The Blue Bedspread (18 page)

I got up again, it must have been about an hour later because the floor was dry, the water had dried. Except for the footprints. They were there again, this time in different places.

The same footprints, four to five little dots of water ringed around a little patch. It was as if the baby had come in my absence, dipped its feet into the water and walked all over the floor again.

I wanted to wake you up but through the window I could see the morning light, a dull grey stain had already appeared in the sky and it made me feel better. Maybe it’s memory trying to swim to the surface, I don’t know. I covered my head with the blanket and went to sleep.

It was there again the next night, yesterday night. The same footprints, the same cockroach. Why has the baby come back to me after all these years? How do these footprints appear? Is the baby still alive?

‘Please help me,’ she says.

‘Tell me what happened to the baby,’
he says.

‘She died. I just stood there, on the steps, watched it sink in the river.’

‘What happened before she died?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Think,’ he says. ‘Think hard, think about those stories you told her, the games you played with her dress. What did he do to you when you were sitting in front of him?’

‘Who did what to me?’

‘The teacher? What did Sir do?’

‘I don’t remember anything,’ she says.

She is fast asleep when he gets up and walks to the bathroom, the red tiles are dry, he takes a jar out of his pocket, releases the albino cockroach near the drain. The cockroach first flutters for a while, its wings blur and then they come to rest as it hangs, upside down, from the wall in the drain.

He balls his hands into two fists, dips them in water and then he goes down on his knees, crawls on all four, along the tiles, printing tiny feet on the bathroom floor. Then he dips his fingers in the water and prints the toes.

It’s very cold and he shivers, his back hurts, his body supported on his hands, his knees press hard against the tiles, he is careful so that water doesn’t spill.

It takes about fifteen minutes and then he gets up, switches the lights off.

Maybe she’ll remember more and more, he thinks, keep diving into the depths of her memory, through the highwayman and the old inn door, below the ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas until she comes to what Sir did to her so that he can wipe her slate clean, rub everything off so that they can go into the future leaving her past behind.

But it doesn’t happen that way at all, it can’t happen that way, he will not be able to wipe her slate clean. He will try hard, he will dot the bathroom floor every night but one night she will discover and run away. Your mother, my sister.

The pen now rests on the paper, its job done, its nib catches the light from the table lamp but it doesn’t glint as it should. That’s because it isn’t so dark now, there’s other light coining into the room, the first light of the sun, through the green window, its wooden slats, through the red curtains.

It’s a weak light, part blue, part white, the yellow will take at least an hour, but it’s a persistent light. Envious of the table lamp, it pushes itself into the dark corners of my study, under my table, behind the bookshelves, in the space between the door and the wall.

And then it begins to silently dry, one by one, the black pools of shadows which have gathered during the night.

I have to get up.

The chair makes a noise, my feet rub the floor, I can hear one sparrow, it must be the one with the black bib which keeps hopping all around my balcony during the day.

The fridge still coughs, the tap in the bathroom has stopped dripping. They must have switched off the water supply sometime during the night while you were sleeping and I was pulling the words out of the air in my room. Lining them up on my pages, like schoolboys and schoolgirls waiting for a drill. Telling them to march, left, right, left, right, about turn, attention, stand at ease, telling them to dismiss.

Now they are tired, each page sleeps covered by the other. There’s just one thing left before I am done. I have to search for the lampshade.

For that thirty-year-old lampshade made of cane lying in the storeroom, next to the kitchen, along with other things: the mallet Bhabani used to clean the clothes with, the red bicycle Sister got from Grandfather, the black coat Father got on his wedding day, the red socks I wore when snow first fell from the sky.

Once I find the lampshade. I shall clean the cobwebs caught in between its slats, carefully, so that baby spiders don’t get hurt. I shall wipe the dust and then I will bring it to you, my child, and put the shade on the lamp, switch it on, but wait.

Wait.

Before all this, before all that, I need to put your mind to rest, no one’s going to take you away. I shall call up Mr Chatterjee, tell him that he doesn’t need to wait any more, the man and the woman will surely find another child somewhere in this city of twelve million, a child at some hospital, unclaimed and unnamed, one they can call their own. If not today, they will get the child tomorrow. Or the day after.

So it shall be I who will take you to the Alipore Zoo, to the Birla Planetarium. We shall watch baby monkeys and mother monkeys, the tiny torchlight, shaped like an arrow, that flashes, darts across the huge black hemispherical dome. We shall find out where Jupiter is, try to understand why we have evening and why we have night, I will tell you all the stories that didn’t make it this night.

As of now, however, let me get the lampshade and switch it on.

So that the light falls in a million specks on the blue bedspread making our sky shimmer with stars. And let me lean over you and spin the shade so that the stars move in orbits across the bed, over your body, your fingers, across the two pillows, which serve as your walls, in the hollows where my fingers were.

I am tired. I shall quietly remove one pillow and lie down beside you, adjust myself so that your head fits exactly in the curve of my neck. Let us sleep for a while because tonight is the night they will all be there, we shall wake up only when the stadium is full, the microphone is ready, the amplifiers have been tested. For tonight is the Eden Gardens night.

He’s standing in the centre of Eden Gardens on top of a towering stage, more than one hundred feet high, draped with white silk, ninety-five thousand people sitting around him, waiting for him to speak.

It’s an evening, December, cool, a wind blowing from across the river has dried the city, brought light shawls, sleeveless sweaters out. They have painted the stands at the stadium, the cricket season begins in two weeks. They have switched the floodlights on and so high is the stage that when he looks down he can see their bright haze as if it’s morning, stained by smoke from some fires lit somewhere near the stadium.

Above him are the stars in the sky, as faint and as high as they were from his bedroom window. To his left is the Howrah Bridge, he can see the winking lights of the steamers, the clock tower at the railway station.

The air is unusually clear tonight for he can see beyond that, much beyond that, over the railway platforms, the sheds, he can see a train coming in, a passenger train, its yellow windows like a string of lights being dragged along by a child.

He can even see the dark forms of a man and a woman, perhaps husband and wife, standing at the entrance to one of the coaches in the train.

No one’s talking. Down below, he can see their faces, all ninety-five thousand, turned towards him. He can make out each face distinctly, old and young, even babies, women with saris across their shoulders, men on their way home from the office, their leather suitcases on their laps. He can see a child turn to his mother, she lowers her face to kiss him on the forehead, a man near her lights a cigarette.

He can see the potato chips boy, the blue and orange plastic packets between his fingers. There are some faces he can recognize. There’s a man, drunk and laughing; a woman standing near a white washbasin in one corner of the stands. There’s a man in glasses waving at her; a woman from Sarajevo, her red scarf; an old man, bent from his waist, painting glue onto aluminium cans, a woman in an oversized nightgown talking to her nurse, both smiling.

There’s a beautiful woman in a blue sari and a sleeveless blouse, her arms as white as milk. She’s holding a picture book with drawings brightly coloured on paper that shines.

The microphone stares at him, like an injured puppy he’s picked up from the streets, its eyes closed, its snout turned upwards, waiting to be petted. He can see its steel frame, the semicircular black base that strangles its neck.

He clears his throat, there’s a hush as the noise is magnified what seems like one thousand times. The microphone whines.

The doctor, the one with arms as white as milk, smiles at him, he can see her lips move, she’s telling him to write it down.

‘Write it down,’ she’s saying, moving her lips, hoping he will lip-read.

But it’s too late, everything is set, they are all waiting.

So he goes up to the microphone, taps it once, taps it twice, he can hear the wind in his ears, the first nervous coughs from the crowd, the first fidgets, someone gets up to walk out, he clears his throat one last time, and they all look at him as he begins to whisper the words he’s been waiting to whisper.

And because he cannot say the sentence all at one time, because the doctor, the one with arms as white as milk, has made him recall that afternoon when he lay on the carpet, the words growing and growing until they filled his lungs, he breaks up the sentence, one or two words at a time so that he can take long breaths in between, give each word the air it needs to travel across the city and ninety-five thousand people.

So the first word he says is
I
, it floats all around the stadium, brushes against the faces of the people he knows, the strangers he has seen who look at him, through the haze, the second is
am,
his lips open and close, he can hear his breath through his nose, a hiss in the microphone, like a wind blowing, and they are all now waiting for the third which is
the
and no one notices, it’s a common word, an article, used and reused in almost every sentence they hear, and so it flutters for a while and then silently flies off into the sky but it’s the fourth word,
father,
when some faces light up, some faces darken, he can see someone gesture towards him, there is a roar in one corner of the stadium, someone’s shouting something he doesn’t hear, he can see an old man standing, gone is the fat around his waist, he goes on to the next word which is
of,
and he says it pretty fast because it’s a word that’s neither here nor there, what does it mean, no one knows, and he needs to end the sentence now since it’s already getting very late and he can see some people getting up, preparing to leave, he has to keep them back for that extra second or so because they need to hear it all, that’s what he has been waiting for, the whole night, and he says
my
and they stop, some turn back, it’s beginning to get personal, a sudden interest surges through the crowd, he can see Bhabani standing in the crowd, clapping, she looks at him as he looks at the microphone again, the puppy seems fast asleep.

Through the corner of his eye, over the heads of the ninety-five thousand people, he can see the railway tracks coming in from the darkness, glinting in the light of the giant halogen lamps they have put up at the station to prevent thieves from ransacking the store or even ripping off the fish-plates and selling them as scrap at the How-rah foundry market, it’s time now for the last two words,
sister’s
and
child,
there, it’s done, the eight words have been spoken, they have flown, each word across the city, like eight pigeons in flight, in the night, white against black, he doesn’t have to lie any more, twist facts to flesh out his fiction, he coughs once to clear his throat, coughs twice, and then he looks down to see the belt in his trousers firm and stiff, he breathes in hard, the tummy doesn’t droop, he adjusts his shirt, walks down the steps that lead off the stage, they are all standing now, some clapping but he doesn’t hear because he has to be home in time for his daughter to wake up, to open her eyes.