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There were tears, and complaints of indifference that had no effect on him other than producing irritation, because he had heard these so many times already. It was no use trying to explain that he was suffocating and had to go where he was going simply to breathe again. And that he needed to spend some time alone, with neither she, nor the baby, nor his parents, present to claim his attention or break into his thoughts ... But she didn't seem to understand. Either that, or it didn't matter to her, he thought, that he needed fresh air...
So he gave up trying to reason with her, and went about making preparations for the trip, the first item on the list being a reserved sleeper berth on the train.
After the sleeper berth, it was an old canvas rucksack [that was needed]. It had been stowed, when they moved into the house, in one of the two lofts under the ceiling of the dining room. Five tunnel-like lofts with wooden doors, each four feet wide, a yard high and five or six feet long, had been built into the house over as many narrow spaces that had found their way into the design, two on the ground floor and three on the first floor, the latter being where they actually lived. These lofts were meant for storing the various things the family had stopped using for one reason or another but liked to imagine it would need some day or simply did not have the heart to throw away. Later, however, no one remembered what exactly had gone into those dark pigeonholes of the past carved out of the wide, well-lit space of their present. It was only when someone looked for something that couldn't be found in any of the rooms but had left such a luminous trail in the mind that one instinctively knew it was still in the house, that the stepladder was brought out of the store-room on the ground floor and the lofts searched.
The sack was a crude thing with an aluminium frame that Sumit had made with his own hands one autumn eight years ago. Jojo, his brother Biji (once good friends of Sumit's) and he had decided to go to the Kumaon Himalayas. The mountain range was familiar to the brothers as they had gone to boarding school in Nainital. Biji would go on alone, first south to Bangalore to collect the B.Sc. certificate that had been gathering dust in some steel cupboard in the office of his college, from which he had graduated three years ago, then to see a couple of historical sites and drop in on a friend in Gujarat on the west coast. After he would be meeting up with them on the veranda of a certain forest rest house in the mountains of the north at a certain time on a certain day, and he was taking the one proper rucksack he and Jojo had between them. It was a gift from their father, an engineer who had worked briefly for a government transport company in the Middle East after retiring from the Indian army's paratrooper unit. So the brothers were one sack short and Sumit needed one, too.
They asked around, and it turned out that - in the Calcutta of 1980 - real rucksacks couldn't be had for love or money, unless one was willing to buy the ones hocked by hippie types for dope money on Sudder Street. So Col. Sen had taken things into his own hands. He got a luggage store to make, to his own design, a pair of canvas sacks with lace-up flap covers. Then the boys put together two frames under his directions and with his own set of hand-tools, from aluminium tubes and strips bought at a neighbourhood hardware store. And, voila, each had his own rucksack.
They weren't perfect. The shoulder straps were loose and the cross-struts, made of aluminium strips, were too weak for the loads they carried. These loads included a big bottle of rum in addition to rice, lentils, potatoes, onions, boiled eggs, canned beef, baked beans, sardines in oil, and an assortment of clothes, mugs, ropes, plastic sheets, knives, sleeping bags (Sumit's was big and heavy, but Jojo's, bought in the Middle East, was light and American), candles and matches. Somehow the struts survived these loads, just as their friendship survived the bitter argument that broke out over onions, stopping just short of a fistfight on the grassy top of the hill by the rest house, against the backdrop of a glorious, near-180-degree panorama of Nanda Devi, Trishul and a hundred other Himalayan snow-peaks. When Sumit, who was in charge of cooking, decided to have the onions peeled but whole in the rice-and-lentil khichuri while the brothers insisted minced would have been better the argument commenced. The memory of that falling-out having faded away almost completely, leaving nothing but a chafing sensation that could have been more imagined than real, Jojo and he heaved the sacks on their backs and went on another hike a year later, this time closer home in the Eastern Himalayas, in Sikkim.
This was before each of the three would go his own separate way after a night that started sentimentally with a little gin drinking and guitar-strumming on the terrace of the brothers' family home in the old South Calcutta neighbourhood of Bhawanipore. The night ended with a fourth friend, who had also come in to say goodbye to the brothers, trying to throttle Biji, who, he thought, had stolen his girl. The would-be-murderer had been high on barbiturates already when he came in and had proceeded to get drunk in the bargain over the next half hour. His attempt to throttle Biji, though accompanied by a tremendous roar of pent-up anger, was not taken seriously by anyone, but it succeeded in ruining the evening's mood...
Standing on the ladder to reach into the loft, then crawling in to get to the things deeper inside, Sumit went through a jumble of broken leather suitcases, overnighters with worn zippers, rolls of electric wire left over from house-building time, leaky galvanized-iron buckets, and brass utensils that the family had given up using at least fifteen years ago. Eventually, he found the sack wrapped in newspaper and tied neatly with string. The canvas was smelly with fungus. He felt something sharp on his thumb. It was the head of a screw that stuck out of the frame as he hadn't bevelled the hole properly. Was it the same one that had cut his finger on the crowded train on the way back from Kumaon? He had ignored it, and the cut had gone septic. He looked at the sack, turned it over and over, weighed it in his hands, smelled it again, and decided it wouldn't do. With cobwebs in his hair, Sumit came down the ladder, folded the sack and took it down to the store-room which was the designated resting place. This place was a sort of temporary halt on the way to the junk dealer's sack, for all household items finally judged unusable.
Now there was nothing to do but try once again to buy a rucksack. Times were changing, he thought. In 1988, the stores might have things that hadn't been sold in 1980.
He didn't know where to look, except for New Market, and drew a blank there. Next he thought of his colleagues at the Chronicle, but the couple of people he asked there had no clue.
Later that week, luck smiled on him. In the Press Club, which was more crowded than usual because a liquor company was promoting a new rum brand with a two-for-one offer that evening, he caught sight of Pijush. Pijush was a mountain-climbing wire service reporter several years older than himself, a large man with the air of a benevolent big brother. Pijush organized rock-climbing camps for schoolchildren in the hills of South Bengal every winter. Sumit went over to his table and Pijush, whose effusion showed he had been in the club for some time already, asked him to pull up a chair. Over glasses of rum (Sumit wasn't drinking vodka that evening, since the rum was really cheap) they talked about his plans, especially the routes he might take. When the rucksack issue came up, Pijush offered to lend his own. Sumit said thanks, that would be a great help.
Iin half-an-hour, after one more round of drinks, they were chugging along on Pijush's old Royal Enfield motorcycle towards his home on the southern outskirts of the city, braving the drizzle that had started when they were still in the club. It was past midnight when Sumit, tipsy, wet and triumphant, came home with the large sack under his arm, empty and flattened. Sumit was greeted by suspicious looks from Neepa and the disapproving silence of his parents.
None of the passengers spoke for the first fifteen minutes as the train clattered over the points and crossings of the Howrah yard, then of Tikiapara. An endless, electricity-lit expanse slid by the open windows, a world of slums and ugly, congested suburbs stretching away to a horizon lit up by the city. The six people in their little nook of the compartment, including Sumit, stared in fascination at their own world, which now looked alien...
As the train rushed through the night, the compartment filled with the cool air of the countryside. (The nightmare of the suburbs was now a long way behind.) The compartment was transformed into a dreamworld by the blue glow of the nightlamps, the main lights having been turned off. Before he knew it, Sumit fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.
The family was obviously watching him. "Not there yet," the man said, reading his thoughts. "We're running late, as usual."
The clatter of the train's wheels echoed from the rust-red steel of their box wagons, a counterpoint to the loud chirping of crickets warmed by the October sun in patches of grass growing between the tracks. A sense of imminent arrival, of about-to-be-somewhere, grew in him as the speed gradually lessened. An old steam locomotive, one of the few still living out their last reserves of vitality as unglamorous shunters before the final trip to the scrap yard, appeared by the window. Then, puffing and wheezing, it fell behind the rapidly slowing express. Sumit felt the dampness of condensing steam on his face, and inside, a pang of nostalgia for boyhood train rides on the way to vacations in his mother's family home (that cool, mango-tree-shaded dreamworld of ponds and gardens and harmless snakes! gone forever!). Smoke and coal dust would get into his eyes as he sat glued to the window during those long ago journeys.
The station came at last. A platform stained with the blood-red spit of a thousand paan-chewers glided by the windows, and the memory of open spaces, lingering in the air of the compartment, was unceremoniously pushed out by a heady cocktail of smells: of urine, of bleaching powder and of loochis frying in wheeled vendor carts. The compartment filled with the hubbub of a crowd talking in half-a-dozen languages, each person at the top of his or her voice, while trying to make sense of the muffled train announcements coming on over a crackling public address system in Bengali, Hindi and English. The first announcer carried an accent that Sumit couldn't immediately identify, except to know that it was different from the accent of middle-class Calcutta, and the other two announcers were heavy with traces of the first.
Soldiers on leave sat on their rolled-up holdalls of olive-green canvas and black steel trunks, waiting patiently for trains that would take them to obscure railheads deep in the heart of India. For the next two or three days, perhaps, and as many nights, they would be playing cards or gazing vacantly at fields and forests and arid, rocky landscapes interspersed by villages and ugly towns rushing past their windows. Now and then a long, inexplicable stop at a small station in the middle of nowhere, deserted and silent but for the chirp of crickets and the cawing of an occasional crow. At the end of the journey, they would get off the train to load their luggage on rickety buses or share cabs and count the last dusty miles to their families waiting in nondescript towns and villages indistinguishable from the ones they had passed. Some of these men, Sumit knew, had come down from sentry posts on the border with Tibet, high in the Himalayas, and the remote, icy cragginess of those regions had left a shadow in their eyes and their manner. This radiated from them into the air of the platform, giving the noise and the smell a complexion, a texture, that was distinct from similar noises and smells of other railway stations.
There were other ways as well, in which one could feel the mountain's presence.
In the crowd, there was a sprinkling of faces with the flat features typical of hill people and the blonde heads of two backpacking foreigners bobbed over the sea of black hair ahead of him. Large framed posters of the tourism department hung on the walls, with colour photographs of a dazzling white Kanchenjungha against a deep blue sky. There was also one of startled one-horned rhinos staring into the camera lens amid the greenery of the Dooars jungles just south of the point where the land begins to rise. In the chaos of the platform, pregnant thus with a sense of snow peaks and the romance of the frontier, the ennui born of his own city on the wrongly named river seemed to fall away from Sumit's being like the dead skin off the back of a snake or the spent stages of a space-bound rocket.
His soul had so far resembled the oppressive air of Calcutta in August, but now he felt as if one of the "western disturbances" of the early, muggy part of autumn, had suddenly blown away the heat and humidity. Such a storm brings from Iran and Afghanistan, all the way across the sweltering plains of India, the liberating winds of death and romance, the magic of Omar Khayyam's carefree love and the smell of roses, pomegranates and freshly oiled Kalashnikovs. He went up the stairs with a sudden spurt of energy, along the long walkway over other tracks and platforms, into the terminal building and out into the noisy yard packed with cycle-rickshaws, cars, microvans, and arriving passengers bargaining with the drivers over fares.
Every time the driver of a car coming downhill caught sight of the van (and this sometimes happened when the two vehicles were literally within feet of each other, because the turns were sharp), he would stop, often even back up a few yards, to let Sumit's cab pass. The uphill traffic's right of way was conceded without exception. The young driver of the van would then tap a quick thank-you on his horn as he drove on and the other, coming down, would beep back, as if to say, "you're welcome." The drivers all seemed to know one another well and, at times, stopped side by side for a minute or two to exchange notes on the condition of the road, the health of another driver who had taken ill, or the impending marriage of somebody they knew. The drivers spoke in Nepalese, the soft-sounding language of a gentle people who were also among the deadliest warriors of the world. (Because of its similarities with Hindi, as well as his own Bengali) Sumit could still catch the drift of their conversations.
The mountain, the gorges, the sky that met them on the level of the road with the plains and the rivers stretching away below, seemed to make up one big communal living room or village square. This marred, somewhat, the road's air of wildness and danger, its romance, and gave it instead an everydayness, an almost domestic air. This casualness made one wonder if the rugged look was styled to please tourists from the plains, and if there was anything to justify the sense of risk and the nagging fear that remained. Sumit had a feeling that, no matter how difficult or menacing the situation might be here, a relative of his driver or someone else familiar enough to be on first-name terms with him, would turn up in fifteen minutes at the most with 'Dil kya karay jab kisi-se pyaar ho jaai' playing on his stereo, the breezy, melodic babbling of boy-and-girl-in-love echoing from the wooded mountain wall. And this sense was the last thing Sumit wanted.
CONTINUED NEXT EDITION
TAPAS RAY is 44, nearing 45. He lives in Calcutta - officially "Kolkata" for a while now. He used to be an engineer (electronics) between 1979, the year he got his B.Tech., and 1985, the year he moved to journalism. Over the following years, he has done journalism with the Economic Times, Calcutta, The Statesman, Calcutta, and the Frontline magazine; taken time off to do his master's in the USA; enrolled in the Ph.D. program there and then dropped out (for family reasons); came back to India and taught at two universities; gone back to journalism; and is now back as guest faculty at
Jadavpur University, Calcutta. He has written and published a little poetry (including a collection, 'No Alternative,' Writers Workshop, Calcutta), but finds himself drawn increasingly to fiction and has finished writing his first novel ('The Road to Duckweed City,' published here, as excerpts from this novel). He has a love-hate relationship with his city and his milieu,
and thinks fiction is the best medium for exploring their meaning. Tapas hates his double chin and would like to receive suggestions on ways of getting rid of it without too much trouble (and nil expense). This is his first submission to The World's Magazine.