So what if Chaurasia creates magic, the raga turns a ravager between the flute and the female, when she needs to flare up at the man she loves the most.
“Come out of this, stupid ass, or you’d be stuck on the wall like a goddamn lizard?” slammed Bhupali. “You’re 43, stupid, and you’re still stuck at six. You don’t need to hold on to the wall anymore. Or, you still need someone to hold your hand down the road?” she kept breathing fire at Iman.
“It’s festival time. Pujo is round the corner. There’s light all around you. The whole city is beaming. And, look at you. You’re not exiled, for heaven’s sake. At 43, you’re not at anybody’s mercy. It’s your life, you’re the master of it. Don’t kill yourself like this.”
F’s were in the abundance in a flurry of expletives.
Bhupali paused for a breath. “Look at those children,” she pointed to a noisy clutch of boys across the road, playing with the remains of a rubber ball, deflated and de-shaped, yet good enough for a kick-ass evening.
“They live in the ghettos. They barely have a new shirt and most have either a worn-out dress their mothers picked up from their employers, or nothing at all. Do you see them grieving? They find their happiness themselves. And, you, still clutching the wall on the dark roof just because you think there’s none by your side.”
Twenty-two years separated the two lives, but when they met again, they began where they had parted. And they moved on, this time, together. They meet almost every day. They never wondered what draws them down from one corner of the city to another, come rain or shine.
Is that love? An affair outside the hackneyed marriage? Sometimes the thought gnaws Bhupali. “Bullshit! Bloody monstrous vermin.” Allegations and abuses seem to far outweigh their love, yet they can’t stay away from each other.
“You’re talking shit, Pali.” Iman dared between her soprano and contralto. He had shortened her name when they were in school. “The life isn’t the same for everyone. Look at people around me – my relations, my friends, colleagues – they don’t feel it’s hard dying but harder living. Every moment is a bloody fight for survival for me. In fact, often I confuse between Darwin and Nostradamus. Perhaps I was the focal point for both the clairvoyance and the theory.”
“Poetry is simply melting away in prose.” He was more disgusted than exasperated. Breathing is slowly becoming a labour.
“Have you eaten your head, jack ass? There’s no other way to look at your life?” Bhupali retorted, maybe, on a lower octave this time.
“Every day I’m fooling my husband, kicking the butt of my family, and showing the middle finger to the society. For whom? How many people have you seen in such a sexy affair with a dame like me?”
“Don’t make a fun of everything, please. It’s always easier said than done,” Iman fumed.
“I was 22 when cancer gave my father a ticket to ride out of the rigmarole. I was left gasping for breaths under a huge debt load. I don’t know why my mother sees a bugbear in me. My darling wife dumped me because I couldn’t buy her the luxury she wanted and now waiting for my final bow out. My daughter is the saving grace because she’s too small to say anything yet. And, by the time she would talk like her mother, I’d be in a photo frame dangling on the wall.”
Bhupali gave him a patient hearing almost to the end. But a tight slap came down like a bolt from the blue the moment he talked of the photo frame.
“Why the hell are you so violent?” Iman cringed in pain.
“That’s what you deserve if you talk like a dickhead. Do you think I should love you for such words?”
“Umm… Pali… It’s been ages since you loved me last. Love me, dear.” And, he moved closer to her.
“Now you’re inviting yet another slap. And, mind you, it’ll be a real nasty one.”
“Are you a woman or a hammer-head shark?” he sniggered.
“Lay off, you headless bastard. Or, I’ll kill you.” As Bhupali tried to push him away, Iman held her more closely, wrapping his arms around her waist.
“Headless body in topless bar,” he whispered into her ears. He told her about this witty headline of a British tabloid many times. Another round of abuses drizzled and disappeared in their laughter. Between her chortles, Bhupali began melting in his embrace.
A strange chemistry binds the two. Both are in their mid-forties but their interactions resemble a teenage love. They fight over almost everything. And, the next moment, they cry for each other. “It’s like the rains. It’s sunny now and it’s cloudy at the drop of an eyelid,” she says often. “Don’t forget I’m the rain maid.”
Raindrops bring out the child from behind the woman. Iman loves that frivolity. He saw the ballet of the clouds as she danced in the rain. He saw parched leaves turning green with her touch. He felt gloom fading into in her giggles.
A depression engulfs Iman around this time every year. Durga Pujo spells the doom in his life when the entire community dazzles. Flooding lights, madding crowds, blaring music – everything slanders him because, he feels, he is undesired. Iman could never find an answer why he is so brutally alone. He saw since he was a child how happiness would override woes in every life around him during the festive days. He saw people making merry no matter what pulls them back. But he could never join the league. An invisible wall kept all this out of bounds for him – as if he was banned from celebrating the festivals.
Like any other household, the festive fever would sweep through their ubiquitous joint family in North Kolkata. Everyone looked happy, save for the little Iman. The child didn’t know why the chemistry didn’t work out between his parents. When the entire city was decked up with light, an overcast darkness reigned in their room. His father would sink into his black-and-white world of books and his mother would be fast asleep after a hectic day attending to the relatives. That’s what was every evening of the five-day celebration.
All his relatives, cousins and friends would go out in the evening hopping from one pujo to another. He was the only one left out. Iman can’t figure even today what was wrong with him that he was not taken along. Even when someone called him, it would always end up with just one or two pandals in the neighbourhood and then, the youngest in the family used to be dropped at the doorstep.
The wall of the roof got the touch of the tiny little fingers since then. He would stand on the roof, leaning on the wall for hours and watch the endless sea of people hanging around the iconic festival ground just a few minutes away from their house.
Years have gone by. The tiny hands have grown, and so has the little child. But nothing has changed between the wall and the touch. “The Tramp would take refuge in the rain to hide his tears and I look for a shelter in the darkness of the roof to hide my pains,” he had written to Bhupali.
As the advent of festivity begins to fill the air with celebration, Iman feels choked. Since the unconventional life of a journalist didn’t give him much room for what others do, Geetasree had decided to take the daughter along to spend the Pujo with her parents and siblings. Iman began taking up extra load at office to stay up till late.
He couldn’t negotiate for the last day, though, as it was a press holiday. Mother’s miffed disgruntlement in everything life had thrown up and her deep breaths of disappointment, the endless ticking of the clock, the emptiness of the house – there was no dearth of elements that would chase him to the roof in search of darkness to escape what the world greets as light and happiness.
Bhupali is just poles apart. She loves to enjoy life to the hilt. Pujo brings to her a respite from the everyday life. Community lunch, hanging around with friends in the housing complex, fashion shows, gossips and endless laughter flatten all walls of isolation around her.
But, every year, her celebrations would erect an unscalable wall between the two protagonists of this story. Bhupali fails to find time for Iman through these days. It doesn’t create distance between them but disputes are inevitable. Iman often shoots his mouth off in a wild fit of rage. His pent-up anger, frustration and his barbs do not take long for Bhupali to flare up.
There’s little she can do on these few days. Kolkata turns impossible for commuting. Neither can she ask Iman to come over, nor can she step out to meet him. Moreover, Rohit’s office stays shut through the Pujo. She doesn’t go out with Rohit but they stay at the housing complex with other families.
It was the first Pujo after Geetasree walked out of Iman’s house with her daughter. The low-profile, introvert man suddenly became a subject of curiosity. He felt every pair of eyes was chasing him down with a bunch of whys. There was nobody he could open up to. He shied away from his friends, too. As an impregnable darkness slowly swathed him, Iman reached out for Bhupali all the more, in search of a shelter, in order to breathe.
But he groped in the dark in vain. She was nowhere around when he needed her the most. And, finally, when the phone rang after an entire day of stifling solitude, Iman failed to put a leash on his anger.
It’s been five years since he picked up a fight with cancer. Rogue cells have begun invading different organs. He fails to identify which one is harder to bear – the pain of the disease or the toxin pumped into the veins that sets all things ablaze. If cancer had pruned his half-life, then radiation and chemo scorched most of what he was left with. He seethes as the light dies out slowly. When the pain becomes intolerable, he prays for death, and again when he sits in front of Bhupali, he craves for life.
The six-footer looks somewhat shrunken. As days pass by, a patch of tiredness thickens on his face. Bhupali found her boyhood friend grown up to a lanky, successful journalist, but with little ability to comprehend the complexities of human mind. He has made a wrong decision in every relationship.
“Can you deny the fact that no one is responsible for your fate other than you?” she had told him once. “It’s neither your father, nor your mother, nor your wife, and certainly not anyone you trusted. You just let things happen to you. You’ve always been taken for granted and you chose to be the order supplier to all.”
When they met first after two decades, Bhupali saw a broken down man with shattered confidence and extreme pessimism in life. She saw for the first time how a man could crave for a drop of love. “I wanted you to come to my life like a splash of rain. And, you stormed in like a flood,” Iman said so many times.
What creates a relation? Is it the blood, genes, or is it the oath taken in front of the God or is it chanting of hymns around the fire or signature on stamp papers? Or, there is some invisible bond that binds two individuals? Sometimes she thinks of walking out of the man.
“I can never make you happy, Iman, and in fact, no woman in this world can make you happy. You love being depressed and you drive everyone around you into depression. You’re simply jealous of everything. What do you expect me to do? I should shut myself out from the entire world only because I’m the be-all and end-all in your life? But it’s not the same for me. I have other things too and I can’t stop everything only for you.”
“All I want is just a slice of your time. I can’t breathe without you. It’s like my blood transfusions. Don’t shoo me away like this. I can’t live without you,” Iman pleads like a beggar.
“Spare me, for God’s sake, I can’t handle this anymore. Your expectations will never end no matter how much I try. Please let me live my life the way I want to live it. And you live yours.”
Bhupali’s blazes scorched Iman every time she talked like this. The sheer fright of risking his biggest treasure would drive him in an insane rush to bend backwards, apologise for his every “cooked-up disappointment” and coax her not to spoil the relationship.
“Don’t stop everything like this. I promise I’ll withdraw myself slowly. I’ve started recoiling. Just give me some time. I promise I’ll set you free.” he told her several times.
But old habits die hard. “Live your life with your family, friends and your Facebook. I know you’d be happy without me around.” Iman could never leave his barbs behind.
Those barbs are potent enough to kick off a riot yet again. What do they want? Social marriage? Living in? Or, just a shelter in each other. It won’t scratch any balls if they live happily like this. Every relationship needn’t be tagged and neither has to have a binary ending. They don’t know what awaits them. Their relationship that has weathered blazes and blizzards more than springs and autumns remains uncertain even after so many years.
“Displacement is a vector quantity. It has a direction by default. Without a direction there’s no motion,” Iman tried to read her mind about a future they had planned once. “Nothing moves without an objective, Pali.”
Bhupali evades such issues now. They did spawn a few dreams but she doesn’t know why they began withering away. It could be because of her failure to live up to Iman’s endless expectations or his untiring accusations for her actions.
“What would you have said if you were in my shoes?” he questioned.
“I’d have long gone. You’re the lone warrior in your battle. I’m not as strong as you are,” she said.
“And, what about the relationship? Where is it headed?”
The more Bhupali tries to avoid, the more Iman presses her. “You have to say. I won’t let you go unless you say what’s on your mind.”
“I won’t answer. All bullshit.”
Bhupali feels scared these days. Her words have often been the triggers for squabbles. Iman would stress on the spoken words. Sometimes he grates on her nerves with his long, meandering explanation on etymology of expletives and their inherent meanings and ramifications. She can’t hold her patience for long. So, fights are inevitable, though she is far more careful now before she says anything.
“You’ve killed my spontaneity. I need to measure every word before it leaves my throat. I don’t need to care for my words so much while talking to my friends or anybody for that matter,” she told Iman.
“Leave me, please. I can’t meet your demand.”
They even had a fight over the origin of abuses. “Know the meaning of what you are saying. You’re not illiterate,” Iman told her.
“What the F! Abuses are the most spontaneous expressions. They’re not supposed to be measured, goddammit,” she rebuked.
Countless battles they fought in the few years since their reunification. “Even Germans hated each other earlier. But there’s peace now. Why can’t we get along?”
Bhupali prefers silence to scoop out an answer for Iman. The man has changed a lot. She knows what he undergoes through this duel with the disease, she feels how helpless he is, she realises that loneliness is killing him faster than malignancy. But what could be done? She can’t leave her family behind to stand by him. She, too, has the right to be happy. What’s the harm if she indulges in a few hours of fun with friends? There’s no breach of trust. She’s not a bitch, after all.
“Yes, I couldn’t contact you through the day, because there were people surrounding me and I don’t want anyone to look at my phone. I care for my privacy. And, yes, Rohit was with me. I haven’t walked out of my marriage and I can’t deny my responsibilities,” she blasted.
“A woman needs to show off a lot of things in this society. And, you would never understand a woman’s predicament. You’re bothered only about yourself.”
“Cut the crap, Pali. Shove your excuse up your ass,” Iman’s rants inflicted deep wounds. “All your love is flushed out when it comes to pose with your hubby. How long, Pali? How long will you go on saying that all these are nothing but advertisements? If you’re not in love with someone, how could you let him hold you so intimately?”
F’s do not cost a dime, and he makes no frugality with the F’s in venting fire on her.
“When everything is over for the day, you’re about to retire, then you find five minutes for Iman. You become groggy even before I begin to talk properly. Everything is convenience and nothing else,” Iman goes on, “I can make do without your bloody bounty.”
Iman had scheduled his radiation two weeks ahead of the Pujo. He had to prepare for yet another lone battle. “You know, Pali, I’m beginning to loathe myself,” Iman said.
“What? What the hell do you mean by that?”
“There’s so much of blood. I don’t like it.” The man who looks for all the hues of life in black-and-white words, resorted to his favourite Calvero of the Lime Light. “I hate the sight of blood, but it’s in my veins.”
“I bleed so much these days that I can’t take it anymore. There’s blood in the stool, there’s blood in the vomit. It stains my teeth. I feel dirty.” His face was full of disdain. “I’ll never be fine. It never gets cured from Stage III. There’s no reason to stay alive like this. I’m tired of this battle.”
“You’re wasting your time, Pali. How long will you stick along? Trust me, I won’t sulk, I won’t be angry with you, if you decide to move out of this relationship. Just one request – let me know before you go.”
Bhupali is a raga of early evening. It’s not about sadness. She holds his hands tight. “I won’t go anywhere, Iman, I’ll be there with you, all my life. And, I won’t let you go either.” She tries to wipe out the last strains of Behag from his mind but the raga of loss and despair resounds from deep inside the lone warrior’s weary mind.
Iman doesn’t get sleep most of the nights now. “I can see that beast yet again. It had disappeared after I found you but it’s back now. I’m scared, Pali. It’ll catch me soon.”
She tried to cordon him off with all her resolve. “Don’t be afraid, my hero, you’re guarded on all sides. Nothing can scale that wall,” she said, silently, holding the face of the frayed man close to her heart. She knows he hides a lot from her these days – probably not to make her feel scared. She knows Iman encounters some strange incidents – no reason or logic can explain such things – but rarely shares with her. They drive him into a darkness that she can understand.
She herself experienced something eerie just a few days back at his place. They had lunch together and then long chats. She didn’t know when she crashed out. When Bhupali woke up, she saw Iman sleeping on the floor like a child. She hated to wake him up and dodged her way to the washroom. Suddenly she noticed a weird smell of sandalwood. She knows for years that Iman was allergic to it and there was no trace of sandalwood in his house because he feels breathless. The smell on her elbow was intense.
Bhupali returned to Iman’s room quickly. He had just woken up. “Can you smell something on my elbow?” she stretched her hand to him.
“Uh… How did you get that? You know how I hate sandalwood.”
“It’s strange, Iman. I woke up and found this smell. It was not there when we were awake.”
She spotted a sudden change in him. “Don’t come to me, Pali. It may not be good for you.” Despite her repeated asking, he kept quiet.
As the Pujo comes near, Bhupali sees a rapid change in Iman. He’s getting lonelier by the day. She wants the five days to get over at the earliest. No matter what he feels, she knows how Iman’s pains are draped around her. She knows her limitations but there’s a steely faith that she can keep him safe from all odds with her willpower. They had a brief fight over the phone just a while back on something very trivial.
“I goofed up in whatever I tried to do since this morning,” she told Iman, “I had this feeling that something unfair was on the cards.”
“You must haven’t had enough of Facebooking. Go ahead and catch your Romeos. All will be fine.” Pali let go his slight. “You’ve grown up enough to be a granny yet you can’t mend your habits,” he kept on poking.
“Go and call your mum a granny,” she was at her wit’s end. And, then quickly jumped to stop yet another round of brawl. “It’s just a way of saying. I didn’t really demean your mother.”
“Huh… How does it matter? Have you left anything unsaid about anyone? Do you even know that there’s something called a leash that we need to use before saying something?”
“Go, you stupid bugger, we’ve had enough of chatting. Go and get back to work, Iman,” she said. “I stay at home doesn’t mean that I’m idling away my time.”
“Why don’t you admit the fact that you’re done with me, at least for now. And, you want me to simply fuck off.”
Pali restrained herself yet again. She has noticed Iman has mellowed down on her. He deliberately overlooks many of her actions even if he’s hurt. Perhaps he, too, doesn’t want to ruffle feathers. Squabbles lead to internal bleeding, fresh drop in platelet count, and back to hospital. Is this some kind of a mutual understanding, or compromise? Such things happen between spouses. But Bhupali and Iman are not husband and wife. They’re not bound by any social bond.
“You gave me an open sky to unfurl my wings and fly,” she had said when Iman wondered what drove her to love him.
The autumn sky, the advent of the festivity, the pandals, the happy faces of people – behind all these lurks in shadow the roof of a four-storey house in North Kolkata and its wall on the flank facing the main road. It is soaked with the pain and deep breaths of a little child through his years of growing up to a youth and then to a man in his midlife. He waits for the last day of the festival when the goddess is sent off.
On the day of immersion, the deity is smeared with vermilion, and women believe a dash of this holy power on their faces brings health and prosperity for their spouses. Geetasree used to take part in the ritual every year like a devout Hindu wife.
She made an exception this year. She turned up at Iman’s house on the Bijoya Dashami evening. She didn’t go for the ritual. In fact, there was no trace of vermilion on her forehead. Iman is far from these beliefs but she had started wearing it as a Hindu ritual in respect to a married life after he told her about the disease a year before she left him. Geetasree said she had gone vegan.
“Perhaps she has started practising for her widowship,” Iman had texted Bhupali, recollecting the orthodox Hindu system of women being barred from eating fish and meat after the death of their husbands.
Neither Iman nor Bhupali had a clue how that night of immersion would sink them into an abyss of darkness.
“How could I stop her from visiting the house? She has the right to visit. After all, we’re not divorced,” Iman said when Bhupali poked him later that night.
“Why don’t you live with your ‘right’ if that’s what matters so much?” Bhupali couldn’t control her rage. “Who gives you the right to get into a relationship with me? What right do you have to ask me to listen to your ailments?”
Seven lakh rupees was not small amount of money for the cash-strapped cancer patient. Iman had spent up everything he had gathered through his twenty years of service on his treatment. And it didn’t stop there, it dragged him deep under a burden of debt. Nobody ever came up to help him out before the lone dove stood like a messiah. Bhupali kept all her jewellery mortgaged to help him pare his debt and breathe again.
“On what right did you take all my jewellery to fund your treatment? I gave you everything without being asked for it. I don’t even know if you can ever return them to me. Those are memories of my life. And I gave it to you without a second thought. You’re such a shameless bastard that you took everything from me and now telling me about the right of your wife.”
“Did I ask you to part with your wife? Did I ask you to come to me? Did I ask you for anything at all? You used me for the money. And, now your wife’s rights are all that counts. Just get the hell out of my life. Go and lick her ass, you fucking bastard. Bloody cheat.” She slammed the phone down and turned it off.
The cursed night of immersion came like a lethal blow to the man. He was frayed beyond repair. Bruised and battered, Iman lay on the washroom floor for hours. He had surrendered himself for the first time to someone. He never imagined the woman who was his reason for staying alive could thrash him like this.
Bhupali had snapped all her ties with Iman on that fateful night itself.
The next morning a man limped to her home. Bhupali had met a shattered Iman and, five years on, she found him hammered to fragments standing across the door. He seemed to have only as much life left that could take him to her doorstep. He was gasping for breaths like a fish out of the water.
She couldn’t understand whether it was mere sympathy or sheer love that melted her down. “I need you if I got to live, and I need you if I got to die.” He could barely mutter the words.
Bhupali’s love overpowered her ego – probably for the first time in her life. She grabbed him and led him inside.
What gives someone the right? Is it the signing on the stamp paper, or social recognition? Or, the vermilion? She never asked for any rights. She has walked out of many rights that she had earned herself or that were thrust upon her. There’s nothing that she could ask for. “Hail your rights, my baby,” she stretched her hands for the poor man.
She took out a small box from the closet and dipped Iman’s thumb into the red vermilion in it. While dragging his finger on her forehead, she said calmly, “I give you all the rights. Now come out of the roof and leave your wall.”
Bhupali didn’t leave Iman behind despite knowing that he would leave her very soon, and she would be left alone to see the light from the dark roof with her hands clutching the wall.
[Adapted from a short story called, পাঁচিল, by Debjani Aich]
The Pen Drive 