Amit Chaudhuri: Real Time: Stories and a Reminiscence

“Are you enjoying it?” he asked me at one point.

“I like it very much.”

“Of course,” he informed me, “you cannot understand, beneath all its lightness, its spiritual rhythm.”

I protested then, a little offended. But I know now that he was right, that the music of a piece of writing becomes richer with the passing of time. Mastermoshai’s Chhelebela, with his life behind him, was not the same as my Chhelebela, at the age of seventeen. The Bengali lessons continued, interrupted by discussions in which we spoke of various things, including my most recent poetry, an inexhaustible theme, and the strangely refreshing absence of tragedy in Sanskrit drama. But we did not complete the book. Mastermoshai had a small disagreement with my mother, and then with my uncle, a few childish, irrational outbursts, after which I myself became rather childishly cold with him. It was not a serious breach and would have healed. I met him again, by chance, a few days later in my uncle’s house. I had put a record of Hindustani classical music on the gramophone and, listening to it, was waving one arm passionately in the air, keeping time with the music. Unknown to me, mastermoshai came and stood behind me, waving his arms as well. When I saw Binoy smiling, I turned. Mastermoshai stopped immediately and became completely serious. With adult restraint, we acknowledged each other, and he went down the stairs.

Soon after, I left for England. Sometimes I would ask my mother on the phone: “How is Bishnu Prasad Chakrabarty?”—for that was mastermoshai’s name. Information about him was scarce, however. It seemed that, after a series of sporadic and silly quarrels, he had left his tuitions and taken up the cooking-oil business in earnest. When I came to Calcutta from England, I longed to make up with him, but no one knew where he was; I heard that he had moved into Ganesh’s house beyond the railway lines, where the nomadic poor — domestic servants, factory workers — lived in a different society with a different kind of life. Then, a few years later, my mother told me that he had died, leaving everything to Ganesh. I see now that the period in which I knew mastermoshai was a transitional one, when, after having lost his wife and children, having seen through life, he returned to his youthful enthusiasms — Baudelaire, Eliot — to temporarily regain his sanity. And then, for no good reason, he loosened his ties again.

Since that first meeting, much has changed in my life. Going to England blurred certain things and clarified others. I realised that a strange connection between this small, cold island and faraway Bengal had given rise to the small-town world of Calcutta, and even to mastermoshai; from a distance, I saw it gradually in perspective — a colonial small town, with its trams and taxis, unknown to, and cut off from, the rest of the world, full of a love for the romance of literature that I have not found anywhere else, and that is somehow a vivid part of small-town life. As for Binoy, I hardly see him these days; I live, for most of the year, in another part of the world, while he has stayed on in the house in Calcutta. Not having done exceptionally well at college, he works in his father’s business and has also joined, I hear, a political-theatre troupe, and performs, occasionally, in street plays. I saw him once on the stage, dressed in silk and costume jewellery as a medieval king, a turban on his head, his dark face made pale and floury with powder. Calcutta is his universe; like a dewdrop, it holds within it the light and colours of the entire world.

IT WAS AFTER SCHOOL HOURS.Almost an hour ago, either Krishna or Jimmy had rung the bell, a continual pealing that seemed to release a spring in the backs of the boys and girls, who jumped out of their chairs and proceeded to throw, without ceremony or compassion, their books into their satchels. It was then useless for a teacher to try to be heard, or to beat the table despairingly with the back of a duster, raising dramatic puffs of chalk dust, for the boys hard-heartedly assumed deafness; one or two “good girls” who raised their arms even now, a full twenty seconds after the bell, to ask a relevant question, further irritated the teacher, who, her hands powdered with sediments of green and white chalk, wanted to be upstairs in the teachers’ common room, pouring tea from her cup into her saucer and very slowly sipping it. Preparing, like Atlas, to lift a tottering load of brown-paper-covered exercise books full of long, ingenious bluffers’ answers, she, in a moment of mischief and vindictiveness, said to a “good girl”: “Lata, will you please carry these for me upstairs?” So impenitently angelic was the girl that she agreed without a murmur of resentment; with an air of perpetual readiness, even.

Mud-stained boys were now, at half-past four, coming in through the main gate after having played rugger, walking with both a tiptoer’s tentativeness and a plodder’s crushing stride in their studded boots. Only one girl, but the prettiest of them all, 7D’s Charmayne, had stayed back, accidentally, to admire this spectacle. The rugger tryouts had taken the trouble, on-field, during the scrum, to wrestle and hug the earth completely and, by the end of it, to return with an unfaultable cosmetic exterior of dirt, sweat, and plastered hair. Not an inch of clean skin or, on their bodies, uncreased cotton, was to be seen, and on coming through the gate, they were confident of having presented their most redoubtably sluggish, most uncompromisingly slovenly, most acutely male selves to Charmayne’s gaze; who, however, refused to look directly at them, perhaps out of shyness.

One of the boys, mounting the two steps to the corridor, regarded his left boot, whose lace had come untied. Elegant, casual, and drooping, the untied lace seemed to him a stylish touch, like an illegible but masterly signature, and he left it as it was and clattered off.

Gautam had stayed back with Khusroo because Khusroo had coaxed him into believing that dancing was something that could be learned. “There are no steps, believe me,” he said. “You just have to move, and enjoy yourself.” And this matter, of moving, and being able to enjoy it, had taken on some importance because the first Senior School Social of the year had been announced, and the date set for Saturday. “But you must come,” insisted Khusroo, who had never shown much interest in Gautam’s spiritual or social evolution. “You should come,” he had said with genuine, though inexplicable, eagerness. Gautam had been, at first, resistant. He could not see himself, much as he would have liked to, wantonly positioning himself a few inches away from a girl, and then, with aplomb, shivering and shaking ecstatically before her. Perhaps he would not mind if she did not look at him, but, contradictorily, perhaps he would mind. Such introspective furrows were left to be smoothed out by Khusroo, who tried to convince Gautam of the ordinariness and rationality of it — that dance was not a wayward display, but a necessary pleasure. Yet Gautam would not have changed his mind had not Anil, at five feet and half an inch, had the temerity to say, “Of course I’m going,” as if it were a right it would be foolish not to exercise. If Anil, at his height, could suffer to relinquish the shield and protection of his white school uniform for the daring intimacy of his social clothes, so could Gautam.

So here they were, standing in the corridor near the gate, in front of one of the Standard 9 classrooms, by the back door to the chemistry laboratory. The temperature had fallen, imperceptibly, gracefully, to 27 degrees, till the school itself seemed raised to a timeless stratosphere that was neither heaven nor earth, a place rained upon by coolness. The sun became tolerant, and suddenly sunlight was reflected in blinks and flashes, now here, now there, off hospital windows across the street that, earlier in the day, no one would have guessed even existed. Just outside the school walls, in the trees whose branches climbed prolifically over roofs and partitions, and ranged freely everywhere like a band of irrepressible trespassers, sparrows had begun to chirp all at once, loudly, excitedly, and perhaps informatively. Now that the school was empty, it seemed that the life around it had begun to imitate the intent, sometimes shy, play of the schoolchildren, with light bouncing and glancing off one hospital window to the next, chasing certain routes and eluding others, and the invisible birds shouting at one another at the top of their voices.