After a long time, it has rained beautifully today in this mollifying monotonous town. It’s nearly eleven o’clock at night. Rickshaws are still plying on the road with a splashing sound, as if someone is rowing a boat in Gotia beel: ‘hurry! or the bus to Dhaka will leave!’. The drunken music of bellowing-beauty rain jingles on my window. The line of croton plants is filled with a dampened smell, and the walls are hued in melancholy; after many days, today, I feel good. I think I didn’t have such a thrilling night and such a lonely lapse of time for many days, many years, or perhaps I’ve never ever had it. How can I sleep on this rain-rippled night? Rain seems to be very peculiar, it seems like an unknown sigh. I can’t even read on a night like this. Books remain open in my front; letters pass by carelessly as if someone has given them a hollow hemorrhagic birth to endure an eternal virginity. Three split leaves in the teacup like the three hands of a clock quiver time sluggishly. A sixty watt bulb keeps pouring soggy light and I feel a twinge in my heart. It has been quite a long time since I and Ashiq were returning from Azimpur in heavy rain listening to seven Tagore songs: “whom you have left behind” (“tui fele eshechhis kare”). Some dream mistakenly dreamt in the golden childhood glimmers in the mercurial web of my memory. I can’t sleep; I stay awake amidst the light.
When I am walking to Ma’s room in the evening, the sky is already dark, and the roads are empty of pedestrians. Two Volkswagens run off, seizing the silhouettes of croton plants from our four windows making crows and bats yell loudly. I think I won’t be able to sleep tonight at all. Spending half an hour alone in Ma’s room when I return to mine, the rain is full-voiced. I feel a strange unease; I can’t sleep tonight; I must have left something in Ma’s room.
Ranju stands up to go to his mother’s room. Getting to the door, the moment he raises his hand to unlatch it, he remembers that the door is locked from outside. Between Ranju’s room and his mother’s, there is another room; even then, he places his mole-like lips on the small door hole and whispers in a soft low voice, ‘Ma, open the door, open the door, please’!
The rain has been receding slowly. Ranju looks through the window and discovers that it has completely disappeared now. Breathing of the bakul leaves seems to be empty. Dews of the rain are hanging from the electric wire in a queue and glittering in the soggy light of the lamppost; and in every blink of an eye, they are dropping down and shattering like pieces of music. Through this wire, where, in whose bulb does Kajla didi flame up? Where? “Flowers’ fragrance keeps me awake, and I awake alone; Ma, where is my storyteller Kajla didi?” Ranju feels sad for Kajla didi at this very moment. He knocks at the door with hurried and agitated hands and screams in a muffled voice, “Ma, open the door; open the door; Ma, open the door; hurry up please; open the door, open”. After calling out four to five times with a few seconds’ irregular intervals, Ranju hears a couple of drowsy voices arising after a long break.
‘Who’s there? Isn’t it someone calling out?’ Ma is emerging, ripping through a dream. My poor Ma!
‘Ranju! After a pause it’s Baba again, “isn’t it Ranju”?’
‘Ranju?’
‘Humm. He hasn’t gone to sleep yet.’
‘Isn’t he asking to open the door?’
‘Humm.’ Creak ! Creak! ‘Didn’t the doctor say yesterday that he would improve a bit if the weather changes?’
‘Listen! It’s him again. What should I do? Should I open the door?’
The timid voice of his mother makes Ranju a little frightened.
‘The door? Okay, open it, otherwise he’ll cause more trouble.’
‘But, if he wants to go out?’
‘Let him. I just don’t like chaos at such a late hour of night. Go, and open it.’
‘Okay, you too come with me then.’
‘Are you scared of going alone?’
The shaky shadow of the curtain appears to be a man, or maybe not just a single man. “Near the pond, underneath the lemon plant, fireflies are glowing in clusters”. The rustling of the lemon leaves makes Ranju feel discontent once again. Am I mirroring an opposite man for nothing? Suddenly, he hears the sound of the door being unlocked from outside. He pulls down the bolt quickly and glances at the wavy curtain where that absurd reflection is falling to pieces.
‘You aren’t asleep till this late night, my son?’ The hair on his father’s head has become gray, depressed and scarce after the rain.The effort in his arid voice is pitiable; it feels like Ranju is listening to some sad news from a trunk call.
‘You’re still awake, my son! It’s too late at night, you should go to bed now’: the words come out weary, entangled in his mother’s just-roused tongue. She is short, fair-complexioned and roundish. Ranju gets a little surprised looking at the flickering shadows of his parents. Why does it happen like this?
‘Ma, I have left that thing in your room.’
‘In our room? What have you left?’
‘When? What did you leave in our room?’
‘That time, in the afternoon, when it was about to rain….’ Ranju likes to speak in a decorative language right now as if he is making a painting with words and hanging it up in the air. ‘When the sky was very cloudy and you were saying: “Anju hasn’t returned yet, where is he?”. A big branch of the palm tree flew down and began swinging on the wire, dust was all around; right then I left that in your room.’
‘But what is it you left?’
Being a little embarrassed Ranju notices that his unwilling shadow image has started trembling once again even more rapidly. He sets his disorderly gaze at the cold floor, at the deep-maroon legs of the chair and at the dropped down creepers of the table cloth.
‘But what have you left actually?’
‘Can’t remember exactly what I left … um … I guess, I forgot … can’t recall what it was…’ says the suddenly guilty Ranju in a haphazard but gentle way.
‘Well! Then come with us to our room, and see what you’ve left by yourself.’
His father rather smiles a little intolerantly, ‘okay, let’s go then, hurry up!’
The shadow image vanishes as Ranju comes to the other side of the curtain. Anju and Manju are sleeping with ease, plunging into the dreamy soft darkness of the room and their aspirations. In the almirah, books are shelved like coffins in rows. Passing all these, they enter into a big room: Ma, Baba and Ranju.
On the wall, there remain the white cotton made will-never-fly butterflies, and the green thread stitched peacock couple that has turned reddish now. Upon the stretched arm of the easy chair and from the top of the shameless Bernard Shaw, Baba’s thick spectacles are staring at the mosquito-net distastefully.
‘Where? Can you remember what you left here?’
I certainly left something in this room in the evening, when the sky was very cloudy, and darkness was encompassing all around.
The back wall is reflected placid and pale in the tall mirror of the almirah. Someone’s voice is smeared in the sponge of the intimate telephone upon Baba’s bedhead that starts talking pleasantly at the picking up of the receiver.
Where, Ranju? In the afternoon Baba sounds quite masculine, but now his voice is so ordinary! Ranju feels a bit sorry to see him turning into a typical family man day by day.
‘Can you remember now? Where? What did you leave? What exactly?’
‘Ranju, my son, please try to think, can you recall now?’
Only the dead-slow night expands eternally; helpless Ranju smiles a bit. ‘I can’t exactly remember, Ma; somehow I’ve forgotten completely ’, he says in a meager way. What is it that slips from my memory again and again? ‘In the evening, when darkness was engulfing all-around; no, maybe not then, maybe in some other time I left something, exactly what, I can’t really….’ A wonderful premature darkness is slowly emanating like a sunrise in his eyeballs. Staring feelinglessly at the obscured and unembodied, Ranju murmurs in his throat’s salty red, ‘then, maybe elsewhere’. In the deep of his interior, on the skin wall of his heart and abdomen, his bleary words echo: ‘maybe I’ve left it elsewhere’. Having a boiling darkness in the sunken stoves of his eyes, Ranju returns to his own room with his parents.
‘We’d rather go now, you get some sleep, okay?’ Pulling a wrapper on him, Ma looks at Baba. Both she and Ranju can see his sparkling tearful eyes.
‘Ranju!’ It’s Baba again. Ranju gets a little surprised, his father’s voice has become different again: low, feeble and almost dissolved in the air.
‘Now go to sleep, my son. Both the doors are kept open, if you really feel upset, you may go to the verandah, just don’t get into the road; the sky is terrible tonight. But try to get to sleep first, okay?’
‘I can’t sleep,’ Ranju mumbles. ‘Close your eyes and stay lying on the bed quietly. Try to think— in front of you there is a field, a lot of sheep are grazing in that, they are thousands and hundreds of thousands in number. Start counting them—one, two, three, four, five, six…’
I don’t remember where I saw such a field before. There was a gray hill on one of its sides; and a very tall man was standing motionlessly opposite to the hill and behind the flocks of thousands of sheep. When did I see that? When? In which life?
‘Just count this way, you’ll find yourself tired soon, and then you’ll fall asleep.’
‘Will I be able to sleep if I get tired?’ But I am always very tired. I’m born tired. Then why can’t I sleep? ‘Yes, my son, keep counting for a pretty long time with your eyes closed. You’ll see that you’re falling asleep peacefully. I myself get to sleep this way many times!’
After they’re gone, the sleepy tranquil fragrance of Ma’s saree stays across the room. Lying curled up in his bed and being absorbed, Ranju starts taking deep frequent breaths of the room. He inhales the pale smell of the blue light, the odor of the damp soil coming from outside, the dispersed vanished smoke from Baba’s cigarette, the old Statesman underneath, the dusty slippers, and the eternal fragrance of Schopenhauer flowing from the table.
The smell of this room is changing day by day. In earlier days and in morning times, it used to smell like the new Chhorar Chhobi. ‘As if a reply I hear, “we aren’t here, we aren’t here” (“Mone holo jobab elo “amra nai nai”)—setting eyes on the beautiful bitter aroma of the page on which those words were written used to make him fall asleep all the time. On some nights, the scent of his mother’s blue georgette saree used to wake him up. It used to smell old. The aura made up of naphthalene, leather box and the air all together awoke him up on many nights.
‘Ma , are you going to the cinema?’ ‘Oh dear! You’re still awake?’ Ma used to look at me sweetly and start arranging the foldings of her saree again. ‘Go and sleep, my son. These films are for grown-ups. You shouldn’t see them.’ In those days, only Bengali films were shown at Rupmahal. At times, Ma used to take me with her too. Shetu was one of the films we saw together; and some other films also, like Sansar, Niyati, Babla, and some more too. I can’t recall all the names now. Baba used to get a little displeased though, ‘these films are not for you. I’ll take you to Tarzan someday’.
Manju and I then watched Tarzan with Baba in the New Picture House. Maybe there wasn’t any restriction on smoking in the cinema halls those days. I can clearly remember that Baba lit a cigarette. In the interval, someone from the front seat was talking loudly to some other person: ‘no, no, he has failed this time too’; perhaps someone failed in some examination. Did he or she fail again and again in the same exam?
All of a sudden, Ranju hears a speedy and continuous ringing of an alarm. Being bewildered, he stands in front of the window to see what it is. The bedsheet drops on the floor; half of it is still streaming leisurely towards the ground. A red coloured gasping fire truck runs away with a loud piercing nee-naw. Who is ruined at this dead of night? For whom the bell tolls? Whose house is devastated tonight? Where has a house caught fire on such a night? The vehicle disappears leaving an illusion of light on the thin water-web. Ranju leaves his room and stands outside with a distressed mind. A little of his room’s dim blue light has reached out here. The clouds are dark in the sky but the rain has stopped. The moist darkness slenderly spreads on trees in such a fusion of light and shade, and in such a stillness of nature that he feels a shivering fear.
The small old wooden damp gate is rotting. Ranju nibbles off a little of the wood with his finger nails. Twice, very lightly, he breathes off the damp pale smell that hardly exists.
The water is a bit turbid in the gaps of the red brick-dust road. Electric wires, gloomy sky and the stooped head of the lamp-post are trembling in that water. In the shadow of the dim light bulb, Ranju looks at the scorching midday in the time-bound indifferent field of Nischintapur. Casting small shadows on earth, he is walking a long way with Durga to see the rail line. Ranju feels very sad as he remembers that Durga stole the vermilion box and hid that on the rack. ‘Didi, why did you steal the vermilion box?’—Ranju looks straight to the front to ask her. Suddenly he finds that Nischintapur is sunk deep into the darkness and the water; and leaning against the lamp-post, Durga is looking at him through eternity. Her shape has turned into a quintessential goddess which is now retaining all of Ranju’s memories. His heart overflows; Ranju babbles, ‘Didi!’
Then a tremendous, speechless, motionless and intense fear makes his neck stretched. Cold lifeless blood stands still in his spine; it has been very long since Durga died!
Making him feelingless and nerveless, Durga comes forward wearing a raincoat and gumboots with a baton in her hand, ‘Who’s there?’ Getting no response the man stands face to face with him. ‘You? You’re son of Mr. Ilias, right? Where are you going?’
‘Nowhere…’
‘Then why are you standing here late at night?’
‘Go home. Why have you come out on such a wild night?’
‘For nothing’, says Ranju. ‘I just couldn’t sleep. I can’t sleep on rainy nights.’
‘Oh! You can’t sleep, right? You can just stroll along the road for a while, you’ll feel quite good, you know.’
It is not raining now. But the black blind clouds all over the sky have put out even the last one of the stars. Ranju starts walking with the policeman listening to the sound of water dripping down from the trees on both sides of the road.
‘Are you studying in college?’ ‘No.’
‘Doing a job, right?’ ‘No.’
‘Why doing nothing?’
‘There is no exact reason. I just don’t like it.’
‘Don’t like it?’ The policeman glances at Ranju. ‘Anyway, how is the health of your grandfather now?’
‘You know my grandfather?’
‘Humm.’ The policeman smiles a bit, ‘how can’t I know him? I became a constable when your grandfather was in Katihar. After that, we were together at Howrah and at Santahar also. Your father and uncles were all young boys at that time.’
‘Do you know my father?’
‘I have known him since long, when you were not even born’: excitement makes his voice sound like boiling milk.
Ardent Ranju observes the memory struck man with absolute attention. ‘When your grandfather was in Katihar, he lived there with prowess, I haven’t met a boss like him again.’
The policeman halts, keeping one hand on his waist, and resting his baton on his knee. Looking at the lamp-post at the end of the left road, the man murmurs like in a monologue. ‘Your father was studying in Kolkata then. He used to arrange lots of meetings with students. The meetings used to be held in different places: today at Ranaghat, tomorrow in Dhaka, day after tomorrow at Burdwan, also in Sirajgonj, sometimes at Patna; he even used to go to Delhi some of the days. That was how frequently he used to travel from one place to another for his meetings.Your grandfather became angry so many times, “if you are always lousy with these things, when will you study?”—he used to ask.’
Ranju feels a pain in his heart: such days have been lost so long ago before his birth. Why do I even have to feel for those days now? Being mixed up with Baba’s blood, have those been flowed in my bloodstream as well? I can sense that a strong desire to touch them is arising within me.
A thunderbolt hits nearby once again. And to my surprise, the policeman suddenly says in a very normal voice, ‘I’ll go by this road to do my duty or else the bloody scoundrels will get a good chance on this darkest of nights. You go home my boy; thunderbolt is hitting somewhere with the flash of lighting, it will rain again for sure.’
The raincoat-covered constable walks away will-lessly and slowly, being bent with memory and melancholy. Houses on both sides move aside to make way for him. Reaching the turning of the road he stands under the lamp-post and waves his numb hand at Ranju. But Ranju is not at all willing to return home now. He steps into the darkness, lowering his head down, and looking straight ahead.
As the drizzle falls on him, he looks up and sees that the clouds have made the sky descend. Strange uncanny shadows are spread all around. Thousands of leaves on the old plum tree are hung to death unsatisfied. Ranju feels a tingling in his body. This man, who has just left bemoaning the memory of my past blood, is he really a policeman or someone else? Is he someone or no one? But what if he is a no-one? No! I can’t think anymore. Ranju starts walking briskly with his head stooped; he does not try to look in any direction.
The town ends here. The long wavy field on the river that inhales ocher breath is now fatigued and drenched in rain. An old shimul tree on the river bank stares at the opposite bank in the same way it does so all day and night. The sluggish clouds are being divided every now and then at casual lightning-strikes. In another flash of lightning, Ranju sees the field, where he came over and over again for many years. His friends came here to play cricket one thousand nine hundred and forty three years ago. Ranju spent his time and melancholy sitting on the bank of this river either by looking at his friends or by staring at the river. Shelley asked him so many times: ‘hey Ranju! Won’t you play?’; but he always felt scared of playing and had never ever played with them. He experienced countless evenings here; he even used to stay after they got dark and turned into nights; he didn’t like to get up to go home. Distressed moon poured pale light upon the gloomy river, and in the darkness, the cosmos stood like a statue. The thin fragrance of the river itself dissolved prematurely in the firm thick smell coming out from the lingerie of the water. Ranju used to have unnatural weird feelings. One day his friends lost the cricket ball. They searched for it the whole afternoon—along the small bushes on the three sides of Chadmari, in the west, amidst the darkness of the shirish tree, underneath the shimul tree—but it was nowhere. The boys finally went away with heavy hearts.
He has lost something somewhere; Ranju feels very anxious as his mind gets cluttered with such a thought. Being restless he could only keep thinking that he must have lost something somewhere. But where? Bewildered, Ranju lies down under the shimul tree; his eager ears are set to the river water.
The rain is falling heavily now, breaking down the black sky. He feels a little thirsty. Touching his lips with the tongue, Ranju listens to the homeless river water where the lunatic waves are being born only to be dead soon. The drunken wind is desperately making its place in the bosom of the shimul tree. Memory-afflicted Ranju starts searching for something like a madman; he looks for it in his father’s white coloured liquid thick wish, in his mother’s scarlet darkness, in the field of Nishchintapur, in the water of the river, in the rustling of leaves—everywhere, putting up everything in a chain. He keeps on searching for it from one territory to another, from one era to the next. Thirst penetrates his throat with its savage trunk.
Thirsty Ranju stays agape with a fervent desire. Rain water is rolling down along his cheeks. Falling out from the tip of his nose it travels to an unknown destination. Drops of water keep hitting his cheeks harshly. Water, water everywhere, but not even a single drop passes through his thin lips and crosses the queue of the haphazard teeth, and then through his tongue, finally, reaches the throat. Ranju is gulping randomly like a drowning man with the hope of a drop of water. But every blank gulp pierces his heart like a prickle.
A violent storm starts blowing. And just then, an enormous branch of the shimul tree with its murmured leaves, silent nests, scattered raindrops, and a chest full of boons for Ranju breaks down making the sound of a tidal wave. Ranju feels that upon him, within his heart, a black, dark, heavy incorporeal breath takes refuge permanently. He tries to open his eyes to see it, but the heap of wet shimul flowers are lying piled up, covering his eyes. He raises his hands with a desire to embrace it. In his arms, the shimul branch spreads quietly and inevitably. Ranju wants to take a deep breath to smell it, but his breath has come to an end, and he fails to inhale the scent.
About the Author:Akhteruzzaman Elias (12 February 1943 – 4 January 1997) was a Bangladeshi novelist, short story writer and academician. His most notable works are Khoabnama and Chilekothar Sepai. He earned Bangla Academy Literary Award in 1983 and Ekushey Padak in 1998.