Lopamudra Basak was known to all as Lopa. At thirty-six years of age, she disbursed loans for agricultural equipment during the day and read revolutionary literature in her one-bedroom flat at night.
Since marriage and motherhood had not made any claims on her, men thought she was available. They sought her out, in empty street corners when dusk was falling or in the stairwell when she returned from work, and complained in low voices about their bratty children and nagging wives. Once Prashanto got married, their attention increased manifold.
Lopa had loved Prashanto for five endless years. She had longed for a future where she was his wife. When he married another woman, she had attended the wedding like any other member of the family, firm in her resolve to love him all her life, even if from a distance.
Amala, Lopa's mother, felt that her pallid complexion had worked against her. From the time the girl was little, she had taken it upon herself to correct the oversight. She had made her swallow nubs of raw turmeric with tall glasses of water. She had scooped the thick cream off milkpots and smeared it all over the child. Little Lopa had suffered in rigid silence as the fat had thickened on her into an armour of flaky crust.
It had not worked. Lopa knew that from the puzzled look on her mother's face, like an artist looking at a work in progress and wondering why it was not coming together in spite of her best efforts.
At Prashanto's wedding, none of her neighbours from the housing society had spoken to her. Theirs had been an odd story but everyone had relied on the mysteries of the heart for a happy end. When it did not come about, they got furious at Lopa for tricking them into believing it would.
Prashanto had been someone else's husband for three years now. But everything around Lopa still spoke of a time when he needed her around. Her darkwood study table was a bargain buy from his friend leaving town. He had copied a poster from a magazine, mounted it on the table, and secured it with a glass top. She looked at it every night, a bouquet of brown and black and yellow fists, spirited yet feminine. 'Cada mujer es una trabajadora', it read in bold red font. The English translation was printed in tiny letters at the bottom: Every woman is a working woman.
In her five years of longing, Prashanto had spoken little of the future. If he talked of the years ahead, there was no indication they were in it together. When he had broken the news of the marriage, she knew there was really no reason for it to be any other way. "I'm doing this for my parents. You know how they worry as they get older," he had said.
To avoid the eager, prying men, Lopa turned to her mother. For almost ten years, the widowed Amala had divided her time among her three sons. Lopa's older brothers were sharp with figures. It came about that every year, their mother spent exactly one hundred and twenty one days and eighteen hours in each of their care. When Lopa asked if her mother could come live with her, the brothers agreed it was a sound idea.
Forced together, their lives fell into the pattern lonely women were familiar with across the world. They anticipated crises and imagined ways of resolving them. They fussed over trivial matters. In the mornings, as Lopa got ready for work, her mother sat over an unfinished breakfast and wept unreasonable tears. Through the rest of the day, she wrote long letters to her sons, recounting everything she had done over the course of her day.
****
No man ever steps foot inside, the lady superintendent with vicious, beady eyes had told her brother. Lopa had just been posted to that town and had sought out a hostel for working women near her workplace. That evening, she had moved in with a bedroll and suitcase to a jaunty welcome from three women who would be her dorm mates. Big, bulging women in their late forties, they lounged around in a state of undress. The dormitory with its metal beds was all they had for their home, where they brushed their greying hair with one hundred exact strokes.
We have fun here, they had told her, pointing to a stack of playing cards and a bottle of cheap alcohol. Lopa lay awake that night, imagining a future that looked like theirs. Next morning, her boss had found the ashen young woman on the pavement outside the office, sitting with her suitcase and a resignation letter. He had sent her home for a week and arranged the flat in the housing society.
Prashanto might have been life's way of making up for that one night among ageing flesh. He lived with his parents, a double-storeyed house right next to the housing society. Tall and straight, with a soft mouth and thin waist, he was easily the most handsome Bengali man around. When he spoke, people listened as if to a captivating sermon. On Sunday mornings, when business was slow in his photo studio, he mounted his canvas on its stand and painted posters. It made those passing by find a reason to go inside and talk with him.
He hated gossip. They never went anywhere. Why not go to Shimulia, Lopa had suggested that first winter. A little outside town, it was known for lovers' trysts, a drowsy village on the curve of a lazy river. She had thought enough about it to make it vivid. A quiet, rocky niche in the afternoon, which would come alive when the ripened red pods of the 'shimul' tree burst overhead, showering the lovers with tufts of snowwhite cotton.
That is where the riff-raff go for privacy, Prashanto had said, with undisguised horror.
They had begun walking around the neighbourhood more frequently, a lonely woman and her man of ideas. Into her eager receptacle, Prashanto had poured everything that churned in his mind. On summer evenings, they walked under a sky ablaze with pink and orange clouds, as the dry stinging breeze carrying the residual heat of the day parched their throats. They walked past the bungalows where the town administrators lived, past the barracks where the cadets trained and into the empty premises of the civil court. They would sit on the steps of the courthouse for a while, Lopa imagining generations of court clerks, notaries and litigants who had walked those arched, colonial-era corridors while Prashanto told her the story of the Dreyfus Trial.
There was a parallel dirt track for going home, stray foxes' haunt in winter and hurried office returnees in summer. Prashanto hated both, so they would go back the way they came.
When dreams made way for reality, she had blamed Payal Mukherjee. They had met during her second winter in the housing society. Payal had been visiting her parents, expecting her first child. Their friendship resembled something seen in frantic children. All they wanted was to withdraw into their world and talk to each other.
Winter was a lean time at the bank. In the cold afternoons, when men smoked and played cards on the office lawn while women with knitting needles and crochet sticks pored over pattern books, Lopa sat apart, writing poetic entries about Prashanto in a small notebook. Payal, who was bored and getting bigger, would later read them, giving new meaning to every casual remark or fleeting touch. In their imagination, a tepid friendship between Prashanto and Lopa became a torrid affair.
By the time spring made way for summer, Lopa could barely survive the week in office without meeting Payal. The walks with Prashanto had begun to seem interminable too. Sunday afternoons beckoned, two women in a darkened room, windows shut tight against the searing heat. Payal had a peculiar craving those days, nibbling on green chillies smeared with rock salt while her left hand rested on her enormous stomach. A burning white light would find a way in through the slats, inverting shadows on the walls of their personal playhouse. They would sit there for hours, staring at the lopsided reality.
In the humming heat, Payal would say, "Sing something he has taught you."
Lopa would skim through the political anthems in her mind and settle on one:
"Dukhini Africa...kalo te chhaya te tumi shajano..." "Mournful Africa, you are adorned in dark and shade..."
The lyrics were sentimental. But to Payal, it seemed like a love song.
****
Nowadays, nobody brought up Prashanto but her mother. At ten, Lopa put her to bed, propping her head up against two thin pillows, tucking in the edges of the mosquito net under the slim mattress. She sat next to the bed on a chair, talking about the same things every night.
"What happened at work today?" Amala asked, lying with her back against the wall.
"Work," she answered, reminding herself to close the gap under the door with an old nightdress. It was getting cold towards dawn.
"You gave out any loan?' Amala asked.
"No, but we're working on a few," Lopa replied, distracted by her mother's frail hand, resting on the torchlight by the pillow. Its blue-green veins looked like rivulets on a withered land. In a joint family of twenty-one individuals, her mother had been in charge of cooking rice for everyone. Like stray pieces of a puzzle, the images haunted her. A gigantic aluminium rice pot, Amala's ruddy face, her determined arms. Every woman is a working woman.
"Mothers do not stay around forever," Amala said in a faraway voice. "How's Prashanto? Heard his baby's not well?"
Lopa opened the door to the balcony. The conversation was over. The door's hinges groaned in despair. Outside, the earth exhaled a damp breath. Along the western sky, the tall chimneys of the iron and steel works were emitting thick bursts of sulphurous vapours. The night sky glowed a bright orange, like a canopy over an alien planet.
She stood with her elbows on the iron railing, looking towards the railway tracks that skirted the northern edge of the housing society. It lay swallowed by the darkness. In the distance, the whistle of an approaching train pierced through the night. Prashanto's gone Ma, she thought. No distress in his family life will bring him back to us.
In what seemed like a lifetime ago, she had spent an entire day with him in Calcutta. He was not a Party member but they had managed to travel without tickets for the train journey. Prashanto laughed so close to her face, it had made her dizzy. He could not believe that she had never been to a Brigade rally.
It was unreal, waves of humanity kicking up a dust storm with their heels while she sat in the shade of a tree, next to a garbage vat overflowing with lunch boxes. Hundreds of red flags billowing against the blue sky, aged comrades hobbling towards a red-drenched podium in a world which had learnt to move past those ideas.
The stench of the stale meat curry from the garbage nauseated her, so Lopa had wrapped Prashanto's red sweater around her face. Sweet and pungent its intoxication, sleeves like a firm embrace, hinting at revolutions the world could not fathom. She had shivered with joy and fright, till Prashanto had come and sat next to her, lightly resting his arm around her shoulder.
Lights were going out in the housing society flats one by one. Beneath the towering bamboo scaffolding of the Durga Pujo pandal being set up on the football field, a few boys lay on their backs, the lit ends of their cigarettes dancing like fireflies. An older man hollered from somewhere. The boys dispersed, laughing and patting the wet grass off their pants.
A lone engine came to view and chugged past. The driver's bay was brightly lit. A man in a pale blue shirt and dark pants stood alone, his palms resting on the control panels.
Maybe it was not such a bad idea to go check on Prashanto's son, Lopa thought. She secured the door, turned off the light and went to bed. Till she fell asleep, her mind played with the image of the solitary engine driver, burrowing into the darkness.
****
Always spirited and impulsive, Payal Mukherjee needed little convincing. Prashanto was away on an errand when the two women arrived at his house on a Sunday evening. His mother, who appeared uncertain, asked the visitors to the living room. She sat down facing them, her daughter-in-law Chandrani by her side.
The sound of canned laughter, like some funny show on television, drifted from one of the bedrooms. "We have two TV sets now," Prashanto's mother clarified. "One in each bedroom."
Chandrani turned towards Lopa. "You should visit more often, I keep hearing so much about you." A round, contended face and trusting eyes, that was Prashanto's wife. Lopa knew that look. All the decisions in her life had been taken by someone else, and they had turned out to be sound ones. The plumpness from giving birth had not left her yet. Her hands, resting on her lap, looked like two friendly pillows.
"How is your son doing?" Lopa asked.
"Oh, he's fine. He cried all night from a blocked nose a few days ago and now everyone thinks he is sick."
Deben, the tall elderly servant who had lived with the family for decades, served tea, the white china cups had blue flowers on them. On a white ceramic plate, sat four rectangular slices of bhapa sandesh. Not a fleck of garnish on their pristine whiteness. The cheese so fresh and moist, the corners were already dissolving in their own juice. We were not expected to linger, Lopa thought, looking at them.
"Have you decided on a name?" she asked, nibbling on a sandesh.
"We call him Pablo at home," Chandrani replied. "That's his father's favourite poet," she added, to remove any doubt.
"England," her mother-in-law chipped in.
"No, no, Italy, I think," Chandrani corrected her.
"So when can we see your Pablo?" Payal asked. She had finished eating her sandesh, had her tea and looked buoyant.
Lopa found herself in Prashanto's bedroom for the third time in her life. Many years ago, offended by Lopa's suggestion that he expand his business, Prashanto had brought her to that room to show prints from photographers he admired.
"This is art. I am an artist," he had said. "My dreams are not commercial."
The way she remembered them, the photographs were of dark alleyways in foreign cities, torn by sharp incisions of light. In others, pensive women and passionate men were caught in their inner turmoil.
On his wedding night, Lopa had come there to stash some gifts at his mother's insistence. Everyone else was away at dinner and she had briefly stopped by the empty wedding bed, strewn with rose petals under a floral dome.
Domestic life had stripped any allure of the bedroom. The sheets looked straightened in haste. A cloth bag, overflowing with baby clothes and home-made diapers, rested on one of the pillows. In a crib by the bedside, a little boy lay snuggled in a blue blanket.
A sudden commotion cut short their chatter. A flurry of excited male voices, and the thud of heavy steps on the stairs, was coming closer. Lopa noticed Deben and Prashanto's father hurry outside. There was a moment's silence. The old man's voice was shrill when he spoke, "What on earth is all this?"
Lopa and Payal had already come out of the room when the elderly servant came and slammed the bedroom door shut, bolting it to keep Chandrani and Prashanto's mother inside.
Prashanto stood in the middle of the living room. He had nothing on except a pair of underpants, streaked with mud. His left hand was holding it in place while the right arm, somewhat elongated, hung lifeless from the shoulder. Tiny red drops gathered on his head where tufts of hair had been pulled out. Across his face, the nose lay defeated and purple.
"They would have killed him," Ranjan, who had brought him home, said in a low voice. He was around thirty, tall and wiry, with a head full of black curly hair. He worked full time for the Party. "I'll wait till the ambulance was here."
Prashanto's wife and mother had started banging on the locked bedroom door without ceasing. Failing to drown that noise, the baby bawled at an odd pitch.
"It's become a thug's paradise," Prashanto's father said. The shrillness in his voice was gone, subdued by fear. "I'm going to the police right away."
"Make sure your son wants that," a short, fat guy who had come up to the door spoke up. His shirt was unbuttoned to his hairy belly, revealing low-hanging necklaces. He raised his fat forefinger. "This was just a warning. We know how to deal with gentlefolk."
****
The news of Prashanto beaten mercilessly by hoodlums caused more worry than outrage. That young men could be vulnerable made people stay indoors for a few days. Those shopping for Durga Pujo chose to move about in groups. After sundown, even street corners were deserted.
Running circles between doctors and the hospital, Prashanto's family had time for no one. Payal had withdrawn into a cocoon, shaken by the violence of that evening. Lopa smarted alone in her tiny universe, unable to process why even her memory of love needed such a brutal assault. Her mother remained unaffected by the upheaval, speaking of Prashanto every night as if the old ways of living had not died yet.
In one of those early winter nights right after the festivities had ended, as Lopa propped her mother against the pillows, Amala's cold bony fingers grabbed her wrist. That fellow was no good, she told her, burning with angry energy. For everyone knew how in the name of art, Prashanto used little girls from the slums for posing, which had brought about the beating in its wake.
Lopa secured the balcony door, turned off the light and went to bed. For the first time in more than three years, she wept long and bitter into the night, for the sadness she had felt at being defeated by the reality of love was drowned by the grief she felt at losing her ideal.
End
Feb 10, 2017
Yeh kahan aa gaye hum, youn hi saath chalte, chalte.../How did we come here, thus walking along with each other...
