A Short story by Somnath Batabyal.
Shantum loved the September mornings in Kolkata. He always preferred to call the city that. Even before the official name change, ‘Calcutta’ never really appealed to Shantum. The city brought out his “bangaliana” his father would say, laughing at his sudden interest in kurta pyjamas and Bengali women. For the rest of the year, he and his friends listened to Rolling Stones and Grateful Dead in school.
He smiled at the memories as he walked past Lake Market. Seven in the morning, with a week left to go for Durga Puja, the place was already teeming with buyers and sellers. The smell of rajnigandha, fresh roses, jasmine; he loved the flower market here. I should buy some for Shumona, he thought. She will be surprised. He could not remember the last time he had tried to woo his wife of eight years.
“Koto kore?” he asked, pointing at the rajnigandhas.
“Seventy rupees for twelve sticks.”
I wouldn’t get a packet of biscuits for that in London, thought Shantum.
“Diye dao,” he said to the surprised boy who was anticipating a bargain. Seeming deprived of a fight, the boy sullenly packed the sticks in a newspaper, before wrapping it with a white thread.
The stretch from Lake Market through Gariahat to Ballygunge station was Shantum’s favourite part of Kolkata. As a schoolboy, every summer when he came to visit his grandparents, Shantum would take this walk in the mid morning heat, before taking the Metro from Rash Behari to Park Street. He remembered how gratefully he would climb down the steps of Kalighat Metro station, escaping from the sun and welcoming the shafts of wind, which every corner of the underground seemed to unleash. In London, people cower against the drafts, the icy wind chilling the bone and soul, penetrating clothes and mind. In this city, the underground tunnel was nature’s way of lending a helping hand when you could not afford air conditioning.
Now as he walked on the familiar footpaths yet to succumb to the hawker’s cries, past the known signboards of Priya Cinema and Deshapriya Park, Shantum was filled with an immense urge to share this with his five-year-old son.
Today I should take Arghya out, he thought; the same walk, the same restaurant, the kulfi faluda at Rallis on Esplanade. It’s not very hot this time of the year. Arghya loves the sun. Deprived of it in London, the boy spends hours happily in the second floor balcony of their Ballygunge house, basking in the late afternoon glow with his grandmother.
Ma refuses to leave Kolkata. Even five years after his father’s death, his mother clings to the house. “Come with me, ma. We can look after you in London,” Shantum had pleaded. But she wouldn’t budge.
She was never this stubborn, thought Shantum as he stepped over the tramlines and turned on to Ballygunge Station Road. In fact, she had been the easy going one in the family, the one who always smelled of good food and love, sweat and joy. Her behaviour was completely out of character, he thought as he walked past the teashops lining the railway station. Shantum looked at his watch. Twenty to eight; he had time.
“Come, come” a man waved at Shantum, seeing him look around. Two others made space for him on a bench.
“Ekta cha,” he said, sitting down. He overheard snatches of conversation: cricket, the non-inclusion of the Bengali captain in the national team, the coming state elections.
“Cigarette cholbe?” the man asked, extending a glass. Why not, Shantum thought and smiled his assent. He hadn’t smoked in several months now, part of the strict diet he had been put on by his doctor and wife.
Why had ma become so obstinate? It made him feel guilty to leave her here.
“I can’t come to London to lessen your guilt, Shontu,” she told him last night and the matter ended there. It was perhaps in the way she got the house, he thought, and reclaimed her space in Kolkata. Ma had stayed away far too long for her to move again. Not that Shantum wanted to sell the place. He liked it, its decrepit oldness, the large, airy rooms with their high ceiling and windows that looked down on a delightfully unplanned garden.
He had grown up in two small rooms with his parents and sister; in a town indistinguishable from the hundreds that people cross on trains on their way to somewhere else. He remembered the constant fights of the neighbours, the slum across the window, ma’s tired face. Privacy came at a premium, hiding on the terrace amongst old, worn out furniture and other castaways.
That terrace was his space. A mat could be spread there and the entire sky became instantly accessible. Watching Star Trek serials, Shantum had wanted to be an astronaut, crisscrossing across the Milky Way. On summer evenings, sitting alongside him, his father told him stories of impossible daring, of romances that stretched across the seven seas and thirteen rivers.
But reality refused to fade. The two rooms, the incessant noise, the bickering of family, they clawed back. His friends now tell him that most memories of their childhood were inflated, made bigger as time passed. He thought of Anton, his Greek colleague who laughs every time he speaks of his father’s boat, which, as a child seemed bigger to him than the Titanic. Seeing the same boat, thirteen years later, after the ship had been firmly etched in memory, courtesy Hollywood, Anton had been shocked at its smallness. I had no such luxury, thought Shantum. Everything I knew was small, or short, or tiny.
Thus his craze for space! He remembered how much he loved the Enid Blyton stories. George of the Famous Five had an entire island to herself. She and her cousins went to beaches and solved mysteries in lighthouses on stormy nights. Every time he sees a lighthouse, he still thinks of sinister smugglers.
He laughed, shaking the glass. The hot liquid fell on his hand, making him wince. Stubbing the cigarette, he stood up.
“One more, sir,” the man behind the stove asked.
“No, not today.” It was getting late. Shumona would be up and ma would soon be leaving for school. He paid and started walking briskly homewards.
It has been four years since ma retired from the neighbourhood school. But she still goes twice a week to teach music. The staff doesn’t mind, and the children love her. Sixty- nine this year and she still hasn’t lost an iota of melody.
Baba called ma his nightingale. Her voice filled the house, pushed back the walls and somehow widened our universe, Shantum now thought. Even the neighbours stopped their quibbling. Baba had many stories of her singing. He insisted that ma had wooed him in college by singing Hindi film songs. Baba was a sucker for the old romantic duets. Shantum smiled as he stepped into the bylane leading to their home.
“We always went out in groups, you know,” baba would say. “None of this new fangled dating for us. But when your mother sang, I knew she sang for me.” Ma would laugh and say never, it was Arijit whom she fancied.
“Bloody capitalist,” baba would retort of Arijit kaku. Baba loved his communist pretensions, along with his love for the English and Nirad C Choudhury, thought Shantum. “More English than the English, you know,” baba would say admiringly of Choudhury.
“That was a long walk. Ma just left,” Shumona reproached as he came in through the door. “I know I had crossed the Milky Way to get you these”; he said handing the flowers to his surprised wife.
“Over the top, as always,” she laughed, unable to hide her pleasure.
A trait I have got from my father, thought Shantum as he went into the shower.
“I am taking Arghya out today. We will go and have a kulfi at Rallis,” he shouted to Shumona through the door. She was going to her sister’s place in Howrah for the day. A father and son excursion, thought Shantum happily.
The water was refreshingly cool after the long walk and he closed his eyes. Yes, baba always overstated, he thought. Even the small things had to be magnified, oversold. The same excursion he was about to undertake with his son, his baba and he, they had done the same. How many years ago was it? He must have been around Arghya’s age. Thirty-four years.
He recalled his baba telling him the night before about the size of the kulfi. “This big,” baba said, hands at least a foot apart. “Do not eat too much breakfast. Otherwise you will not be able to finish it.”
Shantum steadfastly refused the delicious luchis and aloor dum his aunt served the rest of the family in the morning. He really wanted to finish the kulfi. Baba had promised it was heaven.
Kolkata in those days were yet to experience the pleasures of underground travel.
After more than two hours on the bus, when they finally reached Esplanade and weaved their way through the teeming millions to Rallis, the place was crowded to the point of bursting. Shantum clearly remembered waiting in line to be seated.
“Don’t we get our own?” he had asked his father, upset at the shared tables. He had conjured up visions of grandeur from his father’s talk. At least the kulfi will be big.
When it came, Shantum was bitterly disappointed. Where was the foot long slab of heaven which his father had promised? What was in front of him was not more than three inches in size.
“Kemon,” asked his father expectantly as they both tucked into the ice cream. “Darun, baba” he smiled, unable to deflate his father’s happiness. “Wonderful,” he gushed.
No wonder my entire childhood seemed small, thought Shantum, toweling. Nothing could live up to my father’s talk. Arghya came running to him as he walked out of the bathroom.
“When are you leaving,” he asked Shumona, picking up the still sleepy boy.
“I am out in an hour,” she replied. “Can you please give Arghya his cornflakes and make sure he brushes his teeth first.”
Putting toothpaste on the child’s brush, Shantum handed it to him.
“Ma says we are going out baba.”
“Yes,” said Shantum. “We are going to have an Indian ice cream.”
“What’s that,” the child asked.
“Well, you will see for yourself. I hope you will like it,” Shantum said smiling, watching his son brush.
“I hate the underground here, baba,” Arghya said. “Why couldn’t we take the car?” “Because your mother had to go in it; the underground doesn’t go to Howrah,” he told his by now slightly sweaty son.
“But the underground goes everywhere,” said Arghya, slightly surprised.
Not here, it doesn’t, Shantum thought, grimacing as he climbed onto a crowded compartment with Arghya. The Kolkata metro, much vaunted, and the pride of the city was just a single track covering a few kilometers.
Shantum was surprised when he came to Rallis. The place wore a deserted look. The crowds which had thronged the place of his childhood had moved on to newer, shinier establishments. Rallis looked positively seedy. Shantum stood outside, unsure.
“Baba, can we go somewhere else?” Arghya tugged at his hand. Shantum picked the boy up.
“No, Arghya, let’s eat the Indian ice cream and then we will go somewhere else. I promise.”
The kulfi, if anything had become even smaller. Shantum looked doubtfully at the syrupy red liquid poured on top.
“Kemon,” he asked his son hesitantly. The five year old looked up, mouthful of cream and smiled.
“Darun baba, first class,” he replied.
