People are not only nice to me; they are tender with me. They are waiting for the big day to arrive. They have started constructing their shrines, making their preparations. Whenever I walk into the club, people stop eating and give me a second look; it’s as if they realize their food’s a shadow in comparison to the sanctity of my blood, my meat.
The other day I was sitting in the club with an old friend, someone close to my father’s age who has known me for years. He was in the navy blue suit he always prefers to wear, and there were chop suey and two bowls of clear soup before us. We were bent, absorbed, over our bowls of soup, and my friend, Mr. Dastur, asked me how my little one was doing.
“Oh, he’s fine,” I said. “He’s been going to school for a year now.” Mr. Dastur has never really been interested in small talk, although we make nothing but small talk, and he called out distractedly to a waiter to bring him some chili sauce.
“My grandson’s in the fifth standard,” he said. “He’s turning out to be a real smart chhokra.” Suddenly a look came to his eyes, not the kind of look he’d had when he was calling for the waiter, but an untranslatable look, something I’d rarely seen in his eyes, something that went to the very depths of his being.
“You know,” he said, looking at his soup, “you’ve surprised us all. I never thought, when you were a child, that…” I shook my head, not knowing what to say. There are some things human beings are still not articulate about; not even I, although my profession’s connected with words.
At first, I didn’t quite know. I didn’t know why people were nice to me, why they came and shook my hand and wanted to listen to my every word. I was interviewed by various newspapers; sometimes I’d be woken out of sleep by the sound of the phone ringing, not knowing, in my semi-awake startlement, what it all meant, as if my mind were still reluctant to emerge from the dream it was having, or had begun, without effort, to confuse dream and reality. In my daytime world, I was invited everywhere; everyone recognised me as soon as I walked in, and their voices took on a different kind of tone, their faces hovered between awe and inscrutability. Consuls and ambassadors invited me to their houses; they fed me the best food; when I went to a new city, I was kept in the most elegant hotels. Gradually, one day, or in the course of a number of days, it dawned on me — I don’t remember who told me — that I was being prepared for the sacrifice, that I’d become involved with something much bigger than I could understand, that my life had become, in some way, connected to the nebulous common good and its continuing life.
I am truly privileged. Over the centuries known to man, right from time’s consciousness, from the dawning of light on rudimentary societies, there were a few who were chosen. They didn’t lead the life that “normal” people do; they were set apart from others, pampered, worshipped. Their long preparation was always a mystery. Their clan’s, or tribe’s, dreams and hopes — something more than dreams and hopes, something I still find difficult to express — became theirs; their passing and return were celebrated in shrines, as they are now in newspapers. So it was then; so it is now.
I have begun my preparation. I had begun it even when I was not, could not be, altogether conscious of doing so, and continue it even when I believe I am immersed in other things. Long before the actual day arrives, you begin the sacrifice, you hand over your life, you allow bits and pieces of yourself to be taken from you. At the same time, you are loved, not for what you are (and what are you, anyway, what were you before all this began?) but for what you can give, and the immense gift you will bestow on everyone in the future. That day has not yet come. In the meanwhile, in the last, extraordinary days of my preparation, I accept, with good grace and humility, the curiosity and reverence that others direct towards me. There are a few who spit on me, because they think I am not worthy.
The Old Masters
HE GLANCED at his watch and made an attempt to finish the tea in his cup; he was waiting for a call, and it was his second cup of tea. Five minutes later, the phone began to ring.
“Pramathesh?” said the voice at the other end; and he could tell, from its slight note of insouciance and boredom, that it was Ranjit.
“I was waiting for your call, old man,” he said, trying to muffle his irritation with his usual show of joviality. “You were supposed to call half an hour ago.” He didn’t know why he even bothered to mention this, since Ranjit, who was never known to acknowledge he was late, would take this to be an unnecessarily pedantic remark, a remark that pointed to the actual, if generally concealed, gulf that distinguished their temperaments.
“Trying to send the boy off to school … didn’t want to go this morning,” Ranjit muttered. “That boy’ll cost me my job one of these days.”
“Come, come, don’t blame it on poor Mithu. He has enough troubles being an innocent bystander in your life. Are we ready?”
“Of course I’m ready! Should we say ten minutes?” As an afterthought, a change of register: “Sorry I didn’t call earlier.” You can’t choose your colleagues in the office; he hadn’t grasped the significance of this until a few months ago. And to pretend you were friends — that, too, was a fiction you couldn’t bring yourself to wholly believe in, but couldn’t entirely dispense with either; you did “things” together, sometimes outside office hours, you visited each other’s houses — he’d been to Ranjit’s place in New Alipore only day before yesterday — got to know each other’s wives and children, the kind of food the wife, affectionately referred to as the “grihini,” cooked, and, yet, you made a pact to keep all that was true and most important about yourself from the colleague; in case the desirable boundary between private life and secret nightmare and employment ceased to exist. Meanwhile, your real friends, those mythological beings, who by now had embarked on lives and careers of their own, fell obligingly by the wayside; they became things you put inside a closet and meant to recover, someday, in the future. In other words, you were alone, with your family, and your destiny.
Pramathesh Majumdar had joined the company three years ago, soon after coming back from England in 1964 as a chartered accountant. A brief honeymoon period with office life and work in Calcutta ensued, which also saw this makeshift arrangement, this friendship, with Ranjit Biswas come into being. Ranjit had never been abroad; he’d been born and brought up in Calcutta. He had the ease and the unquestioning expectancy of routine repeating itself, and of things continuing to fit, that belong to one who has never been removed from his original habitat. Pramathesh belonged nowhere; he came, originally, from East Bengal; his sights were probably set somewhere higher. Although Ranjit Biswas was still, strictly speaking, a colleague, both knew, though this wasn’t articulated, that Pramathesh, in his unassuming way, was preparing himself for the race people called “professional life,” while Ranjit, with his impatience at keeping appointments, was perhaps going to stay in the same place for some time, feeling, now and then, bitter, without being unduly bothered to do anything about it. It was the strength of Pramathesh’s British degree that gave him a head start, of course, but it was also something else, a meticulousness that might be called foresight. In fact, Pramathesh had been transferred to the Delhi office in June this year, and since the Delhi office was now the head office, this move had been interpreted as a promotion.
Today’s mission was the outcome of a chance remark made day before yesterday. He’d been sitting at Ranjit’s place after dinner, contemplating returning to the guest house; he said, stretching his arms, “Well, I’m returning to Delhi next week. Have to get down to some shopping.” “Like what, Pramathesh da?” asked Ranjit’s wife, Malini, as she was putting away the dishes. “The usual things, I suppose,” said Pramathesh, who looked younger than his thirty-nine years. “Go to Gariahat, buy a few saris; decorations; take some gandharaj lime — my son loves those…” In his heart of hearts, he missed Calcutta; Delhi seemed small and transitory and provincial in comparison. “How did the project with the boss go this time?” asked Ranjit, lighting a cigarette (his wife called him a “chain-smoker”) and leaning against the wicker chair in the verandah. There was curiosity in his voice, and a hint of competitiveness. “Oh, all right,” said Pramathesh, sounding noncommittal, but actually engrossed in the mental picture of Lahiri as it hovered before him, a quiet, balding man with fair, tissue-paper-like skin who wore glasses with thick lenses and looked as if nothing had changed noticeably since the years before Independence. He could hear his voice and his cough. “You know, generous and friendly when he’s in a good mood, and slightly unfathomable when he’s not.” Ranjit nodded and took a fresh puff on his cigarette. “Are you thinking of taking back a two-kilogram rui from the fish market?” said Malini from the semi-lit dining room, her voice holding back laughter. “I saw you eating today and thought, ‘He doesn’t get fish there.’” “Yes, that’s right,” said Pramathesh, “I’ll just give it to the air hostess and tell her to hang on to it until we land.” “A lot of people take back mishti doi,” said Ranjit. He began to laugh in his unobtrusively nasty, dry manner, which meant that he was going to reveal something that had given him pleasure at someone else’s expense. “I saw a man standing in line for security at the airport with a huge bhaad of doi, and the next time I saw him the bhaad had fallen to ground and shattered, the yoghurt lay on the floor in a tragic mess: the poor man, he looked lost and heartbroken! I don’t think we’ll see him in Calcutta in a hurry!” After a few moments, Pramathesh said quietly, “I was thinking of taking back a picture … something nice — to hang up in the new flat.” “A picture?”