My Mother's Lover and Other Stories Read online

  When he mentioned it to his father once, calling it, at first, ‘the anxiety of the footnote’, then simplifying it for his comprehension, the aged man couldn’t make out what the fuss was about. Shob boi-ey aachhey (everything’s in the books). Didn’t we say that once? the poor man asked. It was true, just saying that was enough once. Now no one believed you. So you had to show who had said what and where, on which page in which book and in which edition. That culture of distrust had come to them from America, where this culture of citation must have originated.

  Something else he’d discovered about America without going to it. Everyone discovers a wrong America first, like Columbus – Deep Mukherjee had once said that in a Facebook post. Ever since then, he’d been careful about imagining his impressions about America (he still couldn’t say ‘US’ or ‘the States’). It was while reading Provincialising Europe, a book by an Indian historian telling the truth about Europe, that it was, in spite of its show of great cosmopolitanism, actually exceptionally provincial, that the thought had occurred to him – that America was the most provincial place in the world. He’d soon tell the world why. The title of the book had made a home in his consciousness – Provincial America. It’d make him famous, it’d turn his words to quotes.

  It didn’t matter to him – for the real world didn’t infringe upon his imagination – that the students he taught in the college in Raiganj, where he was now travelling to, spelt ‘quote’ as ‘coat’.

  ‘Quote,’ he’d said to a boy during a viva-voce examination last year.

  The student had been answering a question about Robinson Crusoe. ‘I don’t have a coat, Sir. It’s summer,’ he’d said in response.

  No one had understood the relation between ‘quote’ and ‘summer’, not until the student had left and tea had been served.

  It didn’t strike him as odd, the difference between his ambition and where he was. He wouldn’t repeat the mistake his father and uncles had made – of growing roots. Roots were old things. He wanted to be new. Roots were invisible, like his father and grandfather had been. He wanted to be the focus of attention every moment, he wanted to be visible, he wanted to be not a root but a flower, to have the flamboyance of flowers. His father had spent his life looking at his image in the handheld mirror – he hardly looked at it. But Shubhro was his own annotator – he wanted his mind to be available to the world in quotation marks, he wanted to be revealed, his face recognisable to acquaintances and strangers.

  He took out his phone again. He’d post something. Everything needed riyaz (he liked to say ‘riyaz’ instead of the Bangla ‘reyaj’), Haripada Sir, his Mathematics teacher in school, used to say – everything, singing and listening, English and Mathematics, even walking. To become quotable needed riyaz, too – so many practised it on Facebook. He’d do the same. He looked out of the window – the bus still hadn’t left Balurghat. Everything moved slowly here, time and people, even the bus. An old man was selling tamarind – the pods stuck to each other in a way that resembled a beehive. As the bus crawled towards the corner where the man was sitting, a shivering statue with nothing moving except his teeth, the smell of tamarind throttled the bus. They seemed unable to move – the bus, the driver and its passengers. Shubhro swallowed the rush of saliva in his mouth. He was embarrassed that he had no control. It was a sign of his provinciality. Would a sophisticated man have succumbed to the sight and smell of ripe tamarind? In all likelihood, they’d never even have tasted it. He was angry with the University of North Bengal. Titora – five rupees of that sweet-sour thing that one sucked out of a tiny plastic packet; the Nepali girls had got him addicted. Then it had seemed so cool – the girls with their straight hair and modellike faces sucking something from a packet. He’d copied them. How he’d changed from that person. It was because his ambition had changed – he didn’t just want to look smart, he wanted to appear sophisticated. He wanted to spit out the saliva. But that’d make him even more plebeian. He swallowed it again, surprised by the resilience of the body, how it could accept everything. If only his mind were more like his body. That would happen. It was only a matter of time.

  The bus had become crowded. The driver was braking to make more space, the way his mother beat a container against the table to make space for more moori to get in. He hadn’t noticed that a young girl was sitting beside him. It wasn’t the girl that surprised him as much as what she was doing. She was reading a book in English. It filled him with mixed emotions: maybe the bus in Balurghat was gradually turning into a metro in a European city. He surveyed her book from the corner of his eye. Charles Lamb. Was she a student taking an English Honours exam in a college nearby? If so, he was angry that she hadn’t recognised him. He had the record for the highest marks in English Literature by a student from Balurghat in his name, but, quite clearly, it was a useless distinction. He longed to be recognised, to be asked for his opinion, or to pose in a selfie.

  Dream Children. The page in the book was open at this essay. The girl was muttering something to herself, in a rhythm that wasn’t very different from his mother’s Lokkhi panchali. He remembered something and suppressed his laughter. At a viva-voce examination, he had a question for a student: ‘Name one essay by Charles Lamb that’s been prescribed for your reading by the university.’

  The answer was prompt. ‘Dream Girl’. The name of the Hindi film alongside the potency of that youthful expression had had him confused.

  ‘If there is no Dream Girl, how can you have Dream Children?’ he’d replied.

  He returned to his phone. He wanted to post a quote, something that was seemingly simple but deeply philosophical. He looked for inspiration outside the window. ‘Blow Horn’; ‘Buy One Get One Free’ on the blue shutter of a store that still hadn’t opened; ‘Where will you go?’, from the bus conductor; ‘What’s your size?’, a hawai chappal-seller; ‘Dekhbi, jolbi/Luchir mawto phoolbi’ (‘You’ll watch and burn with jealousy, and swell up like a puri’). All of these lines had resonances besides their immediate meaning. Like poetry or philosophy. Putting them in quotes would give them gravitas. Should he do that? He spent time on Facebook posts and comments, weighing them, as one would an examination answer.

  The girl sneezed. A water droplet fell on ‘M’ – ‘Lamb’ became ‘Lab’. She didn’t say ‘Sorry’ or ‘Excuse me’. English Literature hadn’t taught her manners.

  Comedy of Manners, he thought. The girl sitting next to him wouldn’t know what it meant (a question on the subject hadn’t been asked for the last few years – students only studied for important questions in exams). She also wouldn’t know that she and many like her, whose ambitions were incongruent with the roots of their lives, were living their lives as if it was a Comedy of Manners. Ah, that was it, that’d be his post. He juggled the words in his mind, feeling nervous about making a mistake, aware of the destructive gravitational pull of bad grammar. Dissatisfied with the permutations inside his head (All the world’s a stage, and we actors in this Comedy of Manners – this was his favourite, and it hurt him slightly to abandon it), he took out all the words, like his father sheared a coconut. Just the kernel. And so only the phrase from where the thought had begun: Comedy of Manners.

  Gangarampur. The girl got down. So she was a student of Gangarampur College. As he stretched his legs slightly, he felt relieved without reason.

  A man took the vacant seat almost immediately. Shubhro turned away from the smell of hair oil. He tried to guess the brand – Dabur Amla or Parachute? He knew this smell but couldn’t identify it – it was like a school friend whose face he could remember but not the name. Was it an insult to those whose names we couldn’t remember? Like the old classmate one wants to forget and has therefore forgotten.

  He grew slightly impatient to post something. Angry that life gave him so few opportunities to represent it as interesting to the world, he, by default, thought of his parents. How ordinary they were, how lacking in beauty and humour and interest, how non-photogenic, both they and their s
urroundings. That proverb about lotus and the dung had to do with exceptions – he was that exception. He’d be the first breakout, the first person from Balurghat, from his family, both pathetically unremarkable, to arrive into the world. The PhD was a side dish. It was like a comb, giving his hair form. His real energy – he called it ‘mangsho-bhaat energy’, in contrast to ‘doodh-bhaat energy’, meat-and-rice energy, not baby-food rice-and-milk energy – was in what he was doing every moment: self-fashioning.

  At moments it felt that he was really like Sisyphus – it was impossible to fight destiny’s obedience to its own laws of gravity. But he wouldn’t give up without a fight. That is why every moment was important to him, containing the germ of a victory. The opponent was an abstraction, it was true – though his father, an amateur astrologer, saw it clearly drawn in the lines on palms – but so was the reward: the future. There was such great hope in the assurance that the future was elastic, that it could hold so much, the possible and even the unimagined. It was perhaps this that gave him secretive energy of a seed – but it also made him feel trapped inside himself, crouched, shrunken, waiting for time to water him to fullness. Every moment was a stop, a station that wasn’t his.

  But, for now, for the present, a moment for which he had little respect, he had to reach Raiganj. He was the exam invigilator.

  ‘Aaj ki baar?’ the man sitting next to him asked.

  Shubhro wondered whether his mother had ironed his hankie. Had she put it in his back pocket? The man’s breath was stained by beedi.

  ‘Thursday,’ he said, looking out of the window.

  ‘Third day?’ the man repeated. ‘Ki baar?’

  Shubhro had found his post. ‘Brihaspati-baar,’ he said, moving to the Facebook page on his phone. He’d report this conversation, about ‘Thursday’ becoming ‘Third day’. He’d seen Deep Mukherjee post about such things; also Professor Seturaman and Dr Singh, the latter from America.

  But how did Rita Banerjee, in Jalpaiguri, more than 500 kms away, know about this?

  ‘Third Day.’ That was her Facebook post. Shubhro was bewildered, and, almost immediately, scared. Had he been mispronouncing Thursday all his life? Was the ‘s’ silent? Only a couple of years ago – or was it last year? – he’d discovered the correct pronunciation of ‘Wednesday’. Not Wed-nas-day. He was filled with embarrassment thinking about the number of times he’d mispronounced the word. Was ‘Thursday’ actually ‘Third Day’? He unzipped his jacket to his stomach – the nervousness made him hot. He was counting the sequence of days on his fingers: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday... No, it was the fifth day, not the third. Not even if one started counting from Monday.

  But he had to know, he had to find out. So he commented: ‘Third day?’

  Rita Banerjee’s response was prompt. ‘Yes, third day of my period.’

  Unable to enjoy his relief of knowing that he actually hadn’t been mispronouncing Thursday all his life, he grew anxious about what he should say in response. He’d read articles in Huffington Post and Buzzfeed about the need for women to talk about their period openly, as if it was nothing more than a headache (no, no, not a headache, something more normal). But he didn’t know what men were supposed to say in response. He decided that he’d stay offline for some time – he imported his strategy from real-life quarrel situations into his online life often. But he was also two different people – the Shubhro Mitra on Facebook wasn’t the same person as the Babu who woke up in the house with damp green walls in Rathkhola. He’d never heard the word ‘period’ being said in his life. His mother had kept it a secret from him. He was still without a girlfriend – he longed to hear her say the word. There was such a difference between reading a word and hearing it being spoken.

  ‘Look at what’s happened to Gangarampur,’ said a male voice.

  ‘Population problem,’ said another, in English; the phrase had sneaked into Bangla a couple of decades ago.

  ‘I used to take a morning walk on this road. Even three years ago...’

  ‘Yes. And an old brinjal-seller would sit there – right over there, under the lamp post (it was wooden then) – with the best Panjipara brinjals. You know, those that melt in the mouth...’

  ‘My mother, if she were alive, wouldn’t recognise this Balurghat...’

  ‘It is good that Mashima’s not alive. Think of the pain and confusion it’d cause her.’

  Shubhro hated such conversation. He was not a nostalgist. His attachment was to the future, not to a past over which he had no control.

  The vegetable market – less a market, and more a street lined on either side with baskets of fresh produce – would have looked like a painting (Gauguin, he said to himself, pronouncing it like ‘penguin’, then correcting himself) had it not been for the smells. It had once been full of wonder and beauty when he would accompany his father to the Saturday haat as a child. He remembered the smell of fresh vegetables bursting out of his father’s bag, the stems of the young bottle gourd creeping out of it like an infant’s curious fingers from a cot, and, returning home, his dusty feet. The dust-soaked water running from his feet towards the moss-mouthed drain – what a thrill there was in watching these journeys of things flowing out of one’s bodies (the urine on the dry bathroom floor, no less colourful than his mother’s alpona).

  How gross childhood was. He congratulated himself on having reached where he was, unstained by it. He looked at his maroon socks briefly – his feet would never get dirty again.

  He felt pity for the vegetable-sellers, how they’d not see the world beyond this street, and how the world would never know of them. Did such a life have any value at all? Was it really true, as an American professor lecturing in their college had said, that a vegetable-seller affected more lives than a teacher? Did the man selling brinjals know that ‘begoon’ was called ‘brinjal’ and ‘eggplant’ and ‘aubergine’? Would it have made him happy? It was, after all, like having London, New York and New Delhi editions of one’s book. Poor man, he thought: Ish.

  The smell of his co-passenger’s hair oil brought him back, not in space but in time, for he lived more in the future than he did in the present. He was addicted to the future, to the rewards it held and which the present continued to hold back. Resisting the urge to sneeze, he turned towards the cause of the sneeze and asked, ‘Where are you going?’

  The response was prompt. ‘Goose-rat.’

  Shubhro knew what it meant. Gujarat. Gravely, he said, ‘There are no z sounds in Bangla. Only j and jh. Gujarat. Not Goose-rat.’

  The man was startled, not by the piece of information, which didn’t mean anything to him, but that the barrage of English was directed at him. It reminded him of the time he went to a restaurant and the waiter thrust a menu card in front of him – how could this be food, all these things in English? English could only be medicine, those difficult names on bottles and strips of tablets.

  In response now, he uttered the longest English sentence he knew. It was in a song – Amitabh Bachchan coming out of an egg, in a hat, a stick in hand, saying these words like koo-jhik-jhik, in shai-shai-shai speed.

  You See The Whole Country Of The System Is Juxtaposition By The Haemoglobin In The Atmosphere Because You Are Sophisticated Rhetorician Intoxicated By The Exuberance Of Your Own Publicity.

  Shubhro was shocked – it might have been that shock which had turned ‘verbosity’, the last word of the utterance, into ‘publicity’. Again, not by these polysyllabic words coming out of a man with peeling dry skin, in a sweater and lungi, not to mention the stink of his hair oil, but the epiphany in the words themselves. He recognised the nonsense in them, the arbitrary arrangement of the words, their rejection of meaning – they’d been chosen and then set beside each other only because of their polysyllabic nature and their comic foreignness. And then he saw, though still as a blur, the way one sees things immediately after waking up, that the symptom had been diagnosed much before the disease had turned into an epidemic.

 
; Everyone spoke like that now, college teachers and PhD students, collating words together without creating relationships between them, so that the sentence seemed not like a home, a place of rest, but an inn, where people were unrelated to each other, where there was no conversation. He decided to post this on Facebook.

  ‘What’s on your mind?’

  You See The Whole Country Of The System Is Juxtaposition By The Haemoglobin In The Atmosphere Because You Are Sophisticated Rhetorician Intoxicated By The Exuberance Of Your Own Publicity

  As he was typing this, another minor epiphany came to him – this line, unfriendly to meaning as it seemed, was an appropriate description of Facebookers too: The Exuberance of Your Own Publicity.

  The first like had arrived. Or perhaps the first liker (last February, on Valentine’s Day, he’d got an anonymous letter from someone who’d written, ‘Sir, I promise I’ll be a good laugher’. She’d meant ‘lover’, of course, but ‘laugher’ was probably how she pronounced the word.).

  Julia Kristeva.

  He wasn’t surprised. She was almost always the first person to like his Facebook posts. It wasn’t the real Julia Kristeva, of course. A student who, like a few others he knew, used a pseudonym. Almost inevitably, the pseudonym they adopted was the name of a critical theorist or philosopher. His colleague, Manojit, called himself Man Chomsky – Shubhro had once mistakenly said ‘Man Chomsky’ instead of ‘Noam Chomsky’ at a seminar. Such assumed names were disorienting – he could no longer remember the real Kristeva’s face. When he heard the name, it was his student Pinky’s face that came to his mind.