ISSUE 41

From the shop window, he could see the Police Bazaar roundabout. When he was a boy, a constable used to stand on a small platform and direct the traffic. He had not got used to the roundabout. He thought it was too big for Shillong. Dark clouds hung overhead. It would rain. He watched the afternoon traffic, the slow circling of buses and cars. The buses were not the blue and yellow Bedfords of his youth, the ones that had vertical, chimney-like exhaust pipes. Around the corner used to be Kelvin Cinema where he and his friends went to see Clint Eastwood movies. In the other direction, still standing, was Bijou where his mother had taken him to see Dharmendra’s first film. He remembered his father. It was here in Police Bazaar that he had last seen him. Their farewell as he got into the bus was hurried, casual; who knew it was the last time they would be seeing each other? But exactly a week later he was home from Hyderabad. His father had died suddenly of a heart attack. When he had arrived, he had looked at the body waiting to be cremated. There was a small smile on his father’s face, as though he was not quite so sorry to die.

The salesgirl was neat, her hair fashionably gelled. Her movements were unhurried and she had a calm, polite air. She took out yet another pair of shoes from a box and gave them to Bina. On the floor there were half a dozen that Bina had rejected. The girl was going to be rude, he suspected. Two dhkars wasting her time. He turned toward his sister, ready to hurry her out of the shop with the excuse that it was going to rain. The salesgirl looked at him. He felt her gaze taking in his loose white shirt and travelling down to his rumpled trousers and his large, black shoes (like suitcases, his deceased wife used to tease him). He knew the salesgirl saw him as a shabby, old man. He wore the same clothes every day because his wife used to look after him and now she was gone.

He wondered about the shoes Bina was being offered by the girl. They were red, not black or brown. Bina was thinking about her clothes, it seemed, worrying if the shoes would match them.

Bina put a foot into one of the shoes. ‘Nice?’ she asked, extending her foot and giggling. ‘Nice, madam,’ said the salesgirl dutifully. Bina made up her mind. She chose the red pair.

On the way to Police Bazar, they had met Ganeshji who, staring at him, pronounced, ‘You have become very old and fat.’ This sudden attack on his grossness had deflated him; hands hanging by his sides, he drooped. He didn’t retort that Ganeshji was no spring chicken himself, and it was left to Bina to come to her brother’s defence: ‘But, Uncle, you can’t even walk!’ It was indeed true that Ganeshji couldn’t walk the five minutes to Police Bazaar from Pineland without stopping for breath a few times. Ganeshji however had the unsinkable confidence of the self-made man. For decades he had put his accounting skills at the service of the Marwari businessmen in Shillong. He had sent his son to a good school, built a house somewhere in Rajasthan, and, as soon as his son had attained legal age, had got him married. Ganeshji proceeded to ask his inevitable question, ‘Chutti, Baba? How long?’ It was a question he had been asking him ever since he got his first (and last) job in the Public Health Department. Today Ganeshji was very surprised to know that he planned to live here with Bina because he had retired. So, Baba was now retired? Ganeshji came from a different age and culture. Age did not dismay him. But Ganeshji let out a guffaw because he thought it rather odd that an Assamese man had returned home to Shillong. He remembered how when the new state of Meghalaya was created, the Assamese with houses in Shillong had fallen over each other to sell them off, so that they could move to Guwahati and build new houses there. Only a loser would come back, thought Ganeshji, though he had the good sense not to say it aloud.

Ganeshji he met or saw every morning when, as a boy, he walked to take the bus to school from the bus stop at Police Bazar. This was usually at about eight in the morning, and as he went past the house Ganeshji lived in, he would see him reading the newspaper. Now, suddenly he was assailed by a feeling of not having gone anywhere, of not having done anything. He could easily be that schoolboy again, if one could ignore his massive bulk. He was overwhelmed, saddened by his failure to achieve anything. He listened humbly as Ganeshji prattled on. Unlike Ganeshji, he did not even have the satisfaction of being a good father. Bina was the one who told him of Ankita’s pregnancy, announced on Facebook. It had not occurred to his daughter that a baby on the way might dissolve all previous hindrances and hurts.

Brother and sister walked back home. Overhead the glowering clouds threatened to rain. His rule of thumb used to be to carry an umbrella in Shillong, even on a bright day. But there are things he had forgotten. The road home led downhill, so the walk back was less taxing than the earlier trip. There was a new road now branching off from near the old MLAs’ hostel and leading to somewhere near Jail Road, but he had never taken it. He thought it unnecessary: if it was built to ease traffic congestion, it hadn’t worked. As they walked down the sloping road, they passed the house of one of his aunts. He thought of it as his dead aunt’s house even though it had been sold to – he didn’t know who but guessed it was some businessman with a shop in Police Bazaar.

There was a time when this house was full of life. Now it had the forlorn air of a house waiting to be demolished. All the Assam-type houses were being replaced. He was not sentimental about this because he felt that most of these houses, with their small-paned windows and angular shapes, had little aesthetic appeal. They did not make architectural sense at a time when you needed space. Also, they were expensive to maintain. Thanks to the rains, the tin roofs, green or red, needed painting every year. Otherwise they rusted and gave your house a decaying look. Bina had suggested replacing the Assam-type house their father had built when he came to Shillong in the 1950s to work in the state secretariat. Their neighbour had been none too happy to find a new two-storied house coming up alongside. It blocked out the sunlight from his house. But he was the son of the late Mr Deb, a friend of their father’s, and so had refrained from complaining.

His growing up was something of a wonder to his aunt and cousins. Often as he passed their house, they remarked on how big he had become. When he had begun going to college, sometimes they would wait for him outside their house just to see him. And when he got married, they were astonished that this could happen to someone who they had carried around as a baby. When he had bought his car, he didn’t want to park it on the road outside his house. So, he had driven it to his aunt’s compound, where he had parked it first and then asked for permission. His aunt had died, and the cousins were scattered: the daughter, a doctor, now lived in Dibrugarh, while the son – the one who had sold off the house – lived in America.

Brother and sister passed the new apartment building. A few of the apartment dwellers were idling their afternoon away in the shop outside. Bina was a member of the Pineland Durga Puja Committee and seemed to know everyone. She smiled at them and stopped to exchange pleasantries while he stood a little apart. They nodded at him, a stranger. The stranger nodded back.

Finally, Bina and he reached home. Bina went to her room while he went upstairs to his floor. His wife had died suddenly. It was strange to set up a house on his own. His wife used to treat him like a big baby. ‘Wash your face,’ she would say when he came home after office. ‘You’ll feel better.’ He went to the bathroom to splash some water on his face. It had begun raining. The downpour had darkened the inside of the house and he had to switch on the light to see his face. He felt grateful that the rain had held off long enough for him and Bina to make it back to the house.

While Bina took her siesta, he sat heavily in a chair, turned on the tv, and resisted the temptation to lie down. He couldn’t sleep at night. He hoped the walk to Police Bazaar and back would give him a good night’s sleep. He fiddled with his cell phone. Some time ago he had met an affectionate school friend at Guwahati airport. His friend had seemed genuinely delighted to meet a classmate. ‘Let me take your number,’ he had said. ‘It’s fun to be in touch. We have a WhatsApp group.’ He had added him to the group and now his phone was full of notifications. Friends whose faces he had trouble recollecting – though he remembered the names – wrote about their children, sons or daughters, sons-in-laws and daughters-in-law. There were jokes about alcohol and cholesterol, an occasional pornographic picture and dirty joke. Only sometimes was there news that interested him. A friend, now retired and living in Gurgaon, had learnt to play the saxophone with some success. He had been briefly written about by one of the Delhi newspapers in their local news column. Suresh (that was the friend’s name) had spoken about how he had always wanted to play the saxophone. But the school orchestra had died with the mysterious death of Mr D’Costa, the music teacher who had started it. Suresh’s family had bought him a saxophone on his retirement.

He read the unsolicited messages. He rarely responded. He didn’t feel connected. He had no wish to meet anyone from his schooldays. He had little curiosity about anyone, no news to share. His friends would have regarded him as a failure.

But he was not sentimental. In fact, he felt an unnecessary fuss was being made over him when he retired. Sometime before his last day in office, it had dawned on his colleagues that a man who was dependable was leaving. He was good at his work. And he was patient: a lifetime of reacting too early, of saying the wrong things had taught him that. And so, his colleagues had given him a proper farewell. Few of them sensed how final that farewell really was. But he knew a door had closed that day.

It would happen again. He realised it straightaway, though Bina didn’t realise it at all. It had stopped raining and for a moment he thought she had come upstairs to suggest another walk, this time to Polo Bazaar to pick up vegetables or a chicken perhaps. Bina had this restless quality unlike him who could sit in a chair for hours brooding and blanking. Today, Bina had an elated air. She missed her granddaughter very much. Some nights ago, while lying awake in bed, he had heard her groaning in her sleep. When he went down to her bedroom, he found Bina calling out her granddaughter’s name. He had returned to his room feeling disturbed. But at breakfast the next morning he didn’t mention it. Now, Bina had received a phone call from her daughter asking her to come down to Guwahati. In Bina’s elation, he heard the sound of one more door closing. Of course, Bina would stay a few days more. She wasn’t going to abandon her brother without making arrangements for him. She would look up an old servant who would come in to do the cooking and cleaning. But go she would, and he could not deny her the satisfaction of spending time with her daughter and granddaughter.

After dinner he sat and wondered what to do. The day had passed. The night remained. In a sense, he had been preparing the whole day for a quiet night’s sleep. The time when he used to sleep like a log, and would be very surprised to be told in the morning by his wife about a thunderstorm at night, was over. Now he slept for four hours at most. There were the mandatory visits to the bathroom – his prostate was as big as the rest of him. What he dreaded most was waking up after sleeping an hour or two and then being unable to go back to sleep. He hated staying awake.

He watched tv after lowering the volume so as to not to disturb Bina. He read the newspapers – the Shillong Times, the Assam Tribune and the Guwahati edition of the Times of India. Then after midnight he got into bed. Outside, the rain had begun falling again. The sound of it increased, drowning out another sound, the sound of the small stream flowing by the side of the house. The stream had its origins in Ward’s Lake and had been a free-flowing one in his childhood. But as Pineland had grown congested the stream had dwindled into a dirty nullah. In the monsoons, however, it regained some of its former glory as a hill stream. The stream had provided the background music to scenes of his childhood and now, as the rain gradually receded, its sound swelled. He listened to it.

Some nights he drifted in and out of sleep. On other nights he stayed wide awake. He knew he needed patience. If he kept listening, at some point the stream would become a sea and he would no longer just float and drift but be submerged in it.

He waited.