1

It is a tale from fifteen or sixteen years ago. Having passed my B.A., I was in Calcutta, living a life of idleness. Despite searching in many places, I had not found a job.

It was the day of Saraswati Puja. I had been in the mess for a long time, so they wouldn’t throw me out outright, but the manager had worn me to a frazzle with his incessant demands for payment. A clay idol had been made and the puja was being held right there in the mess—the festivities were not inconsiderable. Waking up that morning, I thought to myself that everything would be closed today. One or two places had given me a sliver of hope, but it would be useless to go anywhere now. Better, instead, to wander about and look at the various puja idols.

Just then, Jagannath, the mess servant, handed me a slip of paper. I read it and saw it was another letter of demand from the manager. A special feast was being prepared in the mess for the puja, and since I was two months in arrears, I was to give the servant at least ten rupees. Otherwise, from the next day, I would have to make other arrangements for my meals.

The demand was perfectly fair, of course, but my entire worldly wealth consisted of two rupees and a few annas in coin. Without giving any reply, I walked out of the mess. The music of the puja was playing in various parts of the neighbourhood; children were gathered at the lane-crossings, making a racket; in Abhay Moyra’s sweetshop, all sorts of new confections were arranged on platters. Across the main road, a nahabat had been set up at the gate of the college hostel. People were returning from the market in droves, carrying garlands of flowers and other articles for worship.

I wondered where I might go. It had been over a year since I had quit my teaching post at the Jorasanko school and had been doing nothing—or rather, not exactly nothing; in my search for a job, there was not a single merchant’s office, not a school, not a newspaper office, not a rich man’s house where I had not trudged back and forth at least ten times. The answer from all was the same: there were no vacancies.

Suddenly, on the road, I ran into Satish. Satish and I had lived together in the Hindu Hostel. He was now a lawyer in Alipore, though I didn’t think he was doing particularly well. He had a private tutorship somewhere out in Ballygunge, which was currently serving as his raft in the ocean of life. I, far from having a raft, did not possess so much as a piece of a broken mast; I was drowning as deeply as one could possibly drown—but seeing Satish, I forgot all that for the moment. There was another reason I forgot: Satish said, “Well, well, Satyacharan! Where are you off to? Come on, let’s go see the idol at the Hindu Hostel—our old haunt. And there’s a big music soirée this afternoon—you must come. Remember Abinash from Ward Six, the son of some zamindar from Mymensingh? He’s a famous singer these days. He’ll be performing. He sent me a card—I do a bit of work for their estate now and then, you see. Come along, he’ll be happy to see you.”

During my college days, five or six years ago, if there was amusement to be had, I wanted for nothing else—and I saw that this part of my nature had not yet faded. Going to see the idol at the Hindu Hostel, I received an invitation to stay for the midday meal. This was because many boys from my own home district were living there now, and they simply would not let me leave. I said, “But the soirée is this afternoon, what’s the rush now? I’ll go back to the mess and eat.”

They paid no heed to my words.

Had they paid heed, I would have been forced to spend the day of Saraswati Puja in fasting. After such a harsh letter from the manager, I could not have brought myself to go and partake of the feast of luchis and payesh at the mess—not when I had been unable to pay him a single rupee. This turned out very well—after eating my fill at the luncheon, I went and sat down at the afternoon soirée. The exhilaration of my student life, from three years past, came flooding back. Who could remember whether I had found a job or not, whether the mess manager was sitting with a long face or not? Sinking into a sea of thumri and kirtan, I forgot that if I could not settle my debts, from the next morning my sustenance would consist of thin air. It was eleven o’clock at night when the soirée broke up. I caught up with Abinash. When we were at the Hindu Hostel, he and I had been the leading lights of the Debating Club—on one occasion, we had even persuaded Sir Gurudas Bandyopadhyay to be our president. The topic had been: “Compulsory religious education should be introduced in schools and colleges.” Abinash was the proposer; I was the leader of the opposition. After a thunderous debate from both sides, the president gave his verdict in our favour. From that day on, a great friendship had grown between Abinash and me—though this was the first time we had met since leaving college.

Abinash said, “Come, I have my car—let me drop you. Where do you live?”

Dropping me at the door of my mess, he said, “Listen, tomorrow you must have tea at my house on Harrington Street. Four o’clock in the afternoon. Don’t you forget. Thirty-three by two. Write it down in your notebook.”

The next day, I found Harrington Street, and my friend’s house as well. The house was not enormous, but it had gardens in the front and back. There was a wisteria vine on the gate, a Nepali gatekeeper, and a brass nameplate. A curving path of red gravel—on one side of it a lawn of green grass, on the other, large trees of muchukunda champa and mango. In the portico stood a large motorcar. There was no room, from any angle, to mistake it for anything other than the house of a rich man. The drawing-room was just at the top of the stairs. Abinash came and welcomed me warmly, seating me in the room, and almost at once we were both lost in talk of old times. Abinash’s father was a great zamindar of Mymensingh, but none of the family were at their Calcutta house at present. They had gone to their country estate the previous month of Agrahayan for one of Abinash’s sisters’ weddings—and none had yet returned.

After this and that, Abinash asked, “So what are you doing now, Satya?”

I said, “I was teaching at the Jorasanko school, but recently I’ve just been idle, in a way. I’m thinking I won’t teach anymore. I’m seeing if perhaps some other line—I’ve had a few prospects in a couple of places.”

The part about having prospects was not true, but Abinash was a rich man’s son, their estate was vast. I said it only so as not to appear to be petitioning him for a job.

Abinash thought for a moment and said, “A capable fellow like you won’t have to wait long for a job, of course. I have a proposal. You studied law too, didn’t you?”

I said, “I passed the exams, but I have no inclination to practice.”

Abinash said, “We have a jungle-mahal—a forest estate—in Purnia district. About twenty to thirty thousand bighas of land. We have a steward there, but we can’t trust him with the responsibility of settling all that land. We’re looking for a suitable person. Would you go?”

I knew that one’s ears can often play tricks. What was Abinash saying? The very job for which I had been scouring the streets of Calcutta for a year had, at a tea invitation, completely unsolicited, presented itself before me of its own accord?

Still, I had to maintain my dignity. With immense self-control, I suppressed my feelings and said with an air of indifference, “Oh! Well, I’ll think about it and let you know. You’ll be here tomorrow, won’t you?”

Abinash was a very frank and large-hearted man. He said, “Forget all this thinking and deciding. I’m sitting down to write to my father today. We’re looking for a trustworthy man. We don’t want a corrupt estate employee—they’re almost all thieves. An educated and intelligent man like you is needed there. We are going to settle the jungle-mahal with new tenants. Thirty thousand bighas of forest. Can a job with that much responsibility be left in just anyone’s hands? This isn’t the first time we’ve met; I know everything there is to know about you. Just agree—I’ll write to Father this minute and get the appointment letter sent.”

There is no need to say much more about how I got the job, for the purpose of this story is entirely different. Let me state briefly that two weeks after that tea invitation at Abinash’s house, I alighted one day with my belongings at a small station on the B&NW Railway line.

It was a winter afternoon. A deep shadow had fallen across the vast plain; in the distance, a light mist was gathering on the crests of the forest-line. On both sides of the railway tracks were fields of motor-shak, and in the cool evening breeze, the clean, sweet scent of the fresh pea-greens gave me a strange feeling—that the life I was about to begin would be one of great solitude, as solitary as this winter evening, as solitary as this wide plain and that distant, blue-hued line of forest.

I travelled for about fifteen or sixteen krosh in a bullock-cart, all through the night. Inside the cart’s canopy, the blanket and quilt I had brought from Calcutta turned to ice in the cold—who knew the winter in these parts was so severe! When the sun rose in the morning, we were still on the road. I saw that the nature of the land had changed—the natural scenery, too, had assumed a different aspect. There were no fields or farms, and one hardly saw any villages or settlements—only forests, large and small, sometimes dense, sometimes sparse, with open plains in between, but on them, no crops were cultivated.

I reached the kachari at ten o’clock in the morning. In the middle of the jungle, about ten or fifteen bighas of land had been cleared to make way for a number of thatched huts, built with timber, bamboo, and straw from the forest itself. The huts had walls of dry grass and thin bon-jhau trunks, plastered over with mud.

The huts were newly built; upon entering, one was met with the smell of freshly cut straw, half-dry grass, and bamboo. On asking, I learned that the kachari had previously been somewhere on the other side of the forest, but due to water scarcity there in the winter, these new huts had been constructed here, for a nearby spring meant there was no shortage of water.

I had spent most of my life in Calcutta. I could not imagine a life devoid of friends, of libraries, theatres, cinemas, musical gatherings—and now, for the sake of a few rupees from a job, I had landed in a place whose profound isolation I had never even conceived of. Day after day went by. I would watch the sun rise in the eastern sky over the distant hills and jungle, and then watch it sink in the evening, dyeing the tops of the entire forest of bon-jhau and long grasses in shades of vermilion. In between, the eleven-hour-long winter day seemed to gape with emptiness. How to fill it—that, at first, became a great problem for me. There was much work to be done, it was true, but I was an absolute newcomer; I still could not properly understand the local people’s language, nor could I make any arrangements for the work. I would sit in my own room and somehow pass the days by reading the few books I had brought with me. The people at the kachari were utterly rustic; they did not understand what I said, nor did I properly understand them. Those first ten days passed in what great hardship! How many times I thought: to hell with the job. Better to live in Calcutta on half-empty stomach than to die of suffocation here. What a mistake I had made, at Abinash’s urging, to come to this desolate jungle. This life was not for me.

One night, I was sitting in my room thinking all this, when the door opened and the kachari’s elderly muhuri, Goshtho Chakrabarti, entered. This was the one person with whom I could speak Bengali and breathe a sigh of relief. Goshtho-babu had been here for at least seventeen or eighteen years. His home was in Burdwan district, in some village near Banpas station. I said, “Please, have a seat, Goshtho-babu—”

Goshtho-babu sat down on another chair. He said, “I’ve come to tell you something in private. Don’t trust any of the people here. This isn’t Bengal. The folk are all very bad—”

“It’s not as if all the people in Bengal are so very good, Goshtho-babu—”

“I know that better than anyone, Manager-babu. It was on account of that sorrow, and the scourge of malaria, that I first came here. It was very difficult when I first arrived, my heart would feel suffocated in this jungle—but now it’s come to such a pass that, forget my home village, I can’t stand to be away for more than two days even when I go to Purnia or Patna on work.”

I looked at Goshtho-babu’s face with amusement. What was he saying!

I asked, “Why can’t you stay away? Does your heart feel suffocated for the jungle?”

Goshtho-babu looked at me and smiled faintly. “Exactly that, Manager-babu. You’ll understand too. You’re new, from Calcutta, your heart is fluttering for Calcutta, and you’re young. Stay here for a while. Then you’ll see.”

“What will I see?”

“The forest will take possession of you. Gradually, you won’t be able to stand any commotion or crowds of people. That’s what’s happened to me, you see. Just last month I went to Munger for a court case—and all I could think was, when can I get out of there.”

I thought to myself, may God save me from such a sorry state. Long before that, I would have resigned from my job and returned to Calcutta!

Goshtho-babu said, “Keep your gun by your head at night. This isn’t a good place. There was a dacoity at the kachari once before. The only thing is, no money is kept here these days.”

Curious, I said, “You don’t say! How long ago was the dacoity?”

“Not long. About eight or nine years ago. Stay a while, and you’ll come to know all the stories. This region is very bad. Besides, in this terrible jungle, if someone robs and kills you, who is there to even see it?”

After Goshtho-babu left, I went and stood by the window of my room. In the distance, the moon was rising over the jungle—and against the backdrop of that rising moon, a crooked branch of a bon-jhau tree looked exactly like a painting by the Japanese artist Hokusai.

What a place I had found to take a job! A dangerous place like this—had I known beforehand, I would never have given my word to Abinash.

Despite my anxieties, the beauty of the rising moon captivated me deeply.

Not far from the kachari was a small stone hillock, and on it, an ancient and enormous banyan tree. This banyan was known as Grant Saheb’s Banyan Tree. Why it had this name, I could not discover at the time, despite my inquiries. One silent afternoon, while out for a walk, I climbed the hillock to watch the beauty of the sunset on the western horizon.

Standing under the banyan tree on top of the hillock, in the dense shade of the approaching evening, my gaze travelled in a flash across a vast distance—I saw my mess in Colootola, our meeting spot by that bridge in Kapalitola, my favourite bench in Gol Dighi—where I would sit at this time every day and watch the ceaseless stream of people and the throng of buses and motors on College Street. Suddenly they all seemed so very far away. A wave of desolation washed over me—where was I! For the sake of a job, I was living in a thatched hut in some godforsaken wilderness! Do people live here? No people, no life, complete solitude—not even a single person to have a proper conversation with. These ignorant, barbaric people of this land, they can’t understand a single well-spoken word—was I to spend day after day in their company? Standing there in that far-stretching, horizon-spanning, desolate evening, my heart grew listless, and I felt a kind of fear. I resolved then and there that only a few days of this month were left; I would somehow get through the next month with my eyes closed, and then I would write a long letter to Abinash, resign from my job, and return to Calcutta. I would be saved by receiving the welcome of my civilized friends, by eating civilized food, by listening to civilized music, by plunging into the throng of humanity, by hearing the joyous, clamorous voices of many people.

How could I have known before that I loved being among people so much! That I loved people so much! I may not always be able to fulfil my duties towards them—but I love them, surely. Otherwise why would I suffer so much, having left them behind?

That old Muslim man who sells books by the railings of Presidency College, how many times had I stood at his stall, flipping through the pages of old books and monthly magazines—perhaps I should have bought them, but I never did—even he now seemed like my closest kin. How long it had been since I had last seen him!

Returning to the kachari and entering my room, I lit the lamp on my table and sat down with a book. The sepoy Muneshwar Singh came and stood at attention with a salaam. I said, “What is it, Muneshwar?”

By then I had learned to speak a little of the local Dehati Hindi.

Muneshwar said, “Huzoor, if you would give the order to the muhuri-babu to buy me an iron pan.”

“What will you do with an iron pan?”

Muneshwar’s face lit up in anticipation. In a humble tone, he said, “An iron pan is so useful, Huzoor. You can take it with you anywhere you go, you can cook rice in it, you can keep things in it, you can eat rice out of it, it won’t break. I don’t own a single pan. For so long I have been thinking about getting one—but Huzoor, I am a very poor man. A pan costs six annas, how can I buy one for such a high price? That is why I have come to you, Huzoor. It is my long-held wish to have an iron pan of my own. If Huzoor would grant it, Huzoor is the master.”

That a simple iron pan could have so many virtues, that people here dreamt of one at night—this was the first I had ever heard such a thing. Are there people on this earth so poor that acquiring a six-anna iron pan is like receiving heaven in their hands? I had heard that the people of this region were very poor. I had not known they were this poor. A great pity arose in me.

The next day, on the strength of a chit signed by me, Muneshwar Singh bought a number-five iron pan from the market in Naugachhia and, setting it down on the floor of my room, stood before me with a salaam.

“Ho gail, Huzoor-ki kripa-se—karahiya ho gail.” It has happened, by Huzoor’s grace—the pan has happened. Looking at his joyous, beaming face, for the first time in this whole month, a thought came to my mind today—they’re good people, these folk! How great their suffering is