The Blue Bedspread (2 page)

White and grey, white and grey, like tiny clouds blown across a patch of imprisoned sky.

We are on Main Circular Road, which connects the north to the south of the city, the airport to the station, and right through the day buses and trams, trucks and taxis keep passing by, making so much noise that it’s only now, well past midnight, that the ringing has stopped in my ears: the horns and the brakes, the angry passengers asking the driver to please slow down or stop, bus conductors coughing and spitting, jangling the bells, shouting their destinations in between.

Now it’s just the opposite, silence sits in one corner of the house, when I move my head to the right, when I move it to the left, I can hear my chin graze my collar, the sound of its stubble, I can hear my breath, even the crick in my neck, some muscle being pulled, perhaps some bone rubbing against some other bone, I am not a young man any more.

I am not going to type since the noise may wake you up, the paper being rolled in, my clumsy fingers pushing the keys, the ring at the end of each line, the paper moving up, the page ready to be rolled out.

And somewhere in the middle, if I wish to erase a word or add a letter, fix a comma, I will have to use the All-Purpose Correction Fluid. This means more noise: I will have to shake the glass bottle, open its cap, pull out the brush, let the white drop fall and then blow it dry with my lips. What if the bottle slips, falls on the floor?

At this hour, every sound gets magnified, every ear gets sharper.

I’ve heard that there are some babies who sleep undisturbed, even on Diwali evenings, dreaming silently to the noise of Catherine wheels and chocolate bombs. And there are some babies who wake up at the slightest of sounds, whose ears are like little funnels made of something like gossamer, ready to tremble, to catch anything in the night. A dog barking a dozen houses away, the wind blowing through the garbage dump, the ceiling fan, the tap dripping in the bathroom, the man beating his wife in the upstairs flat.

So where do I begin?

With you, the baby in my bedroom, on the blue bedspread, no taller than my arm, your tiny fingers curled up, the night resting like a soft cloud on your body. I shall begin with the phone ringing late at night, the police officer telling me that you have come into this city, unseen and unheard.

And once I have told you this story, I shall tell you more, as and when they come. I shall retell some stories, the ones your mother told me, even those which she said not in words, but in gestures and glances. Like that of the black and yellow Boroline banners catching the wind on Durga Puja day; the dead pigeon, its stain carried all across the city; the albino cockroach hanging, upside down, from the bathroom drain.

Or that evening in the maternity ward, when she stood in the room, your mother, in the hospital’s oversized nightdress, looking out of the window at the street lamps being switched on, one by one.

We shall visit all these places, I shall hold your hand, open all those rooms that need to be opened, word by word, sentence by sentence. I will keep some rooms closed until we are more ready, open others just a chink so that you take a peek. And at times, without opening a door at all, we shall imagine what lies inside. Like the murder, the screaming, a red handkerchief floating down, just as in the movies.

In short, I will tell you happy stories and I will tell you sad stories. And remember, my child, your truth lies somewhere in between.

‘I am sorry, sir, your sister is dead.’

The telephone rings late at night, it’s the Superintendent of Police, Lake Town, B Block, Calcutta 700089, Mr M. K. Chatterjee.

‘I am sorry, sir,’ he says, ‘your sister is dead.

‘We found your name written on four pages of a book she brought with her to the hospital. There was no one with her when she came in. In her admission form, she didn’t write anything except her name. She was pregnant.’

I listen, I tug at the telephone cord, watch my finger push through its black spirals.

For years, I have been waiting for news of my sister. I have made up mornings and evenings, invented entire telephone calls from police stations in the night, I have looked at the crowds on TV, wondered whether it’s she who walks in the top right-hand corner of the screen. Or when it rains, is she the one with the umbrella?

No, not the one with the red umbrella but the one with the black, a man’s umbrella?

Sometimes, in what seems like a dream, I see a marble palace, which looks like the Victoria Memorial, where she sits on a wrought-iron bench in the garden, one leg crossed over the other, regal and lonely. Swans glide past her on the grass, white against green against the blue of the sky.

‘The baby is alive,’ says the police officer. ‘It’s a baby girl.’

What do I say?

I look around, nothing has changed. Through the window I can see two men waiting for the last tram. There’s a circus in the city.

All trams have black and yellow posters plastered onto their coaches, I have been watching them all day:
Rayman Circus, Tala Park, Three shows, One, Four and Seven p.m.

Each poster has the same woman, a small woman in a tight-fitting shining dress balancing herself on a rhino’s back. And a tiger smiling, its face ringed with fire.

‘Are you there, sir?’ asks the police officer.

‘Yes, I’m here,’ I say.

‘Do you know who the father is?’ he asks. ‘We would like to inform him. Can you tell us something about her?’

I can tell him what I am telling you: the swans, the umbrella and the TV screen, but I don’t.

‘I haven’t seen her in a very long time,’ I say.

He doesn’t ask how long. ‘It’s very hot,’ he says, ‘we can’t keep the body for long. If no one comes, we have to give the baby up.’

‘Who will you give the baby to?’ I ask.

‘There’s a man and a woman, a childless husband and wife, waiting for three weeks.’ He pauses, I can hear him breathe, I wait.

‘Police rules are police rules, sir,’ he continues, ‘but I can relax them a bit. It’s very late in the night and I can’t call them up. You can keep the baby for a day. If you decide not to keep it, I will call them.’

‘Thank you,’ I say.

‘But you have to come down to the hospital tonight, we can’t keep the body, it’s very hot in here.’

It’s hot, although it’s December.

A full four months after the south-west monsoons have swept across the city, curved towards the Himalayas, winds laden with rain, wet and heavy, crashing against the foothills, the
Oxford University School Atlas
hung across the blackboard at school, more than twenty years ago, I can recall the oceans, the cities, a town called Genoa in Italy.

It’s supposed to be cool now, that time of the year when your skin begins to dry, when you rub pomade on your elbow so that it doesn’t wrinkle into a knot. One more month and on some nights in January it will get cooler, cold, so that you have to wear socks at night. But this year it’s hot.

Across the road, at the bus stop, the yellow light from the street lamps falls onto the garbage dump. It’s so far that I can’t make out what it’s falling on, I can only imagine: cracked plastic buckets, tufts of hair from the combs in the neighbourhood, women’s hair, tangled and knotted, some dry, some oiled. Scraps of newspaper, fish bones, vegetable peels. Nothing new, it’s been the same all these years, except that by now some of the clumps of hair have begun to grey.

‘You know the way to the hospital, I hope,’ he says.

‘Yes,’ I say.

‘Please come straight to Emergency. We will be there with the baby,’ says Mr Chatterjee. ‘How will we recognize you?’

‘I am not a young man any more, my stomach droops over the belt of my trousers.’ What more can I say?

‘Where?’ says the taxi driver. I tell him the name of the hospital, I tell him Emergency.

‘Anyone sick?’ he asks. I say no, he doesn’t hear, he doesn’t notice, there’s a black, earthen idol of a Goddess above his dashboard, two incense sticks burn, their heap of ash trembles when he changes gears.

On Grey Street, near Khanna Cinema, we take a right, past Ultadanga, the bridge, the vegetable market. The taxi’s windows are rolled down, there’s no one at this hour except empty wooden cots on which vendors sit every morning. I lean back and look out. High above, I can see the suburban railway station, just two platforms, the white neon sign of the Waiting Room glowing all alone. A local train sleeps, eyes wide open, stuck on the wire-mesh of the engine.

At the hospital entrance two touts run towards the taxi, they bend down, run a couple of yards, look at me. Admission? Emergency? Post-mortem? Death certificate?

I say nothing, I get out, ask the taxi driver to wait.

I walk into the Out-Patient Department, past the sick children wrapped in blankets on the floor, the saline drips propped up, along one side, the shadows of the tubes casting patterns on the wall. Two intern doctors share a cigarette, flirt with a third. A stray dog sleeps in one corner exactly like in newspaper photographs.

I see flowerpots being carried out on a stretcher, perhaps to be watered, it’s very hot tonight. A nurse with two safety pins on her bangles walks past, wheeling the food tray, I see crumpled balls of aluminium foil on the hospital dinner plates, rice half-eaten. The nurse looks at me.

At the end of the hall, I see the constables, in black and white, I see you there, crying in the police officer’s arms, one day old, there’s a blue towel that wraps you. Behind you, I see her lying on the trolley, covered in white.

‘Can you come this side and identify her, sir?’ the police officer says.

I don’t need to look at her. I identify her, your mother, my sister. I sign a form, I can feel you, in my arms, cold and wet. I think I am about to cry when Mr Chatterjee, vaguely embarrassed, holds my shoulder, says I need to be brave for your sake, he helps me lift you to my face so that I can wipe my eyes in the end of the towel that wraps you. And then I walk out of the hospital. With you and the red pacifier in my pocket which the nurse gave me. ‘Give this to her when she cries, when something disturbs her at night,’ she says.

Nothing will disturb you at night.

My tap drips in the bathroom, I have tried many things, I have turned the steel faucet all the way to the end, turned it again, hard, harder, so hard my fingers lock on to the steel, they still hurt. But the water continues to drip on the red tiles.

We’ll muffle the sound tonight, put dirty clothes below the tap, my trousers, my shirt with the city’s fingerprints on the collar and the cuff. If that doesn’t work, we shall tie a handkerchief to the tap, let the water collect in the pouch, drop by drop.

The fridge also makes a noise but that’s very light, as light as the old man coughing in the downstairs flat, once an hour or so. That shouldn’t bother you. As for the man who beats up his wife in the upstairs flat, that must have been over by now. It’s already past midnight, the husband would have gone to sleep, the wife, too, since how long will she cry?

The taxi driver pulls out of Hospital Parking, the incense sticks have burned down, some of the exhaust gets to where we sit but your eyes are closed, you are safe, in the blue towel in this city in the night.

Before we make our first trip to the past, let us go to the future, to a day, many years from now, when you are in a room with several people. As soon as you turn, maybe to get a glass of water or to look out of the window, they point you out with their eyes which say:

Don’t you know she is the one who came out of her mother’s womb, leaving her mother dead?

Do you know who brought her from the hospital? Her mother’s brother who didn’t even cry that night. Not one tear drop? No.

Unknown to them, you see what they say.

Will you keep your back turned, angry and hurt? Or will you put on a smile, walk straight into their waiting arms, into their trap of pity? I don’t know.

All I know is that in this city of twelve million, if six or seven, even ten people, say words that hurt, they are a speck in the ocean. Wait for a while, the moon will slide into the right place, the clouds will gather, there will come a tide and with it a wave which will wash this speck away.

The exhaust gets into our eyes, the driver rolls up the windows, the black sunfilm on the glass is chipped in several places but that’s not enough for the city’s light to enter the taxi. So we are moving in the dark, the inside lit only by the light from the dashboard, trapped behind the half-broken dials. It’s a weak light, it dies before it can cross the front seat.

Let the city pass us tonight because it has nothing to show, no longer does it have your mother, my sister. We shall not roll the windows down, the hospital building gets smaller and smaller behind us, there’s no need to turn and look back.

To our right is the market, closed at this time but even if it were open, even if there were women, trying out earrings, looking into mirrors held in their hands, choosing blouses that match with their saris, buying handkerchiefs for their husbands, three coloured, three in checks, I wouldn’t have looked.