Harbart Read online

Dhanna came down again, crying. A band of boys and bicycles sped off to the police station. The officer heard them out. Then, “Bloody bastard!” he said: “Ruined my day.”

  Harbart was unfazed. Unmoved. Now forever unconcerned with the trifling troubles of this world.

  The crowds continued to swell.

  Koka, Somnath, Gobindo—how-howled in grief.

  “Just last night he paid for a TV. Spent so much. If only we’d known, even a little …”

  Khororobi’s brother Jhaapi looked mentally unstable. Ever since his brother’s suicide, he’d been a little funny, and now he squatted on the pavement and shouted every so often, “Over! All over!”

  In only a little while the police van arrived. An officer and three constables. The crowd parted to let them through.

  The officer inspected the room and the body. “Any suicide note?”

  No one could tell.

  Pinching his nose tight, the officer went over to Harbart lying so flat and still, reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a fold of paper.

  On it was written:

  The tank-trapped tilapiya is off to the sea

  Want to see a double chang? A double chang?

  Cat, bat, water, dog, fish.

  “Never read a suicide note like this in my whole bloody life,” said the officer, “Was he crazy or what?”

  “Not crazy exactly,” said Hartal, “A little touched, perhaps.”

  Local Dr. Sudhir refused to sign the death certificate. “He was my patient, it’s true,” he said, “but he didn’t die of dengue. Nor did he die of my treatment. He died by committing suicide, and that too in a ghastly manner. The police’ve come. Now, kindly, please do not request me anymore. We’re neighbors, don’t forget. If I could write off two lines and help you out, do you think I wouldn’t have?”

  Thereafter the boys would always call him Dr. Sonofabitch.

  Finally, the police officer said: “Alright. I’m going back to the station, sending a corpse car. One of you come with me. The constables will stay back, keep watch.”

  “You won’t come back, sir?’

  “Of course I will! Let me speak to the Sambhunath Hospital, if I can get him on their list, then from there straight to Katapukur morgue.”

  “Sir, when will we get the body?”

  “Let’s see, what time is it now? Quarter to twelve … Say, seven? Why don’t you come to the morgue by seven? Although with morgues you can never tell … it may end up taking longer.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that. We’ll figure out how to hurry things up there.”

  “Then there’s nothing to worry about, then.”

  A black corpse-car carried Harbart away. On the second-floor verandah, Nirmala and Dhanna-boudi watched him go, Jyathaima clutched between them. The sun was high in the sky and so strong and fierce that the calls of the crows dried up in their throats.

  Up on the roof, beneath the scorching sun, Lalitkumar asks his wife, “Shobha! Will the film be a hit? Or a flop? It will be exactly as you say. I am happy to accept your choice.”

  Shobharani laughs and laughs, shakes and shimmies with laughter.

  Downstairs, the sweeper arrived, took out the bucket and threw the bloodied water down the drain. Threw away the bottles, the cutlet bones, the dead cockroaches, the razor blade, the cigarette butts, the ashes. Gulped down the last few drops of rum.

  The room was washed. The windows flung open. The fly trapped in the room since the night before perched for a moment on the window grille. Then buzzed a few circles in the air and flew away.

  The neighborhood boys got together, held a meeting, and decided that Harbart’s bed and mattress should be used on his final journey. Ever since the Saha-da–Swapan case, the crematorium was insisting on burning the dead’s bed and bedding too. Let Harbart-da’s bed go with him.

  But Dhanna-dada’s permission was vital in this regard.

  “I was thinking the same thing,” Dhanna said gravely: “It’s so full of Harbart, best it goes with him.”

  Then he began to remember. “That bed, that mattress—all bought for Binu. Binu died an unnatural death. And now Haru is gone too. What now? Take it, take it all. But, yes, the bed is a sturdy one. You want to take that also?”

  “So many more beds will come, Dhanna-dada. Let this one go. All his time he spent on it.”

  “Take it,” sighed Dhanna, “We’ll go to the crematorium too. Oh, and you boys had better take some money. There will be expenses, after all.”

  “Don’t worry, Dhanna-dada. Harbart-da was our brother too. We’ll arrange for the car and all. Please, we beg you, don’t make a fuss now.”

  Dhanna begins to cry again.

  The boys get busy with their arrangements.

  Lala in the neighborhood has a fleet of trucks. So a truck and a driver were easy. Then came the flowers, incense-sticks, scent, clothes—everything. The bed was lifted onto the truck. Then the mattress. The mattress was really heavy. They struggled quite a bit.

  “Old-fashioned stuff, see? Packed full with coir. Feel the weight?”

  Sticks of tuberoses were tied to the four legs of the bed. The mattress was covered with a new sheet and on it they placed a new pillow. In the end so many boys had gathered that they had to hire a small Tempo. The rest of the neighborhood who wanted to come had been told to go directly to the crematorium.

  This lot set off for the morgue.

  A huge crowd gathered to bid farewell to the truck-and-Tempo sorrow convoy. Onward, captain—destination Remount Road, Katapukur. In between, sips of country liquor. A blast down the throat, raw, then the bottle tucked away at the waist. The towel tied tightly over it again.

  However, in the matter of alleviating their own sorrows, the spirits may be found to be entirely helpless or subservient. Therefore, some spirits, unable to endure that agony, manifest themselves before their near and dear ones, or, remaining invisible, send them manifold portents, in an attempt to urge them to perform those funereal rites which will ensure that they, the spirits, are able to rest in peace. This particular power of the spirits is remarkably well known to experts: English experts and Bengali experts—both have spoken of it, both have deliberated upon it, and both have not been averse to writing a variety of books to communicate their thoughts about it.

  —Mysteries of the Afterlife

  At the morgue, after the autopsy, the loss-of-blood examination, and the stitching back up—Harbart emerged wrapped in a sheet, looking quite neat and tidy, not grisly and grotesque like most suicides. Just before this, across the western sky, the slowly sliding sun’s enchanting crimson glow had touched every cloud with tenderness. The pond just beside the morgue, and behind that the long lines of the railway tracks, and along them, along that field, the wagon-breakers went flashing past like deer.

  Gobindo, one of the boys, came from a rich home. Emptying a bottle of expensive scent all over Harbart’s body, he shouted, “Let the other dumb dead smell of shit. For our boss, only Intimate will do!”

  The truck rolls on. And suddenly, the slogans begin:

  “Long live Harbart-da!”

  “Long live—long, long live!”

  “Won’t forget you, Harbart-da! Won’t forget!”

  “Won’t forget, never forget!”

  The truck paused in traffic. “Which party was he a leader of?” someone asked.

  “Band party,” someone answered.

  Then the clapping started. Along with the whistling and weird cries and shouts. And thus, through the final ritual, grief was gradually transformed into a happy hullaballoo. No one noticed. They were not meant to. By the time the truck drew up to the crematorium, the lights had been switched on. It was night. Beside the gates waited a weeping Shobharani and a dumbfounded Lalitkumar. But as he heard the sounds of the mourners’ exhilaration, Lalitkumar could not help hims
elf: “Why are you crying, Shobha? Look, look at this carnival!”

  Dhanna, Phuchka, and Bulan, the neighborhood elders, they were already there. Someone ran off to sign the paperwork. Those who accompany the dead to the crematorium, they often like to make enquiries about how and why the other corpses died. One such man asked Koka:

  “What happened, brother?”

  “What happened to who?” asked a mildly intoxicated Koka.

  “I mean, what happened to your brother?”

  “Murder.”

  Koka thought that the word for death in English was murder. In Bengali, people die. In English, they murder. Once this word was out, a huge crowd swarmed down upon them for a glimpse of the murder case. Even those maintaining ritual contact with their dead, even they began to fiddle and fidget, waiting for their turn to scramble over and see.

  Dhanna, a drained and desolate Dhanna, said he couldn’t do it. Couldn’t bring himself to perform the last rites. So nephew Bulan was the one who touched the fire to Harbart’s mouth. The crematorium was crammed with policemen. Bits of talk, shouted slogans, sobbing.

  “Yes, yes, the mattress and pillow go with him.”

  “Harbart-da, long live Harbart-da!”

  “Boss, you’re going away!”

  “As long as sun and moon shall shine, Harbart—your name shall shine!”

  “Please move, please move, the corpse is going in!”

  Clatter clatter clatter—the door to the furnace rolled open—clatter. Harbart, sleeping his final sleep, waits for a few seconds. The slogans rise to a crescendo. Crash through the crematorium. As the bed of flames deep in the heart of the furnace blazed into view, an entranced Lalitkumar whispered, “Fascinating!”

  “Quiet, you bastard!” someone roared back, and a simultaneously startled and shaken Lalitkumar turned his head and saw Dhui beside him and a little further away, Lambodar, Sridhar, Nishapati, Keshab, headless Jhulanlal—all of them standing, waiting.

  Harbart rattled and rolled into the furnace. His clothes, his hair and the sheet that covered him burst into flame. Clatter clatter clatter—the door to the furnace rolled shut—clatter. And then only an unbroken hum as the fire burned within.

  A little to the back of the crowd stood a forlorn Surapati Marik. Two English-newspaper cuttings folded in his pocket. “Farewell, friend, farewell,” he thought to himself and lit a cigarette.

  People, so many people, a wave, swelling down to the ground.

  The furnace hums on.

  Suddenly, a small explosion. Like a bucket-covered chocolate bomb bursting: Boom!

  Before the trace of it has completely disappeared, there is another. Louder: Boom! Then another, yet another. One after the other. Louder, and louder. The doors of the furnace begin to shiver and shake, the crowds begin to panic and pell-mell stampede back and away. The on-duty policemen scramble to their feet.

  And—TI-DOOM!

  Part of the ceiling over the top of the furnace explodes, launching bricks and sand and chunks of plaster everywhere, and through that hole billow multicolored plumes of smoke, reeking of gunpowder and explosives.

  “Bloody bomb!” a local goon roars, “Bloody bomb!”

  “Switch it off!” one of the policemen, displaying an astonishing presence of mind, finally manages to shout, “They’re bursting inside!”

  At that very moment a sky-splitting explosion rips out the walls beside and behind the furnace. Bits of hot coil fall into pots of funeral water and hiss and sizzle and smoke. The lights go out. The destroyed furnace smoulders red.

  An awful affair.

  People rush about in the dark. Someone in one of the houses opposite must have telephoned. The police arrive. More police arrive. Cordon off the entire crematorium. Much later, when the CESC people somehow manage to patch together a temporary electrical connection and the lights came back on, the furnace is found to have been exploded from within, blown entirely to bits.

  In the end, deep at night, under the eagle eye of the police, Harbart’s head, entrails, arms and legs, belly and breast—all the bits and pieces—are collected and taken to the next-door manual set-up and burnt on a wood fire, a wood pyre.

  *

  That Harbart’s body was jigsawed together and burnt led to a lot of debate and discussion during the initial phases of the investigation. Only natural. After the events of May 21, 1991, everyone had reason enough to believe that, comparable to Dhanu, the LTTE’s live human bomb, Harbart had been a dead human bomb. Although his motives were not entirely clear. In fact, at first glance, there seemed to be no motive at all. Because that night no prominent personality had been expected at the crematorium. And even if they had been … the veteran investigators eventually dismissed that hypothesis.

  At first, when one particular event ends up having a profound impact, people try to explain all subsequent events in its light. Such is human nature.

  The tank-trapped tilapiya is off to the sea

  Want to see a double chang? A double chang?

  Cat, bat, water, dog, fish.

  —Harbart Sarkar

  Even the suicide note didn’t seem to contain any coded messages, although in the double challenge of the double chang a threatening tone was more than evident. Let the record show that in some areas of Howrah, especially venal swines and sons-of-bitches were indeed referred to as double changs. But “Cat, bat, water, dog, fish!” Possibly nothing more than mere whimsy. The man had been exposed by then. A severe shock, followed by the inevitable depression. And, of course, he’d been abnormal all along.

  Still, it is not possible for a mystery so rife with gunpowder reek to remain inexplicable and irresolute. Such a state of affairs is not desirable for either the state or the people. In fact, such a state is particularly undesirable.

  *

  The crematorium catastrophe was all Binu’s fault. Yes, Binu the dead Naxalite. Night after night, it had been Binu and his friends who’d packed every inch of the mattress with dynamite sticks stolen from the ICI factory at Gomiah, dynamite sticks of varying lengths and force, manufactured to blow apart rocks and mountains. These advanced sticks were built to withstand considerable shock without exploding. Not crude handmade bombs these, that a little pressure and presto! they popped. Who is not aware of the positive role played by dynamite in ensuring the progress of this great nation?

  Perhaps Binu and his friends had planned an awful apocalyptic affair. Perhaps the assassination of some prominent personality. Perhaps some even more unimaginable calamity. That had remained undone. That had remained undone, true, but for the last twenty-odd years, that assortment of explosives had lain winter-sleeping tight inside the mattress and then warmed awake by the flames of the furnace, exploded into angry life.

  And what is even more astonishing is that if, since the Saha-da–Swapan case of May 18, 1992, the practice of burning the bed along with the dead had not been established, then none of this would have happened.

  How strange, then, was this detonation!

  The deplorable series of events that unfolded around the cremation of Harbart’s bloodless body inescapably signal that when and how an explosion will occur, and who will cause that explosion—of all such knowledge the state machinery remains woefully ignorant still.

  Ten

  In vain we come, in vain we go

  To what end? We do not know.

  —Akshay Kumar Boral

  Without the bed, Harbart’s room looked very empty and large, although no one had observed it, since it had been put under lock and key and stayed that way for a long time thereafter. Then, much later, one night, in a pitch-black loadshedding-dark night, there had been a terrible storm. The window that had been opened, the window through which the fly had flown, that window had remained open. The storm wind, the wild wind, blew into the room, scattering all over it the pages, beginning from 171, of Accounts of the A
fterlife. A bolt of lightning scorched with its reflection Harbart’s mirror on the wall shelf. Raging, the wind swung the hanging Ulster up and down. Mysteries of the Afterlife, Gopal Bhaar and the Spooks’ Soiree, Harbart’s notebook of poems, Shanta’s letter, the West Bengal Rationalist Association’s letter—the wind blew right through them, set them all aflutter, and flung the shirt and dhuti and towel from the line on which they’d hung and flew them to the floor.

  A few days later, Dhanna-dada unlocked the room and sold all the books, the pages of the books, the notebook, the signboard made of tin—sold them all to a scrap merchant. Sent the table fan and trunk and chair up to the second floor. The trunk contained a broken dot-pen and a few coins. Harbart’s umbrella and Ulster were given away to the sweeper and a beggar, respectively. In the heat of a summer afternoon, the beggar had been reluctant to accept that blanket-like cloak-like object but then, thinking of the future, he finally relented. That same beggar was also gifted Harbart’s shirt and dhuti and towel. The scrap merchant who’d bought the signboard had at first found himself in a bit of a fix. But then, by the grace of good fortune, it was in turn bought by a pop-gun-and-balloon man in New Market who devised a scheme—an elaborate hammering of nails all over it to which he then tied many multicolored balloons. Thus Harbart’s signboard became a target for popgun pellets.

  Once all the balloons had burst, then through the jungle of nails, perhaps the eye could see the upside-down letters: Conversations with the Dead. Prop: Harbart Sarkar.

  Perhaps many days later, perhaps many, many years later, some little boy, letting go of his mother’s hand, his father’s hand, will run and run and then stand still before the dusty glass window of some antique shop and stare and stare, entranced, at the light-holding fairy still hovering on the other side. And when his mother, his father, when they drag him away, perhaps his lower lip will tremble a little with hurt.

  None of this, of course, may ever happen.

  But if it does, then later, even later, when the boy begins to shiver in his sleep, even then no one will notice. That sort of thing happens all the time.