Shyama Dhobi, Where Are You?

Shyama, lifting his head above a mound of dried earth on the banks of the Gorai River, glanced across the languid channel. The barrel of his rifle was trained on the peacock-blue petals of the water hyacinths floating along the edges of the vast current long before his eyes had time to scan the opposite bank.

Shyama had no special reason for remembering Kulbhushan today. It was a wonder, then, why the memory of his friend should have occurred to him at all. Since Kulbhushan had quit East Pakistan and left for Calcutta, a whole seven years had swept by in a blur. If Kulbhushan were around today, would he, too, have joined in the Bangla freedom struggle of 1971? Would he also be squatting down beside him now, clasping a gun to his chest?

Shyama held out his rifle and ran his eyes over it with a fresh wave of amazement. Would he have ever once imagined that, in place of a paddle for whacking the dirt out of clothes, he, a dhobi, would one day hold a firearm in his hands? And that, too, for claiming the life of a fellow human being?

Since Shyama was a small boy, he had never missed his mark when firing with the slingshot. Yet, the surprising fact was, he had never felled a single bird. The other boys from his basti, in their overweening zeal for a taste of the flesh of the geese that came beating in from far-off lands during winter, were hatching fresh ploys for shooting them down near the river or out of the sky all the time. Shyama had staved off their recruitment efforts once and for all, saying, ‘Look, my palm lines don’t lie. If I ever kill a bird, I’ll die coughing up blood the next day.’

If even one bird’s life could be saved with a tiny white lie, he had reasoned to himself back then – and he could spare himself his friends’ anger in the bargain – surely it wouldn’t harm anyone. Actually, the truth behind his aversion to violence was known only to Shyama. And maybe also to his best friend, Kulbhushan Jain.

‘A VEGETARIAN DHOBI! Ha! A new species! Tell me why you won’t eat eggs, meat and fish?’ Shyama’s mother was fond of occasionally raking Kulbhushan’s name over the coals, especially on those evenings when she was preparing the quintessential Bengali machli bhat for dinner.

‘Now look here – those people are Jains!’ She used to exclaim, whirling on him from the direction of the hot mud stove. ‘They mask cloth over their mouths to avoid accidentally swallowing invisible life floating in the air! Impossibly vegetarian, no! They can afford to fatten up on milk and almonds. What contest do you hope to give them? Mark my words,’ she swung her ladle back and forth in the air to reinforce her point, ‘follow along in their footsteps, and you’ll end up a spindly scarecrow and nothing more! To start with, you’re as sooty-black as this frying pan I hold in my hand. And if that weren’t troubling enough, your face is pitted all over with pox scars. What parents in their right mind would get their daughter married off to you?’

When Ma got fired up, there was no quieting her down. Her lashing tongue was held with the same awed reverence throughout the basti as her wrinkle-free ironing. In preparation for just such moments, Shyama kept a wad of paan leaves at the ready, which he would soak after snapping them from the betel creeper they had growing in the corner of their hut. Loading one up with lime paste and betel nut, he’d plop it playfully into Ma’s mouth, giggling as her fury dissipated into a grin stained with betel juice.

Shyama’s father Gobindo Dhobi, seated with his legs folded on the floor as he waited for his dinner, would chide in cautious jest, ‘Hey you, crazy woman! Can’t you see you’re talking to none other than the precious blessing the Yogi Baba left us with? You only had him after thousands of our prayers to God went unmet. And it was only through the combined powers of the Baba and Sitala Mata alone that he survived the smallpox. Just dump his portion of fish onto my leaf. I’m sure the Almighty has a girl written for him in his palm lines somewhere. Don’t worry yourself to death.’

Shyama recalled how Kulbhushan’s grannies and aunties often wagged their tongues and spouted this same kind of nonsense at his house, simply because of his skin’s burnt, baked colour. While picking up and dropping off the family’s laundry, he’d heard those shrews carrying on with this drivel more than once.

Shyama had never answered his mother’s question about why he refused to take her fish. For even at a young age, he knew that to mention the name of that other Baba – that powerful ascetic, after a single sighting of whom he had decided to renounce eating all meat – was perhaps not the wisest action in a world which was no longer the same sanctuary it once had been.

Gandhi Baba had been widely regarded in town as a kind of saint who would put a stop to the splintering of the country and the killings between Muslims and Hindus. But he did not turn out to be the saviour they had all thought. Shyama accepted this hard truth when, in 1947 at the age of eleven, he had watched the world blow up around him – watched, helplessly, as scores of people were pushed into abandoning their homes overnight as they fled for Calcutta or any Indian city that would give them refuge. By boat, rail, their own two feet – basically, any vehicle that would carry them.

East Bengal had irretrievably become a part of Pakistan. And all around the clock during those sad years after, Shyama’s father would curse Gandhi Baba’s name. Any number of his clients had, one by one, boarded up their homes or sold them dirt cheap and disappeared. With no one around to even wear clothes, who would pass them their outfits to launder? The saint Kabir had a saying for when a person’s trade became irrelevant: ‘What is the dhobi to do, residing in a village of naked people?’

‘That Gandhi Baba is a complete dolt. He’s shattered the country into three separate pieces. Hindu and Muslim pieces. He could have at least protected our Kushtia by sorting it into the Hindu country. All the big landlords, rich businessmen, artisans, doctors, lawyers – they’ll move someplace else and get by just fine, believe me. But we don’t know a soul in Calcutta. How are we to survive, if we leave this sturdy roof over our heads, our river, our dhobi ghat? Did Gandhi Baba spare a thought for poor folks like us? How we’re to fill our bellies?’

Shyama would absorb these complaints at family meals with a bowed head. The year before, Gandhi Baba’s train had halted in Kushtia on the way to Noakhali. Before this, horrifying tales had reached them of Muslims in Noakhali filling up wells to the rim with the remains of slain Hindus. In spite of this horror, Gandhi Baba had hastened to make peace between the communities with little regard for his own safety. He gave a public appearance from a few steps outside of his carriage door at Kushtia station. Several children, under the close supervision of Kulbhushan’s elder brother’s schoolteacher, had clipped badges onto their uniforms and raced, tripping over their feet, to pour out water for Gandhi and his travelling companions.

Shyama too had wangled a badge from the tailor and fallen in behind them. Pushing and shoving past the plump schoolboys, he had fought and reached within several arms’ lengths of the revered Congress Party leader. The crushing crowd – which was also desperate for a glimpse of the Mahatma, wanting to receive the blessing of his darshan – were tugging at his shoulders to pull him back. Shyama’s struggle to hold his position at the front had drawn Gandhi Baba’s gaze.

Chortling, he waved for him to come up and stand beside him. Then, resting a hand flat over Shyama’s brow, he uttered something into his ear. In the din of the crowd, Shyama failed to catch exactly what was said. But all at once, a pulse of serenity rippled down from his head, throughout his whole body, all the way to the tips of his fingers and toes.

Later, while stumbling home in a daze, he had heard Kulbhushan’s eldest brother boasting to a friend several paces ahead of him – ‘It’s clear as day Gandhi Baba is a reincarnation of our Jain Mahavir Swami. Just like the beloved avatar, the Mahatma would never harm a living thing. That’s why there’s not a creature alive that can cause him to fear. When Gandhi Baba makes it to Noakhali, just you wait: the Muslims will stop slitting goats and cows’ throats, much less hold their knives to other people’s. They’ll give up violence altogether!’

What had Gandhi Baba said? Shyama pondered, his rifle heavy in his hands. Maybe he said that a life should not be taken for any reason. The rifle’s cold metal made him shiver. The truth is, after that, the food he swallowed never tasted the same again.

The train had remained standing stalled at the station for almost an hour. Amidst the teeming crowd, there was hardly space anywhere to plant one’s foot and listen to Gandhi Baba’s sermon. The white and black pith helmets of the police formed a tight cordon around him. Onlookers who had clambered atop the roofs of the train cars sat with folded legs and hung onto his every last word.

The holy man himself sat high up on a wooden chair which had been set out for him on a dais, from whence he addressed them for a long time on the state of the country and the political situation. An attendant stood next to him with an open umbrella over his head. It was the first week of November. The onset of winter had made the sun mild. A feeling akin to relief was tossing in the breeze – carried on the gentle cadence of his voice, it wafted through the people’s ears and settled over their hearts like a balm.

Gandhi Baba’s voice, floating across the hall of the station, was entreating one and all: ‘If you are Muslim, don’t look to the Muslim League to solve your problems. If you are Hindu, don’t think that the Hindu Mahasabha holds all the answers to your worries. What do they know of your daily needs? Only you know the sufferings of your neighbours. Only you know how to alleviate the distress of others.’

Shyama saw all the Hindus and Muslims gathered together that day nodding their heads in assent. Gandhi Baba’s words had touched the heart-beating core inside of each of them. After all, wasn’t it Kushtia’s own Lalon Fakir who had claimed to be neither Muslim nor Hindu? Had that ever once stopped anyone from paying respects at his shrine? The fear that had been lurking earlier in people’s hearts was dispelled. Whether they were Hindu or Muslim, each one of them had followed their own customs and rituals. Neither side could have ever dreamed that peace could only be won by expelling their brothers from the country.

Shyama strongly suspected that his father had also been present somewhere in the crowd that day. But perhaps his heartstrings had become so tangled into bitter knots that it was beyond even Gandhi Baba’s powers to prise them loose.

*

In the years before the Noakhali riots, Tulsyan Babu – owner of the ‘Kalyani’, Kushtia’s famous cinema hall – had been his father’s most generous patron. Gobindo was the only washerman in town, in fact, to whom the aristocrat entrusted his garments: kurtas of the finest Dhaka muslin and dazzling Dhakai dhotis. To find anyone outfitted in a heavenly, spanking white dhoti-kurta like this landed aristocrat was nearly impossible in a bustling metropolis like Dhaka, let alone in a relative backwater like Kushtia.

Tulsyan Babu would have Gobindo wash ten pairs of clothing to take with him on his regular trips to Calcutta. That Gobindo held magic in his hands was clear for all to see. Even a four-year-old garment left in his care came out looking as if had been bought from the store just yesterday. Such was the clout Gobindo enjoyed from Tulsyan Babu’s good favour that he never had to buy a ticket at the cinema hall. And was it not a token of appreciation of his laundering skill that Tulsyan Babu would stuff a box of fresh sweets into his hands upon his return from Calcutta? Wherever Gobindo strutted about town, other shop vendors nodded to him from behind their counter stalls with respect.

The reality was that Gobindo’s own laundered clothing shone no less lustrously than any highfalutin zamindar’s. But when Shyama’s father set out for Tulsyan Babu’s house on his usual collection routine, he dressed in only threadbare garments. ‘The king should look like the king, and his humble servants should be what they are,’ Gobindo would tell Shyama while running a hand through the arm of his shirt. ‘Don’t ever forget, we come from the lineage of washermen who served the noble king Ram. The rule has come down to us to never to wear princely garments before the king – especially clothes he’s given to us as gifts.’

‘Did you know,’ he told him another time, while slipping on his sandals, ‘that it was because of a dhobi that King Ram banished his pregnant wife Sita to the forest? Ram had just rescued Sita from the demon-king Ravan of Lanka. He overheard a dhobi quarrelling with his wife in the market one day, suspecting her fidelity. He said, “I am not Ram, that I will take you back unquestioningly after living with another man.” Ram was heartbroken to send his wife away, but had to uphold his moral duty – since a king must set the proper example for his subjects. But also consider the inverse: a king is only as good as the subjects whose advice he takes!’

It came as quite a shock to Gobindo to discover that Tulsyan Babu had orchestrated a swap of his cinema hall for another cinema hall, Kamal Talkies, which belonged to a Muslim owner in Calcutta. After cutting backroom deals on a lot of his properties – his grand manor, his flourmill and the fields of his estate – he had boarded the train to Calcutta from Kushtia station for the last and final time and slunk off in the middle of the night, never to return. For this particular trip, he had not bothered to take Gobindo’s ten pairs of freshly laundered clothes with him. In his new life, maybe he had no use for such spotlessly white garments.

Shyama would often overhear his father muttering into his chest, ‘How could he? What could have spooked Tulsyan Babu into totally abandoning his senses? Didn’t he know that his man Gobindo is here to protect him from harm? And if it really was so necessary to bolt and flee, a gentleman of such high standing could have at least afforded to take a dhobi and his family along with him to Calcutta.’

That Tulsyan Babu would treat his own loyal subject with such indifference stunned Gobindo. He swore loudly to himself that he would never step foot into another cinema hall for the rest of his days. This, notwithstanding the fact that he had already seen the first Bengali talkies – ‘Jamai Shashthi’ and ‘Dena-Pavna’ – as well as all the recent popular, hit Hindi films, ‘Acchut Kanya’, ‘Amar Jyoti’ and others, without purchasing a single ticket. Decked out in his splendorous dhoti-kurta, he had grown all too accustomed to finding his favourite seat, smack dab in the centre row as the hall lights dimmed over the projector screen. He had seen his favourite film, ‘Devdas’, as many as ten times.

After each screening, he would hurry back home to narrate every harrowing twist and turn of the film’s plotline to his community, accompanied with greater or lesser flourishes of acting. The basti’s other residents would watch him with envy and astonishment, grumbling to themselves as they returned to the pitch dark of their huts that some men just had all the luck.