The summer I turned nine, I spent with my grandparents. Thin and trusting, nails bitten down to the nub, hair so dry it could rust, I arrived with a suitcase crammed with clothes and holiday homework. On the train, my father had bought me comic books and told me to be good. He spread a thin cotton sheet on a Rexine-swathed plank that smelt slightly of tamarind and vintage sweat, wedged a limp pillow against the metal wall of the compartment and helped me up the iron rungs to the top bunk. When I lay down, the bobbing end of the emergency chain within my reach, I told myself I was on a ship.
I was my grandmother’s favourite. Baba was her younger son. He had quarrelled with my mother so that I could spend the summer with his parents. On the taxi ride to the railway station, Baba was sullen, the end of his cigarette turning ashen as he regarded a dirty sun setting on Howrah Bridge. There was chaos on Strand Road. Surly commuters jostled with emaciated hustlers, conductors crammed homebound clerks into bellies of bulbous minibuses. I saw ochre water from the Ganges gurgling down a crimson hydrant, wetting the end of a beggar lady’s saree as she squatted with her scrawny children on a pavement from which bricks had been pried by militant protesters not so long ago.
I was trembling with anticipatory thrill, summoning the delight that would greet me when I set foot in my grandmother’s large house; imagined the touch of cool on my skin from rooms opened to the sun not long ago, the softening of my grandfather’s face as realization hit that this precious child, the firstborn of their younger son, would be theirs for a month.
Baba’s mood improved over the train journey from Calcutta. I clambered down from the top berth and rooted myself by the window. As small stations flashed past one after another, he recited their names effortlessly. He pointed out which one was famous for lentil fritters and which one for faith healing, where the last cheetah of the district had been hunted down decades ago and which boasted of the legendary man who had lived on even after a tiger had clawed out his intestines. As the train rolled through sun and shade, North Bengal homes on stilts with wood-panelled walls and shiny tin roofs twinkled. When the train whistled, it cut through fields waiting for the rains. Vendors walked up and down the corridor peddling jhalmuri and tea kept piping hot in kettles over open fire burning in self-contained aluminium contraptions. When a grubby chaiwalla lifted the kettle to pour tea into reddish terracotta pots, tongues of flame were bared. I shrank back.
“Watch it,” Baba growled at him, an arm around me. The vendor stuttered an apology, handing the tiny pot of tea to my father without meeting his eyes.
When we were younger, my sister and I would be fascinated by the procession of unlicensed vendors on long-distance trains we would take on holidays, sometimes spending up to three days inside metal compartments. The journeys would always happen in summer once schools let out. The emptying corridors on the last day of term would dip straight into the depths of my stomach and scoop up happiness so sharp that my head would buzz.
All train journeys became an exploration of another world, each station a different dominion of colour and tongues. Lying on my stomach, with my hanging head rolling slightly as the locomotive moved, I would be amazed at how passengers built makeshift lives around the berths they were assigned. Strangers would be wary of each other, inspections of new arrivals would be made with the earnestness demanded at vegetable shopping at the Sunday market, and then somehow, barriers would slowly dissolve. Sometimes not. I once saw a man shout abuse at his wife in a steady stream for all the hours they were on the train, the nervous flick of his eyes, the tensing of his limbs itching to give her a good thrashing. I never once saw the woman’s face because the end of her saree draped over her head hung too low. Her hands were brown and brisk, wiping down their assigned berths with diluted Dettol before setting her children down on them, dishing out lunch from a wicker basket that smelt of good food, arranging pieces of luggage under the bunks so that all fit without dislodging suitcases already stacked there. The woman’s neat organization eventually drowned out her husband’s curses. She didn’t once let the hood of her saree slip from her head or locked eyes with him in warning. The children were unperturbed. They sucked thumbs and looked out of the window, fascinated. When the family got down hours later at a small junction, no one remembered the man’s rant. I missed the wife and the quiet economy of her movements.
On that journey with Baba, he ensured we travelled light. That’s how simmering resentment between my parents had twisted itself into a stinging row.
“I just want to make sure she packs enough clothes. She will miss her books and toys,” Ma had entreated.
Baba was firm. “One suitcase for her and an overnight bag for me. I have changes of clothes there. No one can fault my mother’s housekeeping.”
“Is that right?” And, they kept at it, their voices on a leash, animosity crackling like electricity till the taxi honked outside. My sister lurked in the doorway sullen, nursing a plastered arm, etiolated and wispy like the dolls she liked to play with. The hospital smell she had brought with her hung like a haze on our ground-floor flat, wiping off smiles and pushing pins of unease into the compressed domesticity that sat in layers on us. Her lips parted like windows cracked in a stuffy car as I waved goodbye.
On the train, I had waited to see if we would have interesting passengers. What if the same couple boarded with their brood of children, the man cursing, his wife bearing it silently? “Watch it,” I whispered to myself. “Watch it,” I repeated slowly, wondering what would happen if my father were to decide to stand up to train bullies. “Watch it! watch it!” I intoned, swinging my legs carefully so as not to hit anyone while I was having fun, trying to touch a shoulder as I swivelled my head.
Soon, it was dark outside, interrupted only by the lights of small stations the train chose to ignore. A turbaned Sikh man on the opposite berth had containers of food spread on a small towel. He offered me a knob of butter to go with my dinner. Baba had unfolded a day-old newspaper on the lower bunk and laid out our tiffin boxes neatly on them, his glasses flashing with the movements. The passenger assigned the top berth across was already supine, slipping once while hauling himself up the rungs earlier, my father lending a steadying hand. He had started snoring shortly after mumbling a stingy, belated thanks.
“So, why are you so thin?” Our elderly neighbor enquired suddenly, his eyes grave as he indicated my small frame. I was indeed underweight, the whole class had been weighed and measured for growth just before the term ended. The teacher had shaken her head as she had noted down the stats on my report card.
“She’s is a fussy eater,” Baba threw me a defensive smile. He was the sole parent on a journey with a child and was trying hard to do the quotidian things right, as my mother would.
“I can see that. Here, have some butter, slather it on your roti. Good for health. Go on girl, will fatten you up,” and he scooped up a chunk from a small steel box and handed me the spoon. “Taste it, I have lots. Here,” he picked up the box and held it before me.
“Don’t worry, this is homemade,” he assured my father.
I loved butter. But it had started melting. I gulped it down and smiled guiltily at my father who lifted an eyebrow. “Thank you,” I piped up in English. The turbaned man lifted the corners of his mouth in quiet acknowledgement, his bushy beard streaked with grey quivered.
Every time my father needed to smoke, he would catch the Sikh man’s eye and he would give an imperceptible nod, a code for agreeing to watch over me. I would regard Baba walking to the end of the swaying carriage where smokers would congregate at the vestibule, the doors on either side often left open, air gushing in to blow away the acrid smoke of unfiltered tobacco and cooling down travellers trapped inside non-air-conditioned cars. Harsh lights from compartments with passengers keeping sleep at bay punctured the aquatic darkness that seemed to slosh in the car as the train picked up speed. I had the upper berth, my father sleeping below me, the furrows between his eyebrows that had deepened with each passing day my sister spent at the hospital smoothed by gusts from the open window at his head. I slept fitfully, resting when the carriage moved, feeling his palm on my brows whenever the train screeched to an unscheduled halt, waking me up. I sat up before dawn, in the moving gloom that swirled like a drop of blue ink in a glass of plain water, and caressed the comic books I had picked out at the beginning of the journey, lifted them one by one and hugged them as one would greet a neglected pet after long holidays, whispering apologies for stopped subscription. “Medicines are costly, you see,” I parroted my mother, trying to summon the finality that her voice held when she had already won an argument.
My grandfather was waiting for us at the station. His hands rested on the handle of the umbrella, its tip scraping the cement of the platform as he tilted this way and that, trying to scan the faces of passengers disgorged by the train. He was handsome, thinning hair slicked back with oil, and his face had reddened under the sun. As he spotted me, a smile spread smoothly to touch his eyes. Dadua put a hand on my head and patted nervously. “How she has grown,” he exclaimed, pride dripping from his eyes as his own son was eclipsed out, light shining firmly on a granddaughter he had last seen months ago. I forgot to touch his feet as my mother had instructed me to before kissing me goodbye, jumped up and down on the platform in tingles of joy that ran up and down my spine, making me headachy. I threw my arms around Dadua’s little paunch, his starched shirt cool and smelling delicious against my brows.
Baba was telling him how passengers had been made to wait for nearly an hour in the middle of nowhere at dawn because a freight train had the right of the way. Dadua was listening distractedly, as if he didn’t see the point of bringing it up anymore, now that we had arrived. He kept nodding, solicitous, stealing happy glances at me, placid like a co-passenger parsing details of shared travails that didn’t matter anymore. Baba and Dadua looked a lot like each other, my grandfather perhaps a little taller but dressed better – in a pressed, pristine shirt worn over tailored black trousers. Baba, in his late thirties then, had a head full of hair through which he kept running a hand, tugging at a short-sleeved, collared shirt in grey he often wore to work. Meeting after months, father and son practised courtesy with the patience of strangers.
“Why didn’t you book yourselves on an air-conditioned carriage? This is the height of summer, she is just a kid. The toilets must have been dirty too,” Dadua remonstrated, his tone barely changing. “Let me take care of the return leg.”
I remember Baba looking away, frowning, stopping in the middle of a sentence and blinking away what could be nothing else but dampness from his eyes. I left my grandfather’s side to hold his hand.
As we were driven to the large house my father had grown up in, Dadua pointed out a road that seemed to take forever to be built. He was a big shot in the town, had a say in municipal affairs. My father called him feudal to his face. This was lower Assam and bore the scars of unseasonal flash floods that had made roads impassable. As naked children and bare-shouldered women with feet caked in mud stopped to watch our car pass, it was with some amazement. Small boats had been plying in these parts only weeks ago, ferrying relief material and desperate families to safety as the river raged.
“Nothing changes,” Baba declared quietly.
Dadua shifted in his seat, cleared his throat and said, “Well, you are here with your daughter. Who would have thought that would be possible barely weeks ago?”
My grandmother was waiting on the verandah, her arms resting on the curved cemented ledge painted red, the end of her saree pulled over her head, squinting against the sun. Her house was at a busy crossing with a wet market on the other side lined by shops owned by small merchants. The ground floor was leased to a rural bank and people were always milling around. I remember the place getting particularly boisterous on weekly market days. As our Ambassador drew up under the verandah, the crowd quietened down and was openly appraising. Some shouted greetings to my grandfather, a few passersby crossed the road, smiling as they recognised my father – a couple of them his classmates from primary school – I gathered. As I hid behind them, slowly turning on my heels, my hands joined at the back and my head dipped, a Bodo woman wrapped in lengths of turmeric handloom stopped and bent to pinch my cheeks. She looked up and threw a few words in her dialect up at my grandmother, who beamed, the diamond on her nosepin catching the light, her impatience with the hold-up below momentarily diluted.
From the roof of my grandparents’ house, the hills of Bhutan were visible on a clear day. We had gone picnicking near the border a few winters ago. It was a large group, all eager to be heard and calling out to each other. The smell of burning wood was sharp under a mellow sun as food cooked slowly in makeshift earthen ovens into which dry twigs had been thrust and coerced to catch fire. An advance party had set out at the break of dawn to forage for firewood and get lunch going.
A shout of delight had rippled through as the picnickers spotted an orange orchard across the stream we had set up camp by. Excursions were promptly made and fruits brought back were shared liberally over exclamations: “These are Bhutanese oranges, you know? How easy to cross the border!” I remember the fibrous wedges had tasted particularly piquant. Sucking at them in wonder, I had treated them like spoils of a special adventure, pocketing the seeds instead of spitting them out.
Pointing at a slightly tilted forest department hut built on stilts by the river, a millworker employed by my grandfather had pointed out, “Look at that, kids. A whole herd of elephants had rubbed themselves against the structure. See how it’s leaning? That’s the elephants’ doing.”
“But why? Why were the elephants rubbing themselves so? Tell me,” I ran to where my father was sprawled on the blanket with his friends. He was sipping from a can of beer, focused on a game of bridge.
“Because they get itchy, all the time they spend in the water and then foraging. They get itchy too, just like us,” my father was patient.
“Oh, I see,” I replied solemnly and his bridge partners couldn’t help laughing out loud. Leaning on the parapets of my grandparents’ roof, the Bhutan hills standing far away like forgotten relatives waiting to be greeted, I begged my father to take me to the place where itchy elephants rubbed themselves against forest department huts. He was blowing a ring of smoke. “I’ll think about it.”
At lunch, the ends of our fingers were yellow, mixing rice with the rich gravy. Dida, dressed in homely Bengal handloom, gold bracelets twinkling on her wrists, ladled fish onto my father’s plate. He was beaming, it was koi cooked with fennel in mustard oil, my father’s favourite. Baba looked my way. “The hills will take hours to reach but I can take you to another place I would go riding as a kid. We’ll take a bike, you can ride pillion.”
Large windows were open to our right, light pouring in, making patterns on the cement floor as it wrestled with the wrought iron grilles and dappling the ancient refrigerator with lemony patches as it whirred, occasionally groaning like an ageing pet as its innards protested. It was a comforting sound, familiar from earlier visits and as I looked up, I caught Dida’s eyes. Her lips were pursed, hinting at the beginnings of a smile, eyes sparkling effortlessly behind bifocal lenses as they darted between me and my father. Her hair was still mostly dark, the vermillion in her parting fresh and as stark as the crimson dot between her brows, applied right after the shower she always took before lunch. She had planted herself between son and granddaughter, slipping in a cajoling word as needed, piling food on our plates, ignoring protests, sending conspiratorial glances her husband’s way, weighing the mood and instantly adjusting herself when it shifted.
Dadua was eating slowly, carefully removing bones from the koi fish, bunching the food into balls with his fingers before putting them in his mouth and swallowing, taking occasional sips of water – all in a continuous, effortless motion. I was fascinated, and the quietly efficient woman on the train journey from a couple of years ago came to my mind. I hated small fish with bones. My father chose to ignore me and concentrated on his food, his mother’s palm resting on his back, giving him gentle pats when she sought appreciation. She did not sit down for lunch with us, savouring the chance to feed her family first.
“I sent someone early this morning to catch the first train to Fanigram. Not easy to get koi otherwise. You miss the train, you miss the fish,” Dadua spoke up from across the table, noting my father give a nod and motioned to Dida to let him have some more fish.
I slept in my grandmother’s room that night, her palm on my forehead, her caresses like unwrapped candy, her bosom smelling of sandalwood and baby powder. When my father came to kiss me goodnight, I reminded him of his promise. He was leaving by night train the day after.
“You be good, now. Don’t bother your grandparents. I shall return to fetch you once we are back from taking your sister to see specialists down south,” Baba whispered in the wavering voice that crept up on him like a shadowy figure in an alley whenever he mentioned my sister. “And,” he reminded me with a tiny smile, “enough comic books to last you a month. Don’t try to get your grandparents to buy you more.”
“No, I won’t. I know, I know, money is tight,” I declared with the sombre indignation of someone made to state the obvious.
Baba flinched and looked away. “Sleep well,” he patted my head. “We shall have fun tomorrow.”
A bike was arranged the next day and we rode off. After half an hour or so, my little, tender behind started hurting. We were on an incline and the sun was beating down. The soil was ochre mixed with red, packed dry. The green on the trees was going yellow, yet sat easily on the eye. The Tipkai river down the valley meandered in a slim flow of turquoise. Bodo women with babies bound to their backs with handloom shawls, on their way to the weekly market, sent us shy glances. The fat limbs of the babies bounced as their shapely mothers with dark hair parted in the middle swayed down the mud tracks barefoot, in a single file. The air was crisp and dipped in silence that oozed from the earth and mixed with imperceptible noises from the rising wind. My world seemed to have grown greener and intimate.
“Smoke break,” Baba announced. We dismounted and the cycle was propped against a Sal tree. I rubbed my behind, complaining as I trotted behind my father who was already reaching in his pockets. A packet of Wills and a box of matches emerged, a little worse for the wear after the ride. There was another large Sal tree a few paces ahead. It had thrown up a dense shade and a family of goats was frolicking on the rough grass. I squealed, startling them, the mother instantly alert. The kids were tiny, their black coats shiny and eyes expectant.
Baba turned his head, raised an arm, palm facing my way, and asked me to watch the animals from a distance. “Yes, stay right here. Please don’t move, the mother can charge if she senses danger. I’ll be on the other side. Shall be back in five.” He walked in a large circle so that he did not scare the goats. The kids followed him with their eyes. Then one leapt and another and soon they were on top of each other, their little mouths hanging after a while, tongues pink and incongruous. The family soon stopped paying me any attention.
I rested on my haunches, wary of the line of red ants that seemed to be crawling everywhere. Rotten vegetation peeped from under layers of drying yellow leaves. From a Bodo terrace farm on the other side of the knoll, a woman’s laughter rose like dust, scattering meaninglessly. I picked up a twig and tried to puncture the fallen leaves, giving myself a point every time I heard a rasp. It was a game for one and I suddenly missed my sister. Sensing a sudden commotion, I looked up: the goats were agitated. The shiny animals leaped, their ears cocked and bounded off after a momentary stillness only they could muster. Emboldened, I approached the Sal tree gingerly, taking care to shake off determined ants, swinging the twig in a hand, confident that my father would be on the other side.
He was, sobbing: with his back to the trunk of the tree, his glasses on the grass peeping between its sturdy roots. He was facing the terrace farm as his hands rubbed his face, legs stretched, tears streaming down, snatches of anguish that escaped from his throat demolishing the late morning like rocks lobbed on thin ice.
On that clear summer day, as I watched rooted to the spot, my head throbbing and my mouth dry, I had a hint in my coursing blood of what it must mean to be the mother of a child and to be a child who also must be a parent and to be parents who longed for the time, the moments that could be held still at will, because possibilities remained enormous, so enormous that it was all right to be children who didn’t care either way.