The Blue Bedspread (9 page)

So they followed the rules, as laid out in the book, typed out a notice at the police station which no one came to read. And, therefore, forty-eight hours later, they cremated him.

He was seventy, they said, no medical college needed a cadaver so old. He could even have been eighty, it didn’t matter.

It was one of the four suicides in the city that day; it would become, by the end of the month, one of a hundred and fifty. By the end of that year, one of over fifteen hundred. Multiply that by fifteen for fifteen years and what do you have left?

Nothing, the old man is gone.

Gone also is his house, it wasn’t a house exactly, just a four-wall shack, with a tarpaulin roof, beside the road, which they demolished the day after they found him. There was nothing in the room except an extra walking stick, an iron chair, clothes that smelled of his years and some pigeon feathers scattered below the bed, some underneath his pillow.

They took it all away, leaving behind nothing to mark the fact that once upon a time there lived an old man. And that for a week or so, he changed the life of a little girl, brought joy into her house and filled her little heart with some love.

Once upon a time, there lived an old man who worked in an oil-refining mill, pasting labels on tin cans, just before the oil was poured into them: bright yellow labels with pictures of Lord Ganesh, in black and red, the name of the mill in blue: Ganesh Oil Mill, Calcutta 700006.

How long he’d been doing this, no one knows, but it must have been quite a while because if you looked carefully you could see that his fingers were crinkled as if glue had dried on them and merged with his skin.

When he picked up a piece of paper, any piece of paper, through instinct and habit he made it look as if he were holding a label, he held it gingerly, between the thumb and his finger, looking all around him as if he were lost, as if he were searching for a place to paste it, somewhere, anywhere.

Just outside the oil mill, a couple of feet to the right of its entrance, were the birds. In a large cage, more like a coop, the kind you will see at the Alipore Zoo, slightly smaller, the size of an average storeroom in an average house. Three sides of the cage were walls, the fourth that faced the road was strong wire netting.

There were twelve pigeons in the cage, six grey, six white, the prettiest things in the neighbourhood. And although there were several pigeons out in the open, resting on window ledges, cooing in the afternoon, fluttering in the narrow lanes and doing pretty things like scratching their backs or sleeping, people stopped by to look at these dozen birds in the cage.

Flying round and round, grey and white, grey and white. On certain rainy days, when the sky was dark, it seemed tiny clouds had slipped into the cage each dragging with it just a little bit of the sky. And then one afternoon in 1977, the oil mill closed down. Just like that, all of a sudden.

It was the time they started painting Moral Science lessons on trucks and trams, buses and taxis. In black cursive letters:

Work more, talk less. Honesty is the best policy.

The owner of the oil mill, a heavy man in a silk kurta and dhoti, his chin glowing from the necklaces around his neck, there were at least four, drove up to the mill door that evening, stepped out of his car, and walked to the gate, two locks, one in each hand. The workers waved red flags, shouted their protests, one even spat in his direction but it didn’t matter because the owner kept walking as if he couldn’t hear; with a smile on his face, he locked the gates, put the keys in his pocket, the workers heard the clink and he began to walk back to his white Ambassador. When suddenly, he stopped.

He saw the old man in the crowd and he walked up to him, the old man, afraid, hid behind some young men, the owner put one hand on his shoulder, lowered his mouth to his ear and said something which made the old man smile. This whole thing lasted not more than fifteen seconds before he turned and walked away towards the car.

Some workers, the more angry ones, ran after the car, chased it over a distance but the car was faster. They returned, cursing the man, calling him names, they then circled the old man, asked him what the owner had said.

One young worker shouted at him. ‘Don’t double-cross us,’ he said. ‘Don’t stab us in the back,’ another said.

The old man just smiled, a sad and nervous smile, and said, no, there was no deal, the owner had told him to take care of the pigeons, to look after them, to see to it that they got fed every day and the cage was cleaned every morning.

This gave the workers some hope because it showed that the owner had a little bit of his heart still left. And no one protested, no one was against the pigeons.

But like water in the sun, this hope began to disappear, in patches, so that by the time summer slipped into the monsoons, it was gone. A team from the Labour Commissioner’s office came to inspect but nothing happened, the mill never opened.

Some workers stayed there at the entrance, shouting slogans, propped up their flags against the door, and when it was too late, when the rest of the neighbourhood had gone to sleep, they sat down, in a bunch, played cards until they fell asleep.

As the rains came, the flags got drenched, discoloured, the red turned into some pale brown, the older workers began to leave the group, in ones and twos, to look for other jobs. The younger ones waited and waited to teach the owner a lesson but nothing happened. Until one day, they too went away, leaving behind the red flags drooping over the signboard. Only two things remained unchanged and unaffected: the pigeons and the old man.

From the very first day, they fell in love, the old man and the birds.

Morning, afternoon, evening, he sat on an iron chair, his back to the road, as if in a painting, looking at the birds. When it rained, he sat with an umbrella; when it got cold, he sat with a shawl draped over his head, a small pile of wood, old newspapers, burning at his feet.

Exactly at eight every morning, when the siren from the flour mill, about half a kilometre away, went off, he would get up, steady himself with the walking stick and climb up the two steps that led to the door of the cage. He would unlock it, enter the cage, close the door behind him, pick up the broom that lay on the floor.

The birds flew around him, some perched on his shoulder, on his back, their feathers falling across his face but the old man looked as if he were walking in paradise, in the snow, all wrapped up and warm, the flakes falling across his face.

Until one day, when he walked inside, something happened, maybe a wind blew or there was something wrong with the hinges since the door, which he had pushed close, opened, not much, just a tiny crack restoring the link between the cage and the outside world, enough for one white pigeon to fly away.

Now pigeons aren’t great fliers to begin with and this one was perhaps a young one since it fluttered for a while, hopped and then flew, only to go and sit on the tram wire above the street, looking this way and that, unsure what to do with its sudden freedom.

The old man hurried out, half-stumbling, half-walking, locked the door, stood at the edge of the pavement, called out loud to the bird. It didn’t listen, he picked up a stone, threw it, it didn’t travel far, his hands were weak, he beat his walking stick on the iron chair, the noise was loud but the pigeon just turned its head to scratch its back.

It continued to sit, its feet glued to the wire, it looked around, at the banyan tree near the oil mill, at the cage, it rubbed its beak against its neck, it preened itself. Not once did its little feet feel the tingle of the No. 12 tram from Esplanade to Galiff Street which was now just a couple of feet away.

By now, the old man was hysterical. He called out to the tram driver; someone was walking by, he stopped her, asked her to call the driver, she walked by. ‘Fly away,’ the old man shouted, ‘fly away,’ but it was as if the bird was made of stone.

The tram clanged, the old man shouted, the woman who walked by stopped and she shouted too, a crow, like an accidental ally, joined them, fluttered over the pigeon but nothing helped. The tram moved, the old man saw the pigeon fall, the white bundle drop onto the roof of the tram and then slide down, along the side, the dead pigeon, its tiny feet up in the air, its head lolled to one side.

He rushed to pick up the bird but before he could step off the pavement a double-decker bus, No. 11A bound for Howrah Station, came rushing by, followed by a couple of taxis, another bus, a truck, so that by the time the road had cleared, most of the dead bird was gone leaving a reddish-brown stain on the manhole cover, some feathers drenched with blood.

And as the day wore on, as vehicles kept going up and down the street, moving across the dead bird, parts of it stuck to the tyres, big and small, slow and speeding, so that by the end of the day, bits and pieces of the bird travelled across the city.

The old man went back to his iron chair, one white bird less, the cage looked darker. Whether the old man cried we don’t know. Even if he had, no one would have noticed since it was about nine o’clock, time to go to office, time to go to school. Except for a little girl, about ten or twelve years old, standing in the balcony of her house, across the street from the oil mill, a little girl who saw everything and began to cry.

The old man turned to sit down in his chair, this time facing the road, his back towards the cage, and when he turned, he saw this girl, dressed in her white nightdress, with red flowers all over.

He couldn’t see her eyes, he was at quite a distance, but the sight of the girl, standing in the balcony, looking at him with a face wet with what could only be tears, offered him not only a distraction from his sadness but also a chance to silently share his loss, if only for a moment.

Our story will, after a while, move across the street, over the manhole, over the reddish-brown stain, into the girl’s house and from there, into her heart, in one straight line.

On winter nights, just before Father switched off the lights in our bedroom, your mother and I played the Blanket Game.

Our eyes still open, we pull the blanket over our heads, stretch it tight, turn over on our sides so that we face each other. And then we look at the light refracted through the woollen fabric. It’s a blue yellow orange red light, a strange glow that you see only in the movies.

We then imagine that we have built our own light garden, its floor the blue bedspread, its roof the blanket and its flowers the red flowers on my sister’s white nightdress, the checks and stripes on my shirt.

There are several smells in our garden. The earth is the blanket, musty and warm; the grass is our clothes, smelling of water and soap and sun, the blue bedspread is the night, the flowers are my sister’s shampoo, the wind is the breath of approaching sleep.

But soon it becomes difficult to breathe, so we raise one end of the blanket, the one over our head, let the cold, fresh air rush in and then we dive underneath, back to our garden.

Sometimes we feel bold, so we hold the blanket high. We balance it, adjust it with our hands, so that the tassels on its fringe hang straight down, touch the blue bedspread in such a way that they seem like pickets for the fence of our light garden.

Then the light streams in, it gets brighter, it’s daytime in our garden, the colours of the flowers change. Until Father switches off the light and our garden melts into the night, the flowers go to sleep.

We played this game for quite a few winters until we found that we were growing bigger and bigger, the blanket, after we were covered, couldn’t reach far enough to be held high and tight, the garden then grew smaller and smaller.

But I needed to tell you this little story, my child, so that when you have to pull your blanket over your head, remember that with a little bit of imagination, you can always find some love trapped in some fear.

Mike testing, ten, nine, eight, seven six five, four three two onezero. Testing, mike testing, ten, nine, eight, it’s the first day of the Pujas and she is ironing their clothes, his mother has to go for the prayer later in the day, she can see the thin man climb up the lamp-post, another holding the ladder, he adjusts the microphone underneath, the huge black and yellow banner for Boroline, the antiseptic cream for all seasons.

There are neat circular holes punched in the banner. Grandfather told her, long ago, those holes are for the wind to pass through so that the banner doesn’t tear.

She still cannot understand why. Maybe it has to do with forces acting on a rectangular surface, her school physics. Wherever she goes, she finds these banners, calling out to her across the city, strung across two lampposts on either side of the street, above the tram wires. Sometimes even across two houses in narrow lanes. All kinds of banners. Sure Success Tutorials for the Joint Entrance Examinations, Slimline Beauty Clinic, Complete Course in Computer Programming.

But this black and yellow Boroline banner comes up only during the Pujas, around the pandals, the huge tents made of canvas and cane, set up in the neighbourhood to welcome the Goddess who comes down from the hills, with her children, to her father’s place. For ten days every year.