aaaaMuch
of the talk concerned relatives scattered all over
India and all over the world. Much of it was about
money and the cost of living. Chhotomama's business
ran in fits and starts, like his car. It had to
be pushed before it worked; it was unreliable. There
was no demand for this and no demand for that; this
supplier had let him down; that partner was unscrupulous
and lazy; the times were not conducive to ... In
short, money was short. "Today the palm of
my left hand's itching," said Mamima. "God,
God, I wonder—it means I'll have to spend
more money—on what, I wonder." If the
right hand itched, it meant one was going to get
money—but it seldom itched, and when it did,
money seldom followed. Someone was not playing the
game.
aaaaThe
subject would switch from money to people "who
need money more than we do," and these people
were usually poor relations, or, to be more accurate,
poorer relations, old men and widows whose sons
were too young to earn or who themselves had lost
interest in working for a pittance. The second case
was more frequent among men: there seemed to be
something masculine about giving up one's job and
dignifying one's idle hours by speculating about
existence. So they had to be helped and supported,
while constantly being assured that they were not
being helped and supported, to which they would
reply, with different degrees of sincerity, that
of course they were and how could they forget it?
They were helped and supported, not necessarily
because they deserved it, but because money was
meant to flow from the hands of one member of the
family to another.
aaaaThis
kind of talk, whether at the dinner-table or in
the bedroom, did not become too oppressive: it was
too full of metaphors, paradoxes, wise jokes, and
reminiscences to be so. It was, at bottom, a criticism
of life. And there were unpredictable breaks, when
Sandeep's mother and Mamima would begin to murmur
conspiratorially about the colour of a sari. And
there were unpremeditated instants when everyone
would suddenly stop talking, perhaps to think, each
one about something different, and there would be
a gap of hushed clarity, in which a crow cawed outside.
And the children would be arrested in whatever they
were doing at that point of time: one swinging by
the window, one lying on his stomach reading a comic,
and one sitting on the ground, listening and comprehending
nothing. And then they would resume their argument,
very loudly, as if they were early-twentieth-century
actors in some green, neglected village in Bengal,
where there were no mikes and no electricity, and
every actor had to bellow his speech melodramatically
before the large village audience would hear and
applaud what he was saying. One would have almost
expected Sandeep's uncles and aunts to have been
attired in the splendid, vibrant costumes that folk
artistes wore in keeping with the dramatic excessiveness
of their gestures. Yet his uncles wore white pyjamas
and nothing else, and the women were draped in faded,
hand-woven cotton saris—their bodies cool
even in the cumulative heat of conversation.
aaaaSometime
during the day, probably not too late, or too early,
as on weekdays, Chhotomama would take a bowl of
water and other equipment to the verandah, place
them on a chair, perch himself on a stool, and shave.
This was one of Sunday's simpleminded pleasures
and self-indulgences: to shave at what time one
pleased, and as long as one pleased, with the children
nearby, watching, convincing one that a morning
stubble was an amazing thing, and that the shaving
instruments were holy tools, and that the act of
sprinkling water on the face was somehow profound.
When he would look up from the mirror, he would
sense the stillness of the street around him, the
endless, enduring world of pigeons and crows, the
perpetual movement of pariahs, beggars, and vendors,
and he would feel, simultaneously, the warmth of
the sunlight and the coolness of the brush on his
cheek. The boys would stand around, noting his movements
the way passersby in Calcutta break their journey
to work to stare at acrobats or a monkey show on
the pavement. With curiosity and envy, they followed
the determined attentiveness with which he put the
cream on his brush, and then swished the lather
with a flourish on his face, white and frothy, till
it gained a rich uniformity that looked both ornamental
and delicious, and then carefully ploughed it with
his razor in primitive agricultural fashion.
aaaaLater,
he would enter the toilet, armed with an ashtray,
a newspaper, and a pair of reading glasses. The
toilet was his study. Here, filling the room with
cigarette smoke, he read the significant news of
the day; he pondered on "world affairs"
and "home affairs"; he pontificated to
himself on the "current situation" from
a Marxist angle. He was a water-closet thinker.
aaaaThis
part of the daily ceremonies over, he would enter
the bathroom to have his preluncheon bath, humming
a small tune to himself. He would turn on the old,
ineffectual shower and, suddenly elated, begin singing
aloud to himself. He had a resonant tenor voice,
a voice both strong and delicate. When he sang in
the bath, the notes echoed in the four enclosing
walls like rays of trapped light darting this way
and that in a crystal, a diamond. He usually sang
old, half-remembered compositions that had been
popular thirty or forty years ago in a Bengal where
the radio and the windup gramophone were still new
and incredible machines breaking the millennial
silence of the towns and villages:
aaaaaaaaaaaaGodhulir
chhayapathe
aaaaaaaaaaaaJe
gelo chini go tare.
Roughly
translated, this meant
aaaaaaaaaaaaIn
the hour of cow dust, on the shadowy path,
aaaaaaaaaaaaWho
passed by me? I felt I knew her.
Knocking
on the bathroom door, Sandeep made a pest of himself
by asking: "Chhotomama, what does godhuli mean?"
aaaaLost
in the general well-being of cleansing himself,
his uncle replied patiently: "The word go means
'cow,' and the word dhuli means 'dust.' In the villages,
evening's the time the cowherds bring the cattle
home. The herd returns, raising clouds of dust from
the road. Godhuli is that hour of cow dust. So it
means 'dusk' or 'evening.' "
aaaaAs
Chhotomama explained, his voice emerging from behind
the steady sound of water, Sandeep saw it in his
mind like a film being shown from a projector—the
slow-moving, indolent cows, their nostrils and their
shining eyes, the faint white outline of the cowherd,
the sense of the expectant village (a group of scattered
huts), and the dust, yes the dust, rising unwillingly
from the cows' hooves and blurring everything. The
mental picture was set in the greyish-red colour
of twilight. It was strange how one word could contain
a world within it. Quite unexpectedly, Chhotomama
now began a song by Tagore:
aaaaaaaaaaaaBahe
nirantar ananta anandadhara.
aaaaaaaaaaaaBaaje
ashima nabhamajhe anaadiraba.
In
an unsatisfactory translation, this meant
aaaaaaaaaaaaEndless
and unbroken flows the stream of joy.
aaaaaaaaaaaaIts
timeless sound resonates beneath the great sky.
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