“Keep the bag,” added his uncle.
“You won’t need it?”
“O, these bags!” He shrugged, as if it possessed no value. “I have hundreds.” A treasure trove.
—
In the kitchen, he noticed the smell of his mother’s cooking. The kitchen was still but for the fridge’s neutral throbbing. A secret place.
Returning to the room, he saw his uncle crouching over last year’s books on shelves Ananda and his mother had brought home from Habitat — books whose alienness he’d had to understand and tame and which he was now liberated from. His uncle was examining Piers Plowman.
“I haven’t heard of this Langland,” he said. “The English poets we knew of were Milton and Shelley…Shelley was the greatest Romantic kobi, wasn’t he?” Solemnly he intoned: “ ‘Let pity clip thy wings before you go.’ ”
“Langland is from much further back.”
“Yes, this doesn’t even read like what you and I would take to be English,” said his uncle, frowning and scrutinising the page. “Too intellectual. Maybe a bit above my head…” he said with sly self-deprecation.
“Langland wasn’t an intellectual, Rangamama,” said Ananda, bristling. “At least, I don’t think so. To tell you the truth, very little’s known about him.”
His uncle lowered himself on to a chair by the dining table. He still hadn’t taken off his pinstripe jacket.
“What are you reading? I hope you have a decent horror novel at hand?”
“Yes, it’s not bad,” replied his uncle casually, placing his right leg on the left knee. “Also, I’m rereading Debojan. Wonderful book! Have you heard of it?” How could Ananda have not? It was a sacred text to his uncle; every other conversation was punctuated by a reference to it. “It’s by Bibhutibhushan Banerjee. You know Bibhutibhushan, of course?” About Bengali literature, his uncle presumed a scandalous ignorance on Ananda’s part. Ananda was from a breed on a new planet, impossibly removed from the world that had formed his own parents. That old Bengal that his uncle had left behind, and which was gone forever…Ananda in fact knew Bibhutibhushan, who’d written Pather Panchali—an unprepossessing man, but a great cherisher and noticer of the everyday, the mundane; he’d had no clue earlier that there was another side to him, which was drawn to the transmigratory.
“What’s the book about?” said Ananda, though he’d had pretty intricate accounts before from his uncle.
His uncle was happy to take up the theme again.
“It’s highly interesting,” he said, with the air of an anthropologist. “For instance, he describes the astral plane.”
“What’s that exactly?”
“It’s a plane much like the one we live on, but where you experience things more intensely. Even a beautiful summer’s day like today would be so much more vivid on the astral plane.”
“I see.” Ananda weighed the remark, and tried to conceive how this day’s beauty might increase. “In what way?”
“Things…tremble on the astral plane.”
He vibrated one hand, like a man who’d been administered a jolt of electricity.
“It’s mainly about life after death,” he said, moving on rapidly, unrestrainably. “The soul journeying through the stars and the cosmos. All sorts of extraordinary things happen on that journey! At a certain point, it can hear the screaming of the souls of various animals that have been slaughtered for our consumption.”
Ananda nodded — as if he could almost hear the dreadful din himself.
“Do you know,” said his uncle, untying his shoelaces, “that when a man dies he often doesn’t know what’s happened? It’s described in Debojan. A man suddenly falls dead on the street, say, or is hit by a car. The body’s taken away in an ambulance. But the soul doesn’t realise what’s going on. So the man gets up, goes home as usual.” Painfully, he wrested a sneaker off. “Everything’s as it was. A while later, he notices his wife and children are weeping. He thinks: What’s wrong? He goes to them. But they continue to mourn; they don’t seem to notice him. It’s at that point that an already dead person might come to him and break the news — and guide him to the other world. He’d be reluctant to go, of course; he might have a daughter to marry, a debt to pay. It’s hard to pull away.”
Both sneakers had come off.
“Who would this already-dead person be?” asked Ananda — witnessing, in his head, the disconsolate progression of events.
“Oh it could be anyone. But someone who knows the dead person. Maybe a friend. Or it might be a relation.”
Ananda was soothed by this. He’d never much cared for the conception of the afterlife. Even misery in Warren Street was more congenial to him than any possible idea of paradise. But the thought of being reunited with a known figure who’d keep you company, after your death, on your journey to the hereafter spoke to everything in him that, ever since he could recall, was groping its way through this world.
“Would you be scared if you saw such a — saw someone of that kind?”
“Of course I would!” said his uncle, histrionically enlarging his eyeballs. He scratched his ankle, making a rasping sound. “I don’t want to see a ghost!”
“If it were someone you knew?”
“Even if it were my mother, my dear friend,” he said, absolving himself of being the type that rejoiced upon seeing a phantom. “I would be — I’d be terrified!”
“Mm,” said Ananda. He switched on the TV and was greeted by a gale of uproarious laughter. Terry and June were in bed, confabulating.
“I had a dream once,” said his uncle, oblivious to the mirth, which had as suddenly subsided. “You know that when our father died, we three younger ones — Dukhu, your ma Khuku, and I — were reigned over by the three older siblings who had forceful personalities: Chhorda, Sejda, and Didi. Our mother protected and looked over us all, but she had no real influence over us. Mejda was too dreamy. It was these three who controlled us: the committee.” He pursed his lips at the memory of their authority. “Then Sejda — who sang Tagore songs more beautifully than anyone else I’ve heard — died at the age of thirty.” He looked at Ananda; Ananda looked back at him, experiencing a sorrow that was distant, yet curiously personal. Ananda had never seen this uncle; he remained forever youthful in these stories; forever in Sylhet in undivided British India. “We were all completely shattered. Others cried; I grew very quiet. We knew he had a bad heart, but he was so versatile — he baked wonderful cakes, and played the harmonium magnificently (no one taught him, don’t know how he picked it up) — that we never expected it to happen.” Further merriment: Terry had emerged awkwardly from bed and was wearing his trousers. “Two days later, I had a dream. Sejda had just got back home with a group of English officers he was friendly with. He was sitting in the drawing room — they were talking and laughing loudly. Then Chhorda called me aside and said, ‘Doesn’t he know he can’t do that? Why is he sitting over there? Go and tell him he’s dead!’ ” Rangamama sighed. “He gave me that chore — to go and break the news.”
Chhorda, the brother for whom he sent a monthly cheque to Shillong.
“You should read the book,” he said semi-urgently, as if it wasn’t too late. “Can you read Bengali?”
“A little,” Ananda confessed.
“It’s known everywhere. In China they call it Deb-chan.” He spat out the syllables. “Deb-chan!” he said again, almost making an authentic Chinese sound.