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At the northernmost edge of the village of Nischindipur stood Harihar Ray’s small brick house. Harihar was a man of ordinary means, who managed to run his household in a simple fashion on the income from a small ancestral plot of land and the annual offerings from a few disciples and patrons.

The previous day had been Ekadashi. On the veranda of the house, Harihar’s distant cousin, Indir Thakrun, was having her morning snack of ground roasted rice. Harihar’s six-year-old daughter sat silently beside her, watching with heart-wrenching intensity the journey of each fistful of powder from the bowl to the old woman’s mouth, and glancing from time to time with a look of despair at the steadily emptying bronze bowl. Once or twice she seemed on the verge of speaking, but could not bring herself to say anything. After raising fistful after fistful until the vessel was empty, Indir Thakrun finally looked at the little girl and said, “Oh dear, I didn’t save any for you, did I? Just look at that!”

With mournful eyes, the girl replied, “It’s all right, Piti, you eat.”

Indir Thakrun broke off half of one of the two large, ripe biche-kolas she had and placed it in the girl’s hand. At this, the child’s eyes and face lit up. She took the gift from her aunt’s hand and began sucking on it slowly and with great concentration.

From the other room, her mother called out, “Gone and planted yourself there again? Get up and come here.”

Indir Thakrun said, “Let her be, Bouma—she’s just sitting here with me, she’s not doing any harm. Let her stay—” But the girl’s mother replied in a scolding tone, “No, why should she sit there like that when you’re eating? I don’t approve of such things. I said get up and come here—”

The girl rose timidly and left.

Indir Thakrun’s connection to Harihar was a very distant one. She was some sort of cousin from his maternal grandmother’s side. The ancestral home of Harihar Ray’s forebears had been in the neighbouring village of Yashra-Bishnupur. After being widowed for the first time at a young age, Harihar’s father, Ramchand Ray, had noted with extreme vexation that his own father showed no inclination whatsoever to arrange a second marriage for him. After a year had passed in shamefaced patience and still no effort was seen on his father’s part, a desperate Ramchand was forced to resort to various weapons, both direct and indirect. In the middle of the afternoon, for no reason at all, the normally placid Ramchand, having finished his meal, would writhe on his bed; if anyone sat near him and asked what was wrong, Ramchand would launch into a lament—who did he have left in this world, who would look after him now, what did it matter if he had a headache—and so on. The result was that Ramchand’s second marriage took place in this village of Nischindipur, and shortly after the wedding, upon his father’s death, Ramchand abandoned his home in Yashra-Bishnupur and settled here permanently. This was all in his youth—after coming to this village, Ramchand, with his father-in-law’s encouragement, began studying Sanskrit in a tol, and in time became a fine pandit in the region. But he never took up any profession, and there was grave doubt as to whether he was even suited for one. For nine months of the year his wife and son would live at her parents’ house. He himself would spend most of his time at Poti-ram Mukhopadhyay’s den of dice-players in the neighbourhood, appearing at his in-laws’ house only at mealtimes; if anyone asked—Pandit-moshai, you have a wife and son, shouldn’t you think of the future? Ramchand would say—Not to worry, my friend, even if they live by gleaning what’s left under Brojo Chokkoborti’s rice granary, they’ll get by laughing for two generations. Then he would return to pondering how to combine a five and a six to break his opponent’s formation.

Just how misplaced his faith was in the permanence of Brojo Chakravarty’s rice granary, Ramchand did not take long to realise after his father-in-law’s death. He had no land in this village, nor much in the way of cash. He had managed to gather a few disciples here and there, and with their help he somehow ran his household and raised his son. Before him, one of his kinsmen had also married into his wife’s family. They too had lived here. They had been a great help to Ramchand. This kinsman’s son, Nilmoni Ray, worked in the Commissariat, but as his job always kept him abroad, he eventually all but abandoned his home here and took his elderly mother with him to his place of work. Now, no one was left on their homestead.

It was said that Indir Thakrun had been married to a high-ranking Kulin of East Bengal. After the wedding, her husband would grace the village with his presence only on rare occasions. He would stay a night or two, collect his travelling expenses and the fee due his Kulin honour, and, after making a mark in his register, set off with his luggage-bearer for the next father-in-law on his list. Consequently, Indir Thakrun could hardly be expected to remember her husband well. After her parents’ death, she had found shelter and two square meals a day with her brother, but as fate would have it, that brother also died young. Shortly after, Harihar’s father, Ramchand, built his house on this homestead, and it was then that Indir Thakrun first entered this household. But that was not a matter of today.

A long time had passed since then. In the Shankharipukur pond, generation after generation of red water lilies had bloomed and faded. On the Chakravartys’ open field, Sitanath Mukhopadhyay had planted a new orchard of grafted trees, and now those trees too were growing old. New householders settled on so many homesteads, so many others were deserted; so many Golok Chakravartys, so many Brojo Chakravartys died and mouldered away; the restless, ever-moving, limpid waters of the Ichamati, racing against the infinite flow of time, had swept away—like so much chaff, so much sea-foam—the village’s indigo planters, the Johnson and Thomson sahebs, and countless Majumdars, to who knows where!

Only Indir Thakrun was still alive. Not the slender, smiling young woman of the year 1240, but a seventy-five-year-old woman, her cheeks sunken, her back slightly bent, her body stooped forward. She could no longer make out things in the distance as she once did; shading her eyes with her hand as if to shield them from the glare of the sun, she would ask, “Who’s that coming? Nobin? Behari? No, is that you, Raju…?”

And what changes had this very homestead undergone before Indir Thakrun’s eyes! That plot of Brojo Chakravarty’s, now overgrown with jungle, was once a place where on the night of the Kojagori Lakshmi-Purnima the whole village would sit down in rows to feast. And what a game of dice would take place, morning and evening, in the great Chandi-mandap! Was there such a bamboo grove there then? On the day of Poush-Parban, a maund of rice would be husked in that dheki-shed for the Poush festival pithas—if she just closed her eyes and thought, Indir Thakrun could still see it all! The middle daughter-in-law of the Ray family arriving with her entourage to husk rice, the thud-thud of the heavy pestle, the gold bautis on her fair hands moving back and forth, disappearing and reappearing—a form like the goddess Jagaddhatri, and a nature to match. When Indir Thakrun was newly widowed, every Dvadashi morning she would prepare a meal with her own hands and bring it to feed her. Where did she go! There was no one left from those old days with whom she could share a few words of joy or sorrow.

Then Ramchand, the master of this household, died; his son Harihar was born just the other day, it seemed. He used to go leaping and playing down the path to the ghat; he fell while trying to eat unripe tamarinds from the Mukhopadhyays’ tree and broke his arm, and was bedridden for two or three months; it felt like only yesterday. He was married with great fanfare at a young age—and after his father’s death, leaving his ten-year-old child bride at her parents’ house, he vanished from the region. For nearly eight or ten years there was almost no news of him—on rare occasions he would send a letter, and sometimes a money order for two or five rupees in the old woman’s name. How she had struggled to look after this house, how many days she had gone without food, depending on the charity of her neighbours.

After a long absence, Harihar had returned six or seven years ago and set up house; he had a daughter, who was now nearly six years old herself. The old woman had thought that at last the family life of her childhood would be restored. In her narrow life, she had never asked for any other happiness, nor was she capable of conceiving of any other kind of joy or sorrow—if only the old, familiar patterns of life could be restored, she would be content; for her, that was the ultimate story of happiness.

She could not bear to have Harihar’s little girl out of her sight for a moment. She too had once had a daughter, whose name was Bisweswari. She had been married at a young age and had died shortly after. In Harihar’s daughter, Bisweswari had returned, after forty years, from the land beyond death to her destitute mother’s lap. Forty years of extinguished, dormant motherhood would awaken in an instant of startled eagerness, with the desperate hunger of a life drawing to its close, stirred by the girl’s helpless, abashed expression, by the laughter in her innocent eyes.

But what she had hoped for had not come to pass. What if Harihar’s wife was as pretty as a picture? She was terribly quarrelsome, and couldn’t stand the sight of the old woman. Some nobody from who-knows-where, with no discernible connection to them, sitting around and eating them out of house and home.

She would pick fights with the old woman twice a day over trivial matters. After one particularly long quarrel, the old woman, clutching her personal brass water pot under her arm and dangling a cloth bundle from her right hand, would declare, “I’m leaving, new bride, and if I ever set foot in this house again, may I be—”. Leaving the house, she would spend the entire day sitting miserably in the bamboo grove. Towards evening, Harihar’s little girl, having found her, would start tugging at the edge of her sari. “Get up, Pitima. I’ll tell Ma not to scold you anymore. Come on, Pitima.” Holding her hand, the old woman would return to the house in the evening darkness. Sarbajaya would turn her face away and mutter, “So there she is! Where else would she go? Is there another hearth for her but this one? ….. But her pride is still intact, all sixteen annas of it!”

This had begun within a year or so of their arrival—it had happened many times and continued to happen quite often.

The thatched hut on Harihar’s ancestral homestead had long been in a state of disrepair. This was where the old woman lived. On a bamboo rack hung a couple of soiled and torn widow’s saris. The two edges of a tear would be tied together in a knot. The old woman could no longer thread a needle, so she had no way of mending her clothes; when a tear became too large, she tied a knot. To one side lay a torn mat and a pile of tattered quilts. A bundle was filled with a kingdom of old rags. It seemed they had been carefully collected over a long time as material for making quilts; they had never been needed, and now, though they were, her eyesight was no longer sharp enough for the task. Still, she kept them with the utmost care, and in the month of Bhadra, when the sun came out after the rains, she would sometimes take them out and spread them in the courtyard to air. Inside a wicker chest was a bundle containing some tattered red-bordered saris—they had belonged to her daughter, Bisweswari; a brass water pot, a clay oil-pot, and a couple of clay jars. The brass pot was kept full of roasted rice, which she would pound at night with a pestle and mortar and eat from time to time. In the clay jars were a little oil in one, a little salt in another, and a small amount of date palm jaggery in a third. Since Sarbajaya did not always give her these things when she asked, the old woman would secretly bring them from the main household and store them away in her wedding wicker chest.

Sarbajaya entered this room only on the rarest of occasions. But in the evening, her daughter would sit for a long time on the torn-quilt bedding on the hut’s veranda, listening raptly to her pishima’s fairytales. After hearing this story and that, the little girl would say, “Piti, tell me that story about the robbers!” It was the story of a robbery that had taken place in a house in the village fifty years ago. Although it had been told many times before, it had to be repeated every few days; the girl would not let her off. After that, she would listen to rhymes from her pishima’s lips. Indir Thakrun knew many rhymes from the old days. As a young woman, she had earned much praise by reciting rhymes from memory to her friends and companions at the ghat and along the pathways. After that, she had not found such a patient audience for a long time; now, lest they grow rusty from disuse, she would recite all the rhymes she knew to her little niece every evening, to keep them sharp. She would draw out the words as she recited—

Oh Lolita, champa-bud, listen to me, A thief has crept into Radha’s house—

Reaching this point, she would pause, a smile on her face, and look expectantly at her niece. The girl would chime in enthusiastically, “A man with a topknot!”—and she would finish the line, bobbing her little head forward as if to keep time, stressing the ‘ma’ sound for no reason. The girl found it immensely amusing.

Her pishi would try to trick her niece by reciting rhymes that had perhaps not been said for ten or fifteen days, leaving the final line for her to complete—but the girl always remembered; it was difficult to trick her.

Later in the night, when her mother called her to eat, she would get up and go.