Harbart Read online

  “Let him sleep. He’ll be alright if he sleeps.”

  Two

  Abroad, beloved, when you travel

  A new sight will greet you every day

  —Baldeb Palit

  From the notebook Harbart wrote in Puri while on holiday with his Jyathaima, we come to learn that:

  What we do not learn from the notebook is roughly as follows:

  Harbart Sarkar. Father Lalitkumar. Mother Shobharani. Harbart’s arrival: September 16, 1949. Lalitkumar poured all his wartime earnings into the movies and was bankrupt fairly soon. In 1950, soon after Harbart’s first birthday, Lalitkumar was killed in a jeep accident on the Darjeeling–Kurseong route, along with failed film actress Miss Ruby, two other passengers, and the driver. Mother Shobharani took baby Harbart and went to live with her parents. About eight months later, trying to hang the washing on a metal wire up on the terrace, Shobharani was electrocuted to death. Baby Harbart wailed “Ma go, Ma go” and tried to walk to her but stumbled and fell, and then lay on the ground, crying helplessly, until high in the sky he spotted two kites—a Burnface and a Splitbelly—engaged in a fierce slack-string fight which captured his attention entirely, thus saving his life. Baby Harbart then returned to his father’s family home and proceeded, through indifference and neglect, toward adulthood, his Jyathaima being the only one to spare him some affection.

  Jyathamoshai Girishkumar, Lalitkumar’s older brother, had a whore habit. Which resulted in him contracting the inevitable disease, whose inevitable consequence was a general paralytic insanity. He would, as witnessed by Harbart throughout his childhood, live on the second floor, flit room-to-veranda and then back again, and on the hour, every hour, with remarkable rooster-regularity, let out a scream of “Peeyu kahaan, peeyu kahaan!”

  In the early days of this habit, if Jyathaima was in the kitchen or, next to the first-floor courtyard, in the front-of-the-house bathroom, she would cry out a “Here, just coming dear” in response.

  Girishkumar had two sons—Dharmalal, Harbart’s Dhanna-dada, and Krishnalal. Krishnalal was a professor of English, extremely close to the progressive and undivided Communist Party and still a believer. He taught at the K. M. College in Baharampur and had managed to build a small house for himself there. His share of the Beadon Street paternal property, he had, after his son Binu’s death, written off to his brother Dhanna.

  Dhanna, since his childhood, was a bundle of bastardy, greedy as hell. Somehow, he’d managed to get a job at the Mint. In those days, they were not so strict, and maybe he’d indulged in some bribery too. Because every day he’d come home with his tiffin box full of stolen quarter-rupee shikis and half-rupee adhulis. By the time he got caught, there was no way of telling how long he’d been stealing. Got fired, got jail time—although his sentence was cut short quite a bit. Set free, Dhanna set up a large lock-and-key shop in Naadu-babu’s Bazar, got married and fathered three sons. The eldest lived in Gauhati. Fat and foolish, and a slave to his wife. But that one was still alright. The other two were loafers—fatter and fattest, scoundrels to the core. One installed a satellite dish on the terrace and supplied the neighborhood with cable-TV connections—Star TV, MTV, BBC, the people were gorging on that stuff these days. The other had conned a black belt into being his business partner and ran a kung-fu/karate school, although he knew fuck all about any of it.

  Dhanna-dada’s wife was a clever woman, an English-medium girl. She ran a cookery class at home—a three-month snacks course that went from Party Loaf to Ribbon Sandwich as well as another three-month Mughlai course that included Rainbow Polao, Murgh Irani. She also baked birthday cakes to order.

  Many wives came to Dhanna-dada’s wife’s classes.

  From Harbart’s room at the mouth of the lane, a room out and away from the house, he could, alas, not watch the women come and go.

  But two lines in his notebook are dedicated to this affair:

  In Dhanna-dada’s hall

  Mrs. Centipedes coo and crawl

  Harbart Sarkar. Admitted to Nandakumar Institution in Class Three and then, after his promotion from Class Five to Class Six, dropping out. Preferring to stay at home and read whatever he could. That Harbart was no longer attending school escaped everyone’s notice for quite a few months. By the time his Jyathaima did notice, she had already gotten used to sending him to the grocer, to the market. Of course, even when he had been going to school, it had been with Dhanna-dada’s tiffin, his cheat sheets, and his books. Since Dhanna-dada cheated in all his subjects, he needed more books than usual. This neighborhood had a long tradition of sneaking answers in to the students through the window. All the boys were local boys, so the teachers didn’t mind. Over the last thirty-one years, only three students at Nandakumar Institution had slid as low as a Second Division.

  When Harbart was eighteen, Jyathaima took him to Puri for a fortnight. Harbart brought along a notebook and a pen. They had put up at the ashram run by Bharat Sevashram Sangha. There, Harbart’s poetic genius had blossomed in leaps and bounds. The Harbart who wrote upon his arrival in Puri—

  Beside Bengal is where the Oriyas stay

  The Puri Express goes there every day

  that same Harbart wrote, four days later,

  A wave comes in

  And out it goes

  Here by the sea

  Life ebbs and flows

  And then, three days later, the more complex:

  Mighty the wind when it blows on land

  But evil when it blows on sea

  Scaring even the octopus, who thinks,

  “Oh, what will become of me?”

  Harbart paid regular visits to the neighborhood tailor to read the Bengali newspaper. To the saloon, to read Morning Star and New Wave.

  His sense of rhythm and depth of perception had hinted at a luminous future although, in the end, that had all come to naught.

  Back home from Puri, Harbart had written:

  The hat-headed nuliya has a good life

  No need to dress up and cut a dash

  Splash in the ocean all day long,

  Simply splash in the water and pocket the cash.

  The diminution of poetic sense and poetic skill—Harbart was a spot-on example of that too. Who would not be mortified by the thought that the hand that had penned these earlier gems had also written this?

  Footpath, foot-fart

  Toots–plat–toots

  Dhanna goes to work

  In his gumboots.

  Or this?

  How hot it is, oo

  Roach in my ear goes coo

  After this stupendous stupidity, although it was vulgar, in this next ode to a motley of maids getting wet in the rain, one’s finds one’s faith restored, albeit slightly:

  Ladies, why do you wet, oh?

  Wet so

  Girls, why grow wet, low?

  Come, lo.

  In the end, what arouses not only despair but also pity is the passing off—in a fit of desperation, clearly—of Amrik Singh Arora’s lyrics as his own (these are the last lines in his notebook):

  Let me be

  The kohl so black in your silver kohl container.

  *

  Dhanna-dada’s house was not too large, not too small. A two-story house, a terrace. On the terrace, a room used for prayers, and a smaller terrace atop that. On it, a tank that once had water pumped straight from the Ganga. Now, it had a Star-TV satellite dish. A small room on the ground floor—not toward the main door but to the back. Used to store old books, 78 RPM records, documents, and the electricity meter. When in 1969 Binu came to Calcutta to study, a small bed and a table fan had been put in for him. After his death, the room lay locked up for a few years. Then one day it became Harbart’s office and, until his last moment, his room.

  Before that, Harbart had slept on the second-floor veranda, the one tha
t ran inside the house. And that stayed dry even in the monsoons. His clothes hung on a line along the stairs that led up to the terrace. Once there’d been a rotten wooden staircase leading up from the second floor to the top-terrace. But as you climbed up it, you could peek into the neighbors’ bedrooms. Their loud protests had rendered that staircase practically defunct. A few days after Binu died, there was a huge storm. In the middle of that rainy night, the bottom half of the staircase collapsed. In the morning they found the top half hanging from the terrace-top, refusing to let go. Only after much prodding and pulling, yanking and yelling, did it finally fall to the ground.

  At the crossroads in front of the house, they celebrated Kali Puja. They celebrated Durga Puja too, but that was a little farther off. Where Bachha-da had his sweet shop. Same sweets all year around, but for Dol he made Dol Delights.

  An album of photographs belonging to Lalitkumar should have come to Harbart by way of his inheritance. In it, color photographs, from the early years, of Rudolf Valentino, Lon Chaney (in various roles), Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, and Errol Flynn, to some from the later eras, of Clark Gable, Robert Taylor, Van Heflin, Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, Vivien Leigh, Katharine Hepburn. Then, Lalitkumar and Shobharani in front of a Sunbeam Talbot automobile. Lalitkumar flanked by Madhu Bose and Sadhana Bose. Failed film actress Miss Ruby and Lalitkumar. Shobharani and, on a lap, Harbart. Baby Harbart.

  But Harbart never laid eyes on the album. Because Dhanna had pinched it, wrapped it in some old clothes and stashed it away at the bottom of his cupboard.

  Lalitkumar had amassed another collection—cigarette holders. Those were looted not by Dhanna, alas, but by someone else. Dhanna had looked everywhere but never managed to locate the cigar box in which Lalitkumar had lovingly hoarded them. Thanks to Lalitkumar’s wicked ways of the West, Dhanna was able to steal, now and then, his imported cigarettes and his Scotch. Now and then, some money too. Lalitkumar was not the sort of man who ever kept count, so he never noticed all this pilfering. Beyond a shadow of doubt, had Lalitkumar not blown away on the movies his incredible wartime fortune made from scrap iron and copper, Harbart’s life story would have been very different indeed.

  Harbart Sarkar. Five feet six inches tall. Fair. Features sharp, build Caucasian. Slim. Lalitkumar must have felt that, somewhere, the boy had a Hollywood-ish air, a Leslie Howard-ish air and so the boy got a shahebi name—Harbart. Harbart’s mother was a practically pure-white beauty, bred in the shaded-shadowy homes of North Calcutta. Lalitkumar himself was no less dashing and debonair. Anyway, no matter how, Harbart’s manner was always a bit hero-hero-ish. This Western movie star effect was heightened by the fact that he spent most of his time living in fear. The fear drained the blood from his face and made him paler, hence fairer. Because of his mother and father, he lived in fear of cars and electricity and then the fear of Dhanna-dada’s thrashings and then the fear of Jyathamoshai’s sudden cock-crows of “Peeyu kahaan! Peeyu kahaan!”

  And the entirely new kind of fear that Binu later brought with him.

  *

  When he was fourteen, Harbart had an extraordinary experience. One afternoon, rummaging through the heap of old books in that last room, he discovered an old tin trunk. In it lay a human skull and some longish bones. No one in the family had ever studied medicine. Nor magic. Unprepared for the sight of it, Harbart had at first been terrified by the skull, its eyeless sockets, the teeth. But in time, time and again, as if in a drunken stupor, Harbart would open the trunk and stare at the skull and bones. Try to imagine the man they had been. No matter whom he’d been, an overwhelming sadness would engulf Harbart.

  Two years later, Harbart put the skull and bones into a little cloth bag, and then went to the Old Ganga behind Keoratala Crematorium and threw them into the water.

  He used to store his own things in the trunk, later. Later, his money too.

  After immersing the remains of that unfortunate unknown, Harbart was filled with an intoxicating attraction for death. He would feel that he was drowning in the darkness of those empty eye sockets—that all around him spun a Ferris wheel of stars or a furious flutterment of fireflies.

  Soon after, he began to read and reread those aforementioned two most important books.

  Soon after, his friend Khororobi committed suicide. Harbart was nineteen. The boy had a khor-kutter, a straw-cutting machine, at home, so his friends had stuck the word before his name, the name his parents had chosen for their son, Sun. Robi. So he became Khororobi. Straw Sun. Khororobi was a good boy who had fallen deeply in love with the short Jaya from the neighborhood behind theirs. Every evening, Jaya and a gaggle of girlfriends would step out for a walk, come over and chat with the girls on this side. That Khororobi would begin to act honey-funny whenever he saw Jaya, everyone knew that. Everyone also knew that he didn’t have the balls—he’d never dare to venture out of their gang. But that fateful Ashtami day, what madness filled his head, only he knew. Elbowing his way through the crazy crowds, he strode into the Durga Puja in Jaya’s neighborhood and handed her a slip of paper and one of those tiny fountain pens that had then flooded the market. On the paper was scrawled in a crow-leg-and-stork-leg script: “Jaya, an offering at your divine feet from a humble devotee. Yours, Robi.”

  The local boys grabbed him. Jaya sped back home. Robi somehow scrabbled free. The scuffle had ripped apart his new shirt. That night, Jaya’s uncle came to have a word at Khororobi’s house. The two neighborhoods grew dense with hostility. Nabami, Dashami—Khororobi was AWOL. Then, the strains of the idol immersions were not yet past when, in the late afternoon of the day after, a hue and cry—Khororobi had been found. Floating in the wall-encircled Corporation pond. Dead.

  Khororobi’s corpse floated facedown near the water’s western edge, floated in water two men deep, floated and bobbed and swayed and rocked. On the shore stood all the neighborhood boys, stood Harbart. The sunlight shone on the water, made it a little transparent, one could see beneath the surface a waggle of waterweeds, and then the deep green of the moss thickening into darkness. On the shore, a bicycle. Someone holds out a shaft of bamboo. Two boys from the swimming club get into the water. A prod from the bamboo upturns Khororobi and sets him floating away from the diving board and into murky waters. The sun is swiftly sliding. The police have arrived. Striding to the pond, the sergeant asks, “Corpse come up?” No one answers. The swimmers have reached Khororobi. But as soon as they touch him, he bobs away on the backs of many little waves. Then each boy swims to one side and grabs a fistful of shirt. Khororobi is finally caught. Then they kick and kick their way to shore, and the water stretches out taut and tight Khororobi’s full head of hair.

  Harbart looks at him by the dying afternoon light and thinks that Khororobi is coming back as an obedient school of fish.

  That scene, it could have been a photograph.

  Although by now it would have become yellowed, corner-nibbled and slurred with time. Yet, for a hundred years hence, and a hundred years more, by the light of the moon, in the mists of a winter morning, Khororobi and his love will remain afloat on those still waters of death. Around him will twist and tumble mermaids, the ones who cry but whose tears you cannot see.

  *

  “My name is Harbart! I’m a tit. You’ve seen a tit. Now see a tat.”

  “On the velvet greens of grass and flower, houri-fairies prance and play.”

  “Kite, airplane, balloon, broom, man, parachute, bird—they all fall down. Yet first they rise. This also rises. This also falls.”

  “If man is 1, then 0 is dead man. Man + dead man = 1 + 0 = 1 = Khororobi.”

  Water’s riddle in cranny and crack

  Fate’s flight of fancy in saree edged wit black.

  —Harbart

  Three

  Life, dear god, is hell!

  —Maankumari Basu

  Rabba! Rabba!
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br />   That kite, that one, with its sun-smeared belly, rising high, fly-high-ing higher, if you turned away for a moment as it began to fall, there, th–e–e–e–r–e, on the other side of the thirteen-story building until just the other day you could see the Howrah Bridge … the top of the Victoria Memorial … there, shaheb-para, the posh neighborhood … there, cinema-para, where all the movie theaters were … there, the telephone office at New Market … closer home, the Seal terrace … then the rowdy Pals’s terrace … the clothes of the Christian landlord’s Punjabi tenants drying in the sun … then the sigh-soaked Haldar terrace where Buki, beautiful, dust-skinned, soft, slightly saucy-breasted Buki would come no more in the evenings, home from school, walking from one side of the terrace to the other and back again, an open book in her hands, the potted plants in the terrace garden swooning in the breeze, the strands of Buki’s hair lifting, the pages of her book uncurling …

  The top-terrace was Harbart’s true place. That was where he had perceived everything. The extraordinary dream that had granted him social status and standing, that had granted him fame—but that had also, in the end, been his end—that dream too had come to him there.

  The Ganga-water tank used to be on the top-terrace. Once upon a time, Harbart would climb in and, scrabbling in the fine mud at its bottom, catch little white shrimps, their legs whirring in the water as they tried to flee.

  Round snails clung to its sides.

  Later, the water stopped. The mud dried. The pipe broke.

  Later, rainwater collected in it. Then, inside it, at most a little moss or scum or a clutch of bubbles bursting into somersaulting water mites or mosquito spawn. Without the flow of Ganga water, the tank was dead. But to Harbart even the dead tank had its uses. In the hot summer months, he would crawl under it and sleep in its shade. Take his pickles or lozenges there. Suck on a lozenge a few times, then put it on a scrap of paper, and read Accounts of the Afterlife. Read and read and then fall asleep. Waking up, if he found that three or four—no more would venture up to the top—ants had begun to nibble at the lozenge, he would flick them off, one by one, and then suck on the lozenge again.