Harbart Read online

  Harbart opens his eyes. It is dark. The streetlamps are dark too, only the cars glowing by.

  Harbart thought two thoughts at once: that he had something to say, and that this house did not have that top-terrace.

  *

  A famous jeweler’s son had come to him, accompanied by his employees, but Harbart’s words had deeply embarrassed him. Made his face flush red.

  “What nonsense! My father was like a god. Ask these men, they all worked with him for years—Mr. Das, tell him—”

  “What have I said that I need to ask them? What have I said that’s so hard to swallow? That’s sticking in your throat? Have I called him names?”

  “Yes, you did—you called him a sinner.”

  Harbart burst out laughing. “Only a minor sinner, I said. Only a third-plane dweller—but you’ve started quacking. Do you even know what that means?”

  The young man falls silent. The young man sits still and listens.

  “A businessman, he was. So he’s cast a huge big net, and he’s drawing it in—now the fish are scrabbling, now he’s grabbing the males from this pond and chucking them into that—what, understood?”

  “But, sir, we have no fish … we’re in the jewelry …”

  “Oh-ho, these are all riddles, don’t you see? You must solve them. When I say businessman, I mean a man of possessions and property, a man of plots and plans, a man taking a bit of time to get over the death-shock. But, at the very most, I give him a year and a half … then he’ll be free. Zoom about in glee. Oh, such are these mysterious ways!”

  “So, what should we do now?”

  “You? Nothing. Focus on the business. But yes, he has that worry about the land.”

  “Land?”

  “Yes, yes, land. Says he’s very concerned, very unhappy. Is there something fishy about it?”

  “Well, there’s that bit of land in Barasat, there’s a court case on …”

  “No, no, I don’t need to know. Settle it if you can. I don’t care.”

  “We should go now. Your fee … ?”

  “Here, you can put it right here. What’s it to you—every time I get paid, my sins pile up and collect interest. Alright, gentlemen. May the goddess go with you.”

  There was another man waiting outside. Long hair. Glasses. Quite smart. Wearing a raw-silk bush-shirt the color of clotted cream and full pants the color of chocolate. As soon as the jewelers left, he stepped into the room. “When are you free to talk?”

  “Please, go ahead. I’m free right now.”

  “No, not now. I don’t have time right now. Got a taxi waiting. You take cases in the evenings?”

  “I’m sorry, no. I go out in the evenings.”

  “Go out? Well, staying in one evening won’t hurt you. This is important.”

  Harbart feels a twinge of anxiety. “Am I in some kind of jam?”

  “Jam? Well, from one point of view it’s a bit of jam I suppose. Heavy sticky jam. Alright, I’ll come when it’s time. When are you back?”

  “I’m usually home by seven-thirty.”

  “Yes, of course you are. So that you can drink with the local lumpen. See, I know everything. Alright, I’m off. Goodbye.”

  “But why don’t you just speak plainly? This sounds highly suspicious.”

  “Let it. I’ll be back. Sweep the suspicions away. Goodbye.”

  *

  A car was driving out of the Robinson Street nursing home. Its driver wore a white peaked cap. Inside sat a lady doctor, bob-haired and beautiful—the sight rendered Harbart speechless. A foreign car. A Toyota or a Datsun, something like that. Those cars have such great suspension that you can hardly tell they’re moving, they just roll away like a wave. And as its wave flowed past him the lady doctor tossed her head and shook a strand of hair off her face: Harbart saw, statue-frozen to the spot, his mouth hanging open in astonishment. Through the glass he saw that face. That old familiar face. He had something terribly important to say. But the lady doctor didn’t stop to listen. The driver drove on. The lady doctor went away.

  Who was it who climbed up that wooden staircase?

  Harbart was coming down the wooden stairs on the right of the framed mirror, and on the left the one who was going up, the one whose back, bobbed hair, shoulders, waist, white clothes, frills on those white clothes … The lady doctor’s profile glimpsed through the car window in the winter of 1991 was for Harbart an extraordinary encounter, lady doctor, wait, please, don’t go away like that. I don’t have breath enough to run after your car, I’ll never catch up with your car—wait, listen—what harm can it do just to listen, if only I could stand in front of the mirror again and if only I could remember again—oh …

  Harbart’s head hurts. The Ulster is too warm around him. Its buttons too big. As he wrenches them open, one, like a big black medal, comes off and flies from his fingers. Harbart gropes on the ground for it. Picks it up. Puts it in his pocket.

  What did Harbart want to tell the lady doctor?

  Harbart walks on. “Cat, bat, water, dog, fish!” Harbart mutters under his breath.

  When he went out in the evenings, evening after evening, he spent hours waiting outside the nursing home but never saw the lady doctor again. He was angry. Hurt. But who gave a damn? The lady doctor had gone away. Didn’t stop to listen to any one.

  Harbart walks on. Makes a sound with his mouth like a machine gun. Harbart has seen a machine gun. In a movie.

  Ratatatatat.

  *

  A half-mad man stumbled in. His sister had run away and a few months later, after identifying fillets of her flesh in a found trunk at Howrah Station, he had lost his mind. So he had come to Harbart.

  “Can’t bear the sight of trunks—suitcases—closed boxes of any kind. Keep seeing her hair hanging out from under the lid. I’ll open the lid, and then I’ll see—”

  The man’s clothes were unwashed and untidy. Bursting into tears, he shook his head and pleaded, “Can’t. Can’t stand it anymore. Please help me. Or I shall die. I beg you, please help me. You can, you can communicate with the dead … my sister …”

  His sobs grew louder, swelled into wails. He cried for a long time. Then he took out a grubby handkerchief and wiped his face, rubbed his glasses.

  “What was her name?”

  “Shanta.”

  Santa—Harbart wrote on a piece of paper. Then drew a line under it.

  “Got a photo or something?”

  “No. But after she’d run away, a letter had come. I’ve got a Xerox. Will that do?”

  “Why a Xerox?’

  “The original’s at police headquarters, in Lalbazar.”

  “Uh oh! Police! Lovely time you’re having, aren’t you? Alright, I don’t need to read it. Just to touch it. But you have to be patient, sit for a while. In fact, why don’t you go out for a bit? These things tend to work better when I’m on my own.”

  “Alright, I’ll come back later. But please, you have to help me. I’m telling you I’ll go mad otherwise.”

  Harbart had no idea what to say. Closing the door behind him, he grabbed Accounts of the Afterlife and, by the light streaming in through the window, frantically scrabbled through its pages. Hoping to patch something together from “Dead Sister Brought Back by Brother’s Devotion”: “It was in 1872. The chief employee of Jessore’s Chanchraraj Sarkar, the (now) late Nabinchandra Basu, was then in residence with his family at No. 3 Sookia Street … had she become a ghost then?” But no, there was nothing there. Nor in “Revenge of the Wasted Wife” nor in “Haunting the Husband’s Harlot.” “My Departed Daughter Jyotsna” provided the gem that the higher a soul ascended, the brighter it tended to glow. Yes, but so what? Harbart was growing more and more tense, more and more scared. About all of it. What the hell kind of case was this anyway?

  Suddenly, someone knocked on the door.


  With a quaking heart, Harbart opened it—but it was only Pachu, from the tea shop, come to collect the glasses. And he said no, there was no one waiting at the shop, no one waiting to come back here. Sliding his feet into his sandals, Harbart followed Pachu out, walked over to the cigarette shop, walked on to the bus stop, walked everywhere. Looked everywhere. That man was gone.

  That man never came back.

  The copy of Shanta’s letter stayed behind with Harbart, was left behind in his pile of papers, all with addresses scribbled on them.

  But the things he could have told the man—those turned out to be useful. A young doctor, a child specialist, had brought to Harbart the beautiful Belgian actress Tina. It was Tina’s first visit to India. She was a TV and stage actress. A crowd had gathered outside Harbart’s door in the hope of catching a glimpse of her. The doctor was acting as interpreter, translating Harbart’s words into English for her. Tina’s mother had also been an actress. But a car accident had crippled her. Tina’s father married again. Tina’s mother was now dead. Tina was very sad. Harbart was only too familiar with the actions and accomplishments of dearly beloved motherly souls—Tina being a foreigner, he had also deployed, with flawless aim, some basic theory—the afterlife comprised six sorts of spirits—what each was like—who inhabited which plane—how a mother’s love acted like a shield around her children. Tina said she’d visited a Tibetan lama in London. He had also told her about the six-spirit system, but had not been able to tell her where her mother was nor how she was.

  The memshaheb paid a hundred rupees to Harbart. Harbart’s reputation multiplied a thousandfold. The doctor made sure Harbart signed a receipt.

  “You’re on a roll, boss! When’s the mem-femme coming again?”

  “As soon as she needs to. I gave her quite a dose.”

  “Boss, did you really close the door and show her a ghost in private?”

  “You lot are so full of shit, I tell you. Know this, that Harbart doesn’t sniff at every hole for honey. Mem-femme! Hah, I’ve seen hundreds!”

  *

  Although he never saw the lady doctor again, through the glass window of a closed antique store on Park Street, Harbart did see the fairy. And at once he realized that of the lady doctor—of the woman who’d climbed up the wooden stairs on the left of the mirror—this fairy was the younger version. Buki had been a little older than the fairy. But the Buki he’d gazed at from his top-terrace, that Buki had been different. He couldn’t match the two and come up with the one. But the fairy was the beginning. Golden hair, carved out of a yellowish stone. A stone body, draped in stone robes. The left hand gently folded behind her head. The right arm holding aloft a lamp. The light must come on at the touch of a switch, for a black electric wire trails away behind her. The sight of that wire upsets Harbart, makes him uncomfortable—and all those things, so many things, around her! Stone vases, stone chairs, wooden elephants whose faces were turned away, a stone table on which was placed an enormous lamp from some enormous ship.

  “Cat, bat, water, dog, fish!”

  As Harbart stared at the fairy, he thought he heard the dead women of the West singing their songs. Swelling into a cloud of lament, the songs drew closer and hurled themselves against the dusty glass. Alas, stone fairy. Like that young Russian woman facing the German machine guns—naked, her hands hiding her breasts, running across the dark black ground. Not stopping to listen to anyone. If the busy pedestrians stopped for a moment, they would hear the entranced Harbart’s stifled sobs. And see that fairy slowly floating upwards, her cheeks rubbing against a bulbous big balloon tied to a ladder with string.

  On winter’s Park Street, a streak of refrigerator air sidled up and clasped Harbart in its arms. Harbart turned up the collar of his Ulster, and now it was impossible to look at him and think of anything but Hollywood. It was still evening, now. It had still been evening, then. Soon, as the darkness spreads, the fairy will seep away from view. Only to be sometimes startled by the lights of a passing car. Then, her lips will seem to move. Then, her blind eyes will seem to gleam with yellow light. “Staystill, staysafe,” whispered Harbart, “I’ll be back.”

  On the way home, to the trees by the street, to the familiar lepers, to the balcony pillars, to the signboards and tea shop, to the duty-done homeward-bound ayahs and nurses, to the prostitutes, park railings, and the pictures of a lion and of a Mickey Mouse painted on the walls of the park pond, to the water spurting out of the depths of the city—to each and every one he had something special to say. Car lights splayed across the giant billboards, and Harbart felt he was at the movies again. Standing in the heart of a crowd, in the middle of some street, Harbart and Krishna-dada had watched The Fall of Berlin. And many other documentaries about World War II. A naked young Russian woman hides her breasts with her hands and runs across the dark black ground while the German soldiers slowly raise their machine guns. The woman runs, runs on and on. Not stopping to listen to anyone.

  Ratatatatat.

  *

  The wheel of time spun round and round. 1992 arrived—armed with a litany of shame and blame, calumny and corruption, thievery and treachery—but Harbart’s year began well enough. A Bengali newspaper or two published the odd article or two. Nothing much in January. Nothing much in February—no, there were a few cases, off and on. Then again nothing much in March. Harbart was happy enough with whatever money he was making. But not with the smoking-drinking expenditures which had risen dramatically. Harbart decided that since Dol was on March 18th, he’d carry on with his flamboyant spending until then. From the day after, he would let go of everything, lead a frugal life. Harbart was slowly running out of swagger too. The machine was giving trouble—sound, yes, but picture, no. Or sometimes picture, yes, but sound, no. Man was a TV, after all. For a few days now, different parts of Harbart’s body had been emitting different croaks and creaks.

  “Tell me, dear,” Jyathaima said, “You seem to be making good enough money. Then why is that body of yours as thin as fish bone? Must be too much drink.”

  “No, no, nonsense, Jyathaima. Actually, it’s hard work, very hard work. Bone-crushingly hard. That’s why all my marrow-fat’s drying up—it’s not getting a chance to stay in my bones.”

  “Oh but that’s a sign of sainthood! What good will it do for my Haru to be like that? I’m going to find you a girl, get you married. Tie you down a little.”

  “Who do you think will want to marry me?”

  “Who won’t? And why won’t they? An earning boy. A god-looking boy. So many girls just waiting. You roll the beads. Then see how they come, chasing them home.”

  The beads roll, roll away. No one chases after them, no one follows them home to Harbart. Not Buki. Not the lady doctor. And the fairy? No, Harbart simply cannot bring himself to imagine the fairy as his bride.

  *

  Dol was a riot of colors. Someone put something peculiar in Harbart’s hair—the more he washed it, the more it gave out color.

  The day after Dol. Still hungover. When bang in the middle of the afternoon, the doors to Harbart’s room were flung open by that sisterfucker who’d come that one time wearing a raw-silk bush-shirt shirt the color of clotted cream and who’d left promising to turn up again and sweep his suspicions away. Harbart was dreaming then, that he was in a hospital hallway lined with big glass jars containing bits and pieces of the human body, aborted fetuses without eyes or mouths, that he was running through that hallway, that he was running and that a naked woman was running with him. But how will he get out with a woman who’s wearing no clothes? Wait, there’s a way—on the hospital grounds, in the shady-shadowy spots, some hookers hawked dead women’s things. Harbart bought a cheap nylon saree for the naked woman. She put it on, and then they came out from the hospital gates and found themselves in front of the tram depot. But instead of boarding a tram, they climbed into a rickshaw. The rickshaw lurched on its way. Suddenly, H
arbart looked down and got the shock of his life—how had he not noticed that the woman had high heels on! And her armpit, there, just beside him. And just beyond that her nylon-saree-covered breasts …

  Harbart’s eyes snapped open.

  And saw clotted-cream bush shirt leaning over his face.

  “Sleeping, eh? Then how can I sweep your suspicions away?”

  Harbart jolted up in bed.

  “Didn’t I tell you, I’d come back when it’s time? Arise, awake, O Harbart the Great. For I am about to change your fate.”

  The man opened his briefcase and took out a bottle of booze. Took out two fine glasses. A pack of Classic cigarettes. A lighter.

  “Go, you witless wanker—go take a piss and then come back here and squat tight. Don’t stare at me like a disobedient donkey. Do as I say. And you’ll jack off the jackpot, and I’ll be Genghis Khan.”

  Thumping-hearted Harbart scudded off to pee. By the time he got back, the man had poured two drinks. Each took a glass, lit a cigarette. “Not cheers,” the man said, “not skol. We’re Bengali, and everyone in Bengal now says: Joy!”

  “Joy!” Harbart repeated.

  The man’s name was Surapati Marik. Property, fish farms, coal mines, mopeds—a broker for a wide variety of goods and services, he’d amassed an immense expanse of experience. Those who’d started computerized horoscopes in India—Mr. Marik has been in on that too. Now, desperate to start big-league professional soccer in India. Russi Mody, Ratan Tata, Chhabria, Ambani—he’d spent the last three years talking soccer to them all. But now, right now, he had Harbart in his sights. Now, casting a loving look at Harbart, he said, “Look, my boy, I don’t believe a word of all that ghost stuff. Don’t believe you’re hugger-mugger with the lot of them. Don’t disbelieve either. I just know one thing—a tilapiya in a tank will never grow to full size.”

  “Meaning, dear sir, that I’m a tank-trapped tilapiya?”

  “Or what? Carp in a lake? Or whale in the ocean? I believe in calling a spade a spade.”

  “Then why don’t you get to the point? Cough it up, whatever you’re on about. Or I’ll soon be too sloshed to care.”