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“Ohhh Banerjida!! Coming?”

   He was washing his face when Nimai’s voice reached him, between splashes. They had had a late breakfast, it being Sunday, and there was a festive feel in the air for no reason at all. Reema had made luchi aloor torkari and the taste of the gentle spices, just green chili and black cumin, loitered pleasantly in his mouth still. And the luchis! Aah! He was reluctant to rinse the taste out of his mouth. Instead, he washed his face, removing his glasses carefully and holding them folded in his left hand, while he opened the tap and gathered handfuls of water with his right.

   It was eleven already. Funny how Sunday started so slowly and then suddenly began galloping away.

   “Coming!” he said, quite sure they wouldn’t hear him, standing downstairs in front of his building, calling up boyishly through cupped hands. He heard Reema call out from the balcony:

   “He’s coming!” and Nimai saying:

   “How are you, boudi? All fine, I trust?” and Reema saying:

   “Yes, yes, all fine” and by then he’d wiped his face hurriedly, the stiffness of the freshly washed and bone-dry towel bristling across his face like stubble. He hadn’t rinsed his mouth after all, but who cared. His friends were calling for him and he must go.

   “Just be back, then,” he told Reema, slipping into his new Puja sandals with the strap at the back. It was comfy and airy — good for a chatty stroll. His 3,000-rupee foreign sneakers that Ronjona had got for him were saved up for the brisk morning walk. Air-cushioned. Well, this was airy and cushiony enough for what he and his friends were planning!

   Nimai had called up around nine o’clock, just as he was sipping his second cup of tea with the fifth page of his Sunday Telegraph. Reema picked up the phone and said,

   “It’s for you. Nimai.” And the girl in her giggled as she said the name just like that, unadorned by Babu or any such ‘polite’ form of address.

   “Oh!” he said, not unpleased. Nimai was one of his few good friends. His few good literary friends. Nimai. Chidanondo. And he.

   “Hello!” he said. “Ki baypaar?”

   “Na, Chido-da and I were planning a walk to the bheri. Will you come along? We can talk — solidly!”

   “Okay. But what time?”

   “Around eleven. Suits you? After you’ve let Sunday morning take its own sweet time, what say?”

   And they had both laughed, unsure of what was funny, but needing to laugh, just so.


   He was halfway down the stairs, still thinking, when Reema called out: “Eijey! You forgot to take your cap!” and came running down with it in her flip-flop rubber chappals (which he had told her not to, time and again, ever since she’d missed her step in them and fallen down — rolling like a Hindi film heroine pushed by the villain — landing at the bottom of the flight of stairs bruised and completely
shaken, more by the fact that she hadn’t broken a bone than by the suddenness of the fall).

   “Didn’t need it, really,” he said, not meaning it, knowing the sun would be a nuisance, getting into his eyes, frying his scalp like a tawa, making him blink and wish he had glares like Chidanondo, though those were really ridiculous, dark and ponderous like the man himself.

   The lady on the floor below theirs, hearing their voices, opened her door like a trap and sprang out to say hello.

   “Ki! Going out?!” she said, archly, accusingly, as if it were a trifle illegal.

   “Not me, he!” Reema said, pointing her head towards him, standing a few steps below, holding the white cloth cap in his hand. That was his cue.

   “I’m off, then,” he said, and turned around to go, while Reema said to Mrs. Saha,

   “Don’t see you at all these days, where have you been hiding?” and Mrs. Saha promptly launched into a family history of exams and illnesses and bad weather.


   Nimai and Chidanondo had parked themselves on the stone ring around the kodom tree. Nimai was smoking, though he had asthma and spondilosis and a working wife. Chidanondo was staring into space, his frizzy matted hair sizzling down to his shoulders, so unreal on his kind of person. Next to him on the platform was a jhola. It bulged awkwardly, as if whatever was in it wasn’t big enough or full enough to stretch the bag and give it a definite shape.

   “Sorry, got a little late getting down,” Rudra said.

   “No, no, no matter. We were just gathering ourselves together, na, Chidanondo-da?” Nimai said agreeably, getting up and flicking the rest of his cigarette onto the grass.

   “Be careful. So dry, even one cigarette butt can start a forest fire!” Chidanondo said and laughed, as if surprised by his own dry wit. Four nondescript trees marked the four corners of the rectangular piece of grass where all the society functions were held. The irony of his statement, according to him, was devastating.

   “Naah! No such luck!” Nimai said, as he crunched his leather-slippered toe into the cigarette butt through the short apologetic grass. “Shall we?”

   And the three of them moved from their corner to the one diagonally opposite, taking the shortest cut, though none of them were in a hurry to get anywhere fast. Before rounding the corner of the last building in their block, he looked back, out of habit. Yes, Reema was standing in the balcony in her pink onion-skin sari the way she always did when anyone went out. He would have liked to wave to her, but what would his friends think? So he looked and
looked away, and laughed loudly at what Nimai had just said even though he hadn’t heard a word.

   Fat Man Munshi was standing near the gate in his oversized Sunday shorts and his unbecoming trendy t-shirt that caught his paunch and proclaimed it. He rolled a greeting towards them like a rock from the mouth of a cave.

   “Good morning, good morning! Where are the Poets Incorporated off to now?” “Ei, just walking,” Nimai said politely and evasively. He didn’t want any hangers-on on this little trip. None of them did.

   “Or to put it poetically — just eating the breeze!” said Chidanondo, pleased not only by his snappy translation of a peculiarly Bengali phrase into English, but also by the title ‘Poets Incorporated’! His round dark bumpy face, something of the nature of a spoiled and weather-beaten potato, swelled up a bit behind his sinister glares and his chest, below the tight sandalwood-brown kurta with white plastic buttons, thrust out a little more.

   Nimai hoped Chido-da wouldn’t say anything else that was pompous and silly or just plain telltale.

   “In this heat?” Fat Man Munshi hooted. “A bit too creative for me! Anyway, don’t let me keep you! As they say, the best poets are all a little mad!”

   And released from his hectoring presence, they slipped, like guilty boys, into the road behind the complex, a half-tar, half-dust, half-hearted path to the highway.

   “Saved by a hair’s breadth, say what?” Nimai exclaimed. “Otherwise, we’d have that goon with us, going on and on in his jatra-party voice!”

   Nimai was the youngest among them. Then came Chidanondo. Then him, Rudra. That made Nimai the one who could get away with anything. The others thought the words. Nimai pronounced them. That way, no one was guilty of any social breach. Boys will be boys and speak their minds like honest young gentlemen. Nimai, with his willowy back, his slightly slouchy shoulders, his thin nervous hands, his forty-something hairline and his bright sparrow-eyes behind youthful plastic frames, was undoubtedly the only one among them who could claim that rash and reckless role.

   Rudra smiled to himself. How long had it been since he had felt young and foolish? He couldn’t remember. Maybe not since he had gone to Shootey’s village in his final year of M.A. The house to which he had run like mad, shouting across the bluebottle field at night, convinced he had seen a ghost or at least a will o’ the wisp. Shootey had got up from his chaador on the floor with a start as he
collapsed in, still shouting. And asked him patiently, like one would ask a delinquent child, “But why did you have to go out that far at night?” And he had answered, slightly embarrassed, “I had to go, you know, go?” at which Shootey only laughed louder, which brought his sweet frail mother out, to whom he then laughed and wept and said, “Have you ever heard of anyone, Ma, who goes out for a shit and comes back with a spook?” It had all been so — comic.

   “Banerjida, why so pensive?” Chidanondo said, in English. Chidanondo made it a point to speak English with Rudra. Even if Rudra answered in Bengali, Chidanondo carried on, imperturbably, in English. It was a matter of propriety. English teachers with degrees from England could not be spoken to in anything but Queen’s English. Rounded and grammatically rearranged in Chidanondo’s very Bengali diction.

   “Na, not so,” Rudra answered. “Just enjoying the moment, as it were. So tell me, what are you writing these days?”

   “Oh, this-that. Just completed a poem last night, actually. Haven’t got a title yet. What do you think of Serendipity?”

   “Serendipity? English poem, is it?”

   “No, but about a Bengali with a fondness for grandiose words.”

   “I see. Well, I couldn’t say till I read the poem.”

   “Good point! I will bring it for our next session, don’t you think?”

   “That'll be lovely. And Nimai, what’s cooking in that bright young head of yours?”

   It had to be said — his affection for Nimai was pure and unadulterated. Not a tinge of envy or dissimulation. Nimai wrote splendid short stories. Sharp, snapping with humour.

   Original, too. No family melodramas or carefully macabre science fiction for him. Just life, acutely observed and deftly captured. A talent, Nimai. Yet to be discovered, but what did that matter.

   “You know what Banerjida? I’m suffering from — ki boley — writer’s block! Nothing’s coming into my head! Absolutely nothing. Why do you think I’m smoking so much?” And Nimai laughed, self-deprecatory and subtly fraying.

“Oh. Don’t worry. It’ll come.”


   They’d gone past the decrepit cha-stall where the 3C bus drivers swigged cha between one round of bus-routing and another. The parked buses looked lost. The green sides peeled and the tin strips holding them together like bandages threw the sun into their eyes, painfully. The insides looked rusty and uncomfortable, even out of motion. The one in front was ready to go — a sullen conductor swung in through the back step and yanked the bell-pull viciously. The driver paid no attention. He opened the driver’s door and hauled himself up like a monkey. The bus roared. A puff of foul black smoke swooshed into their eyes and mouths and cringing lungs.

   “Babba!” Nimai said. “These buses should be turned into junk. What ghastly pollution! Come, let’s cross.”

   The highway was empty. Sunday now nearing noon. As the 3C swung left towards Gariahat, they swung right and crossed, the asphalt snicking their exposed toes and heels. They walked singe file along the highway towards the roundabout. The green looked brown. A small brown boy in khaki with a red Peerless stitched on his shirt pocket manfully watered the big round mound of ‘park’ at the centre of the crossroads. The watering can in his hand looked completely inadequate. The boy didn’t let that affect him. His brow was black under the rim of his faded red cap. He was singing, “Yaayi-re yaayi-re, jor laga ke naache rey-ey!” His hips moved slowly, as if the memory of the dancing heroine lingered in his bones. The sound of the song curled around their ears and evaporated into the heat. They had reached the dirt road that led to the village. Past
the sprouting Industrial Estate where the Mongini’s factory baked sweet-smelling bread and crumbly cake with lurid pink and green sugar icing, and a little shack proudly offered International Internet Facilities. On the right of the road, new blocks of flats were coming up, faster than seemed possible. Row upon row of Lego houses, not one claiming to be anything other than hideous. So many cubbyholes
for humans.

   “God knows what will happen to this area when these flats are ready.” Chidanondo mused. “The peace and tranquility will be destroyed.”

   “Won’t affect us, really,” Nimai said.

   “No, not really,” said Rudra.

   Chidanondo mused some more but in his head. His words were not being received too well. We’ll soon see, he thought. Without any warning they were in the village. It should have been called a bosti, really, were it not for the pond with two grey ducks and the well and the pump under which children bathed naked in the sun and men and women discreetly, yet blatantly, in their clothes. And the trees. Banana trees, leaves wide, green. Coconut palms. Houses, part concrete, part thatch. Bright blue daubs for walls. The smell of maacher jhol, so similar to the one served every afternoon at the bus drivers’ shack. A big red Drink Only Coce-Cole misprinted on a wall otherwise devoted to political posters and dog piss. Ghootey drying calmly wherever there was an unoccupied stretch of wall or brick — small female hands imprinted on their once wet surfaces, round dung cakes yet unclaimed for fuel. The vacant cows and sleepy dogs and half-curious hustle could have happened anywhere. The pond was what made it specific. And a little further down, the bheri. A surprisingly lucid attempt at pisciculture here in the midst of rural disarray. Squares of water sunk and trapped between concrete paths. The whole thing was like a giant checkerboard puzzle. In the squares of water little fish squirmed and bubbled under the surface. They were fed and tended to, and when they grew too big for their ‘traps’ they were taken away and flung into larger bodies, to prosper and fill the nets of fishermen, presumably. More often they were calmly plucked out by the village men before the pisciculturists arrived and sold to whoever would pay. Chidanondo was famous for doing that. Buying a big fat katla and then swinging it unabashedly in its soaked newspaper wrapping all the way into the complex, not caring that he was breaking some unspoken law.

   “We’re here!” Nimai said, gleeful. “About time! I’m dying of thirst, aren’t you Banerjida?”

   “Yes! Can you see that daabwala who was there last time? I could do with a nice green daab!”

   “Banerjida,” Chidanondo said, gravely. “No need to resort to coconut water today, Banerjida. I have come prepared for all eventualities.”

   “You have?”

   “Absolutely!” And like a magician, Chidanondo dug into his jhola and pulled out a pale blue Bisleri bottle filled with a pale yellow liquid.

   “Beer! Beer, is it?”

   “Yes, Banerjida,” Nimai said, the grin in his voice waiting to erupt. “Thought we should have some incentive for the walk in the hot sun, what say?”

   “Oh boy!”

   What a pleasant surprise this was! Beer on a Sunday afternoon! It had been a ritual once, when he was a young teacher in Ethiopia. At one among the Peace Corp teachers from America and the others from other parts of the world, a wide-eyed community of young people whose only ambition was to live simple and happy lives. What days! Peggy with her Scandinavian brow and her shocking black eyes. Fred with his goatee and his guitar and his sense of fun and sly flirtation. The two French teachers, Larousse and what was his name? Struggling to teach him and Reema masculin and feminin and quelle est votre nom? with a dogged patience and a complete lack of English! Beer in the afternoon it was, under the hot African sun, cool in the shade of their sprawling dusty tree-laden garden, Reema so lovely in her sleeveless kurtas, sipping orange juice and excited by a single sip of beer. And Fred, singing Isn’t it good, Norwegian Wood in his deep, sad voice, while their son, just four years old then, looked on worshipfully, later shyly plucking the strings that Fred showed him how.

   And now! Rudra wanted to laugh. The camouflage was too transparent. Bisleri bottles of beer. What next!

   “Shall we sit, then?” he said.

   “No, no, no, that’ll attract attention!” Chidanondo whispered, still acting the conspirator. “Let’s keep walking and drinking as we walk, casual-like.”

   “Okay!” he said. If we must be ridiculous, let’s be so in style.
  
   Nimai had the bottle to his lips already. He didn’t care either way.


   They walked. Crisscrossing along the concrete, sometimes seized by the absurd notion of hop-skipping into the water. In and out, left and right. The concrete hurt. They deserted it and took the continuous road around the pond. Dawdling, as if taking in the sights. Mossy membrane on the pond. Drinking in the green of the trees and hidden sky. The ducks.

   His head swam. They had completed two circles around the pond. The second bottle was three-fourths gone.

   “Shall we sit for a bit? Here, on the slab?”

   “No, no, no. Most imprudent. Come on, keep walking.”

   They walked, the third bottle now passing from hand to mouth to hand. Nimai, then Chidanondo, then he. The sun was on the wrong side of noon. He was happy.


   “Time we were heading back,” he said to no one in particular.

   “No, no, keep walking,” said Chidanondo.

   “No, no!” said Nimai. “No, no.”