The following is an excerpt from the novel, 'We, the Caterpillars', a hilarious and disquieting story of how the insular lives of the residents of 3/B1, a simple neighbourhood, fall apart with the arrival of an Interviewer looking for a storyteller among them to knit a set of 36 tales. Funny and poignant, his tales stir up personal desires, dilemmas and emotions of the residents even as the sleepy neighbourhood is rocked by a series of events, both comical and disturbing. In brief, what comes to the fore eventually is a deeper clash between two worlds of lore, between two ways of seeing and the differing perceptions of the residents to make meanings out of a quotidian existence.
This excerpt—from the first segment—introduces the first of the many tête-à-têtes involving the Interviewer and the two central characters: the Puppeteer and his witty and playful daughter Amrita.
Etceteras
I
“I don’t want to read any letter,” the Puppeteer mumbled, voice groggy from last night’s drinking.
Amrita stood by the moss-green door on which hung a mailbox, its flap chipped at the edges. She hesitated, tapping a blue envelope against her palm. She sensed her father’s anger. The envelope felt stiff, the sides jagged, unlike the letters he often received from Malati: smooth flowery covers stuffed with many unstapled pages, filled in a crawly and slanted handwriting. A small envelope, its corners folded and stained with ink, had now bugged him. He had been expecting Malati’s letter for the past one month. She would be in town, soon.
“Read it out to me,” Amrita insisted. “It could be an invitation from one of your troupe members.”
“Hell!” the Puppeteer hollered, taking the blue envelope. He was soon raging, “The freak! First, he spied on me at the pub. Now he has sent me a note!”
“Who?” Amrita asked, frowning.
“The Interviewer.”
“The Interviewer?” Amrita repeated excitedly. Had someone tracked her father down for a story about his performing past? That would be great, she thought, after all these months of silence.
“Don’t be stupid,” the Puppeteer snapped. “It’s the nickname of the guy whom many have seen roaming around our neighbourhood, walking with a slight stoop, dressed in black corduroy trousers and white T-shirt.”
“For how long?”
“Past five days, in the evenings.”
“Have you met him?”
“At the pub. I am sure someone in 3/B1 has talked about me. He wouldn’t have known I go there.”
“It could be Baka,” Amrita said, drawing closer to her father. She was twenty three, tall, with dusky skin. Her eyes, where silence seemed to have caved in, were moist, like freshly cut cucumbers, a look that veiled her blindness. “Baka is always keen about strangers,” Amrita repeated. “He is also damn pushy.”
Baka, a cartoonist, was the Puppeteer’s drinking pal at the pub.
“I don’t care. If not Baka, someone sure has talked about me. I hate being talked about. People ask for strange favours if they know about me.”
A frown cut her forehead. ‘What favours?”
The Puppeteer crumpled the letter into a ball. “The Interviewer wants me to string thirty-six stories from his notebooks.” The Puppeteer laughed, as if amused at recollecting the request. But his eyes burned. “What sort of a joke is this? I have stopped performing. That doesn’t mean I am dead. I don’t need sap from anyone.”
“No, you don’t,” Amrita said. “But you will turn into a dry twig soon if you keep visiting the pub so often.”
“Oh, shut up,” the Puppeteer yelled, looking at the lane, shaded in patches with coconut trees. His house was midway in the alley, with no immediate neighbours. The only other building, a little further on, was a dyeing joint. The shop had been shuttered a week ago; shreds of coloured cloth lay piled by the entrance. With the wind, every now and then, a few strips fluttered about the gate, bringing a momentary flush to the surroundings with their iridescent colours.
“Did you get to hear any of his stories?” Amrita asked.
“You think I asked him to narrate, silly.”
“Has he sent a sample in the letter?”
“Nothing,” the Puppeteer said, looking at Amrita. He feared her curiosity. “Don’t invite him in my absence,” he said.
“Could he be a drifter?”
“Whatever, I was sure he’d visit me soon. He could be in the colony right now, enquiring about us.”
Was her father telling the truth? Amrita wondered, running fingers over the potted plants on the balcony sill. The leaves felt parched, wilted in the summer heat. Her father had wilted too, lost his unerring hand with the strings. This bothered Amrita: his sudden dip into a vacuum, a phase where nothing seemed to touch him.
Outside, the summer heat rained. In the March sunlight, twelve pigeons circled about, their shadows shifting on the brick lane. The Puppeteer observed his pets; actually not his, but Amrita’s. She clapped, making the pigeons flutter about more. Then the birds settled around the aviary the Puppeteer had built last summer. A year ago, he still took an interest in simple things like building an aviary. He showed a curiosity for neighbourhood gossip, the fun and the fights. He also discussed Malati, in jest. Amrita disliked Malati’s grip on her father. But she would ignore his obsession, remembering Malati had once infused a new zeal in the Puppeteer with her wantonness. However, all his verve had evaporated around October last year. He became quiet. He started taking sleeping pills. He even stopped discussing Malati for a while. What had caused the depression, Amrita did not know. But she missed her father’s enthusiasms. Amrita had a playful soul; she loved banter and counter-arguments, not the wintry blue with which her father’s moods had become roofed. She was at him always, trying to stoke his leftover embers whenever she could.
“What do you talk about at the pub?” Amrita asked, enquiringly. “You said the Interviewer got interested in you after listening to your stories there.”
The question sparked off the Puppeteer's abrasive mood. He insisted the stories he told at the pub were old and inane tales; the drinkers wouldn’t enjoy such tales in their sober moods. It was a lie. At the pub he did indeed grow springy and boisterous, unlike his nippy self at home. He lorded over his fellow drinkers with songs, mimicry and anecdotes of the women he had slept with; many of these women he referred to as “Pattering pitchers.” Caught in the spirals of these impromptu stories, the co-drinkers sat clutching their glasses while the Puppeteer drank straight from the bottle, often reminding his listeners to foot the bill. The drunkards didn’t argue about paying. After a glorious anecdote many repeated how the pub would miss him if he were never to return. He drowned such adulation by swearing hard. He insisted he wasn’t telling stories, but tidbits of a life gone by. Whatever, his voice gave a raw momentum even to such snippets.
“If I were you, I would have invited him over.” Amrita said.
“The Interviewer? What for?”
“To hear his stories.”
“I won’t string his tales,” the Puppeteer resolved. “Let him team up with the twittering sparrows of 3/B1.”
“Who you have in mind?”
“First, Pointboudi. Her bedtime stories would lull the Interviewer.”
His rancour irritated Amrita. She went inside the room, but returned soon. “Take this. It will sweeten you,” she said, holding a bar of Cadbury.
The Puppeteer refused. “I would prefer a green mango. Get one from the kitchen. Bring my knife, too.”
Amrita felt the knife’s sharpness. “Cut carefully, the sides have become blunt.”
He juggled with the mango, thinking. Wrinkles gave an undulation to his broad forehead and his dark eyes carried a touch of aloofness.
“How come nothing interests you anymore?” Amrita asked, pulling a chair near him.
“I am tired,” he said, checking the blade’s sharpness.
“Aren’t you excited by the Interviewer’s proposal?”
"No. Damn it.”
“Ha!” Amrita sighed.
The Puppeteer hated her when she took on a martyred expression on his behalf. To tease her, he said, “Guess what I told him when he bought me a drink and asked that favour?”
“What?”
“If he needs woodwork, he could visit me.”
“You love demeaning yourself, don’t you?”
“It's true, I gave up puppetry to use my skills with wood.”
“Hmm,” Amrita muttered, taking a mango slice from the Puppeteer. “How did he react?”
“Kept mum. He has a pig’s skin, naturally.”
“He can’t be having any big tales, right?” Amrita asked, her voice increasingly inquisitive. “Thirty-six tales in a notebook couldn’t run as soap.”
“Oh no!” the Puppeteer moaned. “Actually his tales are small. As ugly as chicken coops. No fun in wrestling with them.”
The Puppeteer instantly became guarded after his slip. Amrita quickly latched onto the mistake. “So you did hear a few. I should have guessed. Baka must have pressed you to listen.”
“Yes ... but the stories I heard were like sawdust, easy to blow away.”
“Let me hear,” Amrita said, fingering her hair. “I can tell if they are sawdust or not. By the way little specks enter the eyes, not boulders.”
The Puppeteer didn’t enjoy the sting. Throwing an angry look at his daughter he settled on the mango. His hands had varicose veins; with each turn of the blade into the flesh of the unripe mango these veins stood out like snaking lines. Once agile in handling strings, the hands now seemed rough from carving wood.
“If he visited you now, what would you tell him?” Amrita asked. “Argue about his sawdust stories?”
“You chirpy brat!” the Puppeteer snapped, digging the knife deep inside the unripe mango.
“What does he look like?” Amrita asked.
The Puppeteer’s face instantly took on a stiff look. “No prince, I must say. Quite rugged. Tall, he has a gash on his right hand. Curly hair. Sharp jaw lines. Trousers with fraying hemlines. Good enough to picture him?”
“Just about,” Amrita said. “The rest might come from listening to him, if he does visit here.”
“I would turn him away from the door,” the Puppeteer promised. He had finished the mango; he juggled the seed a few times before throwing it away. “Go now. Your Pishima will soon start shouting. It is past midday.”
Amrita lingered, hoping to gather more information about the Interviewer. She saw the chance of a conflict ahead. Two storytellers made for a teasing presence. She knew her father’s fascination for heroic stories, big venues, with hundreds in the audience. The Interviewer seemed a contrast to that expanse. The contrast could provoke her father, break his stupor. “Did you talk about your interest in sports,” she abruptly asked.
The Puppeteer frowned. ”Oh yes, I did say I love watching cricket on television. He thought I was joking. How would he sense the drama in a big stadium? His nuggets won’t make epics, anyway.”
Pishima, the Puppeteer’s sister, came to the doorway. “How long do I work alone while you two talk about a freak? As if Baka wasn’t enough, here comes another devil!”
Amrita stood up, smiling. Pishima wasn’t amused. “The Interviewer came yesterday to borrow my paanchali book,” she said irritably.
Astonished, and then angry, the Puppeteer yelled, “I knew the bugger would come when I was not home. I am sure he had dropped the letter himself in the mailbox.”
Amrita was surprised too. But her curiosity doubled. “He came while I was home?”
“No,” Pishima said, surprised at Amrita’s interest. “Even if you were present I wouldn’t have asked you to serve him tea.”
“I trust you to tackle all evils,” Amrita said teasingly. “Did you tell him anything?”
“I asked him to visit bookshops rather than our house,” Pishima said, pulling at Amrita’s elbow. “Help me with washing. And you,” Pishima said, craning her sinewy neck towards her brother. “Rub some oil on your haystack before you bathe.”
The Puppeteer ran fingers through his matted hair. He asked for a cup of tea. Pishima refused, dragging Amrita along.
The Puppeteer’s eyes drifted to a bumblebee buzzing around the window. He pulled the crumpled letter out from his kurta pocket. Sitting against the door frame, he read the untitled story written in minuscule handwriting.
THE FIRST STORY
“Algae grow over the carved path that leads to her house. At night, away from her, Aniket waters the plants in a small roof-top garden. Each time he passes a row, he concentrates, careful not to water more than necessary. But sometimes he forgets. The spray can, held at a slant, keeps dripping. At such times, with the water trailing near his feet, the sides of his kurta wet, the green of the leaves dark under the muted terrace bulb, he is overcome with guilt remembering his small room. The room where paper-flowers flutter whenever the south wind blows in. Each flower dangles on a dry stem once the fan is turned on.
Evening. On the pavements young lads sell jasmines. She buys some, smelling the fragrance as she walks. He keeps himself on the side of the traffic, careful that she doesn’t trip or hit a lamppost. To ease her, he talks of many things, often about the flowers he grows in his rooftop garden: Golden marigolds, karabi, water lilies...
‘Must be a gardener,’ she tells her friends.
‘Bring some flowers for me,’ a friend requests. ‘My vase is empty,’ one pleads. ‘Roses would look lovely by my harmonium,’ another wishes.
His room is near the staircase landing. On his way up or down, he meets many people. They greet him, say a hello; they ask for his flowers too, those that he grows in his garden. He tells them his stock won’t make stunning ikebana. He has no artful bonsai to offer. Maybe, some marigolds or a dahlia.
She visits him, often in the afternoons.
‘Let’s sit outside,’ he tells her. She hesitates, her face tilted a little, as if listening to the flutter of coloured plastic sheets inside the room. He switches off the fan. He wipes off the glue stains on the floor. He insists they sit by the terrace door. But she wants him in his room, by the window. She moves around the space slowly, careful not to miss a step. He grows afraid. What if she finds the touch alien ... what if the glue smells give away his deceit? He then talks of many unconnected things: how a snail is different from a shark, a pebble from flowing lava.
‘Do rolling stones ever gather any moss?’ she asks abruptly. He laughs, thinking how the simple word ‘pebble’ has taken her mind towards a proverb.
A week before, on a Sunday, she asked if he knew of any landscape artist. He offered names that sounded alien to her. ‘Artists,’ he said, ‘wonderful painters.’
‘No … not them. An office colleague will be moving to a new apartment building next August. He wants a landscape artist to beautify the complex.’
Alone at night, watering the flowerpots on the rooftop, Aniket wonders what it takes to be these unique gardeners, folks who doll up concrete spaces with a green lie. He thinks how tiring it must be settling and ordering nature, notepad in hand.
An old lady, his neighbour, whispers often: ‘Stay well … what is her name, the one who visits you?’ Eyes glistening, the old lady adds, ‘Don’t you offer her anything?’
‘A nice girl’, he tells her. ‘Loves flowers most.’”
II
Late afternoon. Sunlight hugging the window panes. Amrita had been listening to music on FM radio. The doorbell chimed thrice. She let it tinkle, thinking the caller could be a sales girl, or Baka, or Malati. Whoever, she didn’t feel like leaving the bed where she was curled up, pillows pressed against her breasts. Weekend afternoons were dear to Amrita, especially when she had the house to herself. She hummed along with the song, while the doorbell chimed once more. And again.
Irritated, she grabbed her walking stick and sauntered to the veranda. The air around had a whiff of nicotine, a strong odour that irritated Amrita and yet excited her curiosity.
“Is the Puppeteer home?” The Interviewer asked, standing at the edge of the gate.
“No,” she said, frowning.
“I can wait for him,” he said, stubbing the cigarette dead under his sneakers. His voice sounded warm and yet carried a tinge of shyness.
Amrita hesitated. The Puppeteer was away at the Pub, Pishima at the temple. The lane was deserted.
The Interviewer read her discomfort. To reassure her he said he wasn’t a newcomer. He gave her dates of earlier visits. He gave details about the Puppeteer.
“If you are that keen,” Amrita said. “But I am not sure, when he might return.” She paused. “Don’t smoke. The smell upsets me.” With difficulty she slotted the right key into the keyhole, and stepped aside.
Leading off the veranda was the Puppeteer's room. A big room with a bed, two cane chairs, and a table; conspicuous among the many papers on the table was a white handkerchief, the name Malati appliquéd in red at one corner. Opposite the table were three wooden trunks, piled atop one another.
Amrita drew the curtains apart. “Tea or coffee?” she asked.
“Tea, no sugar,” he said, surprised by the shift in her tone. He was meeting her for the first time. She was wearing a black sari, striped with blue lines. Her hair, pushed back with a ribbon, had a faint glow of henna. Blue veins stood out around her neck like thin pencil marks. While taking the teacup he noticed her fingers were long, their tips whitish.
He hadn’t expected her to keep him company. But she sat at the edge of the bed, seemingly restless, eager to talk.
“The Puppeteer ... when did his depression start?” he asked, running his fingers along the edges of his blue notebook.
Troupe members often talked of fatigue: weariness from repeated performances with the same themes, with the same set of puppets. Possible, he lost his flair for the stage, both as an actor and as a puppeteer. Maybe it was a private dilemma. Whatever, Amrita didn’t want to discuss that with the Interviewer.
“You can narrate a tale if you wish,” she said, icily. “Or sit alone.”
Caught off guard by the request, he paused. A lizard pounced on an insect. Two passers-by went past the window, discussing Sultan Khan’s latest film. “What happened?” Amrita asked. “Don’t tell me you aren’t the Interviewer?”
“I will keep the story short,” he said, as if he needed the excuse. He chose the tale about the paper-flower artist, the same one the Puppeteer had read in his letter. Halfway into the tale, he added, impromptu, new images and lines. The story jerked along. “Finished?” she asked midway, as if to cut the jagged flow.
“Not yet.”
“Oh dear,” she sighed. “I thought you would be brief.”
Like a car losing pace before a speed breaker, he lost enthusiasm. He flipped the pages of the notebook.
“Where do you pick your nuggets from?” Amrita asked. “I hear you have thirty-six tales. Or more?”
He smiled impishly. “Are you interested?”
Amrita grinned. “Invite more people, if you think your tales are interesting.”
“I don’t want a buzz.”
“Oh! You love silence, do you? But in 3/B1 you can’t keep the flies away.”
“I won’t attract many.”
“Why? You have repellents to drive the flies away?”
“Time will tell!”
“You could catch sleeping sickness waiting so long.”
“I have no bait to hook anything quickly.”
“No fish turns to a bare hook,” Amrita replied, clapping mildly.
His eyes strayed to the three trunks. Brass locks hung on two; the trunk at the top had a broken handle, its lid scrawled over with ornate calligraphy. Possibly, Baka’s design, he thought. Baka was a strange presence in the Puppeteer’s life, a mismatched bonding, but deep, nonetheless. Amrita disliked Baka, for the filth in his language and the panache with which he drank. She blamed him for turning her father into a guzzler, and also a comic-strip addict. She frowned the moment the Interviewer mentioned Baka.
Sensing her anger, the Interviewer asked, “How many puppets are in those trunks?”
Amrita thought for a while, as if to be sure of the number. A faint smile touched her lips. “Have you met Pointboudi?”
“Who is she?” he asked, surprised by the abrupt query.
“Find out. She will like you?”
“Pointboudi,” he repeated. “Sounds like a nickname.”
“Yes ... if that comforts you,” Amrita said. “A yellow house, near the flourmill, with a tamarind tree on its right.”
“What?” He asked, unable to get the hint.
“Pointboudi’s address. On the way say a hello also to Fischer and Spassky, the chess players.”
Nicknames again! “Are those your coinages?”
“They themselves chose through a coin. Heads was Spassky.”
The Interviewer laughed. To keep the teasing note, Amrita said, “Meet the Magician too, and surely Lathibabu. But before anyone else, it should be Pointboudi, the darling of 3/B1. You haven’t met her even once?”
A touch of suspicion in her voice. “What’s the urgency?” he thought. Who was Pointboudi? A friend of the Puppeteer’s? Was Amrita pushing him into a challenge?
Silence hung in the room for a while. Amrita broke it with an icy voice: “My father can be pretty nasty if nagged. Give him time, he might help you out.” Her tone was calculating, as if she was voicing a deal.
“Has he not performed in the last two years?”
“I don’t keep track,” Amrita said, yawning. “I hate puppets, anyway.”
The remark confused the Interviewer. Did she mean him? Just then her cellphone buzzed. “Back in a minute,” she said.
In her absence, he studied the grainy photograph of the Puppeteer’s on the wall. The frame had become mouldy, the glass stippled with dust. Unlike his brooding self now, the Puppeteer looked different in the photograph: rippling muscles, hair down to his collar, and a naughty smirk on his lips. What had curbed his enthusiasm?
The Interviewer heard Amrita giggling on the phone. Her voice was laced with a husky edge which he found attractive. She was speaking fast and loudly, as if excited, then slowly her voice dipped and trickled to a total silence.
The pigeons cooed on the rooftop.
A strong smell of Vodka suddenly wafted into the room. He turned around and saw the Puppeteer at the doorway. He seemed to have spilled Vodka on his kurta: it was soaked in patches. Had there been a brawl at the pub? So early in the evening?
“What the hell are you doing in my room?” the Puppeteer yelled.
The uproar attracted Amrita. “He was here to meet you,” she said, switching off her mobile. “I called him in. He numbed me with a story,” she said, smiling.
“I don’t want to know,” the Puppeteer hollered. “I don’t like a creep who drops letters in my box.”
The Interviewer said he hadn’t dropped the letter. He was to post it, but before he could do that, he misplaced the note at the pub.
“Then Baka must have found it and dropped the letter himself,” Amrita said. “Baka is like that only: meddling with things not his own.”
“Don’t blame Baka,” the Puppeteer slurred. “I know him better than this freak?”
Amrita’s mobile buzzed again.
“Stop your nagging machine!” the Puppeteer snapped. “And you ... If you visit again, bring a bottle of pricey whisky. I’ll pour that on your notebook and set fire to it. Get it, man?” he said, punching the air.
Soon after he had hit the lane leading to the main road, the Interviewer heard the trill of a cycle bell; it kept trilling as if calling for his attention.
The cyclist braked near him. Rooted to his seat he mocked, “Here people hiss piss and ponder. What’s your interest?”
The tone was sly, as if he suspected the Interviewer was up for something. More than a bully, the cyclist looked funny in crew-cut hair, loosely fitting khaki shorts, and a white shirt buttoned to the neck with the sleeves rolled down; a silver hoop in the left earlobe added a further dash of oddness to his thin physique.
“I was at the Puppeteer’s,” the Interviewer said.
“3/B1 is full of yarning oldies,” the cyclist taunted. “Know who I am?”
"No one has briefed me about you.”
“I write one-liners. Call me a poet if you wish,” he said and trilled the cycle bell; he seemed happy being a Poet. “Ask me why I do that.”
“Write one-liners you mean? Must be a reason.”
The Poet whistled a shrill note and then declared triumphantly: “My writing is best read on T-shirts.”
“It would be fun to hear your lines."
“Let me stab you then,” the Poet said. Next, more expressively, “She likes my lines, but never admits it.”
“Who?”
“Amrita. She dubs them as limp as noodles,” The Poet laughed, so playfully that it reassured the Interviewer. “Could we sit somewhere?” he asked.
“Come, let’s talk near the culvert.”
The Poet took the lane by the abandoned glass factory. The big signboard had rusted, but the factory's main gate stood intact, its base now covered with weeds and a garbage heap. A gaping hole stood out on the boundary wall like a scar.
They walked till the railway tracks were visible. Near the culvert, two Palash trees, dripping red, stood next to one another on a vacant lot. Leaning his cycle against one tree the Poet kicked the fallen flowers. “Ants under buttocks aren’t good for conversations,” he said, searching the ground. Satisfied that ants weren’t crawling around, he sat down in a yogic posture, stretched, yawned, and then gestured for the Interviewer to sit. Opposite the Poet the Interviewer sat cross-legged, hands clutching his notebook.
“What do you write in that holy book?” the Poet asked. The Poet confessed he himself never used any notebook. Margins of a magazine, a cigarette packet, a torn end of a tissue paper, all sufficed for his writing.
“One-liners,” the Interviewer said fervently, “it is interesting you write one-liners only.”
"I hate bulk. I bear words, separately.”
“How many of your lines have adorned T-shirts?”
“A few on mobile phones would be even better.”
“Let’s hear a few.”
"Brick battle tittle-tattle, hunky-dory fun."
“What?”
"Describes the colony you are in now."
"Oh! Next?"
Rolling the tip of a cigarette over his lighter's flame, the Poet asked, “Are you after the Puppeteer or his daughter?”
“Why you ask?”
“Lest you get butchered. Amrita is as deceptive as a knife inside a decorated sheath.”
“And the Puppeteer?”
“Wooden. No wonder he hates poets.”
“He is so lively at the pub?”
“To forget himself. What do you narrate to him?”
“A few anecdotes ... little stories. I need his help to string them into a taut story-line.”
“Who else in 3/B1 has caught your fancy?”
When no answer followed, the Poet said, “Good luck. If possible, slot a few of my lines into your narration. Amrita might appreciate that.”
“You like her?”
“To write, neither trees nor tits,” the Poet said. “I need heaving, shrieking, loving, fucking freaks. Did you talk to her this afternoon?” he asked, stubbing the cigarette dead.
“Yes,” the Interviewer said.
“Did she bug you with her silence? Amrita can bore any interviewer.”
“I found her witty.”
“That’s the misleading trait in her. She strings you along with that and makes you writhe alone. Got some change? I need to buy a bottle of cough syrup for my mom.”
The Interviewer gave him a fifty rupee note.
“Thanks. You’ll get it back in two days. Did Amrita talk about me?”
“She asked me to meet Pointboudi.”
“Oh!” The Poet gave a mock sigh. “Pointboudi is a humming bird. She will lull you to sleep.”
“You seem to dread both Amrita and Pointboudi.”
“Never judge a chameleon,” the Poet said. He steadied the cycle, and then ringing the bell twice -- as if warning someone on his way -- the Poet pedalled away. But he returned soon. Stopping at a distance from the Interviewer he yelled, "Take your time, dear. It is a funny place. Don’t disclose your choices too soon. It would spoil the fun. If you need help, look for me at Srikanta's tea stall."
The Interviewer lit a cigarette and opened his notebook. He ticked the story on page nineteen and then holding the pen in between his lips, he read, pausing on each line as if he was unravelling a code...
THE SECOND STORY
Rakhal lived in the terrace room: a small nondescript block of space with asbestos roofing. A Krishnachura tree stood opposite his window. During summers, when the tree sprayed its branch full of vermilion, he would behave oddly. Then our elders would whisk him away to a hospital on the old post office road.
Before each departure he banged his head on the water-pitcher, made faces, or, if still forced, lifted the earthen pot to let the water inside cascade all over his soil-smeared body. His brothers could barely control his anger. My father abused him in slang whose meanings we learnt much later. Unable to pull him out through the green door, Barojethu, my pot-bellied uncle, would give him a tight slap with his hairy hand. The women – mothers, sisters, aunts – would stand wearing forced gloom on their faces, and hidden behind their sari aanchals, we, the younger lot, would try figuring out the need for such drama.
He didn’t cry when hit. His silence would make us wonder how he withstood it all. Maybe, he bore all the pain inside his eyes, which looked hazy, as if covered in mist. On summer afternoons he would peel watermelons for us. He also made paper boats which we ran in the gutters during the monsoon. He built playhouses with driftwood and narrated stories of demons and fairy queens.
Elders warned us not to go near him. They didn’t give us reasons why we shouldn’t. They only repeated ritually: ‘He will break your neck!’ We ignored such warnings. We needed our paper boats. Though we did feel anxious observing those moist eyes fixed upon us.
A quack once spread the gossip that ‘Someone in your family must have been like him.’ Peers teased us when we did something funny. We, too, would think of weird possibilities, as if it was important to find an eccentric amongst us.
Nothing happened, though.
In due course, boys grew up alike and girls grew up accordingly. Sisters distanced themselves with their bosoms, perfumes and daydreams. We brothers grew close through masturbation, hero worship and career prospects. I took a teaching job. Ella, my sister, married a bank officer. Jhumpa, my youngest cousin, fled with a TV serial hero. Shampa, the cousin I was closest to, became pregnant at eighteen. All our fathers grew old. They started talking of pensions. Mothers talked of grandsons and ill luck. The rest of us spun different webs.
And the Krishnachura tree sprayed its blood red delight every summer. Only occupants on the terrace floor changed. After Rakhal’s death, Barojethu used it as his study. Later, after his son’s marriage, it became his living room. After his death, one daughter-in-law of the family used it as a storeroom. When she sifted elsewhere, my middle aunt turned the room into her puja-ghar. Everyday, smells of frankincense would waft down from the room and ants hovered around the bowls of sweets offered to the deities. Then, she had to vacate the space for her ailing grandson.
Last year, Chhoto Kaku, the youngest uncle, passed away. Sunil, my cousin, is getting married soon. Baba has grown old.
The terrace floor waits…
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Copyright (c) Shiladitya Sarkar, 2007
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