Neel Mukherjee - A Life Apart

The library is like a sombre chapel, a dark redbrick edifice with gothicky spires and a huge heavy door, which not only looks but also feels like the door to a castle, all enormous wood and metal; he has to push against it with his entire body to get it to open. He likes working here: it is cosy, warm and unintimidating, not at all like the central library where you have to wait for more than six hours for the ordered books to arrive and when you go up to the members of staff after the scheduled wait, they sometimes tell you things like, ‘Sorry we couldn’t find it, it’s missing, and we have no idea when it will turn up.’ Or, ‘The book fell off the trolley and its spine was crushed under the wheels; it’s gone to the binders, it’ll be six months before we get it back.’

But here, he can see the books on their shelves, go up to them, pull them out, browse, let his attention wander to other books far removed from his subject. At the table next to his, the historian with round glasses, red hair and the area around his nose and eyes marked by a populous colony of freckles has left a pile of books on Indian history lying around. Instantly curious, Ritwik reaches out for a volume with an incredible title: Wanderings of a Pilgrim in search of the Picturesque, during four-and-twenty years in the East; with Revelations of Life in the Zenāna by a Fanny Parkes, an Englishwoman who travelled around in India in the 1820s and 30s. Ritwik tries to dampen the excitement at this serendipitous find as he flicks through the pages: entire sections on a visit to a former Queen of Gwalior at a camp in Fatehpur, a chapter on a visit to a Mulka Humanee Begum married to a Colonel James Gardner. . Here it is, an outsider, a foreigner, being let in and recording her experiences; he adds the book to his own tottering pile.

He can touch and smell the books in this library, make a precarious tower of a dozen or so of them on his desk and feel secure behind that wall. He can even borrow them and take them back to his room, arrange them according to size on his small desk or his bookshelves and feel the satisfaction of order and method, order and method.

He reads as if his life depends on this reckless rush of words entering him in a torrent; words of different tongues, of other times and alien places all now gone, words which force their own spaces inside him so they can rush in to fill them up.

He reads about a mother who stands under a tree and tells passers-by to look at her for there is no sorrow greater than hers: her son has been nailed through to a tree. He reads of how this son came to her, to be conceived, as still as the April dew that falls on grass and flowers. On another page, the son enters her as the all-comprehending light through a stained-glass window. Another one about a helpless mother crying and watching her son die in a welter of blood and thorns and nail.

He reads about people who are so sleepless with love-longing they have gone mad and driven themselves to the forests where they meet others complaining about their despair in love. There is always someone standing under a thorn tree, singing as they languish in love’s prison. And he wonders at Jankin, the naughty church officiant who, instead of chanting Kyrie eleison , breaks out cunningly into Kyrie Alison , hoping the girl in the congregation is going to show him some mercy.

The strong undertow of his thoughts have pulled him so far away to the pitiful mother that he has trouble making his way back to the shallows again. The poems don’t tell him how she survives.

The days pass in anticipation and apprehension. Most of her possessions are packed in large trunks and boxes. Mahesh will see off the first consignment to Sealdah station tomorrow morning. She is taking her first class carriage in a week’s time, on the Eastern Bengal Railway, from Sealdah to Kooshtea. Mr Roy Chowdhury will receive her there himself and arrange for transportation from Kooshtea to Nawabgunj, in all probability in his motor car, but he has written that the rivers are in spate this season, the tracks are either all flooded or swamped with mud, where wheels will invariably get rutted, so Miss Gilby is really not looking forward to that particular leg of her long journey.

These days she spends mostly saying goodbye to people and things. Yesterday, she had farewell tea with her Bengali teacher, the old Sheikh Maqsood Ali, in his overcrowded, dark house, crammed with objects, in Collutolla Street. It had been impossible to read the expression in those nearly blind eyes behind their shield of lenses so thick that they looked magnified like an owl’s. Ali- miyan had refused to take back the books which he had lent her in the beginning — ‘Keep them, Miss Gilby, keep them, consider them a humble gift from teacher to student, something which I hope will remind you of our lessons together’ — books of the Bengali alphabet, elementary reading, sentence construction and writing by an eminent Bengali gentleman, Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar; Ali- miyan had never stopped singing the praises of that ‘great man’. Despite the initial difficulties with such a strange script, Miss Gilby had made not inconsiderable progress: she could read that bizarre and unpleasant moral tale of a boy who had his ear cut off as punishment for being a liar almost without any halting or help from Ali- miyan . He had been pleased; for Miss Gilby, his joy had been a welcome change from the almost constant state of his surprise at the rare occurrence of a memsahib making the effort to learn an Indian language. Even after three years he still couldn’t believe he had an English lady as one of his private pupils and one who came to his house to take her lessons. It was rare, it was unconventional, it was daring, and Ali -miyan had both savoured and feared it.

For the last three years, every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, without fail, come rain, floods or the unbearable sticky heat of summer, Miss Gilby appeared in her private brougham, from Elliott Road to Collutolla Street, for her Bengali lessons. The lessons had to be terminated, regrettably for both parties, when Miss Gilby was invited to tutor Saira- begum : it was an offer she couldn’t refuse because the Nawab of Motibagh was one of her brother’s influential acquaintances and when Miss Gilby had first moved to Calcutta four years ago the Nawab had extended every possible help to her because she was James’s sister. Besides, this was an opportunity Miss Gilby had been looking for all along, this chance to spread the knowledge not only of English but also of a different way of living, the knowledge of a whole new world, to Indian women, to forge a contact with these unheard and dumb creatures, to hear them speak, to hear their lives.

In the balance of things, her lessons with Ali -miyan , enjoyable and challenging though they were, and her unfolding relationship with her old teacher proved wonderfully that James, and along with him every single servant of the Empire in India and all the Anglo-Indian community, was wrong wrong wrong about the impossibility of a true, trustful friendship between the natives and the Anglos; the lessons had had to be sacrificed but she had made certain that her continuing friendship with Ali -miyan didn’t suffer. To this effect, she had visited him for tea — an institution to which she had slowly converted the all-too-willing teacher by speaking gloriously of the ways in which her people in England practised it daily — every first Sunday of the month during her time with the Motibaghs.

For her now, there is a valedictory air to everything in this messy city of lanes and by-lanes and road repairs and road building. It tinges her beloved tramcar journeys, which she has taken at least once every week during her time here. She goes down her favourite routes again and again: first, from Sealdah Station through Circular Road, Bowbazaar Street, Dalhousie Square, through Customs House and Strand Road — which, Ali -miyan tells her, was under water until 1823 or so — to Armenian Ghat on the banks of the Ganges. Seated in her first class carriage, she wills herself not to think of James’s words beating themselves out to the titup-titup-titup of the horses’ hooves on the cobbles as houses, temples, churches, people, buildings gently pass by, leaving her desiring the wide open space of the Maidan or the muddy brown water of the river, the sky low over it, and on its broad surface, boats and dinghies, ramshackle things barely held together with bamboos and tattered cloth. She likes the stillness of these boats; they seem to ply the waters in so leisurely a manner that it is difficult to believe they’re going anywhere or transporting people on them. It is the very rhythm of the country, this apparent lack of movement, of any forward motion altogether. Time means an altogether different thing to them.