Don't Let Him Know (22 page)

Romola felt someone step on her toes as they tried to push by her.

‘Ohh,’ she exclaimed. ‘Bhai, be careful. Stop pushing.’

‘Didi,’ said a profusely sweating bearded young man in a checked shirt. ‘If you don’t want pushing you’d best get out of this street today. It’s like a river in high tide.’

Usually she had a lot of clout over young men like these. She knew how to give orders and be obeyed. But today she was afraid she would just get crushed underfoot.

Someone started chanting ‘Subir Kumar
amar rahe
– Long live Subir Kumar’. More and more people picked up the chant – the noise passing down the street in waves, a bier of sound carried on the shoulders of his mourning fans. It sent shivers down her spine. She felt a little faint and hoped she was not going to get sunstroke. But at the same time, for the first time in many many years, Romola felt a tremor of something forbidden and exciting, a rude weed with deep stubborn roots poking through the rubble, the kind that grew in the cracks between the bricks and mortar of old crumbling homes. She knew she wouldn’t be able to share this with anyone else. This would be part of no breakfast conversation with Avinash. But at least she would have it.

When she had seen her wedding invitation she had wondered fleetingly what it would look like if the ornate golden letters had said Subir Lahiri and Romola Dutt instead of Avinash Mitra and Romola Dutt.

When she had first met Avinash, he seemed a decent, responsible man. Her parents had not laid eyes on each other till her father had lifted her mother’s wedding veil. But these being much more modern times, and their parents being much more progressive, she had been sent out unchaperoned for a meal with Avinash so they could get to know each other. He was finishing his PhD in America. He did not have a nose as straight and fine as Subir Kumar’s but then who did? She could see his hair was already receding but Romola found no real reason to object to him. Her mother was pleased; his mother was keen. She had felt like a little tugboat in the sea, pulled along by other tides.

One day as they were shopping for wedding saris, she suddenly wondered what would happen if Subir Kumar showed up at her doorstep now just like in the movies. If he stood there and shouted for all the world to hear, ‘Romola, I cannot live without you.’ Would she leave everything and run to him down curved staircases, the marble steps shockingly cold against her bare feet, along miles of courtyard, her sari trailing behind her like a waterfall as the background music swelled, the sitars twanging with such shuddering intensity that the chandeliers shivered as she flung open the door to see him standing there unshaven, his eyes bloodshot from weeping?

‘What do you think?’ asked her mother. ‘Orange or crimson?’ Romola looked startled. ‘My little daydreamer, she is getting married soon,’ her mother said with a fond smile to the lady next to her. ‘She is so excited.’

Romola thought, at least he lives in America. She had never been to America and perhaps it would be easier to forget Subir there. Then she laughed at herself. Forget? There was hardly anything to forget. What a lot of schoolgirlish fuss she was making about a couple of chicken sandwiches and some idle afternoons.

And here she was decades later behaving like a giddy schoolgirl while the midday sun beat down on her with increasing intensity. Romola could feel the back of her neck starting to burn. She could smell sweat and cigarette smoke all around her. She felt as if she was trapped in a pressure cooker. She wondered if the garland of bel flowers in her handbag were turning brown in the heat. It was all starting to feel like a stupid idea. In the calm tranquillity of their home, it had seemed like something she had to do. Here on Monmohantala Lane it was something else altogether. People were shoving her in all directions. She had visions of being crushed in a stampede. They’d find nothing left of her except her shoe. Just as she was wondering if she should turn back and hail a taxi, she looked up and saw the birds.

It was a scene right out of
Bhorer Paakhi
(Bird of Dawn), as if the negative itself had been developed against the white glare of the midday sun. There, behind the feathery green fans of a rain tree, smudged with red blossoms motionless in the still noon torpor, was an old house, its green shutters faded by the sun and monsoon rain just as she remembered from the film she had seen three times, not counting the snippets she had caught late at night on television.

As Romola looked up at the house, someone flung open the windows and a pair of doves fluttered up, beige-grey clouds of soft anxiety. That’s how every afternoon Subir Kumar used to let his secret lover, the young widow who lived next door, know that he was alone at home – the fluttering doves, startled smoke signals of forbidden romance. Romola, not an overly religious woman, couldn’t help feeling this was a sign meant just for her. She decided that it meant she should keep going, fighting through the jostling crowd.

Apart from a fresh coat of paint and some newly installed air conditioners in some of the rooms, Subir’s house looked just as she remembered it from when he had shown it to her. She could see a man in a khaki uniform standing at the gates trying desperately to instil some order into the scene. He stabbed at the crowd with a stick attempting to make everyone queue up. But no one paid any attention to him. Like tendrils of some monstrous vine, the crowd curled around him trying to push through the wrought-iron gates. Romola wondered what would happen if the gates collapsed under the sheer weight of the crowds. Inside she could see a courtyard packed with cars, the drivers standing around smoking cigarettes.

‘How long are they going to keep the body there?’ she asked the man next to her.

He shrugged. ‘I heard they are waiting for the chief minister to come to pay his respects. Then it’s going to go in a grand procession to the cremation grounds.’

‘Will they let people in to see him?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know. Ask that guard – he’ll be able to tell you.’

She tried to fight her way over to the guard. He had given up his attempt at crowd control and was just standing behind the gates. The crowd, getting more and more restless, buzzed around her, the numbers seeming to multiply by the minute. The smell of tobacco and sweat was now overpowering. She felt her head swimming. Someone stepped on her foot again and she felt the strap on her sandal snap. Dismayed, she tried to cling on to the shoe but the crowd kept pushing. She grabbed the man next to her to keep her balance. Her sandal slipped off her foot and the teeming crowd swallowed it in a flash.

‘Hey, mister,’ she said trying to catch the guard’s attention. But her voice was lost in the din. She wondered what kind of spectacle she made, her greying hair rapidly unravelling, her creamy cotton sari crumpled, her blouse stained with patches of dark sweat like the map of some lost continent, limping her way through the jostling crowds, one foot bare.

‘Let the aunty through,’ said the man whose elbow she had clutched. Stung, she looked at him. He was a bearded young man, maybe twenty-five. She put up her hand to pat her hair back into place and almost tripped. The man grabbed her by the elbow to steady her. ‘Are you all right?’ He was looking at her with some concern. ‘You really shouldn’t be out here in this madness. You’ve probably never been in a bus in the last ten years, have you?’

Everything was swimming around her, the noise of the crowd muffled as if she was spinning underwater. Her vision was fogged with sweat. She was getting thirstier by the second and could feel rivulets of sweat running down her back pooling where her sari was bunched up against her skin.

The man grabbed her arm and started hollering, ‘Let us through, the lady is fainting. Let us through.’ Romola meekly followed, grateful that he was doing the pushing. The next thing she knew they were at the gate and the guard was shaking his head, ‘Lady, are you crazy trying to fight through these crowds? Couldn’t you just watch on TV?’

Romola had a vision of herself fainting right at the gate. She imagined herself lying there on the baking concrete, the string of bel flowers wilting in the dust, a gasp of fragrance in the unending asphalt. Wasn’t that the remake of
Limelight
where Subir Kumar regains his sight and can no longer recognize the flower girl who loved him? But then one day as he passes by in his horse-drawn carriage, he reaches out to buy a bunch of rajanigandha and the touch of her hand and the cool smell of the snowy-white flowers brings it all back to him and he shouts ‘Stop’ while the flower girl tries to flee. Now that she was there, at the gates of the house, Romola knew she couldn’t turn back.

Deep inside she wanted to be acknowledged by the khaki-clad guard, by Amit, by Avinash, by Subir’s fat jewellery-laden wife, his television-actress mistress, the young widow next door, the gossip columnist of
Chhaya
magazine. Dammit, she thought, she had sacrificed something too. She had given up Subir Lahiri so he could become Subir Kumar.

In the movie inside her head, Romola was no longer fainting on the sidewalk. In that movie, she was at the front of the crowd, her head bare and unveiled, her hair once again lustrous and black, cascading down her back like a curtain of dark satin. In that movie her pink tissue patola was whole again and the dusty hedges around the walls were all laden with perfumed clusters of snowy flowers – bel, jasmine, rajanigandha. In that movie, her voice was strong and unwavering as it demanded entrance. ‘Tell them Romola is here and she has come too far to go back.’

But in reality her tongue felt thick, the words clogged in her throat like leaves in a drain. The guard shook his head once more and offered her his plastic bottle of water. ‘Go on, have some,’ he said. ‘You look like you need it.’ For a moment Romola wondered whether it was safe to drink. The bottle seemed a little grimy, the plastic not quite clear any more, as if it had been filled and refilled for years from the neighbourhood tubewell. Then she just took it and gulped two mouthfuls, feeling relieved as the water trickled down her chin. It was lukewarm but it still felt good.

‘Are they letting people in to see him?’ she asked handing the bottle back to the guard.

‘Are you crazy?’ he replied. ‘Look at these crowds. Only family. And other actors.’

‘Can you get me in?’ she said. ‘I have come a long way.’

‘Lady, people have flown in all the way from Delhi,’ he said importantly. ‘Like I said, are you family?’

‘Not really,’ she said. ‘But I knew him once.’

‘Really?’ He grinned showing misshapen teeth stained red from chewing paan. ‘So does everybody. Everyone is suddenly his long-lost childhood friend. What are you – his girlfriend?’

‘How dare you?’ she retorted automatically. But inside her head, Romola answered, ‘Yes.’ For a moment she wanted to tell him, this anonymous man with greasy hair, everything. About that party at the Sanyals’, the chicken sandwiches, the bottle-green Plymouth. She wanted to tell him and the bearded man next to her and the fat man mopping his face with an oversized handkerchief next to him. She wanted to tell them that yes, as a matter of fact, she had been his girlfriend for a brief lost summer before many of them had even been born.

But she said none of this. Instead she just looked at the man, swallowed hard and said pleadingly, ‘Please, just for a minute.’

The gatekeeper continued grinning impudently. He waved his keys at her and said, ‘Lady, just wait by the side of the road like everyone else and you’ll see the body when it’s brought out. Now if you’ll step aside. We have to clear the gate. The chief minister’s car should be here any minute.’

Romola wanted to shake him. She wanted to make a scene. She wanted to lie down in front of the gate forcing the chief minister’s car to a screeching halt. What if this was it, she thought? What if she made such a scene that she could never go back to the life she once had? Perhaps Avinash would see her on the news that night and recognize her with a start. Would he miss her? she wondered. She would be gone like that Bengali housewife, Sonali something or the other, who had just upped and run off with that Italian filmmaker Roberto Rossellini, leaving ripples of scandal in her wake.

‘I am not leaving,’ she said with grim determination. ‘And if you touch me I will scream.’ Some of the men standing next to her were looking at her with a mixture of curiosity and interest. They sensed the beginning of some drama that could while away the tedium of waiting for the body.

The guard shrugged and said, ‘Look, I have my orders. And who are you anyway, the Queen of Calcutta?’

‘I don’t care,’ said Romola, hardly believing her own ears. ‘Ask whomever you like. I’m not moving.’ She was almost starting to enjoy this now. She wished Leela could see her. She imagined telling her the story, embroidered and embellished over time, on the phone to Connecticut. ‘And then, can you imagine, he just gave up and opened the door a crack so I could slip in. But he told me to put on my dark glasses so people would think I was some film actress.’

And as she slipped in through the side door, the catty reporter from
Chhaya
magazine would notice her and ask for her story. Of course she wouldn’t really tell them. Maybe she would just hint at a mysterious past. But it would be enough, enough so she would count for more than her decision to have rui for dinner and paarshey for lunch.

‘I knew your Subir-babu before you were born. So don’t push me,’ she said with as much confidence as she could muster. ‘I can make your life very difficult. I could faint. I could have a heart attack. And it would be your fault.’