24

In the beginning, when Harihar first returned from Kashi, everyone said he had a brilliant future, that no one else in the region had come back with such learning. His scholarship was on everyone’s lips; they all said he was bound to do something great now. Sarbajaya, too, imagined that they would soon summon her husband and offer him a good position (who ‘they’ were that gave out positions was a notion as indistinct in her mind as a fog-shrouded sea). But months turned into years, and many years went by; no horseman in gold-braided livery came galloping up at midnight with an appointment letter to the post of court pundit, nor did a djinn from the Arabian Nights fly a jewel-encrusted magic palace through the sky and set it down in place of their broken-down home. On the contrary, the worm-eaten panels of their door grew more dilapidated by the day, the ceiling beams threatened to sag even lower; what little they once had was also disappearing, and yet, she had not given up hope entirely. And Harihar, each time he returned from his travels, would speak of some new prospect so convincingly, as if everything were already settled and only a short delay remained, as if their fortunes were just about to turn. But when did they ever?

Life is so full of sweetness for one reason alone: that much of this sweetness is wrought from dreams and imagination. Let the dreams be false, let the imagination be devoid of a single speck of reality; what matter if they are not always crowned with success? They are life’s greatest treasures. Let them come, let their place in our lives be imperishable. Success is a trifle, gain a trifle.

It had been nearly two or three months since Harihar had left home. He hadn’t sent any money for expenses for a long time. Durga was suffering more acutely from her illness; she would eat, and the illness would flare up. For a couple of days she would be a little better, then suddenly, one day, it would return.

Sarbajaya frequently pressed her husband about their daughter’s marriage. She had made him write two or three letters to Nirendra’s father, Rajyeshwar Babu. She had not yet given up hope on that front either. Harihar would say, “Have you gone mad? These are the ways of the rich. Do you think Rajyeshwar-kaka will even acknowledge us?” Still, Sarbajaya would not relent. “Just write one more,” she would say, “just write and see—Niren did like her, after all.” A month or two would pass with no particular reply, and she would start nagging her husband to write another letter.

This time, when Harihar went away, he had promised that he would finally arrange for them to leave this place and settle somewhere else.

A couple of small, thatched huts, their floors neatly plastered and polished, off to one side of the village. A healthy, milk-laden cow tied in the cowshed, a rick piled high with hay, a granary brimming with paddy. The fresh, green scent of peas from the field at the edge of the meadow wafts across the courtyard on the open breeze. Birds call—the Indian roller, the baya weaver, the shama. Apu rises in the morning and sits down to study after a breakfast of warm muri with a large earthenware bowl of frothy milk, fresh from their black cow. Durga does not suffer from malaria. Everyone knows them, everyone respects them, they come to take the dust of their feet. No one looks down on them for being poor.

…She only dreams. Day and night, Sarbajaya only dreams. She feels that after all this time, something is truly, finally going to happen. Someone inside her mind tells her so.

Why had it not happened for so long? Why only after all this time? From those childhood days spent wandering under the jamun and sajne trees, this wish has been entwined in her mind with the mantras and alpana patterns of the sejuti-brata—the wish to set up her own home and family in her husband’s house, on a courtyard painted with the alta-red footprints of the goddess Lakshmi. Who had ever wanted this kind of crumbling, ancient house in a bamboo grove?

Durga, having procured a small mankochu from somewhere, sits stubbornly in the kitchen. Her mother says, “What’s gotten into you, Dugga? What will you eat your rice with today? Didn’t you have a fever just last evening?” Durga says, “So what, Ma, what kind of fever was that—just a little shiver, that’s all… You just put this mankochu in with the rice and give me a little—” Her mother says, “Go on, this illness of yours has made your cravings worse. If you’re well today and tomorrow, then maybe the day after.”

After much pleading, Durga gives up and puts the mankochu away. She sits quietly for a while, saying to herself, “I’m perfectly fine today, my fever won’t come back today—later I’ll have two rotis and fried potatoes.” A little later, a yawn escapes her. She knows it is a sign the fever is coming. Still, she reasons with herself: a yawn is just a yawn, people yawn all the time, the fever isn’t coming back. Gradually, she begins to feel a chill, and feels the urge to go and sit in the sun. She doesn’t go, consoling her mind that feeling cold is a normal bodily function; what does it have to do with a fever coming on?

But no consolation works. Before the sun has even begun to set, the fever arrives. She steals away to sit in the sun, lest her mother find out. Her heart aches; she thinks—it’s because I’m thinking about fever, that’s why this is happening, I don’t really have a fever—

The ruddy sunlight falls upon the moss-covered, crumbling wall. The afternoon shadows deepen. Durga feels that if she can distract herself, the fever will go away. She says to Apu, “Come sit with me for a bit, let’s tell stories.”

One time, last year, during a night of heavy monsoon rains, she and Apu had hatched a plan and gone to steal fallen palm fruit from Sejthakrun’s garden in the dead of night. Suddenly, a thorn pierced Durga’s foot with a sharp pot! Wincing in pain, she stepped back with her left foot—and another thorn pierced it with another pot!… In the morning, they saw that Satu, to prevent anyone from gathering the palm fruit during the night, had planted rows of bel thorns upright along the path under the trees. And another day, what a strange thing happened!

From somewhere, an old Muslim man from East Bengal came to show his magic box. It was a large, brightly painted tin box studded with bits of glass. He was showing it in Jiban Chowdhury’s courtyard in the next neighbourhood. Durga was standing nearby. She had no money. Everyone else was paying one paisa each to look through a small tube on the side of the box.

The old Muslim man was cranking the box and chanting in a singsong voice: See the tomb of the Empress Queen! See the elephant and tiger in a fearsome scene!

As each person finished looking and moved their eye from the tube, Durga would ask them with great eagerness, “What did you see in there? Is it all real?”

Uff! They couldn’t describe the marvelous things they had seen… What things they were. One by one, everyone had their turn. Durga was about to leave when the old man said, “Won’t you have a look, Khuki?”… Durga shook her head and said, “No—I don’t have any money.”

The man said, “Come, come, Khuki, have a look—it won’t cost you anything.”

Durga felt a little shy. She said, “No, really—” but her heart began to pound with eagerness and curiosity.

The man said, “Come, come, what’s the harm?… Come, have a look—”

Her face bright, Durga walked slowly towards the box, but she still couldn’t bring herself to put her face to the tube. The man said, “Just look through this little pipe, Khuki.”

Durga brushed a stray lock of hair from beside her ear and looked. She cannot describe what she saw in the next ten minutes. How could real people be seen in pictures? So many sahibs, memsahibs, houses, battles, she cannot put it into words! What a thing she had seen.

She desperately wants to show Apu. Durga has searched for him many times, but that showman and his box never came back.

Before the story can be properly finished, Durga can no longer sit up under the force of the fever. She gets up, goes inside, and lies down, wrapped in a quilt.

These days, with Father not at home, finding Apu is a difficult task. His books and papers are in danger of being devoured by woodworms. He leaves in the morning with a small bundle of cowrie shells and only returns well after midday, at lunchtime. His mother scolds him. “To hell with the boy’s studies! Has your education gone completely up in smoke? Just you wait, when he comes home, I’ll tell him everything, you’ll see—”

Apu, frightened, sits down with his books and papers. He spreads the books out all around him. He tells his mother, “Give me a little khayer, Ma, I’m going to put it in my inkpot.”

Then he sits and practises his handwriting and puts the paper in the sun to dry. Once dry, the khayer-infused ink glitters—Apu stares at it in absolute delight, thinking—I’ll add a little more khayer from tomorrow—ooh, just look how it shines! He secretly takes a large piece of khayer from his mother’s betel box and puts it in the inkpot. Then, after writing something and putting it out to dry, he stares at it with great curiosity to see how much it will gleam today. He thinks—what if I add just a little more?

One day, his mother catches him. “The boy doesn’t care a whit for his writing,” she says. “He just needs lumps and lumps of khayer every day! Put that khayer back!”

Caught, he says, a little sheepishly, “You can’t make ink without khayer, can you?… Do you think I’m doing it for no reason?”

“Oh, so you can’t make ink without khayer? I suppose all the other boys in the world who are studying have stores that supply them with kilos of khayer every day! Go on!”

Apu sits and writes a play in a notebook. He has nearly filled the notebook with his writing. Betrayed by his minister, the king leaves his kingdom for the forest; Prince Nilambar and Princess Amba fall into the hands of dacoits in the woods; a fierce battle ensues, after which the princess’s body is found on a riverbank. A complex character named Satu is created, only to be sentenced to death shortly thereafter, despite the absence of any particularly heinous crime in his description. Towards the end of the play, Princess Amba is revived by a boon from the sage Narada and marries the loyal general Jibanketu. To those who might say that, aside from the names, the play is fundamentally no different from the jatra performance seen last Baishakh, and is in fact a direct copy of it, they forget that if, on some silent, moonlit night in the distant past, on a dimly lit couch in a lonely chamber, an ancient poet’s dream of a faraway forest—visible as a blue cloud, resonant with the cries of peacocks—inspired Kalidasa to describe the journey of a liberated cloud, then what of it? For a thousand years, mankind has, all unknowing, been paying homage to that forgotten, auspicious night.

Fire can only be lit with fire; who has ever found a torch to light by searching in a heap of ash?

Among his papers is a book. The book is called Charitmala, and it says ‘authored by Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar.’ It is an old book; his father has a habit of collecting books for his son from various places, and had brought this one from somewhere. Apu sometimes sits and reads a little of it. He wants to be like the people whose stories are in the book. The farmer’s son Roscoe, sent to sell potatoes at the market, would sit by a hedge, practising algebra; for want of paper, he would scratch his sums on a piece of leather with a blunt awl. The shepherd Duval, giving his scattered flock free rein to wander, would sit under a tree, lost in the study of his geographical charts—he wants to be like them. What is this ‘algebra’? He wants to study algebra like Roscoe. He doesn’t want to practise this handwriting; he doesn’t like these multiplication tables or the Shubhankari rhymes. He wants to sit in a lonely spot under a tree, in the shade of the forest, or by a hedge, and spread out a ‘geographical chart’ (what is that?) and read it, read big, big books, become a scholar like them. But where will he find such things? Where is this geography, where is this algebra, where is this Latin grammar? Here, there are only the aryas for calculating with cowries, and the three-times table.

What did it matter if his mother scolded him? The things he wanted to read were simply not here.