No Country: A Novel (47 page)

My father steadied Sushma into the boat. I scrambled up the side and almost lost my foothold, but Jadab caught me in a sure grip and hoisted me in. Baba cradled my mother carefully in his arms and sat her on the side of the boat, quickly clambering in behind her. My mother had swaddled her small box in a shawl and clung to it.

“Do not lean over the water,” Baba said anxiously to me, as Jadab shoved off from the shore, but I leant over the swift cobalt water anyway, drawn by its forbidding depth. The fisherman stood at the stern, grasping the shoulder-high oar, his muscles taut and slippery over his hard bones, as he propelled and guided the boat, his eyes slits as he faced the salty wind. The bank, with its large peepul tree beneath which we had sat, receded fast.

“Calcutta?” Jadab asked.

“Yes,” nodded my father.

Jadab paused at his oar and towelled his face with his gamccha, which he then tied about his waist. “Two days’ walk,” he said, pointing at the approaching shore. “One, if you have a cart.”

“Where can I get one?”

“You want a cart?”

Father nodded again.

“I’ll get someone,” said Jadab, pausing to scratch his neck, “but he will not take money. A piece of jewellery.” My mother clutched the box under her shawl. Jadab turned his head, as if checking the horizon.

Some trees which grew at the edge of the shore perched on
spidery legs. “Mangroves,” my father pointed out. “That means the sea is not very far away.”

“An hour,” said Jadab, pointing downriver.

As the boat nosed into the muddy headland, I jumped down with the large suitcase, sprawling in the gum-like mud of what was to become India. I struggled quite ineffectually to stand up.

Sushma hunched at the back of the boat, her nose wrinkled with distaste at the mud on the shore. Baba climbed down and held out his hands for Ma, but my mother, hugging her shawl-swaddled box, looked around for some other way.

Swiftly, with one hand, Jadab snatched at the box. Ma cried out as her shawl unraveled, and the box clattered onto the deck. As she leant to retrieve it, Jadab lifted his oar and hit her sidewise, and she plunged screaming into the shallow water. With practiced speed, Jadab thrust the length of the oar into the bank and pushed. The boat rocked and teetered.

I was stuck in the mud, the suitcase beside me, while Baba was stranded, up to his knees in the same muddy bank. Sushma screeched, perched on the boat, trying to retrieve the jewel box from its stinking bottom. As the lurching boat angled away from the shore, Jadab raised his oar and thrust it again in the water. One more heave and he would catch the swift current, and the boat would be away. I watched as he dipped the oar and rose with it, his rope-like muscles glistening in the early sun.

My father raised something he had fished out from under the waistfold of his kurta. He held it out slowly, like a sleepwalker, less than a man’s length from the swerving boat. At the sharp report, birds on the mangroves squawked and rose in a body. Jadab’s head snapped back as he fell in a heap, his oar falling on the deck with a
clunk
, next to the jewel box.

The current caught the boat in its powerful tug, pulling it sharply downstream, where it rotated out of reach, gathering speed. My father tried to wade out, but by the time he had struggled up, the boat was out of reach. In his frustration, he threw what he held in his hand after it, slipping and falling to his knees in the mud. Sushma was standing now, balanced precariously on the boat, clutching the jewel box she had retrieved, her mouth distended in a scream. We could not hear her over the howls of my mother, thrashing in the water, crying out for her jewels as the boat spun downstream towards the ocean.

I thought I saw my brother Laub’s arm raised helplessly above the lip of the lost boat.

•  •  •

W
E WALKED NUMBLY
through the countryside. All I remember was my father plodding ahead, his muddy shoes in front of me. More and more feet joined ours on that hypnotic march, a great and growing stream of the ragged and exhausted, flowing towards Calcutta. We walked doggedly, weighed down with fatigue and bags. We stopped when my mother would cry out in weariness, then sat or lay listlessly under the roadside banyans, tamarinds, and barren mango trees, and when evening came, we ate what little puffed rice Baba had brought. On the second day, I remember the milestones on the side of the road, little tombstones with diminishing numbers printed on them. I stared at the asphalt, fissured like unending maps, until daylight faded into black. We were going slower and slower because Ma was exhausted. We slept under a tree, our hunger turned into a hum of pain. I knew Baba could not help. On the morning of the third day, with no words
but just a sip of water which Baba had saved for us, we were on the road again.

When I looked up a couple of hours later, with the sun high, my head swimming with weariness, I suddenly saw the city all around me. Underfoot, the macadam was cut open by curved tram tracks, while overhead spread spiderwebs of tram cables and electric lines. Writing covered everything: billboards, walls, shops. There had been little to read in our village landscape; but here, the insistent script named everything. Even the trams which trundled past us like small steamers were smothered in print. My mother and I followed Baba into narrow lanes until he walked into a dilapidated house and up a staircase and knocked on a door. During the interminable bargaining among grown-ups, I curled up on the dusty red of the cement landing and fell into a deep sleep.

When I woke in an unfamiliar room, I could not, for a moment, remember who I was, or where. The room was dim, airless, with a single barred window whose ledge was green with sunless moss. I lay on one of mother’s old saris, in lieu of bedsheets.

“I’ll g-go to Mr. Aherne,” I heard my father whispering to my mother, “t-to the P-police Headquarters. I knew h-him once.” He looked about for a comb, but not finding one, he used his fingers. “He’ll h-help us.”

He returned late in the afternoon, stooped with disappointment and fatigue. “I c-could not find him. He has long l-left the p-police,” Baba mumbled, “and they are too busy for my questions.” He took his shoes off. He had no socks, and his blisters were bleeding.

I realized that this rented room was where we were to stay. In the morning I ate what Baba cooked ineptly on a bucket-oven on
the landing. His gold ancestral signet ring was missing from his finger.

“I will go look for work now,” he said to us as we ate.

Until early afternoon, I sat in blind boredom. Then, just to test matters, I asked my mother if she wanted some water. She turned her back to me and curled up tighter. I went outside and sat on the stair landing, waiting for Baba. I was thirsty, but past caring. A cat skittered up the stairs. When I stretched out my hand, it sniffed my fingers, then went past me to a frayed mat at the bottom of the stairs and sat cleaning itself. I watched it hold its hind leg up, like the picture I had once seen of a musician holding his cello. I heard something behind me, and turned, thinking,
It is Laub!
My mother stood holding out a glass of water, and I took it from her, unable to say a word. She returned to the bed. I came and stood by her and drank half of the water.

“Are you thirsty, Ma?” I asked.

She nodded gravely. I gave her my glass to hold, and was about to fetch her a fresh one, when she lifted it to her lips and drained it. She lay down on the bed. Her face was unusually flushed, and a vein pulsed under her forehead and hid itself in her long, unkempt hair, which spooled over the pillow.

“Come to me, Laub,” she said. Without a word I lay down beside her and closed my eyes. I could smell the musky odour of her hair, and realized I was lying upon it. I kept my eyes closed and felt her fold me in her arms.

I woke up to a commotion in our room. There were strangers in our small space. I came to know them later: Tewari-babu, who lived next door, and owned the stationery store at the end of our lane, and his wife, Shanta-Auntyji, were leaning over the bed, alongside Baba, who looked dazed. With them was Dr. Gupta, a
local homeopath, under the sole electric bulb that hung from our ceiling.

“No pulse, no pulse,” he muttered, shaking his sweating head, “Big stroke she had, Mitra-ji. Nothing to do now. All over.” The bed was wet, for they had poured water on my mother’s pale and bony face. The men gathered by the window, talking. I slid over to my mother, putting my mouth next to her ear.

“Laub has left,” I told her, reaching to touch her face. “Ma, I am Kush.” I was shocked how cold she was.

•  •  •

I
ACCOMPANIED
B
ABA
to Nimtollah Ghat on the Ganges, where Tewari-babu, his grown sons, Manoj and Saroj, and some of their friends had carried Ma, lying on a flimsy wooden bier, upon their shoulders. Now she lay on a bed of logs, by the river, her hair hanging down to touch the ground. On her, they had heaped splinters of wood and kindling, around which circled the chanting priest swathed in an ochre shawl covered with Sanskrit writing. Baba said these were the hundred and eight sacred names of Lord Krishna.

The priest poured ghee over the wood, and on Ma, then lit a twig and handed it to me. I held it, not knowing what was expected of me. He daubed Ma with more ghee till her face glistened in the sun. Her eyes were not completely shut, as if she was about to wake.

“Hold the flame to her face,” directed the priest.

I shook my head.
Nononono
.

“Do it, boy,” he said, beginning to lose his patience.

“Ma spoke to me.” I wanted to touch Ma’s face, sure that
she was now warmed by the sun, when I felt Baba stay my hand.

“This is something a son has to d-do,” he pleaded. “Can you d-do it for your m-mother?”

I flung the sputtering twig, barely missing the priest. The river-water glistened, sending a shaft of light that burned my eyes.

“I will d-do it for you, Kush,” my father said, so softly that I almost imagined he had said it. “Go lie down under that t-tree there. Son, you d-do not have to see any of this.”

“Are
you
supposed to do this? Are we supposed to do any of this?” I pleaded.

“I d-don’t know, Kush. But these are our r-rites, given to us by our f-fathers.”

I lay down under the tree, facing away from the sacred river, the burning pyre. I closed my eyes. I clasped my palms over my ears, but I could still hear the hiss and crackle of the growing fire.

•  •  •

M
Y HEAD FELT
unfamiliar when I touched it the following morning. It had been shaven, according to custom, after which I had accompanied Baba into waist-deep water to consign Ma’s ashes to the Ganges. We had repeated unfamiliar Sanskrit prayers after the priest.
I don’t understand these words. And neither will Ma,
I thought.

With Tewari-ji’s help, Baba found a job in a shop at Burrabazaar, keeping numbers in a ledger, no longer an employee with a comfortable salary in the state judiciary, for that state was no longer a part of dismembered India. He was too tired to explain any more. We ate two meals everyday, one early in the morning before Baba left for work, and the other past nightfall, after he trudged home.

When I was enrolled in a local free school, the few boys who took any notice of me smacked my shaven head because it amused them. Then they discovered where we had come from and derisively called me Refugee, as if it were my name. I learned quickly how to remain unobtrusive, never drawing attention to myself if I could help it. I walked to school and back on my own.

In Jessore I used to be an explorer with my brother, Laub, and had found the lost mosque and Kalo Pir. I was a different boy now, in a different place.

I made friends with numbers because I could count on them. I poured my attention onto the precision, the reliability of numbers, arranging them carefully in this changeful world. Prime numbers were my favourites, for nothing and no one could divide them. After Ma, we had been reduced from three to two. Two is a divisible number, very vulnerable. I longed for us to be three; I wanted Laub to return to me, but he did not.

•  •  •

I
FINISHED SCHOOL,
then college, unsure what one did after studies. I wanted only to deal with numbers, mainly because I was not sure what to say to other human beings.

In the midst of general political turmoil, I completed my Master’s degree in Mathematics, and though I scored among the highest marks, there were no jobs to be had. I wanted to teach at a college, but had only the prospect of keeping ledgers at the shop in Burrabazaar. My usually pliant father bitterly opposed this eventuality.

“N-no, and no a-again,” he declared to our peeling ceiling.

I took up private tuitions for meager sums, training the bored and the hopeless in simple algebra and trigonometry for their
exams. Baba continued to fill out application forms on my behalf, single-mindedly submitting them to various academic and government authorities. I watched him, an accomplice in futility. I would be called to the occasional and perfunctory interview, waiting for hours in forlorn corridors. Nothing came of them. After months of these, I mentioned the ledgers again, so I could ease his financial burden.

“Wh-what!” he glared, this time six inches from my startled eyes.

I continued with my tuitions. Two years later, the impossible happened. A letter appointing me junior lecturer of Mathematics to the local branch of City College arrived one afternoon; I barely remembered the long-ago interview. I was to start in seven weeks.

I asked Baba to quit his job by the end of the year, but he had a fear of change, even if it meant respite from his daily drudgery. He took down the old biscuit tin from its ledge, emptied his small rupee hoard on his bed.

“You must get new glasses, Professor Kush,” he said, counting out the few notes.

“I will,” I countered, “if you buy a new pair too.”

Baba was accustomed to holding his newspaper close, as if he wanted to wrap his balding head in the newsprint. His eyeglasses dated from the time he was a civil court employee. Like the British Empire, his eyeglasses had come apart, but unlike the Empire, he had held the pieces together, with tape, which he occasionally replaced with his usual care.