Flame Tree Road (28 page)

Biren remembered the file sitting on his office desk.

“I heard there was some trouble with the
bedes
in the weavers’ village and the police were called out.”

“Oh, that!” Kanai shrugged. “The police are called when somebody wants to get somebody else into trouble. The villagers are trying to get the
bedes
evicted from these waters, so they just go and file a
faltu
complaint.”

“See! This is exactly the kind of information I need,” exclaimed Biren. “I can’t trust anyone else to give me a true picture of what is really going on.”

Kanai narrowed his eye and gave Biren a critical look. “Why should people trust you if you go riding around on your big horse wearing a
belayti
suit-boot?” He slapped his forehead and broke into a cackle. “
Hai Khuddah
, when I first saw you I thought you had come to take me to jail! Wait till I tell Chickpea, Dadu and the rest. They will fall down laughing!”

Biren grinned to see the old Kanai he remembered so well. For a brief moment, Kanai had forgotten that his old tea shop friends at Momati Ghat were all dead and gone.

* * *

A local fisherman is a government officer’s best ally. Biren kept a tab on village activities through Kanai. Kanai brought news of any unrest before it brewed into trouble. Biren took to visiting the villages by boat rather than on horseback and chatted with the locals in tea shops. Often he was able to sort out petty grievances without involving the authorities. In most cases, an impartial mediator was all that was needed.

One sunset evening on the boat ride back from the villages Biren saw a floating flower. Or was it a dream?

She passed in a swish of oar barely six feet from his boat. Perhaps it was the fragrance of her passing that made him look up. Biren was staring at the water, lost in the hypnotic pattern of swirls and the clumps of water hyacinths as they floated past. Later, in retrospect, he wondered what it was that shifted his gaze up to the passing boat. He would never know.

She sat gracefully on the rush mat, chin in hands. Her dark silken braid twisted with jasmine hung to one side. As she passed, Biren got a fleeting glimpse of her delicate oval face, her finely arched eyebrows and the dark lashes resting softly on her cheek. The long tail end of her orange-red sari fanned gently in the river breeze as she passed.

He peered around the side of the boat but all he could see was the back of the boatman growing smaller against the slanted evening sun.

The image of her played on his mind: her jolting beauty, the delicate jasmine in her hair, the iridescent flame of her sari ignited by the setting sun as she floated by.

CHAPTER

42

The following week there was a note from Thompson asking Biren to submit an estimate for building his house.
His own house!
Biren had been so caught up with day-to-day affairs, he had not given the matter any thought. To his frustration he had not been able to talk to Thompson about the school project, either, as most of the time his boss was either in a foul mood or out of the office.

Designing a house tickled Biren’s fancy. It was one dream he could see turned into a tangible reality for a change. To build a house he first had to find a plot of land. He kept his eyes open and stumbled upon the perfect location on one of his jaunts. It was a stretch of vacant land between the fish market and the river. Although relatively close to the center of town, there was no access road leading to it. Later he discovered he could ride his horse through a patch of dense scrub and thicket to get to the mile-wide vacant lot. It had rice fields and bamboo groves on one side and the tall embankments of the river on the other. Across the river was a fishermen’s village.

Biren halted his horse to gaze at the open sky and waving green paddy and he knew in his heart that this would be the very spot on which he would build his house. Looking at the vast expanse of nature lifted his spirits and made the petty world of office politics fade away.

He found his way back to town through a residential neighborhood with rows of pukka houses made of brick and mortar with tin roofs. Many had neatly fenced yards, potted marigold plants decorating the front walk and latched gates with hand-painted signs of fanciful house names: Bono Kusum, Flower Garden; Ananda Niketan, Joyful Abode; Asha Nibash, Hope Dwelling. Middle-class Bengalis lived in houses like these, office
babus
, schoolteachers, postal and shipping clerks.

Biren was passing under a leafy plum tree when a small green plum whizzed past his ear, followed by another that bounced off the horse’s flank, causing it to shy. He jerked his head around in time to see a flash of brown leg and a crimson skirt disappear into the tree’s upper branches. Cowering among the leaves was a small girl, who looked down from the safety of her perch with big brazen eyes. She stuck a pink tongue out at him. Biren wagged an admonishing finger at her and rode off smiling to himself.

* * *

He made inquiries about the land and found it did not belong to anyone. It was a no-man’s-land that separated the Muslim and Hindu sections of town. The two communities lived in clearly demarcated areas, and the land between them was used as a grazing ground for cattle.

The challenges of constructing a house in such a location were many. It involved clearing out dense vegetation, constructing an access road, and there would be no neighbors to speak of. All this to Biren’s romantically inclined mind was beginning to sound quite appealing. His one concern was the budget. Surely the cost would be prohibitive? Thompson had told him he had an open budget at his disposal, and Biren wondered if asking for an access road leading up to his residence would be stretching it too far. But when he submitted the written proposal, the budget was quickly approved and he was given the go-ahead.

Two elephants were commissioned to do the bulky work of clearing the land, and Biren rode out whenever he could to watch them work. Meanwhile he worked feverishly on a floor plan. It morphed from a romantic jumble in his head to a concept of increasing complexity that kept him awake at nights. He made countless sketches, changing them frequently, only to scrap everything and start over again. Silchar had no architects to speak of, and he was at the mercy of Chinese
mistris
.
They were skilled, diligent house builders who could construct anything to specification from even a rough sketch. Their specialty, however, was the faux-English-style bungalow with big formal rooms and long connecting passages. Biren had a radically different idea in mind. He knew what he wanted in his head but found it impossible to translate it into a sketch for the
mistris
to follow.

He finally enlisted the help of Ren Yamasaki, the famed Japanese architect and Haiku master whom Biren had met at the College Street Coffeehouse in Calcutta. Biren wrote to him explaining the project, and was overjoyed when he accepted his invitation to visit Silchar. Biren took him out to see the plot, and back at the guesthouse Yamasaki sat at the dining table and deftly drew a detailed sketch on a roll of rice paper with his beautiful calligraphic pens and black squid ink. It was a remarkable floor plan, stunning in its simplicity. The house had a wide-skirted veranda, sloping roofs and a clean skyline opening out to a vista of the river. The rooms flowed easily into one another with no dark, narrow passages. Yamasaki specified natural building materials—thatch, cane and bamboo—all cheap and abundantly available in Assam. The materials integrated the house seamlessly with its surroundings and gave it a very natural feel. He also agreed to send a Chinese master carpenter to oversee the project. The detailed plan with the handwritten notes was an exquisite work of art in itself, and Biren went to great lengths to get a woodblock print of the original made in Calcutta to send to Estelle. He was excited to share it with her. Estelle was the only person he knew who would appreciate the beauty of the design. She was a free-spirited country girl, after all, who embraced bold ideas and dreamed as freely as he did.

He waited impatiently to hear back from her.

I would have excepted nothing less from you, dear Biren
, she wrote.
The house is as extraordinary and as original as you are. I can clearly picture the green rice fields, the big river and open sky just as you described them. Your idea of planting an avenue of shade trees leading up to your house is nothing short of magnificent. The only thing left to complete this picture is, of course, a beautiful Indian girl with jasmine in her hair sitting on your veranda! Don’t mind me, dear friend, but you have put me in a dreamy mood with your beautiful descriptions.

The image of the girl on the boat immediately flashed through Biren’s mind. It was uncanny, almost as if Estelle had described her. He recalled the girl’s poetic beauty, the pensive look on her face as she floated past. Which lucky man was she was dreaming of? he wondered. A man waiting for her on some distant riverbank, silhouetted against the setting sun. His eyes would light up to see her boat. He would rush up to hold her hand as she stepped delicately on the shore. She would lift her lovely eyes up to meet his and smile...

Biren sat up with a jolt and shook his head. Had he really succumbed to such imaginings? It was all Estelle’s fault. Her dreamy mood was contagious. He snatched his pen and wrote with a furious scrawl.

Forgive me, dear Estelle, but I suspect your romantic notions are a reflection of your own state of mind. In your last letter there was a fleeting mention of a certain gentleman by the name of Luke Adler. I daresay I caught a suspicious whiff of coyness in your words. The Estelle Lovelace I know is by no means coy. Perhaps you would care to explain?

Selfish as it sounds, I am building this house for my own personal pleasure to enjoy in peace and solitude. I remain a confirmed bachelor to date.

Calcutta

18th March 1895

Dear Dada,

You will be pleased to know I got the posting as the assistant medical officer of Chandanagore Hospital I had applied for two months ago. As an added bonus I will be given staff quarters inside the hospital compound. I have one month’s leave before I join and I am leaving for Sylhet tomorrow to get Bela and Ma.

I have convinced Ma to move to Chandanagore. I cannot leave her alone in the
basha
without Bela. She is now almost completely blind and very dependent on Bela to take care of her. Ma, as you can imagine, does not want to leave the old
basha
because she will miss Apumashi.

Chandanagore is a much smaller and quieter town even though it’s only thirty kilometers from Calcutta. I hope on your next visit to Calcutta you will come to visit us in Chandanagore.

Your brother,

Nitin

Biren returned from a month-long trip to Calcutta to find the construction site of his house abandoned. Not an inch of progress had been made in his absence. The foundation had filled up with rainwater and the Chinese
mistris
were absconding. He later learned they had taken off to work on some other project in town.

Back at his office, he was greeted by a towering pile of paperwork and a curt note from Thompson sternly reprimanding him for failing to submit certain judicial council documents by the due date. Biren frowned. Surely this had to be a mistake? There were no such documents that he was even remotely aware of.

He slumped down in his chair, feeling utterly exhausted. This was not how he had envisioned his life. All he seemed to do was government paperwork, manage local squabbles, ferry documents up and down to the high court in Calcutta and build a house that was becoming unmanageable. These activities were taking up all his time, and he was losing sight of his dreams.

The last meeting with Samaresh and the group at the coffeehouse had turned out to be deeply frustrating. To Biren it had sounded as if their proposal was gathering dust in the education department and it was unlikely George McCauley had even glanced at the file. The group, meanwhile, had talked animatedly about starting another completely unrelated project. Listening to their intellectual arguments, Biren had became irritable and restless. He’d left the coffeehouse and wandered around the secondhand bookstalls of College Street with their precarious towers of mildewed books, all the while wondering what was going on with his life.

On the riverboat back to Silchar, it had suddenly struck Biren he was falling into the same trap as his father. His father had been a diligent, hardworking man, and the British had used him to their advantage only to further their own interests. Now he was being used in exactly the same way.

Reginald Thompson had dangled the carrot and fed Biren’s dreams, but he had done nothing to further the school project. It was impossible to discuss anything constructive with him; he was always in such a murderous mood. Thompson’s intentions were no doubt honorable, but unless one demanded fairness, one was likely to be sidelined.
They need me more than I need them
, Biren thought.
I can do without this job, but I am not going to give up my life’s purpose.
Biren made up his mind to confront Thompson—bad mood or no—and hold him to his word. If Thompson ignored him, he would quit his job.