The Blue Bedspread (7 page)

Father can hear the people all the way from the Oval in London, he must have read about the city, seen it in postcards outside the British Airways office, the pigeons at Trafalgar Square, men and women in overcoats, and tonight, India is chasing four hundred and thirty-eight to win, that’s all he needs to know as he listens to the runs getting added, one by one, until the voice says that everyone is standing in applause, Gavaskar has scored his two hundred, India cannot lose.

You are lying in bed, and you are listening to the voices, looking at the yellow line on the floor, when the commentators change, Father walks into your room and kisses you on your forehead.

The next morning, it’s Teacher’s Day, 5 September, we all had to go to school in coloured clothes, classes were off, we had to go early to decorate the classroom, the balloons had to be filled, Teacher’s gift had to be wrapped.

‘Here, take this,’ says Father and he gives us ten rupees each, which means twenty vanilla ice creams, and when we reach school, my sister and I, everyone’s talking about how they stayed up last night, burst crackers and how they will, after the Teacher’s Day function, go to New Market to buy Gavaskar posters.

And they look at us, brother and sister, and ask us what did you do, we don’t say much, we smile and turn away because we can still feel Father’s lips on our foreheads, the twenty ice creams waiting, and we know that for the next one week, maybe even two, we will be the happiest children in the city.

For once, let me say this. And I promise I shall never say it again tonight: I’m afraid.

This is a story about a man crossing a street.

He may not be a young man, his stomach may droop over the belt of his trousers, but look at him walk to the bus stop every morning and you can make out that he knows his city, so casually he crosses the street.

Others stop, look left, look right, take one step forward, one step back, hold on to their children’s hands, tell them, ‘Don’t hurry, wait for the bus to go.’

He walks straight ahead.

In one sweep of his eyes, without even raising his head, he takes the entire road, its entire traffic from one end to the other. A split second and lies done his arithmetic: the distance he needs to traverse, his speed, by how much does a bus slow down when it approaches a stop, so that he is sure he will make it before the bus does.

Every time, he gets it right.

At the bus stop, he doesn’t fidget like the rest. He stands still, calm, the crowd swirls around him like rainwater around a lamp-post.

When a bus pulls up, the others run forward, push each other, crane their necks to see the route number, ask the conductor if it goes where they want to go. But he stands there, looking at something entirely different.

Sometimes the sky or the tram lines. Sometimes, the pigeons in the cage.

He doesn’t have to check or ask, he knows when his bus will come. He knows it will wait for him, he will walk towards it, no hurry, no furtive looking at the conductor, he will climb up the steps, if there are many people standing inside, he will walk as if he’s the invisible man. No one will tell him, ‘Watch your step, mister.’

At work, he doesn’t manufacture smiles or frowns, he walks straight to his desk, he can see, sideways, the others gathering in small groups, talking about their buses, their children, mid-term exams, last night’s cinema on TV.

He gets down to work.

What does he do? It doesn’t matter.

Look at him once again, as he takes out the stapler, the Scotch tape, the Gem clips. He arranges the sheets of paper, flicks the dust off his desk, wipes his typewriter clean with a yellow cloth. Opens his notebook to today’s date, his list, neatly written down, of things to do.

Insignificant things but into each he breathes a grand sense of purpose.

Question: Where does this confidence come from?

Answer: Part instinct, part habit, both honed over fifteen years, every day, minus Sundays and holidays. There’s another answer: loneliness.

This city likes lonely people, the city likes this man.

There’s no one to walk by his side, to wait for him at a street crossing, so the city moves in to help, it slows down the traffic, parts the crowds. There’s no one to talk to him, so the city speaks through its banners, its hoardings. At night, he has nothing to do, so the streets tell him their stories, street lights trap insects in their plexiglas covers, lull him to sleep.

No wonder he is so grateful to his city and returns the favour whenever he gets a chance. For example, when buildings, more than a hundred years old, streaked with moss and rain, not worth a second look, tug at his sleeves, he stops in his tracks to watch and admire. Once, twice, even thrice.

On days when the streets are deserted, trade unions have called a strike, he stays up extra hours, gives the city company, listens to its stories like a loyal child.

Until one night his phone rings.

‘I am sorry, sir, your sister is dead.’ It’s the Superintendent of Police, Lake Town, Calcutta 700089. ‘She was pregnant . . . We can’t keep the body for long . . . the baby is alive, it’s a baby girl.’

Now the baby is in the next room, sleeping. The city is outside the window, watching.

During the night, the man gets up to check on the baby, to see why it’s silent, why it’s crying. He opens the fridge to find out if there’s enough milk for the morning, he will prop pillows against the baby, gently close the door so that it doesn’t make a noise. And while he is doing all this, the city keeps watching him, irritated and angry.

In just a few hours, the darkest of the night, the foundations of their friendship will crack, the pillars of his solitude, the walls, will begin to buckle, some will even give way. The night will grow darker, the city, once spurned, will begin searching for another lonely man or woman in some other neighbourhood.

And until then, until it finds a new friend, all alone, it will keep coming back to haunt the man, filling him with fears and dreads he has so far never imagined.

Like, how will he cross the street tomorrow morning.

That’s why, for once, let me say this. And I promise I shall never say it again tonight: I’m afraid.

Read this once, read this twice, thrice. Come back to it when you have the time. Read this carefully, then imagine it, feel it, hear the sounds in it. If you grow up to be a painter, paint it. Because it’s short and fleeting. It’s here, it’s not here, it lasts for about two seconds and then it disappears, like smoke gone with the wind.

It’s the only distinct image I can recollect of my mother, your grandmother. She’s standing near a white washbasin.

There’s one more memory, a fragment, more sound than image: she is waking up in the middle of the night. Then there’s nothing. Except her giant photograph, two dead cockroaches trapped in its glass frame, in the room where you sleep.

In my veranda, there’s a washbasin, a sink, white ceramic, your usual washbasin, nothing fancy, just one steel tap, no faucets like they show in magazines, no hot/cold knobs marked red for hot, blue for cold, no sparkling steel rings attached to drain covers. Just one white washbasin, stained in a few places, one steel tap, its base corroded.

It’s here that I wash my hands after dinner, brush my teeth every morning, I have to bend at the waist to turn the tap on, sometimes it hurts, I am not a young man any more.

Above the washbasin, there’s a wooden shelf, where I keep my brush, my shaving mug, my razor blades, a sponge, a bar of soap. There’s also a small plastic bird, I don’t know where it came from. It’s been lying there for how many years, I don’t know. It’s got some soap on it, dried, marks of water drops that must have splashed up from the washbasin below.

I am a child, three or four, naked, standing in the washbasin, my head just touches the underside of the shelf so that I am a near-perfect fit, my feet are on the basin’s floor, my calves touch the tap. Mother holds me at the waist, it’s not winter since I’m not shivering.

It’s early morning, through the iron grille of the veranda, I can see the tram wires, the bus stop across the street, I can see buses come and go. I can feel the water run in circles around my feet, I hear Mother’s glass bangles making a noise as she rubs the soap on my chest. I balance myself, my left hand rests on my mother’s head, I can see the red vermilion in the parting of her hair.

And while she is bathing me, suddenly she stops and turns. The soap slips out of her hand, slithers down my body, falls with a thud against the ceramic, my body is half-covered with soap and water. Her head turns, I lose balance, my fingers slide against her hair, my feet press hard against the washbasin, my back rubs against the wall. It’s rough, I can feel the white plaster on my skin.

She looks out, across the roof of the shanties, over the tram wires, to the bus stop where a man stands, a tall man with glasses, and she waves to him, she lifts my hand and waves it too, the man waves back, he’s smiling, she smiles back, she turns quickly, picks up the soap, the tap is running so the water by now has formed a pool near my legs, she scoops some of it, pours it onto my shoulders.

A bus stops across the street, screens the man, the bus is gone, the man is gone and my mother is back to bathing me. Under her breath, I can hear her sing, I try to recall what happens next and all I see is her giant photograph, two dead cockroaches trapped in its glass frame.

And all I remember is my hand resting on her head, my fingers on the red vermilion in the parting of her hair. And that the man across the street wasn’t my father.

Mother gets up in the middle of the night, I can remember the sound, the blanket rustling, she moving, her feet touching the floor, she goes to the bathroom and on her way back, after she pulls the flush and the gurgling in the tank dies down, after she switches off the lights, maybe she hears it.

At first, it seems like a medley of several noises. The muted roar from a cricket stadium, the noise of rain falling and then it gets softer. It must be a very light rain, so light that before the drops reach the earth, the wind carries them away, back into the sky. And then it changes, into the sound of something soft rubbing against glass, like when you take a piece of cotton wool and let it slide down the face of a mirror.

By this time she’s back in the bedroom, it’s dark but it doesn’t matter, it’s been her bedroom for more than fifteen years, the dressing table is in the same place as it was when she first moved in, so she walks in the dark, glides, without bumping against anything, without making any noise, up to the door which leads into the balcony.

Carefully, so that we don’t wake up, so that Father doesn’t wake up, she opens the green wooden door, it creaks and she steps out. And it’s then that she sees the snow.

White in the dark.

She closes her eyes once and then opens them, she closes her eyes twice, opens them again, nothing has changed. It’s white in the dark.

There’s no moon tonight and when her eyes adjust she can see the banyan tree across the street covered in white, the flakes falling in the night, catching the light from the street lamps so that it seems a million glow-worms have burst down from the sky.

The snow is there wherever she looks, covering the tram tracks, all the way to where Main Circular Road meets Grey Street, where the flour mill is. The snow covers the film posters on the lamp-posts, she can see the white streaks in the hero’s hair, running down the heroine’s neck, the snow has covered the little trolley, its lettering,
Amit Egg Rolls,
from which Amit, BA (History Honours), twenty-seven years old, runs his shop.

The snow has entered everything, his gas stove, the place where he keeps the chopped onions and the chillies, the bottle of tomato sauce, the box with the loose change.

At the bus stop, the snow has piled up in three heaps, over the garbage, making them look like old men and women sleeping on a white floor, huddled under white sheets.

To her left, the slums, too, are white, the snow sticks to the TV antennae, the cable wires like glistening cobwebs. The roofs of the shanties across the street are white, the tarpaulins showing in a few tiny patches of blue.