1

Shankar was a boy from the deepest countryside. He had just passed his F.A. examinations and returned to sit idle in his village. His routine consisted of going to his friends’ houses in the morning for a chat, a long sleep after his midday meal, and going to fish in the Palghat oxbow lake in the afternoon. After the entire month of Baishakh had passed in this manner, his mother called him one day and said, “Listen, Shankar, I want to say something. Your father’s health is not good. In this state of affairs, how can your studies possibly continue? Who will pay for it? It’s time you looked for some kind of work.”

His mother’s words gave Shankar pause. It was true; his father’s health had been very poor for some months now. Paying for his expenses in Calcutta was becoming more and more impossible for him. But what was Shankar to do? Would anyone give him a job now? And who did he even know?

The time of which we speak was still five years before the outbreak of the Great War in Europe. The year was 1909. The job market was not so dire back then. A gentleman from Shankar’s village worked in a jute mill in Shyamnagar or Naihati. Shankar’s mother went and spoke to the man’s wife about a job for her son, so that she might ask her husband to arrange a position for Shankar at the jute mill. The very next day, the gentleman came to their house in person to say that he would do his utmost to find Shankar a job.

Shankar was no ordinary boy. During his school days, he had always excelled in sports. At the sub-divisional exhibition that year, he had won a medal for taking first place in the high jump. There was no centre-forward like him in the entire region back then. As a swimmer, he was nearly without equal. He was highly skilled at climbing trees, riding horses, and boxing. While studying in Calcutta, he had regularly trained in boxing at the YMCA. For all these reasons, he had not done quite so well in his examinations, passing only in the second division.

But in one subject, he possessed a strange and profound knowledge. He had a passion for poring over all manner of maps and reading vast geography books. He had a solid grasp of geographical calculations. He could identify nearly all the constellations that rose in our country’s sky—there was Kalpurush, there Saptarshi, there Cassiopeia, there Vrishchik; which one rose in which month, and in which direction—he had it all at his fingertips. He could tell you just by glancing at the sky. It can be said without a doubt that few boys in our country know such things.

Upon his return from Calcutta after the examinations, he had brought back a whole stack of such books, which he would often read in solitude, losing himself in his thoughts. Then came his father’s illness, the family’s poverty, and with them, his mother’s plea for him to take a job at the jute mill. What could he do? He was utterly helpless. He could not bear to see the sorrow on his parents’ faces. He would have no choice but to take the job at the jute mill. But he was not so blind that he didn’t understand this would mean the shattering of his life’s dream. Shankar, the renowned centre-forward, the district high-jump champion, the famous swimmer—was he to end up a clerk in a jute mill? Tucking a duster in his pocket, carrying his lunch or his paan in a nickel tiffin-box shaped like a book, he would have to rush to the mill at the sound of the morning siren—come back at twelve for a quick bite, then head off again—and finally be released by the six o’clock siren. His young, vibrant spirit could not even conceive of it! The very thought made his entire body and soul rise up in rebellion—would a racehorse be put to pulling a hackney cab in the end?… It was not long before evening. Sitting in solitude by the riverbank, Shankar was thinking about all of this. His mind longed to fly away to the far, distant lands of the earth, into the midst of a hundred daring adventures. Like Livingstone, like Stanley, like Harry Johnston, Marco Polo, Robinson Crusoe. He had been preparing himself for this since childhood—though he had never considered that what was possible for boys of other nations was all but impossible for a Bengali boy. They were made to become clerks, schoolmasters, doctors, or lawyers. For them, the hope of setting out on unknown paths in unknown lands was nothing but a pipe dream.

That night, by the soft light of a lamp, he sat down to read his large Westmark geography book. One passage in this book always fascinated him. It was the strange account, written by the famous German geo-explorer Anton Hauptmann, of the ascent of a great African mountain—the Mountains of the Moon. How many times had he read it. And each time, he had imagined that he, too, like Hauptmann, would one day go to conquer the Mountains of the Moon. A dream! It would forever remain a thing as distant as the real mountains of the moon…. Do mountains of the moon ever descend to Earth?

That night, he had a most peculiar dream….

All around was a dense bamboo forest. A herd of wild elephants was snapping bamboo stalks with a loud, crunching sound. He and someone else with him—the two of them were climbing a colossal mountain; the scenery all around was exactly like Hauptmann’s description of the Mountains of the Moon. The same dense bamboo groves, the same great trees draped with parasitic creepers, the heaps of rotting leaves below, the occasional bare face of the mountain—and in the distance, visible through gaps in the trees, the mountain’s peak, washed in moonlight, stark white, covered in eternal snow—now visible, now hidden behind the forest. A few stars dotted the clear sky here and there. At one point, he truly seemed to hear the roar of a wild elephant. The entire forest seemed to tremble…. It felt so real that the very sound seemed to tear him from his sleep! He sat up in bed. It was dawn; daylight was streaming into the room through a crack in the window.

Uff, what a dream he had had! They say that dreams at dawn come true! So many people say that.

In their village stood an old, broken-down temple from a long-ago time. It was said that in ancient days, one Madan Ray, the son-in-law of one of the Baro-Bhuiyans, had built this temple. None of Madan Ray’s descendants remained now. The temple was in ruins, with ashwattha and banyan trees sprouting from its cornices—but the arch above the spot where the deity’s altar stood was still intact. There was no idol, yet on Saturdays and Tuesdays, worship was still offered; women would come and daub the altar with vermilion and sandalwood paste, and everyone said the deity was very much ‘awake’—that whatever vow one made there would be fulfilled. That day, after his bath, Shankar went and tied a stone to one of the banyan’s hanging roots and offered up a prayer.

In the afternoon, he went and sat for a long time in a thicket of durba grass before the temple. Although the place was within the village precincts, it was surrounded by woods, and nearby stood a derelict house; a murder had taken place in that house during Shankar’s infancy, and ever since, the owner had left the village to live elsewhere. Everyone said the place was haunted. Hardly anyone ever came this way alone. But Shankar loved to sit quietly in the solitude of the forest in this deserted temple compound!

The morning’s dream had etched itself upon his mind. Sitting here in the woods, the image came back to Shankar—that herd of wild elephants crunching through the bamboo grove, and high above, through gaps in the dense jungle creepers on the mountain plateau, the moon-pale, snow-covered peak, seeming to mark the very border of some dream kingdom. He had dreamt many dreams in his life—but never had he seen such a vivid picture in a dream, never had any dream left such a deep impression on his mind….

It was all a lie. He would have to go and work in the jute mill. Was that not what was written on his forehead?…

But such strange things happen in a person’s life that, were they to be put in a novel, readers would refuse to believe them, laughing them off instead.

Just such an incident, completely unexpected, was about to occur in Shankar’s life.

In the morning, having just returned from a short walk by the river, he had barely set foot inside the house when Rameswar Mukherji’s wife from the other side of the village came up, put a scrap of paper in his hand, and said—

“Baba Shankar, we’ve finally had word of my son-in-law after all this time. He sent a letter to their house in Bhadreshwar. Pintu came from there yesterday and they wrote down this address for us. Can you read it for me, baba?”

Shankar said, “Uff, news after nearly two years! He gave everyone such a scare, running away from home like that! He’d run away once before, hadn’t he?” Then he unfolded the paper. It read: Prasad Das Bandyopadhyay, Uganda Railway Head Office, Construction Department, Mombasa, East Africa.

The scrap of paper fell from Shankar’s hand. East Africa! Can a person run away so far? But then, he knew that Nanibala-didi’s husband was an extremely stubborn, reckless, and vagabond sort of man. Shankar had even met him once, right here in the village, back when Shankar had just entered his Entrance class. The man was generous by nature and well-educated, but he could never hold down a job for long; it was in his character to drift. Another time he had run away, to Burma or Cochin or somewhere. This time, too, he had run away from home after some disagreement with his elder brother—Shankar had already heard this news. And that same Prasad-babu had run off and ended up all the way in East Africa!

Rameswar Mukherji’s wife could not quite grasp how far away her son-in-law had gone. She had no concept of such a distance. After she left, Shankar copied the address into his notebook and, within the week, wrote a letter to Prasad-babu. Did he remember Shankar? He was a boy from his in-laws’ village. He had just passed his F.A. and was now sitting idle at home. Could he possibly arrange a job for him on their railway? He would go no matter how far.

A month and a half later, just when Shankar had nearly given up hope of receiving a reply, an enveloped letter arrived in Shankar’s name. It read:

Mombasa 2 Port Street

My dear Shankar,

I have received your letter. I remember you very well. I haven’t forgotten that I lost to you in that test of wrist strength. You want to come here? Then come. If a boy like you doesn’t venture out, then who will? A new railway is being built here; they will be hiring more men. Come as quickly as you can. I will take responsibility for getting you a job.

Yours— Prasad Das Bandyopadhyay

Shankar’s father was overjoyed to see the letter. In his youth, he himself had been a reckless sort of man. He had never liked the idea of his son going to work in a jute mill, and had only been forced to agree with Shankar’s mother because of the family’s poverty and hardship.

About a month after this, a telegram arrived for Shankar from Bhadreshwar. The son-in-law had recently returned to the country. Shankar was to go and meet him as soon as he received the telegram. He would be returning to Mombasa in about twenty days. In that case, he could take Shankar along with him.