My Mother's Lover and Other Stories Read online

  But no such thing happens. After what seems like a long silence – the quiet of resting slippers, before they are employed, again, for walking – sighs and laughter follow. No, the pot is still whole, unhurt. I turn to look at my mother. I think I see tears in her eyes. When I gesture to ask what is wrong, she says something that I can’t really hear, that I read from her lips as ‘insects’. Yes, it is true – there are these tiny black insects that are aiming for our eyes. They are like tears – they are uninterested in any other space other than the human eyes. They know they will die there, but they still fling themselves at the face.

  My mother says something that I can’t hear. I ignore her words. What is so urgent that can’t be repeated later? Age has taught me that apart from an intimation of death, no message is really urgent. Surely she, a poor innocent woman losing her memory like her teeth, isn’t telling me about death.

  It is my cousin’s turn now. Her hair is long, left open, so that its ends reach below her shirt. She’s getting married next month. I wonder why she had to grow her hair for that. My youngest uncle is tying a piece of cloth on her eyes. She’s always been his favourite niece. ‘This is my dupatta,’ Puja declares.

  The blindfolded person is held by someone and made to move anticlockwise to disorient their sense of direction. My youngest aunt is doing that to her. ‘Stop, stop, my head is spinning,’ says my cousin.

  Everyone laughs. That seems to be the source of joy of this game, of most games – someone’s discomfort, someone making mistakes.

  Puja, taller than even her uncles, takes long strides. The little boys are the opposite of the adults – they want every blindfolded person to break the pot, the adults want them to fail, to walk in the wrong direction, to see them make mistakes. It is what differentiates children from adults – not just their bodies but their different joys.

  Her mother tries to help: ‘Turn to your left, why are you…’

  Puja stops walking. She turns towards where she imagines her mother is. ‘Why don’t you play instead of me?’

  We’re all shocked by the anger in her voice. What no one knows is that the mother and daughter have been arguing since morning. I could only hear a snatch of a line from their conversation: ‘This phone is the root of all your sadness…’ The dried leaves had carried away the rest of their words.

  Puja begins walking again. One of the little boys – I always confuse their names; I see them so infrequently – tries to help her by holding her elbow. ‘This way,’ he says.

  ‘Don’t touch me! Who is this? No one will touch me,’ she says, lifting her stick as if about to hit him.

  The little boy moves away. He looks like he will cry right now.

  Puja keeps walking. Her favourite uncle shouts: ‘Hit, just hit right now, don’t move an inch, hit hit hit hit, hit baba…’

  Puja hits. Everyone claps in joy, as if she’s hit an over-boundary. And immediately after, an echo follows: ‘Oh no… Eh ma…’

  The clay pot lies broken, but something else too. Everyone looks at each other and then at Puja. Who hid her phone inside the clay pot? Though the smartphone can do almost anything now, it can’t answer this question.

  Puja turns to look at her mother. She is standing a few feet away, her hands raised to her head, frozen by the shock of what has just happened.

  ‘You?’ Puja asks, asking her mother to confess.

  ‘Are you mad?’ Her mother breaks down. She’s now squatting, her face in her hands.

  The uncle quickly intervenes. ‘I’ll get you a new phone. I would have anyway, as a gift for your wedding. Let it be.’

  ‘All my photos and texts?’ It feels like someone has hit Puja with the stick.

  Is this the beginning of something that’d turn into a catastrophe as it did in stories about picnics?

  But there’s nothing that can stop the game. My oldest uncle has already volunteered to be the next player. He’s taken the stick from Puja and is now waiting for someone to blindfold him.

  ‘Hurry up, it’ll be time for lunch.’ His voice is urgent.

  My father walks up to him with the dupatta in his hand. My uncle is taller than him, and he has to crouch for the piece of cloth to be tied on his eyes. My father, always efficient with his hands, has finished tying even before we’ve realised, but he isn’t letting Himangshu-kaku go. Uncle is bald – my father is moving his hands on the poor man’s bald pate and laughing. Someone – a female voice – compares the bald head to the clay pot. The rest of the words are lost. The breeze has turned into a restless wind. The chorus of dried leaves would’ve scared a lonely traveller in the woods – it has become the voice of an invisible person.

  The little boy who’d been scolded by Puja has returned as the cheerleader again. He’s shouting out instructions to his grand-uncle. ‘Straight,’ he says.

  ‘Forward,’ says Himangshu-kaku.

  ‘No, straight,’ the little boy insists.

  ‘Forward,’ the man insists.

  It becomes a rally between two players – straight-forward, straight-forward, straight-forward – until the man reaches close to the pot. One hit and the pot will break.

  ‘How many clay pots did you get with you, Anu?’ asks my father, always a stock-keeper.

  ‘Two dozens, Mama,’ she replies. She’s my father’s favourite niece.

  The number makes my father happy. He begins counting the number of people still left to play the game. I’ve counted before him. Twenty-three still left. Eighteen pots remain. My father isn’t bothered, I know. He hasn’t counted the maids and the driver, and possibly not even his wife. Eighteen pots, nineteen people by his calculation. I even know the rhythm of these words in his mind. It’d be exactly the way he says, ‘18 balls – 24 runs’, while watching the final overs of a Twenty20 cricket match.

  Himangshu-kaku has hit the pot. Human voices have managed to drown the sound of leaves at last. There is celebration. Buro-kaku gets a bottle of drinking water and sprays it over his brother. ‘Champagne, champagne,’ he says.

  The children repeat after him. ‘Champion, champion.’

  Himangshu-kaku wants to make a speech. ‘I’ve never broken anything in my life,’ he begins.

  We laugh at his parody of ‘I’ve never won anything in my life before this…’, which is often the opening sentence of award ceremonies.

  ‘Yes, it’s true. I’ve never even broken a glass. Today, for the first time I forced myself to break something. How could I die without breaking anything in this life? My time is near…’

  There is silence, even from the leaves. His wife died in October last year – her cancer was diagnosed very late. He has cancer too. All of us know but we pretend we don’t.

  Tonu-kakima, who everyone turns to when in trouble, begins laughing.

  We are shocked.

  ‘You have broken something, Mej-da,’ she says, laughing again.

  ‘What?’ he asks, guiltily.

  ‘You broke someone’s heart when you got married, Mej-da.’

  Himangshu-kaku is staring at his shoes.

  ‘I know her, Mej-da. She never got married…’

  ‘Really?’ he asks, as if life is giving him a second chance.

  ‘Yes. Tapati-di used to teach in my school.’

  ‘Teach? Teach what?’

  ‘You don’t remember? Mathematics.’

  ‘I used to fail in Maths. How could we have…’

  A strong wind begins again. We cover our eyes and mouths. We stop talking.

  ‘Keka, where’s my shawl? I’ll cover my ears… Keka…’

  It’s one of my aunts. Keka is her house-help – it’s difficult to remember a time when she wasn’t part of their family.

  My eyes are closed, as I imagine everyone else’s to be. There’s only the roar of the leaves and my aunt calling Keka by her name.

  ‘Keka’s lost. She’s gone!’ she screams.

  We open our eyes, as if doing that would bring Keka back, or that we’d be able to see what my aunt
hasn’t been able to.

  ‘How can she be lost? She’s not an earring,’ says my mother, always speaking like a schoolteacher.

  But Keka is really not there. The two boys, who are used to finding hidden things only as part of a game, move chairs and look under tables, and, a little later, behind trees. They don’t even know who Keka is and what she looks like, but they still want to find her.

  My aunt is near-hysterical. ‘How will I answer…’

  ‘Isn’t she an orphan? Whom will you have to answer then?’

  I turn to look back at whose voice it is, but something gets into my right eye. I rub hard, and it’s possible that it leaves, but it leaves my eye feeling heavy. I can’t see clearly either.

  ‘Let’s go to the police station,’ says my aunt.

  ‘Now?’ asks my father, angry to have the game interrupted.

  ‘Yes, right now, before it’s too late.’

  ‘What’ll happen to all the pots then?’ my father asks.

  ‘A girl has gone missing and you’re thinking of your pots!’

  I fear my aunt is about to faint. ‘Ask the driver to get the car…’

  ‘Shonku,’ my father shouts. ‘Shonku, Shonku…’

  But where is Shonku?

  Now there’s a chorus of ‘Shonku, Shonku, Shonku’. People are looking for him everywhere. One of the little boys begins scraping through the dried leaves to look for Shonku. I feel like laughing, but my fear takes over. Scenes from Satyajit Ray’s Aranyer Din Ratri sprint through my mind – of the tribal girl Duli being abused by the man from the city (I can’t remember his name now). Has something similar happened to Keka?

  Everyone is walking in different directions – to look for Keka and Shonku. Everyone except my mother and me. She can’t walk without help, and literature has limited my chance of appreciating the world. It annotates every experience of my life – reading, and consequent knowledge has been such a burden. As a child, it was a complaint – why my mother couldn’t cook the food that the Famous Five ate. A few years later it turned to slotting men as Darcy or Heathcliff.

  Literature turned me into a complainant, and it took away the joy of surprise and unexpectedness from my life. I could predict things as they’d happen, not because I was an astrologer, but because I’d seen similar events and circumstances happen in books and films. This picnic that we were in – too many such picnics and outings had occurred in the pages of a book or in films. It was impossible that anything new would happen. Someone would be raped, someone would be lost, someone would die. It had to happen.

  My mother is calling someone on the phone. She isn’t getting through. I can see it from her face and gestures.

  ‘Whom are you calling?’ I ask.

  ‘I’m calling Shonku,’ she says.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘What’s the use of looking for him when you can phone him to ask where he is?’

  I’m surprised by my mother’s common sense.

  She clarifies: ‘That’s what I always do. I can’t walk. How will I go looking for people?’

  I sit down, waiting for bad news to arrive – a dead body, or a bleeding piece of cloth. My specs are in my hands – my eyelashes are too long, their oiliness scratches the glass. I have to struggle to see the world, as if through a translucent curtain. I can’t say exactly what happens in the next few minutes, but when I am conscious – alert is perhaps what I mean – I can see that Shonku and Keka are standing not too far away from me. As I stare at Keka, inspecting her for what she might have been through during her short excursion, I sometimes see Simi Garewal’s face instead of hers. Simi, who’d played the tribal girl Duli in Ray’s film, the girl molested by the man from the city. When I turn to look at Shonku however, I don’t see the man from the film. Aware of being repeatedly misled by cinema and literature, I caution myself against making too much of Keka wearing her red kameez inside out. I can see the stitches distinctly from here. Had she been forced to take off her clothes? Had she been violated? Raped? No, no, it couldn’t be. She is smiling. What is she saying? Why can’t I hear her words? Why isn’t anyone else noticing this except me?

  I hope that literature is wrong, that art is wrong. The only way to escape from literature is to escape from life. Since that isn’t possible, we can, at least, escape from this place. But no one pays my words any attention.

  The game continues.

  It is one of the little boys now. The darker boy in the blue, striped shirt. But the other boy – who resembles his father so much that one can send him to his father’s office on a day when his father isn’t well – also has a stick in his hand now.

  He walks beside his cousin. But this time he’s silent. He doesn’t offer help. The adults are kinder. They direct his body towards the direction of the pot when he goes astray. When he’s very close to the pot, his cousin touches his stick with his own. Scared – blindfolded as he is – he hits at the other stick. The other boy is unprepared – the stick, loose in his hand, flies into the air.

  I scream in fear. This is the moment I was waiting for – someone will die now, or something bad will happen.

  The stick is up in the air. There, it’ll land on someone – Prem? No, Shiuli. No, who’s that in the brown sweater? Someone will die now.

  The stick lands at last. The humans are safe. The pot breaks. Everyone claps, even the adults. The young boy looks at my father to ask whether this should be credited to him. But people are rushing to clear the debris.

  ‘How did this get here?’

  That’s all I can hear. I’m eager to see, but nothing is visible. A thalamus of heads. What is it?

  Could it be my phone? My turn now, after Puja’s? I touch the pocket of my pants – no, it’s still there. I wonder whether technology will make it possible for phones to escape out of tight pockets in the future.

  ‘Who put this…’

  A broken egg lies between shards of clay. ‘Whose egg?’ I ask by mistake.

  ‘Yours.’ It’s a female voice behind me. I meet them so infrequently that I can’t identify their voices.

  ‘Count the eggs, Partho,’ my father says, having found some work to do. He is like a fly hovering over a ripe fruit – he has to move around it even if he’s not interested in eating. That is his idea of busyness, of work – to be present everywhere, standing on attention, waiting to be summoned.

  ‘Why?’ asks my brother. Only his silence can calm down my father’s excess voltage.

  ‘Then we’ll know whether it was one of the eggs we brought or an egg of some other bird in the forest,’ my father explains. He doesn’t like to explain anything, but when he has to, he does it to the tiniest detail, as if he was reporting an accident to the police. Fear is his primary emotion – he doesn’t want to do anything wrong.

  ‘Look at the shell – it couldn’t be a hen’s,’ says someone.

  ‘Then?’

  ‘Is it a bird’s or an animal’s?’

  ‘Does a snake lay eggs?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘A dinosaur egg.’

  ‘No, that would be much larger.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter whose egg it is – a dinosaur’s or yours. The most important thing is to find out how it got there, inside the pot.’ It’s my brother, the youngest of the adults in our generation. He’s a mathematician. Everyone takes him seriously. There’s a thing about numbers – people who deal with them are treated with more respect than those whose disciplines are invested in the imagination. I feel victimised for having studied Literature.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Not just the egg, but Puja’s phone. Who is putting things there?’ As if to accommodate my brother’s long sentence, the wind has stopped.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Who do you think it…?’

  The wind starts again, and nothing can be heard anymore. I close my eyes and try to walk towards my mot
her. ‘Close…’ I hear a male voice being dragged away by the wind. I imagine everyone walking with their eyes closed. I’m slightly envious of those who’ve just played the game – that they’ve had practice at walking blindfolded.

  After what seems as long as a season, the wind recedes. It doesn’t go away completely, like a child’s tears that return even in its sleep. But it’s just an occasional murmur. I call my father aside and tell him what I feel – I am certain that something will happen. He looks at me as if I’m mad. He calls his siblings and reports my apprehensions to them. Nothing will happen, they say. I tell them that someone who’s about to die somewhere in the world says this at some point. They laugh it away – they are old, they’ve seen the world, this is a picnic, not a war, I mustn’t think of dead bodies. I plead with everyone to stop the game. They laugh at me, again. But believe me, I’ve seen it happen – in books, in films, in… They make fun of art as if it were astrology.

  By now everyone is hungry. The smell of mutton, with its buzzing garlic, strings the air. Tonu-kakima returns from the cooking place and says that if it’s mutton, why are there bird legs and wings? They might be feeding us crows, she says.

  What does crow taste like? asks one of the little boys.

  The conversation moves to eating birds. If pigeons and water-hens and chickens and turkeys are food, why not crows? asks someone. Because the crow is our national bird – comes the prompt reply. No, the peacock is our national bird, says the little boy. Why not sparrows? asks another. Where’s the flesh in a sparrow? Why not an aeroplane? Because it has no flesh.

  ‘Why do we eat birds, Ma?’ asks the shorter of the little boys.

  ‘Because it’s powerless. We can only eat what has less strength than us.’ My father replies on behalf of the boy’s mother – he wants everyone to be satisfied with the day.

  ‘Do the Japanese really eat sharks? Aren’t sharks more powerful than us?’

  My father’s fled the scene.

  Such inconsequential conversation goes round and round in circles. Literature has prepared me for this too – the spinning of words, its flatulence, and the amplified show of attachment that disappears as soon as one has left the site.

  Soon we’re eating, even my mother, who always eats last. There is a purposeful re-creation of an older world, of the way Bengalis would eat once: a tiny anthill of salt and next to it, as if offering it obeisance, a slice of lemon and green chillies, the same pair of vegetables used to ward off the evil eye. A little farther away from this outpost, there is another white hillock, of rice, and reclining on it a corpse of a brinjal. The brinjal has a tail – it looks like a dead rat. I won’t be able to eat it. Most people are saying no – not in words but putting upturned palms over their sal-leaf plates – to the potato and cauliflower curry, the florets having been minced by the harsh iron spatula. Even the promise of green peas speckling the gravy isn’t tempting. Everyone’s waiting for the mutton curry to arrive.