Dead Yellow
At first glance it looks green. Green in endless
variations—deep green, ashen green, radiant green, barren green, faded green.
How many shades? Is there ever an end to green? Yet when one opens both eyes
wide and peers with intent, there is no green at all—only a parched desert.
Infinite stillness reigns there. Stains of dried blood mark the ground, ancient
wounds long unhealed. Each night, someone comes and commits another murder.
The blows have continued for long. “Will you step aside a little now?” comes a voice of protest. A sound of refusal, a note of rebellion. Though dead, it is lured still by worldly consciousness. Who knows, by this evening, in storm and rain, how many will die struck by lightning? Those standing in pain, clinging to life, one of them mutters: “Step aside, or my waist will break. I am at the edge of death.”
“Bear it. We are almost there.”
“If it goes on like this, I may never arrive.”
There is no space left to stand. A headache gnaws at Anutosh. He has been waiting an hour in line at Dalhousie for the bus. Through the tinted glass, the heads of people outside cannot be seen. All appear headless. Some call them spineless men. The blouses of women conceal their working breasts—looking prouder than they are. Men’s shirt-buttons hang open. Suddenly, the jungle of green surges again before his eyes.
At Park Street, crowds throng in desperate rows, like fish gasping on land, waiting for buses. The right bus never arrives on time. By evening here, the embankment breaks, and water rushes in. Bangladeshi refugee families’ daughters jostle in the throng. Train services and rescue work will take long to resume. Already, afternoon news had said: a deep depression over the Bay of Bengal would strike Andhra Pradesh, disrupting normal life. Countless houses may collapse. Hundreds injured, lakhs homeless. In Madanamalli town, eight hundred people were swept away today; none yet traced. Torrential rains endanger millions in the lowlands. A time of peril. And peril itself has become the normalcy of civilization. For many, the dream of climbing to dry land will remain only a dream. Because of peril.
What nonsense dream is this? How can a desert be green!
“Hold me close and sleep,” Shikha whispers, leaning nearer. “The fan is at full speed, yet you’re drenched in sweat. Turn this way, let me wipe your chest.” With the edge of her sari, she dries the sweat from Anutosh’s chest.
But the headache pricks again. At the Park Street crossing, buses stand crooked, in narrow winding lines. In Kolkata, buses always stand so—like crabs, locking pincers sideways so the one behind cannot slip out. The morning’s lesson was: Maintain the line, the line!
“Don’t lean so hard on my shoulder,” he mutters. The pain in his head crawls down his spine. Strange—everywhere he looks, there are people without heads. Where have all the heads gone? Someone says, “They’re all swarming at the Maidan. The world’s highest density per square kilometer.” By end of January, they all sprout knowledge in the Book Fair grounds. A little further away, a man called Nehru has been standing for days, head bent toward the earth, hiding his sly face. Of course crows would come and defile his face.
It was by his side, some days ago, that Shikha and Anutosh entered the Book Fair. It was a Saturday. Dust flew into Anutosh’s eyes, nose, mouth. He pressed a handkerchief to his face. At the little-magazine stall, a scuffle had broken out. A seventeen-year-old poet accused of squeezing a middle-aged woman’s breast.
Elsewhere that Saturday evening, storms had begun. In Mahbubnagar, seventeen killed by lightning. Nellore, Karappa, Krishna, Kannur—the air filled with the smell of corpses. Standing uneasy in the minibus, Anutosh heard the meteorological report: the deep depression 270 km south of Vishakhapatnam, expected to make landfall by Sunday evening, then pass over some other city. He shifted weight from one leg to the other. He remembered four months earlier, one Saturday at the Maidan, Shikha’s newly bought book had fallen into the dust. The book, thin as a skull, stripped to bone, titled The Story of Freedom. She had dug it out of the dirt, its letters illegible. Wiping it with her sari, she made it readable again. That book she placed atop the poetry book Anutosh had bought. People wept that day. A fitting pair, those two books.
“Are you feeling hot? Shall I bring the table fan from the other room?” Shikha asks.
“One ceiling fan, one table fan—nothing will do. Can you bring me the sea, Shikha?” Anutosh chuckles inwardly.
Never has he felt such heat. He mutters again: “Age doesn’t wait, bastard. A whole day wandering in the desert no longer suits me.”
Shikha replies: “How many times have I told you, don’t climb onto the pillow. Drool still seeps from your mouth. Your greenness is fading. Look at yourself—you are turning yellow.”
Anutosh stares with bleached eyes.
“What happened, Ma? He’s disturbing you again?” Bolan shouts loudly from the other room. “Give him a sleeping pill. Knock him out. He’s been rambling nonsense too long.”
Shikha thinks: My breast is his sleeping pill. She says softly, “Alright, try to sleep now.”
“But how can I sleep? That tall fellow behind keeps jabbing my back with his elbow. If it were a woman, she’d have screamed by now. I say nothing only because I am a gentleman.”
“Can’t you move a little?”
“Where will I move? You’ll sit down here? Every day it’s the same—crossing deserts alone, fighting oneself. That is the curse of this city. Unless it heats me, it cannot be fulfilled. I indulge in vulgarity, throw bottles, slap faces. Yet why does this desert still look green? What enchantment binds me? You’ll say nothing, Shikha, nothing. In front of my arrogance you’ll remain silent. Only, instead of pills, you’ll offer your chest. Or in a voice thick with tears you’ll whisper: Do you understand nothing?”
“Say nothing now. My head is fogged.”
“You understand nothing,” said Mr. Bhavesh, rising from the next desk. “I told you to exclude the tax-saving account balance from the gross-profit calculation. Forgot again? How many times must I repeat myself?”
“Sorry, sir. I was distracted today. I’ll correct it before leaving.”
“You should take a golden handshake with the company now. The firm will be free, and so will you.”
Anutosh smiled a wooden smile. Good advice, he thought. What would it be like to retire, to take Shikha on a second honeymoon? Somewhere close, in nature, a vast green meadow, surrounded only by sky. In its midst—Shikha as she was twenty years ago. He had heard there was a tourist spot near Haldia, pleasant enough. Seven days there would cost at least two thousand rupees. This month he had already taken a three-thousand loan from office—for Bolan’s books. Second honeymoon—let it go to hell.
That day Shikha had said: “In our time, we didn’t have such thick, heavy books. College notes were enough to pass. Now, every book comes with a private tutor attached.” She regretted that nearly four or five thousand rupees a month went into Bolan’s education alone.
Anutosh calculated inwardly—if that money had been saved for twenty years, with interest, what wealth it might have grown into! Bolan could have lived his entire life comfortably on it.
Whenever money was mentioned, Shikha’s lips trembled on the edge of saying what she never could: We could have had our own home. A home of our own. That was her lifelong dream, her repressed desire.
Anutosh chuckled bitterly. His head throbbed with unbearable pain. Such words he could not endure—they mocked his life’s failures.
“Keep your foot to yourself, mister!” said a man beside him.
No longer could he bear storms, rains, calamities. He sought an escape. Somewhere, there must be a path of escape. A road opened inside his head, splitting the desert. A grey path across the barren land, skirting decayed canal banks, running straight through rice fields.
Once, the land on both sides had been called waste ground—infertile, incapable of crop. Water seeped from canals, flooding it always. In the mornings, Bhibhu the cowherd would release cattle into it. The hooves of cows and buffalo sank into the wet soil, making pits. In monsoon, those pits filled with water. Then green grass sprouted, scattered, surviving year-round, feeding Bhibhu’s beasts.
And yet the land remained sorrowful. Its chest bore festering wounds. Bhibhu the cowherd understood the grief of the soil. Returning from the village market at dusk, he gazed wide-eyed at the vast stretch. Endless, immeasurable. From end to end, the horizon lost itself. The entire sky could be seen standing upon it. People called it barren. They warned: to watch it at twilight brought misfortune.
He would tell his wife Malati: “Go call Parvati into the house. It is not right for her to linger on that field so late.” Then Malati would search for their heifer calf. It refused old grass, always slipping into the juiciest part of the field, deep in the middle, where soil was soft and deep. From there, nothing could be seen—only shadows of trees and clouds. Malati would shiver, thinking how vast it was. Every year the field swallowed a cow or calf. Last year it took Ganesh. At dusk they counted and Ganesh was gone. At night, Bhibhu and Malati searched deep into the field, but no trace. Swallowed whole by the earth.
At dawn, Bhibhu went searching again. He walked miles into the field. The end was never found. No sign of life anywhere. Then his foot struck something—the rope of Ganesh’s neck. He stumbled. The tether was buried in soil. Ganesh was gone, vanished into the belly of some invisible storm.
Shikha had once looked into Anutosh’s eyes on a Saturday morning and said: “What happens to you these days? Why do you scream in your sleep, babbling nonsense? You never used to talk in your sleep.”
These days, Anutosh could not gaze long into her eyes. He turned instead to the ceiling. On the wall’s paint he saw green stains, faceless figures. Closing his eyes, he saw clearly the desert field—vast, infinite, barren.
In the evening, the minibus crawled along winding roads. Inside, impatient passengers shifted the weight of flesh, wondering where to rest it. “Shikha, what if we sleep on the roof under the sky?” Anutosh murmured.
“That would be nice,” she replied. “But is there space now? Families live there. Try tomorrow. But what of Bolan? Will he sleep alone? Though, he is used to it. Parents never have time. He never asked. Besides, he studies late. He cannot yet tell the difference between sleeping under a ceiling and sleeping beneath the sky. Perhaps this generation never will.”
When Shikha listens in silence, Anutosh seizes the chance to speak on: “Don’t you ever feel, Shikha, that we have wasted our lives working only for the future? Isn’t this a meaningless expense? A waste? We do not live today fully, always thinking of tomorrow. And who knows—we may not even live until tomorrow!”
Shikha thought quietly before answering: “Looked at from a certain angle, your words sound true. But in reality, they are nonsense. Thinking of the future is not meaningless. If we live only for today, life itself becomes meaningless.”
When a bus idles in gear, its body is lulled into a drowsy hum. In that drowse, Anutosh’s insides seemed to melt. Pain rushed from his head through veins, down into his body. Pavements slid swiftly past his eyes. Pavements—like wings of the city. The moment a distant bus appeared, excitement rippled across the faces of weary office-goers waiting there. Then, like bats, they would cling and swing back to the shore.
The 7:30 news announced through PTI: in Tamil Nadu seas, 240 fishermen still missing. Helicopters had spotted bodies floating. In the state, 31 dead confirmed. Five thousand houses destroyed. Crops ruined. Yet what of it? Like a serpent, the minibus wound through alleys.
“You’ve been standing here too long, taking too much space. Others need room too,” someone snapped.
“Excuse me… where will you get down? In this crowd, it’s impossible to stand properly.”
Anutosh lowered his once-bold face in sudden shame.
On Friday, he had returned home to find a white envelope, addressed in his name. No one else had opened it. On the corner, below his address, one word was written: Malati. A letter from his mother after long years. He had felt joy. But opening it, he found bad news. His heart grew bitter. That night he hurried to catch a train.
On Saturday morning, before leaving for office, he had left behind a line scrawled on the back of that envelope. Later, as she cleaned his desk, Shikha found it. His words, then scribbled over with restless pen-strokes, unreadable. Yet Shikha knew. She understood him like water. Beneath the scratches she could still see:
“Amidst everyone I struggle to keep myself intact. All are busy, all are weary. Tireless I-I, you-you. Do we even exist anymore—our selves, our us?”
At the very center of his thoughts, in the middle of his skull, there sat the tyrant I. All his consciousness filled with only himself.
By evening, as he stood in the crowded bus, he wondered in awe: So busy, all of us—where are we headed? What are we preparing for, over and over? For the future? For the few moments before death? And then?
Survival itself was exhausting life.
What startled him more was the realization: the future we are forever anxious about, for which we sacrifice today—do we even know if that future will ever arrive? Or if we will survive to reach it?
“Are you struggling to stand, sir?”
“No, no. I’m used to this. In childhood, the schoolmaster kept me standing all afternoon under the banyan tree. And near our house was a barren field. Father punished me by telling me to wander its jungle at dusk. And I went.”
“Really? There was a jungle in your village? But don’t we too have jungles, here in Kolkata? Can’t you see them?”
Anutosh laughed inwardly. Indeed! An urban jungle. From above, it looks a grey plain. Enter within, and it is a thicket. A witty man, this stranger.
Ugh—his head split with pain. He no longer wished to see people’s shouts, cries, joys, and sorrows on the racing streets. His tired body longed for the certainty of walls. Tomorrow would bring new rations of struggle.
It was his father being spoken of. To the stranger he opened up more freely than usual. Last Wednesday his father had died, at the age of ninety-five. Bibhutibhushan Majumdar. Still hard to believe. Ninety years a wrestler—what lungs, what strength! He seemed immune to age. That serene, solemn worker, that saintly youth—how could such a man ever die?
On Sunday night, a strange thing happened in the ancestral home. In deep night, Anutosh dreamt he saw Bhibhu walking across the barren field. He was calling out for a lost calf. Searching deep into the thickets. In the dark of new moon, his tall, broad figure shone like a living monument. His silhouette stretched long, like a shadow of trees. That shadow could never be subdued.
Anutosh drew close and called: “Father!”
With steady voice Bhibhu said: “Bhombol, you’ve come. Which train brought you? I could never make the journey. I kept meaning to, but who would manage these creatures?”
“Father, I am here now.”
He looked at his son and replied: “In this world, comings and goings are not simple. Better to drive your stake in one place. Then you will not be lost in the jungle.”
The shadows nodded from afar, agreeing with him.
The next morning, two or three villagers searching for Bhibhu the cowherd found his rope, cut, lying on the barren field. The tether was gone. Before vanishing into some unseen path, he had left no footprints in the soil. Forced at last, he had taken some unfamiliar way. In this barren land, his self-annihilation was complete. Crossing it, no trace remained. What a marvel!
Anutosh saw—it was no ordinary land. It was a desert fragment. Above, a cover of green; below, the call of yellow death. Our beloved city too contains such places. That barren ground pulled at him now.
“Brother, please hold this gentleman’s arm. Let him sit by the window. Times are not good. He has lost a leg up to the thigh.”
Anutosh glanced toward the window. Through the black glass of the minibus, the sky appeared more infinite, more grave. Would a green meadow slowly form upon it?
“Sir, can you hear me? How do you feel now? Why did your head spin? Why did you leave the house in this state? Look at the country. What will people do? Imports are low, prices rising. Do we survive? Is civilization destined to survive?”
Something rose in Anutosh’s throat. His chest burned. Sand, sand everywhere—inside chest, stomach, head, all a desert. Intense nausea. Within the bus itself, he wanted to vomit blood, the old blood of life.
Suddenly, the commotion woke him. He had been asleep. On waking, he heard the irritated voices around him. The bus window was spattered with vomit. People were cursing, loud, delighted in their disgust.
“Shikha, Shikha—light a lamp. I’m nauseous. I must go to the bathroom.”
Startled, Shikha sat up, one hand lighting the lamp, the other holding her husband. Then she called their son: “Bolan! Come hold your father. What happened to him? Why vomit? Is it a stroke? I’ll call the doctor.”
After a while, somewhat recovered, Anutosh pulled the white envelope again from the table and reread his mother’s letter in one breath. It was no dream. True. Then he asked Shikha: “We will all go, won’t we? For Father’s rites? I’ve taken leave. We’ll spend some days in the ancestral home. Long since we went. It will please Mother too.”
“All of us?”
“Yes—you, me, Bolan. Twenty-two years you never lived in your in-laws’ house. Stay with Mother-in-law a while. Bolan will like it. He wants to see the village. He loves his grandmother.”
“But will Bolan go? His exams are near.”
“Why not? To hell with exams! Did passing them make my life? I won’t hear excuses. Remember, beside our house was that jungle. It is still there. I hear a road may be built through it. Before it is destroyed, I must show Bolan. He must know his past.”
Shikha smiled faintly. She understood. She had never laughed the foolish laugh. Yet she felt, in this indifferent household, a few days of fresh air might come. Some newness.
Anutosh sensed her agreement. He asked: “Has the cyclone in South India ended? Did you see the news?”
“Who knows? Perhaps it has passed. Monsoons never stay in one place long.”
Anutosh laughed: “Ha! Your geography is still sharp.” Shikha laughed too.
Then, growing pensive, she said: “The storm will end one day.”
The blows have continued for long. “Will you step aside a little now?” comes a voice of protest. A sound of refusal, a note of rebellion. Though dead, it is lured still by worldly consciousness. Who knows, by this evening, in storm and rain, how many will die struck by lightning? Those standing in pain, clinging to life, one of them mutters: “Step aside, or my waist will break. I am at the edge of death.”
“Bear it. We are almost there.”
“If it goes on like this, I may never arrive.”
There is no space left to stand. A headache gnaws at Anutosh. He has been waiting an hour in line at Dalhousie for the bus. Through the tinted glass, the heads of people outside cannot be seen. All appear headless. Some call them spineless men. The blouses of women conceal their working breasts—looking prouder than they are. Men’s shirt-buttons hang open. Suddenly, the jungle of green surges again before his eyes.
At Park Street, crowds throng in desperate rows, like fish gasping on land, waiting for buses. The right bus never arrives on time. By evening here, the embankment breaks, and water rushes in. Bangladeshi refugee families’ daughters jostle in the throng. Train services and rescue work will take long to resume. Already, afternoon news had said: a deep depression over the Bay of Bengal would strike Andhra Pradesh, disrupting normal life. Countless houses may collapse. Hundreds injured, lakhs homeless. In Madanamalli town, eight hundred people were swept away today; none yet traced. Torrential rains endanger millions in the lowlands. A time of peril. And peril itself has become the normalcy of civilization. For many, the dream of climbing to dry land will remain only a dream. Because of peril.
What nonsense dream is this? How can a desert be green!
“Hold me close and sleep,” Shikha whispers, leaning nearer. “The fan is at full speed, yet you’re drenched in sweat. Turn this way, let me wipe your chest.” With the edge of her sari, she dries the sweat from Anutosh’s chest.
But the headache pricks again. At the Park Street crossing, buses stand crooked, in narrow winding lines. In Kolkata, buses always stand so—like crabs, locking pincers sideways so the one behind cannot slip out. The morning’s lesson was: Maintain the line, the line!
“Don’t lean so hard on my shoulder,” he mutters. The pain in his head crawls down his spine. Strange—everywhere he looks, there are people without heads. Where have all the heads gone? Someone says, “They’re all swarming at the Maidan. The world’s highest density per square kilometer.” By end of January, they all sprout knowledge in the Book Fair grounds. A little further away, a man called Nehru has been standing for days, head bent toward the earth, hiding his sly face. Of course crows would come and defile his face.
It was by his side, some days ago, that Shikha and Anutosh entered the Book Fair. It was a Saturday. Dust flew into Anutosh’s eyes, nose, mouth. He pressed a handkerchief to his face. At the little-magazine stall, a scuffle had broken out. A seventeen-year-old poet accused of squeezing a middle-aged woman’s breast.
Elsewhere that Saturday evening, storms had begun. In Mahbubnagar, seventeen killed by lightning. Nellore, Karappa, Krishna, Kannur—the air filled with the smell of corpses. Standing uneasy in the minibus, Anutosh heard the meteorological report: the deep depression 270 km south of Vishakhapatnam, expected to make landfall by Sunday evening, then pass over some other city. He shifted weight from one leg to the other. He remembered four months earlier, one Saturday at the Maidan, Shikha’s newly bought book had fallen into the dust. The book, thin as a skull, stripped to bone, titled The Story of Freedom. She had dug it out of the dirt, its letters illegible. Wiping it with her sari, she made it readable again. That book she placed atop the poetry book Anutosh had bought. People wept that day. A fitting pair, those two books.
“Are you feeling hot? Shall I bring the table fan from the other room?” Shikha asks.
“One ceiling fan, one table fan—nothing will do. Can you bring me the sea, Shikha?” Anutosh chuckles inwardly.
Never has he felt such heat. He mutters again: “Age doesn’t wait, bastard. A whole day wandering in the desert no longer suits me.”
Shikha replies: “How many times have I told you, don’t climb onto the pillow. Drool still seeps from your mouth. Your greenness is fading. Look at yourself—you are turning yellow.”
Anutosh stares with bleached eyes.
“What happened, Ma? He’s disturbing you again?” Bolan shouts loudly from the other room. “Give him a sleeping pill. Knock him out. He’s been rambling nonsense too long.”
Shikha thinks: My breast is his sleeping pill. She says softly, “Alright, try to sleep now.”
“But how can I sleep? That tall fellow behind keeps jabbing my back with his elbow. If it were a woman, she’d have screamed by now. I say nothing only because I am a gentleman.”
“Can’t you move a little?”
“Where will I move? You’ll sit down here? Every day it’s the same—crossing deserts alone, fighting oneself. That is the curse of this city. Unless it heats me, it cannot be fulfilled. I indulge in vulgarity, throw bottles, slap faces. Yet why does this desert still look green? What enchantment binds me? You’ll say nothing, Shikha, nothing. In front of my arrogance you’ll remain silent. Only, instead of pills, you’ll offer your chest. Or in a voice thick with tears you’ll whisper: Do you understand nothing?”
“Say nothing now. My head is fogged.”
“You understand nothing,” said Mr. Bhavesh, rising from the next desk. “I told you to exclude the tax-saving account balance from the gross-profit calculation. Forgot again? How many times must I repeat myself?”
“Sorry, sir. I was distracted today. I’ll correct it before leaving.”
“You should take a golden handshake with the company now. The firm will be free, and so will you.”
Anutosh smiled a wooden smile. Good advice, he thought. What would it be like to retire, to take Shikha on a second honeymoon? Somewhere close, in nature, a vast green meadow, surrounded only by sky. In its midst—Shikha as she was twenty years ago. He had heard there was a tourist spot near Haldia, pleasant enough. Seven days there would cost at least two thousand rupees. This month he had already taken a three-thousand loan from office—for Bolan’s books. Second honeymoon—let it go to hell.
That day Shikha had said: “In our time, we didn’t have such thick, heavy books. College notes were enough to pass. Now, every book comes with a private tutor attached.” She regretted that nearly four or five thousand rupees a month went into Bolan’s education alone.
Anutosh calculated inwardly—if that money had been saved for twenty years, with interest, what wealth it might have grown into! Bolan could have lived his entire life comfortably on it.
Whenever money was mentioned, Shikha’s lips trembled on the edge of saying what she never could: We could have had our own home. A home of our own. That was her lifelong dream, her repressed desire.
Anutosh chuckled bitterly. His head throbbed with unbearable pain. Such words he could not endure—they mocked his life’s failures.
“Keep your foot to yourself, mister!” said a man beside him.
No longer could he bear storms, rains, calamities. He sought an escape. Somewhere, there must be a path of escape. A road opened inside his head, splitting the desert. A grey path across the barren land, skirting decayed canal banks, running straight through rice fields.
Once, the land on both sides had been called waste ground—infertile, incapable of crop. Water seeped from canals, flooding it always. In the mornings, Bhibhu the cowherd would release cattle into it. The hooves of cows and buffalo sank into the wet soil, making pits. In monsoon, those pits filled with water. Then green grass sprouted, scattered, surviving year-round, feeding Bhibhu’s beasts.
And yet the land remained sorrowful. Its chest bore festering wounds. Bhibhu the cowherd understood the grief of the soil. Returning from the village market at dusk, he gazed wide-eyed at the vast stretch. Endless, immeasurable. From end to end, the horizon lost itself. The entire sky could be seen standing upon it. People called it barren. They warned: to watch it at twilight brought misfortune.
He would tell his wife Malati: “Go call Parvati into the house. It is not right for her to linger on that field so late.” Then Malati would search for their heifer calf. It refused old grass, always slipping into the juiciest part of the field, deep in the middle, where soil was soft and deep. From there, nothing could be seen—only shadows of trees and clouds. Malati would shiver, thinking how vast it was. Every year the field swallowed a cow or calf. Last year it took Ganesh. At dusk they counted and Ganesh was gone. At night, Bhibhu and Malati searched deep into the field, but no trace. Swallowed whole by the earth.
At dawn, Bhibhu went searching again. He walked miles into the field. The end was never found. No sign of life anywhere. Then his foot struck something—the rope of Ganesh’s neck. He stumbled. The tether was buried in soil. Ganesh was gone, vanished into the belly of some invisible storm.
Shikha had once looked into Anutosh’s eyes on a Saturday morning and said: “What happens to you these days? Why do you scream in your sleep, babbling nonsense? You never used to talk in your sleep.”
These days, Anutosh could not gaze long into her eyes. He turned instead to the ceiling. On the wall’s paint he saw green stains, faceless figures. Closing his eyes, he saw clearly the desert field—vast, infinite, barren.
In the evening, the minibus crawled along winding roads. Inside, impatient passengers shifted the weight of flesh, wondering where to rest it. “Shikha, what if we sleep on the roof under the sky?” Anutosh murmured.
“That would be nice,” she replied. “But is there space now? Families live there. Try tomorrow. But what of Bolan? Will he sleep alone? Though, he is used to it. Parents never have time. He never asked. Besides, he studies late. He cannot yet tell the difference between sleeping under a ceiling and sleeping beneath the sky. Perhaps this generation never will.”
When Shikha listens in silence, Anutosh seizes the chance to speak on: “Don’t you ever feel, Shikha, that we have wasted our lives working only for the future? Isn’t this a meaningless expense? A waste? We do not live today fully, always thinking of tomorrow. And who knows—we may not even live until tomorrow!”
Shikha thought quietly before answering: “Looked at from a certain angle, your words sound true. But in reality, they are nonsense. Thinking of the future is not meaningless. If we live only for today, life itself becomes meaningless.”
When a bus idles in gear, its body is lulled into a drowsy hum. In that drowse, Anutosh’s insides seemed to melt. Pain rushed from his head through veins, down into his body. Pavements slid swiftly past his eyes. Pavements—like wings of the city. The moment a distant bus appeared, excitement rippled across the faces of weary office-goers waiting there. Then, like bats, they would cling and swing back to the shore.
The 7:30 news announced through PTI: in Tamil Nadu seas, 240 fishermen still missing. Helicopters had spotted bodies floating. In the state, 31 dead confirmed. Five thousand houses destroyed. Crops ruined. Yet what of it? Like a serpent, the minibus wound through alleys.
“You’ve been standing here too long, taking too much space. Others need room too,” someone snapped.
“Excuse me… where will you get down? In this crowd, it’s impossible to stand properly.”
Anutosh lowered his once-bold face in sudden shame.
On Friday, he had returned home to find a white envelope, addressed in his name. No one else had opened it. On the corner, below his address, one word was written: Malati. A letter from his mother after long years. He had felt joy. But opening it, he found bad news. His heart grew bitter. That night he hurried to catch a train.
On Saturday morning, before leaving for office, he had left behind a line scrawled on the back of that envelope. Later, as she cleaned his desk, Shikha found it. His words, then scribbled over with restless pen-strokes, unreadable. Yet Shikha knew. She understood him like water. Beneath the scratches she could still see:
“Amidst everyone I struggle to keep myself intact. All are busy, all are weary. Tireless I-I, you-you. Do we even exist anymore—our selves, our us?”
At the very center of his thoughts, in the middle of his skull, there sat the tyrant I. All his consciousness filled with only himself.
By evening, as he stood in the crowded bus, he wondered in awe: So busy, all of us—where are we headed? What are we preparing for, over and over? For the future? For the few moments before death? And then?
Survival itself was exhausting life.
What startled him more was the realization: the future we are forever anxious about, for which we sacrifice today—do we even know if that future will ever arrive? Or if we will survive to reach it?
“Are you struggling to stand, sir?”
“No, no. I’m used to this. In childhood, the schoolmaster kept me standing all afternoon under the banyan tree. And near our house was a barren field. Father punished me by telling me to wander its jungle at dusk. And I went.”
“Really? There was a jungle in your village? But don’t we too have jungles, here in Kolkata? Can’t you see them?”
Anutosh laughed inwardly. Indeed! An urban jungle. From above, it looks a grey plain. Enter within, and it is a thicket. A witty man, this stranger.
Ugh—his head split with pain. He no longer wished to see people’s shouts, cries, joys, and sorrows on the racing streets. His tired body longed for the certainty of walls. Tomorrow would bring new rations of struggle.
It was his father being spoken of. To the stranger he opened up more freely than usual. Last Wednesday his father had died, at the age of ninety-five. Bibhutibhushan Majumdar. Still hard to believe. Ninety years a wrestler—what lungs, what strength! He seemed immune to age. That serene, solemn worker, that saintly youth—how could such a man ever die?
On Sunday night, a strange thing happened in the ancestral home. In deep night, Anutosh dreamt he saw Bhibhu walking across the barren field. He was calling out for a lost calf. Searching deep into the thickets. In the dark of new moon, his tall, broad figure shone like a living monument. His silhouette stretched long, like a shadow of trees. That shadow could never be subdued.
Anutosh drew close and called: “Father!”
With steady voice Bhibhu said: “Bhombol, you’ve come. Which train brought you? I could never make the journey. I kept meaning to, but who would manage these creatures?”
“Father, I am here now.”
He looked at his son and replied: “In this world, comings and goings are not simple. Better to drive your stake in one place. Then you will not be lost in the jungle.”
The shadows nodded from afar, agreeing with him.
The next morning, two or three villagers searching for Bhibhu the cowherd found his rope, cut, lying on the barren field. The tether was gone. Before vanishing into some unseen path, he had left no footprints in the soil. Forced at last, he had taken some unfamiliar way. In this barren land, his self-annihilation was complete. Crossing it, no trace remained. What a marvel!
Anutosh saw—it was no ordinary land. It was a desert fragment. Above, a cover of green; below, the call of yellow death. Our beloved city too contains such places. That barren ground pulled at him now.
“Brother, please hold this gentleman’s arm. Let him sit by the window. Times are not good. He has lost a leg up to the thigh.”
Anutosh glanced toward the window. Through the black glass of the minibus, the sky appeared more infinite, more grave. Would a green meadow slowly form upon it?
“Sir, can you hear me? How do you feel now? Why did your head spin? Why did you leave the house in this state? Look at the country. What will people do? Imports are low, prices rising. Do we survive? Is civilization destined to survive?”
Something rose in Anutosh’s throat. His chest burned. Sand, sand everywhere—inside chest, stomach, head, all a desert. Intense nausea. Within the bus itself, he wanted to vomit blood, the old blood of life.
Suddenly, the commotion woke him. He had been asleep. On waking, he heard the irritated voices around him. The bus window was spattered with vomit. People were cursing, loud, delighted in their disgust.
“Shikha, Shikha—light a lamp. I’m nauseous. I must go to the bathroom.”
Startled, Shikha sat up, one hand lighting the lamp, the other holding her husband. Then she called their son: “Bolan! Come hold your father. What happened to him? Why vomit? Is it a stroke? I’ll call the doctor.”
After a while, somewhat recovered, Anutosh pulled the white envelope again from the table and reread his mother’s letter in one breath. It was no dream. True. Then he asked Shikha: “We will all go, won’t we? For Father’s rites? I’ve taken leave. We’ll spend some days in the ancestral home. Long since we went. It will please Mother too.”
“All of us?”
“Yes—you, me, Bolan. Twenty-two years you never lived in your in-laws’ house. Stay with Mother-in-law a while. Bolan will like it. He wants to see the village. He loves his grandmother.”
“But will Bolan go? His exams are near.”
“Why not? To hell with exams! Did passing them make my life? I won’t hear excuses. Remember, beside our house was that jungle. It is still there. I hear a road may be built through it. Before it is destroyed, I must show Bolan. He must know his past.”
Shikha smiled faintly. She understood. She had never laughed the foolish laugh. Yet she felt, in this indifferent household, a few days of fresh air might come. Some newness.
Anutosh sensed her agreement. He asked: “Has the cyclone in South India ended? Did you see the news?”
“Who knows? Perhaps it has passed. Monsoons never stay in one place long.”
Anutosh laughed: “Ha! Your geography is still sharp.” Shikha laughed too.
Then, growing pensive, she said: “The storm will end one day.”
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