Bhudeb-babu, Bolai-da said, you can come out now. It’s only Shombhu Debnath.
He shone the torch into the palm. Shombhu Debnath was clinging to the top with his knees. He had one arm wrapped around a fan-shaped leaf for support. In the other he held a toddy-pot. All he wore was a strip of a cotton gamcha around his thin, angular waist.
Bhudeb Roy’s jaws worked convulsively. He coughed, for he had grass in his mouth. Shombhu Debnath? he spluttered. What’s he doing here?
Drinking God’s milk, Shombhu answered, and singing.
Bhudeb Roy exploded: What?
Raga Lalit of course, Shombhu said, surprised. What else could you sing at this time of the night?
Come down here with that pot, Bhudeb Roy roared.
Why? The toddy’s fresher here. Closer to God. It ferments nastily when it gets down to earth with men and money.
Thief. Bhudeb Roy flung himself at the palm. Thief, thief, petty thief.
Next day he had all his palms chopped down. That was the only time he had ever destroyed a source of income.
It was generally felt that Bhudeb Roy was wrong. Shombhu Debnath was no thief. If he were, why would he sing while he was up in the palms? Besides, everybody knew that if they found a few emptied pots in their palms they had only to ask Rakhal to be paid their price (though, of course, only if Rakhal happened to have money that day).
People who had known Shombhu Debnath and his family in Noakhali used to say that he had always been like that: restless, unpredictable, fond of heights. A little mad, too: that was why he sang.
Only those who did not know him well were surprised when he first disappeared at the age of twelve from the quiet, reassuring huddle of his father’s and uncles’ and cousins’ huts on the edge of the Noakhali mainland opposite Siddi Island, where the Meghna becomes the Bamni before flowing into the sea.
His family, like all the Debnaths, were weavers of coarse cotton. They wove thick white cloth, checked lungis, coarse cotton gamchas, and suchlike in great bulk. It was mere drudgery: throwing the shuttle one way and another for years without end until their spines collapsed. It was not much of a technique, and Shombhu mastered it while he was still a child. His mother was not at all surprised when he vanished. She had known; she had seen it in his hands. He had beautiful hands, long-fingered and strong, quicker than the eye, and always restless.
But even she had no inkling of his plans. Nobody did, for Shombhu had set out to do the impossible.
As a child Shombhu, like all the other children in his hamlet, had heard tales and legends about the Boshaks of Tangail, near Dhaka. Everyone knew the legend of the Boshaks: for centuries they had ruled continents with their gossamer weaves. But it was not only for their weaving that they were legendary; it was also for the secretiveness with which they hoarded the trade and craft secrets of their caste. A Boshak could no more teach an outsider than another man could give away his family’s best land. The few outsiders who learnt from them disappeared into the fastnesses of their families — they married Boshak girls, lived in their houses, ate their food, and surrendered every memory of their lives outside. And if there was anyone against whom every glimmer of an opening in the Boshak defences would be clamped shut it was a Debnath — a despised weaver of coarse cotton.
Twelve-year-old Shombhu Debnath found a way of breaking the formation. He walked from his village to the ferry port of Shahebghata and found a boat to take him up the Meghna and down the Padma to Tangail. There, passing himself off as an orphan, he found a place in a Boshak master-weaver’s family, in a hamlet outside the town. He worked with them for years, for nothing but his food and a few clothes. He learnt to size and to warp; with the master-weaver’s sons he learnt the secrets of punching Jacquard index cards. He learnt the intricacies of their jamdani inlay techniques. He even learnt to make the fine bamboo reeds which were the centrepieces of their jamdani looms, the only ones which could hold fine silk yarn without tearing it. That was a skill few even among the Boshaks could boast of, for it was the preserve of a wandering caste of boatmen and bangle-makers called Bédé.
And he learnt their songs, melancholy, throbbing songs of love and longing. They all sang, he and the master-weaver’s sons and everyone else, they sang as they worked in their tin-roofed shed, each at their own loom, taking their beat from the rhythmic clatter of fly-shuttles and the tinkling of needle-weights hanging on Jacquard looms.
Shombhu forgot his hamlet; he had no family left but the master-weaver’s.
But it had to end. One day the master-weaver met a merchant from Noakhali. That day, tears pouring down his cheek, he confronted Shombhu with his secret. Shombhu fled that night, straight back to Noakhali, towards the safe circle of huts that had suddenly been resurrected in his memory.
But the master-weaver’s tears had burnt his curses into Shombhu’s flesh. Shombhu paid for his treachery — the dreadful, corroding price of a wasted secret.
He arrived in his hamlet with the gift of fire cupped in his palms and found that his world preferred its meat raw. We know what we know, they said when he tried to teach them the secrets of jamdani, and we want to know no more. A crow falls out of the sky if it tries to learn peacockery.
Shombhu, too, had his burnt books.
That was when Shombhu first began to frequent the branches of toddy palms. Soon he stopped working altogether. Then one day he disappeared again. This time his family were relieved.
He left the hamlet with a group of singers — wanderers who spent their lives journeying from one village to another, living on alms, dancing and singing of their love of Sri Krishna. They taught Shombhu what they knew of the rudiments of music: the moods and the hours, the ascending and descending scales of a few basic ragas like Bhairavi, Asavari, Desh, Yaman Kalyan, and Lalit. But the lessons never lasted very long. His teachers usually lost interest halfway. Technique was immaterial to them; all their bhajans and songs ended in the same ecstatic chant: Hare Rama, Hare Krishna; Krishna, Krishna, Hare, Hare.
Then one day, long after the convulsions of the decade had swallowed his family, Shombhu appeared in Lalpukur, with an ailing wife, and incurably and thirstily hoarse. Some people in the village recognized him and helped him a little for the sake of his vanished family. He cleared a patch of land and built himself a couple of huts, at a marked distance from the rest of the village. He even built himself a loom. His wife recovered long enough to bear him a son. But her strength failed her the second time, and she died bearing Maya.
Shombhu almost stopped working then. He wove barely enough to keep them alive. When Rakhal was about eight, he taught him to weave the coarse cotton of his ancestors, and let him cope as best he could. All the help he offered him after that was the encouragement of an occasional, hoarse Jaijaiwanti. Maya listened to him, and when she was barely knee-high, and already wise with poverty, she thought ahead to her wedding day and decided that a hoarse Jaijaiwanti for dower would fetch her no husband. So she decided to ask Toru-debi, for theirs was the house nearest to their own, for a job — anything at all.
Shombhu, wounded to the last ragged edge of his proud poverty, forbade her: Shombhu Debnath’s daughter a servant? But her womanly courage and worldliness were proof against him, and she had her way.
In revenge, Shombhu Debnath thundered Bhairavi from the tree-tops and would not speak to Balaram.
But Balaram watched him, especially when he heard that he had stopped weaving. Balaram could only guess at the wealth of his skull, but even at a distance he felt a theory stirring …