My Mother's Lover and Other Stories Read online

  He’d returned to Middlemarch. The bus had moved out of Gangarampur. The sun, though anaemic, was blooming gradually. It had reached the edge of the agricultural fields and would’ve reached them too had the bus not run away. The bus had picked up speed as it always did once out of crowded towns – the speed created an illusion of warmth, as if the passengers were running and would soon begin sweating. It was a cold day, so cold that it had almost stunned the passengers into silence. There was no sound in the bus, except cell phones ringing and someone from the last row of seats, possibly a man, making a shivering sound – uuuuuuuuu.

  Shubhro’s phone rang. He looked at the name of the caller (sometimes, like at this moment, he couldn’t forget his father’s face of disbelief at the name of the caller appearing on the phone screen; the old man was from a world where ordinary things were imbued with a sense of mystery – no one knew who was calling until the voice announced itself from the other end of the line). Ashok Sir. His teacher in college, now retired. What was it this time? How would Shubhro know when his pension would be released? No, he didn’t know anyone in Calcutta’s Bikash Bhavan. He ignored the call. The phone rang again. What an insistent caller.

  Hello, he said, though he was on the verge of saying ‘uff’.

  ‘Shubhro,’ the voice said, ‘Kaymon aachho, baba?’

  He hated being called ‘baba’ and ‘babu’. That old-world familiarity and infantilisation at the same time. Intolerable.

  ‘I’m good,’ he said, in an accent that wasn’t completely his, but one he wanted to use, to show Ashok Sir the difference between the two of them, two generations of college teachers of course, but particularly between Shubhro and the man. He was as new as America, as Facebook – his teacher an old provincial. He wouldn’t let that word taint his life.

  ‘Will you help me with a quotation, baba?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Shubhro in his self-absorption.

  ‘That Fool...’

  ‘Fool? Ke?’ he asked, curious. Was it any of his classmates? Himangshu?

  ‘That Fool who says something about greatness.’

  Shubhro was suddenly annoyed. ‘Fool?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, that fool-like man in Twelfth Night. That man who says something about greatness… What’s his name?’

  ‘Do you mean Malvolio?’ he asked, conscious of replying in English.

  ‘Yes, yes, baba. Do you remember the quote about greatness?’

  ‘“Some are born great, some achieve greatness,/and some have greatness thrown upon them.” That one?’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes. Thank you, baba. How are you? I’ve been thinking of these lines for the last few days, but they just wouldn’t come to me. Do you know why?’

  ‘Why?’ said Shubhro politely and without interest.

  ‘Well, it started like this. Sadhan – my son, you remember him, don’t you? – bought me a new phone. And then he showed me something called Friendsbook…’

  ‘Facebook, Sir, not Friendsbook.’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ the aged man replied; saying ‘yes’ thrice was one of his tics. ‘So this is what I see on Facebook – people using quotes all the time, as if it was a quote-emitting factory. At first, I didn’t want to add to the effluent, but even to criticise it, to stop people from feeling celebratory about it, I thought I must use a quote myself. It was then that I thought of this quote.’

  Shubhro was exhausted by his teacher’s English – it seemed like he was listening to a book being read, he even heard the commas and periods. Realising that he was expected to reply, he said, ‘You don’t necessarily have to post a quote, Sir. People share news and other people’s posts, too.’

  ‘Yes, but news reports and other people’s posts are quotes too. Why do you think people do this, baba?’

  Irritated by everything around him, but mostly Facebook, which wasn’t helping him to become famous in the way it had so many, he said, ‘To become famous.’

  ‘Oh,’ replied the old man, ‘perhaps they will now have a subject in school – that teaches students to become famous.’

  Shubhro was eager for the conversation to end, to check responses to his Facebook post, for comments confirming his intelligence to himself. ‘Sir, I’ll have to get down from the bus very soon. Let’s talk later again?’

  Only three likes. It had been nine minutes since he’d posted. If Deep Mukherjee had posted this, there would have been 300 likes by now.

  He looked into the bus. A man was trying to insert a broken umbrella inside a plastic bottle – the Aquafina bottle would serve as the umbrella’s temporary handle. Shubhro knew the name for this – jugaad. Indians had come to be identified with it, he knew. Deep Mukherjee had extrapolated the concept of jugaad to explain why Indian academics, particularly those who taught and wrote about literature and the social sciences, had begun to write in this strange language that neither belonged to them nor to anyone identifiable. He had likened the quotational fabric of Facebook to academic papers – their language was a practical and material problem, Deep had argued. It came from the lack of resources in the provinces. Just as the plastic bottle was serving as an umbrella handle but could be replaced with a stick or anything else, similarly, scholars were looking for a quote from any possible theorist to make their paper stand. They had no ideological affiliation to the thinker – the quote was enough. It was the provincial’s bricolage – it depended purely on the availability of books and texts in these small places. The Indian scholar had become a walking Facebook – reproducing quotes and thoughts. One didn’t hear his voice but the voices of those who’d spoken before him.

  Shubhro knew this was true, and tried not to be this parody. But how was it possible to escape this epidemic? How else would he become famous?

  The first bell had rung before Shubhro had entered the examination hall. Digonto, his colleague, who lived nearby, had distributed the answer scripts. They looked at each other but didn’t speak a word, as if they too were bound by the examinees’ code of silence. The students had begun writing their names and other details on the cover page of the answer script. Digonto came to him and whispered, ‘Have you noticed how many students have coloured their hair? I’ve been teaching in this college for twenty-three years. This is a new phenomenon. I don’t understand why they have to…’

  ‘Should we give out the question papers now? Only five minutes remain…’

  ‘Yes, here, you take half the bunch…’

  Shubhro peeled dry skin off his lips. He felt the urge to look at his phone, to check for responses. Something told him that he was on the verge of being famous. It was no longer a matter of time. It was about to happen. It was possible that this post would make him famous – if it did, he’d be sharing the glory with Amitabh Bachchan, but did that matter? Academics co-wrote books and essays often after all.

  The sun was behaving like a paying guest – it was only a few minutes past eleven, but it was checking out for the day. Shubhro’s hands were freezing. He rubbed them and started walking, hoping to bring some warmth to his body. Who’d believe that Raiganj could be this cold in January? It was too cold for him to hold Middlemarch in his hands.

  Examination time behaves in a bipolar manner: it seems too short for examinees and too long for invigilators. Shubhro noticed something odd in the third row. He’d forgotten the girl’s name – was she from History Honours? – but he’d seen her on Facebook, and on the bus to Balurghat a few times. She got down before him always. She seemed to be copying from a tiny piece of paper. Shubhro walked swiftly towards her and put his hand out – it was a friendly way of asking for what students called the ‘cheat chit’ or ‘micro-xerox’. The girl pretended not to see. He stood there, his palm facing her.

  ‘I follow you on Facebook,’ the girl said.

  Shubhro saw her name on the answer sheet. Prarthona. ‘Give me the piece of paper, Prarthona,’ he said, his voice soft and calm. He’d let her go – he’d just take away the piece of paper, he wouldn’t report her.

 
‘It’s only a quote from Ambedkar,’ the girl replied. ‘Please let me copy this, Sir.’

  He shook his head.

  A silent battle continued for some time.

  ‘You just posted a quote from Amar Akbar Anthony. Isn’t that cheating too, then?’ the girl said. ‘I’m quoting from Ambedkar. How are they different? Ambedkar is more important than Anthony.’

  Something in Shubhro snapped. He leapt at the girl, trying to get the piece of paper out of her hand. The girl had, in the meantime, put the piece of paper inside her sweater.

  When Shubhro reached home, he saw he’d been tagged 126 times on Facebook. The girl’s post had gone viral:

  Professor Shubhro Ghosh molested a Final Year student in Raiganj College. He pulled her by the hand, and also tried to put his hand inside her sweater. We demand his immediate suspension.

  Prarthona and her classmates, who had jumped at him and fought him, scratching his face and neck, had made him ‘famous’.

  My Mother’s Lover

  ‘Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never understand such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.’

  —George Orwell

  I DISCOVERED HIM IN a poem. My mother’s lover. But that was not until I had made other discoveries about her.

  I had been expecting the phone to ring every morning. She had been ill for some time and the doctor in Varanasi had said – quoting a poetess I did not know then – that she would be with us until ‘salt melts in the hands’, by which he probably meant the end of summer. He had not been wrong. It was the ninth morning of September.

  ‘She left us last night.’ That was all Tina would say. She would not use the words ‘died’ or ‘expired’. Those were always used for other people; not for those whose cold scaly feet we smeared with red ink for impressions of footprints to frame on walls next to our favourite gods and goddesses.

  Tina refused to tell me anything else or, even if she did, I had perhaps refused to hear because I’d been making mental journeys of my own, like calling the Singapore Airlines office for my air ticket and leaving the trash outside the door. She had sent me an email, she said, crying; I, too, had been crying while talking to her, but her tears sounded different, even odd, soaked more with anger than hurt.

  I wouldn’t have checked my email at the airport had she not insisted, for though I was the older twin, I had grown up listening to her; it was not really pampering a younger sister, as maintaining the illusion of being the older sister.

  ‘Mrs Srivastava used to write poetry,’ her email began.

  I stopped reading; Tina had sent me a wrong email by mistake, I thought. Curious, I read on. I couldn’t understand why my sister would write an email about a poetess on the morning after her mother’s death.

  Yes, you are reading it right – Mrs Srivastava used to write poetry. In case you are confused, let me clarify that she was the woman we called Mother. No, this is not a secret that we hid from you. We only came to know this morning, half a day before you…

  When we were preparing to take her body to the cremation ghat, a few strangers arrived. Their white clothes led me to mistake them for grieving relatives from her side of the family. Soon Babuji and I found ourselves pushed to a corner in our own house. This group of men, led by a pot-bellied man whom others were addressing as Gupta-ji, let us know that we would not be allowed to take Ma’s body to the burning ghat until the television crew from AajTak and CNN-IBN had arrived. We were surprised, rather shocked. Neelima Bua asked them why. That Gupta man shouted at her saying, ‘She’s not your property. She’s the property of the nation, of Hindusthan, of Hindi-sthan.’ By this time I was sure that these were a bunch of mad men who had fled from the sanatorium in nearby Ranchi, but I was too exhausted to take control. And Vikram wasn’t at home; he’d be able to reach Benares only at midnight.

  OK, let me cut the story short. This is what we learnt: that Gupta-ji was a publisher, that he had been publishing Ma’s poetry for the last twenty-four years, that she had written under pseudonyms all her life and yes, that she was a ‘celebrated’ poet, an ‘asset’, ‘one of the most important female poets in post-Independence Hindi Literature’. These are not my words but of those stupid TV journalists.

  Do you realise how I feel? How Babu-ji feels?

  How do you feel?

  Why did she need to hide this from us? Why?

  I can never forgive her for…

  I couldn’t read any further; I felt like a student who, on entering the examination hall, discovers that she’s prepared for the wrong subject. Unexpectedness was only part of the curse, the most significant emotion, after the initial shock of betrayal. It took me a long time to realise that what I had felt was not betrayal but the pain of exclusion; she had played word games with the world after putting us to sleep.

  The flight was on time. I went through the security check, opened my handbag and socks, let my most precious things go through the scanners. My mother had done the same in life, and yet she had hidden what was most important to her.

  It would perhaps have been easier for me to accept that my mother had been a flautist, someone who had accumulated and then put all her breaths into a piece of wood to let the world hear her; that would perhaps have been easier to accept because I’d have been able to fill the auditorium with dark silhouettes of strangers. But the thought of her being a poet, someone who had made dealings with the world on a page in daylight in a language that I no longer use in my daily conversation with my American husband, my divided children or my colleagues in Boston, infuriated me.

  On the plane, sitting next to the window, I began to think of my childhood, to search for her in a time when she was only ours, Tina’s, my father’s and mine.

  We grew up, my twin sister and I now realise, without stories. My mother must have been busy telling stories to other people, more important and more understanding than us, two little girls quarrelling, at bedtime, about who would sleep near the window. I remember my mother coming into our bedroom once, with a pen in hand, her hair tied into a drooping knot and acting judge, with almost the same verdict every day, ‘Who sleeps near the window sleeps closer to God.’

  We didn’t argue with her then, but when we’d grown up and moved to a new house with separate bedrooms for the two of us, we didn’t give in so easily.

  ‘I don’t want to sleep with God,’ Tina had said to her one day but my mother hadn’t been surprised.

  ‘I wouldn’t like to either,’ she’d answered without a smile, and adjusted the curtains on the window before pulling the door behind her.

  Our father was a sales manager who changed jobs often. My memory of him is a blur of blue shirts always opening doors – doors of the house, of the garage, of his bedroom, of the car and, sometimes, the bedroom. I try to remember him otherwise and I fail – the blue shirt and tie, the bluish-grey suit, sometimes the blue marks on his hand left by an outdated stamp-pad. Only, I can’t remember whether he wore blue shoes, but that might be because I don’t remember looking at his feet. In fact, I don’t remember looking at him at all; children never look at their parents because they need no meaning to interpret two people who act as traffic police in their lives. Parents, I have discovered, though only after becoming one, look at their children, study them in their sleep, in photographs and even during school sports or concerts, just to confirm, again and again, that the object of their love is worth their sincerity.

  ‘My mother is a housewife,’ we said to friends in school or to quiz-masters in competitions, sometimes with embarrassment, especially when Rohini, the girl who came first in our class, said that her mother was a scientist. What a blessing to have a scientist-mother, we thought; to live in a house full of beakers and test tubes full of important liquids, doing something for the world, inventing new things and planning to go to Mars or Jupiter for summer vacations. Our mother did nothing; she didn’t even
cook, except sometimes on Sundays; she gave instructions to the maid; she wrote something all day, all our childhood.

  We find it strange now, when Tina and I talk about her, that we were never interested in what she wrote; it never occurred to us that she could be writing something important. ‘Important’ – that’s the word they used for her in the obituary, ‘important writer’.

  Why did we not ever ask ourselves that question? ‘What does my mother write all the time? Why does my mother write all the time?’

  Perhaps because her writing never interfered with the rhythm of our children-lives; perhaps because what she wrote, and sometimes in spite of it, she remained our mother.

  Tina discovered it, only a part of it, before I did. She was always good at discovering new things; she even discovered her menstrual cycle a few days before I discovered mine. And love.

  We were in a bookshop, only the two of us, looking for love poems. It was Tina’s idea, to surprise the man she loved secretly, with a poem on Valentine’s Day. We must have been about seventeen then and had tired of ‘Roses are red, I won’t come with you to bed’, but her secret love was a lecturer in Hindi Literature, and he loved poetry. We hated poetry, Tina and I. It only made our life more complicated by not speaking directly to us. But Tina was so much in love with this balding man, she could do anything for him – read poetry and speak in complete grammatical sentences, even during dinner.