“It’s very nice,” she said, nodding. The old two-storeyed house with long verandahs where she’d first been married, a family house converted and rented out for such occasions, had set like a sun, while this one had risen like a new sun which has no name, only an indefinable light, in its place. She couldn’t look at it properly. This past month, she couldn’t tell clearly if she was happy because she was at last getting married, or because she was getting married in the light of her imperfections, and others’; that imperfection, as much as accomplishment, would define them when bride and bridegroom finally met. This second time round, she’d discovered that to be happy was not so much a self-sufficient, spontaneous emotion, such as you might feel in relation to a dream or a secret, but a way of reacting to the rest of the world; that to be happy this time, she must curb the natural human instinct to look up at the sky, with its all-encompassing definition, and gaze towards the immediate ground and horizon, with its lack of shape, or abode, or clear ending.
He was talking about food. He said it would maybe be better if they didn’t have an elaborate dinner this time for guests at the reception in the five-star hotel in Calcutta; just some snacks and cocktails.
“You know, things like chicken tikka and kababs,” he said. He meant that the meal should be composed of small, disposable items that one could consume and move on, instead of those large repasts that arrested the passage of time and movement. To be left slightly hungry seemed appropriate to the occasion; and when he saw, in his mind’s eye, the singed wedges of the tikka, they seemed well suited for this purpose.
Two months later, she and he took separate intercontinental flights to Calcutta. They arrived at the small shed of an international airport with the air of those who’d arrived on a necessary business trip; she was carrying her laptop with her; neither had anything to declare, as they walked, on different afternoons, nonchalantly past the incurious customs officials in the way one might walk down the marriage aisle were all the guests on either side asleep. During the ashirbaad ceremony in her father’s flat near Dum Dum, everyone was a degree less solemn than you might have expected them to be; they’d blessed her once before, but they had enough blessings in store to bless her again, with the same untidy shower of grain and grass; there was an element of playacting, as they were not adhering to the plan of the ritual, but imitating what they’d done a few years ago. But there were also unsettling moments of discovery; some of the faces — those of the bridegroom’s family — were new, while others were the same. This collision, this bumping into each other, of strangeness and familiarity in the small flat, made the experience something like rereading a well-known story and finding that some of the characters in it had changed while others had remained who they were. Later they all relaxed, like actors after the performance, unmindful of their attire and a slight air of dishevellment. There was a gap of silence, in which Arpita existed momentarily as if it were her new home. She remembered how everything had been precisely laid out and premeditated during the last wedding; how she’d hardly had to move of her own volition, but had been carried down, as the ceremony pre-ordains, from her small room in the rented house, down the steps, precariously, in the arms of her male cousins towards the fire, and from there to walk blindly behind her husband seven times. She now saw that house as one she’d never visit again, but which she’d sleepwalked through, without the aid of her hands and feet, half afloat, as if she were handicapped but had been somehow given the power to move through its spaces in a supra-normal way. She said:
“Ranga dadu, it’s good to see you looking so well! You’re positively pink!”
“It’s the rum that keeps him so healthy,” someone else said. After two weeks, she was looking at the photographs, and she said: “So many photos! I didn’t realise someone was sneaking around taking so many photos! Who was the photographer?”
“I don’t know,” he said. Proudly, he added, “I wasn’t there.” Naturally, he couldn’t be present at his wife-to-be’s ashirbaad ceremony.
They sat looking at the set of photographs. Everyone in them looked as if they had no desire to go anywhere, and there was a strange unhurriedness about the faces and postures. It was almost as if someone had somehow managed to take the pictures after the event.
Words, Silences
TWENTY YEARS HAD PASSED since I last saw him, and when I came out of the room I didn’t recognise him at first, though I knew it must be him. Twenty years in books seems like a long time, but linear progression actually has no felt shape; in reality, you always live in the present. Mohon was three times the size he’d been then; and since you don’t grow from being medium-sized to huge overnight, he must have had to buy new sets of clothes more than just once.
“Ei Mohon,” I said, putting one arm round his shoulder. His bulk pressed against mine, and he smiled. Yet there was an awkwardness between us — where did that come from?
“How long are you here for?” I heard myself say. “When are you leaving Calcutta?”
“Hey, day after tomorrow,” said Mohon, smiling; and, turning to his wife, he said: “This guy hasn’t changed, yaar. He was more or less the same when I saw him last.” Romola, in a salwaar kameez, rather pretty, got up from the sofa.
“He’s told me so much about you all.” At this point the telephone rang shrilly, and I had to raise one palm to indicate I’d be with her directly.
“Hi, I think this must be the first time I’m meeting you,” I said, after I’d answered the inconsequential query and put the phone down. Now glasses of soft drink were distributed among us, though I refused mine from the boy who worked in our flat.
“What’s it like over there right now?” I meant Tezpur, where he’d been working and living, on an estate, for the last fifteen years. He seemed used to the question, but embarrassed. His wife answered for him.
“It’s boring!” she said, and then giggled surreptitiously, as if she’d let the cat out of the bag. He answered more seriously, although trying not to sound too serious, “The troubles are always there. You just have to avoid them,” making them sound like bacteria you could keep from contracting by observing a careful diet. He said as an afterthought, “Of course you can’t always do that.”
“Where’s your daughter?” I asked suddenly. “Didn’t you bring her with you?”
“Ritu,” said Mohon, with a deprecating look. “She’s gone in with mashi. Mashi came out and took her inside.”
“Strange girl! Not in the least bit shy,” chimed Romola, shaking her head, as if she couldn’t believe the person she was speaking of was her daughter. “She just followed your mother inside.” And she broodingly took a sip of the pale drink.
So my mother had been out to see them already. She had been present at Mohon’s wedding; I’d been away, but of course she’d known Mohon since his birth, because we’d been born around the same time.
Twenty years — I settled back in my chair and said to Mohon:
“But I hear you want to leave that place now? Maybe move to Calcutta?” Mohon leaned forward and nodded his head thoughtfully. All that extra weight had magnified his mottled complexion, which had never been very clear, but there was a strange combination of the effects of aging and an almost untouched simplicity about him. In as polite a way as possible, he said:
“That’s right, re. It would be nice.” I knew, in fact, that that was why he’d come to Calcutta — not just for a holiday but to see if there might be an “opening,” any chance of leaving a landscape made intolerable by strife. But, of course, there was really no great possibility of there being one; opportunities were few.