Home

“You know, home to me is memories of songs and familiar streets. Of tall trees and square ones. Of the fun of riding my cycle downhill from the 9th street of Newton all the way down to Marconi, feet spread on either side. Of the gradient of each road. Of coming home to find George Biswas singing "With a high hope" on the 33 rpm vinyl. Of the first footsie under Dhar Sir's bed that transported me to another land. It could have been Atasi or Sonali, but I have no way of finding out. Home to me is the fear of Mathematics and of rushing to Atanu's house for help. And of him making me smoke his dad's half cigarettes. 

When I speak with you, I have a tremendous urge to go home, only there's no home, just memories on YouTube, in forgotten songs that make my eyes well up.”

“Can you promise not to go to anybody else?” she suddenly asked.

"But, wait, didn't you say you aren't possessive just about half an hour back?"

"Oh, that was then. Now I think I love you."

"Err...what kind of love?"

"Oh, the possessive kind, I suppose? Like deep enough to say, don't go to that other woman.
Write to me about your memories."

"But, what did you say about love? Do you really mean it?"

She paused. I waited. I could see she was typing.

"Oh, that I can't tell. It is like Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, you can say. I can't determine my feelings very exactly."

And she logged out soon after. Schrodinger's cat was trapped in her closed chat window, strangely three-dimensional. But we will never know. And I lost my sleep that night, and many nights thereafter. This was love I hadn't known erstwhile. Of someone being able to defend her unpredictability with quantum mechanics. Usually, I was the one being mysterious. Now was my time to be hunted. Strangely, it wasn't fear. It was the euphoria of being tranquilized by an excess of lotus leaves.

A strain of a Julia Stone song wafted into the room:

"So come on Love, draw your sword

Shoot me to the ground"

So I started writing to her, and it made no particular sense. I didn’t know if I was cautioning her or pacifying myself. My heart just seemed to beat faster.

“Each new love comes with a strange humming sound. Like a buzz. Like a disclaimer, a fine print of sorts. Perhaps of the same old mothballed caution? Of thunderstorms and telephones that never ring? Yes, you know what I mean. It is repeated, this time in a careworn, raspy voice, drooping to almost the floor with the weight of collected wisdom, just about holding its own against gravity by virtue of its need to be heeded just once. An inch, perhaps. Do not fall in love again, it says.

But as expected, you don't. Heed the good advice, that is.

Mothballed stuff is never used, you argue, never have been, in a bourgeois household, like the unworn cashmere gets used to the damp comfort of a loft as babies grow up and give birth to new babies. And houses moved. Old luggage discarded with mixed emotions. That's where you leave caution and wisdom to spoon, strange bedfellows. Out of sight and forgotten. The image of the loft has a familiar dampness to it. Place it next to a leaky toilet, for good measure. There's seldom a Toy Story in real life, is there!

You turn off the radio and holler out to the first mate to flank her into the storm, full steam ahead. With each lightning strike, with each rising to the crest and tossing into the sea, the gentle whir of wisdom is drowned just like you cannot hear her engine anymore. And there's no disembodied voice from down below loud enough to tell you if the engine is running at all.

With each new love, remember to turn off the radio.”

And when I turned off the weather forecast and came back to the chat window, I unlocked the cat and let it go. It walked away or it didn’t.

She was calling out my name.

“I’ve baked you a shepherd’s pie. Come home.” And we logged in to Skype again.

Feburary

It is a dry February day and even at 10 in the morning the sun bears down like it has plans of magnifying its heat and burn some DTC buses in Delhi.
Only it is Bangalore, and such heat is unheard of.

Even Delhi is pleasant now, "just lazily slipping into Spring," as one particularly jealous friend informed last night. "Let the summer come, and we will have reason to rejoice as you all burn there," I thought as I hung up on her. But to accept to the denizens of Delhi that Bangalore is actually rather warm, is hurting my pride. Where was it that I read "denizens of Delhi" first? In a letter from Upamanyu Chatterjee to David Davidar, in the files of The Last Burden, if I remember. I should have torn off that handwritten note from the file and kept it folded in my wallet, but my wallet contains other unwanted stuff now, and some long unused condoms.

As I wait on my bike for the signal to turn green, the heat is burning my right thigh. I desperately seek a bigger vehicle to offer some shade, but am in the right lane and nobody can squeeze between me and the median. A giant oncoming BMTC Volvo stops on the other side and I pretend to listlessly look inside. From the corner of my eye I can see a young boy ogling at my bike and trying to figure out the make. I sit up straight on the saddle, posing like a true biker. But the traffic moves and the relief of the shade is short lived.

Two elderly gentlemen in front of Moghul Durbar last night were discussing just this. How the afternoon namaaz on Friday burnt everybody black. How much blacker will they become, after all, one of them quipped. And they rued the chopping down of trees around the Tilaknagar mosque, and were lost in memories of the canopy of leaves.

The signal turned green. It has rained in Durgapur, and it won't be long before it rains in Bangalore. You talk of tabebuia and eucalyptus, but I say, give me a good old banyan tree any day.

Much like a banyan tree, I've been rather stationary all my life. If life is like the last bench in a Math class, I must have moved only a few inches here and there, as the varnish faded and the planks started creaking, the nails became wobbly and purposeless, and Trigonometry struck off the curriculum. I had been in love with Ani since the day I first saw her. And today, standing at the signal, when I think of her, I realize I haven't moved very far from where I started, unless there were tectonic shifts that I am unaware of.

It is a story from only a couple of Februaries back. "Why, Shubho?" she had been crying. "Why did he go to another woman when I was carrying his child and waiting patiently for his return? Am I not beautiful enough?" She started taking off her clothes and tossing them all around the room. "Let's place some on the staircase to give it a classic Hollywood feel," I suggested in an effort to lighten the mood, as I picked up her discarded denims and black shirt to drop them from the landing to where the stairs started. "They belong there, at the bottom of the staircase. And now for scattering some lingerie as we come up."

She alternated between being coquettish and violent. To disarm me with her beauty and also to try and erase the memory of her cheating husband with a vengeance. But cheating is a relative term. Aren't you cheating on him by being with me? "I'm not sleeping with you. In the last three years I have allowed you absolute access to my body, but I'm not sleeping with you. You pleasure me with a massage, and it doesn't constitute cheating. It isn't adultery, if you know your penal code well. But he was with her all these years! I've seen their pictures together."

As she took off her red bra, I stood transfixed. It happens every single time I see her undress. I picked it up from the bed and walked to the staircase, to gingerly place it on a step. To the untrained eye, it would have looked like the aftermath of unbridled lust, with the clothes strewn along the path in utter disdain. The borrowed Nikon captured every stage of undress with care, but she was untiring as a model. Am all yours, she seemed to say, but not just to me. To the world, in a Marilyn pout.

I ran my fingers through the scar on her belly and asked who was the first to see her like this. "Like what?"
"Like this," I looked up, "with not a single thread sullying your beauty by attempting to cover an inch of it?"

"Oh, there were many, many, Shubho. But the first would be one village boy in Santiniketan who watched me bathe one evening." And then him. And them. And me.
We made love that February morning for the first time in three years. She lay there, insipid, the Tamil Brahmin side saying she had sinned, and the Bengali genes saying you finished what you started. That was the last I saw of her. Like she had failed to show up on a designated Ashtami evening several years back, she vaporized again, leaving no trace for me to pursue. I could sense something terminal in the way she picked up each piece of clothing on her way down, with clinical precision.

Februaries have continued to become harsher ever since. Some say it is global warming, but standing at the traffic signal, with the sun baking my limbs, my eyes still dart around for a glimpse of her in her red little car.

Baghdasha

Memories are tricky. Some titillate you, some waft in like the smell of fresh bread from the oven, and some draw you back in time, just to remember a forgotten name.

My memories of Borkhola are tinged in various shades of green. Of fresh tea leaves, mostly. And the smell of sweat when I played with the Santhal boys, just behind our tea estate, where the laborers lived. The Santhals were brought to the British tea estates in the late 1800s, but they remained indigenous. Living on the fringes of a small village, bordering the jungles, they were the first to face the wrath of the elephants and lose their children to the leopard cats. They danced around the fire at night, and the jungle beat of their drums could be heard reverberating in the hills. The memory of that rhythm is fading.

The winter memories beckon, of the empty paddy fields, the tea gardens in the hills, and of Nara Tilla, the single barren hillock that I could see from my terrace. It can't be far, I thought to myself, and I must roll down Nara Tilla one day. That seemed like a singular purpose for the longest time in my boyhood. I can't remember having any such concrete goals in my adult life now.

A laborer's boy and I had gone in search of that lonely hillock one day, just to roll downhill. The journey to the hillock was arduous, although it didn't seem so far. And on the way down we went over the touch-me-not bushes at breakneck speed. The fever that followed lasted 18 days. There are memories of Ma removing the tiny thorns from my body. That pain is still palpable. I can almost feel the harsh edges of the thorns under the skin of my palms, close enough to pull out but deep enough to hurt. Just like it hurt when she walked out the door, taking a part of my soul with her.

I can't remember the name of the boy, though. He tied a red thread around my wrist when I was leaving Borkhola. Protects you from the baghdasha, he said.

Thirty years later, I had never seen a leopard cat in my life.

***************************** After Ma passed, I had not gone back to Silchar, but the winter offer on the return flight was irresistible. Everything seemed to have changed in Borkhola. There were so many more shops. "There's a big mall coming up near the bazaar," I was informed, but I went walking to the Santhal village. There was Nara Tilla in the distance, and I could see a trail of smoke coming up from the village. As I approached the gathering of men and women around the fire, an acrid smell of burning flesh hit me. There was a dead animal hung above the fire, and everybody was cheering. The fur was burnt black, and the body had gone stiff. One man was turning the body with a long stick, to ensure it gets cooked evenly.

"Sujan, isn't that you?" I heard a man calling out my name. He was a bearded man, squatting a few feet away from the crowd. "Am Ramdass, do you remember me?" There was Ramdass, my childhood friend and ace archer. He taught me how to make a bow and build two kinds of arrows. The thotti is to stun, and the gajal is to kill with piercing. I didn't have to tell him about my failing memory, so I just smiled and sat next to him.

"Nara Tilla, Ramdass, how can I forget? What are you people up to? Aren't the forests officials going to trouble you later?

"Oh, it was a baghdasha that we trapped after almost a month. It had taken away three babies last month from us," he muttered, "Dushman, dushman. The forest babus will turn a blind eye."

"I heard you've become a sadhu, Ramdass? That you are a clairvoyant of sorts?"

He smiled, exposing his burnt sienna teeth. "You've grown shorter than you were, Sujan. And don't worry, she will come back one day, only you have to unburden yourself of her memories first. But when she comes back, you won't want her anymore."

***************************** I don't know how one can "grow" shorter, but something tells me it means I lack the vision of a taller man, who can see clearly till the horizon, where the sun sets behind Nara Tilla.

(a story by Sujan Bhattacharjee)

Muluk (Ashtami)

1.

Muluk couldn't hear what Daaribaba said from under the tree.

Daaribaba sleeps on the platform at night and sits under the clutch of sal trees during the day. Muluk has seen him everyday the last 13 years he's been in this village. Ramu, Pocha, Muluk, his parents had run out of names and named their third kid after the village. He doesn't resent it. This is a little hamlet of about fifty families, and most of them are into tilling land. But they have a well-kept secret. The village of Muluk has created the best thieves, burglars and pickpockets in this part of Birbhum. Some have moved to Calcutta for better career opportunities, and Kartik'da is famed to have picked the pocket of the legendary Dharmendar in Bombay. Muluk loved Amitabh Bachhan better.

He dropped out of the village school after the master moved to another village. Apparently he didn't get his salary on time, but Muluk can't tell. Most of the breadwinners of the village used nearby Santiniketan for their daily haul. From bathroom mugs to slippers to dog chains, there's absolutely nothing that they didn't covet. "Don't be too discerning. Pick up what you get, and till the land during the day." There were little snippets of wisdom like proverbs in this community to whom stealing was a way of life in the absence of a religion. And the haul was traded every weekend near the railway station. It's the month of Aswin and time for Durga Puja, but there's no puja in his village. But the hope of new shirts and clothing from the clotheslines remains. The women prefer new sarees.

"Get me a towel. That Madrasi Mariamma of cobblers' street got a towel and says gamchhas aren't as good as towels. Can you find a towel for me today?" his mother demanded.

And Muluk walked along the rail tracks that led straight to Santiniketan, off to try his luck for the day. To find, among other things, a towel for Ma. Daaribaba was waving at him and saying something urgent. There was always an urgency in his voice as he nodded his head, shook his white beard, and lifted his emaciated hand to wave at someone. He had stories to tell, and nobody had the time. It somehow didn't matter,

It will take him a good one hour to reach Purva Palli, the area where all the rich folks stay, and he aimed to reach by twilight. "Make your hit either at twilight or before the birds are up." Muluk could never do 3.00 in the morning. He always chose twilight to do his thing.

****************************************
2.

It was the evening of Ashtami, and Anindita didn't like it one bit. She had a date with Shubho that night at the Central Pujo, and when they suddenly came off to Santiniketan this morning, she had no way of letting him know. She didn't have their number.
It made her very upset, but there was no protesting in the face of what had happened. Her dad's house in Santiniketan had been burgled the previous night and their neighbor had called to inform. The fun of Durga Puja for her was in Durgapur. And here she was, looking at the broken backdoor, the broken wardrobe from which the latest question papers were missing, and the dust around the rectangular spot on the mantelpiece where the radio used to be. They couldn't take much money because he had come to spend Durga Puja with them, but it was a burglary nevertheless.

"Let's check out the nearby pandal, why don't you take a bath and get ready, Ani?" her dad insisted. Prof Shankar Raman taught Physics at the university and although he was a Tamilian, he enjoyed celebrating Durga Puja with his Bengali wife and daughter. "Let's not waste the evening."

"How do you plan to lock the door, baba?"
"Oh, we'll leave it open anyway. They've taken what they had to take. I will make a new set of question papers for this semester. Come, come, hurry up. And Nobeen is coming to fix the door tomorrow."

Anindita went into the bathroom and switched on the light. The wooden shutters had been neatly lifted off their hinges leaving a gaping hole into the night. The neighboring land was vacant, home to wild shrubs and Giant Milkweed. If some house was vacant for a night, they didn't spare even the windows and doors.
Ani took off her chiffon kameez. Ma had bought her some pairs of Belle bras, but Ani didn't like them. Her breasts were pubescent, just showing up, and she didn't want to modify their appearance. The open window didn't bother her anymore as she gradually removed all her clothes.

The song from the nearby pandal had stopped playing, and the metallic sound of water filling the steel bucket shattered the silence. The Giant Milkweed has a thick white flower. The milk makes you blind, they say. She could see the white flowers in the dark outside, and the darker shape of a boy standing there, the light from the bathroom falling on him.

The boy was standing there, staring at her. He didn't have a shirt on. He was probably not even a teenager and Ani realized that he couldn't take his eyes off her. Ani stared back at him for a good long minute, without trying to cover herself up. The boy didn't try to run away.

Ani wrapped herself in the towel and switched off the light of the bathroom.

She didn't know if to cover her breasts or to cover the scar that ran from between her breasts down to the navel and beyond. She wasn't thinking. This moment hadn't happened.


***********************************

Muluk couldn't register what had happened either. He had seen the womenfolk of his village bathing at the pond, but he hadn't seen anybody like this before. She was beautiful, like the earthen idol of a young goddess. And with her inexplicable act of generosity that night, she was nothing less than god. There simply couldn't be a bigger act of kindness, there couldn't. It was the day of his richest haul, Ashtami. Muluk could hear a buzz in his head, the drum-roll of a possessed dhaaki, weaving magic with his sticks. How could she be so beautiful? Even the railway track seemed to shudder mildly with the drums. It was loud enough to drown the sound of the approaching train.

"Don't walk on the tracks on your way back, tonight. There's a new express to Sainthia." Daaribaba still waves at people and warns them. Nobody listens to him anyway. It doesn't matter.

Fair Game

It was the last day of sales training for Suvro. He was unusually reticent, and not an expert at convincing people about anything. It was still a mystery how he managed to get selected at all. But then, the water filter people didn't care much about whom they hired. They were just bothered about numbers. And nobody in Calcutta had heard about arsenic poisoning before this. Armed with deadly pictures and pamphlets about the effects of various water-borne diseases and how the ground water in Calcutta is polluted, it was fairly easy for even a shy person to meet the monthly targets.

Suvro was introverted and withdrawn because of his heavy German accent. His parents moved back to Calcutta in the 80s when he was barely ten, and Suvro could never recover from the cultural shock of having moved from a quaint little European village to a bustling city with frequent power cuts and curious people. The kids in the neighborhood made fun of his accent, and the only respite was the Sunday service at the local church, where Father Gilson used to preach. He was Belgian and had taught Mathematics at St. Xavier's School, Ranchi, before moving to Calcutta. Father Gilson understood the troubled kid and took him under his fold. He could sense that the kid wasn't growing up to be a Christian, but Father Gilson believed one would seek god only if one needed him. He watched this boy grow up mostly an agnostic, immensely interested in European history, and caught in a cultural limbo. The last few years of school was at South Point, the largest school in the world, but Suvro could hardly make any friends. But there was a lot of space for an agnostic Christian boy in a city that had opened its arms to people of all faiths and even to those with none.

And there was Maya. Dark, wiry, a long jumper, and basically lost in her thoughts all day. She had learned very early in her life that although this city had made peace with atheists, pickpockets, authors, playwrights, musicians, and communists, there was still no acceptance for a dark-complexioned woman. A person's good looks are defined by the complexion, and even in her family Maya had to face a lot of rebuke for being dark. Her aunt, who used to live with them, would constantly keep reminding her father that he wouldn't find it easy to get her married. "Men will just use you and move on." Maya hated going home. She would often sit by the river next to the abandoned jute mill. She would go only when Baba was around. He loved her unconditionally, and called her his pretty little Sreela. Sreela Majumdar and Smita Patil were beautiful actors (despite being dark, as the industry kept reminding you). But Baba seldom came home. After the closure of the jute mill, he took up another job that involved a lot of travel.

Maya loved going to school because she found a friend in Suvro. He was this confused kid, mostly cornered and bullied by the others, and only Maya didn't make fun of his accent. It didn't take long for them to find comfort in each other. They would have their tiffin-time stories. He would tell her about Bach and the wonders of how multiple layers of simultaneous music could be composed by one man's brain. And about Edward Hopper.

They grew up together and stuck with each other through school and college. Father Gilson died of cancer. Maya was the first among the two to get a job with State Bank of India for representing Bengal in athletics, and Suvro, being a student of history from Calcutta University, was struggling to find a job as a salesman. That's all Calcutta had to offer in the mid-nineties. A job in sales for many, a career for a lucky handful. But the water filter people selected him. They were recruiting for an army of sales locusts to cloud over the city and were not very discriminating. Can you speak Bangla? Hardly. And English? What's that accent? We will give him the Alipore sector and Hastings to cover. All the rich English babus there.

Suvro got a job and it was the final day of training. Mr Devadasan was a brilliant trainer and had taught them all the techniques of sales over the last two weeks. About tricky situations, difficult customers, categories of customers, how to read their minds, how to make an entry, and so on. It is about instilling fear in the mind of the housewife about water. Doesn't she love her children?

"Today, I will put a special mantra in one lucky person's mind. And that person will never fail in his career." Mr Devadasan sounded mysterious. "I will hypnotize him."

Everybody was eager to be hypnotized, but apparently there was a game to be played first, to decide who is most suitable. Not everybody can be hypnotized. You have to be willing.

All the trainees were asked to close their eyes and straighten out their hands ahead of them, with one palm facing up and the other down. They were to imagine a balloon tied to one hand, and a pound weight placed on the other. At the end of the exercise, when they were asked to open their eyes, Suvro was the winner, with one hand soaring way above his head and another almost wilting, about to touch the table. Most of the other students hadn't moved their hands much.

"Like I said, you have to be a willing candidate, and let your imagination rule you. I cannot hypnotize someone who isn't ready to let me control his mind."

Suvro then had the most amazing experience of his life. Sitting in the room, he experienced being taken deep into a dungeon down a white marble staircase that slowly turned moss green. It was the inside of the redbrick Astorhouse, where he had never been. The voices from all around sounded like distant gurgle, and the only controlling voice was of Mr Devadasan's, whom he saw in a white suit, holding his hand.

Suvro came to with the sound of fingers snapping. All this while he was seated in the middle and Mr Devadasan had pricked two needles into his stretched arms. It wasn't hurting, and there wasn't any blood. But Suvro had no recollection of this incident at all. Mr Devadasan removed the needles and pressed some cotton on the incisions. "I've given you the secret code to becoming a successful salesman. Come back next year and tell me how you fared."

It was getting late, Maya would be waiting at Desapriya Park after 5.30. They had decided to celebrate with muglai parota at Adi Sutripti after he got his first salary, but for now, it was roasted groundnuts at the park. Suvro was breathless by the time he reached. Maya was waiting for him at the gate. It would be awkward for a girl to enter the park alone, infested with couples and hawkers. Suvro ran toward her and animatedly started showing the incision marks, not sure where to start his story. It might not be in the same league as Jasper Maskelyne's creation of a German warship on the Thames, but this was nothing short of a miracle. Mr Devadasan looked like god, you know? In white.
Maya hugged him and offered some badam bhaja.
Suvro wasn't listening. The needle marks were his trophies for the day.

But Maya's trophy was much bigger than that. Just that she chose to keep quiet about it.
More than the medals, the cups, and being photographed with the Chief Minister Mr Jyoti Basu, she had found herself a fair-complexioned boy.

It was time for a triumphant return home.

The Minister and the Minstrel

What have you done to me? The hundred paces to my bejeweled harem, seem laborious, but the hundred furlongs to my minister's, I can cross in a heartbeat. Is she what they call a witch? In her black robes, with the knowledge of the world and wars, and the brightness in her eyes of a thousand suns, that's the light which beckons more than the oil of the night. She tells me stories of Byzantine to Ottoman, and how the wars were won. She tells me of the Greeks before Constantinopole, and of ancient times when the Thracians ruled Lygos. Of the change of guard over centuries and how it couldn't spill blood on the pristine Morning Glory that grow near the Aegean Sea. The lamp of Memorah never dies, she said, and I find myself walking toward her quarters, located at the edge of my desert. I had asked her to move in to my palace, but she wanted to stay away. I offered her guards, but she drew her sword instead, blinding me in its glint.

The eunuchs guard my harem and their shadows look menacing in the flickering light. They guard, they pleasure my queens in my absence. But I don't care. I want my Nisa. Of placing my throat at the tip of her sword, of looking up into her light eyes in total surrender. What has the Sultan come to?

********

The minstrel, with her soulful voice, sings songs of love in her saffron. She is something of a Hindu sufi, and calls herself Megh Baul. Sonargaon is all she said when prodded about where she is from. Like a raincloud, her songs tease the acres of barrenness in my kingdom. I bathe her in rosewater and milk, but the redolence of the wilderness persists. One day, like camphor, she dissolves.

"O paran, tomar majhe ashi
Chhere sobuj sonargaon
Sonar morur pashi

Morey jete na dao, dhoira rakho
tomay bhalobashi..."

Yes, I won't let you go, but where are you? I am torn now, between the empty court at night, vivid with memories of Megh, and the walk to Nisa's. With one last longing look at the palace, I walk to the edge of the desert.

*********

One will win, as is the nature of things, wild. Nisa's light eyes have a strange sparkle. A fear grips me as I hear her say "I have sent your poet to be with her god, Sultan."

I slump to her bed. The strain of a distant song wafts in.
A Hazara child is walking home, humming to himself "jetey na dao, dhoira rakho..."

Mahalaya and Saptami (two stories)

Mahalaya

In front of our house was a row of yellow and red company quarters. Our row and their row met at the end of the street, giving us a triangular field in between. This triangular strip of land served as our football, hockey, and cricket field. Every Sunday we used to abandon our books around 10.00 and run to the field to play in the sun. We had heard of the hole in the ozone layer in the southern hemisphere, but that wasn’t a deterrent. We had melanin and adrenaline to keep us going in the sun. Our mothers started calling from around 12.00 noon, but the games went on till about 1.00 in the afternoon. My mom would come and stand at the door, waiting to catch my eye, and then silently go inside.

A few days before the Durga Pujo celebrations in October, came this special day called Mahalaya. Early in the morning my dad would switch on the radio and listen to the voice of Birendra Krishna Bhadra welcoming the goddess and asking her to come down to earth for four days. It was the most beautiful chant, and our entire field outside resonated with the sound emanating from the radios in all the houses. One morning I went out to sit in the field and listen to it coming from everywhere, all around me. It was a magical surround sound experience. If I have an AV room someday, I will make it triangular, I thought.

Mine being an atheist home, the significance of the chant was restricted to the love for the man who sang it, and although the other kids would not have to touch their books today, I would have to finish my homework before the games began at 10.00. Whereas on other Sundays and holidays I would eagerly finish my studies before the field beckoned, studying on the day of the Mahalaya remains in my memory as particularly painful, as tears would well up and the words in the books would go hazy.
But that marked the beginning of the celebrations for the next ten days. We would discuss our new clothes and the latest fashion, chalk out the pandal visits, plan to meet friends at appointed hours, and everybody seemed to be smiling. How much pocket money will we get, was the question on every boy’s mind. Egg rolls at the Newton pujo were legendary.

It is Mahalaya today, and being outside Bengal, it has lost its significance to me now. I still have to come to work, and my son has no idea of what it meant to us as children. That was a day when everything was allowed. Don’t want to study? Okay. Don’t want to do the dishes? Okay. Want to have luchi? Okay. And payesh too? Okay. Want to try out your new clothes in front of the mirror? Okay. The excitement of trying out new clothes isn’t there anymore, and life is the same as it is on any other day.
"But, shouldn’t there be an exception to the rule?" Saya asked.

"Let it be sugar in the tea today then, instead of sugarfree."

______________________________

Saptami

“So, tell me about Pujo - what happened then?” Saya asked, sipping her sugared tea. It was the morning of Mahalaya, and we'd decided that work could wait, for a bit. “Tell me", she prodded.
Oh, so much happened. All the action was around Newton, Einstein, Vivekananda, and Aurobindo. “What now", she said knitting her brows, "make sense now". I was at the risk of losing my only audience. Not people, places. In Durgapur, avenues and roads are named after everyone who is a someone; Tolstoy to Guevara. Okay, I kid you, not Guevara. There is a markedly large number of men, dominating road names, I accept. Though this would be an interesting topic, for a debate, I must'n’t digress.

Most of the Pujo action was centered around Newton Avenue, where we had a carnival of sorts around the main dais. After the Mahalaya, the days passed quicker than ever and as Saptami approached, we were gripped by a frenzy of expectations. It was mostly about food, clothes, and not having to study, as I told you.

“And girls? Isn’t that the primary thing for boys during the Durga Pujo? To ogle at all the beautiful girls and flirt with them?”

I ignored her question and continued. When I was 14, egg rolls were about Rs 4.00 each and chicken around Rs 6.00. The pocket money we got during the pujo was around Rs 30 for the three days, which was enough. Nobody asked for the change back, and you could spend all your money on day 1, if you were living for the moment.

At Newton, on Saptami, I had worn a dhoti for the first time in my life, just for the effect. It was a cumbersome silk cloth draped around my waist and made walking rather uncomfortable. My dad made me wear my football shorts underneath, in case of an emergency. Sankar kept shouting at the public in general “hey, everybody, here’s a groom in the market for you, here’s a grooooom, any takers?”
The joke was on me; I was blushing all through the evening and the kurta already got soiled, and they were playing “Meri Biwi Maike Chali Gayee” on the loudspeaker. Suddenly someone changed the song to Tagore’s “Arjun, tumi Arjun.” Before I knew it, a girl broke out of the crowd and started dancing in front of the pandal. Dancing to the song, as Arjuna the warrior.

"Oh yes, that's from Chitrangada. That's a beautiful dance drama. I used to be Chitrangada in it," the wife piped up.

And this girl, with her short hair, was Arjuna. She was oblivious to her surroundings, tied her saree way way above her waist, and danced like a warrior!

Her friends cheered her on, people gathered around, and by the time she finished, I was in love.
I had seen this girl earlier at Ma’s school, playing Swami Vivekananda, delivering the famous Brothers and Sisters of America speech from 1893. She had lodged herself in my head like a buried dream, and there she was, in front of us, in front of me, at touching distance!

After the dance, she came up to me and asked about my mother. "I’ve seen you with Namita miss. You are Shuvo, aren’t you? What's with the dhoti?"
"What's with the saree, then?" I asked.

My friends had abandoned me, just when I needed their support the most. I heard myself offering her chicken rolls. There were five of them and I had paid for it all. My first act of chivalry saw me spending all my Pujo pocket money on five girls. We talked like we had always been friends. It was a strange happiness, to know love for the first time, and when I walked back home with my friends that night, I was determined to tell her one day, about my affection like instantly brewed coffee.

“What was her name?” asked Saya.

I never asked. She knew my name and I pretended to know hers. Seemed rude to ask. Back home, when Ma asked how much I had spent, I couldn’t lie. I told her about the girl who played Vivekananda at her school, and that I had bought her chicken rolls. But I didn’t want any more money, I was covered. And it’s not necessary to have rolls, anyway, I added.

Ma listened to my story attentively, smiled and kissed my forehead. As I stood there hugging her, I heard her quietly add, “And by the way, her name is Anindita.”

The wait for Ashtami had never been longer. And when I found another thirty rupees in the pocket of my Avis jeans the next day, the atheist in me suddenly felt the stirrings of faith in Ma.

Sorry Business

You see, I forget. I forget what my wife has sent me to buy at the stationery shop and buy pens instead of envelopes. I forget to take prints and sometimes overshoot addresses and end up at alien lands. But I am not complaining. It is nice to be engrossed in thoughts of the destruction that I have left in my wake: brain damaged people and wrecked relationships. Sometimes I see the scattered crowd on the streets and they seem suddenly to have a singular purpose. To metamorphose into a mob and come attack my windscreen, and then me. I can hear the thwack of a hockey stick on the bonnet, and so I have taken to wearing my helmet these days, with a bala clava. Which means the bike. With no rules about dark visors for helmets, my vulnerable soul finds comfort in the obscurity that the helmet lends. And still I take the wrong turn. Almost every time. And check the price of diesel at the Shell filling station while riding a petrol bike. Someday, someday. Someday the diesel car will be brought here. If I can remember the road or the purpose.

And then there's a tap on my shoulder accompanied by an extremely sweet voice piping up, "Daddy, wrong turn; We are going to school."
School it is, then. She has grown up to be a beautiful teenager indeed, and am so proud of her. Although I had always wanted her to learn karate and beat the shit out of the boys, she decided to have dimpled cheeks that flush at the slightest embarrassment or the mention of boys.

"New York already has so many tall buildings, daddy, why do you dream of me as an architect in New York?"

"I haven't been there, ever, so I think that's where an architect should fall in love." In a studio apartment with glass on one side, I thought.

"You know, I am fond of Rikin. But I don't think he notices me much."

"He is only thirteen, dear; boys at thirteen are thinking of being Messi."

"Or Carlsen. I want to beat him at chess."

"You will. The day I can find the way to your chess class. Whom, Rikin? Or Magnus?"

"Rikin. You mean beat at chess?"

"Hmm, don't worry. Do you want to watch a Ray movie with me tonight? It is called Aranyer Din Ratri. How Sharmila Tagore willingly loses a memory game, just not to hurt a man's ego. Rikin will lose to you one day. And that day you will know he loves you too. Sharmila Tagore is Saif Ali Khan's mother, by the way. But all this winning and losing is such a sorry business."

"Funny you should say 'sorry business'. Did you know, daddy, sorry business is an aboriginal death custom, in Australia? I saw it on Discovery. You are not supposed to take a dead person's name. Their spirit might return."

"That will be so cool. For the spirit to return. A human spirit belongs here, on earth, don't you think? Even after death, shouldn't they just be hovering around us?
"Isn't that your school?"

She got off and walked into the school through the huge iron gates that were kept ajar as if just for her, a cerebral girl and my best friend. She looked back and smiled. And then the gates clunked close behind her. Didn't I tell you to have a kid, my wife would say, but man, having a child is the happiest feeling after all, isn't it? There's a T-junction right ahead. Should I go left or right? Left for office, right for home. What am I wearing? A tee? I wear a tee to work too, so should I be going to the office now? Is it Friday? It is Friday...chess class and all?

"Today's a holiday for you, daddy" she tapped my shoulder from the back seat, "you have a funeral to attend."

"Thanks, Orna," I reached back to hold her unusually cold hand, "what will I do without you?" 

Being able to finally utter her name didn't seem such a sorry business after all.

Afim

"Can you get me some of that afim?"

I had no opium to give her, but she insisted that if I went down to Katrasgarh and met the mining contractor, he will take me to the kameens and that they have opium. Her Katrasgarh in Bihar was 20 hours by train from Delhi, but there was no point trying to tell her that.

"They do opium at night, and beedis during the day, those women."

And then she told me how the grass snake tasted like fish to her and how the kameens brought their lunch from home and worked with their male counterparts at the mines, ferrying coal to the waiting trucks. They were shiny black, from the hills of Purulia, wiry, and could work all day. Their children grew up in those clever little cloth swings around their hips.

"You will find them if you look for them. They shared their lunch with me and will share their afim too. This hifenac isn't working, son."

Mother was fascinated that they could stand and pee nonchalantly, smoking their beedis. That seemed like a new world of freedom for women in sarees.

"Did I tell you the snake tasted like fish? Haven't you had sole? Ah, your dad doesn't like it much, so I don't get it. The kameens eat rats and snakes alike, giving a damn about who's predator and who's prey.
Rats, snakes, rats, snakes, rat-snakes? Are there rat-snakes?"

The thought of snakes made me shudder, but I was curious to taste a cooked snake someday. Right now, there was a bigger problem at hand. Mother's pain.

She was getting more and more incohorent with each passing day. The hifenac had stopped working and her rheumatoid arthritis was getting worse. She kept repeating things, kept talking about her childhood in the mines, a pink little child among the black, loving kameens. With her wheezing and pain and delirious sleep in the bitter winter of Delhi, I could do precious little to help. With my meager salary as an editorial assistant, I couldn't even afford her medicines.

"I have to deliver a manuscript to Priya at CP, will you be able to manage on your own?"

Get some afim on the way back, if you can, was all she said to me. She had a hardbound copy of An Equal Music next to her, but I doubt she could make sense of her books anymore. I have sometimes seen her read the same page over and over again.

A Sunday morning ride on a 445 blue-line to Connaught Place is always dreamy. The roads are empty, the bus doesn't have many passengers, and that day everybody seemed to be in blue blazers. Priya's typesetting office was on the outer circle, and I was forever uneasy in her presence. She was a page 3 lady, once beautiful but now aging, something she couldn't seem to come to terms with. She gleaned through the pages and kept checking my markings. Suddenly, she paused on a particular page and looked up at me with a look of utter disbelief:

"Since when do editors at Penguin spell a hyphen as hifen, dear?"

I had no clue what she asked me about, although when I looked, I had actually marked a compound adjective thus. That very spelling, indeed. I had a tremendous urge to run out the door right at that moment, but this was an embarrassment I had to put on a brave face to. Priya would call up David, and mock him about his editors, and I will promptly lose my job. And my mother's medicines, the rent for the barsati, the money I owed Gaurav! My whole little world seemed to come crashing down around me, when this dapper young gentleman in green shoes and a ponytail walked into the room.

He was Priya's young lover boy, and looked pretty much like an upstart to me. I hated his wealth, his black Cielo parked outside, and the black muscle tees he wore to those socialite evenings. He was quick to gauge the situation.

"Hifen? Oh yes, that's how the Americans spell it these days" he came to my rescue. As Priya looked at him incredulously, wondering if to be disgusted at me or the Americans more, I murmured a goodbye and slunk out the door. Outside, the beggars in front of the restaurant were still sleeping, and the pigeons were pottering about, feasting on last night's litter. There was a solitary janitor in the distance, two policemen in a white Gypsy, and the sweet winter-morning smell of relief. The man didn't seem so bad after all, I thought.

A little after Khubchand's pork shop came Bercos, where the girls took me out many days and paid for my lunch. I smiled at the thought of so much love, took out mother's prescription from my jacket pocket, and changed hifenac to hyphenac.

There is afim available in Pahargunj, I heard.

Across the River

Riku is eight, and he loves the breeze on his face when they get onto a steamer to cross to the other side. The river is pretty wide at this time of the year, but he has heard his father talk about a river that has no banks on either side, is covered with ominous clouds carrying rain, where the sun abandons your boat, and the night advances stealthily bearing rage and fear.

"At the mohona the river knows no bounds, and I was only five, holding my mother's hand,  praying for the night to pass." And every time his father told him the story, Riku waited for the reference to the morning, in which his father's uncle appeared, admonished the family for having undertaken such a perilous journey with a kid, and took them to the comfort of home, in Khulna. It was a wedding in the family.

Riku is only eight, and he loves to cross the river on a steamer, from the side of the tall buildings to the stark contrast of the rows of abandoned factories on the other bank, with their redbrick chimneys gone dark with moss and decades of neglect. 

There is a wedding in the family. There will be a river crossing. But it isn't a steamer this time. It is a yellow taxi, rather stuffy and uncomfortable inside, with the springs coming out of its seat, and they will take the bridge to the other side. Riku loved the smell of diesel fumes, but he longed for the breeze on the river. To see the bride, you had to go in a car, and hence the two yellow taxis. The yellow ones ply outside Calcutta, his father explained. Riku and his elder brother Sujan got into one, and although it was a squeeze and the traffic was slow, he was in a car. 
In the dingy by-lanes of the other side, most of the houses were abandoned too. The taxi stopped in front of a hundred-year old house that had green shuttered french windows and trees growing out of the brick folds. At the end of the street, sat some people with blank faces, as old as time.

When the bride gingerly stepped into the living room, Riku first saw her feet on the red-oxide floor with a black skirting all around. There was a nail driven into the center of the floor where all the lines seemed to meet. And there were her white feet.

Riku looked up, and couldn't believe his eyes. He hadn't seen anybody more beautiful in his life. She was like Shuyo Rani from Thakurmar Jhuli, with long eyes, curly hair falling on her back, and red lips slightly parted. She was in a white sari. Everybody around him was speechless, and he heard Sujan murmur, almost to himself, "...smooth as monumental alabaster. Yet she must die..."

The groom was their uncle, and the elders stayed inside as Riku and Sujan came out with Riya, a wiry little girl who seemed to appear like magic from behind the green curtains that covered the door to the bedroom. The three of them walked to the riverbank. Come back for the singara, someone said.

Riku shyly wished he could be the groom instead. He was so mortified by the thought that he never could ask the name of his would-be aunt. There was a longing for the breeze again.

There were steamers plying on the river, the sky was clear, and somebody remembered to switch on the lights in the buildings on the other side as the sun slowly set.
"Will your uncle marry my mother, do you think? I have always wanted to go to the other side of the river."
"Yes, of course. Of course he will." Riku was positive.
"But they say she is a widow and men don't like to marry widows."
"I will marry her, then," was Riku's valiant answer, and they all laughed.
"Do you know anything about keeping ghosts away by driving nails into the floor? My dad really loved me, you know?"
"He is here, somewhere, watching you," said Sujan. "And if he loves you, a nail on the floor cannot keep him away." 
Sujan somehow always seemed to have reassuring answers. 


The uncle didn't marry her, eventually. He married someone else, who wasn't previously married. And Riku could never find out who Riya's mother was, or her address. 

Since then, he has only longed for a river with no banks on either side, of the mohona, for ominous clouds and a tornado tossing their boat high up in the air, but there was no boat, and someone seemed to have stopped the breeze on the river too.

All that remained were memories of diesel fumes.

The Crows of Durgapur

Mr. Nandalal Ghoshal used to play chess with my dad every evening. I must have been very young then to remember, but according to what my dad later told me, they spent hours walking each other back after dinner because the conversation never got over. From Edison Avenue to Newton Avenue wasn’t a long distance, and the nights in Durgapur were pleasant and breezy. What better than being able to converse with a learned friend especially when you were stuck in a Steel township that reminded you of the 19th Century Eastwood of Lawrence, narrow in its thinking like the dark tunnels of a coal mine? When he had just moved to Durgapur, my dad used to stand alone on the over-bridge of Durgapur Railway Station every evening, looking below at the trains headed to Calcutta, a city he missed so much.

“Each train reminded me of everything I left behind there, and even a remote chance of meeting someone I can talk to. So I started talking to myself.”

Talk of trains used to excite me and I invariably ended up asking “How far below were the electric wires? Could you touch them? Why don’t the crows perched on the wires die?” little knowing how lonely the man used to be. And then he met Mr. Ghoshal.

We moved from Edison to Joydev, and the frequency of their meetings came down. It was a good 10 km away, and it wasn’t possible for either of them to leave their family duties to go for chess on their bicycles. There were no telephones those days, and as time passed, the two friends grew apart. But I kept hearing about Mr Ghoshal from my dad—his first friend in Durgapur, a scholar of Bengali and Sanskrit.

When I was in class IX, in my search of a person who would teach me literature, I found Mr. Ghoshal again. I spent four years under his tutelage and believe he played a very crucial role in keeping me on track when everything else other than studies seemed so attractive. I was mostly a vagabond, riding my cycle to unknown places, coming home late, bunking classes, watching Hindi films (that's the worst a Bengali boy can do, watch Bollywood films), riding in and out of Einstein Avenue to catch a glimpse of someone, but I never bunked his classes. And for the first time in my life, I was regular not because of any pretty girl in the class (although there were a few), but for Mr. Ghoshal himself. He always managed to make us laugh. Once when I paid him his fees in an envelope from Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, he exclaimed, “Oh, our poet Lau Sen? When did he move to Switzerland?”

Among many weird ten-minute essays he made us write, one was The Crows of Durgapur. I remember mentioning how they nonchalantly perch on the overhead electric wires with no worries of being burnt black. There were some rules about writing these essays. You had to start the moment he gave you the topic, and not stop until the alarm went off after ten minutes. You could go berserk with your imagination, let all the absurd come out, forget about punctuation and syntax, and just had to write. The kind of things that came out of each one of our minds was fascinating. Shovon and I were his favourite students. By the end of four years, our minds were free and wandering, welcoming abstraction in any form, like The Dry Twig I Found. Many years later when I watched The Terminal, I remembered how he had asked us to write about being lost in Charles de Gaulle. I wonder if he had a brush with the rudeness that's French and why really Charles de Gaulle. Maybe Syed Mustafa Ali had told him about his university days in Paris.

When my dad passed away some years back, among many other things I found in his belongings, there was a letter addressed to Mr. Ghoshal and an old Parker pen that he hadn’t opened. Because we didn’t know where Mr. Ghoshal was, the letter never got sent. So I took it upon myself to deliver my dad’s letter to his first friend in Durgapur.

Durgapur had changed. There were shopping malls all around and the roads unfamiliar. I got off the bus at Newton Avenue and tried locating his place. The Steel township quarters were like single-story row houses earlier, uniform in shape and colour. But now people had changed all of that. They had built extra rooms on top of the houses and painted them wild. The entire area seemed to have grown like a formless protozoa, pretty much like the DDA apartments in Delhi have grown. Nobody in that area knew about him, so I was stranded with no clue about where to go. Suddenly I remembered Mintu’s cigarette shop and went a couple of streets further to find if it was still around. It was still the same, the same small gumti only now with billboards stuck all around. “Mintu?” I asked the bald man sitting crouched inside the shop reading Anandabazar.

Mintu was so surprised to see me, he bumped his head trying to come out of the small trap door. Shuvo! How come! You haven’t changed one bit, bro!

He didn’t have Capstan cigarettes any more. People smoke Gold Flake and Classic these days. Mintu himself had stopped smoking after a bad bout of asthma. We remembered how he had started the shop because of his love for tobacco. Although he was an outcast and most of our parents didn’t approve of that boy, I used to still go meet him every day. He had dropped out of school and had a lot of time to spare. And he was a master storyteller, narrating stories of movies animatedly. Watching him enact each scene was more mesmerizing than watching the real film.

Mintu told me about “Ghoshal Sir” and where he had moved to. He had moved from his quarters to a place further north. His children had grown up and moved out, so he stayed alone. He was still teaching after retirement and should be available now, Mintu said. He called the assistant of the neighbouring puncture-repair guy and asked him to look after his shop while he dropped me to Ghoshal Sir’s place on his scooter.

We stopped in front of the house and I asked Mintu to come in with me. He refused. “I didn’t finish school, Shuvo, and he had kept insisting that I do. Somewhere, I don’t think I can face him again.”

“But he loved you, Mintu, just come in with me.” But he just gave me a long hug and said, “good you never took to smoking, bro… it was good to see you.” I opened the creaky gate and walked in. There was an old button switch for the doorbell, pressing which made the bell scream in agony. 

And there he was, his hair all white, looking at me through the netting of the door.

“Wasn’t that Mintu who dropped you?” he said as he recognized me and opened the door.

He recognized me, which was a big thing given he must have seen thousands of students in his lifetime as a teacher. He was very happy to usher me into his living room strewn with books. “You should have brought that boy in. He had talent, that boy. He could have regaled any audience with his stories.” To him, we were all boys and always would remain so.

We talked about publishing in Delhi, the weather in Bangalore, and he asked if I had had a chance to see the leopard of the Yellagiri Hills. “If you remember, your dad used to read out Jim Corbett and Kenneth Anderson to you every night.” Yes, I remembered. I used to imagine the jungles in little detail and always wanted the machan to be placed high above the ground beyond the reach of the tigers. And I dreamt of big double-barrelled rifles in my sleep.

“Do tread the path Kenneth Anderson did when you are in South India, my son. Your life will be incomplete without that."

He was overjoyed with all the Penguin titles I had carried for him from my collection. “Warehouse clearance? Get me a job there, Shuvo! You really worked with David Davidar?” And it was a morning of stories and reminiscences that spilled over to lunch. “If you have a chance, find more of these Mintus. Don’t let them get wasted.”

On the way back from his place I thought of dropping by at Mintu's shop, but somehow my mind was filled with a strange jealousy I had never felt before. 

I might have been his favourite, but Mintu would always remain his Ekalavya.

Rag-Tag Voodoo

on the surface, like acupuncture
the shiny steel pins find their way
into a doll 
swaying to a hindi song
even till yesterday,
with a tiny little bell
in her hand

and the needles can tell
if it is wheelchair for life
or a speeding truck
struck by thunder
or quick-burying sand.

on the surface,
every little pin
is innocent acupuncture

but there's hell,
just fucking under.

Arrivals and Departures

I brave the rain on the roof
scanning the sky
for an approaching light
blinking in the drizzle

you'll be on one of them, tonight

and soon the green of the messenger
will tell, you landed

but I see a shooting star, instead,
unblinking and bright
and forget to ask if you reached,
and would never get to know
are you richer for my not asking
am I richer for the star?

and if i go again, tomorrow,
whom will it be for?

Alternative Reality

Alternative reality taking over you and me.

I forget which is home.

You forget vaccinations, but defend,
"This one's 4.5, dude, am on top of things."

He forgets the brand of scotch you love,
coz you passed out in his arms, hun...
although he wouldn't get to know
how I pressed you against the red, red wall
begging for a kiss.

And she?
She goes ranting in crepe,
unready to drink, smoking a Black
staring inanely at the rudeness of skirts,
baring her fangs, but only in a private smile.

I don't have body hair, I whisper into her ear.

Alternative reality has begun,
no more alternating between reality and dreams,

Waiter, can you play some Black Hole Sun?

And then he asked "What about love?"

And then he asked, "What about love, then?"
"What about it, sir?"
"You say you want a romp with a 26-year old when you are 85, but that sounded so insensitive and blatant. I can see someone else putting that idea in your otherwise chaste wish. You are, from what I see, generally losing your libido, aren't you?"

"Yeah, you can say that. And it is effing irritating to talk to a person who knows it all, already. This is so weird. And I thought you would look like Morgan Freeman."

"I don't, actually. I don't know it all because when i created the brain, I never thought it would have thoughts in it. It was chalky, tasted bland, and I stuffed as much of it as I could into the skull. It was meant to find you food and shelter. It evolved, and evolution wasn't something I had accounted for."

"No wonder. Before meeting you I kept thinking if you had really created and willed it all, how come the world's such a dark place, like...like someone's spread a jet-black sheet of night sky, and scattered only a few bright stars, as if you had thought of Blackle before us, and then given us pollution."

"I hadn't thought of the mind's capability of thinking. I had kept thought exclusively to myself, and to...err... some dolphins, but it seems there's an evil design that had gotten into everything even without my knowledge. Like what do you call it? Virus? And that brings me to the question I had been meaning to ask you all this while. Why demonhead?"

"Eh! That's supposed to be secret, maaaan! Am not the devil in anybody's mind. I ask them to invoke the devil in theirs."

"See? Now tell me about love. Haven't you loved?"

"Oh yes, and you probably know about all that too. Yes, I have been madly loved by two, almost unconditionally, where one embrace can lead to a koala snore, and another conversation can remain open-ended in 'when you decide to come to me, don't think twice.' And then I have chased three, obsessively. And that pretty much sums up all."

"Who was the last? The dancer?"
"Yes, and you wouldn't like the term bimbo, would you? You being effing G or whatever they call you."
"No, and I hate the term romp as well. I don't understand why you created language and created slang in parallel. That was like a virus in your original thought about how effective communication would be, with language. See, it is inflicting all of us."

"Slang helps make communication precise, sometimes. You wouldn't happen to know Bengali, would you? A term 'baal', meaning pubic hair, can be used in almost every sense to communicate a range of emotions. Very nice, in fact. By the way, about this dancer, what do you want to know? Why I was obsessed and what I got out of it? What if her husband reads this?"

"He wouldn't reach till here. He has very little patience in life, and you must have heard about it from her. Every morning he stands in front of a picture of what he thinks is me and utters some unintelligible stuff in Sanskrit, which he himself doesn't understand. I didn't feel any prayers in his heart. He wouldn't reach till here, am sure. You continue."

"It was obsessive, that's about it. And now it is over. And it left me scarred, which I thought wouldn't heal for quite some time. But strangely, there's no pain, and there's nothing left to say."

"So, the open-ended, lifetime offer saved you?"

"You can say that. Sometimes she is quiet and her hand, with her nails painted shiny black, is placed on mine. And nothing throbs. That's peace."

"And the snore of the koala?"

"That too. In a disneyland of her own dreams."

"Why is it that you don't talk much about what you genuinely received as opposed to stories of how much you have given in vain? Do I smell some vanity in that? What does it get you?"

"Where, you should ask, non?" I replied with a sheepish grin. He knows me inside out by now.

And then I offered him a drink of a local whiskey. He said he will be back to hear more and that he is drawn to demonhead. He asked why he is seen as ugly in some parts of the world. And I have the answers.
I wonder if he will ever figure who the devil in our minds really is.