If he looks down, he can fool himself that his feet have released a lake of blood. No, not blood, the floor is both too beautiful and too normal for that. A rich, dark red, stretching away, gleaming with forty years of constant footfalls, it’s too calm, and the black border too neat. It’s too much a part of his sanctuary, his home, to have anything to do with something as crude and as fresh as blood.
The garden doesn’t aid thoughts of bleeding cuts and scars either. The grass is now an intense green, a green loaded by rain and, in this coy evening light, made even more gaudy by the white pillars which frame it at regular intervals. Paul Gauguin is the only one he can think of, among them all, who could approach it. And Gauguin did not, strictly speaking, even belong to that particular “them”, but he is the one who would have come closest. Perhaps Van Gogh, too. And after the two of them, Matisse, Picasso, et cetera, but none of the main people. Not Monet, not Pissarro, not even his favourite, Cézanne. From what he knows of it, none of them except Gauguin ever saw this light, none of those stay-at-homes ever experienced what humidity and cloud could do to their normal supply of sun. They had snow, of course, which Kedar has never seen at close hand, and he knows that a European winter puts up a very different kind of obstacle course for the painter, but still, it’s very different from a subtropical garden in August. Not that he’d mind a bit of snow under his feet at this moment, though the cool floor feels good as well.
Sitting on the veranda, Kedar stretches his legs as he waits for Raskolnikov to bring him his sandwiches. Though he hasn’t shed any blood at all, it does feel as though his energy has leaked out of his battered soles. A loss that needs to be replenished by an immediate infusion of meat, which is why his first demand after coming home has been ham sandwiches.
With clear instructions. Because Raskolnikov, while far from being a dullard, always needs clear instructions. In fact, it is precisely because Rasko is not stupid, precisely in order to stop him from exercising his billiard ball of a brain, that clear instructions always need to be given.
In this case: the good bread from Nahoum & Sons and not foul slices from the bread-walla’s morning delivery, the ham from Empire Provisions behind New Market and not the stuff Kaku procures from the Anglo-Indian fellow on Elliot Road and, Rasko, pay attention, proper English mustard, which means not that kashundi stuff you make in the kitchen, mustard, lightly spread. And tea. As in proper Darjeeling made from the Benkabari Spring tips. If you bring me any of that Doars sawdust, I will kill you, bujhechho? Yes, Dada-babu, understood.
Kedar is not sure why death makes people hungry, but he has seen it time and time again, the violent gorging people immerse themselves in after the cremations and shraddhos of loved ones. Some do this shamefacedly, but others are not so discreet, quite openly gluttonous in fact, trying to affirm life, scrambling to put up a kind of food wall against the steamroller of mortality. Kedar is sure, though, that his current famishment is not of that ilk. It’s just that he has walked barefoot all the way across the city, from Harrison Road and Portuguese Church to Sunny Park in Ballygunge, which is not something he has ever done before. Not that he isn’t fit, not that, but playing a few sets of tennis, twice-thrice a week, is quite different from struggling through the massive crowd and then walking – what? maybe four miles? – with his feet getting cut by tiny stones, glass, and all the other unnameable whatnots with which the roads of the city are mined. The whole thing today has demanded the use of different muscles from the ones his body normally deploys, and needed different muscles, he realizes, from his brain as well.
“Different muscles of the brain.” He mulls the phrase over, absently, not really thinking, more just sleepwalking through the events since news of the great man’s passing came, just after one this afternoon.
The sense of loss the news brought, of time suddenly carving a different shape out of the fixed sculpture of their lives, is now diminished: something rare – his mother crying openly, bent over the ebony holder shaking in her hand, her cigarette managing to catch some falling tears, the wasp-hiss of the dying tip; his father folding and unfolding his arms behind his back, as if in callisthenics, before finally reaching up into a bookcase for a copy of Chaar Odhhaay inscribed for him by Gurudeb himself; then Borun-kaku, his father’s younger brother, striding off into the garden as if he had been personally mauled by fate; and last but never least, Raskolnikov, standing behind Ma with the tea tray.
A tall, thin ghost doing aaroti with a tilted tea cosy hatching the bottom of a tea kettle. Garlanded by the steam being emitted, Rasko, eyes afire, suddenly intoning the words of the song he had been taught by Borun-kaku – Jei raatey mor duaar guli, bhaanglo jhorey... – getting out the first line in a reverential drone before Ma whirled on him and snatched away the tray, snapping at him through her sniffles to go back into the kitchen at once. Yes… nothing worse than having your servant reciting a love song at the wrong moment.
Kedar remembers Borun-kaku, a few years ago, trying to teach Raskolnikov English, trying to use the song as a platform upon which to build. ‘That night, Rasko – dhyan daao! – that night when the storm, storm maaney jhor – pay attention! – that night when the storm broke open my doors!’ At the time, the boy had scratched his head, and shaken it in complete fuddlement – what was Kaku-babu saying? But, this morning, Kedar could have sworn he heard him muttering the English words under his breath as he beat a defiant retreat to the kitchen, “That naaiit. Whuen tha eshtorm. Birokopen. Maii dhores.”
Raskolnikov’s name began from Kedar’s father calling him “rascal” when he first arrived to work in the house, a boy carrying some undecipherable age between eleven and fourteen, something like that, but a little older than Kedar, and much, much, taller. A few years later, Borun-kaku, avid reader, changed rascal to Raskolnikov – “Na, na, o bhishon complex character, o’r onek parts achhey, jemon in Dostoevsky.” The boy’s alleged complex character with many parts and facets did not impress Kedar’s mother. “That’s all we need,” she said tartly, “one fine night for him to come up the stairs and murder me.”
“But, Boudi! You are looking at the obvious! Banal! Surface!” Borunkaku exploded as much as he could with his older brother’s wife. “Do you think Raskolnikov to be a mere murderer of older women?” The “older women” was a bad mistake. When recounting the incident to Kedar’s father, Borun-kaku amended it to “older ladies”, and he got away with it, at least for that moment. But “Boudi” being a higher rank in this particular house than “Kaku”, despite Borun-kaku’s protests, a typical family compromise was distilled over the next few weeks. The name had stuck, and so it stayed – officially, Raskolnikov – but to appease Kedar’s mother it was shortened to “Rasko”, which is what everyone now calls him.
Not once in all of this was Radharomon, from Village Panchpukur, Jila Pingla, District Midnapur, asked what he wanted to be called. And neither did he ever say. But, as he grew up, it became clear that Rasko was the last person in the household who would murder Kedar’s mother. Despite her daily insults and snappings, Rasko was completely devoted to Boudi. ‘Like a dachshund with legs,’ as Borun-kaku put it. Around sixteen, when Kedar was in his detective novel phase, he would work out elaborate plots centred around the murdered corpse of his mother, with the imbecile police inspector always making Rasko the chief suspect, and Holmes or Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple or Inspector Maigret inevitably demonstrating that the murderer was someone else: Kedar’s grandmother, Kedar’s father, Borun-kaku always a favourite, the meat man, the fish man, the bread man, the maali and, once or twice when the story got away from him, even Kedar himself.
The thought of crime drags Kedar back to his evaporated wallet and the tiny surgeon’s slit at the end of his kurta pocket which confirms that he hasn’t dropped it. There is still a presence where it used to live, like a limb that’s been recently severed. Many times, on the way back from Barabajar, where the conductor – relishing the rare moment of power over an obvious bodolok rich boy – triumphantly ordered him off the tram, Kedar has gone over what he has lost with the wallet. Some money, thirty rupees, not a lot in his mind, though he is aware that four poor families could eat well for a month on that amount, a couple of visiting cards he’d been given at the tennis club, no great loss, a receipt from Salamatally Tailors for his new summer suit, not a problem, they know him well, a couple of other bills and things, again, no great loss, and a tiny reproduction of Cézanne’s ‘Jug and Peaches’ which he’d cut out from a book and put in the photo window. A pity, that one, a painting he really loves, but he’d put it in the wallet to remind him that one day he would reach the Louvre and see the original, so, yes, a loss but not a great one. The main thing is the wallet itself, worth far more than what it contained today. That is Loss.
Bulldog-kaku, his father’s first cousin, younger than his father by a couple of years, had given it to him on his twenty-first birthday. ‘Eijey, young Kedar! This is for you! Finest pigskin from Chalk and Boxall, best leather goods suppliers for gentlemen in London. Qualityta appreciate korbey! You will not find a better wallet anywhere in the world.’ And then, with his fat Lahiri nose frying in the oil of its own humour, “Also, Kedar, now that you are of age, we expect you not only not to lose it, but also to do some work towards filling it! Hah, hah, hah!” This, accompanied by a breath-destroying slap on Kedar’s back from a heavy, artillery major’s hand.
Major “Bulldog” Lahiri is currently serving in North Africa, commanding his Sikh batteries, and there is little chance of his returning soon to question Kedar about his wallet. But – the German not yet being born who can actually kill him – sooner or later, he will be back. And then he is bound to ask, the sound exploding out of his chest, the mouth a mere barrel, “Kedar! Fellow-me-lad! Show me! How full is that wallet I gave you? And was any honest sweat involved at all?”
War’s not going well over there, so maybe he’ll become a POW, Kedar thinks, and immediately reprimands himself for such a thought, though in the deepest cellar of his heart, he knows he would much rather Bulldog-kaku gave the Germans a headache than himself or his family. “Only a major, but thinks he’s a field marshal. And we are jemon, his foot soldiers,” Borun-kaku likes to say. While on the subject of foot soldiers, Kedar wonders whether there will be any dancing at the party tonight. It seems wrong, somehow, with the whole city in mourning, but that is unlikely to affect the English – their parties will go on, as will their war, regardless of minor events such as the death of the greatest writer India has ever produced.
Kedar catches himself in two minds, three, actually, if the state of his feet is to be taken into account. On the one hand, tonight of all nights, he has no desire to join revelry, especially the kind of desperate thing that passes for jollity nowadays, with all sorts of strange, newly arrived army types, both gora and native, going about as if every drink, every dance and every flirtation is their last, pretending to be heroic posthumous, many of them well before they have seen any action. On the other hand, he’s had his fill of mourning today, a surfeit of damp, romantic gloominess – the juggernaut of tears and quavery song has inexorably pushed his own ability to feel anything into a roadside ditch.
Excerpted with permission from Great Eastern Hotel, Ruchir Joshi, HarperCollins India.
