Amit Chaudhuri - Real Time - Stories and a Reminiscence

ON THEIR WAYto the house, Mr. Mitra said he didn’t know if they should buy flowers. They were very near Jogu Bazaar; and Mr. Mitra suddenly raised one hand and said:

“Abdul, slowly!”

The driver eased the pressure on the accelerator and brought the Ambassador almost to a standstill. Not looking into the rearview mirror, he studied two boys with baskets playing on the pavement on his left.

“Well, what should we do?” Mr. Mitra’s face, as he turned to look at his wife, was pained, as if he was annoyed she hadn’t immediately come up with the answer.

“Do what you want to do quickly,” she said, dabbing her cheek with her sari. “We’re already late.” She looked at the small dial of her watch. He sighed; his wife never satisfied him when he needed her most; and quite probably it was the same story the other way round. Abdul, who, by sitting on the front seat, claimed to be removed to a sphere too distant for the words at the back to be audible, continued to stare at the children while keeping the engine running.

“But I’m not sure,” said the husband, like a distraught child, “given the circumstances.”

She spoke then in a voice of sanity she chose to speak in only occasionally.

“Do what you’d do in a normal case of bereavement,” she said. “This is no different.”

He was relieved at her answer, but regretted that he had to go out of the car into the market. He was wearing a white cotton shirt and terycotton trousers because of the heat, and shoes; he now regretted the shoes. He remembered he hadn’t been able to find his sandals in the cupboard. His feet, swathed in socks, were perspiring.

He came back after about ten minutes, holding half a dozen tuberoses against his chest, cradling them with one arm; a boy was running after him. “Babu, should I wipe the car, should I wipe the car…,” he was saying, and Mr. Mitra looked intent, like a man who has an appointment. He didn’t acknowledge the boy; inside the car, Mrs. Mitra, who was used to these inescapable periods of waiting, moved a little. He placed the tuberoses in the front, next to Abdul, where they smeared the seat with their moisture. Mr. Mitra had wasted some time bargaining, bringing down the price from sixteen to fourteen rupees, after which the vendor had expertly tied a thread round the lower half of the flowers.

“Why did she do it?” he asked in an offhand way, as the car proceeded once more on its way. Going down Ashutosh Mukherjee Road, they turned left into Southern Avenue.

Naturally, they didn’t have the answer. They passed an apartment building they knew, Shanti Nivas, its windows open but dark and remote. Probably they’d been a little harsh with her, her parents. Her marriage, sixteen years ago, had been seen to be appropriate. Usually, it’s said, Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, and Saraswati, of learning, two sisters, don’t bless the same house; but certainly that wasn’t true of the Poddars, who had two bars-at-law in the generation preceding this one, and a social reformer in the lineage, and also a white four-storeyed mansion on a property near Salt Lake where they used to have garden parties. Anjali had married Gautam Poddar very soon after taking her M.A. in history from Calcutta University.

As they passed a petrol pump, Mr. Mitra wondered what view traditional theology took of this matter, and how the rites accommodated an event such as this — she had jumped from a third-floor balcony — which couldn’t, after all, be altogether uncommon. Perhaps there was no ceremony. In his mind’s eye, when he tried to imagine the priest, or the long rows of tables at which people were fed, he saw a blank. But Abdul couldn’t identify the lane.

“Bhai, is this Rai Bahadur R.C. Mullick Road?” he asked a loiterer somewhat contemptuously.

The man leaned into a window and looked with interest at the couple in the back, as if unwilling to forgo this opportunity to view Mr. and Mrs. Mitra. Then, examining the driver’s face again, he pointed to a lane before them, going off to the right, next to a sari shop that was closed.

“That one there.”

They went down for about five minutes, past two-storeyed houses with small but spacious courtyards, each quite unlike the others, till they had to stop again and ask an adolescent standing by a gate where Nishant Apartments was. The boy scratched his arm and claimed there was no such place over here. As they looked at him disbelievingly, he said, “It may be on that side,” pointing to the direction they’d just come from.

“That side?” Mr. Mitra looked helpless; he’d given up trying to arrive on time. What preoccupied him now was not getting there, but the negotiations involved in how to get there.

It turned out that what the boy was suggesting was simple. The main road, Lansdowne Road, divided the two halves of Rai Bahadur Mullick Road; one half of Mullick Road went left, the other right.

“Don’t you know where they live?” asked Mr. Mitra as Abdul reversed and turned the car around. The over-sweet, reminiscent smell of the tuberoses rose in the front of the car with a breeze that had come unexpectedly through the window. In front of a house on the left, clothes hung to dry as a child went round and round in circles in the courtyard on a tricycle.

“But I’ve only been there three or four times — and the last time, two years ago!” she complained. “I find these lanes so confusing.”

The lanes were confusing; there were at least two, one after another, that looked exactly the same, with their clotheslines, grilles, and courtyards.

About ten or eleven days ago, they’d noticed a small item in the newspaper, and were shocked to recognise who it was. Then an obituary appeared, and Mr. Mitra had called his daughter in Delhi, who remembered Anjali from visits made in childhood. Last week another insertion had told them that “Observances will be made in memory of Mrs. Anjali Poddar, who passed away on the 23rd of February, at 11 A.M. at 49 Nishant Apartments, Rai Bahadur R.C. Mullick Road. All are welcome.”

They didn’t expect it would be a proper shraddh ceremony; they didn’t think people would be fed. So Mrs. Mitra had told the boy at home, firmly so as to impress her words upon him, “We’ll be back by one o’clock! Cook the rice and keep the daal and fish ready!” Without mentioning it clearly, they’d decided they must go to the club afterwards to get some cookies for tea, and stop at New Market on the way back. So they must leave the place soon after twelve; it was already ten past eleven.

The first to be fed was usually a crow, for whom a small ball of kneaded aata was kept on the balcony for it to pick up; the crow was supposed to be the soul come back — such absurd make-believe! Yet everyone did it, as if it were some sort of nursery game. Mr. Mitra, looking out through the windshield, past the steering wheel and Abdul’s shoulder, speculated if such practices might be all right in this case. Here the soul had made its own exit, and it was difficult to imagine why it would want to come back to the third-floor balcony of Nishant Apartments.

“Ask him!” said Mrs. Mitra, prodding her husband’s arm with a finger. She nodded towards a watchman standing in front of what looked like a bungalow. “Ask him!”

“Nishant?” said the thin, moustached chowkidar, refusing to get up from his stool. Behind him was an incongruously large bungalow, belonging to a businessman, hidden by an imposing white gate and a wall. He barely allowed himself a smile. “But there it is.” Two houses away, on the left.

It was clear from the size of the cramped compound, with the ceiling overhanging the porch only a few feet away from the adjoining wall, that Nishant had been erected where some older house once was, and which had been sold off to property developers and contractors. It must be twelve or thirteen years old. An Ambassador and two Marutis were parked outside by the pavement. Mr. Mitra, holding the tuberoses under his right arm, glanced at his watch as he entered the porch, then got into the lift, which had a collapsible gate, hesitantly. He waited for his wife, looked at himself quickly in the mirror, and pressed a button. Mrs. Mitra smoothed her hair and looked at the floors changing through the collapsible gate.