Silverfish Read online

  Nausea welled up inside his throat. Everybody must know him by now, the old buffoon who came begging for his pension every day, going from desk to desk, coughing up the same sob story. He realized that he hadn’t shaved for three days, and he hadn’t even had the chance to wash his shirt for the last week, spending his days at these desks, running between them.

  A snivelling interruption in their rounds of tea and gossip and newspaper-browsing.

  They had a name for him, and someone here had the talent to do caricatures, mocking the earnestness in his voice, his flapping Shantiniketan bag and his slippers.

  For a moment, he froze on the threshold, hesitating to cross into the hall. He felt ugly, worn out. But it had been three months without a rupee coming in. Three months of slashing at small savings. And only a walk to look forward to, through long hours under the mid-day sun, after yet another day of failure.

  He walked in.

  The hall looked emptier than it had at the first glance; at least a third of the employees were missing. It should have been emptier, given the scale of the rally and the rancour of the protests today. But then again, this happened so often these days that perhaps some of the employees had opted for tea and a chat at the workplace over scorched hours at the rally.

  No one seemed to be laughing at him, or stealing glances at him from the corners of their eyes to store away for later hours of amusement.

  Nobody seemed to notice him at all.

  He walked up to the desk of the clerk who handled the pension files. Over the last several days, he had come to make some sense of the maze of bureaucracy here. A could be the appointed official for the pension files, or income tax, or licking the flap of envelopes, or whatever the government dreamt up for its clerks. To actually get it done, however, you had to first approach C who’d then ask you to come a day later and talk to D. D would, doubtless, suggest that you write a ‘letter of application’ – a mouthful of words that floated around in the hallways here like the buzzing flies – addressed to B. If the day was sunny and if he’d had a day’s relief from his constipation, B might then just be kind enough move the relevant files to A’s desk.

  If you were bullish enough to approach A directly, you’d need God on your side. Without a doubt, you’d be told that this wasn’t the set of files he handled, or he didn’t have signing authority in the matter, even though on paper there wasn’t anybody else to which you could trace it all.

  Over the last month, Milan felt he had met over a hundred people, all of whom seemed to sink their eyes into piles of documents or newspapers as they spoke to him, never looking up, their words a muffled murmur nudging him towards so and so in such and such department, who, when Milan got to meet them after hours and hours, more often days, sank their eyes into thicker piles of paper, mumbled that this matter was not in their hands. I only handle the southern districts. Only files for the visually impaired here, please. Nothing processed here for those who are going bald on the right side of the head? He remembered having drafted seven letters of application; he had copies of them all. He had explained his situation so many times that now he couldn’t help rattling off exactly the same words and phrases even if he tried to put them differently, whenever he had to go at it again. The waits in the dark, clammy corridor, bus stops, on the benches at the corner of the hall, long enough for him to have finished reading a whole novel, had him dozing off, near-dead of boredom and fatigue.

  Now he knew the right places to go to.

  He stood before the clerk’s desk. His name was Achintya Sarkar. He was a soccer enthusiast, a rabid partisan of the East Bengal team, and had two daughters, the prospect of whose marriage worried him endlessly. All this and more Milan had come to know from long waits at his desk while Achintya Sarkar slowly went through files, bantering, chatting with his colleagues four or five desks away. But his unwillingness to engage in any conversation with Milan had been complete and lasting; he relied mostly on grunts and distressingly negative monosyllables. Milan felt he needed Achintya Sarkar to like him a little bit to listen to him; maybe he would be more helpful then.

  Things were going to change today.

  ‘Looks like no one can stop East Bengal from winning the League this year.’ Milan poured laughter in his voice, generous dollops of it ‘What do you think, Achintya babu?’

  Achintya Sarkar looked up, stared at his face blankly. He had never looked so directly at Milan’s face before. Though Milan was a little vexed by the vacuous stare, he couldn’t help feeling that he had made an impact on the man.

  There were only so many things a fellow never failed to warm up to.

  ‘Yeah, that makes sense!’ The voice that flew from about two desks away to the right belonged to a bespectacled smoker of Charminar cigarettes named Sadhan, Milan knew that too, though not his last name. ‘East Bengal has the lowest points of the Big Three this time, and four of its matches with small-fry teams have ended in draws. It’ll win the League, like India and Pakistan will become one country again!’

  Laughter shot out around in acrid fumes, but Achintya Sarkar seemed too benumbed to laugh. It wasn’t just Milan’s wiseass prophecy on a life and death matter he clearly understood nothing of; it was perhaps the bizarre thought of him trying to break the ice. Thank God it was soccer! The other thing about Achintya Sarkar that stood out in Milan’s mind was that he was worried about marrying off his two daughters, who were growing distressingly into marriageable ages!

  Achintya-babu, is your daughter pale or dark? Does she sing Tagore songs? My neighbour is looking for a bride for his son…There could be many nightmares!

  He stared at Achintya Sarkar’s face for a while, which stared back at him. The blankness melted away, the face returning to its stone-like form holding an intent gaze at Milan.

  ‘I…I actually…’ Milan stumbled along, somehow. ‘Mr Basu had asked me to come today to meet him. He told me “Wednesday”. I mean he said my file would clear by today. He asked me, really. It’s in the books somewhere, surely. You can look. I don’t have a letter or anything, but he really did ask me. Surely. My name is Milan Sen, you remember me, don’t you? I was here yesterday. But Mr Basu told me “Wednesday”. It’s about my pension; you remember, don’t you?’

  The stuttering, quickfire delivery made Milan breathless. He had wanted it all to be out on the table, to make his case as strongly as he could before he could be shut up and told that he had no business here. But even after the words had all tumbled out, he felt like an errant schoolboy before this man with a stare frozen on his face, who had not joined in the laughter squirting off the neighbouring desks.

  ‘Mr Basu is not in today.’

  Not in today!

  Even a couple of months ago, Milan did not know that these could be the most nightmarish words in the Bengali language. Did it make a poor nightmare next to what the word ‘famine’ had done during the fatal hungers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that had swept off whole districts, or the bloodied halo of ‘riot’ during the years of the partition of the country? Did it? Cut an aging lower-middle class man from the pittance doled out for forty years of thankless service, make him take endless crushed-limb journeys in crowd-bursting buses through scorching Calcutta noons, and fling him into a labyrinth of rusted bureaucracy. Suddenly it may not seem so outlandish. Before, ‘this is not really my area’, or even the plainer, ‘there’s nothing for me to do here’, one could beg and plead, but ‘not in today’ was a closed door – open and shut, shut, shut for the day, anyway; there’s nothing to do but turn around and make one’s way down the dank stairs as breathlessness and hunger quelled the sharp edge of stretching despair before.

  He asked in a near-inaudible voice, ‘Will he be in tomorrow?’

  ‘How am I supposed to know? I’m not God!’

  Fair enough. None less could predict government employee movements in Calcutta. The added gruffness of Achintya Sarkar’s voice did not have much to do with East Bengal’s dismal performance at this yea
r’s League. The man hated him, hated his guts, his quick, nervous words, his soiled clothes and torn slippers and his whole crummy self!

  It was the desperation that squeezed out the frantic words.

  ‘Three months! Can’t you imagine what it is for three months to pass for a lower-middle class household without the few rupees of pension coming in? You have two marriageable daughters, and you know how it is losing sleep over their dowries and who can arrange for their daughter’s marriage these days without a fat dowry?’

  Achintya Sarkar’s face, which had almost lowered itself into the files below, sprung up like a piece of live wire and Milan realized he had pushed it again but did he have an option? The cost of season tickets for the soccer league on a middle-class salary or such like just didn’t cut it, and what else did he know about Achintya Sarkar? The shock inside him was that he had always hated the barbarism of dowry with passion; one of his own short stories, published in a prestigious magazine was about those real life incidents of housewives setting fire to themselves out of the torture and humiliation for bringing a small dowry, but today the picture of the long trek back home in the scalding sun, empty-handed must have scrambled his beliefs as if they were the toys of a moody child.

  ‘How would you feel if your father ran from pillar to post trying to get his pittance of a pension released from this blackhole? If you have a father, he must be my age. Please! I have my file number here, and here are the letters I wrote to the district inspector and to the pension officer; Mr Basu asked me to write it, please, you only have to check and see if my file has cleared.’

  Distress, incredulity and despair had formed a red, throbbing knot in his head. For a moment, he panicked that his blood pressure, forever perched at a dangerous high, would tear open an artery in his head, cause him to stumble and fall, melt into oblivion.

  It couldn’t have been the first time Achintya Sarkar had faced such a barrage. He was, after all, the gatekeeper to the chief accounts officer who dealt with the sad, dusty files of thousands cut off from their blood-stream by the quirks of red tape. But even so, his face drooped, magnetically drawn to the heap of paper below.

  But he looked up, slowly.

  ‘I don’t know what is there for me to do here. But you can take them to Akhil-babu, in the room next to Mr Basu’s. He’s the deputy director of accounts.’ He added after a pause. ‘He’s in today.’

  ‘Thank you, thank you, sir.’ Relief and gratitude rose in Milan’s chest. After all, Mr Basu’s conviction about ‘Wednesday’ couldn’t have been drawn out of thin air. ‘I’ll go and talk to Akhil-babu right away.’

  The middle-aged peon sitting outside Akhil-babu’s room looked eerily like Achintya Sarkar all over again, just a little bit friendlier.

  ‘Akhil-babu?’ he said as Milan asked for permission to enter the room, ‘He’s not in.’

  Milan felt he was going to scream, but still managed a feeble protest. ‘But Achintya-babu said he’s in today!’

  ‘Oh, he came in all right! But he’s gone out for tea.’

  ‘Gone for tea.’ Milan repeated mechanically. ‘When will he back?’

  ‘Back?’ The peon seemed amused by the question. ‘He’s gone to the teashop across the street.’ He uttered the last sentence in a meaningful drawl.

  Milan realized that ‘going to the teashop across the street’ indicated a particular lifestyle habit that he was expected to catch. It could mean Akhil-babu would come back within ten minutes as much as that one wouldn’t see him for the rest of the day. But who was up to cracking such codes today?

  ‘I’ll wait.’

  The peon nodded absently and returned to his newspaper. Something in his tone told Milan that this wait wasn’t so absurd after all, and one might get to see Akhil-babu before the end of the day.

  He walked to the end of the hall and sat on the wooden bench near the window, gently laying his Shantiniketan bag across his lap. The hinges creaked as he sat, but they seemed stable enough. He felt the arthritic pain in his legs, an old friend who seemed to have left him in the day’s excitement. A burning sensation, a bilious cloud of fire, spread wings in his stomach slowly, up along his chest and above.

  The scalding summer day managed to send enough light through the window. After taking a few moments to regain his breath, he took out a folder from the bag. A nice faux leather folder. Gautam had got this for him from his office. He always remembered to keep aside little gifts and souvenirs from his office for his father.

  Milan remembered the day like it was yesterday.

  Calcutta Energy Supply Corporation, the logo-encircled letters said at the top right corner. Nice and hardy it was, with a glossy surface. Next to the cardboard ones Milan bought for five rupees at the local stationer’s, this was royalty. Not a single scratch on the leathery skin, Milan had been very careful never to use it outside very special, very rare occasions, like carrying corrected galley proofs back to the printers’.

  Today, the inside of the folder was dusty from the loose sheets. Loose, brittle sheets thick with dust, dust that had rubbed off on the soft leathery interior. A few of the sheets had their edges broken, and they looked alien in their new habitat.

  The peon coughed, and the tremors rattled the newspaper pages stretched out before his well-hidden face. Right in front of Milan’s bench were the fossils of some sort of a canteen or a tea-corner – an oven that hadn’t been used in years, a dishwashing sink cluttered with cigarette butts, ancient paper-plates and smashed earthen cups. Tucked in the corner of the office, they looked like the ruins of ancient human life – the dust-layered memories of a fire, the chatter of human voices and the clinking of teaspoons. Sitting near them, Milan felt a strange cloud of sadness come over him.

  Carefully, he rearranged the first few pages. Under the trails of silverfish, the words were faded, and far away.

  Finally, my turn has come.

  Seventeen years of wearing rich vermilion in the parting of my hair, the bangles of iron and shell, red-bordered saris like the goddesses themselves, all blessings of a married woman.

  Today, I have lost my rights to it all, till the day I die, a shrunken skeleton, blessed to rejoin my husband in heaven.

  The doctor came at five in the morning, when my husband began to get worse, as if he was having difficulty swallowing, letting out his breath. Even when the doctor was called, one of my elder sisters-in-law had already placed a much-thumbed volume of the holy Gita on his chest, and had sprinkled sacred Ganga water in his mouth. Everybody knew what it was going to be this time. The doctor had come in soon; the British civil surgeon himself. No Indian doctor had ever attended to any member of this household, and it was mostly the civil surgeon who came in for serious cases like this. Ours was, after all, the richest, the highest-born family in all of north Calcutta, and the British government only tried to keep us happy.

  I’d cried a lot, shed enough tears to fill all the three Venetian jugs in my husband’s bedroom. All the women of the household had been there. Sarala, being the first wife, had the pride of place at the head, and I sat at his feet, touching them, cold, lifeless and wrinkled. The others were all around him, the wives and the mothers and the aunts on the huge, ornate, Burma-teak bed that reeked of illness and old age, the phlegm-soiled sheets and the last warmth of the body; the maidservants on the floor, hitting their heads against the smooth, reddish wood of the bed-frame, on the cool marble of the floor, wailing their lungs out, like night time jackals at the burning ghats. Even the untouchable maids had been there, outside the bedroom, flopping around in the hallway. They probably had the threshold to bang their heads against, I don’t know.

  My voice there had been loud and clear, like a morningtime raag, an intense, pining tune practised by a maestro tormented by his passion for his muse. They almost rose above all the other voices that were strangely united in their cacophony. I say ‘almost’ because it had been hard to beat Radhu, the dairymaid, who’d been sending out such swirls of yelling from the flo
or that it must have scared off every crow or vulture that had tried to perch anywhere on the roof of our mansion that day. It had been audacious of her to outcry her highborn mistresses, and she was going to pay dearly for it. Mine was, however, far more musical, like the tormented maestro asking for liberty from his cruel, imprisoning goddess. Radhu’s hoarse and masculine voice could never aspire to that.

  But of course, I could wrench out that lyrical tune of tears because I wasn’t that sad at my husband’s death. I was sad, without a doubt, he was the reason behind the daub of vermilion on my head, the iron and shell bangles, my goddess-like pride. He had been all that for seventeen years, since I was twelve years old and had been brought crying into this mansion in a flurry of music and rituals. But not that sad. How deeply can you fall in love, as a twelve-year old, with a fifty-nine year old man, married when you understood nothing of it? I mean, look at Sarala. Just a few years younger than my dead, cold husband, married to him for over half a century, wrinkled and papery-skinned herself. Seated with his head in her lap, she was silent, frozen, the only one so in the room. If I’d been that sad, I couldn’t have cried either. Instead, here I was, maestro-singing, thinking of the most rotten ways of punishing Radhu, the dairy-maid, for her hoarse masculine voice shadowing mine.

  A few decades ago I’d have had a different reason to cry after my husband’s death. Especially in a situation such as mine – a twenty-nine year old woman, her sixty-six year old husband’s third wife (my husband’s second wife had died long before I was married into this household), left widowed with more than half her life before her. I’d be crying, and probably with Radhu’s force in my lungs, with fear, horrible fear, because there would be no life left before me, not in another half-day. Like all ill-starred wives, I would be packed with a fresh batch of firewood on my husband’s pyre, bundled next to his cold, wrinkled body, and my tender, warm body would burn to death along with the cold flesh of my husband’s. And my cries would truly drown this time, under the drums and the cymbals, under the chanting of the hymns, under the cheering of the men, for the blessed sati, the self-immolating widow who went straight to heaven with the rising, swirling smoke and took her husband along with her.