Amit Chaudhuri: Real Time: Stories and a Reminiscence

One night the following week, when Bishu had returned to the outhouse after some work in the mansion, he noticed three bicycles on the landing, leaning on the wall by the staircase. They seemed quite new; the bicycle spokes glinted sharply in the light of the bulb. Bishu wondered what they were doing there — had the watchman put them there? No, it must be Jagan. He listened outside Jagan’s door, but there seemed to be no one inside the room.

He went up to his room, and a little later Uma brought him his dinner of rice and daal and vegetables. He ate without talking much, thinking of whether he should tell Mr. Banerjee about the bicycles. “Something seems to be on your mind,” said Uma. “No, it is nothing,” he said, rising to wash his hands. “Nothing.” He decided to dismiss the thought from his head.

* * *

THEN A HOT SPELL BEGAN AGAIN,punctuated by infrequent showers. It was during hot days like these that Bishu had first met Uma two and a half years ago. Uma used to emerge from the gates of the building opposite, Southern Gardens Flats, and walk down the lane towards the main road, perhaps going to the market; on her way she would stop at the gate of the strange new, huge Marwari house, which looked like something between a castle and an aeroplane, and talk to the watchman, whom she seemed to know. Bishu, who was never really friendly with the servants in the house he worked in, loitered about a lot, and he had seen her a few times. She was not particularly pretty; she was thin (though not as thin as she was now), with protruding teeth; but, in her sari, she looked slim and small and had a certain grace.

Often she would come down the path that went past the outhouse with a pitcher against her waist. One day Bishu said to her:

“What’s the matter, don’t you getting water in your building?”

“Of course we do — why shouldn’t we?” said Uma. “It’s just that didimoni prefers tubewell water.”

Bishu noticed that there was vermilion in the parting of her hair: he realised she had a husband somewhere, in either her past or present; he was not unduly bothered. Thus their courtship began, fifteen or twenty minutes of conversation each day on the dusty path between the outhouse and the mansion that led to the tubewell, looked upon and ignored by the many windows and verandahs, the numerous eyes, of the multi-storeyed building. Sometimes she had a ponytail, sometimes a plait. Their differences — he an Oriya of the sweeper caste, she a once married Bengali — which should have kept them apart, only brought them together. In a couple of months, the conversations had led to the first physical intimacy in the room in the outhouse, hurried embraces; though everything was so quickly and secretively done that no one had an inkling, least of all didimoni. It was only after Uma had begun to retch and throw up and realised she was pregnant that she ran away from her job to marry Bishu.

* * *

AFTER A SHORT BURSTof rain late in the morning, the sun came out and it became hot again. Priti, who either played with other children on the dusty path where her parents had once met, or wandered about at home, was now crawling about busily in the room, seeming to have found a playmate in the sun, which, though burning in the sky after the shower, appeared to be crawling about in the room as well. Her mother picked her up and put her on the bed, where she sat without protesting. A few minutes later, two shaliks came to the window.

“Paati!” said Priti, looking at them, for all birds were pakhi, or “bird,” to her. The birds took off immediately, and Priti seemed a little surprised that they were now here and now not. When her mother picked her up and took her to the window, she looked out at the lane contentedly, with its buildings and huge banyan and gulmohur trees casting shadows everywhere.

In the afternoon, Uma took the child in her arms and went to visit didimoni on the seventh floor of Southern Gardens Flats. She did this from time to time, because she was always welcome in didimoni’s flat and she liked to keep in touch with her.

“Oh — it’s Uma,” said Mrs. Sengupta, whom Uma called “didimoni.” “Come into the room! How are you?”

“I’m well, didimoni,” said Uma shyly, stepping inside the bedroom. She sat on the floor beside the bed, Priti in her arms.

“The child has become very sweet — pretty…,” said didimoni.

Uma smiled with pleasure; that was another reason she liked coming here — the child was always fussed over. Priti looked back at didimoni and around her in silence, as if puzzled by the flat.

“And is everything going well?” asked Mrs. Sengupta.

“What should I say, didimoni,” said Uma with a small smile, “sometimes I want to leave him and come back here with Priti to work — he bothers me at times!”

Didimoni laughed — but did not know what to say. For although she could have possibly given Uma a job, it would have been too much of a problem having a child in the house; she had tried it with another servant, and it hadn’t worked. Nor did she really take Uma’s complaint seriously. And yet her heart went out to her. She had become thinner than before, and darker, and her teeth seemed to protrude from her mouth more prominently.

“Never mind,” she said, thinking back to her own marriage. “There are always misunderstandings at first, and then they get smoothed out.” Uma nodded and smiled a little, while Priti, in her arms, looked this way and that. Uma remembered how, in the first days she had met Bishu, she used to think he was a driver, because he sometimes had the car keys in his hand; only later had she discovered he was a cleaner.

After half an hour, she got up and said goodbye to didimoni, promising to come again, and walked to the front door and then the lift, glimpsed by the cook and the other servant who had once been her companions in this flat. On her way out, the child in her arms looked in a leisurely way at the furniture in the house — it was difficult to tell if she was registering anything — as if content to be adrift in this frail maternal carriage, an avid, if powerless, observer of life.

* * *

IN THE MIDDLE OF SEPTEMBER,towards the end of the rains, Mr. Banerjee threw a couple of dinners in his flat. An unusual brightness emanated from that side of the mansion; parties were seldom thrown these days. Behind the white façade of the mansion, the lives of the occupants were in a sort of abeyance; none of the tenants paid rent to Mr. Banerjee — and Mr. Banerjee did not seem terribly concerned. Only against one tenant was a court case under way.

One morning, when Bishu was walking past the lawn towards the lane to buy a few things from the tea stall, the Hindustani watchman at the gate called out to him. “E Biswajeet!” They had never really liked each other, and the watchman always addressed him by his full, not his shortened, name. He was a bulky man in khaki, certainly larger than Bishu, who was only five feet four inches, and he had moustaches. “Have you heard?” “Heard what, darwan?” asked Bishu. “I haven’t heard anything.” “Arrey, everyone has heard and you haven’t heard,” said the watchman. “You’re a strange fellow! Your friend was taken away this morning by the police.” “My friend?” said Bishu — he felt suddenly ill; he could not hear the raucous cries of the crows overhead. “Which friend?” “Arrey — which friend — that friend of yours, Jagan, the one you brought to work,” said the watchman, leaning back on his stool. The watchman, his uniform, the lane, Southern Gardens, the sunlit lawn, all seemed to belong to a world of which Bishu was not really part. “Why?” he asked softly. “What does he do?” “The fellow is a thief, a known thief — he and his aunt’s son and some others were stealing bicycles and other things and selling them in these parts. They opened his trunk and found a gun in it — I saw it myself! Where did you bring him from, e Biswajeet?”