THE
MONEY CARPET Abhijit Dasgupta
By Abhijit Dasgupta -
visit our Abhijit
Dasgupta page to find out more about the author, or read our Abhijit
Dsagupta interview
Anirban always thought he was like a flower. Small, pink, slightly soiled,
the sort you see lying unheeded on the ground beside some trees in a park or on
desolate roads, trampled upon by some indifferent traveller. Or, as later
Anirban reasoned, one of those flowers which would have fallen off from a
handmade garland without anybody noticing the difference that it was not
there.
When he was a child, barely a boy of six or seven perhaps,
Anirban, tiny and pink himself, used to sit beside his mother who cooked the
two-member family meal in an old, worn-out stove. From time to time, even as he
listened wide-eyed to the stories that Ma told him, he picked from the broken,
chipped aluminum bowl which he always kept beside him and where his mother kept
serving him whatever she was cooking. It could be a spoonful of steaming,
frugal vegetable soup or may be just a few oily, potato chips. Sometimes, on
better days, chingri bhaja, the almost friendly-sounding Bengali equivalent of
small, fried prawns. Anirban relished these tiny offerings immensely. They
added spice to the tales that he heard on those days he didn’t go to school,
which was every Thursday and Sunday. Anirban, friendless even at that age,
looked forward to those hot forenoons in Kolkata, the easternmost, impoverished
city of India, which had attained cult status after Dominique Lapierre’s
"City of Joy" or, for better reasons, for its association with Mother
Teresa.
He had never seen his father. During one of those oily,
potato-chipped humid story sessions, made more interesting for the young boy by
the wet sweat falling off his pink, bare back and forcing his glasses down
every time he bent to pick a morsel, Ma, as he called the woman who gave him
birth, had told him his father’s story. Anirban found no particular interest in
the man’s life who had sired him. Even at that tender age, failures forced him
to look the other way. His father had been a clerk with the Food Corporation of
India, came over as a refugee from East Pakistan much before the riots, married
Ma when he shouldn’t have, and died of a strange, undiagnosed illness shortly
after his son was born. His father was 43 years when Ma became a widow without
a penny to fall back on. She was 32.
However, Anirban was fascinated by one little story which Ma
told him about the man whom he never have to call Dad. When Anirban was born at
the Campbell Hospital, now named after the famous Dr Nilratan Sarkar, and even
as he lay sleeping in the dormitory cot beside his mother, his father had
arrived for a first look at his son. He had spent the better part of the day
borrowing money from relatives and friends to buy medicines for his frail,
anemic wife. Ma always told this story without changing a word; it was as if
she had, like a born actress playing out her part, memorised the lines. Even
the pauses, the blank, faraway looks at suitable intervals, the moist eyes, one
hand bent with indifference towards the cooking pot, another stretched over her
knee, always touching some part of his body when she spoke; it was, as if, she
was in some sort of a communion. Sometimes, Anirban tried his own little tests;
he would shift his leg or his hand where Ma would be touching him. In an
instant, she would reach out to another part of her son. Anirban was convinced
that this was not coincidental.
His father, a shy man, had entered the Campbell
dormitory. Ma would tell Anirban later that he wouldn’t even look at his son.
Natural shyness, maybe. Nobody else in the packed dorm gave them any
attention. There were too many babies lying around, anyway. And far too many
relatives and new parents. They were alone. The frail woman with a smile for
her husband and pride in her eyes; the man, who had just become a father but
had no means to celebrate, had carried just a packet with him. A small, tiny,
brown wrapper sort of thing usually reserved for flowers and sweets with little
dreams inside them, like those which the temple priest forces on you before you
enter the sanctum sanctorum. Tied with thin, red strings that Ma always used
when she was tying little things that had to do something with her gods and
goddesses.
Ma’s lines were rehearsed; this had been told so many times
before. “He came in, I could make out he was happy, proud also...but he would
not show it. He sat beside me: ‘Madhu, you have given us a son. I have nothing
to give you but this. Tomar bhalo lagbe bodhoi. May be, you will like this.’ I
opened the wrapper. There was a small, pink Madhabilata flower inside and a
pair of tiny slippers... padukas... made of sandalwood. I had never known your
father to be religious; nor that he loved flowers so much either. But...this
had a different meaning. My name is Madhabilata, was it because of that? But
the slippers? Janish, ami ekhono jani na keno tor Baba amakey ogulo diyechilo. I
still don’t know why he gave me those...”
Anirban had seen those little slippers, not an inch bigger
than his school eraser, kept on the shelf where his mother had her gods and
goddesses lined up. Every day, after her bath, Ma would light up an incense stick,
fold her hands and mutter a silent prayer. And, the little boy did not fail to
notice, after every prayer, she would look at her husband’s photograph which
had, since he died, also become part of that sacred shelf. Since she did not
get any Madhabilata flowers in the market and, actually, because the maid did
not care, Ma put the brown wrapper which her husband had carried to the
hospital on the first day beside his photograph, not forgetting to weigh it
down with a small coin. She had kept that wrapper, only shreds of them as the
years passed, till the day she died. Ma loved his father very much.
Ma would look far away. Then, the story would take a totally
different turn. Far away from the man who gave birth to him. Mandrake, Phantom,
Superman, sometimes, even Sherlock Holmes and Jules Verne. And he loved Ma’s
version of "Lorna Doone". She, merely a high school passout, was
well-read. Anirban, picking from his bowl, continued to listen. Till it was
time for his bath and lunch. Mother and son would sit together and eat. And
then, holding tightly on to his mother’s saree, the little boy would fall
asleep. Thinking of a small, pink flower which he had never seen, a young woman
on a hospital bed, two tiny wooden slippers and a shy man whose face he could
never remember once he woke up.
Anirban never dreamt. He woke up only when there was
load-shedding. And the beads of sweat started gathering on his face and
shoulders, wetting the thin, stained yellowish pillow. And
that was sharp at 3.30 every afternoon. Those days, you could time your clock
with the load-shedding hours. By then, Ma would be ready with his milk and a
large plate of puffed rice. Anirban didn’t have much use of the plate; he put
all the rice in the milk and, using a wooden spoon, made a paste as he crushed
the cereal in the milk. His mother watched him do this every day as she sipped
her tea. This routine continued till the day Ma died. She was not even 40.
Anirban never quite understood why both his parents had to die so young.
II
The lane where he lived reminded Anirban of the TV serial,
"Nukkad", which he loved because of its street characters who were so
real-like that he at times he even talked to them while watching the show. The
lane— the Corporation address qualified it as a bylane leaving Anirban trying
to figure out the difference— was grandly named after Raja Harishchandra or
Harishchandra, the King; whether it was a tribute to the first Indian talkie or
the King himself, nobody was quite sure. There were rows of shops jostling for
space on either side of the lane which had just about enough room for a
rickshaw and a small car to pass through together and there was talk among
oldtimers that when the going was good and the world was not such a bad place
to live in, neighbours actually exchanged teacups and banter across windows of
different flats. And wives, drying their wet, bathed hair, chatted one-to-one
on balconies separated only by a partition wall.
Anirban lived alone in a tiny one-roomed first floor flat but
what he liked most about his home was the small, squarish balcony that
overlooked the dirty, dingy lane below. He did not socialise
with any of his neighbours and, anyway, he was hardly home, leaving at 9 in the
morning and returning late at night, sometimes not at all. The neighbourhood
was somewhat wary of him; old men looked at him with disdain, the middle-aged
refused to acknowledge him and those, who could have been his friends had
Anirban given them some hint that he was willing, gave him various names behind
his back. His only communication was with the local stationery shop-owner,
Bihari, who gave him cigarettes “on account” and never bothered about
prompt payment and some local boys who lived on the small, lean pavements and
escorted him up the stairs when he came home late at night, obviously too drunk
to make it to his flat. Anirban was a sub-editor with the fastest growing
English daily of Kolkata, a job for which he slogged, sometimes double-shifts a
day, and which, at the end of the month, gave him just enough money to
eat a little and drink a lot. Most of the time, Anirban drank with
willing colleagues who, like him, had nowhere to go but his preferred regimen
was drinking alone. He drank only rum which he bought from the store just next
to where the bus dropped him, and he made it a point to open the newspaper
wrapping and carry the pint of rum in full view of the conservative
neighbourhood as he walked down the lane to his flat. At times, stopping at Bihari’s,
he even opened the cap and deliberately took a swig or two, lit up a cigarette
and then proceeded on his brisk walk home. He loved to shock Raja Harishchandra
Bylane.
The locality hated him. But nobody told him anything either.
He didn’t bother. This lane in North Kolkata had seen drunks for two centuries.
As long as you didn’t make a pass at any of the daughters or
sisters of the locality, you were just mere garbage. Nobody bothered.
Not even when Anirban and Kaka played antakshari from the balcony.
A game of songs in which one player took the queue from the other, beginning
his version with the last syllable. It was a game vastly popular in India but
not a game which was played in the dead of night across a balcony and a still
pavement. It was also a game, naturally, of music where defeat came when any of
the players failed to continue the strains with a new song. It was, also
obviously, a longish game with no set time limit.
Anirban and Kaka played this game every night.
III
Anirban had a dream. Someday, sometime, he wanted to write a
story. He had no idea what he wanted to write, he had no clue why he wanted to
write and, also, he was totally unsure whether he would be able to write at
all. Finally, and this was the most difficult of them all, even when he had
snatches of some story to tell, he would rack his brain through the day to come
up with an opening line.
And always, absolutely always, he failed. The first line
always eluded him. His story continued to remain a dream. Anirban was now quite
sure that he would never make it.
He had a passion. He loved Hindi films. He loved the music
more. And this was where Kaka came in. And the antakshari.
Kaka was a character you didn’t find even in story books. He
wore chrome yellow trousers which glimmered in the moonlight, he wore bright,
fluorescent red shirts which made him look like a dancing, elf-like flickering
ember, and he always had a thick, blue polka-dotted tie which swayed like a
wizard’s wand as he sang. He never wore shoes; he said bare feet helped him
dance better. He had a scar marring his face; that did not stop him from
borrowing heavily from superstar-hero Rajesh Khanna, whose nickname he adopted,
or behaving like actor-villain Shatrughan Sinha, whom he thought he resembled,
if only for the scar.
In reality, he was neither. He was simply a thin, impoverished
man who sold tickets in black wearing a striped cloth wrapper which ended at
the knees and a white shirt and hung around cinema halls through the day;
but once the night shows got over, returned to the lane to get dressed for the
night. And the game. When Anirban returned late at night and poured his drink
in the only stainless steel glass that he had, the neighbourhood had fallen
asleep at least a couple of hours back. The crows were frozen on the treetops,
Bihari had closed his shop long back and even the boys had pulled up the
available piece of cloth over their heads and gone to sleep. The lane was lined
with rickshaws on either side with the men who pull vehicles during the waking
hours now sound in slumber. Nobody walked the lane to even reach any other
destination. The streetlights, if ever there were any, were out. The windows of
every family were closed. Except the open, jagged corridor-like sky above, and Anirban
and Kaka below, nobody was awake. Raja Harishchandra Bylane was deserted and
empty.
Tonight was the day of the full moon. The game, as with any
other game, would begin with a toss.
IV
Anirban was on the balcony. Kaka fished out the old Victoria
from his box which reminded Anirban of a wrinkled magician who used to sit on
the pavement outside New Cinema theatre near the huge media house Ananda Bazar
Patrika with a black box, persuading people to buy con cards. The Victoria was
a copper coin which Kaka had got from where even he did not remember but it
shone under the moon and had a face of Queen Victoria on both sides. For both
of them, the coin was a “She’’ and the name, simply Victoria. Unknown to even
them perhaps, it gave their game a sense of royalty and pomp. Victoria, as well
as the moon, was their mistresses of the night.
Kaka always tossed. And Anirban always let him win. For both
of them, this was a ritual which needed to be played out in the darkness. As
the coin went up to come down with a silent whir, and Anirban smilingly,
confidently lit up yet another cigarette, the moon changed sides.
Like a beautiful, sleeping wife. The game had begun.
Kaka began singing. His voice, as Anirban reckoned, was not
all that bad but he never got the words right. The pitch was high, sometimes he
went totally tuneless, but the tuneless mirth left Anirban asking for more. The
level in the bottle went down with every song, Kaka swayed like a merry ghost.
Even the moon was in full splendour; Anirban, his fingers tapping the balcony
railings, his feet moving noiselessly with Kaka’s music, was convinced
that the moonlight was happy too.
Suddenly, he cupped his hands and drank some moonlight. He
took a deep breath. The balcony moved. Kaka seemed to come near. It was as if
he was on a swing, moving towards Kaka and then swaying away as quickly; never
touching each other. Like Satyajit Ray’s Charulata and Amal. On the garden. One
singing, the other in bliss. A permanent visual image for the Kolkatan. A point
of reference.
The moon changed sides again. Anirban squinted. Kaka
knew the rules of the game. Anirban never sang. Kaka would go on and on;
one after the other, he sang the songs. Mostly popular Hindi RD Burman numbers,
sometimes a Salil Choudhury thrown in, to keep alive the Bengali tradition, as
it were. This was a one-sided antakshari. But with two players. Always. Like
the Victoria with the same face on both sides, like the moon-wife which changed
sides, like the moonlight which happily gave herself up in Anirban’s cupped
hands. Anirban poured another drink. The measure was now going awry; it was
time he got rid of the stainless steel, he thought. The moon was a speck of
delight in the red, unseen, deep rum. Anirban drank.
It was then that the first window flung open.
V
It was like one of those countless films that he had seen. Or
even similar to the old, very old, Pramathesh Barua’s "Mukti"
where the titles began with one door opening on to another, and yet,
another. One after the other. Or Guru Dutt’s "Kagaz Ke Phool" where
that shaft of streaming light in the empty studio illuminates heroine Waheeda
Rehman’s face in a mysterious, sensual black and white beauty. Anirban never
quite felt the need to go beyond popular filmic metaphors and images whenever
he needed to describe something to himself. The light from the first window
struck the lane like a moment of sudden truth. And then, another window. More
light. And then, yet another. And then, all of them.
The lane was awash with light. Yellow, goldlike, streaming
across the lane, all over the frozen crows, the sleeping rickshaws, the boys
whose faces were covered with cloth.
Kaka continued, trancelike, with his songs, swaying more as
light after golden light, hit him like sharp rain. Anirban could not see much;
he simply thought.
She needs rest.
He looked at his cupped hands.
The moon again changed sides. The Victoria glittered on the
lane.
VI
And, suddenly, they began. The people at the windows, on the
other balconies. Applauding. Clapping. Cheering. Currency notes flying down
from as high as four stories, in slow motion from terraces that Anirban never
knew even existed, coins tossed from all rooms, people emptying their pockets
on the lane. Like the Biblical manna from heaven, like the sweets that came
down from the skies as Satyajit Ray’s Goopy Bagha sang and danced during
wartime in that all-time classic.
Rupee notes blocking out the corridor-like sky as if a huge
kite festival was in progress. The tinkling of the coins falling on the ground
making a noise drowning the sudden alert calls of the crows, their sleep broken
by a non-existent dawn. And then, as suddenly as everything had begun, it
stopped. The windows slammed shut, the lights went off, the crows went back to
sleep, the rickshaws stood lined as before, the boys slept, their cloths
covering their faces as if nothing had moved.
Kaka was not to be seen. Anirban cupped his hands again. But
the moon was gone. She was resting.
The next thing he knew was the wail of the siren, announcing
that it was 9 o’clock in the morning. He was late, terribly late, for work. The
Darjeeling Accord. It was to be signed today. To supposedly quieten the hill
frontier of Bengal, of which Kolkata was the provincial capital. Prime Minister
Rajiv Gandhi and hill rebel leader Subhas Ghising. He had sheafs of
overnight telex as well as agency copies to sort and arrange before the chief
sub and the news editor walked in. The junior sub-editor’s job in the morning
was to do just that; keeping the meal ready for the bosses, they joked in the
office canteen.
As he rushed to the loo, Anirban prepared himself for an
assault in office.
VII
It hit him like a first orgasm. Inexplicable, misunderstood,
just the moment remaining forever etched in your mind like a Pissarro painting.
Only the points making up a whole, not all of them visible,
waiting to be touched.
Everything was in place like the last time he left it at
night. The lane was flooded with currency notes, like a carpet neatly stitched
for royalty to walk on. Anirban didn’t believe his eyes. Even the coins were
all there, some even neatly placed on the rupee notes to prevent them from
flying in the wind. Small, round paperweights. The small, dingy bylane littered
with money. This, Anirban thought, as he tiptoed on the road, trying to avoid
smudging any rupee, was the ultimate fantasy.
And then, something else hit him. More potent, more
incomprehensible, more mysterious. Raja Harishchandra Bylane was indifferent.
Everything was as should be; nobody even as much cared for the money floating
around. There was fat, pot-bellied Chandu walking quickly to the market, jute
bag in hand; Mr Mullick trying hard to maneuver his huge, anachronistic
Ambassador car out of the lane; the wives, already in deep chatter across
balconies; Bihari, welcoming him with his packet of Wills Filter, noting down
the date for his account to be settled later when Anirban got his pay packet.
A breeze blew. The rupee notes went flying, like pigeons in
flight all over the open sky. The boys, the only ones who seemed to care,
rushed in, like those peons you see in government offices, placing paperweights
quickly on files so that the babus could turn the fans to full speed.
One by one, as if picking rags, they got the rupee notes back
in place, placing the coins on them, fixing the carpet in order.
Not one of the boys, Anirban observed, was even vaguely
interested in putting away some of the cash. He saw Rupa, the college girl who
stayed next door and looked like Juhi Chawla, that year’s Miss India, but who
never ever gave him a serious look, pass by without, yet again, acknowledging
his presence. She was walking faster than usual, trampling the notes as if they
were dirt which would go off the leather-soft sandals she was wearing once she
returned home and brushed them against the doormat. Like him, she was late too.
Bihari handed him his packet of cigarettes with the same daily question,
“Matches...?” Anirban, in a daze, walked past. He saw one of the rickshaws which
had still not got a passenger. There was money strewn all over the arm-rest,
the seat, on the ground; the rickshawallah himself was busy mixing his khaini.
Unmindful. Chandu-da was returning. “Aaj kissu pelam na bajarey, bujhley? Not
even potatoes in the market... And there’s a shutdown tomorrow, as well.
Have you heard, Mr Reporter?” Chandu, smiling, the good neighbour suddenly, for
whom all journalists were reporters, had never ever talked to him before.
Here he was discussing potatoes with Anirban. And tomorrow’s shutdown. Not a
word about the money carpet. Wasn’t anybody interested in money any longer?
There was something seriously wrong. Anirban thought he was
Alice. He looked at the sky. May be, it would rain. There were clouds, dark,
ominous. Did it rain in wonderlands?
VIII
It lay unnoticed, near the garbage dump. A small, new brown
wrapper, neatly tied with red, thin strings, like the ones his mother used for
tying pendants with faces of gods and goddesses hung loosely around his neck.
Somehow, it stood out in the money carpet, the garbage glittering with coins.
Anirban knew it was waiting for him. He stepped quietly aside, letting a
rickshaw clatter by. Crumpling the notes as it trudged along. Then, quietly,
very quietly, he bent down, picking up the wrapper. Tenderly, as if it were a
baby.
He opened the strings. Inside, there was a small, pink flower.
The Madhabilata. Fresh, soft, drops of water still sticking to its petals. And
two, tiny sandalwood slippers. The padukas. Not longer than his school eraser.
Long deleted from his memory; forever, he had thought, lost from his mother’s
sacred shelf. Anirban took a long look. “Janish, ami ekhono jani na keno tor
Baba amake ogulo diyechilo... Why he gave them to me” His mother’s voice.
Beating against his head.
“Ami jani... I know, Ma.” Anirban muttered.
Without turning around, Anirban silently slipped the brown
wrapper, the flower and the slippers into his pocket, taking care that they did
not fall out. He held on to them tightly.
He headed for the nearest medicine shop. He had to make a
call.
IX
The phone rang only once.
“Barun, sir, It’s me, Anirban. I am not coming in today.”
“Meaning? It’s already 10. Not one copy has been sorted. I am doing
that myself. This is highly irresponsible...And how can you not come today? The
PM is already in Darjeeling...”
“I am quitting, Barun, sir.”
There was silence for some seconds at the other end.
“Tui ki pagol hoye geli? You gone crazy? Drunk in the morning?
What’s the matter?”
Barun-da, his chief sub, sounded shocked. And concerned.
“I am quitting, Barun-da.” Anirban repeated. “How do I send
the letter? I don’t want to go to office. Should I post it? Or, may be, could
you ask somebody to pick it up from home?”
He did not want to prolong the conversation. But Barun, sir
was not convinced.
“What’s happened? Gawd! If you quit like this... What about
your dues? And what about the notice period? Erom bhabhey hoye na! It does not
work like this. This is not done, Ani... ” Barun-da’s voice trailed off.
“I should have done this long back,” was all that he said,
before hanging up.
As Anirban, his hand grasping his pocket, began walking back
home after paying half a rupee to the medicine shop owner for the call, it
started to rain. Heavily.
The money carpet, Anirban realised in horror, was getting wet.
X
For the first time in his life, Anirban had got his first
line. Taking out the exercise book which he had kept aside for that day
when he would get to pen his first line, he started writing.
It was a natural. It flowed like the moonlight. And the rain
howling outside.
He wrote the first sentence: “Anirban always thought he was
like a flower...”
THE END
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