“That side?” Mr. Mitra looked helpless; he’d given up trying to arrive on time. What preoccupied him now was not getting there, but the negotiations involved in how to get there.
It turned out that what the boy was suggesting was simple. The main road, Lansdowne Road, divided the two halves of Rai Bahadur Mullick Road; one half of Mullick Road went left, the other right.
“Don’t you know where they live?” asked Mr. Mitra as Abdul reversed and turned the car around. The over-sweet, reminiscent smell of the tuberoses rose in the front of the car with a breeze that had come unexpectedly through the window. In front of a house on the left, clothes hung to dry as a child went round and round in circles in the courtyard on a tricycle.
“But I’ve only been there three or four times — and the last time, two years ago!” she complained. “I find these lanes so confusing.”
The lanes were confusing; there were at least two, one after another, that looked exactly the same, with their clotheslines, grilles, and courtyards.
About ten or eleven days ago, they’d noticed a small item in the newspaper, and were shocked to recognise who it was. Then an obituary appeared, and Mr. Mitra had called his daughter in Delhi, who remembered Anjali from visits made in childhood. Last week another insertion had told them that “Observances will be made in memory of Mrs. Anjali Poddar, who passed away on the 23rd of February, at 11 A.M. at 49 Nishant Apartments, Rai Bahadur R.C. Mullick Road. All are welcome.”
They didn’t expect it would be a proper shraddh ceremony; they didn’t think people would be fed. So Mrs. Mitra had told the boy at home, firmly so as to impress her words upon him, “We’ll be back by one o’clock! Cook the rice and keep the daal and fish ready!” Without mentioning it clearly, they’d decided they must go to the club afterwards to get some cookies for tea, and stop at New Market on the way back. So they must leave the place soon after twelve; it was already ten past eleven.
The first to be fed was usually a crow, for whom a small ball of kneaded aata was kept on the balcony for it to pick up; the crow was supposed to be the soul come back — such absurd make-believe! Yet everyone did it, as if it were some sort of nursery game. Mr. Mitra, looking out through the windshield, past the steering wheel and Abdul’s shoulder, speculated if such practices might be all right in this case. Here the soul had made its own exit, and it was difficult to imagine why it would want to come back to the third-floor balcony of Nishant Apartments.
“Ask him!” said Mrs. Mitra, prodding her husband’s arm with a finger. She nodded towards a watchman standing in front of what looked like a bungalow. “Ask him!”
“Nishant?” said the thin, moustached chowkidar, refusing to get up from his stool. Behind him was an incongruously large bungalow, belonging to a businessman, hidden by an imposing white gate and a wall. He barely allowed himself a smile. “But there it is.” Two houses away, on the left.
It was clear from the size of the cramped compound, with the ceiling overhanging the porch only a few feet away from the adjoining wall, that Nishant had been erected where some older house once was, and which had been sold off to property developers and contractors. It must be twelve or thirteen years old. An Ambassador and two Marutis were parked outside by the pavement. Mr. Mitra, holding the tuberoses under his right arm, glanced at his watch as he entered the porch, then got into the lift, which had a collapsible gate, hesitantly. He waited for his wife, looked at himself quickly in the mirror, and pressed a button. Mrs. Mitra smoothed her hair and looked at the floors changing through the collapsible gate.
A narrow, tiled, clean corridor, going past forty-six and forty-seven, led to the main door to forty-nine, which was open. Faint music emanated to the corridor, and a few people could be seen moving about in the hall. There was a jumble of slippers and sandals and shoes by the door, promiscuously heaped on one another. Mr. Mitra took off his with an impatient movement; Mrs. Mitra descended delicately from hers — they had small, two-inch heels.
Mr. Talukdar, who was standing in a white shirt and trousers talking to another couple and a man, excused himself from their company and came to the newly arrived couple. “Come in, come in,” he said to Mrs. Mitra. To Mr. Mitra he said nothing, but accepted the tuberoses that were now transferred to his arms. “Nilima’s there,” he said, indicating a woman who was sitting at the far side of the sitting room upon a mattress on the floor, an old woman near her. So saying, he went off slowly with the tuberoses in another direction.
A small crystal chandelier hung from the ceiling, gleaming in daylight. Near where Nilima, Anjali’s mother, sat, a ceiling fan turned slowly. Some of the furniture had been cleared away for mats to be laid out on the floor, but some, including two armchairs and a divan, had been left where they were. On the sideboard was a Mickey Mouse — shaped pencil box, next to a few photographs and curios. A clock upon one of the shelves said it was eleven-twenty-five.
Mr. Talukdar was a tallish man, heavy, fair, clean-shaven. Most of his hair was grey, and thinning slightly. He’d held some sort of important position in an old British industrial company that had turned into a large public-sector concern a decade after independence: British Steel, renamed National Steel. He was now standing next to a television set, whose convex screen was dusty, and talking to someone.
Mr. Mitra seemed to remember that Mr. Talukdar had two sons in America, and that the sons had children. But Anjali had had no children, and that might have made things worse for her. He looked at a man singing a Brahmo sangeet on a harmonium in the middle of the room, attended by only a few listeners, and saw that it was someone he knew, an engineer at Larsen & Toubro.
The song stopped, and the sound of groups of people talking became more audible. The hubbub common to shraddh ceremonies was absent: people welcoming others as they came in, even the sense, and the conciliatory looks, of bereavement. Instead there was a sort of pointlessness, as people refused to acknowledge what did not quite have a definition. Mr. Mitra’s stomach growled.
He looked at his wife in the distance, the bun of hair prominent at the back of her head; she bent and said something to Nilima, Anjali’s mother. Suddenly there was a soft, whining sound that repeated itself, low but audible; it was the cordless phone. Mr. Talukdar stooped to pick it up from a chair and, distractedly looking out of the window, said “Hello” into the receiver, and then more words, nodding his head vigorously once, and gesturing with his hand. He walked a few steps with the cordless against his ear, gravitating towards a different group of people. Mr. Mitra realised that the tuberoses he’d brought had been placed on that side of the room, beside three or four other bouquets.
He felt bored; and he noticed a few others, too, some of whom he knew, looking out of place. Shraddh ceremonies weren’t right without their mixture of convivial pleasure and grief; and he couldn’t feel anything as complete as grief. He’d known Anjali slightly; how well do you know your wife’s distant relations, after all? He’d known more about her academic record, one or two charming anecdotes to do with her success at school, her decent first-class degree, and about her husband, Gautam Poddar, diversifying into new areas of business, than about her.
“Saab?”
Thank God! A man was standing before him with a platter of sandesh — he picked up one; it was small and soft; he took a tiny bite. It must be from Banchharam or Nepal Sweets; it had that texture. There was another man a little farther away, with a tray of Fanta and Coca-Cola. Mr. Mitra hesitated for a second and then walked towards the man. He groped for a bottle that was less cold than the others; he had a sore throat developing.