An excerpt from The Firebird, a recently published novel                                                                     by Saikat Majumdar

 

Once upon a time, the familiarity of his neighborhood was a deep comfort to Ori. They were lanes fringed with familiar shops from which faces smiled at him as he walked. It was more than a neighborhood constructed from bricks and mortar; it was a para, a mesh of lanes and voices that chattered with one another tirelessly. But these days, he avoided the front gate of their house. He didn’t like to face the neighbors. He wanted to hide from their keen glances.

           

Their memories brought up a dull pain. There was a strange spark in their eyes when they spoke of his parents in love, a boy and a girl strolling the crooked streets of north Calcutta together, close enough to breathe on each other. It left people hot and bothered those days. For several years before they married, his parents walked those streets together, streets noisy with gossip and the violence of young Naxalite men being chased and shot by the police. Densely honeycombed with people and houses, these streets had too much to talk about. Scattered pairs of eyes gazed out at the streets all day, the women through the bent mullions of the windows, the jobless men from the ledges and steps outside their homes where they lounged all day. They missed nothing. Sounds and smells told them what was cooking in their neighbor’s kitchen every day, and the wind carried in words from one house to another. 

 

“Your father,” cackled aunties with paan-stained teeth, “was a handful those days, a smooth talking charmer. The barrister saheb’s spoilt brat!” Delightfully, the women spat out paan-blood. “Cheeky, to step out of that house and stroll through the streets with a girl.”

Nowadays Ori slipped in and out of the house through the back door. The unclean entry. A frail brown door lined with moss, so weatherbeaten that it felt like a reed curtain. It opened into a narrow, winding strip of unpaved earth  called jomadargoli – the sweeper’s alley. On Mondays and Fridays, the sweeper, a man from an untouchable caste, would slip in through the door and follow the maid who poured water across the bathroom floor from a careful untouchable distance. Fiercely, he rubbed his mop and broom across the tiles of the bathrooms.

 

Ori came to love the narrow, unpaved alley outside the door, the thin strip of reddish earth between moss-covered walls of old houses. High above, pigeons had built an ancient colony. As he walked the red earth, he heard their drowsy hum, trapped in the silence of the lane, punctured only by the flapping of wings and the jostling bodies of birds too lazy to fly. He walked through the deserted alley, until the reddish alley opened out into a small park.

 

            The knot of neighbors lazing in the park made him restless. He felt they were all waiting for him. They waited there all day for him to walk out so that they could whisper among themselves. He sneaked past them quickly and melted into the main thoroughfare, a place of heartwarming chaos, where he felt tiny, near-invisible, his life swallowed up by the giant swirls of dust left in the trail of the thundering buses.

He remembered a time when he accompanied his father daily and hung around teastalls as his father smoked and chatted with his friends. Sometimes the memories lingered, like images on stirred water, and as they broke away he realized that it seemed such a long time ago. His father was now a stranger who often looked sleepy, a stranger with red-rimmed eyes who had forgotten that he had a son. 

 

His father was easy to love. He had the sunlit good looks that ran in that family of fallen zamindars, and a wide smile that drew you in like a hug. He loved people wildly and gave himself away all the time, whether to nurse a sick neighbor or to pick a fight about cricket at the roadside stalls. Shruti still called him Tata, only half-remembering that he was the one who had taught baby-Shruti to wave ta ta, to people who were about to leave. To his aged mother, he was still the baby boy with divine curls. But he could also be a dangerous baby. He liked to grab his fun by the hair and shake it hard till everybody cried.

 

 

            Sometimes when he came home late, his sweat stank of alcohol and he took forever to tear a piece of ruti at dinner into bite-sized morsels, his elbow constantly slipping off the table. “I hate your breath,” Ori’s mother would whisper. “Don’t you come close to me!” Nobody had ever talked to him like that before. He looked at her with his red eyes but said nothing. But soon he found ways of shutting out her voice. There were those pills that put him to sleep. There were plenty lying around the house, bent and crushed silver foils, and he reached for them whenever he could. The little pills brought him down every time, crumpled and lost. In a few years’ time, the man who loved nothing better than going out and hugging the world spent much of his time forgetting it.  

    

The more she spent her evenings away from home, the easier it was for him to sleep away his own evenings. The more she found him lost, the more she was gone. 

 

The sweetshop was just around the corner from their house. Its owner was a large, sweet-tongued man who sat in his shop dressed in a white kurta all day, watching over the rows of sweetmeats in the glass boxes – the fried, syrup-soaked mishti at the bottom, the milky white sandesh on top. He addressed the passersby in a cloying manner. Most of them were locals, and many of whom stopped by, especially in the evenings, to pick up something. People craved his red yogurt in little clay bowls, and the creamy rosomalai was famous throughout north Calcutta. Everybody knew he was a bit of a cheat and often tampered with his weights, but nobody could stay away from his sweets.

 

            That day, he had called Ori from the street.

            “Coming back from school, eh?” His eyes shone. “You must be starving!”

            Ori tried to smile but did not speak. He didn’t know this man well. He was hungry, and in a shop where a permanent sugary aroma hung over everything, it did not feel quite right. He wanted to walk away, but the man would not let him. He ordered the mishti-maker to offer him a leafy plate of crumbly white sandesh. “Eat up.” He said. “Time to grow tall and strong!”

 

            “My hands are dirty.” He did not know how else to refuse. Sweat gathered between his glasses and the bridge of his nose. His face twitched. But the man would not let go. He led him to a sink in the corner of the shop, and pointed to the tiny cake of soap next to it.

 

            Ori stood there and ate the sandesh, the flies dancing in lazy arcs over the glass-encased sweets around him. The pangs of his afternoon hunger slowly wilted in the heat and humidity coming off the street before and the gaze of passing pedestrians. The sandesh were delicious, and as he chewed on each piece and felt them melt in his mouth, he suffered pain, the pain of glorious taste enjoyed not in the cool shadow of his home but in the yellow heat of the streets, listening to the rickshaw-pullers cry out to clear their way.

 

“Is your mother home today?” The shop-owner asked, handing Ori a clay pot with deep-fried mishti floating in syrup. He nodded a no, his mouth full. “She’s out all evening, isn’t she?” Under the double attack of mishti and questions, his head felt muddled, and he chewed for a long time so that he didn’t have to talk. But the man waited patiently till Ori could chew no more. “Sometimes,” he mumbled. “No one to feed you after you come home from school?” The man stared at him with large, sweaty eyes.  

 

The question slid past him the first day, but when on the third day the whole event repeated itself, freezing again on the same question, the mishti felt like tiny, hard pebbles between his teeth. No one to feed you? Ori looked up from the clay pot, his fingers dripping with syrup. A wave of nausea came over him, triggered by at the cloying smell of sugar and cottage cheese thick in the air, the sight of the balls of condensed milk in rows and the sticky whiteness of the man’s kurta-covered paunch. He wanted to run, but did not wish to offend the kind man who had more questions waiting, if his mother was late every night. Was his father left alone at home? The man knew it all. “She comes back late,” Ori mumbled. “After I’ve gone to sleep.” He smiled weakly and swallowed the mishti, un-chewed; they went down his throat like tasteless blobs. He stepped out quickly and walked home. He hated sweets.

 

            He was a kind man, the sweetshop owner. There was affection in his voice. They were all kind to him. He turned warm with guilt for not talking to them properly, for running away from them.

***

The next morning, on his way to school, he saw his mother’s name plastered on walls all along the winding length of the lane. It was splashed in red and white on patches of flimsy paper pasted on the facades of houses crowded with election graffiti and posters for ice-cream.The Firebird. The play by a Frenchman whose name Ori could not pronounce, staged in Bengali by one of the theatre groups in the city. They were going to perform soon in a local playhouse.

 

            His mother was playing a key character. Her name was printed loud and bold on each poster, red and white on flimsy paper, something a child might have made in an art class. Walking rapidly, he felt a surge of happiness. He paused before a house and inspected one poster, pasted across the closed shutter of a shop. The paper was stretched thin across the shutter’s uneven wood, its rough grains ripped through the large letters of the title. He touched the letters softly; a pang of love shot through his heart. The paper was flimsy, like a page from a cheap newspaper. He looked around, warm around the ears. Had anybody seen him?

 

            The Firebird was also pasted around the rusted metal of lamp posts, the flapping wings of the sketched bird hanging broken and torn across the pole, right next to pamphlets for secretarial courses, schools for toddlers, the graffiti of protest against rising prices.

 

            Advertising happened here in the open air, where people lived and frittered the day away, on walls where they aimed their phlegm and piss.

 

            Ori’s eyes kept going back to the letters that formed his mother’s name. The playful font hugged rough surfaces, round and flat, blazing into a boldness that overshadowedall the other names, the director’s and the playwright’s, even the flaming bird that had morphed into the letters of the play’s title. But the name was baldly stated, and for that he was grateful. 

 

            But her name was bare. In red and white, the spiky letters screamed for the eyes of passersby, loudly.

 

How loudly? The evening revealed. That evening, Shruti felt the sudden need to talk to Abir. It was a Sunday and everybody was home. A whole day with her family was bad enough for Shruti to start missing the sound of Abir’s voice by the time it was early evening. But she did not like to call him from their home phone. Home was a crazy mess of a place, where the conversation was always killed by her mother walking into the middle of it while the maids shouted for more frying oil in the background. Everybody watched and heard you the whole time. Most of all Mummum who missed nothing even though she didn’t understand the English or the coded, quickfire Bangla Shruti murmured into the phone. To Mummum, people were like breed dogs. Girls from good families never laughed loudly while talking to men, not even on the phone. Shruti would much rather walk over to the phone booth at the para beauty parlor. Did Ori want to come along? Of course he did.

 

             As Shruti entered the little glass enclosure to make her call, he sat on a small stool outside. The employees of the beauty parlor stood at the entrance, smoking and laughing among themselves. Ori listened to the slippery words fly back and forth between them as he watched Shruti’s lips, the sound and meaning of her words lost to him behind the sheet of glass. If she could provide the right kind of massage to the right kind of men. One of the boys winked at a girl. She could treble her earnings with the tips. The girl grimaced; laughter crackled in the air. Behind the glass, he could see Shruti run her fingers through her hair as she spoke rapidly into the receiver. The doctor from Salt Lake, his eyes are glued to your jugs the whole time you give him a head massage.Shruti had paused, and was now listening, clutching the phone receiver to her ear, with a frown on her face. Rub him with your boobs and he’ll slip you a fifty!

 

            The owner of the parlor, a small middle-aged man, stepped out through the door. Suddenly, the air cooled and the voices hushed. The man’s mouth was crinkled up in disgust. The shadow of a figure had stepped out with him, a sickly, sheepish-looking boy not more than twelve, with a messy bundle of sheets in his hands.

 

            “Harish, get this banchod out of here,” the owner said, with a dismissive wave of his hand. “The fucker’s wasted all the posters for the new weekend packages.”

 

            Harish, the man who’d been holding forth on new ways of pleasing the men who came to the parlor for massages. He whacked the sickly boy hard on the head, sending him reeling several feet away. “Lost them, has he?” Harish barked. Cut his meals for the week and we’ll get the money back.” “You’re a bigger idiot than he is,” the owner shouted. “Do you know how much the printing costs were? We can starve him for six months and not get anything back,”the owner grunted at the boy, “I’ve said this I don’t know how many times. Choose the spots well and stick them up nicely.” The boy tried to melt to the wall. “Banchod puts all of them up together last evening and now they’re plastered over by some other shit!” 

 

            “The seenema posters,” the boy said in a choked voice. “They took up all the spots.”

 

            “You’re nuts to to give him the posters! Bloody illiterate peasant!”

 

            “You really have to hunt for the good spots here. The bloody tutorial centers come up with a bunch every week and plaster over everything you put up.”

 

            “Some bloody shampoo had cleaned out all the spots last week.”

 

            “The seenema posters,” the frightened boy repeated hoarsely. “The seenema posters were all over the place.”

 

            “You can’t fight the cinema posters. Way too much muscle.”

 

            “Way too much bare skin.” Harish reminded them. “Who’s going to tear your eyes away from those yummy tummies to read about weekend deals for hairdressing and neck massage?”

 

            “Boss, why don’t you spice up our ads a bit? Intimate massage for real men – how about that?”

 

            “And make Sonali pose in her bra and panty,” Harish winked at the girl, who stuck her tongue out. “People will stop staring at a wet Sridevidancing in the rain!”

 

            “And then all go to jail?” the owner grunted. “Don’t know why I waste my time talking to you potheads. Anyway…” he pulled out a large, thin sheet of paper, a poster torn off the walls. “It’s not a cinema at all, some play at AnganTheatre next month.”

 

Behind the glass, sparks of laughter lit up Shruti’s face. Ori knew they were all watching him, the men and women of the beauty parlor, watching the redness spread like cancer on his skin, the warmth creeping up his ears.

 

            “The Firebird,” the owner held up the poster. “7th July, Sunday, at Angan Theatre.”

 

            Ori knew that the bird’s wings were torn in uneven halves, slashed all the way to the credits, gouging out some of the names, now a mess of dried glue and dust. One name more than any other. Of course they all knew him by face. Why was Shruti taking so long? When would they go home?

 

            “Whatever. Cinema, theatre. The bastards go all out. They’d plaster over the stray dogs if they could.”

 

            Ori wanted to get up, touch the torn poster. Caress its wound, soothe it, take it away. He wanted to heal the torn wings of the firebird. It’s mine, he wanted to scream.

 

            The owner had spread out the poster, holding the torn halves together. He was looking at it intently.

 

            How could the sickly boy tear it down? Which one was it? The one that had been pasted around the lamp-post? Or one of those plastered across the doors of houses? He could whack the boy hard for it. For maiming the bird, tearing the names.

 

            “Garima Basu.” How he wished he hadn’t come along with Shruti. But the owner lifted his eyes from the poster. “Isn’t that Srijan-babu’s wife? The woman who does all that drama?”

 

            “My aunt,” Shruti said as she stepped out of the glass enclosure, happiness bold on her face.

 

             A dead quiet fell over the place. Sonali nudged the girl next to her and whispered. They looked at him. Sharply, Ori looked away.

 

            “It’s a play by Jean Anouilh. About Joan of Arc.” Shruti said crisply as she counted out the change to pay for the call. “You should go see it if you can.” It unnerved Ori, the disdain sharp in her voice.

 

            The owner broke out of his daze. “Yes, of course,” he said, clearing his throat. “We’re all so proud of her in this para.”

 

            The eyes were on Ori now, crumpled in the corner, trying to look small. Eyes like the blinding white of spotlights.

 

            That’s her son, that pale prettyboy. Nine or ten, maybe.

 

            “Oh yes,” Shruti flashed a shiny white smile. “I know you are.” Her eyes narrowed. “Out here, people just can’t stop bragging about her.”

 

                                                  ***

 

He stepped out, walked ahead as fast as he could. Faster, he urged himself. But no matter how fast he moved, he couldn’t shake off the white glare of the spotlight around him. He knew that everybody on the streets stared at him.

 

            “Slow down nutcase,” Shruti called out.

 

            Garima Basu. The red and white letters screamed out at every passerby. He saw them turn around, stare at him as he broke into a run. Young men outside teashops peeked at the writing on the wall, pointing at him, burning cigarettes stuck between their fingers. That boy, that one with thick glasses and pink lips. He heard shopkeepers bark at him, furious at the damage done to their shampoo and detergent ads. Sensing his fear, stray dogs licked the redness off the letters and trotted after him. Torn posters floated in the breeze and chased him as he ran. 

 

 

He walked into the maze of crooked letters that ran circles around his home. Shruti’s voice grew fainter behind him. Then he couldn’t hear it anymore.

 

            He walked into darkness. His heart beat faster, and for a moment, he longed for streets with light, shops and people milling around in knots. But he walked on, slowly, his eyes gradually getting used to the dark. The walls closed on him and his right elbow brushed against a jutting brick, the slimy softness on it. Moss. The surfaces were thick with it, and banyan roots that wedged their way past the skeletal bricks, through the loosening mortar, walls bare of letters, poster, graffiti. Never. Ori paused. He no longer heard footsteps following him.

 

            Wings flapped high above his head. Pigeons. Old pigeons that had forgotten how to fly. Through the window before him, he could see a room he knew well. He paused, then stepped into the house, pushing open the weatherbeaten door marked for the sweeper, the only one to pass through it, twice a week.