Oh My Love!
The sky brimmed with sunlight. A narrow footpath split
the field. From dry rat-holes snakes slid out and sank into the pond. It did
not feel like spring at all. A vicious heat turned my head to bees. I was
returning after looking upon the corpse of Kanta Halui. There are more in this
village. They are dropping one after another. Some fifty starved have already
gone. Another thirty or so are next to dead—half-dead from hunger and thirst.
Kanta Halui’s age lay somewhere between sixty and seventy—impossible to tell exactly. The very first day I came here I had seen him: the old man searching for something in the pond of Matichak. My friend Partha is the officer at the B.D.O. office. Born and bred Calcutta boy. A job so far from home has made him home-sick and house-bound. I had run to this back-of-beyond for a few days to stand guard over his loneliness. From the moment I arrived I began to grasp a face of my country I had never seen before; and had Partha not summoned me, perhaps I would never have seen it. Sitting in Calcutta, steeped in hobby-literature, democracy, civil rights, and the tug-of-war of urban relationships, life would have gone by. I would never have seen what Kanta Haluis eat when gnawed by hunger.
There was scarcely any water in Matichak’s pond. Toward evening I saw Kanta Halui, waist-deep in muddy slurry, hunting for snails and periwinkles. There is no other delicacy on earth, it seems, like that—once the shell is cracked. A thin, reed-like dark-skinned girl stood on the bank, staring into the distance. She was Kanta Halui’s granddaughter. At first sight, some spell of tenderness fell upon me for the girl.
All around: cracked, bloodless red earth. Dust and gusts of hot wind. A few bald trees stood here and there like ghosts. The girl was perhaps staring at one such tree. Her face was heavy. Had there been nourishment in the body, she might have been beautiful.
Some trees still had leaves, hanging like the skin of the dead. Four or five young men were tugging and tearing those leaves down. The girl kept looking that way. The sun had tilted into the west. Across the vast window of field one could see people here and there. Each taut gaze searched and searched. Nature will either give what she has—or take it back. What falls to a human’s fate is pure coincidence. In the late light, wherever one looked there ran only rows of skull-faced visages, slick with a dim sun’s glaze—shining in hope and anxiety.
Since coming to visit Partha, this village had become my favorite sightseeing spot—an underdeveloped, neglected, near-dead village. Population: four hundred and seventy-two. Each an Indian citizen, with proofs, voter identity cards included. Yet only forty-seven names appear on the BPL list. Only they have ration cards. A total of two literate souls. And the village has but one livelihood—subsistence upon scraps.
Wanting to know better, I asked Partha, “What is their occupation?”
“Occupationless,” Partha said.
“Surely once they had livelihoods. Where there is settlement, there must have been some occupation. Besides, though the land is dry, it didn’t look entirely unfit for cultivation,” I said.
“So there was, as I’ve heard. Some were farmers, some day laborers, some hawkers,” Partha said.
“Then how did all at once everyone become workless? Those who had earnings—how did all meet the same fate?”
Partha said, “One was a good farmer, one a day laborer, one hawked on local trains. But the places they went to for their belly’s chase—those places are in an economic slump. Crops failed because landowners aren’t profiting by hiring sharecroppers; and they can’t till their own land either. The ill-fallout of land reforms. Will Marx’s cooperatives ever run upon human beings? Humans are human. Add political drumroll to it. The entire belt is influenced by Maoist people’s war. From China through Nepal come guns and landmines. Young men are lured by the Maoists’ promise of free-sex society and so forth; then die in police firing. To say these uneducated ones read Das Kapital and pick up the gun would be stupidity. That talk is from Calcutta intellectuals in cooled rooms.”
At Partha’s quarters we had many such talks. He warned me again and again, “Bringing you here has made a fine mess. You’re wandering anywhere and everywhere—if something happens to you, that’s one more tangle.”
I laughed, “I have no pull at home. A man who has a room and a lump of clay. I’m a mess-dwelling vagabond Bengali.”
Partha laughed.
Yet his warning wasn’t wholly false. In this end of the district, law and order were not in robust health. With the symptom of poverty’s wail came the import of Maoists and firearms.
I told Partha, “Once you go to office, I’ve nothing to do. How long can one sit and read in a room? What quarrel can anyone have with a poor vagabond who will be neither revolutionary nor bourgeois?”
“Come to the office with me. There’s hardly any work anyway. You’ve only seen skeletals since you came. In office you’d see the pot-bellied Marxist panchayat clerks.”
I said, “I can’t believe there are pot-bellied men in this region.”
“What! I think across the whole of India only pot-bellied men have the run of the place. They run the country. They swarm.”
“What are you saying? Are they more than the skeletals?”
“Perhaps not. But they are not few in number.” Partha smiled.
I said, “Which camp do you think we belong to—especially you?”
“The pot-bellied camp. You’re higher still—bourgeois intellectual. Mouth and pen: poor poor poor. Revolution revolution revolution. In practice you must oil the leaders, ministers, businessmen.”
“How do you know?”
“Can you write against the local panchayat chief, the MLA, and his potato-godown-owning son? Your paper’s owner will have his backside split. Have you ever gone a day without food? In that village you saw—the skeletal ones—some of them get to eat once a week. Yet what life-force! You’d be amazed,” Partha said plainly.
Annoyed, I said, “Don’t the panchayat, B.D.O., your office help them? Don’t government schemes run here?”
“I don’t know about panchayat. Our B.D.O. office has only one independent task: when someone dies or is born, we record the name; and when of age, we give them voter cards to make them voters. And we also maintain law and order. Everything else runs on the say-so of panchayat babus. Come, one day I’ll show you the pot-bellies.”
“Are people still being born here?” New facts kept astonishing me.
“Three last month,” Partha said.
The question rose: why do they give birth? To die starving?
For days my mind churned; I couldn’t sit still. A despair and a sadness hung over me. Next day I decided not to go to the village; I’d go with Partha to the B.D.O. office.
The first day I went to the B.D.O. office—another snag. Outside, some men had encircled the place in protest. Partha said it was political. Without the B.D.O. office in hand, parties often do this—opposition parties. They need the public eye. Sometimes officers get thrashed. Newsprint needs its filler.
“Ever taken a beating?” I asked Partha. He said, “I never disobey superiors’ orders. Job equals deed of servitude—in your language. The rest is luck. If it hits, it hits.”
“Doesn’t it prick your conscience? Educated civil servants made to clean this sewer—how shameful!”
“Not conscience—ego. But I’ve adjusted—for job and family. When one does unethical acts occasionally, remorse follows. When immersed day and night in the unethical, habit forms; remorse does not. That is the rule. Accept it. Our society runs thus. I, too, by habit formation.”
Hearing Partha, I felt sorry for him. A bright student. In Calcutta I had thought: the boy holds a big post, serving the people. I felt a thrill that such boys, instead of fleeing abroad, serve the nation. Now I understood what a brutal compromise he had made.
Two days later, Kanta Halui died. Hearing, Partha took the jeep, and I went with him. Blinding white glare everywhere. The world burned at forty degrees. On the road a vast rage crumpled inside me. In Calcutta we read such epics of urban amenities: if for a day the corporation’s timed water doesn’t flow, or there’s a power cut, it makes front-page headlines. Millions of words are expended on human rights. Agitations against price-rise. Then entertainment, icons, cable TV, romance—the urbane civilization is busy, busy. India! Sixty years after independence. In whose far villages Kanta Haluis die of hunger. The panchayat, the B.D.O. office wait for the moment he will die.
Upon reaching Kanta Halui’s village, it felt like Stalin’s Gulag—Soviet concentration camp. We had arrived to carry away one prisoner’s corpse.
Kanta’s mud house rose to shoulder height. On one side the roof-thatch had blown away. On the veranda lay his body. His granddaughter and three or four others sat a little apart in a circle, eating rice and dal. On the occasion of Kanta’s death, they seemed to be feasting!
The panchayat babus had arrived before us. It was clear they had arranged today’s rice and dal. Partha whispered in my ear, “This starvation-death news has spread to Calcutta; a few journalists have come. Till now the matter was kept hushed.” I said, “So that’s why you rushed at high noon.” Partha pressed a finger to his lips: hush.
I peeked into Kanta’s house.
A torn quilt, a couple of clay utensils—nothing else. Well, there was one more thing: on one wall a painted Lakshmi and auspicious marks. A sarcastic anger rose in my mind. Later I understood: our country’s ancient spiritualism is by many measures better than this socialism.
My country. O Beloved! This earth of ours, filled with grain and flower. Is this the state of a free country, a socialist country, a democratic country?
I am a city man; I know how to act. With an untroubled face I came out of Kanta’s house. Outside, the government doctor felt the pulse and wrote the death certificate: death by poisoning—after eating a tree’s toxic fruit. The panchayat chief, of course, said Kanta Halui had stomach disease—diarrhea. As if to suggest that is why a delicious fruit became poisonous! The doctor wrote that down too.
An hour and a half later Partha left. I told him, “I’ll return by local train a little later. There’s a plot for a piece forming in my head.”
In truth, I wished to look a little longer at these people. And I was searching for someone. I found her.
The girl’s name was Khushi—Kanta’s granddaughter. A skeletal body, hardly any body at all. The entire frame seemed sinking under the early old age of poverty’s fatigue. Only her eyes were large and calm. Having eaten the panchayat’s rice and dal, her belly had puffed. In a corner of the yard she was shaping little clods of earth. I sat in front and watched her.
On the strength of a full belly, Kanta’s family now listened intently to the panchayat’s arranged arguments. Khushi hummed some song; in her throat it sounded like a chant. Try as I might, I could not grasp the meaning.
Then, seeing me stare, Khushi grew stiff with fear. A couple of times she looked at me in a particular way. What could her age be—fifteen, sixteen? She looked thirty, thirty-five. She tucked her jute-brown hair behind one ear; then some natural womanliness returned to her. She began to arrange her torn dress. Seeing that familiar feminine motion, I too started. I kept watching her a while longer. It felt like a white rose had bloomed in the middle of a desert.
From the first day I saw Khushi, a fierce desire had gathered in me. Swayed by that, I asked her, “Don’t you want to study?” My words sounded foreign to her. She stared blankly, trying to catch their meaning.
I realized the question was foolish; still I said the rest in one breath, “Will you come with me to the city and learn? You’ll also get plenty to eat.”
Khushi understood the part about food. Her eyes and face gleamed. For the first time she giggled. Then said, “You’ll let me eat without making me work?” Then she stood and slipped into the little mud house. Her line kept ringing in my ears.
That night Partha told me four more had died of fruit-poisoning in that region. At his words I saw again the image of men climbing trees days before. I said, “That tree must be felled.” Partha said, “Let’s see.” I said, “And these deaths—did you register them as starvation?” Partha laughed, “All are poisonings. The doctor wrote so.” I said, “Splendid.”
I then shared with Partha my wish regarding Khushi. He started as if seized by a ghost. “You’ll take her? Have you lost your mind? You’re a bachelor. Where will you keep her? What will people say? I’m not involved.”
“Why? There are homes, hostels. She can stay there. I’ll pay the monthly costs. One girl at least will live. Please, speak to them.”
“Panchayat and the rest—terribly messy. A thousand questions will rise. The family will agree only to save their skin. Will the girl want to go?”
“She will absolutely. I’ve spoken. Please try. It’s a life.”
I persuaded Partha. My exile was ending; in a day or two I would return to Calcutta. I told him, “If all sides agree, tell me. I’ll take responsibility. Once back in Calcutta, I’ll quickly arrange where she’ll stay.”
I tried to give Partha some money—for Kanta’s family’s food. He wouldn’t take it. Finally I said, “Please see they get something to eat.”
“I’ll try,” he said. Then, joking, “Seems you’ve fallen quite in love.” I said, “In part, yes.”
Back in Calcutta I quickly arranged a missionary home for Khushi—with schooling. With some positive response from Partha, I deposited an advance. Then I sat waiting for Partha’s call.
In the meantime, one night my college friend Ishita phoned. Long ago we had what you might call a glittering relationship. Yet my character and convent-schooled Ishita’s never matched. Western manners, genteel airs—those aren’t to my taste. I’m a homely Bengali: live simple, think big.
“How are you?” Ishita said.
“Fine. What’s up suddenly?” I said.
“You never call, so I did.”
“Oh.”
“Forgotten me completely, have you?”
“Entirely,” I said.
“Savage! Why don’t you call?”
“No time.”
“That’s a good excuse. Anyway—don’t worry, this is my farewell call to an ex-friend. I’m going to Toronto with my father. I’ll do my MBA there, I think.”
“Bravo. And your mother?”
“She’ll stay here, with Grandma,” Ishita said. I kept quiet. She said, “You aren’t even a little sad hearing this, are you? Of course.” Ishita always spoke like that—made you feel so close; in reality, not at all.
“Anything new happen to you?”
“Every day is new to me,” I said. “Much.” Then: “Your life has taken a nice new turn.”
“May I know your new news?”
“Not on the phone.”
“Oh, won’t tell. Fine. New love, is it?”
“Half-love.”
“What’s that? Listen, I called to tell you a few things. Perhaps we’ll never meet again. Still, let me say.”
“The world is small. We may meet,” I said.
“Will you recognize me then?”
“If I don’t, you recognize me.”
“I never forget anyone,” Ishita said. Then: “Please, don’t pretend not to know me. Anyway, listen—I think I always showed you my hardest side. So you formed a different idea of me. But what could I do? I’m my parents’ only child; I must do everything as they do. Still, believe me…”
She paused, then in dramatic tone: “I consider you a very good friend. Please don’t misunderstand me. Never forget me as a friend. Wherever I am, I’ll remember you. You’ll remain forever my very good friend.”
I listened silently. I thought to say: may your future life be happy. Then thought, what does it matter. I only said, “Certainly.”
“I must be as successful as my father—you know that. You too be happy with someone; I wish it. But don’t forget me. Think of me now and then.”
Ah, what a torrent! For half an hour she babbled and dropped the call. It had come at such a time one might expect me to grow nostalgic. She is career-busy, parents’ darling. There has never been a shortage of love in her life. Strange: she was leaving her mother alone in Calcutta and going abroad. I felt like laughing. I had wanted to say: Ishita, people are weeping. We should try, as humans, to stand beside them. But I did not. Had I said it, that would have become another drama!
Inside me emotions ran, yet only Khushi’s face floated on my mind—the true face of India: a world where Ishita and her romantic life do not exist, where there’s no pomp of the past, no current craving, no ambition to be big—only hunger and hunger, jungle-like.
What a stirring in my mind! Ishita seemed to want me to beg her not to leave Calcutta—or to be deeply sad—or to show some commitment to her. Is that true? A great human weakness: one thinks others will think of them as they do themselves. I no longer have the courage to enter such a grand falsity. Our feelings today are too different.
Cutting through my net of thought, the phone rang again late at night—Partha’s call, for which I had waited all week. From the other end his voice was grave. “There’s bad news,” he said.
In a moment I was stricken. “What—what is it?”
“Khushi has been missing since morning.”
“What do you mean?” I stood confounded.
“Don’t worry—we are trying our utmost. Some woman-trafficking ring has done it. A journalist or NGO who went to that village upon hearing of starvation deaths—someone among them. Police are very active. I’ve spoken with the D.M. We will find her and punish those behind it. Don’t worry.”
He said more. I heard nothing. Only his reassurance rang in my ears: Don’t worry. Don’t worry.
That whole night only one thought kept pulsing in me: for our vile existence, forgiveness before God. O Beloved! Forgive me.
Yet with a thin hope I slept. Surely our coming days will be more luminous than the days behind us?
By morning, before losing myself again in this city, it struck me: whoever worries about this savage, barbaric country—he must be mad!
Kanta Halui’s age lay somewhere between sixty and seventy—impossible to tell exactly. The very first day I came here I had seen him: the old man searching for something in the pond of Matichak. My friend Partha is the officer at the B.D.O. office. Born and bred Calcutta boy. A job so far from home has made him home-sick and house-bound. I had run to this back-of-beyond for a few days to stand guard over his loneliness. From the moment I arrived I began to grasp a face of my country I had never seen before; and had Partha not summoned me, perhaps I would never have seen it. Sitting in Calcutta, steeped in hobby-literature, democracy, civil rights, and the tug-of-war of urban relationships, life would have gone by. I would never have seen what Kanta Haluis eat when gnawed by hunger.
There was scarcely any water in Matichak’s pond. Toward evening I saw Kanta Halui, waist-deep in muddy slurry, hunting for snails and periwinkles. There is no other delicacy on earth, it seems, like that—once the shell is cracked. A thin, reed-like dark-skinned girl stood on the bank, staring into the distance. She was Kanta Halui’s granddaughter. At first sight, some spell of tenderness fell upon me for the girl.
All around: cracked, bloodless red earth. Dust and gusts of hot wind. A few bald trees stood here and there like ghosts. The girl was perhaps staring at one such tree. Her face was heavy. Had there been nourishment in the body, she might have been beautiful.
Some trees still had leaves, hanging like the skin of the dead. Four or five young men were tugging and tearing those leaves down. The girl kept looking that way. The sun had tilted into the west. Across the vast window of field one could see people here and there. Each taut gaze searched and searched. Nature will either give what she has—or take it back. What falls to a human’s fate is pure coincidence. In the late light, wherever one looked there ran only rows of skull-faced visages, slick with a dim sun’s glaze—shining in hope and anxiety.
Since coming to visit Partha, this village had become my favorite sightseeing spot—an underdeveloped, neglected, near-dead village. Population: four hundred and seventy-two. Each an Indian citizen, with proofs, voter identity cards included. Yet only forty-seven names appear on the BPL list. Only they have ration cards. A total of two literate souls. And the village has but one livelihood—subsistence upon scraps.
Wanting to know better, I asked Partha, “What is their occupation?”
“Occupationless,” Partha said.
“Surely once they had livelihoods. Where there is settlement, there must have been some occupation. Besides, though the land is dry, it didn’t look entirely unfit for cultivation,” I said.
“So there was, as I’ve heard. Some were farmers, some day laborers, some hawkers,” Partha said.
“Then how did all at once everyone become workless? Those who had earnings—how did all meet the same fate?”
Partha said, “One was a good farmer, one a day laborer, one hawked on local trains. But the places they went to for their belly’s chase—those places are in an economic slump. Crops failed because landowners aren’t profiting by hiring sharecroppers; and they can’t till their own land either. The ill-fallout of land reforms. Will Marx’s cooperatives ever run upon human beings? Humans are human. Add political drumroll to it. The entire belt is influenced by Maoist people’s war. From China through Nepal come guns and landmines. Young men are lured by the Maoists’ promise of free-sex society and so forth; then die in police firing. To say these uneducated ones read Das Kapital and pick up the gun would be stupidity. That talk is from Calcutta intellectuals in cooled rooms.”
At Partha’s quarters we had many such talks. He warned me again and again, “Bringing you here has made a fine mess. You’re wandering anywhere and everywhere—if something happens to you, that’s one more tangle.”
I laughed, “I have no pull at home. A man who has a room and a lump of clay. I’m a mess-dwelling vagabond Bengali.”
Partha laughed.
Yet his warning wasn’t wholly false. In this end of the district, law and order were not in robust health. With the symptom of poverty’s wail came the import of Maoists and firearms.
I told Partha, “Once you go to office, I’ve nothing to do. How long can one sit and read in a room? What quarrel can anyone have with a poor vagabond who will be neither revolutionary nor bourgeois?”
“Come to the office with me. There’s hardly any work anyway. You’ve only seen skeletals since you came. In office you’d see the pot-bellied Marxist panchayat clerks.”
I said, “I can’t believe there are pot-bellied men in this region.”
“What! I think across the whole of India only pot-bellied men have the run of the place. They run the country. They swarm.”
“What are you saying? Are they more than the skeletals?”
“Perhaps not. But they are not few in number.” Partha smiled.
I said, “Which camp do you think we belong to—especially you?”
“The pot-bellied camp. You’re higher still—bourgeois intellectual. Mouth and pen: poor poor poor. Revolution revolution revolution. In practice you must oil the leaders, ministers, businessmen.”
“How do you know?”
“Can you write against the local panchayat chief, the MLA, and his potato-godown-owning son? Your paper’s owner will have his backside split. Have you ever gone a day without food? In that village you saw—the skeletal ones—some of them get to eat once a week. Yet what life-force! You’d be amazed,” Partha said plainly.
Annoyed, I said, “Don’t the panchayat, B.D.O., your office help them? Don’t government schemes run here?”
“I don’t know about panchayat. Our B.D.O. office has only one independent task: when someone dies or is born, we record the name; and when of age, we give them voter cards to make them voters. And we also maintain law and order. Everything else runs on the say-so of panchayat babus. Come, one day I’ll show you the pot-bellies.”
“Are people still being born here?” New facts kept astonishing me.
“Three last month,” Partha said.
The question rose: why do they give birth? To die starving?
For days my mind churned; I couldn’t sit still. A despair and a sadness hung over me. Next day I decided not to go to the village; I’d go with Partha to the B.D.O. office.
The first day I went to the B.D.O. office—another snag. Outside, some men had encircled the place in protest. Partha said it was political. Without the B.D.O. office in hand, parties often do this—opposition parties. They need the public eye. Sometimes officers get thrashed. Newsprint needs its filler.
“Ever taken a beating?” I asked Partha. He said, “I never disobey superiors’ orders. Job equals deed of servitude—in your language. The rest is luck. If it hits, it hits.”
“Doesn’t it prick your conscience? Educated civil servants made to clean this sewer—how shameful!”
“Not conscience—ego. But I’ve adjusted—for job and family. When one does unethical acts occasionally, remorse follows. When immersed day and night in the unethical, habit forms; remorse does not. That is the rule. Accept it. Our society runs thus. I, too, by habit formation.”
Hearing Partha, I felt sorry for him. A bright student. In Calcutta I had thought: the boy holds a big post, serving the people. I felt a thrill that such boys, instead of fleeing abroad, serve the nation. Now I understood what a brutal compromise he had made.
Two days later, Kanta Halui died. Hearing, Partha took the jeep, and I went with him. Blinding white glare everywhere. The world burned at forty degrees. On the road a vast rage crumpled inside me. In Calcutta we read such epics of urban amenities: if for a day the corporation’s timed water doesn’t flow, or there’s a power cut, it makes front-page headlines. Millions of words are expended on human rights. Agitations against price-rise. Then entertainment, icons, cable TV, romance—the urbane civilization is busy, busy. India! Sixty years after independence. In whose far villages Kanta Haluis die of hunger. The panchayat, the B.D.O. office wait for the moment he will die.
Upon reaching Kanta Halui’s village, it felt like Stalin’s Gulag—Soviet concentration camp. We had arrived to carry away one prisoner’s corpse.
Kanta’s mud house rose to shoulder height. On one side the roof-thatch had blown away. On the veranda lay his body. His granddaughter and three or four others sat a little apart in a circle, eating rice and dal. On the occasion of Kanta’s death, they seemed to be feasting!
The panchayat babus had arrived before us. It was clear they had arranged today’s rice and dal. Partha whispered in my ear, “This starvation-death news has spread to Calcutta; a few journalists have come. Till now the matter was kept hushed.” I said, “So that’s why you rushed at high noon.” Partha pressed a finger to his lips: hush.
I peeked into Kanta’s house.
A torn quilt, a couple of clay utensils—nothing else. Well, there was one more thing: on one wall a painted Lakshmi and auspicious marks. A sarcastic anger rose in my mind. Later I understood: our country’s ancient spiritualism is by many measures better than this socialism.
My country. O Beloved! This earth of ours, filled with grain and flower. Is this the state of a free country, a socialist country, a democratic country?
I am a city man; I know how to act. With an untroubled face I came out of Kanta’s house. Outside, the government doctor felt the pulse and wrote the death certificate: death by poisoning—after eating a tree’s toxic fruit. The panchayat chief, of course, said Kanta Halui had stomach disease—diarrhea. As if to suggest that is why a delicious fruit became poisonous! The doctor wrote that down too.
An hour and a half later Partha left. I told him, “I’ll return by local train a little later. There’s a plot for a piece forming in my head.”
In truth, I wished to look a little longer at these people. And I was searching for someone. I found her.
The girl’s name was Khushi—Kanta’s granddaughter. A skeletal body, hardly any body at all. The entire frame seemed sinking under the early old age of poverty’s fatigue. Only her eyes were large and calm. Having eaten the panchayat’s rice and dal, her belly had puffed. In a corner of the yard she was shaping little clods of earth. I sat in front and watched her.
On the strength of a full belly, Kanta’s family now listened intently to the panchayat’s arranged arguments. Khushi hummed some song; in her throat it sounded like a chant. Try as I might, I could not grasp the meaning.
Then, seeing me stare, Khushi grew stiff with fear. A couple of times she looked at me in a particular way. What could her age be—fifteen, sixteen? She looked thirty, thirty-five. She tucked her jute-brown hair behind one ear; then some natural womanliness returned to her. She began to arrange her torn dress. Seeing that familiar feminine motion, I too started. I kept watching her a while longer. It felt like a white rose had bloomed in the middle of a desert.
From the first day I saw Khushi, a fierce desire had gathered in me. Swayed by that, I asked her, “Don’t you want to study?” My words sounded foreign to her. She stared blankly, trying to catch their meaning.
I realized the question was foolish; still I said the rest in one breath, “Will you come with me to the city and learn? You’ll also get plenty to eat.”
Khushi understood the part about food. Her eyes and face gleamed. For the first time she giggled. Then said, “You’ll let me eat without making me work?” Then she stood and slipped into the little mud house. Her line kept ringing in my ears.
That night Partha told me four more had died of fruit-poisoning in that region. At his words I saw again the image of men climbing trees days before. I said, “That tree must be felled.” Partha said, “Let’s see.” I said, “And these deaths—did you register them as starvation?” Partha laughed, “All are poisonings. The doctor wrote so.” I said, “Splendid.”
I then shared with Partha my wish regarding Khushi. He started as if seized by a ghost. “You’ll take her? Have you lost your mind? You’re a bachelor. Where will you keep her? What will people say? I’m not involved.”
“Why? There are homes, hostels. She can stay there. I’ll pay the monthly costs. One girl at least will live. Please, speak to them.”
“Panchayat and the rest—terribly messy. A thousand questions will rise. The family will agree only to save their skin. Will the girl want to go?”
“She will absolutely. I’ve spoken. Please try. It’s a life.”
I persuaded Partha. My exile was ending; in a day or two I would return to Calcutta. I told him, “If all sides agree, tell me. I’ll take responsibility. Once back in Calcutta, I’ll quickly arrange where she’ll stay.”
I tried to give Partha some money—for Kanta’s family’s food. He wouldn’t take it. Finally I said, “Please see they get something to eat.”
“I’ll try,” he said. Then, joking, “Seems you’ve fallen quite in love.” I said, “In part, yes.”
Back in Calcutta I quickly arranged a missionary home for Khushi—with schooling. With some positive response from Partha, I deposited an advance. Then I sat waiting for Partha’s call.
In the meantime, one night my college friend Ishita phoned. Long ago we had what you might call a glittering relationship. Yet my character and convent-schooled Ishita’s never matched. Western manners, genteel airs—those aren’t to my taste. I’m a homely Bengali: live simple, think big.
“How are you?” Ishita said.
“Fine. What’s up suddenly?” I said.
“You never call, so I did.”
“Oh.”
“Forgotten me completely, have you?”
“Entirely,” I said.
“Savage! Why don’t you call?”
“No time.”
“That’s a good excuse. Anyway—don’t worry, this is my farewell call to an ex-friend. I’m going to Toronto with my father. I’ll do my MBA there, I think.”
“Bravo. And your mother?”
“She’ll stay here, with Grandma,” Ishita said. I kept quiet. She said, “You aren’t even a little sad hearing this, are you? Of course.” Ishita always spoke like that—made you feel so close; in reality, not at all.
“Anything new happen to you?”
“Every day is new to me,” I said. “Much.” Then: “Your life has taken a nice new turn.”
“May I know your new news?”
“Not on the phone.”
“Oh, won’t tell. Fine. New love, is it?”
“Half-love.”
“What’s that? Listen, I called to tell you a few things. Perhaps we’ll never meet again. Still, let me say.”
“The world is small. We may meet,” I said.
“Will you recognize me then?”
“If I don’t, you recognize me.”
“I never forget anyone,” Ishita said. Then: “Please, don’t pretend not to know me. Anyway, listen—I think I always showed you my hardest side. So you formed a different idea of me. But what could I do? I’m my parents’ only child; I must do everything as they do. Still, believe me…”
She paused, then in dramatic tone: “I consider you a very good friend. Please don’t misunderstand me. Never forget me as a friend. Wherever I am, I’ll remember you. You’ll remain forever my very good friend.”
I listened silently. I thought to say: may your future life be happy. Then thought, what does it matter. I only said, “Certainly.”
“I must be as successful as my father—you know that. You too be happy with someone; I wish it. But don’t forget me. Think of me now and then.”
Ah, what a torrent! For half an hour she babbled and dropped the call. It had come at such a time one might expect me to grow nostalgic. She is career-busy, parents’ darling. There has never been a shortage of love in her life. Strange: she was leaving her mother alone in Calcutta and going abroad. I felt like laughing. I had wanted to say: Ishita, people are weeping. We should try, as humans, to stand beside them. But I did not. Had I said it, that would have become another drama!
Inside me emotions ran, yet only Khushi’s face floated on my mind—the true face of India: a world where Ishita and her romantic life do not exist, where there’s no pomp of the past, no current craving, no ambition to be big—only hunger and hunger, jungle-like.
What a stirring in my mind! Ishita seemed to want me to beg her not to leave Calcutta—or to be deeply sad—or to show some commitment to her. Is that true? A great human weakness: one thinks others will think of them as they do themselves. I no longer have the courage to enter such a grand falsity. Our feelings today are too different.
Cutting through my net of thought, the phone rang again late at night—Partha’s call, for which I had waited all week. From the other end his voice was grave. “There’s bad news,” he said.
In a moment I was stricken. “What—what is it?”
“Khushi has been missing since morning.”
“What do you mean?” I stood confounded.
“Don’t worry—we are trying our utmost. Some woman-trafficking ring has done it. A journalist or NGO who went to that village upon hearing of starvation deaths—someone among them. Police are very active. I’ve spoken with the D.M. We will find her and punish those behind it. Don’t worry.”
He said more. I heard nothing. Only his reassurance rang in my ears: Don’t worry. Don’t worry.
That whole night only one thought kept pulsing in me: for our vile existence, forgiveness before God. O Beloved! Forgive me.
Yet with a thin hope I slept. Surely our coming days will be more luminous than the days behind us?
By morning, before losing myself again in this city, it struck me: whoever worries about this savage, barbaric country—he must be mad!
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