The Blue Bedspread (8 page)

There’s no one on the street, all the houses are dark, the windows barred and shuttered, she can’t see the pigeons in the cage near the oil mill.

She looks at the sky which is now a huge white sari, the kind which widows wear, spread out over the grass to dry, crinkled in several places, the white fading away into a colour between light ash and deep grey. She feels dizzy, as in the first months of her first pregnancy, she wants to cry out but her lips are dry, she can hear herself breathe, the sound like that of the snow falling.

There’s not much of a wind, a few flakes have stuck to the grille in the balcony and before they can melt she touches them, shivers, watches them run down in lines of cold water, over the rusted iron and over her fingers.

She walks back into the bedroom, closes the door, it creaks again, she can see the reassuring shapes of her family in the dark, the two children, under the blanket, on the adjacent bed.

There’s work to do before they wake up. So she walks into the dining room where the two Godrej almirahs are, she switches on the lights, pulls the drapes so that the light doesn’t reach the bedroom and then she begins to unpack the heavy woollens.

The black coat Father got during his wedding, the leather gloves he hasn’t worn for twenty years. For the daughter, she takes out the blue jacket she bought last year from the Tibetan hawkers who sit on Chowringhee Road behind Hind Cinema.

For her son, she takes out the red socks she had bought for herself but doesn’t wear, they will be too large for his feet but a little bit of folding will take care of that. And they will reach up to his knees. As for herself, she chooses the Kashmiri shawl Father bought her a month after their wedding.

These woollens will not be enough but there’s nothing she can do. She recalls the household tip she got from a magazine: it’s warmer if you wear two thin sweaters rather than one thick one since the air gets trapped in between the layers and prevents the warmth from running away. She can smell the mothballs in the clothes, she can hear the snow still falling in the night.

And in the first light of the next day, when the sun’s rays, already weakened by the clouds, enter the bedroom through the green window pane, lighting the edges of the bedsheet, she wakes up her children and her husband and they all go to the balcony.

Other parents and children have come out of their homes, too, the rich ones who have read English books, whose parents have visited foreign countries, who get to watch American shows on Bangladesh TV, know what to do. They build snowmen, tie their old red ribbons around their necks, paint cricket balls black and put these for eyes and ears.

The children of the shanties stay at home, wrapped up in blankets and newspapers. The TV is down, there’s nothing to do, they ask their parents what the whiteness is all about and their parents say they don’t know. Sometimes, they come out to stand at the door and watch the other children throw snow at one another.

As for us, we are the family in the middle, so we spend the entire day in the balcony. Father in his black wedding coat which goes all the way up to his knees. My sister in her blue coat, my oversized red socks folded near the toes so that I don’t trip. Mother, wrapped in the Kashmiri shawl, rests her head against Father’s chest, he wraps one arm around her for the first time in my life and Sister and I turn the other way, slightly embarrassed but very happy as Mother reaches out and draws us to her. We can smell the mothballs in her shawl as she tells us the story of how she got up last night and heard the snow, like a piece of cotton wool sliding down the face of a mirror.

She tells us the story for the tenth time but it doesn’t matter and we all laugh, Father holds Mother closer to her, my sister puts her hands in mine and we hold on to each other, the air trapped between our clothes, asking all the gods we know not to let the snow melt.

White in the dark.

You’ve been crying for more than five paragraphs.

You began when we stood in the balcony watching the children play with the snow, tying their old red ribbons around their snowmen’s necks, painting cricket balls black for the eyes and the ears. The TV was down, there was nothing to do, you cried and you cried.

Don’t worry, the police officer had told me. Newborns often cry at night, just like that. It doesn’t always mean they need a feed. Let them cry for a while and they usually go back to sleep.

You haven’t. What do I do?

Maybe I should hold you in my arms, my left hand below your head, my right arm underneath your back, your ear against my heart, and take you to the balcony. Show you, through the iron grille, the oil mill where the red flags still droop, where the pigeons stand fast asleep. And maybe if we are lucky, we can see some of them, white and grey patches in the night, their heads turned the other way, their beaks buried in their backs.

We could also stand where your mother stood once upon a time and watched one pigeon die. But it s very dark outside and they say that at this time of the year, late November, dewdrops keep falling from the sky. I could cover you with my handkerchief but then there are sodium vapour lamps on the street. Your eyes will hurt.

The nurse at the hospital has given me a pacifier but she said to wait for a couple of weeks, use it when she’s strong enough to move her lips. So I shall wait.

I’ve read in foreign magazines about things that may help you fall asleep. Tapes that play the music of the womb, mattresses that move up and down as if they have your mother’s heart inside. But I don’t think we get these things in the city.

I could try Toy Centre on Park Street, they say that shop gets its stocks from London, sometimes from Tokyo.

There’s some milk in the fridge but it’s too cold and by the time I warm it, you may slip into sleep again. I could take vou to my study, the room where I’m writing, and put you on the stack of pages that have been written. Maybe the change of place will calm you, from the blue bedspread to the white paper.

But pages flap, their edges are sharp, it’s not safe.

If only Miss Sarah Parker were alive, I wouldn’t be so helpless. Let me tell you the story of Miss Parker.

Long ago, more than one hundred years ago in fact, there was an American woman who worked out of an office of the Calcutta Municipal Corporation in Chowringhee.

When you grow up and if you live in this city, you will have to go to Chowringhee quite often. That’s where all the big offices are, government and private, the markets with fashionable clothes, the pavement vendors who sell eyeglasses in the summer, sweaters in the winter. That’s where the big movie halls are, the Everest Building is, the tallest in the city.

Chowringhee is where most of the buses and trams begin and end their journey. It’s the heart of the city and like blood, we keep rushing there, through the veins and the arteries of the streets and the lanes. To and fro, to and fro.

So that’s where there was a woman called Miss Sarah Parker. And at 7, Chowringhee, she set up a one-room office and she called it the Mesmeric Institute.

Every evening, after office hours, when everyone had gone, when it was quiet, when you couldn’t hear the horses’ hoofs any more, in those days they must have had horse-drawn carriages, she called her friends, wrote a Word on a slip of paper, folded it, put it on the table, and asked them to close their eyes.

They all closed their eyes at the same time and when they wanted to open them again, they couldn’t. It was as if the eyelids were stuck with glue, they arched their eyebrows, grimaced, blinked and blinked. But nothing. They could not open their eyes until she said the Word.

It must have been a strange sight. There was no electricity then, it must have been in the glare of gaslight or flickering hurricane lamps that she sat in the middle with her subjects all around her, in a semi-circle, all with their eyes closed, their shadows falling on the wall. And outside, the last of the horse carriages going clippety-clop, clippety-clop.

Only when she spoke that Word could they open their eyes.

Then she would ask them to raise their arms and they kept them raised, rigid; they could not bring them down until she said that Word. Sometimes she went even further. Their legs would lose all sensation, they would pinch each other, hit each other on the knees. but feel nothing.

Some of them would even roll off their chairs and fall on to the floor, some in pain, their legs gone to sleep, but Miss Parker never moved, she sat there, in the centre, looking at them until they were convinced that she had the mesmeric power.

Then she would speak that Word and everything would be normal once again. The sensation would return, her friends would look at her in admiration and fright, at each other with shame and guilt. There would be some nervousness in the air, some tension but all that would disappear in a moment as Miss Parker would laugh and call out for the drinks and the dinner.

‘Calcutta is opening its eyes,’
The Statesman
said that time, ‘and in a hot climate like this, the power to mentally order people and oblige them to do our will is not to be despised.’

But Miss Parker is dead.

She was followed by a gentleman from Paris. He called himself a thought reader and he performed at the Dalhousie Institute, a man called Dr Chapagnon.

He’s dead, too.

And where Miss Parker once lived, where her house once was, there is today a vegetable market. Janbazar, behind Elite Cinema.

On nights when I return home late and there is no public transport, I go to Janbazar to take a taxi. I stand near the mound of dead vegetable peels, some green but most beginning to rot, and I can hear the noises of the night show in Elite, the shuffle of feet during the interval, the sound of the ice-cream boys shouting at tired customers, the crinkle of potato chips being eaten in the night.

If Miss Parker were alive tonight, I promise I would have gone to get her. The writing would have waited. I would have got a taxi, paid the driver extra since it s so late, asked him to take me to the Mesmeric Institute at 7, Chowringhee.

I would have woken her up and if she or her servant had refused to open the door. I would have stood on the street and shouted. ‘Miss Parker, Miss Parker, wake up, wake up.’ I would have asked her. begged her, gone down on my knees, on the street, so what if the tar tore the fabric of my trousers. I would have forced her to come with me, to step into the waiting taxi, I would have brought her to your room and asked her to write the Word, make you sleep, make you stop crying so that you wake up only when she says the Word in the morning.

But that’s not to be.

So I go back to my pages, I begin to finish the story about the night snow fell in our neighbourhood, how Mother reached out and drew us close, under her shawl, we could smell the mothballs as she told us the story of how she got up that night and heard the snow, like a piece of cotton wool sliding down a mirror, I can hear you crying.

But I write, word after word, and as each sentence comes to life, grows up and dies, your crying gets softer and softer, it seems someone is taking you away from me, walking into the distance, so that by the time I finish the story, it’s all over, you’ve gone back to sleep, leaving behind your crying ringing in my ears like a faraway bell.

(A story in two parts)

The police came around seven, in a red and white jeep; a red light on the roof which didn’t work; a constable got up on the chair, held him tight with one hand, loosened the blue nylon rope with the other, lowered him down.

‘He’s very light,’ he said. ‘He’s so old he would have died anyway, why did he have to kill himself?’ he said.

Why did he have to kill himself?

The constable took this question and walked around the neighbourhood, to as many people as he could, but no one had the answer. No one knew where the old man came from, whether he had any relatives in some faraway village. Or whether there were some people in the city who would cry themselves to sleep that night.