Volume 1 : Issue 2
ISSN: 2454-9495
The Interloper
He got up and wondered if she would take her bath on the barsati today as well. For the last month,every morning but two, he had woken up at 4 am and, with a book in hand, had stood at the window of his fourth-floor room, looking at the building opposite his house, where on the terrace, at exactly 4.00 a.m., Punya, the maidservant, took her morning bath. It was unlikely Punya would think she was being seen –
he was, in fact, certain. There is a certain languor to the body, a kind of settled-in-ness that comes when you know no one’s looking at you. Yes, he was quite certain: she did not know.
A crow flew past the balcony and for a moment, he followed its flight – ponderous, long-spanned, black as Punya’s hair. It swooped down on Ghoshmesho’s terrace, perching precariously on a clothesline, swinging to and fro, in miraculous balance. A series of blue underwear shook under the pressure, but did not fall. The pink and yellow and blue and red plastic clips held fast. Either the line was too swingy or the
crow a creature without balance, one of the two, but the next moment, up he flew once more and hopped on to the walls of the terrace, knocking a small brass pot kept on the side. Some water splashed on the wall. He laughed loud – there goes Ghoshmesho’s suryanamaskar!
Where was she! Maybe she wasn’t coming. He rapped the book against the bars of his window futilely. Just then, the doors of the terrace across his house opened and there she stood. Tall, dark-skinned, mother of three raucous children, Punya – ever-hungry Punya. You could feed her any number of times during the day, she would happily gorge on any food you gave her, and not put on an ounce of weight. His own mom
exclaimed in dismay how she could just smell one rosogolla and it would show up on her bum the next day, and Punya could eat a whole box and look just the same!
There she was, supple and lithe, grabbing a ramshackle plastic bucket by its rim, the handle having broken off long ago, and pushing it under a small tap. Water gushed out and she put out her hand in the spray, cupping her palm to hold some, drawing it close to her lips, once, twice, thrice, four times. He wondered why she didn’t just ask for a glass of water from the kitchen below.
The light was low. You could, in fact, still see a pale, limpid moon in the sky. He wondered at thescientific phenomenon that made the moon shine in the early morning. He was thankful for whatever it was – at least he could see her! She was getting a low wooden footstool from a corner. He could tell fromits rich dark brown colour how worn of use it was. And then in a flash, she had taken off her blue saree and before he could blink, she had sat on the stool, back to him, and proceeded to take off her blouse. Unlike his mother who wore brassieres under her blouse, and which she scrupulously washed herself and secreted away for drying to some corner of the house, far from the eyes of any of the men in the household, Punya wore none. It seemed to him, therefore, a wonder, how her not inconsiderable breasts sat within the blouse, like obedient little schoolgirls, smug in their knowledge of the lesson when class began.
So there she was, in only her faded red petticoat, bunched up to her knees, splashing the water now up her legs, scrubbing her feet on the hard floor, cupping some water under her arms, cleaning her chest, her neck, her face. It was all a blur – he peered close, half-cursing the sun for being so lazy, halfwondering if he needed new glasses. Her arms were churning up the air, he thought. How fast she bathes! His mother would yell at him if he came out of his bath in under fifteen minutes. Mother always thought a good bath meant at least thirty minutes of labour and some uncountable litres of water. She was proud to tell people that her own ablutions took her nearly an hour every morning. He would want to add in those times, you are the reason why we have water scarcity in the city! But Punya was done already and in the early morning cold, he shivered as she dried herself with the saree and then wrapped it around her body even as, in an act of magical dexterity, her left hand removed the wet petticoat. Again, a blur of hands and bodily movements stumped him from seeing anything but the colour and wetness of her, and just as suddenly as she was unclothed, there she was, clothed and bloused, wringing her red petticoat with her strong arms. She hung the petticoat, crumpled into a wet pile, on one of the clotheslines and then turned around. Suddenly, she pushed her head into the bucket. For a moment, he tried to imagine what it must feel – all that water on one’s face, eyes screwed shut, the breath stoppered, mouth clamped tight. Was it like drowning? And then she came up for air, and half-bent, shook her head left-to-right, her long hair and face splashing off the water. With the tip of her sari, she wiped her face, then grabbed her hair and squeezed it hard. He wondered if he was standing close, would the spray have hit his face? Soused his shirt? His whole body quivered and he felt the gooseflesh ride up to his very ears. He closed his eyes and tried to feel the wetness of her skin, its warm quivering iridescence in the morning chill. He held the book close to his chest, breathing slow the smoky air of pre-dawn Calcutta. He loved mornings like today – slightly smoggy, with a dank smell of burnt wood, a meagre fog that enveloped the horizon in that ethereal way one imagines heaven to be like. And in the middle of it all was Punya. Poor, hungry, grubby Punya. Punya of the long hair and magic breasts. Punya of the hungry children. Quick-bathing Punya. Now she was swatting her hair in the wind, drying it in long gentle strokes. Wet heavy tendrils swung quick and loose in the air. They swung all the way round her neck and she prised them loose and hit them again. Tchhack! Tchhack! She straightened her petticoat on the line, stretching it tight within the ambit of two metallic clips, squeezed the left tip of the garment one last time before putting the footstool against the wall, leaning it on an incline to allow the wetness to drip away, and turning the bucket face-down, she gave a cursory look at her makeshift bathroom and left.
***
The door was closed and the air was still as if she had never come. There was now only the absence of her and a vestigial darkness on walls that had been her audience and that small section of the floor that had been her stage. He tried to see the imaginary shapes water had made on the wall. It was difficult – but he thought he could see clouds, big black ones, huddling close, secreting away from prying eyes what they
had seen. For those walls, only they had seen – he had interloped and failed. What had he seen but a flash of her, like those Hong Kong movies where people fought but all one could see was a war of arms and
legs and flying bodies. He closed his eyes and thought hard. There was the arch of her neck, was there not? And that strong back, the blades poised in action, muscles moving like seasoned workmen, poetic and rough at the same time. Arms, long and taut, their strength incomparable. And there was, behind all of her, the wide sky – vast as the roar in his ears, loud as his beating heart.
He was thirty-one now and on vacation in his old home. Ghoshmesho had died of a heart attack last year – there was no blue underwear on the terrace. And the barsati looked still. There was no plastic bucket, no footstool and only the still, calm air, heavy with incipience. The day yawned ahead but for now, there was
only the dim silhouette of a memory. A memory of wet walls, the frisson of young love and unknown dangers. He smiled to himself and looked once more toward the dawn sky. Smoky Calcutta – always the same. Through the haze, he looked at a vista of terraces, the panorama sliced into segments by the bare
clotheslines of the morning. Soon there would be clothes and the sky would hide behind blouses and bedsheets. A crow flew past him, its wingspan fanning a whiff of cold air into his face. Startled, he
stepped back a little and caught sight of an old face at the window of a house to his right. The eyes of an old woman looking at him through the bars of her second floor window took him by sudden surprise. It was a face marked by the years, and yet, vital and alert. She smiled at him. For a brief moment, there was a panic in his heart as he imagined himself fourteen, caught peeping. And then it passed, and he waved at the old woman, only half in wonderment: what did she know?