4

The baby was now nearly ten months old. He had a frail, delicate build and an impossibly tiny face. Only two little teeth had come in on his lower gum. For any reason or no reason at all, at any given moment, he would bare that gum with its two lone milk-teeth and laugh. People would say, ‘Bouma, your little one’s laugh is something he’s been coaxed into.’ Give him the slightest encouragement and there was no stopping him; he would start laughing so much, like a little madman, that his mother would say, ‘Alright, Khokon, stop now. You’ve laughed too much today, far too much—save a little for tomorrow.’ He had learned to say only two things! When he was happy, he would say ‘Je-je—je-je’ and flash his two-toothed smile. When he was unhappy, he would say ‘Na-na-na-na’ and begin to cry with a terrible shriek. Whatever he found in front of him, he would test the strength of those two new teeth on it—a clod of earth, a scrap of wood, his mother’s anchal. Sometimes, when she sat down to feed him his milk, he would suddenly, in a fit of glee, clamp down hard on the bronze jhinuk with his two new teeth. His mother would burst into peals of laughter and say, ‘What’s this, my little Khoka, why are you biting the spoon? Let go, let go! What are you doing? Those two teeth are all you’ve got—if you break them, how will you laugh, tell me that?’ But Khoka would not let go. With great difficulty, his mother would have to put a finger in his mouth to pry the jhinuk free.

Because she couldn’t always count on the little girl, his mother did her work with Khoka safely seated inside a pen she had made by fencing off a section of the kitchen veranda with high bamboo lathes. Confined like a defendant in a criminal case being heard inside the dock, Khoka would sometimes laugh to himself, sometimes babble in an incomprehensible tongue to an invisible audience, and sometimes pull himself up by the bamboo fence to stand and gaze towards the bamboo grove. When his mother returned from her bath at the ghat, Khoka would hear the sound of her wet clothes, look up from his play, and glance this way and that. On seeing her, he would break into a wide smile and pull himself up to stand, holding onto the bamboo fence. His mother would say, ‘What’s this? Oh my, I just put on your kajal and cleaned your face before I left, and now you’re sitting there looking like a soot-black drongo! Let me see, come here.’ As she tried to scrub the kajal off, rubbing his nose and mouth forcefully, Khoka’s fair face would turn crimson as a vermilion dot, and he would protest mightily, saying angrily, ‘Je-je—je-je!’ But his mother paid him no mind.

After this, the moment Khoka saw the gamchha in his mother’s hand, he would gurgle with glee and try to scurry away on all fours. Some days, Sarbajaya would call from the ghat, ‘Khokon says too-oo-oo! Rock for me, Khoka? Rock, rock, Khokon rocks!’ At once, Khoka would sit down and begin to rock back and forth with great abandon, waving his tiny hands in delight and breaking into song:

(Song)

Je-e-e-je-je-je-e-e-i Je—je-je—je—e Je—je—je–je—je—je

His mother would say, ‘Alright, stop now, no more rocking, Khoka. That’s enough, that’s enough, that was very good.’ Sometimes, in the middle of her chores, Sarbajaya would prick up her ears and listen: no sound was coming from inside Khoka’s pen—as if he had fallen silent! Her heart would give a lurch—had a jackal taken him? She would run over to find that Khoka, like a heap of champa flowers tumbled from an overturned basket, had fallen asleep on the ground at some point, one small hand lying awkwardly beneath him. From all sides, hordes of red ants, flies, and tiny tickling ants were rushing towards him in their great greed. Khoka’s thin, reddish lips trembled slightly in his slumber; in his sleep he would sometimes swallow with a gulp and take a deep breath—as if about to wake—only to fall back at once into a sleep so profound that not even the sound of his breathing could be heard.

From morning till evening, and from evening till late into the night, their lonely house by the bamboo grove would be filled with the meaningless songs of joy and the innocent, babbling laughter of the ten-month-old child.

A mother raises her child with love; through the ages, the glory of motherhood has thus been proclaimed in the story of all peoples. But is what the child gives to the mother any less? He arrives with nothing, it is true, but who can put a price on his heart-stealing smile, his childish liquidity, his face as if moulded from moonlight, his half-formed, nonsensical babble? That is his treasure; in exchange for it, he receives her care. He does not take it like a beggar with empty hands.

One day, while Harihar was busy with market accounts or his own writing, Sarbajaya brought the boy to him and said, ‘Ogo, can’t you hold the boy for a minute? The girl’s gone out somewhere… Thakurjhi’s gone to the ghat… Just hold him for a bit! Am I supposed to bathe, or just sit here with a child on my hip?’ Harihar said, ‘Uhn-uhn, don’t bring that racket in here now, I’m very busy.’ Furious, Sarbajaya plunked the child down and walked away. As he went on with his sums and letters, Harihar suddenly noticed the child chewing on one of his slippers! Snatching the slipper away, Harihar said, ‘Ah, look at this, what a mess. Here I am trying to get some work done!’

Suddenly, a sparrow came and landed on the edge of the veranda. The baby looked at his father’s face, then, amazed, pointed towards the bird, waved his hand, and said, ‘Je-je—je-je.’

Harihar’s irritation vanished, replaced by a great wave of tenderness.

He remembered a night from many years before.

He had just returned from the West and, on the advice of the village elders, had gone to his father-in-law’s house to bring his wife home. The boat reached the ghat of his wife’s village after midday. He had been here only once since the wedding and did not remember the way, so he had to ask someone before arriving at the house. At his calls, a fair-skinned, slender young woman appeared at the outer door to see who was there, and as their eyes met, she quickly withdrew and vanished inside the house. Harihar wondered who the girl could be. Surely not his wife? Could she have grown so much?

That night, he found his answer. Late in the evening, Sarbajaya entered his room, wearing a red-bordered matka silk sari that her mother had saved from their poverty. Harihar looked at her, astonished. Nothing of the child bride from ten years ago remained in this beautiful young woman—it was as if someone had broken her down and remade her entirely new. The girlish softness of her face was gone, true, but Harihar was not slow to realize that the beauty that had blossomed in its place was not of a common sort. The shape of her hands and feet, the way she moved—everything was flawless and new.

Entering the room, Sarbajaya was flustered at first. Though she was a grown woman now, it was fair to say she had never really met her husband until this day. The shyness of a new bride seemed to possess her all over again. It was Harihar who spoke first. Taking her right hand in his, he sat her down on the bed and said, ‘Sit here. Are you well?’

Sarbajaya smiled faintly. The shyness seemed to recede a little. She said, ‘So you remembered me after all this time? Really, what kept you away so long?’ Then she laughed and said, ‘Why, what wrong had I done, tell me that?’

The rustic lilt and turn of phrase in his wife’s speech struck Harihar as new and utterly sweet. He then noticed that his wife had no other jewellery on her hands save for a few bangles of cowrie-shell and glass. A poor man’s daughter, with no one to give her anything; he had been terribly unjust not to have checked on her for so long. Sarbajaya, too, was looking at her husband. Four or five times that day she had peeked at him from behind a screen. The healthy youthfulness of Harihar’s well-built frame gave his every limb the bearing of a hero, something not often seen in the villages of Bengal. From her parents’ conversation, she had heard that her husband had returned from the West having become very learned, and it was not as if he hadn’t brought back a bit of money, either. Her sorrows were over at last; perhaps God had finally looked upon her with favour. Everyone used to say her husband had become a sanyasi and would never return. Though in her heart of hearts she had not believed it, his return had for so long seemed like a distant, impossible hope. How many nights she had spent awake with worry, unable to join fully in the village weddings and sacred-thread ceremonies. Everyone would say ‘Ah, the poor thing,’ and go out of their way to show her sympathy; her eyes would fill with tears of wounded pride. Her golden dreams of a vibrant youth had been shed only in secret, in the solitude of night, as tears. She had never spoken of it to anyone, but she had often sat and wondered—this being their family’s situation, if her husband truly never came back, where would she go after her parents’ death? Who would give her shelter?

At last, she had found her shore.

Harihar smiled and asked, ‘Alright, when you saw me outside the door this afternoon—did you recognize me? Tell the truth now—’

Sarbajaya laughed. ‘No, why would I recognize you! At first I couldn’t be sure, but then, right away—’ ‘You guessed—’ ‘Not a guess, not a guess at all—I knew for sure! Didn’t you see? I covered my head at once and went inside.’ Then, after a brief silence, she asked again, ‘Now you tell me, did you recognize me? Swear on it!’

The night deepened as they talked of this and that. When the talk turned to her late brother, Sarbajaya could not hold back her tears. Harihar asked, ‘Where did Bina get married?’ He hadn’t known his younger sister-in-law’s name; he had only heard it from his father-in-law that day.

‘She was married in Kurule-Binodpur—over by that big river, what’s it called? The Madhumati. On the banks of the Madhumati.’

One question kept coming to Sarbajaya’s mind: would her husband take her with him? Or would he just visit for a while and then go back to Kashi or Gaya? But even as she formed the words, she could not bring herself to ask. It was as if a part of her mind rebelled, saying, ‘Let him not take me then—why should I bring it up, why make myself so small?’

Harihar resolved the dilemma himself. ‘Tomorrow, let’s go. I’ll take you home to Nischindipur.’

It felt as if a rice-husking pedal had crashed down on Sarbajaya’s chest. Composing herself, she said aloud, ‘Why tomorrow? You’ve come after so long—why not stay for a couple of days? Won’t Father and Mother let you go so soon? And besides, my friend Bakulphul has invited you to her house the day after tomorrow—’

‘Who is this Bakulphul of yours?…’

‘Her family’s here in the village—in this neighbourhood, but she married into the other one.’ Then she smiled again and said, ‘She told me she’s coming to see you tomorrow morning—’

The stream of conversation flowed on. The night grew deep. In the sajne tree just outside the house, a night-bird was calling with a strange, monotonous cry. It occurred to Harihar that while this corner of a home in a secluded Bengal village, eager with affection, had waited for him month after month, year after year, with its welcome prepared, what had he been searching for all that time, wandering like a homeless exile through the barren, unfamiliar deserts and mountains of the West! The night-bird called on and on, its song unchanging. The moonlight outside was gradually beginning to fade. In a way, this night felt deeply mysterious to him; the path of their new life stretched out into the vast future—and it began with this very night. Who knew what that life would be like? Who knew what fate the goddess of life held in the basket she had packed for their uncertain journey ahead?

Perhaps, in a vague way, the same feeling was stirring in both their minds. Both of them fell silent, gazing through the gap in the window at the moonlit night outside.

So many days had passed since then. Where, at that time, was there any trace of this child?