The South
Park Street Cemetery
This little
life is all we must endure,
The grave’s
most holy peace is ever sure,
We fall
asleep and never wake again;
Nothing is
of us but the mouldering flesh,
Whose
elements dissolve and merge afresh
In earth, air, water, plants, and other men.
- James
Thomson
In the ancient city of dead people, Marco Polo woke up, and
found on his grave a young girl speaking to herself. On listening closely, he
realised she was speaking to the soul of a boy who had died centuries ago. The
boy was two scores and four years of age then, when the
Plague-bearing-East-Wind wiped him out. The boy never aged since, and existed
only in the yellow pages of a long forgotten novel. The girl, obviously, was
oblivious of that. To her, he was real. She thinks she can touch him. Did she
just kiss him?
- Marco Polo, the veteran traveller, decided to rest. His
grave smelled of Chinese spices and Italian gourmet, and rotten wood and weeds
and mushrooms…
Above him, he knew, another novel was in the making. Is he
going to come out of the book, or is she going into it?
---
Even at your home, where you think you know every nook, where
ants line up, every window and whatever is beyond, the creepy screech made by
the kitchen door, the staircase that has exactly seventeen steps and a switch
for the light bulb at the end of it, which of course, doesn’t work, but doesn’t
matter anyway because you know there are three steps left… Even at your home
you lose things.
And very rarely you find something while you were frantically
searching for something else. Something very insignificant and utterly irrelevant
props up from under the carpet, and makes you forget what you were after in the
first place. And you can’t figure out whether it actually belonged to you, and
if not, where it came from.
You decide to look for more clues, and you wipe off the dust
with the sleeve of your shirt. And you find a book with a ruined cover. An
anonymous hand written book? You turn to the first page. A certain Alexander
James had gifted the book to his beloved. What was her name? Illegible. And the
date? Yes. It is 1914.
And she started reading –
She, who was scared of the nameless, shapeless phantom
cloudlike entities surrounding her who whispered in her ears in a language she
had never heard before. And yet, she could feel that they were asking for
something, requesting, demanding, pleading, and begging for something, something
which they thought she was hiding. Which wasn’t hers to keep. She could smell
their cold and saline presence when she walked back from the church on empty
evenings or when she was brushing her rodentious teeth in front of the empty
mirror or in the shower or in the bed or in the classroom. They fed on the
white pills and on the streams of cigarette smoke spilled out by her lungs –
and on her fear.
But for the precious eleven minutes that she spent on the
nameless book, she could smell only the Oriental spices that her grandmother
used to put into the chirping hot mustard oil in the frying pan. Of hing and tej pata and panch foron. And immediately she knew she was going to read the book. See
the end of it, as they say. So after eleven minutes and twenty six pages, when
her mother alarmed her of the oncoming downpour, she found herself put a
pagemark and rush to the roof to rescue the half dry clothes from the imminent
attack.
---
April it was, when the massive Elizabeth docked at the
Salempore Port in the Bengal Province. The ship looked fatigued, carrying a
burden of history and cargo. So were its crew. Seventy Irishmen and a twenty
four year old architect set foot on a foreign soil. They were greeted by a pack
of dogs, three cows, a swarm of uninterested men, a mesh of wet and narrow
lanes, and a sense of being alien and unwanted in this Oriental country.
The Irishmen took off in a group, searching for a place to
sleep. Salempore had plenty of space to offer them, to the whole of East India
Company, or so they thought. As the brown skinned natives started unloading the
Elizabeth, the Irishmen, with their own sacks and rags and whiskey smelling
breath and three and a half months of unshaved beards, discovered a large empty
hall in the largest warehouse by the river. The twelve banjos and seven flutes
tried to puke a tune, which was absorbed by the crates of sealed, unsealed and
broken bottles of Irish whiskey, the thick brick walls of the warehouse and the
busy Strand Road traffic. Somewhere not very far, a cannon fire announced the
daybreak. The crimson sun was disappearing beyond the July clouds, beneath the
foreign horizon, leaving a drop of its colour in the coursing Varsai River. The
young architect from Somerset was lost in the burning dusk, in this young city
of fifty five distinct odours. But then one is truly lost when he can’t find
his way – way to a destination. Alexander James did not have one.
Everyone was lost in Salempore. There were the British and
Frenchmen and Irishmen and Portuguese and Chinese and of course Bengalees of every kind, and no one knew
from where the others came and what were they trying to say and for what
purpose they kept bumping into each other in this emerging hotspot. So what
does it matter if you didn’t add one more stranger in the land of the infinite?
The tavern would have sold one less mug of beer a night, the yellow corner
house of the East Circular Road would have had one room empty, though not for
long, and the little woman on the Middleton Roe would have read one less book.
Much of a loss for anyone? Alexander James thought he knew the answer to that
question, and he wasn’t particularly happy about it. But he discarded within
himself this feeling and constantly repeated the slogan he had been saying to
himself over the past couple of years, that he was a traveller, and he couldn’t
afford to matter to someone in anyway. So he chose to think about the towns and
the streets and the inns he had spent the previous nights, and the nights
before. And then the nights on the ship. The short and sweet girl from Japan,
who didn’t speak much but only looked. Looked at everything as if she was
reading a book. She was roaming in the bazaar
of Al Bakht when the ship was anchored in the port to refuel and replenish the
inventory. She never came back. Nor did the empty-basketed dates seller girl in
Cape of Good Hope who had promised to bring more for him the next day. But
then, will HE ever return to all those places he had been to?
She had dug out an old calendar from the discarded dump. And
she had carefully clothed the century old book. The first one hundred and
thirty two pages were budding with a promise. A strange promise, though. Rather
a promise of being strange, of being weirdly communicative. It was this
intrigue that kept her drawing to the book every now and then. And she would
find, at times, that she is stuck on the page she has last read. She can’t turn
over to the next one at HER will, as if the book had a mood of its own, and it
would talk to her when IT felt like. She used to get scared at first. What if
the book didn’t let her see the next page? Not after two hours, not after a
week, never? And then she sensed that promise. It will talk to her. Maybe after
two hours, after a week, she wouldn’t know, but it will. And when it does, she
gets to know. Whether she is in class, being taught the randomness of
variables, or in the bathroom, or in the church, alone with her smoky
companions, or in the balcony, smoking—she always feels the next page coming
alive. And then she secretly takes it out of her bag, carefully veiling it from
the curious and often judgmental eyes, and starts reading. And stops, whenever
the book wants so. She would shout at it sometimes. Why does SHE have to go by
the command of a lifeless book with a calendar cover? And in one hot summer
night, when the one thirty second page refused to open, and without any hint,
and that too when she was on a really interesting paragraph, she lost her
patience and threw the book at the wall. The binding came loose. She ran,
swearing that she’d never do so again, and picked it up. The pages were
scattered. Randomly. She began arranging them. And she couldn’t resist peeping
into the next page.
It was empty. So was the one thirty third page. And all the
others after them. They were yet to be written. All she could do now was wait.
---
They were building a bridge over the Varsai, the Company
People. The design came from the Kingdom, and Alex and a hundred others were
sent to Salempore to oversee the mechanics on field. That’s what he did, he
looked blankly at the meandering river practically flushing out the
civilisation’s waste, and yet being called the holiest, a river which provided
the water to purify the Mandirs of
those bhaktas who didn’t hesitate to
take a dump by it when they felt like. He stared at the other bank of the
mighty Varsai, and realised, it was a distance which tons of steel cannot
bridge.
On a really sunny Sunday, Alex went to the church. The only
church in this oriental city dotted with old mosques and older temples. It was
not the usual Mass hour, and the large prayer hall was frightfully quiet. Alex
took seat in the third pew, and stared at the oil painting hanging from the
wall to his left. It seemed so familiar, and yet clearly distinct. This was
much more Oriental, the sword was tulwar,
the water ewer was a spittoon, and the twelve wise men looked at a bit Indian
as well. It was a replica of “The Last Supper”. And the church reminded him of
a home he never had. Alex looked at Jesus in the eyes. “I wish a good evening
to you, Mr. Christ,” he said. “It occurs to me that today is a bit sunny. A bit
too sunny, I should say. Is it possible for you to do anything about it, Sir?
What I mean to say is that, you know, a few clouds from here and there, a
little breeze and perhaps a shower too? Then again, you should not be bothered
about all these. Not from me, at least. I acknowledge the fact that I have not
paid any visit to you for long, Sir… Never to be more precise. I was wondering,
whether you are not mad at me, or is it that there is verity in my
apprehension? Sir, you see I’ve been drifting lately, I presume you know of
that. Of course you do, you’re God! Please forgive my disrespect, dear Lord. Gustakhi maaf ho. So… Ummm… How do
you like this city, Salempore?” “It has turned out, it is not quite as I had
imagined. The inhabitants of this place are nice. When they run out of our
English vocabulary, they grace the silence with their smile. They eat
vegetables, unknown to me, and perhaps to you too. And the spices…” “No Sir,
there is no need to mind all these… This is perhaps not the reason I was here.
I don’t know why I was here my Lord. I hope you do. I can’t find it if I don’t
know what to look for, can I?”
The light dimmed in the church. Shadows grew longer. Alex
smelled a presence in the prayer hall. The candles flickered. The gong on the
church tower resonated. The sound came from beneath the earth. Four times. Alex
stood up, and took a long walk down the aisle. When he reached the door, all
his blurs from moments ago blew away along with the dry leaves of the ancient
banyan beside the church. Clouds were marching in from the banks of Varsai. It
was about to rain. Three noisy naked kids ran across the Warehouse Road towards
the river. “Ka-aa-al-bo-oo-oi-sha-aa-khi-iiii,” they announced the victory.
---
Not a word since morning. She was in the middle of a sentence
when she fell asleep last night. She woke up with her face buried in the book,
drooling on the two hundred and eleventh page. “May be I am saying all this
because I’m drunk, but…” But what? Oh! Why did she have to fall asleep? Now she
won’t know the rest of the confession! Not at least for the next few hours, and
it’s almost day break now! Imagine how she spent the day with an anxious
anticipation in her stomach! Is this what they call butterflies?
Empty pages. The rest of the story was precariously hanging
around a doubtful conjunction. “But…” The plot, much like her, was lost in the
centre of a seven point crossing. The doubt amplified and multiplied in her
mind for the whole day. She couldn’t decide between the cupboard full of
dresses and ended up wearing a white one with flowers printed on it. The three
minutes of four o’clock rain caught her off guard, and pointed out the error.
Bad decision. Now everyone gets a peek at her black brassier through the wet
white shirt. It clung to her like the phantom clouds did. Like moss, growing on
her shoulder, creeping through her neck, whispering in her ear. She attempted
to shrug them off, dust them with her handkerchief. They wouldn’t go. Not like
this. She chose to ignore their presence, and marched into the exam hall. Wrong
hall.
Three hours. A small co-ordinating conjunction pinned her to
the wall. She was exhausted after a doubtful test. Faces blurred, voices
scrambled. The moss was conquering her tongue and forcing their way in through
the ears. They were hungry. She threw her bag on a corner of the bed and closed
the door behind her. A three inch white stick came out of her jeans pocket. The
nagging whispers burst out in screams. She lit the cigarette, and watched the
moss feed. They’ll rest for a while now. So will she.
The knocks weren’t discrete. In fact, they were too loud for
her to pretend she didn’t hear them. She rose from the lag and unbolted the
door. She knew exactly who was on the other side. “I am sorry,” he said, “I am
so sorry… I shouldn’t have…” He wasn’t sure who he was talking to. She sure did
look like the one he came in to apologise, but- Anyway, he thought his apology
worked. On any other day, he would have faced a flurry of choicest profanities,
well directed sarcasms and even a few desperate swats which he used to dodge
with the agility of mosquitoes. So, it was safe to assume from the absence of
the routine violence that – or was it? He was hesitant. Something was
definitely off. That look in her eyes, what was it? He held her face with his
hands and their foreheads touched. Normally, she'd come the other halfway to
greet his lips, but – He waited for a tense second and decided to go for it.
Her lips were cold. He could smell nicotine, and something else. Something
ominous. And why was she still looking at him with that gaze of a dead fish?
What was in that look? Disgust? He pressed his lips against hers, in vain
search of response. The look changed its colour. Was it abhor now?
Disregarding, he meekly attempted to dig a little deep. She snapped. She
slapped. She pushed him away. He was too shocked to react. As he made his way
out through the dark stairs, he realised he was wrong. Her look? It was of
horror.
Yet another night of wet pillows. She couldn’t believe what
had happened. He was breathing greenish fumes. His face was bony. His touch was
pricking. And he smelled like something in rot. The clouds had conquered him.
Or was it her? Was she the one under a dark spell? She couldn’t think anymore.
She was drowning in sobs when she heard it. The book has returned. She zipped
open her navy blue bag and took it out. She didn’t need pagemark to remember
where she was.
“- but I love you.” The moss sublimed away. The wild weeds
that had gripped her leg, loosened. And the clouds disappeared in the strong
Varsai wind.
---
“A letter for you!” Alexander James stopped fiddling with the
steamed rice and mashed potato on the banana leaf and stared at the bearer. He
had learnt to eat with his fingers. Was it fun? Pouring gravy and vegetables
over rice, running fingers through it and then putting a handful of the soaked
rice into the mouth. A small, thin, green chilli sitting inadvertently on one
side, discussing life with a piece of sliced lemon and a bit of salt. A nine
inch fish, crowned with coriander leaves, lying half submerged in the bowl full
of gravy, with its head sticking out. And an ever-smiling cook standing by the
door just for a nod of appreciation. But now, a puzzle in a white envelope
ruined his appetite. “A letter! For me?” The cook nodded. Alex lifted the heavy
brass glass of water, and washed his hand on the brass bowl kept for the
purpose. Somewhere a cat smiled.
An East India Company seal decorated the envelope. Alex
sighed. More instructions, explanations. More numbers and diagrams.
Architecture was something Alexander loved to do. It was a perfect blend of
aesthetics and utility, he thought. But his job here in Salempore wasn’t
exactly designing. He had to comply with orders, and ensure the blueprint was
implemented precisely. Often, he would stare at the one dimensional monster on
the chart and sketch some modifications, to make it stronger, adding elegance.
But he was a low pay scale employee, a young lad of twenty four. Who would
listen to him?
The white envelope with the company seal found a corner on the
mahogany table by the window. It was evidently not the priority of the
receiver. He took out his leather bound book instead. And dipped his long sleek
ebony pen into the inkpot. A week since he had written anything. A week since
he had knocked on his door on the East Circular Road, stinking of whiskey, and
went straight up to his room and lit the candle not before the fourteenth
matchstick, and wrote something which he thought he might regret. He didn’t.
But he didn’t dare to write something for the whole week. As if he would have
to explain whatever he had written, to the reader. But there wasn’t any, was
there? Not yet.
Alex was pouring all his secrets into the pages. Not exactly a
diary, it wasn’t. He invented characters and made them do whatever he liked. He
imagined situations and sometimes it would be difficult for himself to make out
the real ones from the fantasies. And all along, if someone cared to know about
him, he would find striking resemblances between his characters and himself,
his life. Alexander James was telling a story, and he was hoping that someday,
someone would listen to him.
---
Errors kept repeating. A left-out grocery item, an unpaid
bill, a broken China clay cup, flunked tests and gross mistakes of all sort.
Her father never failed to show his disappointment, her mother would admonish
her, with a faint hope that may be she would listen. The moss would grow denser
thicker, the clouds would howl into her ears as she put enormous effort to
withhold tears. Then at night, her bag would glow, and she would plunge into
the words. And smile and laugh and grin and smirk and giggle and turn to the
next page.
And she would avoid him to the extent of denying his
existence. She wouldn’t answer the phone, pretend to be busy when he pleaded to
meet and put on an expressionless mask if, by some miscalculation (or by his
perseverance,) they bumped into each other. This ailed her, because she
couldn’t find a reason strong enough to tell him to go away. Or maybe, she herself
was too weak to do so. It will stir things a lot anyway… He would be
persuasive, she would be evasive, friends would come to know in a matter of
minutes and ask all sort of stupid questions, some of them would show sympathy
and the whole mess would turn a lot worse. Also, she thought, he had been with
him for eight years now, a lot of memories would be unearthed if…
But for how long? How long she seek asylum in the book? It had
to end somewhere, someday! And how long can she keep him away? She knew that
eventually he would penetrate her defensive wall, much like he did some eight
years ago. Nevertheless, she decided to not decide, to postpone the
confrontation to the brink of the inevitable apocalypse. Till then she’d leave
it all to fate which, unfortunately, was showing no sign of being on her side.
On her side, always, was the navy blue denim bag. Inside of it was unexplored
terrain. The availability of any particular object that once entered the dark
room through the zip, followed the Uncertainty Principle forwarded by a certain
Mr. Heisenberg. You have to touch and feel and be familiar with the object you
are looking for to successfully pick it out in less than eight attempts. Pens
with caps, decapitated pens, eye drops, antacids, handkerchiefs, keys, ticket
stubs, an empty purse (because all the cash were in her pocket and the clinking
coins sunk at the bottom of the bag,) cigarettes, paper, wrapped weed, tablets
and capsules and million tiny things. A not so tiny book had lately become a
permanent resident of the navy blue bag. And it had a hilarious sense of
timing. It would ping her just as she introduced herself to the panel of
grey-haired, wrinkle-faced professors waiting to pounce on her with
out-of-context questions and to point out miniscule errors in her thesis
defence seminar. It would spring to life when she still had two thirds of her
dinner left and “I’m full,’ wouldn’t satisfy her mother. It would cry out
almost audibly in the Church prayer hall, in the crowded bus with a fat lady
squeezing her against the stinking conductor, while she’s taking a very urgent
dump in a nearby shopping mall loo (because the college lavatories aren’t clean
enough,) and when the three twenty ninth page announced its arrival, she was in
a cab, alone. She was returning from a theatre in Free School Street, where one
of her friends was a cast of a macabre play they called The Last March, and wasn’t exactly sure where she was. This
happened a lot, she wasn’t well versed with the streets and the lanes of
Salempore, and cabbies had never let her down, so far. So she unsuspectingly
relied on this young taxi driver and concentrated (or rather embraced the
distraction,) on the book. Seventeen pages later, she realised that they had
been travelling long enough to have reached familiar boundary, but given her
history of direction sense, she chose not to bug the driver. However, merely
after eleven more pages, the cab slowed down, and the cabby shocked her by
saying that he was lost. “So am I,’ she said to herself, but blasted out on the
young man anyway. “What sort of a cabbie are you? You’re doing this on purpose,
aren’t you? I now your kind…” her voice faded out. They were parked outside a
pre-historic gateway. The large boundary walls were worn out, remastered, and
worn out again. The gate had a morose appearance in the dusk, and beyond it, in
between trees and shrubs, she could see gothic silhouettes of a million shapes
and sizes. “What are these? What is this place?” “Saheb der gorosthan,” the
cabbie pointed out a marble name-plate on the wall. “South Park Street
Cemetery,” it said, “1706-1914”.
---
“Do you miss home? You must be missing home, I can tell… Your
mother, she’s worried about you, whether you are eating properly, is your
headache bothering you… Your father is anxious too, he just doesn’t show it as
much… Your sister is hoping for a valuable gift from the Orient. Isn’t it?”
asked the landlady. The tropical sun had painted him a shade darker. The
labourers and chowkidaars and dokan-wallahs and juri-gari-drivers had
almost perfected his Bengali vocabulary. But long before he had learnt how to
say, “I have no bloody clue what you’re trying to say, because I don’t know
your language,” his fat landlady in her 60s used to visit him often, rarely to
remind him of the due rent (because he was always punctual on principle,) but
she felt a filial need to check upon the kid from Bilet, who stayed alone upstairs, away from his home and family,
and had that dark, mysterious, saddening aura about him. She used to smile and
talk to him, and it was the affection in her tone that Alex could recognise.
But now Alexander didn’t need the help of Mansoor Chacha, the
cook, to decipher her words. And yet he had that same look in his eyes. Family
is a vague concept to him. Home, for him, is wherever he sleeps at night. He
would listen to anyone who had something to say, not necessarily to him, and he
would talk to his book. The landlady’s question reminded him of all those
people who had been kind to him. The coffee brewer in Cairo, who was also his
cabin-mate in the trip from Turkey to Egypt, he remembered, gave him a room in
his attic, when he turned blue in yellow fever, a mosquito gifted him in the
city of Angora. The childless couple took good care of the ailing architect.
The wife fed him slices of pita bread dipped in chilli pickles and mustard
sauce, and scorned when he attempted to move to the veranda to have a look at the shabby streets and loud bazaars where everyone was negotiating
the prices of everything. He would see donkey carts bring in jute baskets full
of coffee beans. People came to Cairo to cure their lungs from tuberculosis, he
was told. The dry wind filtered by the yellow sands of the Sahara worked like
magic on his yellow fever as well. As it turned out, the caffeine merchant had
never known the presence of an Oriental beverage called tea. He took the first
sip of the dark red liquid made from grounded leaves Alexander bought a while
ago from an East India Company employee en route home, with much scepticism. He
finished the cup silently and asked Alex to leave at once. The Devil’s Drink, apparently, was intended
to drive him out of business.
Yes, Alex could call them family. Mansoor Chacha with his paan stained teeth, isn’t he the family
as well? The landlady, still waiting for an answer while Alex is contemplating,
she’s family too. So is the old fisherman of Ural, who provided Alex a shelter
during the great Russian winter. Old man Oleg and his wolf sized hound Viktor
kept him warm with the fur coats, alpine fire, fat oil lamps and bear hugs of
their friendship. Alex shivered in the steaming heat of Salempore just
recalling the white shiny horizon of the tiny Russian village on the Ural
River.
Alex smiled at the landlady, and nodded. Even after a year, he
still can’t pronounce her name properly. “Well, take care son,” she said. “Go visit
your desher bari when you find time…” He could hear the loud footsteps descend
to the ground floor, and then a squeak of the wooden door. He lifted himself from
the easy-chair, and bolted his door, and flung open the Southside window. A
gust of the Varsai air was waiting outside, and now they pounced upon him. It
fluttered through all the papers on the adjacent mahogany table. The leather
bound book came out from the bottom drawer and the pen, after a little
hide-n-seek surrendered from underneath a chart paper of blue prints. Alex
needed to talk to someone.
---
She couldn’t wipe out the image of an ancient cemetery right
in the heart of a modern city from her eyes. It didn’t belong there. Not there,
sandwiched between the high school and the twenty-two story building under
construction. And a cobbler in front of it, relaxing on the footpath in front
of the guardian wall. Does it even exist? She was perplexed. Her father had
just heard a mention of it somewhere, in some article. Mother was furious right
away. What do you have to do with a cemetery? A dirty place with dying people!
Peek into any corner, and you’d find anti-socials, doing drugs. Do you have any
idea how unsafe these places are?” Her room was not any safer, she thought, and
if her mother was keen enough to peek at certain places in her room, she’ll
find drugs there too. She would have asked her friends at college, but the city
to them is a mesh with shopping malls and restaurants at the nodes. With a
little hesitation, she questioned him, for he claimed to be an anti-consumerist
and whatever. He frowned. “Cemetery? What are your plans? Who feeds you these
ideas?” This was not the first time. The book she was reading, was in love with
Salempore, and it had this urge in it to make her aware of the enigmas of the
city she lives in. And whenever she got overwhelmed, she tended to discuss with
her boyfriend. And every time she met the same reactions.
“Who tells you such stories? How did you know the Chinese
originally settled in Trinity-bazaar
and not China Town (And I don’t?) And
this Shinghi Ghat on the Varsai…
You’ve been going on about the evening aarti
like you’ve been there. Who took you there?”
“The book I’ve been reading…”
“What book? Who gave it to you? (I know I didn’t. I certainly
talk about reading, but…)
“I fou- I bought it. From an old books store.”
“Give it to me. I’ll read it.”
“No!”
“What’s with this book and you? You seem so different these
days. So distant. Where have you gone? Where are you?”
Wrong question. When is she? She is in the same good old Salempore,
with a leather bound book. She is in the nineteenth century. And her tram is
being drawn by two incredibly well bred horses. And the massive Varsai hasn’t
yet been bridged by tons of steel. Soldiers in khaki uniforms cross the river
through the temporary platoon bridge. And a twenty four year old chap sits near
the pulley, overlooking the construction, and contemplates.
“I am sorry.” He wouldn’t understand, she knew. She kissed him
on his beardy cheek, and smiled. No, the clouds don’t interfere much these
days. The moss stays locked in her socks. Yes, she is happy.
---
Architects love arches and arcs. And symmetry too. Varsai was
going to be stringed by a symmetrical archetype bridge pretty soon. There would
be a long base supported by seven columns hung on a pair of semi-circular wings
on either side. It was going to be grand. Spectacular. “And probably a
failure,” Alex told himself. The pillars would have to negotiate the ever
persistent under current of the Varsai. Yes they were strong enough in paper,
but this river, it has eroded mountains in its course, made its way through all
the obstacles the Indian plain tested it with. Seven iron columns? The Varsai
has already set an expiry date to it.
The ever busy giant mechanical toys toil day and night like
genies from a dozen of Aladdin’s lamps, piling on neatly ordered metal
segments. Metals of every nature, weight, volume, shape were hitting, touching,
frictioning against other metals of every other possible variances. The whole
yard was a concert of such metallic sounds. Heavy metals. Loud, lifeless.
People got used to it, money matters. Alex used cotton plugs
and a late night dose of the Esraaj
and the Tabla flowing in from some
temple somewhere. He even remembers the tune of a couple, he can distinguish
between the devotional bhajans and
the melancholic thumris. Once he had
come across the enigmatic seductress living a few blocks away from his
residence, while she was peeking out of her paalki
and smiling quite dangerously at his next door neighbour. Mansoor Chacha had
mentioned her before, apparently she had this amazing voice, with that
appropriate amount of the elixir that kept her clients drawing towards her like
the Shyama-poka to the burning lamp.
Evidently, not everyone could afford her. A few moments later, Alex witnessed a
domestic war resulting in a rare defeat of the patriarch. The wife kicked the
drunk babu out, she was not willing
to share her man with a Bai-ji, however well she sings.
Alex sighed. He could make a better blue-print of the bridge.
But there is not enough time. They would start installing the pillars in a
week. He neatly folded the papers into squares. And walked off into Salempore.
He left the Sailor’s settlements behind him and followed the river. The older
Salempore. Armenians arrived here much before the British did. They built a
church, a few dwellers settled. Babu Motilal Sheel arranged a Ghat for them. It was quiet in the late
afternoon. The huge banyan leaned into the water, and provided a nice seat for
him. The Varsai had taken a turn to the left a few hundred yards from the
Armenian Ghat, right where the Varsai
was to be bridged. The site had a distant view from here. A different perspective.
Alex could close his eyes and imagine the megastructure. Not at all like it was
drawn in the plan. Alexander James took out his drawing tools. He was going to
plan his own bridge.
---
“You didn’t know THIS? REALLY?”
She was visibly embarrassed. She had very inadvertently asked
her father whether they had to cross the first Varsai Bridge to get to the
Grand Central Railway Station. She had vaguely assumed that it was located in
the East Bank, with Salempore.
“Well, we do have the second one, but the first one is much
nearer. In any case you’d HAVE to cross the Varsai to get to Grand Central from
Salempore! It’s on the West side, Salempore is in the East! How can you not
know that?
She made a few half attempts to speak up for herself, to
defend why it was okay not knowing the key whereabouts of her city, but all she
managed to do was pout and leave the room with a well-aimed glance at her
father smirking beneath his moustache. She knew with a fair degree of certainty
that this is not the last time she was going to be digged at with this topic.
All upcoming family and friends packages would definitely commence with, “Do we
have to cross the first Varsai Bridge to get to Grand Central?” It was going to
be a ready-made joke.
She didn’t mind. She might not know the street names and shortest
routes between places, not yet, but she knows stories about them. Stories they don’t know. Nobody else does. So
when she paid the cab off the Betancourt Square (although it’s a circle,) and
strolled past the Nawab Bagh Cricket Stadium into the shabby alley behind a
mosque with surma-eyed people in
white Fez hats and strong Atar
perfumes selling magical tabijes and madulies, nothing seemed unfamiliar to
her. She didn’t even have to ask someone for the subtle left turn that led her
to the white Armenian Church with a giant clock in its tower almost concealed
by the old shops. She walked into a courtyard with a large contrast to the rush
outside. There was a silence looming. A few, three or four people, here and
there. A lot of tombs in the ground, faded, fading names on them. Blackened,
murky oil murals, obscure Aramaic markings on a wall. She felt them with her
fingertips.
“I have a
question for you, O Lord
Ask
yourself, He replied
For you
have the answer, only you do,
The
answer you long denied…”
An old man came out from the darkness inside the church. Wrinkly
face, squinting eyes, no glasses he observed the girl translating an ancient
Aramaic prayer.
“Who are you?” he asked.
She smiled, “There used to be a mahogany door somewhere behind
the church, it was supposed to lead to the –“
“Armenian
Ghat. Yes. The wall grew old, little
woman, it turned to dust a decade ago, you can see the stairs, and they are
still there.”
“So is
the grandfather banyan. Kissing the Varsai.”
“Who ARE
you?” Was his voice shaky solely because of his age?
“You can
see the first Varsai Bridge from here!” She exclaimed. “The whole span of it!
It’s beautiful!”
“It is.
Isn’t it? Who are you, dear?”
“I just
live in the city. I am living in the city for now.”
“You
shouldn’t roam about alone in these parts, you know, it’s not safe…”
“I am not-- Not alone… I have company…” she smiled again, and
kept staring at the distant, shining, century-old bridge on the Varsai.
---
Powerful are those, who can maintain a straight face without a
hint of any expression whatsoever, somebody once said.
Alex silently cursed the Chief Architect and Planning
Commissioner of the East India Company. There was no clue to any decision either
way that he could read in his face. When he approached the bulky man with huge
sideburns with his blue-prints, he expected an outrage. Something more in the
line of, “You are implying that our plans are faulty? How dare you? The best of
our architects have toiled relentlessly for this…” Not even a frown did he
receive. He was asked to wait, while the chart papers with straight lines and
arcs and calculations of all sorts were being reviewed. That was twenty three
hours earlier. A little more than a million gallons of water has flown through
the Varsai under the yet to be built bridge since then.
A reasonable restlessness grabbed Alex. His fat master was
still nibbling at a piece of good looking paper with a pen made of polished buffalo
horn and with a nib made of iridium. Alex was summoned in his office a quarter
of an hour ago. He had had seven gulps of water since. He was reaching out for
the earthen water pot the eighth time, when the Chief of Architecture looked
up. There was a pause. An awkward silence Alex hated. He froze with his left
hand stretched out, as if he was caught stealing. A sarcastic smile appeared
underneath the heavy moustache. “Do you drink only water?” Alex pulled his hand in. A large mass of flesh and fat
stood up with some difficulty as the chair creaked, and headed for a wooden
cabinet. Two crystal glasses and a crystal bottle with a dark liquid came out.
Scotch Whiskey.
The new plan needed less material, less time, and hence lesser
cost. And of course, as explained meticulously by the young architect from
Somerset, was expected to have more longevity. And elegance. The Company
praised of him highly, gave him a raise of a few pounds. Apparently, the Queen
was almost going to confer upon him the Knighthood, but he was so young! The
construction was to start soon, the whole city witnessed a new tide of
business. More and more Chinese cobblers and dentists with pocket full of
opium, Afghan Kabuliwalahs with thick smoky beards and bag full of dry fruits,
Africans with curly hair and ever-surprised eyes with nothing in their pockets crowded the dock and the railway stations,
and the city started growing stranger and stranger. What’s one more stranger in
that lot? What’s one less stranger cost? Except that Alex wasn’t a stranger
anymore.
---
A sudden realisation dawned on her one morning, when she was
re-reading the past chapters, and smiling to herself. The realisation, however,
ripped her of that smile. There were only a few pages left in the book. Very
few. A dozen, maybe. Fourteen, she counted. Fourteen pages left, then it ends.
What next? The lack of an answer, the absence of a promise frightened her. A
tear rolled down her left cheek and landed on a page. The ink didn’t smudge.
“Insensitive,” she grumbled, and wiped her eyes. What was that faint droning
sound? Can you hear that? Are those clouds back? She needs a smoke…
The book came alive before she could find one. She grabbed her
lunchbox and stormed out. Two slices of bread, she watched while it was being
packed earlier, and an apple. As if she’s going to eat that holy bread or the
forbidden fruit! Her mother need not know that, though. For now, she’s on a
tour, to make the most of the fortnight left.
For hours that day, and the days that followed, Salempore
witnessed a short, chubby girl combing the city, with a black book in her
hands, searching for something. She would often fumble while crossing the road,
and reach out for a hand, find the book instead and then shakily manage to get
to the other side. She’d scratch the leather cover like its itching, when she
got excited. Excited to see somethings in the city haven’t changed at all! The
potters of Kumordanga still wrestle with the clay and their life, as they
plaster the Varsai silt on the inner structure of hay, and with subtle, skilful
touches and immense patience moulds the larger than life clay models of the
Goddess. That Chinese eating house behind the inconspicuous monastery in
Trinity Bazaar where there are paintings of dragons and strange Chinese
mythological creatures on the wall, and that peculiar zodiac. It was still the
year of the Tiger, as it was in 1914, when a young man got acquainted and fell
in love with a city lost in the carnival of opportunist strangers, piling on
like ants on a sugar cube to scrounge whatever remains, and resurrected a
little hope, may be not everyone is here to take.
She was tired, yet a strange sense of fulfillment infused her,
as she leaned against the railing of the ferry in spite of the preventive looks
from some of her elder co-passengers. Not all of them meant well, a lot of them
bore the “I wish I could grab you bit I can’t, so I am going to stare instead’
glasses, but today she didn’t care. The ferry moved sluggishly towards the
other shore leaving a prominent trajectory in the dirty green Varsai. The
floating air of a strange familiar smell touched her, caressed her. Kissed her
cheeks, eyes; went around her neck, peeping dangerously at certain sensitivities.
It didn’t leave her, that scent. Followed her as she walked all the way along the
Varsai Bridge, not even in the last seat of the crowded mini-bus, where it
wrapped itself around her, tickling her senses. It faded though, as she set
foot in her house.
“Where had you been? You never actually went to college! Where
did you go?” Her mother knew everything. That she had barely chewed the bread
while she was hurrying through the by-lanes of Mirza Ghalib Street, that the
apple was lying somewhere in the vicinity of Rafi Ahmed Kidwai Road with the
sticker still on, that something was going on. Did she know, there were just
eight pages left?
---
Alexander James was no longer a supervisor anymore. He was an
Assistant to the Chief Architect now, and the planner. The plan was done. Some
other chap from Glasgow was appointed to look after the implementation of the
fresh blueprint. Alex was proud of himself. He was leaving an indelible mark in
a city he had set foot in, for the first time. Salempore would not be just
another city he had traversed on his way… This one, he has conquered. Or is it
that the city has conquered him? For why else would he feel a tad bit homesick
for a city he had spent eight months in, as the giant vessel left the Salempore
Port a little after midday?
Mansoor Chacha had packed some lunch for him and wiped his
tears with his gamchcha. The landlady
went on and on about how he was like his son, and refused to take the pending
rent from him. Alex stood awkwardly, drenched in the raining sentiments. He
lacked the gift of being emotionally overwhelmed, or appreciating the same. He
feared attachment. So, when they required to build a cantilever somewhere in
Baltimore, and Chief Architect W B McMillan recommended him, though mostly
because he himself wanted to be remembered associated with bridging the Varsai
and bag a Knighthood, if possible, he accepted it readily.
Alex had not much time to pack and not a big trunk to fill. He
left out all that was significant, all those meaningful, all strings attached.
In the winter of a tropical city, Alexander James decided to take one last look
at Salempore, his beloved. He passed through the bazaars and muhallas
unnoticed, he strolled through the bank of the Varsai mingled with the crowd,
like just another stranger. And in an hour, the wanderer stood in front of the
church, the only church in the Oriental city dotted with temples and mosques.
He peeked into the prayer hall, “I came to bid farewell, Lord, see you again,
someplace else…” And then he continued on through the courtyard, into the
cemetery behind the church. Obelisks and Gregorian and Gothic tombstones of
mariners and magistrates and all those who lost their life far away from their
home in this city. Who knows how far his fate will take, his story would have
an ending how far away from his home?
Banyans and Peepals
provided a roof to the cool, dark cemetery. Diffused sunlight slipped in
scarcely. Alex chose a tomb with a dome, and sat on the base where lied a
certain Marco Polo, and started on the last page of his book, which he chose to
leave behind.
“You and I have spoken all these words…”
---
“You and I have spoken all these words, but for the way we
have to go, words are no preparation. I have one small drop of knowing in my
soul. Let it dissolve in your ocean,” said a wise Persian poet, some eight
centuries ago. Eight months ago, something very lifeless acquainted us. Eight
months, several lines and even more between the lines, a couple thousand miles,
some kind strangers, three hundred and twenty pegs and a fairy-tale later, here
we are…”
There she was, in the South Park Street Cemetery, sitting on
the tomb of Marco Polo, talking to a boy a little, may be a century, older than
him, trying to convince him to stay, even if for a few more pages. The boy was
silent. So was Marco Polo, in his grave.
The crimson sun dissolved in the silver Varsai in some
distance. The caretaker asked her to leave, it was closing time. She walked out
the alley in small, slow, heavy steps. She walked past the ruined church, the
abandoned warehouses, accompanied by howling clouds and screaming mosses all
over her. She walked right to the middle of the first bridge on Varsai. The
pages of a nameless book in a calendar cover fluttered in the East wind. They
were empty. Four hundred pages left! The girl cried as she was laughing aloud.
It was the start of a new book.
No comments:
Post a Comment