Amit Chaudhuri - Real Time - Stories and a Reminiscence

As we read, the routines of the house continued around us. For instance, the maid might be swabbing the floor and the stairs, leaving dark arcs on the red stone. How swift and anonymous and habitual was her task, almost as if a ghost had done it, leaving those dark, moist marks on the floor, which dried and disappeared soon after! Downstairs, my aunt — my cousins’ mother — might be overseeing something in the kitchen, while my uncle might be preparing to have an early lunch before going out to work at his small business.

We sat just anywhere while reading, suspending activity, waiting for the story or the book to finish — on the stairs, against the side of a bed, on the floor. It might be the years of the Naxal uprising outside, with young men drawn into the movement, into the spilling of blood, blood that could not be recovered, and the lane, in which both Naxal and Congress supporters lived in some of the houses, was traumatised by those years. Cries would be heard; bottles broken; far away, the explosion of a homemade device. My uncle did not know what to make of this; with his shawl wrapped around his kurta, he was both voluble and innocent; he had always supported the Marxists, but now this was destroying his business, and would drive him to the verge of bankruptcy. Then the years passed. And we still sat reading side by side, of worlds that could not be translated into each other; the changes around us came to us as sounds in the street and from downstairs, that were adornments to our consciousness.

My uncle’s business never took off; it was a failure from the start. But optimism never flagged, either. Sometimes, my aunt would come upstairs while we read, perhaps to rearrange something — a pillow on the bed — or to have her bath and do her puja, or to call us downstairs for food. I would be reading about lighthouses, boating adventures, mountain expeditions, while my cousins read about mad scientists and mysteries that Hemendra Kumar Ray had created, about holy men and the seven seas and bloodthirsty kings. Every paisa my aunt spent had to be counted; but they — my uncle and aunt — had great reserves of hospitality and tolerance, so that their worries and struggles never marked their behaviour.

My aunt — whom I will call Shobha mami — hovered around as we sat with our books in our hands; her presence brought us comfort while our minds raced with demons, usurped kingdoms, seashores, and collapsing houses. She was one of those people who have a gift with children, who draw an enchantment around them without any seeming effort; and the spell lasts all childhood. On growing up, I have not come any closer to her; it is almost as if she became someone else; and this is so, most probably, because I knew her as a child. Then, her flaws, her human failings, and the complexity of her character were concealed from me: she appeared to me as a myth would. It was partly, of course, that she was in the midst of her life’s beginning; only nine or ten years married, her life had still not closed into a pattern. It was not that she touched or held or kissed us. Her magic and contact were more subtle; she would sort out fish bones for us from a difficult fish; she would tease and joke with us; she would return home, flushed from the market. And she would treat us all alike; not as if we were, all three of us, her sons, but as if we were infinitely and equally interesting. It strikes me now how little I know her, or knew of her desires, fears, affections; but she cannot have been wholly an enigma; it is said that children sometimes see a side of a person that others do not, and if so, we saw a side of her that even she might not have been entirely conscious of.

They were hospitable people; and, in spite of their various burdens during that difficult time, relatives from other parts of the country were always staying with them as students, or visitors (as I was), or as those who were passing through the city. Downstairs there lived for many years an older cousin, brilliant student, son of a widowed aunt, who had left his house in Assam to study in Calcutta and was a mere twelve or thirteen years older than us, and thus almost a contemporary; he would later become a very rich man in America. From time to time, voices came upstairs, of my aunt, our cousin, my uncle, a discussion between the men, talk of lockouts and debts.

But I never thought of myself as a visitor; and I do not know what my cousins thought, as we finished reading our stories in different languages, and looked up, and became conscious once more of the house, with secret flashlight signals and demons who could grow eight times their size in a minute still in our heads. Once finished, the books lost their interest, but remained precious as material objects, that we would pretend to sell each other as make-believe hawkers. But our worlds, essentially, remained locked to each other; we never read each others’ stories, though I admired the covers of their books, with severed heads dripping blood, and dragonfly-wing-frail princesses. They would never know what it meant to live outside this world, as I did, of magic and small means; and I would never know what it meant to grow up reading those stories by Saradindu and Sukumar Ray and Hemendra Kumar, and to be transported, for that half hour, more completely into another world, as I believed, than I was.

IT WAS INHUMANto play cricket at this time of the year, in this heat, but that was precisely what they were doing these days. Moreover, the team was being sent out into that cauldron to pick up something called the Pepsi Cup. You had to feel for them, though they looked like young braves. While others might shop at the airport in Dubai, one would expect them not to glance at the watches and shapely state-of-the-art CD players, to have nothing but a glass of orange juice at the hotel before going into the nets.

Among them was Tendulkar, whose name, everyone agreed, sounded like an ancient weapon of destruction, and who carried a one-and-a-half-ton bat. He disembarked from the plane with a singleness of purpose, and a sealed, expressionless face. He and the “boys” (though you wouldn’t ordinarily call Azharuddin a “boy”) were here to deal with the English and the vigorous Pakistanis, mainly the Pakistanis, who came from a country that had sprung troublingly from a gash in the side of their own about fifty years ago.

Among the spectators was to be Ummar Aziz, who had no place to hide in India and who, rumour had it, had been living around here in a mansion with a swimming pool for the last three years. He had expertly orchestrated a series of explosions in Bombay in 1993, bombs that had gone off in the Air India Building and in Prabhadevi, not to speak of eleven other places. He strenuously denied it, but from this safe haven; and indeed the charge might be a fiction dreamed up by the police. It was heard that he was coming not so much because of his love of cricket, which was considerable, or of the Indian or Pakistani teams (the Pakistani side was a depleted one, with its main bowlers discredited and removed), but because of his fascination with Urmila Deshpande, the star of Ishq and Jaadu, who was also going to be present. Ummar Aziz had been watching Hindi films since he’d been an orphan child of the Bombay streets.

The team practised nimbly, without exhausting themselves. Now and then a reporter or a television crew came and asked them questions. When Azharuddin answered the questions, you could see the others in the background, throwing their arms about, Tendulkar doing exercises, his glasses so dark they bore no reflection. When he spoke, you had to look at his mouth because of the challenge his dark glasses threw you.

The English were the first to wilt. Ganguly hit the winning shot, a six that saw the ball take flight in a way unlike any bird in these surroundings. Then, the desert sun long set, he got the first Man of the Match award of the tour.