He: (Shey) (Modern Classics (Penguin)) (4 page)

I’ve heard many stories of princes, but none of them was ever hungry. However, hearing that this person felt hungry right at the start, I was pleased. It’s easier to make friends with hungry people. One doesn’t have to go beyond the bend in the lane to make them happy.

I found that the man isn’t one to turn up his nose at food. He polishes off a fish-head curry, a dish of prawns with marrows and a plate of vegetables cooked with fish bones. If given sweets from Barabazar, he scrapes the bowl clean. Sometimes he shows a fondness for ice cream. You should see him gobble one—it reminds me of the Majumdars’ son-in-law.

One day, it was pouring with rain. I was painting a picture— a picture of the field nearby. To the north snakes a red road, to the south stretches an expanse of wasteland, bumpy and undulating, rather like waves on a beach. Here and there sprout bushy date palms. Far away, a few coconut trees peer imploringly at the sky like beggars. A lowering mass of blue-black clouds had gathered behind those trees, like a crouching blue tiger poised to spring—about to leap across half the sky at the sun and swipe at it with enormous paws. I mixed some colours on my palette and went on painting the scene.

There was a push at the door. Opening it, I saw—not a robber, not an ogre, not even a general’s son—but that very man. He was dripping from head to toe with water, and his dirty wet clothes clung tightly to his frame. His dhoti-hem and shoes were plastered with mud. ‘Now then!’ I exclaimed.

He replied, ‘I set out in blazing sunshine; halfway here, it began to rain. If you’ll give me your bedspread, I’ll get out of these wet clothes and wrap it around me.’

I couldn’t refuse. He pulled the Lucknow-print bedspread off the bed, dried his hair, stripped off his sodden clothing and bundled himself up in the bedspread. Thank goodness I hadn’t brought out my Kashmiri Jamewar
²
quilt!

He said, ‘Dada, I’ll sing you a song.’

I had no choice. I put down my paintbrush.

He commenced:

Oh Shrikanta, you handsome young charmer,

One day you’ll quake in the shadow of Yama.
³

I don’t know whether my expression made him suspect something. He broke off to ask, ‘How do you like it?’

I answered, ‘You’ll have to spend the rest of your life practising the scales, far from the rest of civilization. Chitragupta
⁴
must take over after that, if he can stand your song in the first place.’

He suggested, ‘Pupe-didi
⁵
learns singing from a Hindustani ustad
,
how about my joining her?’

I retorted, ‘If you can get Pupe-didi to agree to your joining her classes, there should be no problem.’

‘I’m very scared of Pupe-didi, you know,’ he confided.

At this point, Pupe-didi laughed out loud. Like the other mighty men of the world, she is always very pleased to know that somebody can be afraid of her.

The kind thing said reassuringly, ‘No fear! I won’t scold him!’

‘Who isn’t afraid of you?’ I pointed out. ‘You drink two bowls of milk every day—think of your strength! Don’t you remember the tiger who took one look at the stick in your hand and fled to hide under Aunt Nutu’s bed, his tail between his legs?’

Our young heroine was vastly pleased. She reminded me about the bear who, trying to run away from her, fell into the bathtub.

My hands alone had begun to build up the history of this man, but now Pupe keeps adding to it wherever it takes her fancy. If I say that at three in the afternoon he came to my room to borrow a razor and some empty biscuit tins, Pupe informs me that he has made off with her crochet hooks.

Every story has a beginning and an end, but my ‘There lives a man’ has no end. His elder sister falls ill; he goes for the doctor. A cat scratches his dog Tommy on the nose. He hops onto the back of a bullock cart and gets into a great argument with the carter. He slips and falls at the washing place in the yard and breaks the cook’s earthen pitchers. He goes to watch a Mohun Bagan
⁶
football match and someone swipes three and a half annas from his pocket, so he misses buying sweets from Bhim Nag’s.
⁷
At his friend Kinu Chaudhuri’s, he devours fried shrimps and spiced potato curry. Day after day passes in this way. Nowadays Pupe contributes to the saga as well. One afternoon, he visits her room and asks her to find the cookbook in her mother’s cupboard, because his friend Sudhakanta wishes to learn how to cook banana flowers. Another day he borrows her scented coconut hair oil: he’s afraid he’s going bald, you see. One day he went to Din-da’s
⁸
house to listen to some singing. Din-da was fast asleep, slumped against the couch.

This ‘there lives a man’ of ours, he certainly does have a name. But only the two of us know it, and we can’t tell anyone else. Here starts the fun of my story. ‘Once there lived a king’—he doesn’t have a name; neither does the prince. And as for the princess whose hair hung to the ground, whose smile sparkled like jewels, whose tears were like pearls—no one knows her name either. They are not famous, but every household knows them.

This man of ours, we just call him He. When people ask us his name, all we do is glance at each other and smile cunningly. Pupe says, ‘Reckon out his name; it starts with a p.’ Some say Priyanath, some decide on Panchanan, some think of Panchkari, some insist it’s Pitambar, others suggest Paresh, Peters, Prescott, Peer Bux and Piyar Khan.

Arriving at this point, my pen pauses. Someone asks anxiously, ‘The story will go on, won’t it?’

Now who is this story about? Our He isn’t a prince, but a very ordinary man. He eats, sleeps, goes to the office and is fond of the cinema. His story lies in what everyone does every day. If you can build a clear image of this man in your mind’s eye, you’ll realize that when he sits on the steps of a sweet shop, gulping down rosogollas, oblivious of the juice seeping through the holes in the packet and dripping on to his dirty dhoti, it’s a story in itself. If you ask me, ‘And then?’, I’ll tell you how he then boards a tram, finds he has no money in his pocket and jumps off again. ‘And then?’ Then follow many such events—from Barabazar to Bahubazar, from Bahubazar to Nimtala.

Someone asked, ‘Can’t a story be about something quite extraordinary, something out of place at Barabazar, Bahubazar or even Nimtala?’

I replied, ‘Why not? If it can, it can, if it can’t, it just can’t.’

He said, ‘Very well then. Let this story of ours be just any old how, without head or tail, rhyme or reason, sum or substance, just as we please.’

All this is sheer impudence—going against the divine laws of creation, bound tightly by rules and regulations, where nothing happens that isn’t supposed to happen. All this is quite intolerable in the world of make-belief. Let’s take the maker of those tedious laws to a sphere beyond the limits of his authority. If we make fun of him there, we needn’t fear punishment. After all, it’s not his territory.

He was sitting in a corner. He whispered, ‘Dada, you can pass off what you like in my name. I won’t sue you.’

I must introduce this person to you properly.

The chief prop of the story I’ve been telling Pupu-didi bears a pronoun for a name and is constituted entirely of words. So I can do what I like with him, without fear of tripping on any awkward questions. But as ocular witness to this uncreated being, I’ve had to procure a creature of flesh and blood. In a literary law court, whenever the case seems to be getting out of hand, he is ready to bear witness. A signal from a mere attorney like myself, and he blandly affirms that when he went to Kanchrapara for the Kumbh Mela,
⁹
and was taking a dip in the sacred Ganga, a crocodile seized the end of his holy hair-tuft. It sank without trace, and the rest of him returned abbreviated to dry land. Another wink, and he goes on shamelessly: the pale-skinned divers of a British man-o’-war stirred up the mud of the river bed for seven months and finally recovered the lost tuft, minus only five or six hairs. The divers were tipped three and a quarter rupees. If Pupu-didi still insists, ‘And then?’, he’ll begin on how he fell at Doctor Nilratan’s
¹⁰
feet and implored, ‘I beg of you, Doctor, use what magic ointment you will to fix my holy hair-tuft back to my scalp: I can’t tie the blessed puja flowers to my head without it.’ No sooner had the doctor smeared on a little of the Thunder-Tangle ointment a hermit had once given him, than the tuft set itself doggedly to growing, like some endless centipede. If our He dons a turban, the turban keeps swelling like a balloon. At night, the gigantic mound of hair on his pillow resembles a devil’s toadstool. He has had to employ a barber on a regular salary. The crown of his head has to be shaved clean once every three hours.

If the listener’s curiosity still isn’t satisfied, he puts on the most piteous of expressions and continues: At the medical college, the Surgeon General had already rolled up his sleeves, determined to drill a hole through his skull, plug it with a rubber stopper and seal it up with wax, so that no hair-tuft could ever sprout through it either in this life or the next. But he refused, fearing that the operation might pack him straight off to the next life.

This He of ours is rare in the extreme—a man in a million. He has an unequalled gift for inventing untruths. It’s my great good fortune to have found such a person to help me make up my impossible tales. I sometimes present this native of Make-Believe-and-Wonder Land before Pupu-didi—her eyes grow round with pleasure when she sees him. In her delight, she stuffs him with specially ordered jalebis.
¹¹
He loves jalebis with a passion, and the chamcham
¹²
sold in Sikdarpara Lane. Pupudidi asks him, ‘Where do you live?’ He replies, ‘In Which Town, down Question-Mark Alley.’

Why do I refuse to reveal his name? Perhaps I’m afraid that if I tell you his name, he’ll come to rest within his name alone. In all the world, there can be only one me, and only one you; everyone else belongs to ‘them’. In this story of mine, He stands surety for all of ‘them’.

It would be wrong not to tell you one thing, which is that those who judge him from this drama built up around him judge wrongly. Those who have actually seen him know that he’s tall and well built, his features grave. Just as the night is lit up by the glow of countless stars, hidden laughter lurks behind his pretence of gravity. He is a person of the very highest order; all our joking can’t demean him. I enjoy disguising him as a fool, because, actually, he’s far cleverer than I am. If we pretend he doesn’t understand anything, it doesn’t hurt his dignity. Rather, it’s convenient, as it helps him match Pupu’s temperament.

¹
Tepantar
: a vast, faraway, mythical plain, often mentioned in Bengali folk tales.

²
Jamewar
: a kind of intricately embroidered shawl or quilt.

³
Yama
: the Hindu god of death.

⁴
Chitragupta
: Yama’s scribe, who records people’s deeds for judgement after
death.

⁵
Pupe-didi
: Didi means ‘elder sister’, but is used affectionately by grandparents
to address their granddaughters.‘Pupe’ and ‘Pupu’ are variant forms of the
same pet name.

⁶
Mohun Bagan
: a famous Calcutta football club.

⁷
Bhim Nag
: an old and popular Calcutta sweet shop.

⁸
Din-da
: the form of address Pupe used for Dinendranath Tagore, Rabindranath’s great-nephew, a noted singer and musician.

⁹
Kanchrapara for the
Kumbh Mela
: a town to the north of Calcutta. Facetiously said to be a site of the Kumbh Mela, a fair held as part of a pilgrimage in four holy places (Allahabad, Haridwar, Ujjain and Nashik) in rotation.

¹⁰
Doctor Nilratan
: Nilratan Sarkar, a famous physician, founder of the present R.G. Kar Medical College in Calcutta.

¹¹
jalebi
: a syrupy fried sweet popular in Bengal and North India.

¹²
chamcham
: another popular Bengali sweet.

PUPU-DIDI HAS GONE TO DARJEELING. HE REMAINS AT SCRUBHEAD LANE in my care. He’s moping. I’m irritated too. ‘Send me to Darjeeling,’ he whined.

‘Why?’ I asked.

He explained, ‘I’m a grown man, yet I’m sitting at home without work. My relatives say all kinds of nasty things.’

‘What work are you thinking of doing?’

‘Pupu-didi likes to play at cooking, and I’ll chop up the paper she cooks.’

‘You won’t be able to stand such labour. Let’s see you keep quiet for a bit. I’m writing a history of Hoonhau Island.’

‘Hoonhau? The name sounds good, Dada. It’s more suited to my pen than yours. Could you give me some idea of the subject?’

‘No joking! It’s a very serious subject. I hope to have my essay accepted as a college text. A group of scientists have settled on this otherwise uninhabited island. They’re performing a very difficult experiment.’

‘Put it more simply, will you—what exactly are they doing? Testing some new method of farming?’

‘Quite the reverse. Their work has no connection with agriculture.’

‘How do they arrange for food?’

‘No arrangements.’

‘Then how do they stay alive?’

‘That’s the most trivial of considerations. They’ve launched a campaign of resistance to the digestive organs. They’ve declared nothing’s as convoluted as the stomach. The causes of most maladies, wars and robberies are rooted within it.’

‘Dada, even if that is true, it’s hard to digest.’

‘It’s difficult for you. But these men are scientists. They’ve uprooted their intestines, their stomachs have caved in. Food is forbidden; all they live on is snuff. They inhale nutrients with sniffs of air. Some of these reach their insides, the rest are expelled when they sneeze. So both functions are performed at once: the body is purged, and filled up again.’

‘How ingenious! I suppose they’ve set up a huge grindstone. Do they pound chicken, mutton, lamb and vegetables into a jelly and leave it out to dry in huge basins?’