appeared to me as a myth would. It was partly, of course, that she was in the midst of her life’s beginning; only nine or ten years married, her life had still not closed into a pattern. It was not that she touched or held or kissed us. Her magic and contact were more subtle; she would sort out fish bones for us from a difficult fish; she would tease and joke with us; she would return home, flushed from the market. And she would treat us all alike; not as if we were, all three of us, her sons, but as if we were infinitely and equally interesting. It strikes me now how little I know her, or knew of her desires, fears, affections; but she cannot have been wholly an enigma; it is said that children sometimes see a side of a person that others do not, and if so, we saw a side of her that even she might not have been entirely conscious of.
They were hospitable people; and, in spite of their various burdens during that difficult time, relatives from other parts of the country were always staying with them as students, or visitors (as I was), or as those who were passing through the city. Downstairs there lived for many years an older cousin, brilliant student, son of a widowed aunt, who had left his house in Assam to study in Calcutta and was a mere twelve or thirteen years older than us, and thus almost a contemporary; he would later become a very rich man in America. From time to time, voices came upstairs, of my aunt, our cousin, my uncle, a discussion between the men, talk of lockouts and debts.