The Third Life

Bholanath divided his heart into three parts. On the bypass he was a trader of happiness—his business: happy homes, happy housewives, and happy households. He did not call his office an office but an akhra, a den. On the platform of that akhra, a large tin hoarding announced: “Come, cast off all the burdens of your life.” Before lifting the shutters each day, he glanced once at the board, then raised the shutter with self-satisfied calm.
 
In the commerce of life there is always some division of the heart. For Bholanath, it was thirty–thirty–forty. Thirty percent he lived in truth, thirty percent in the jugglery of imagination, and the remaining forty percent—what it was, even he had never quite known. His thirty percent truth was lodged in his trade, a truth he constantly tried to swell and inflate. Alongside it was his cherished household—his wife Komola, plump, the color of a ripe brinjal, soft as a boiled potato, yielding and tender. Komola was her name, but her essence was pale and starchy. Together they had two children of school age, and a widowed mother who lived with them.
 
When Komola called him at dawn, the darkness had not yet fully lifted. Bholanath lay limp, like a crumpled quilt, newly settled in sleep, body slack with comfort. Her call made him spring like a jolted soul. In the searing heat of his days, this last stretch of night was a kind of peace. In their second-floor, five-bedroom flat, the two south-facing windows by his bed let in the early breeze. The sun was still far from rising. The dream Bholanath had been seeing clung to him, unwilling to leave—the dream-world of his second life, the thirty percent realm where only rare pleasures and excitements lived.
 
In his dreams, not everything was about property or profit. Amidst money, trade, prestige, he often dreamed of other men’s wives. Just before dawn he had seen, again, Rebati Dutta—the slender, salwar-kameez-clad wife of his Malda client, Subir Dutta—like a stick of tuberose.
 
Lately, he dreamt of Rebati often. In those dreams he was entangled with her in sweet, adult intimacies. In this very dawn-dream he had kissed her—and just then Komola’s voice broke in. The taste of the kiss turned bitter. His sleep shattered. With half a dream still smoldering in the bed, he woke with irritation thick on his face.
 
“Get up, the party will be here waiting,” Komola said. She sat nearly naked on the bed. Bholanath didn’t turn to look. After fifteen years beneath the same banyan shade, her shadow, her softness, her care no longer stirred him. If he could get a tall palm like Rebati now, he would climb it at once.
 
Bholanath’s lifelong talent, honed by a career of brokerage, was this: if you take something, you must give something back. If this balance of give-and-take ran smooth, then no worry of assets or liabilities remained. But in this balance, even a minute’s delay could cost a lakh. So, still half-lost in the fog of sleep, he shed the dream and began to dress.
 
For some time, he had kept his hand on a piece of land in Mukundapur. A foreign party was coming—so they said, an NRI, a man of patriotic heart. Seeing the bloated population of the area, he was delighted. He wanted to build a nursing home. A great doctor from Canada, even featured in the papers, with a photograph, and a longing for the motherland. He would be arriving at dawn to see Bholanath’s plot. His flight to Bombay was the same morning. If Bholanath could hit this ball to the boundary, his skin would regain its color. His skin ailment always rose with money—when he struck big, his skin shone, when he missed, it broke out in sores.
 
Of course, the land was not directly his. Refugees had long squatted there—on government paddy fields, an illegal colony. For years the land lay seized. Politicians, playing their vote-bank games, never transferred deeds—only “we will, we will.” Eventually, when the people grew restless, the leaders handed out papers. Once the poor held deeds, they scattered. Then Bholanath and his kind moved in. They lent money to rickshaw pullers, hawkers, vegetable sellers. When debts grew, the land came—ten, twenty, thirty thousand per katha, into Bholanath’s hands. Now he would sell it at three or four lakhs per katha. Just thinking of it filled him with joy; his parched lips curled with a tight smile.
 
Within five minutes, he was riding his old Enfield southward across the VIP bridge. Behind him, unnoticed, the forty percent unknown share of his life followed silently, as if after searching all the world, it had at last found him.
 
On the widest stretch of the bypass, Bholanath slowed his bike and drifted into thought. He thought of Rebati, and as he thought, he became absorbed. He loved to imagine while awake—life was like a pack of fifty-two cards; he shuffled them in his palm, laid out hands as he pleased. He almost always won. Defeat was not his habit. Success was his familiar toy. He played with it at will, his mind brimming with confidence.
 
Rebati Dutta was thirty-two, yet held the figure of twenty-two. Her gait, her dramatics, her modern airs bit at Bholanath like ants day and night. She flaunted herself as a commodity in the costume of modern womanhood, always encircled by nectar-seeking men.
 
Her husband, Subir Dutta, was both Bholanath’s client and partner, a high officer in the bank, a regular collaborator in his trade. Their acquaintance began six years ago, when Subir bought one of Bholanath’s flats. Since then, they had grown close, cementing a business alliance. Subir approved loans, brought in customers, and Bholanath gave him thick commissions. Customers were trapped in two-bedroom-with-balcony concrete cages. Rumor even said Subir was his partner in country-liquor trade—though no one could swear to its truth.
 
Bholanath moved freely through Subir’s home. Their partnership was as solid as a record run. They trusted each other with secrets: Subir had hushed up the scandal of Bholanath impregnating a maidservant; Bholanath knew of the forged papers behind Subir’s promoter client. Their pair was perfectly mismatched, yet inseparable.
 
Except for Rebati. She was the stone wall. For her, Bholanath smoldered, dignity eroded. His obsession with her was making him infantile, incapable of attending to worldly matters. He had no scheme to leap over Subir and claim her. Strangest of all—Rebati herself, though in his dreams she leaned close, in waking life remained aloof, never slipping into the tryst. She need not marry him, need not flee with him—just a few days, a few nights in her lap, that was all he longed for. Such a harmless desire, he thought, almost noble.
 
In Subir’s absence, he treated her warmly, like kin. But what he really wanted, he never had. Always within reach, always beyond touch.
 
Lost in thought, he pushed the throttle. Just then, a herd of buffalo surged from the paddy fields onto the bypass. He braked hard, cursed the herdsman, barely keeping the bike from toppling into the roadside thicket. He parked, looked around. And, as always, at such moments, the call of urine was upon him. As dogs at tulsi plants, so Bholanath at roadside shrubs.
 
He did not know that the forty percent unknown part of his life had just begun to close in.
 
He stepped down between the roadside trees to answer nature’s call. And that was proven to be the gravest mistake of his life.
 
Along the bypass, in that undergrowth of jungle and pond, the illicit trade of country liquor thrived. Within the thicket, a small clearing stood. There a hut with shuttered doors, a den of spirits. Here and there sprawled two or three drunkards—one sitting on the ground muttering endlessly, another collapsed in stupor. Most were sharecroppers or day-laborers, men who dug soil for a living. Under the Gram Sadak Yojana, endless digging and trenching had given them steady work. As agriculture shrank and urban sprawl spread, these men worked by day and drowned at night in cheap liquor. The government’s money found its way through their pockets into the hands of the liquor-dealers. Bholanath, watching, chuckled inwardly.
 
Still relieving himself, he was unaware that the forty percent unknown life was tightening its circle around him. At first he only heard a scuffle. He thought it was the drunks. Then he realized—it was a girl’s cry. From the pondside, faint sobs, a man groaning. Normally, such matters were none of his concern. He never meddled. Yet today, for some reason, curiosity tugged at him. What was happening? Some mischief? He had never stepped into such entanglements before, but this morning a strange power pulled him forward. The man who could walk across a thousand corpses without flinching now turned, pants hastily zipped, toward the sound of a crying girl.
 
As he advanced through the thicket, he was still in the dream-haze of Rebati Dutta. The mask he wore to appear as “Bholanath” in society was by now burned away in the fire of her imagined love. What stood here was a defenseless man, stripped of resistance.
 
The pond lay still in dawn’s dimness. The thornbushes seemed to hold scraps of night’s darkness on their skin. Bholanath strained to see, but within the jungle his eyes faltered. The faint cries had ceased.
 
In the first glimpse he saw: a middle-aged man, sitting with head in hands. A vest clung to his chest, a lungi hung loose, genitals exposed. He looked half-drunk. Then Bholanath saw the wound—a gash on the man’s skull, blood gushing so fiercely that he could scarcely groan.
 
The man whispered hoarsely, “Suchitra… don’t go… come back, slut.”
 
His voice was so faint it seemed a whisper of smoke.
 
Bholanath recognized him. Habool. He once pushed a cart in the mango orchards. Long ago, his father sold raw bananas in the orchard market, while Habool hauled vegetables on his cart with a pair of bullocks. Suchitra was Habool’s niece.
 
What was this? Bholanath pressed through the brambles into the clearing. Habool’s skull was open, blood spurted in thin jets.
 
He had known Habool since boyhood. Once a prosperous farmer in this very area—before there was a single brick house here. Bholanath’s father sold bananas at the market, Habool carried vegetables. The city of Calcutta lay far away, had not yet crept this close.
 
Then came the Naxalites. The villagers shut themselves in. Here and there, corpses dropped like flies. Each dawn, a headless body outside someone’s house. In the wooden pile beside Bholanath’s family’s tin hut, boys hid bombs, pistols, revolutionary books. Twice the police hauled his father off to the station. Habool then often helped. It was whispered the Naxals met by night in Habool’s house.
 
Now all that was history. The Communists governed. Habool pushed a cart. The Naxals had vanished from earth, though their graffiti still scarred old walls: “You failed to revolt—now taste the police baton.”
 
Neither Habool nor Bholanath’s father ever tasted that baton. In those days, much land in the area lay in his father’s hands. Even if given free, few would dare build there. The place belonged to frogs. But then the Reds came. And then the cyclone of modernity. Waves of refugees flooded in—Hindus driven from East Bengal. The city grew dense, spilling into Garia, Jadavpur, Santoshpur, Behala. Land boiled with demand.
 
The children of refugees studied, entered offices. Seeking homes, they turned to land-brokers. Government built roads, hospitals, cinemas, flats rose on fields. Prices soared. Promoter raj began. And Bholanath rose. He sold his father’s lands, then built towers on the profits. Once mocked—“Pagla Bhola, your loincloth slips!”—he was now hailed as Promoter Bholanath Chakotti. Power, prestige, respect. Party leaders chased him. He donated heavily. Businesses multiplied in false names. Gandhi’s notes poured in.
 
Habool, meanwhile, shrank. Farmers lost land, sold cheap, became destitute. Habool became first a laborer, then a cart-pusher. His daughters worked as maids in flats built upon their ancestral fields. His decline was Bholanath’s ascent. Market economy, in pure form.
 
And here was Habool now, clutching his bleeding skull.
 
“Habool? Is that you? What happened?” Bholanath called. Once he had called him Habool-mama. No longer. That, too, was the truth of class struggle.
 
Habool looked up for a moment, fixed Bholanath with a steady gaze. Then, as if filled with a demon’s strength, he sprang to his feet, and before Bholanath could react, vanished into the brambles.
 
Startled, Bholanath hesitated. He might have chased him. But then he heard a splash. Something had fallen into the pond. He stepped forward, spellbound. Two hands with glass bangles floated on the water’s surface.
 
In that instant, Bholanath understood.
 
The forty percent unknown life had entered him fully. Knowledge of reality and imagination slipped away. He was blank, possessed. What had happened? He felt a great culmination inside him. Never before had he been so unsettled. As if under a night-call’s spell, he walked to the pond’s edge. Within him rose firm resolve: he could not lose. The belief that he was always victorious burned intact. He would win this too.
 
He removed his shoes, his watch, and plunged into the water. With a swimmer’s dive he reached her. Suchitra’s body was almost naked, her clothes torn. She clutched at the ropes that tied jars of country liquor beneath the water. She was drowning with both hands gripping that illicit cargo. Bholanath pried at her fingers, forced them loose, dragged her up.
 
The pond was deep. They called it Chora Pukur, the Bottomless Pond. Beneath its water stretched the hidden empire of narcotics—an empire in which Bholanath himself was a secret partner.
 
As he rose with her, he felt triumphant. This was no ordinary struggle—it was heroic. Saving her made him feel like a victor.
 
But in that same moment, the remaining forty percent unknown life seized him. As they surfaced, Bholanath realized—his right leg was entangled. The ropes binding the liquor jars had looped around his ankle.
 
He tried to kick free, but the knot only tightened. He was caught in the maze.
 
At last, Bholanath was captured.
 
The forty percent miraculous, inexplicable share of existence had claimed him. A strange, meaningless peace descended upon his heart.
 
On the bank, Suchitra coughed out water, staring blankly at the bubbles rising from mid-pond.
 
The ancient farmer’s niece, the maid of the flat-houses, Suchitra, lay collapsed on the bank, spitting water from her mouth, staring wide-eyed at the bubbles rising in the pond’s middle.
 
Bholanath’s head appeared once, then sank again. The ropes beneath, bound to jars of liquor, tightened like the embrace of a vindictive spirit. His arms flailed against the black water. He had always believed he could not lose; yet now he was losing to silence.
 
The bubbles rose in clusters, bursting like small planets breaking in the firmament. His lungs burned. That forty percent unknown life — the one he had never understood, never measured, never bargained for — had now fully taken possession. He surrendered to it. A serene futility spread through him, as though he were being signed away on the contract of the universe itself.
 
On the surface, the morning light spread like a pale prayer. The glass bangles on Suchitra’s wrists glistened faintly. She sat on the bank, dripping, her hair plastered to her face, watching the pond’s ripples absorb his absence.
 
The bypass beyond roared alive with traffic, horns, and dust. The city did not pause. No one knew that Promoter Bholanath Chakotti — land-dealer, dream-merchant, buyer and seller of lives — was even now being devoured by the pond that stored his secret empire. The Bottomless Pond swallowed him as it had swallowed so many nameless before.
 
Suchitra did not cry. She simply sat, blank, as if her own life had been bartered away too. Her breath shivered, but her eyes stayed fixed on the water.
 
In the thicket, one or two drunkards stirred, muttered in sleep. Frogs croaked. The village crows, black as burnt cloth, circled once and vanished.
 
And on the surface of the pond, bubbles kept rising.