No Country: A Novel (48 page)

For me too, anything more than a few yards away became vague shapes whose colours and edges melted into each other: buildings, approaching red buses, tramcars, swerving automobiles. I had serendipitously, miraculously, survived swift bicycles and the sudden rickshaws.

“We have money for only t-two lenses,” he said firmly, “and we can hardly b-buy m-monocles.”

“Then let me buy new glasses for both of us when I get paid.”

•  •  •

I
WENT TO
look at the formidable redbrick building with its labyrinth of crowded corridors. “I am to teach here in two months’ time,” I marveled in the hot afternoon.

Instead of walking back, I decided to take the tram in anticipation of my elevation from penury. Its trundling gait and rhythmic clicks induced a half-sleep, and I had almost dozed off in the aisle of the packed tramcar. Suddenly we jolted to a stop. Hemmed in by the crush of bodies, I could see little, but heard angry slogans, wailing police cars, and the rumbling of Black Marias.

The crowd was hurling stones prised from the pavements. These thudded upon passing vehicles, including our tramcar, when I heard sharp reports of gunfire. A young woman next to me crumpled silently. The rest of us huddled on the shard-littered floor. Through a jagged pane, smoke stinging my eyes, I spied khaki-clad police kneeling and firing at demonstrators.

I must get out
, I thought in panic, crowded next to the window, but was unable to move in the packed compartment. Someone threw a bottle, its mouth stoppered by a burning rag, and the rear of the tramcar whooshed into flame, singeing my face and eyelashes as I joined the stampede to escape. Momentarily blinded, I found myself at the tramcar gate, and leaping clear, fell hard on the asphalt. In a red mist, I crawled to the far end of the sidewalk, where I lay shaking in pain, watching the tramcar as raging flames climbed charred metal. The street had become preternaturally
quiet. Amid the scattered pieces of paving stones stretched two young men. I could see the dark punctures of their bullet wounds.

I need,
I urged myself,
I need to reach the Medical College Hospital.
It was a small distance away. I have no memory of when they put my arm in a cast, or who stitched my forehead. I kept passing in and out of consciousness.

My frantic father searched for me in city hospital after hospital till he found me. He brought me home on a stolen bamboo
tthela
-cart, used by small shops to deliver dry goods, for no other vehicles could be found on the streets on this day and night of chaos.

Through the deserted streets, Baba, who had never dreamt of stealing anything, transported me, weeping loudly in relief

•  •  •

I
STAYED AT
home healing in the next weeks while my father cooked me boiled barley, which he insisted was nutritious. I tried to distract him by asking him to read me the newspapers. Entire neighbourhoods of Calcutta—Kasba, Ariadaha, and slums like Phulbagan with its warren of lanes—had become free zones without police control, my father read out to me. Low-ranking policemen, like traffic constables, were often ambushed by Red Guard–style teenagers who wielded knives, iron rods, or bicycle chains, and snatched their service revolvers and guns for further guerilla-like attacks.

After six weeks my arm had healed, and the cast was taken off, but my elbow still felt stiff and tender. I did not tell Baba, for he would fret, and I just wanted to go to work.

The days and nights now changed the city into two very different places. During the frequent power cuts in the smog-ridden city,
police prowled about in the dark, surrounding this or that area in “combing operations,” nabbing young people indiscriminately, hauling them off in their Black Marias. Baba read out newspaper reports that after days of beatings and the occasional rape in jail, selected detainees were taken before dawn to the deserted fields of the Maidan and told to get out and run. Then they were fired upon, supposedly killed in encounters with the valiant police. This last had been the brain-child of a handsome politician who seldom failed to point out to journalists his resemblance to Gregory Peck.

Meanwhile, professing undying faith and piety in dialectical materialism, some local goons had a field day collecting protection money. Within twenty years of Independence, one student group dubbed themselves Marxist-Leninist—a name recalling marriages between Hindu deities, I thought. They had declared Mao their spiritual leader, asserting that Indian independence was a sham. They flaunted lists of their future targets on the wall, calling them class enemies, crossing off names as they were killed, but not always in the order listed, spreading further confusion. India was no country, they declared, and the parliament was a pigsty. Students fought with the police—and most vigorously—among themselves. Through all this my father and I went warily to work, never knowing when the the next rush of violence would trample us underfoot.

“I h-hope th-there are no more b-break-ups,” my father mumbled apprehensively. “But then, what is a n-nation? Who d-decides?” I thought about his remark, between reading chapters in a book on the mathematics of Chaos Theory.

“Wh-where would we g-go again, Kush?” said my father, completely at a loss.

In this turmoil, starving villagers were beginning to show up
in the city in bewildering numbers, cadaverous, virtually naked, swarming onto railway platforms, begging in straggling groups by roadsides and lanes. Out of our one window, for the first time, I now saw rows of beggars on the pavement, their pathetic squabbles, evening domestic fires, their routine roadside defecations. Three days before my twenty-fifth birthday, we woke to a newborn’s mewling—while the crows fought and cawed over the discarded placenta.

•  •  •

O
NE LATE AFTERNOON
when I returned to our room from my day’s teaching, I found my father hunched over his bed, examining something minutely.

“Bedbugs?” I asked in alarm.

“Eh?” Baba was startled. “No, n-no,” he declared, regaining his bearing. “B-barisal,” he said tenderly, “Our ancestral house. In Barisal. East Pakistan now. The one that is gone forever.”

I saw now what he had been doing. On his frayed bedcover he had spread out a wide rectangle of paper. “Handmade paper from China Bazaar!” Baba whispered, as if it were a secret. On this creamy sheet, smooth as alabaster, he was making a sketch of a mansion. It had a semicircular driveway with a covered portico, spacious enough for a horse-drawn carriage. The graceful space was supported by pillars with an Oriental design similar to Corinthian columns. Three wide steps led up to a sweep of verandah which stretched along the entire edifice, and above these was a circular dome, on four sides of which peeped cupolas. A vast peepul tree cast a sepia shadow across the arched entrance.

I leant over the bed, my head next to his, silent in admiration.
Drawn in jet-black India ink, the walls and doorways were so vivid that I felt I could enter the palace. I had no idea he could draw so well.

“I was born here,” my father recounted. “My grandfather Ramkumar Mitra raised me after my parents died very young of the influenza. It was built long ago by our ancestors. My great-grandfather Baboo Doorgadass Mitra was a merchant prince. He lived here when he was not in Calcutta or Rangoon doing business with the English, the Dutch, and the Burmese. He had been a friend of Prince Dwarkanath Tagore, the poet Rabindranath’s grandfather, who had gone to Europe and was received by Queen Victoria and her nobles. There he met Charles Dickens, and even that old Irish rebel Daniel O’Connell, then out of prison, but broken by years. By the time I was born, just before the First World War, Doorgadass was long dead. The house had fallen into disrepair, and a part of the dome had been damaged by the cyclone of 1876. Cracks appeared along the roof and the walls. It was falling apart, like the country did later.” My father’s stutter was momentarily gone.

Over the next few weeks, my father laboured over it, forgetful of time, fading light, or mealtimes. He paused only during the frequent power cuts. Even in the gloom, he would sit beside the sketch, his hand upon it, as if it would otherwise disappear. The smudges from his palm became part of the picture, as if his presence had seeped into its texture. One day I found him using not India ink, but paint, upon the pillars, unexpected crimsons and blues that were faded and flaked. The house aged before our eyes. And then, he stopped. He put the picture away, sighing as if from the exhaustion of leaving it.

I missed seeing my father work on the picture. When I tried to
raise the topic, he shook his head slowly, as if he had been asked to account for a dream he had had.

“It is over,” he whispered. “N-nothing more.”

With my father’s permission, which he gave absentmindedly, I got a frame for it, a cheap black one, and hung it on our wall. Regretfully, I thought it looked like a black-bordered Hindu obituary notice, but it would be too expensive to try to find some other frame.

•  •  •

M
Y FATHER STILL
used the old bucket-oven on which he daily boiled rice and lentils, attempting simple curries, often confusing spices, producing barely edible results. Baba himself ate little, treating the food as a matter of disputation between what was left of his teeth and what was on his plate. Out of expediency, he had begun to drink milk when hungry, supplemented with an occasional handful of puffed rice, but he still insisted on cooking for me, stubbornly refusing to allow me near the open flame.

One evening he sat across from me and confided, “Other than you, Kush, I d-depend only on c-cows.” I did not quite know how to respond to his deeply felt sentiment.

But then came days when the cows let him down. More and more, he felt an acidulous rebellion in his belly. He now referred to his belly as a colonial nation where he had to send punitive taxes. “It is b-bloated and rancid,” he declared, and the sour urge to vomit obsessed him.

He used to worry about his eyes, his throat, his sinuses, the first creaks of arthritis far more than he had ever fretted about his
stomach; this simple pouch he filled with unremarkable supplies every day. An abstemious man, he was incapable of ill-treating that demanding cavity with spicy or oily foods. He tried to make do with less and less, but a gauziness affected his vision in spite of his new eyeglasses.

“Something is t-tap-tapping here,” he said, pointing at his chest. “What if some small o-organ has c-come loose, knocking a-about to find where it belongs?” His pupils bulged behind his new glasses.

Late one night, he struggled up from his bed, crept to our one window, and flung it open. Half-awake, I saw him feeling about for the familiar bulge of the clay water pitcher with the upturned glass on its spout, but his limbs had turned disobedient. Reluctant to wake me, he waved his hands about to locate the pitcher, overturning it. The floor was soaking wet amid shattered earthenware.

Startled by the sound, I switched on the light to see him struggling up, clawing the wall with wet fingers, and reaching for the blur of the pillared house. The picture fell with a crash, and my father slid to the floor beside the broken globe of the pitcher and the shards of glass hanging off the tilted mansion.

“Wh-where is Robert Aherne?” he wheezed at me. “T-tell Mr. Aherne I threw his g-gun away.” His pupils looked like enormous.

“I h-have to t-tell you s-something,” he said emphatically. “I am n-not Monimoy!” I looked at him in panic.

“Just lie back, Baba. It’s me—Kush,” I said with as much calm as I could muster.

“I am n-not Monimoy,” repeated Baba querulously, gasping for breath and trying to get up. I tried to make him lie down,
pushing his shoulders, firmly and gently. “Try to rest, Baba,” I pleaded.

“Don’t tell T-tegart,” he rasped urgently, “I am not Monimoy. D-do you understand? Only Robert Aherne knows.”

He lay still for a while, then grew agitated again. “Kush,” he called out, “Kush!”

“Yes, Baba?”

“I am m-my brother,” said my father.

“Baba, who is Robert Aherne?” I said. “Are you having a nightmare?”

“Tell him!” said my father firmly, “G-guns are no use at all. Tell Robert.”

I waited for his agitation to cease. It did. It was a few minutes before I realized that he was not breathing anymore.

•  •  •

A
LONE NOW,
I forgot to eat as often as I remembered. It seemed bizarre to me that I needed to repeat the action of eating each day. I did boil some rice and vegetables for myself, when absolutely necessary.

A month after my father’s death, in the middle of a lecture on finite integers, I looked at my students, and chalk in hand, in mid-sentence, realized that I had completely forgotten to eat since the day before. I felt lightheaded, almost joyous. At this instant, there rose a sound of angry shouting at the end of the corridor—screaming, scuffling, and swearing—and all the students rushed out of the classroom to see what was happening.

Most outer walls of the college building had been painted over with slogans. Red handwritten posters were sloppily pasted along
the entire length of the dirty corridors, on stairwells, and even on notice boards. One student group proclaimed that China’s Chairman was their Chairman. Another group deemed this a betrayal of Mother India, unpatriotic and pathetic.

Just now someone had been caught tearing a Maoist poster—or had been arbitrarily accused of the act—and a fight was in progress.

As the rampaging circle of students suddenly broke formation, I saw someone flung upon the ground, crouched and shielding his head. I caught a glimpse of the man, his mouth twisted, bloody. Niren Ghosh, a senior man from the History department.

Niren-babu had been one of the few professors who noticed me in the college staff room as I entered awkwardly on my very first day.

“New?” he had said to me. “Brand-new?” He was thoroughly amused by my reticence. “Sit down, young man. You are a teacher, so you
can
sit here. You see that lazy fellow in the khaki shirt? That’s Sridhar, a fourth-class employee. He can barely sign his name, but he is a great admirer of Karl Marx. He will get you a cup of tea—for money, of course. Drink only black tea. Never trust the milk. That is the most important thing I’ve learnt in my twenty-three years of teaching here.” I ordered the black tea. Some weeks later, when Niren Ghosh was not there, I had a cup of the tea with milk. Ghosh was dead right, I decided immediately.