The Blue Bedspread (14 page)

Your neck hurts, you sat all night on the floor of the 19 Up North Bihar Express, your back against the wooden frame of the passageway, your head bent to one side, your left ear pressed against your shoulder the whole night.

You stayed that way, for more than six hours, beginning midnight, when the train crossed Chittaranjan Junction. He told you that’s where they make train engines, that’s where Bihar ends, Bengal begins. ‘Now you will see the names of the stations written in Bengali, Hindi is over,’ he said.

You smiled admiringly, he knew so much.

‘We are almost there,’ he says.

You adjust your sari, jerk your head to the right, to the left, but the neck still hurts. You can taste the unfinished sleep in your mouth, you look at him drag the iron suitcase from below the berth. It’s two weeks after your marriage, you are the only girl in the village who got your man from the city.

From where you sit you can see the door but only a part of it since it’s blocked by the Stranger. He’s wearing a sleeveless vest, a chequered towel around his waist, he keeps looking in the mirror above the steel sink as if he were looking at himself for the first time.

You check yourself, don’t look at strange men in the city, your mother had said. So you lower the sari over your eyes, you can see the boy walk past with the tea, you can feel the warmth from his stove, the smell of milk, water and leaves.

You want a cup but you decide against it. You will need every rupee in the city.

The Stranger is taking his own time. You pull the sari further down, over your head, and then, cautiously, you look at him, the toothpaste foam dripping down his lips. Mother wrapped some food for you: pickles, vegetables and bread fried in ghee, enough to last you and your husband a couple of days.

You will not touch it right now because who knows how long it takes to get your own stove, who knows how far the kerosene shop, the market will be from the house. ‘You never know distances in a city like Calcutta,’ Mother had said.

He loves you, you are sure of that.

The first night you stayed up and he didn’t touch you, just held your face in his hands and told you about his work in the city. His hands were soft, like a girl’s.

‘They are building a big house for very rich people and I am helping them build it,’ he said. ‘I work with men who come in yellow hats and they are very educated people. They have everything drawn on big sheets of paper.’

You didn’t understand, how could they draw a picture of the house even before it was built? He laughed at the question, kissed you in reply, just like a hero in the movies. You blushed, gently pushed his face away.

He told you about Chowringhee, where little boys sell stuff made in foreign countries, watches and small machines which you could put in your pocket, on which you could do arithmetic, add and subtract big numbers. He told you about the shops where they have mannequins exactly like foreign women, with hair, eyes, noses, everything.

One day, he told you, there will be trains which will run in tunnels below the ground, whose doors will open when you have to get out and close as soon as you get in. By themselves, automatic. Above the train, will be the city, the road. And on top, buses, motorcars and people.

He told you about the Grand Hotel, the guards at the door, dressed up like kings in history books, silk turbans and moustaches, guards who earn more than anyone in the village.

‘On Sunday, I have no work,’ he said. ‘We’ll go to see these places.’

The Stranger is still brushing his teeth but now he has moved away from the door, he’s moving closer to the lavatory and you lower your head, peer out.

The train seems to have slowed down, you can hear the whine of the wheels, through the door you can see walls, red houses, the railway quarters, huge piles of garbage pass by. Behind you, a hawker walks down the aisle, balancing himself as the train moves, selling ballpoint pens, red, black and blue.

‘Look, look,’ your husband says.

And he points outside, you hold one edge of one seat, get up, move closer towards the door, you look outside and through the morning mist, over the red officers’ quarters, you can see the iron girders of the Howrah Bridge, the one everyone in the village seemed to know about, the bridge waiting, like a friend, to take you across, into the city.

Both of you are standing at the entrance of the coach, man and wife, looking at the bridge. You can feel his hand against yours, the smell of his sweat mixing with that of the tea and the Stranger’s toothpaste and the train, you can hear the water in the sink.

You will see all the places your husband told you about, you will go to Chowringhee, look at the mannequins, the guards at the hotel.

But before all that, just two days after you step into the city for the first time, you will walk, nervously, into a three-bedroom house, across from an oil mill.

You will meet two children, a girl and a boy, and their father. And you will spend the rest of your time there, standing guard at our door, at our windows, to keep love from running away. Your husband will keep flitting from one construction site to the other, watching the buildings go up in the city.

‘That’s it, Bhabani,’ I say. ‘Isn’t this how you came to this city, to this house?’

‘Who was that Stranger in the train?’ she asks.

‘This is a story, Bhabani, the Stranger was a stranger,’ I say.

‘Who could he be?’

‘Someone who lived in this city and was returning that morning in the same train.’

‘Where will he be now?’

She smiles, she’s pulling my leg, she gives me her hand, asks me to help her get up.

‘It’s a nice story,’ she says. ‘I will remember it.’

‘What do you mean?’ I ask.

‘It’s a nice story,’ she says again. ‘And it’s also not entirely wrong because in reality it was also something like that, we came to Calcutta in the train, we saw the bridge in the morning.’

She stops, turns.

‘What is it, Bhabani?’ I ask.

‘Nothing, I remembered something and then I forgot,’ she says, turns back and goes to the next room to pick up her bags.

Her son is waiting downstairs in the taxi to take his mother away and she walks out of the room, everything is packed, her brown steel trunk, two bags and a water bottle.

And as she gets into the taxi, unsure, her son holding her hand, she turns to me and says, ‘You know why I am leaving, I know you can take care of yourself now, I can go.’

The taxi revs up its engine, the doors slam shut, she’s turned her face away from me, her son waves his hand, all I can hear is the sound of her mallet, which I once used as a cricket bat, beating the dirt out of our clothes. And all I can see in front of my eyes, through my tears, is Bhabani walking up the stairs, two children following her, in their school uniform, to the terrace, all three holding a wet blue bedspread, like the velvet curtain of a cinema hall, and then spreading it out to dry.

The camera glides from one body to the other, all wrapped in green see-through plastic, there’s an ambulance, its doors open, the huge red cross discoloured, split, making each half of the door look like a piece in some sad jigsaw puzzle.

The Serbs shelled a market place in Sarajevo forty-five minutes ago killing more than sixty, mainly women and children. There’s a crowd watching the aid workers and he can see her in the last row, behind the reporters, behind the three UN men. She stands looking away, at something that’s off the screen. He sees a flash of red, it’s her scarf, her eyes are as blue as the TV screen at the end of the day’s programming, just before the coloured bars pop up.

He is the man in the upstairs flat who beats up his wife but tonight he has to see the Sarajevo Woman again so he sits through the entire news bulletin, the full twenty minutes, right through the hour’s top stories: hyperinflation in Argentina, Clinton in trouble, nothing in Calcutta, the inspectors in Baghdad, the Vietnamese teenagers in jeans, on motorcycles, and when they return to Bosnia they show the bodies again, talk to a UN official in Geneva over the phone, they show the ambulance but not his Sarajevo Woman.

He flicks the TV off, he likes watching the image collapse into a bright speck that glows fiercely for a fraction of a second before it dissolves into the greyness of the screen. It reminds him of a shooting star. The next bulletin is one hour away.

Ever since he got a cable connection for two hundred rupees a month he cannot sleep until it’s past two, sometimes even past three in the morning. For a thousand rupees, a fifth of his salary, the cableman gave him a remote and he keeps flicking the channels with the volume on zero because he doesn’t want to wake up his wife, fast asleep in the next room, who wakes up at the slightest of sounds, even that of a remote control accidentally falling to the floor.

He steps into the veranda that overlooks the main road.

To his left is the terrace, common to all the families in the building, but hardly ever used. Sometimes, from the downstairs flat, a man comes to the terrace holding a blue bedspread, spreads it out to dry, two clips on either side, one white and the other red.

Tonight, however, there’s nothing on the terrace, the lights in the man’s room are burning.

From down below, from the pavement, he can hear the men turn in for the night; the wooden cots being dragged, someone gargling, spitting; the clang of iron buckets being plopped down on the pavement. The buses have to be washed.

The landlord owns four 30B buses, the longest and most lucrative route in the city, all the way from Dum Dum Airport to Outram Ghat: right through the busiest market in Sealdah, the office district in Dalhousie Square, past the jetty where steamers leave for Howrah railway station every fifteen minutes.

The buses have returned, stained and streaked, the conductors half asleep, their leather bags slung over their shoulders, hunters coming home with their dead birds.

He likes to watch the buses being washed, to hear the drops of water sizzle against the engines. Buckets and buckets until the conductors get tired, give up, sleep on the Ladies’ Seat as the buses drip until dawn.

The next morning,
The Statesman
has the picture on page one. ‘Death comes shopping in Sarajevo market’, the headline. The photo caption:
A Sarajevo father mourns the loss of his son in a Serb mortar attack in a market place yesterday afternoon. At least 60 people were killed.

The father in the photograph wears a thick black tweed coat with grey stripes; his eyes are closed, his head is thrown back, his mouth half open. Two of his upper teeth are missing, he’s crying. To his left is an elderly woman, perhaps his mother, the dead child’s grandmother. She’s crying, too, holding his left arm firmly, so firmly that the coat’s sleeve is pushed almost off his shoulder. And behind her, is his Sarajevo Woman.

The picture is black and white so he can’t make out the colours but there’s no mistaking those eyes, big and deep; that scarf around her beautiful neck. He can see more of her now: the bridge of her nose, her straight, black hair falling just below her shoulders.

He steps out of the office at five, the newspaper in one hand, his Sarajevo Woman resting against his knee, moving up and down with each step, his imitation leather suitcase in the other.

On any other day, he would have waited at the bus stop, watched the municipal trucks scoop the garbage off the corner, dump it into their vans, like elephants eating at the zoo.

Or he would have watched the crowd at the bus stop, each person doing something, the woman adjusting her sari, the girl walking up and down, the men looking at their watches. He would have noticed the tarpaulin roofs of the slums flutter in the wind; the film posters stuck to the walls, one on top of another, all torn in different places.

But today all that fades in the shimmering haze of the afternoon as he keeps walking, his head down, his eyes locked on to the shifting patch of the street below, the gobs of spit, twisted cigarette ends, a baby sleeping, stones, and finally his door.

He waits for his wife to go to sleep and when he can hear her breathe, see her chest rise and fall in the dark, he undresses, lifts the TV on to the bed, its screen staring at the ceiling, the white cable wire stretched taut against his black pillow.

Today, the Serbs have held about fifty UNPROFOR men captive. And behind the white hospital building, where ambulances are parked in a line, like schoolboys in a drill, she sits, wearing a blue skirt that reaches her ankles, a white shirt and the same red scarf.

Her blue eyes stare straight into his face as he hugs her, his lips move over her, he can see the veins in her hands, her nails painted pink, the fuzz on her lips, he kisses her hard, the camera moves and her head rests against his chin, he can smell the dying city in her hair.

He wants to ask her several questions, why was she sitting at the hospital, what was she doing in the market place, does she know that father mourning the loss of his son in the picture. He wants to help her get out, but it’s too late, Bosnia is gone, will be back in another half an hour.

Outside, they have started washing the buses; inside, his wife turns in her sleep, the marks of his fingers on her cheeks, and he looks at the double lines his lips have left in the dust on the TV screen.