Sudden Changes

If it hadn’t been for her hair, she could have been almost happy.

Almost, because everything about her was almost.

Almost pretty.

Almost educated.

Almost cured.

She was also almost…twenty.

But in her head the monster that sat there and poked fun at her hair was 6 and a half years old.

The bath in the bucket was a bucket bath. She had 6 bucket baths a day. Alltogether. Each took 20 minutes. Alltogether took 120 minutes. She knew that much maths. She also knew that 120 minutes of bucketbath all at one time meant anger, tears and a scolding. She preferred to postpone those three known things. At such times she added 20 minutes of standing and whipping her hair. Take the towel and twist it. Raise your arms above your head. Bring the twisted towel along with your arms – down. Whip the hair. It makes a snapping sound and water flies. Off. Hair dries. Slowly. Next. Take your head and jerk it forward from the neck, making sure your still-wet hair follows, crossing over and tumbling on to the other side of your face. Front. Result: wet hair hangs from your face to your toes, bending your back with its weight. All the time, the twisted towel waits. Whip the hair from the front. Thwack-slap. That sound is like Bashonti punishing the floor. How she hits it with her mother’s sari, twisted like this towel, jhoop-jhaap! She’s angry, Bashonti, to sit on the bathroom floor and wash their discarded clothes. Why me, Bashonti thinks.

Why not, Chhobi thinks. The 20 added minutes are gone. What’s left? Mum-mum’s voice. Calling.

Chhobi drops the towel on the wet floor. Bashonti can punish it for being there. Her frock is hanging from a nail on the door. She picks it up and slips it over her head. Problem. The hair still covers her face. The frock will not slip down over the hair. She opens the door and says

Ma.

Mum-mum is waiting outside as if she wants to go to the bathroom next. She doesn’t, really. She wants to help Chhobi take out her hair from the front of her dress and hold it on top while Chhobi’s arms twist and wriggle to get the frock sleeves in and the frock hips on. Chhobi has remembered to put on her undergarment. The frock slips and falls, relieved. The bunched-up hair falls from Mum-mum’s hand and lands on Chhobi’s back, relieved.

It is a moment.

Chhobi has had her bath, whipped her hair and worn her frock.

It is now eleven o’clock.

Mum-mum doesn’t give her tears, anger or a scolding. Chhobi feels almosthappy. She looks down at her long creamy-white arms which are standing, idle, like her. Almosthappy becomes totallyunhappy. It’s the arm hair that does it. Why does she, a girl, have arm hair, like a man? Normally they stand up straight and then wave about when the fan blows. They’re mean to her. Now they’re lying down flat, with the wet she hasn’t wiped, and pretending to be good. They all follow the same direction, curved. An army of arm hairs, lying down and pretending to be not there. Only, they’ll soon jump up and scream “ATTAAACK!” like in Border, the movie. God has punished her with arm hair and leg hair and only Mum-mum and she knows – chest hair. Not like Baba’s which are round and curly and half-white sticking out of his half-white genji. No, hers are fine and wavy.

She sticks both her arms behind her. She wants to be with no arms for now. Don’t look now. Her frock is only till her knees. She sits down straight on her knees like praying. Her legs are folded under her, her arms are folded behind. Now no one can see.

Mum-mum wants her to get off the floor. She says what are you doing it’s dirty. Mum-mum is not good at getting Chhobi off the floor. Chhaya is.

Chhaya is Chhobi’s elder sister. She is like a chhaya, Chhobi thinks, lovingly looking up at the cool dark face that is looking down from the doorway of their room. Hers and mine. Chhaya’s eyes are like coming into a shady room from the hot, hot sun. Under her shady roomy eyes are two deep and hollow marks. She can keep looking and looking.

Chhaya knows better than to give Chhobi her hand. She kneels down beside her kneeling sister and holding her shoulders firmly she gets up. Chhobi comes along with the getting up. That simple.

Chhaya sits Chhobi on the bed and lets go of her shoulders. She keeps a comb on Chhobi’s pillow and moves, softly, to her table. Their table. Only Chhobi doesn’t study there anymore. She doesn’t study anywhere anymore. She studies the comb on the pillow. It’s dark pink. Half of it is thick, the other half of it is thin. The comb wants to bite her hair. She unlocks her arms. Right arm picks up the comb wonderingly. Left arm tangles with her hair. Wet still. She snaps the tangles with her left hand and starts to comb her hair with her right. Her eyes are on Chhaya’s back.

Mum-mum’s voice destroys the room. It is weepy and untidy. Mum-mum wants her to eat breakfast. Why does Mum-mum want so much from her?

Chhaya’s kind and gentle voice says

Jao, Chhobi. Eat and come.

Chhaya wants good things for her.

She will eat and come.

On a big steel plate, balls of rice are waiting. She doesn’t count. She knows she will eat only half and Mum-mum will weep and eat the other. Balls of rice are for children. Why does Mum-mum think she’s a child?

Chhobi’s hands dangle on either side of the chair. The blue table doesn’t shine anymore. It’s got little scratches on it and 3 light-brown rings like light-brown bangles lying at one end. Teacups that sat in saucers holding slightly spilt-over tea. Teacups now spilling more tea on to saucers and the saucers being sipped. Loud slurpy noises, while quickly-emptying teacups sat quietly on the blue table. Leaving brown rings for her to know: here her family took their morning tea. While in her room on her bed she, Chhobi, slept the sleep of the fat orange pill every bedtime.

Mum-mum’s hand was curling towards her mouth holding a little white ball. Aah – the rice. The ball took the place of her thinking Aah and was in her mouth. Mm. It was nice. What was it? Yes. Potatoes and butter and salt. Mashed up nice and mashy. Once Mum-mum had tried to be clever and had mashed up a hard-boiled egg into the potatoes and butter and salt. She was so clever, even the little yellow flecks didn’t show. In her mouth they did. The taste just like a burp. She spat it out immediately, in front of MeetaMashi from downstairs, and then Mum-mum didn’t look so clever. After that she had never tried. Good.

Second ball third ball fourth ball finish.

Eh ki? Don’t want more?

She shook her head, full, like her mouth.

How will it do if you keep on like this?

She got up and went to her room and lay down fast.

Her mouth hadn’t finished chewing.

She heard Mum-mum say

God! What have I done that this should be my fate!

Mum-mum was very dramatic.

…

Chhaya felt exhausted.

Exhaustion: acute weakness or fatigue, possible cause, hypoglycemia.

That’s what the medical definition was.

The living definition was her.

She wouldn’t have said that aloud to anyone, not even to herself. Such thoughts were detrimental. She had a goal – her MD exams in a month’s time. She had to clear that, then, at least, there’d be time.

Time. She had so little. Her sister had so much.

Her weariness doubled back on her with a resounding thump.

Ma was expressing her sorrow out loud. She should go and comfort her. Say Ma it’s okay. The sedatives are making her sluggish. She needs to sleep. It’s okay if she eats less, she eats as much as her body needs. Her body, Ma. That intricate moving mass of tissue and nerve and muscle and bone. I study it, Ma. It’s okay.

Lies.

A stranger’s body was okay. A body in the OT. A body under observation and copious mental note-taking. A case. A patient. A slab from the morgue. All nauseating. But okay.

This body belonged to her sister. What was wrong with it started in the brain and worked all the way down. Everywhere. She, the doctor-soon-to-be, felt only terror when confronted by it, her sister’s unnamed ailment. Her medical books turned blank and slippery when she scanned them for answers. Not one had anything to say. Not one of her revered tutors at Calcutta Medical College had anything to say. Anything more meaningful than: Hmmm… very un-usual case. Have you dis-cussed it with Doc-tor….?

And they played passing-the-parcel with Chhobi’s pretty body, pretty and incredibly ill.

Chhobi was moaning in her sleep. Chhaya turned around quickly in her chair. Chhobi was merely shifting sides. From right to left. Her narrow back was flooded with hair and a pathetic patch of damp.

The silly girl will catch cold, Chhaya thought. Sillybilly.

Chhobi was her little pet. Her fair-skinned, curly-haired, long-lashed, slim and beautiful pet. She would have been perfect if it weren’t for the tiny but unsettling squint in her left eye. And the hair on her arms and legs. Hormonal imbalance. Annoying, but not unbearable. Surely these two little aberrations weren’t enough to drive someone so out of tune with life. Surely there were other things that mattered. Like…

Li-chenification: hardening and thickening of skin

Leukoplakia: white patch on mucous membrane

Leukorrhea: vaginal discharge

Leukopenia…

She muttered and rocked the definitions as if they were deranged babies. Ma was on the balcony, putting a towel to dry. The window before her study table opened onto the balcony. Ma would see her worrying instead of studying and rush in to weep and console her big girl. Quite avoidable.

Muttermutter rockrock.

Ma had aged a hundred years. She looked older now than both Boro Mashi and Chhoto Mashi. She had goitre in her neck and gout in her knee. Her hair was grey and falling. Her saris were unstarched. Her cooking was erratic. Her gaze was increasingly vague.

Her mother was still her mother.

Chhaya felt guilty. Why was she sitting there and clinically ticking off all the changes in her mother’s condition?

It was a boy they’d wanted. Baba more than Ma. And instead they got Chhobi. Her prettiness made up for her failure to be a boy. Thank god she was fair they said. Thank god she wasn’t short like her parents but tall like herself. Thank god she was a good girl who liked singing and drawing and dressing up in pretty feminine clothes. I will be the boy, Chhaya told her parents, silently. I will be your strong and silent steadfast son. Just let me and I will.

Unknowingly they did. She was so…stable. She was so dependable. And unflappable. As she grew, gliding from class to class with a First or a Third place in the ranks, with an invariable Merit in the Boards, with an astonishing first-shot entry at the Joint Entrance Examination that eased her so simply into medical college: as she did all this, she grew quieter and stronger and cooler. Her father asked her opinion in important family decisions. Her mother counted on her to warm and soothe and teach and love her younger sister.

Chhobi, see how beautifully Chhaya’s done her homework.

Chhobi, do you realise how lucky you are to have such a bright and intelligent Didi to help you in everything?

Chhobi, why don’t you sit down and study instead of watching that utterrubbish Hindi movie? Do you want to pass or fail?

Chhobi, why can’t you be more like your sister?

A sudden gust of rage flared Chhaya’s peaceful nostrils.

She looked at the page in front of her and wanted to rip out that ugly diagram with those ugly arrows and those infuriatingly ugly words out of the book. Out. Tear. Smash. Throw.

Her head hummed.

Chhobi moaned in her sleep.

…

Probir came home early. His zest for work was not as vehement as it used to be. He was getting old. The Black Ambassador that came with the consultancy post was a boon. Picking him up and dropping him home. Otherwise imagine tramming or bussing it back. Uh-huh – intolerable!

The house smelt uninhabited. He felt as if he were breaking in. He shut the door quietly behind him, and took off his shoes, still standing near the door, one foot easing the other out of its slip-on. His shirt stank. Too hot, and today he’d omitted to put his mandatory cologne. Leaving his briefcase next to his shoes he pattered in, a small man, nimble and confident on his feet. A warrior stance in his shoulders. Take me on, you. I’ll be more than your match. The built-up aggression of a small man in a big world gave bounce and jaunt to his steps. Here was, undoubtedly, the Man of the House.

Where are the women, he thought, trying not to be irritable and failing, utterly. I come back from a day’s hard work and all I see is an unwashed plate and unwiped teastains. Intolerable. He felt like thumping the table with his hand the way he used to when dealing with crafty factory workers, all whine and no work! Kaamchors, all. He fixed them with his megaphone voice and his imperious ungiving thump. Done! Decided! Move! It had always worked. Almost always. That one time a worker jumped him…oof!

The oof had become audible. He peeled off his bush shirt and flung it towards the divan. Aaah! What a relief. Even his sleeveless genji was soaked but better leave that on till he cooled off. These sudden changes did one no good.

His daughters’ room was hidden behind the door curtain. Some daughters. One so perfect, the other so peculiar. What luck, to have not one, but two daughters and that too such odd ones. The least they could do was take his briefcase and feed him cold water and ask if he wanted tea. Useless!

Baba? When did you come?

He flinched, guiltily. Chhaya must have read his mind.

Ei, just now. Thought everyone’s sleeping, so…

Chhaya smiled her rare smile. He’d forgotten how refreshing that was.

Na-na! Sleeping? No chance. Wait, I’ll get some cold water.

He stared at her gloomily. Why was she being so nice? But then, when was she anything other than nice? Didn’t it wear her down, being nice?

Umm. Aaah! What a relief! Jao, you study. I’ll just make myself horizontal for a while.

Acchha.

The lean dark shape flickered out of the room. Had she known when he named her what it meant? She certainly seemed to embody it, as if this was the name her mother’s dark stomach had lent her. Chhaya. She even moved like one.

Chhobi was more of a joke. Chosen not because it was as much a boy’s name as a girl’s but because of the way it went with Chhaya. He had had this ludicrous urge, seeing his milky second child, female, to laugh at the notion of fatherhood, so solemn and paternal. Dur!

Naming a baby had never been easier.

ChhayaChhobi.

Featurefilm.

Unrelated adolescent joke. His brother-in-law was the only one who had caught it. Rudra Da. He had said

Aarey looks like you’re a film buff. I had no idea!

And Probir had said

Aarey na Dada, that never struck me!

Lies.

He had wanted to sing playback for the movies, once. Long ago, when he wore outrageous flared pants and 3-inch heels to make him look a bit taller. He had hair then, on his head, he had bones instead of a belly. He also had a voice. A vibrating malleable thing that rang and boomed and glowered into tunes. Robindro Shongeet. Pop songs. His voice was deep and dark like a well and when he sang the girls looked at him with something notoriously like love. When he stopped singing, the looks vanished into the arms of their tall and leggy boyfriends. How he had planned to upstage them all! Not tell them anything till one day they’d go to the movie-hall to see the latest hit and as the title song flared on with the credits, his name would flicker at them like an undeniable insult.

playback
PROBIR CHATTERJEE

That would be the day!

It wasn’t of course. Life caught him by his shining too-wide shirt collar and shook him down to size. Turned him from a small, fierce, romantic man into a small, fierce, hard little man. His voice proved to be, ironically, as important as his qualifications, but that was only because on a factory floor the man with the biggest voice wins. He’d worn that voice like armour, moving from one giant petrochemical company to another, undaunted by their looming tanks and their towering poisonous chimneys. He was king. He was nothing.

Reba!

The weak voice that answered Coming got on his nerves and jumped on them.

Why did she have to be so pathetic? All right, our daughter is a wreck. Hasn’t gone to school after Class Eight. Hasn’t gone to college. Hasn’t learnt anything, not a trade not a skill not even a pretence. All right. Never mind. Get on with life. Done! Decided! Move! What was the point of whimpering about it and dragging around as if life were a load of bricks?

Reba-aa!

She appeared, the haze in her eyes something worse than sleep.

Early today?

Yes. Doesn’t look like anyone’s jumping for joy. Could I get some tea or is it too much to ask?

She dragged to the kitchen, left side limping. Gout. What botheration!

The gas clicked on.

Whose plate here?

Who else’s? She didn’t eat even a mouthful. I can’t anymore…

Silence dripping like her eyes.

What do you achieve by keeping it here? When she wants to eat, she’ll eat! Why force her? Force is no good…

No? Probir checked himself. He was the ultimate disciple in the school of force. Be forceful and you can get away with anything, he had lectured Chhaya in one of his more fatherly moods. She seemed to him so…pliable.

He had used that rule on Chhobi. To make her brilliant. Make her something. Make her…

He made her all right.

A vegetable.

Who would marry her?

When she sang instead of studying, he had rained thunder on her head.

Will singing get you marks?

WILL IT?

She was his daughter all right. All voice. She stared at him out of her disconcerting squinted eyes and her lips shook.

She had stared like that the day she refused to go to school. Something metallic, steely had clamped her where she sat, plaits undone, uniform unworn, books unpacked. She sat and listened to his Voice as if it were empty. She was his blood, all right. She would use all the force in her puny body to resist his.

She won.

The tea didn’t seem necessary any more. What he wanted, was to weep.

…

Chhaya made up her mind. She had to do it. Now.

Baba.

He looked up. He looked funny like his bile was rising.

Baba, I have a friend. A boy.

He looked like a corpse.

We’ve decided to get married. With your permission of course. He has got a job in Nagpur.

And Chhobi?

Ma asked the question as if Chhaya were the mother and Ma the child.

Chhobi? Oh Chhobi can deal with herself. She can’t be my little shadow all her life now can she?

Baba was choking now, but really, it was only his laugh.

---

Dressed For The Occasion

Mrinal Mukkujey played Debdash that year in Kurseong. His beautiful and unavailable paramour Parboti was played by a beautiful youth whose name no one remembers anymore. Just that he was always the one who played the damsel, thanks (or should it be curses) to his fair complexion, his hairless face and his paan-kissed red lips. Debdash was a hit. But then anything that Mrinal Mukkujey starred in invariably was. The Bengali Dramatics Club in Kurseong hinged around that man’s dynamic persona. His light grey eyes glittered so flamboyantly with emotion or anger that the last row in that 6000- capacity Town Hall was stunned into submission by their flare. Girls teased poor Parboti, wanting to swap places with him and asking him how it felt to be loved by such a man. The Cultural Committee risked being accused of favouritism and staunchly awarded Mrinal Mukkujey the Best Actor’s Trophy every year, to the roof-ringing applause of a teary audience weeping for joy and for the justness of things. Mrinal Mukkujey’s small daughters, sitting in the very first row of every performance every night in a row, swelled up with the grandness of their father’s heroism. Next to them his wife Tukun swelled up with the baby in her stomach, kicking its small unborn feet in rhythm to its father’s hour of glory.

Those were the days and Mrinal Mukkujey would never forget them, even if he did sometimes forget, these days, that his daughters were all married and that the bed was not really the bathroom.

Mrinal Mukkujey’s father was a man of limited means and unlimited desire. Throwing away what people seemed to remember as much land and much more wealth to some unexplained wind, he ended up in a mud hut with a jute door, four sons and three daughters. Not in the least put out by this, he married off his eldest son to the nearest, richest landowner in his village, burned his prematurely dead wife with great dispatch and married a woman the age of his second youngest daughter. Blissfully blind to the lack of space (and privacy) in their little mud hut, he promptly went on to create some new sons and daughters with the help of his new wife.

His eldest son Mrinal – from his first marriage, mind you – was made of sterner stuff. Forced into matrimony by his dissolute father and the entreaties of his rich, refined father-in-law (who had always had his eye on this light-eyed bright-skinned boy as groom-material), Mrinal Mukkujey braced up and bore it. He had nothing to say to his startling little wife. The youngest daughter of a family whose wealth included miles of paddy field and mango trees, ponds upon ponds of live and kicking fish and a tradition, strictly adhered to, of not lifting a finger in menial labour or, for that matter, any labour at all. She was small, dark and spoilt. Following her husband from house to house as he moved from one post to another in the Railways, she wept and suffered tremendous indignations. He had nothing to give her but a baby in the belly every year. Most of the babies died. She wept and miscarried and wept and served the crowd of relatives Mrinal Mukkujey gave shelter to wherever he went, as if he too had been a jomidar in a previous life and had not forgotten the meaning of largesse. They were widows all. His sisters, widowed and with sons. He clothed them. She fed them, serving towering mounds of rice and arranging shining batis brimming with shukto and dal and machher jhol meticulously on to a series of waiting plates, before hurrying away to throw up every last morsel in her child-laden belly, sick to the stomach at the smell of boiling rice. She, who had never entered a kitchen in her life! It was a sad comedown and if it weren’t for her father who told her all indeed would be well, she would never have had the nerve to stay on. Her father’s word, and yes, her rage that all those wastrels, with less claim on her husband than her, should not just arrive but grow roots in her house, roots that spread and sank right through the foundations of their meagre little home. Her husband’s father, too, among them. Having lost his hut, or maybe the will to live in it any longer, he arrived in Kurseong one morning with his wife and seven daughters (one son thankfully left behind in an ashram and the other in the Chattogram Wrestling Club). Even Mrinal Mukkujey, the kind and giving man, couldn’t take it any more. He rented a small house for them somewhere in Nabadwip and asked them to consider it their own. He paid their bills but that was bearable. He had, at last, paid attention to his wife’s pointedly silent rage. Three of their daughters lived. Mrinal Mukkujey prospered enough to have the luxury of extracurricular activities. Tukun let him, in return for a red-bordered sari every month and a submission to her tirades for gold. It was, at last, a happy life.

But what of Mrinal Mukkujey’s father-in-law? He…was a poet. A man of property and foresight, he used one to dispose of the other. Selling off his luxuriant ancestral inheritance in Chattogram, he bought himself a palatial house in Calcutta. Saved, thus, the trauma of losing his land in the Partition and being forced to flee, he left, regally drowning his sorrow in white cambric kerchiefs. With the money left over he printed and bound, at hideously extravagant rates, a set of red-bound gold-lettered books, filled with his own delicately nuanced poems. Princely poems he called them, stacking them on one side of his enormous Alipore study, the red fading, the gold jading over time. Alas, there were no poets in his family! Till his grandson-in-law Rudra joined the roost and brought joy into the old man’s garrulous breast. Come, come! he said to the pale young man in glasses, much like the spider to the fly, come, let me regale you with some real writing! And the pale young man, a poet himself, and a teacher, had not the heart to refuse. He listened and even if some of the poems were sentimental and florid, he saw in them the merit of a grand old man holding out against the crassness of a merely material existence and striving for a more ethereal one. Besides which, the old man had a darned good sense of humour, which he undoubtedly kept a secret from the rest of the clan. It was a meeting of minds and the fact that his wedding present to the married couple had been a poem, specially written for the occasion and printed on art card in fine gold-dust print, endeared him all the more. The Old Man, Rudra the young man said to his even younger wife, is a Character! And that, from him, was praise.

With Mrinal Mukkujey’s ancestry and credentials thus firmly and untarnishedly established, the fact of his perfectly unexplained decline into old age was doubly unsettling. Here he lay, on this narrow bed in the living room for the sun to warm him and the wind to chill him, with a load on his heart and a catheter on his bladder. An insolent young girl by the name of Parboti (what cruel irony that!) was his nursemaid. Raa-mo! That he should need a nursemaid like a drooling child. She called him Dadu as if it was her birthright and fed him with a thin, ungentle hand. She wiped his face after that, first with her waterwet fingers and then with a towel that smelt of hair oil. She took him to the bathroom and insisted he have a bath or at least a sponge if nothing else. Sometimes he feared she was about to raise her hand and hit him like he used to in the old days raising three daughters and a wife. That wife, hale and hearty, and not looking as old as he knew her to be, lived grandly as if nothing had happened and kept buying new saris with his Railway Pension (oh to lay his hands on it and buy some Dunhill tobacco again!) and ordering new necklaces each time Parboti or the other maid stole one. That’s what she said, who knows whether they were actually stolen or it was all just a ploy to evade his wrath at such heedless expenditure. In return for such thoughtless behaviour on her part, he pretended not to know who she was. It was his sly and sensational way of getting back at her. He’d grip Parboti’s skinny shoulder with his bird-claw hand and whisper: “Accha, can you tell me who that lady is? The lady who’s living in the next room? Could you introduce me to her?” Aghast, Parboti would wail: “But Dadu! She’s Dida – your wife! How could you forget?! Your wife, who you married how many years ago now, Dida?” and Tukun would look affronted and walk out of the room saying: “The man has gone mad. Mathaye chheet!” It tickled Mrinal Mukkujey no end. Let them think he was senile, he wanted it that way. And when he tried that trick on his granddaughter Ronjona, who was a special favourite of his, he squeezed her shoulder a little harder, trying to get her in on the joke. “Didibhai, who is that lady to you? Does she seem familiar? No? I thought so!” He hoped at least she would share his malignant glee and squeeze back. Poor kid, she probably knew and didn’t want to hurt her grandmother by letting on. Leave her be. When she comes this afternoon, be normal. You’re meeting Ronobir after three years and that’s no joke.

“Parboti! Take me to my bath!”

When he wanted to, Mrinal Mukkujey could still be imperial, like the old days.

…

“Dadu! How are you?”

Ronobir touched the old shoulder, woefully slack in that sleeveless white banian. He was shocked to see the wrinkles on his Dadu’s sleeping face.

“Dadu?”

“Oh…Rono! What a pleasant surprise! Welcome, welcome! You must excuse my state. Things aren’t what they used to be.”

At least this hadn’t changed! Dadu’s long and formal way of addressing me in English, Ronobir thought with relief. He smiled and mirror-quick it came back from that old familiar face, now sitting up and trying to swing his legs over the bed and stand, much to the dismay of that sullen young maid who lurked near his head.

“Na na Dadu! Keep sitting. Or lie down really. Don’t worry about me!”

“Don’t worry about you?! My dear boy, how can I not, for my Oxford-returned grandson?! I must!”

“And for me, Dadu? Or must I be from Oxford too, to qualify?”

“Oh Ronjona! Didibhai! You’ve come too! What a grand surprise!”

They’d all come. Rudra, Reema, Ronjona and Ronobir. This called for a celebration instead of the strange sniffling he heard and suspected was Tukun trying to gain her eldest daughter’s sympathy by shedding a few quick and not necessarily heartfelt tears.

“Parboti! Tell that lady to make tea! Or better still you make it! My grandchildren are here now. I’m fine!”

Parboti flounced out of the room, trying to look proud and managing, merely, to look ruffled.

“So tell me Rono! What does it feel like to be back?”

Rono was Mrinal Mukkujey’s favourite grandson and not just because he was the only one. They had lots in common, the two of them, though he didn’t remember losing hair at such an early age. But what did that matter, it was what was inside the head that mattered, not outside! Fired by this silent witticism, Mrinal Mukkujey’s cheeks reclaimed some of their original lustre and he began dashing off question after question and snatching back the answers.

So Rono’s thesis was complete. Splendid!

It was to be published as a book! Extraordinary!

In England! Astounding was the word!

Was he Head of the Department yet? No? Hard to believe!

What were his plans?…Excellent!

Had he done any plays lately? Doll’s House? Oh perfect!

Got a good review in the Oxford paper! Well done my boy, outstandingly well done!

It was always this ecstatic between the two of them. From the time Mrinal Mukkujey had driven up all the way from Siliguri to Darjeeling just to be present at his grandson’s first ever dramatic performance as a tree, there was no looking back. As Rono graduated from trees and foot soldiers to naughty boys and rebellious youths, to his lead role in a Bengali play at the tender age of thirteen, followed a few years later by his incredible portrayal of a cranky old man who practices off-key songs in a decrepit old boarding house and efficaciously curses his unappreciative roommates, Mrinal Mukkujey had been Ronobir’s most enthusiastic audience. Talking about it days after the event, telling everyone, from the postman to the bank clerk to the man he bought his fish from every morning what a talented actor his grandson was and what a performance! It had embarrassed Rono those days, but now, looking at the gleam the old tales brought back into his Dadu’s slippery grey eyes, sometimes unknowingly vacant, he was glad to be of use. Ma had told him Dadu had dwindled into rantings, might not even recognize him. But look at him, he even remembers the year we did that play and the exact lines in my dialogue! And his English! Impeccably dressed up for the occasion! Amazing!

The room rang with laughter and mock accusations and the sound of teacups and the crunch of tasty mowas that Tukun still remembered Rono liked so much. It was evening, and Mrinal Mukkujey was doing what he did best. Holding an audience, playing a part, masking the pain in his back, and the bite of the rubber tube trickling down his leg.