On subsequent visits to Calcutta (and they did need to make visits, because they had relatives here, and occasionally there were weddings), Pramathesh and his wife were spared the embarrassment of having to meet the Biswases too frequently, because Ranjit had lost his job and joined a Marwari company that made ceiling and table fans, where he seemed reasonably happy, and able to conceal from himself the fact that here, too, the prospects for advancement were of a limited nature. But he had a better position than before; and, since Pramathesh was appointed to the Board in 1977, it was just as well they didn’t meet except in the lobby of the Calcutta Club by accident, or at Lake Market, where they came upon each other with surprised exclamations and hurriedly exchanged pleasantries before saying goodbye. Former colleagues are happy to meet and depart from each other like ghosts, in an evanascent zone of their own making that lies somewhere between their working life, leisure time, memory, and the future. Nothing is final about these meetings until they retire, and they can review the shape of their achievements. Even then, their children, who may have entirely forgotten one another, have the potential to carry on their fathers’ rivalries and friendships without knowing it, in their parents’ drifting, speculative daydreams. Anyway, Ranjit leaving his job and disappearing in another direction saved Pramathesh the minor embarrassment of having to be his superior, and preside over his career.
The main surprise in Pramathesh’s life came from his son, who took up the violin and Western classical music in a serious way when he was a teenager. What had begun as an eccentric but admirable pursuit after school hours became something more than that. One day, the boy came back from school and said, “Baba, I want to study the violin.” Pramathesh was too disarmed to raise an objection just then; and, as he remained unable to come up with one after two, then three, years, he saw, fondly but with a lurking feeling of helplessness, that his son would level out what he had striven for, that all the sense of certainty and dull, precious predictability and self-sufficiency he had naively built up would now — he was almost grateful for it — become, whether his son succeeded or not (because success in the arts counts for so little), less quantifiable, like a new beginning. His son and grandchildren would lead a life quite different from what he’d thought they would. He sent his son to study the violin in London, and this rendered him almost bankrupt, though his “almost bankrupt” was still substantially better off than most of his countrymen. He and Amita moved, after his retirement in the mid-eighties, to a spacious apartment in West Bandra which he had bought twelve years ago for two lakh rupees; they lived here alone, with a servant, going out together now and then to walk in the lane, while their son, finally, settled in the U.S. and married there, making several abortive attempts to inaugurate a career as a musician. The paintings went with them to Bandra, and gazed upon Pramathesh’s life without understanding its trajectory, but forgiving it nevertheless by not giving it too much importance. Now and then he gazed back at the paintings, considering what, or who, had given birth to that procession of figures by the mountainside, or that pale forest; those shadowy colours pointed to something he was still content, in his deliberate withdrawal from the imagination, not to understand. Jamini Roy, however, stayed in the drawing room, immutable; and Gopal Ghosh, who had been forgotten by the art world and then lately recovered and re-estimated, was like an enigma that had glancingly touched Pramathesh’s working and his private life, near and utterly distant. The world that had produced that curious art, those daubs of green and bold lines, that one never knew, in the end, what to think of, had long ceased to exist; he had made an inroad towards it, by chance, for some other reason, and touched it without ever entering it anything but superficially. History, as if to compensate for that passing, and in a belated consciousness of its own importance, had added to the paintings a value that neither Pramathesh nor the painters would have at first dreamt of; while taking away from him, gradually, his working life, his youth, and the bustling innocence of his adult certainties.
An Infatuation (From the Ramayana)
SHE’D BEEN WATCHING the two men for a while, and the pale, rather docile, wife with vermilion in her hair, who sometimes went inside the small house and came out again. She’d been watching from behind a bush, so they hadn’t seen her; they had the air of being not quite travellers, nor people who’d been settled for long; but they looked too composed to be fugitives. Sometimes the men went away into the forest while the woman attended to household chores — Surpanakha observed this interestedly from a distance — and then they’d return with something she’d chop and cook, releasing an aroma that hung incongruously around the small house.
She, when she considered herself, thought how much stronger and more capable she would be than that radiantly beautiful but more or less useless woman, how she’d not allow the men to work at all, and do everything for them herself. It was the taller one she’d come to prefer; the older one, whose every action had such authority. She liked to watch him bending, or brushing away a bit of dust from his dhoti, or straightening swiftly, with that mixture of adroitness and awkwardness that only human beings, however godly they are, have; he was so much more beautiful than she was. It was not his wife’s beauty she feared and envied; it was his. Sighing, she looked at her own muscular arms, used to lifting heavy things and throwing them into the distance, somewhat hirsute and dark but undoubtedly efficient, and compared them to his, which glowed in the sunlight. Her face, which she’d begun to look at in a pond nearby, had cavernous nostrils and tiny tusks that jutted out from beneath her lips; it was full of fierceness and candour, but, when she cried, it did not evoke pity, not even her own. The face reflected on the water filled her with displeasure. How lovely his features were in comparison!
After about six days had passed, and she’d gone unnoticed, hiding, frightened, and when she was glimpsed, frightening, behind the bush, she decided to approach him. She had grown tired of hovering there like an animal; even the animals had begun to watch her. Although she’d been taught to believe, since childhood, that rakkhoshes were better — braver, less selfish, more charitable, and better-natured — than human beings and gods, it was true the latter were prettier. They’d been blessed unfairly by creation; no one knew why. Long ago she’d been told that it was bad luck to fall in love with a god or a human being, but the possibility had seemed so remote that she’d never entertained it seriously. The feeling of longing, too, was relatively new for her, although she was in full maturity as a woman; but she was untried and untested, rakkhosh though she was, and un-courted; and this odd condition of restlessness was more solitary and inward, she found, than indigestion, and more painful.
She decided to change herself. She could take other forms at will, albeit temporarily; she decided to become someone else, at least for a while. She went to a clearing where she was sure no one would see her, where the only living things were some insects and a few birds on the trees, and the transformation took place. Now she went to the pond to look at the picture in the water. Her heart, like a girl’s upon glimpsing a bride, beat faster at what she saw; a woman with large eyes and long hair coming down to her waist, her body pliant. She wasn’t sure if this was her, or if the water was reflecting someone else.