Harbart Read online

  Another kind of insect, many-legged and mild, lived in the cracks of that top-terrace. There was perhaps in all of India and the world no insect so nonviolent and peaceful.

  That time in Calcutta, when lakhs of locusts had swooped upon the city, Harbart had been astonished at the sound of them crashing against the tank. How different that was from the sound of rain!

  In winter, Harbart would climb up to that sun-warmed top-terrace, wearing the sweater from Krishna-dada and the wrapper from Jyathaima.

  Every year, long before Vishwakarma Puja, the season of kites would start. One of those days, Harbart was fast asleep on the empty top-terrace. Suddenly, something slid across his stomach. Opening his eyes, he found a strand of string severed from a kite. The infant Harbart, lying not too far from his mother’s dead body, had witnessed, up in the sky, a slack-stringed struggle between two kites. Even though he did not remember it, he felt the terrible tug of that slack-stringed fight. But for a slack-string fight, one needed a reel full of string. Because you had to let loose lengths and lengths of it, because if you ran out of the glass-glazed manja string, if you got to the reel-end plain white string, then you were bound to lose.

  To pull off a tight-string fight, you needed more twist and violence, and then, if there wasn’t a strong enough breeze, the kite seemed to mutter-stutter through clenched teeth all the frustrated thoughts of its owner. Harbart used to stare, incredulous, at those thrust-and-destroy contests—kite-kidnap games being fought in midair, as though the flyers were feeling the throb and thrill of rape.

  What Harbart loved most, though, was to see, at high altitude, a loose kite drifting off on its own. If it seemed to swing a lot, then one knew it had been severed right beneath the tail—that it barely had any string left. And if it seemed to proceed at a stately pace, rolling like a heavy coin, then one knew it had a lot of string to it still, that it would bring good luck both to its captor and its new reel.

  Dhanna’s three sons used to fly kites from the big terrace. The small terrace higher up was forbidden to them. If Harbart ever caught a kite up in his high place, he gave it to them.

  The Gayla, the Candle, the Bird King, the Four Square, the Splitbelly, the Badge, the Chessboard, the Burnface, the Betel Leaf—no matter how gaily glorious all those were, the deep-dark Booloom was the king of kites. Once, he’d seen a severed black Booloom floating across a clouded sky and been almost afraid. Neither before nor after had he seen such a solemn final journey. As a matter of fact, even his own final journey had not been so grim.

  It was on that same top-terrace that Harbart, one day in his youth, felt erupting from his body an incredible elation and sensual satisfaction. In his eyes, then, the darkness of the sun. And around him, the foot and a half-tall terrace walls gleaming with green moss.

  From that same top-terrace, for so many years, Harbart had watched in the evenings the cranes fly back home in long lines across the sky. Small bats swooping at twilight. And the large bats as the darkness thickened into night. Airplane lights flickering. In the blink of an eye, from the countless constellations, one star slips and falls. A kite-balloon bobs past. Harbart had even seen a kite-lantern once—a paper packet made stiff with a frame, a candle placed inside, and all of it then tied to a kite and flown in the air. Once he’d held on to a kite-balloon until the string went taut in his hands.

  *

  As a boy, Harbart had gone with his Krishna-dada to a screening of The Fall of Berlin, organized by the Communist Party. Then to many other screenings, mostly war documentaries. Once he’d seen a block of ice upturning, and the soldiers on it swirling their way to the bottom of the bottomless sea. No one bothered to tell him he was watching Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky. Long before that, once, at Indira, he’d watched a Bengali movie in which Sabitri Chatterjee stood in the courtyard of her husband’s home, balancing her slippers upon her head. And during the Durga Puja in the neighborhood, he’d watched, among others, Morning Will Come Again.

  Later, when he began to earn a little, he’d been begged to rent videos by the neighborhood nut jobs, and ended up watching even more, many more movies.

  But of all the things he had learned, if half had come from those two most important aforementioned books, then the rest had surely come from the top-terrace.

  It was from that top-terrace that Buki and Harbart had been drawn to each other. Every evening, Buki would come up to her terrace. Harbart would, of course, be on his terrace already. Then, a few moments of deep closeness, despite the two-house gap between them. Until Buki arrived, until then, her frocks drying in the sun would keep Harbart company.

  Buki went to and from school in a rickshaw. Buki and her family were tenants at the Haldar house. For about two years. Then they left. Harbart was sixteen, Buki eleven. The Saraswati Puja not long before they left, that afternoon, by the side of the local library room, that was when they first spoke to each other. Almost invisible Harbart, hiding behind the pillar of the Banerjee-house gate, had whispered, “If I write you, will you read my letter?”

  Buki had nodded, yes.

  “Which class are you in?”

  “Six. You?”

  “I study. But not at school.”

  “You have a tutor?”

  Harbart had nodded, yes, hating himself for nodding, yes.

  After Buki went away, Harbart spent quite a few months away from the top-terrace. Although later he went back—went again. Saw how the shadows thickened at evening’s end, how a light or two came on before all the rest, how the smoke from the clay ovens flowed away like rivers, and saw how, a little after that, the terrace didn’t feel so empty anymore. Perhaps at the heart of that indistinct impossible stood Buki, waving, smiling. It seemed that way even when he rubbed his eyes for a second look. Although eyes are known to be blurred over at times like that.

  Later, the Haldars built a fourth floor and Buki’s terrace was lost.

  On one of the walls of his own top-terrace, Harbart had scratched a B with a bit of brick. Scratched it deep. And even when it was grown over with moss, he could tell that beneath it the B was looking at him, that it was nodding, yes.

  *

  His little top-terrace had never betrayed Harbart. Although two things had happened that could have proved dangerous. One evening, it was pouring rain, pouring down, and Harbart was stuck up there. So heavy and strong the rain. And so loud the sound of the hailstones hitting the tank. Harbart dived under it for shelter. A few hailstones, bouncing off the ground, landed near him. Flashes of lightning. Crashes of thunder. A few bolts landing with a sky-splitting crack. Harbart was frightened he’d never get down. Couldn’t get down, it was raining that hard. What if he lost his bearings? What if he stepped off in midair above the street or the lane below?

  The other time, it had been the morning of Kali Puja. Someone had been testing the flying firecrackers. One of those red-hot clay encasings flew onto the top-terrace—and exploded.

  On Harbart’s neck, right below his chin, right on his throat, until the end, there was a little white scar.

  *

  Dhanna-dada, Dhanna-boudi, their three growing sons—Harbart drifted further and farther away from them.

  The deeply thoughtful walk in half-an-hour-away shahebi Victoria Square and all the attendant shahebi affectations—all that had come later—but the start of those thinking expeditions was born on a winter morning of the mid-1980s, when Jyathaima gave Harbart his Jyathamoshai’s Ulster overcoat. Even though it was moth-eaten in places, even though its nap had rubbed off in spots, even though its belt was lost—even then, Dhanna-dada complained within earshot of his mother: “All the old-is-gold things in the house, all the best-most things in the house, all that she shoves into the belly of that squat-and-eat-for-nothing. A father’s prized possession! And she never thought once to ask the eldest son!”

  “Dhanna, half-old man you’ve become, still as greedy as a go
at. So keen about your share, a son’s share, eh? So what do you care if I give him that coat? Would you ever wear it?”

  “Look, Ma, don’t would-you-how-could-you about things you don’t understand. Do you think I’m being selfish about that coat? No, I’m bothered about habits! He gets food, he gets clothes. He gets this and that. On top of all that if today you get him a parrot, and tomorrow a cockatoo—where’s it all going to end, eh? Then he’ll want his share of the house, want a house and homefront of his own. Then?”

  “He never asks for that because he’s such a good boy. But why shouldn’t he? His father left him a share, after all!”

  “There, see—now, see—you’re making me lose my temper, see? Bugger his father’s share. Do you think there’s brains enough in that skull to even calculate a share? There’s balls enough in that body? Ask for his share! He’s certainly asking for his share!”

  “If he asks, what’ll you say?”

  “What say? I’ll thrash him black and blue and throw him out. All these years of feeding and clothing—let’s add that up first. I’ll carve a canal through the motherfucker.”

  The minds of those persons who are sensual materialists are incapable of understanding the afterlife. Why only the afterlife—they are incapable of understanding so many subtle sensations of this life too. Those minds revolve around thoughts of the body, its sensual pleasures, and its desires, nay, are obsessed with such thoughts and thus dwell in a state of perpetual restlessness. Hence, the highest realization, the purest truth about the afterlife cannot manifest itself in those minds. Those things that the mind can concentrate upon, from those it can extract joy. Those things upon which it cannot so concentrate, from those it can extract nothing. This inherent property, this innate characteristic of the human mind is known to man and boy alike.

  —Mysteries of the Afterlife

  *

  After the Ulster episode, Harbart’s two younger nephews, Prasenjit (Phuchka) and Indrajit (Bulan) suddenly attacked him one day in the first-floor dining room. Their excuse was that while they had been studying, Harbart had been chopping up old coconut shells for kindling, deliberately making a racket to disturb them. Jyathaima was then upstairs, in her prayer room. She could hear nothing. Dhanna was out, in his shop. Boudi was not home either. The eldest son, Priyajit, was in the bath. Hearing Harbart’s screams of pain, he’d rushed out with only a towel round his waist and shouted at his brothers to stop. By then Harbart’s lip was split wide open. And bleeding. The skin beneath his eyes was puffy and swollen. His teeth were throbbing.

  There was one other witness to this event—Dhanna-dada’s maid, Nirmala.

  When Harbart was out in the courtyard, washing the blood from his mouth, as Priyajit was pouring him water, as his head was spinning, then, he remembers, up above him, his Jyathamoshai roaring. “Peeyu kahaan! Peeyu kahaan!”

  Thanks to this incident, the deeply despairing Harbart succeeded in securing the key to the gates of heaven. At the tailor’s, he’d told Dulal and Rakhal-babu that he’d slipped and fallen in the courtyard. But via Nirmala, the truth soon seeped out into the neighborhood ears. At the hand pump where she went to fetch water, at the grocer’s, at the sweet shop—everywhere and to everyone, Nirmala said, “Those heartless boys, oh! That good-man uncle of theirs, how could they thrash him like that?” Word spread so far so fast that one day, in front of so many people, Barilal, the eldest of the Ganguly brothers, actually spoke to Dhanna about it: “Dhanna! What’s going on in that house of yours? Never heard such things in this neighborhood before. Nephews beating up their uncles?”

  The local boys—even the junior gang who greeted Harbart with cries of “Titbird”—they stopped their teasing and drew closer to him to express their sympathy. And because they drew closer, stood nearer, the nephews realized they were cornered.

  Just as this incident brought Harbart close to the hearts of many, so too another incident took place, to understand which one will, of course, have to be open to an elaborately esoteric explanation. The blows that rained upon his head, both front and back, must have jostled Harbart’s still-solidifying brain, or else how could a memory from fifteen years ago come to him so suddenly, slipped into the envelope of such an extraordinary dream? This intervention led the story of Harbart’s life around a new bend in the road and—even though it may have been pure coincidence—what was cause for abundant astonishment was that the father of killed-by-a-police-bullet-in-1971 Binu, yes, the very father of Harbart’s Naxalite nephew Binu, Harbart’s Krishna-dada had come to Calcutta for some work and was, in fact, at that very moment, in their very house.

  I said, “Look, Dinanath, yesterday’s incident must have been preying upon your mind. Hence, those terrible scenes playing across your dreams. Now come, everyone, try and sleep in peace.”

  “What, sir, did you just say?” roared Dinanath. ‘Are you calling me a liar? Dismissing my words as mere dream? I do not lie—I did not dream. All that I told you I saw with my own eyes. If you do not believe me, ask them. We could surely not all have been dreaming the same dream!”

  —The Horribly Haunted Circus

  *

  But oh-woe, where is his Buki gone? On that top-terrace, now sits only a Star TV satellite dish: Harbart gone. Soviet Union gone. Hippodrome Circus gone. The famous Dinu Hotel beside the Gosain house on Simla Street, gone. “Since the eyes of the great and gracious Sri Sureshchandra Basu were always-almost closed, everyone called him the Grand Great Shut Eye.”

  He’s gone, too.

  Rabba! Rabba!

  Four

  Hark! Hark! The trumpet blows,the trumpet!

  —Rangalal Bandyopadhyay

  Binoy, aka Binu, came to Calcutta, to study Geology Honors at Asutosh College. Many years ago, when Harbart was a little boy, Binu had taught him a rhyme: “Cop-sticks, broom-sticks, nothing scares the Comminists.” Binu moved into that room on the streetside, that room at the back of the house. Krishnalal had come with him, to settle him in. A bed was bought. A mattress. Jyathaima brought down the bundle of bed linen hanging from the roof of the second-floor veranda, and took him a pillow.

  Slowly, a Winchell Holmes, and then many other shaheb-written volumes, filled the shelves carved into the wall.

  Binu. Serious. Average height and build. Sweet of speech.

  One morning—it must have been around nine, then—Binu was stretched out on his stomach in bed, a pillow tucked under his chest, writing something. Harbart opened the door a crack and peeped in. Binu looked up and smiled. “Harbart-kaka! What are you looking at? Come in, come in.”

  Harbart and Binu grew quite close. Harbart liked Binu’s friends too. They would let him have the odd cigarette. Chat with him. But then would come a time when Binu would say, “Harbart-kaka, now, if you don’t mind …” And Harbart would realize that Binu was asking him to leave them alone for a bit. But he didn’t mind that, for Binu was never rude.

  Binu had bought him full pants. And a belt.

  “Oof, Harbart-kaka, just like an American filmstar!”

  Dhanna got a bit of a shock when he saw those pants. Later, he was even more shocked to hear that Binu was the one who’d bought them, with money saved up from his tuitions.

  “See?” said Jyathaima, “Look and learn a little. Not everyone is a miser like you!”

  “Oof!” said Dhanna-dada, “stop your scratching! Learn what, tell me, from all this show-show of love? Although the ones who could look and learn are my younger boys—no studying, no manners between the two of them.”

  “Peeyu kahaan!” said Jyathamoshai, “Peeyu kahaan!”

  *

  To hereafter-obsessed Harbart, Binu had provided a different definition of death.

  “What’s all that mumbo-jumbo you read? Nonsense. Ridiculous! He died, went off a ghost, she died, came back a ghost—all these pages scrawling-crawling with ghosts, tell me, have you ever seen even o
ne? It’s not as if people aren’t dying all the time. Why, in this house alone, who knows how many deaths there’ve been.”

  “Just because I haven’t seen a ghost doesn’t mean it’s all lies.”

  “Not only you—no one has seen one.”

  “Then what about the planchettes?”

  “What about them? I was there for one in Baharampur.”

  “You were? And?”

  “And what? And nothing. The ones who do it are the ones pushing the glass or shaking the pencil. Although, of course, I don’t blame you. As long as a handful of men can keep fooling the greater millions into working for them till they die, can keep cheating them, for just as long your ghosts and ghouls will thrive, your gods and goddesses, your dharma and karma. Listen, listen to this” (Binu opens a small book, turns a few pages):

  “ ‘Countless revolutionary martyrs have laid down their lives in the interests of the people, and our hearts are filled with pain as we the living think of them—can there be any personal interest, then, that we would not sacrifice or any error that we would not discard?’—Do you know whose words these are?”

  Harbart shakes his head. He has no idea.

  “Mao Tse-Tung.”

  *

  The night of November 19, 1970 was the night of the bloody Barasat killings. The night when Jatin Das, Kanai Bhattacharya, Sankar Chattopadhyay, Samir Mitra, Swapan Pal, Samirendranath Dutta, Tarun Das, and Ganesh Ghatak were killed by the police in cold blood.

  Charu Majumdar, General Secretary, Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), sent out a call in his communiqué dated November 22, 1970:

  Today the most sacred task of every Indian is to rouse the intensest hatred for all these cowards, imperialism’s running-dogs and assassins. This is today the demand of our countrymen—the demand of patriotism.