Imet Suranjan quite unexpectedly. He rang the bell one day at my Rawdon Street flat, and I opened the door to find an unknown young man. “Whom do you want?”
“You.”
“Me? Why?”
“It’s urgent.”
“That’s not good enough. Why are you here, where have you come from?”
He scratched his head, or maybe his hand, I don’t remember, but he did scratch something. He didn’t seem particularly confident. “You can’t just turn up out of the blue to meet me. Make an appointment on the phone.”
I shut the door in his face. From the other side, I could hear him say, “I’m Suranjan, Suranjan Dutta. Open the door, I need to talk to you.”
Suranjan Dutta. The name seemed familiar, but not the face. Maybe I would recognise him if I took another look at his face – it was with this thought that I opened the door and surveyed him from head to toe. One moment it was like I had seen him before, and the very next, no, this was the first time.
Smiling awkwardly, he said, “I’m Suranjan. Don’t you recognise me? You wrote a novel about me.”
“A novel?”
“Yes, a novel. You called it Lajja. Don’t you remember?”
I trembled. This was probably how it would feel if I found someone I knew to be dead walking up to me. I’d just stand there like a fool, rooted to the spot, frozen. As I was doing now, gazing at Suranjan, who alternated between looking at me and lowering his eyes and scratching his cheek. Yes, scratching his cheek. I remember, because he had a large mole, and every time his nails grazed it, I felt the mole would come off. Thinking of the mole made me stop trembling.
I had been apprehensive about moles for several years now. A friend of mine, a Frenchwoman, had a tiny, innocuous mole on her hand which spread everywhere, I don’t know how, to become cancerous. When I was young, I used to yearn for a mole on my face, no matter how small; I would even draw one just above my lips, a little to the right, with a kohl pencil. But now the sight of a mole anywhere terrified me. It was Suranjan’s mole that unfroze me. I opened the door fully, inviting the stranger in.
The two policemen sitting outside the door with guns were not exactly asleep, but they didn’t bother to frisk the person I was ushering in for hidden bombs or bad intentions. I didn’t actually know why policemen were stationed outside my home, for they didn’t question any of the numerous people who visited me. I had opened the door myself today, but usually it was Sujata who did it.
Although she had been told not to open the door to strangers, she didn’t always remember, brought up as she had been in a village where houses weren’t locked. My intercom hadn’t worked in two years. The maintenance committee of the building couldn’t care less, no matter how much I complained. Completely unknown people had often marched past the policemen into the house while they napped, their guns on the floor.
Did Suranjan seem jittery at the sight of the policemen? So it seemed. His face was pale. I asked him to come in, which meant passing between the sitting policemen and me. This made him hesitate, and led to some additional scratching of the mole. His second step was more hesitant than his first, and the third, even more so. The fourth, however, brought him to the door, from where he shot inside.
The door closed behind Suranjan, and he sat down on the sofa. Asking Sujata for some tea, I sat down opposite him, in response to which he lowered his eyes again. It occurred to me that the heart is a strange thing, and it appeared to me that I had heard Suranjan say this. What if it was someone else claiming to be Suranjan, here with nefarious motives?
It was time to exchange how-are-yous. But I jumped to my feet before we could get there and opened the front door again – not wide – and left it ajar. If the person claiming to be Suranjan had evil intentions, this would remind him that a pair of policemen was stationed outside and would rush in to rescue me from an assassin if I so much as whimpered. It would also give him the opportunity to reflect on the usually macabre outcome for a terrorist or a criminal in such circumstances.
“So, how are you?” I asked.
Suranjan took his time to speak, and his head seemed to droop even further. He had greyed – how old was he now? I calculated in my head. He was younger than me, though not a great deal younger. I had greyed too.
The years disappear in a flash from one’s life; nothing else vanishes quite the same way. How had mine gone away from me? One day I suddenly found a bunch of grey strands when I looked at myself in the mirror. I didn’t even recognise myself, was it really me? Even the other day I had considered myself a girl.
“How do you suppose?”
When our eyes met, he looked familiar. Had I met him before? Suranjan had nothing to tell me about how he was. What was there to say anyway? It would make more sense if I told him instead how I was, and so on. And I continued wondering when and where I had met him.
“Tell me, have I ever...”
“No, you’ve never met me.”
“Is that possible? We must have met. How could I have written the novel otherwise?”
“You heard the story. Kajal Debnath is my friend; you knew him too. He told you my story.”
“But I went to the house in Tantibajar where your family lives. Didn’t I meet you there?”
“No, not me. You met my mother. I got home exactly seven minutes after you left.”
Seven minutes. I laughed.
“Such a precise memory.”
Suranjan smiled and nodded. “Do I have a choice?”
Every time our eyes met, I felt I had set my eyes on his before, though I couldn’t remember where or when. But Suranjan was denying it; we hadn’t met, he kept insisting. If he remembered that he made an entry seven minutes after I had left, he would certainly have remembered if we’d actually met.
He didn’t seem particularly enthusiastic about telling me how he was.
Sujata brought the tea, with crackers on the side. It’s an old practice in my family to serve crackers with tea, but I’ve noticed no one eats them – all they do is drink their tea. Suranjan dunked a cracker into the tea and bit into it. These crackers reminded me of home. Baba would bring something or the other home for us every night, and crackers would always be a part of it.
As a child, I never saw Baba at night without crackers. He brought them without fail, wrapped in brown paper. I was so sick of eating those crackers that I’d be depressed every time he came home with them; I’d be furious with him too. I wanted other kinds of biscuits – sweet ones, cream biscuits, anything other than crackers. And now, caught in an existence thousands of miles away from that life, it is the cracker that I lovingly pick out from among all kinds of delicious biscuits. I don’t know what it’s called, this act of picking it.
I was consciously addressing Suranjan with the informal ‘tumi’ instead of the formal ‘aapni’. I think that was how I had addressed him when I met him. I have forgotten many things over these past years, including everything to do with meeting a young man named Suranjan. Not even a remote memory about the date or time of the meeting has remained.
“So you came to this country in ’93. That’s a long time.” Suranjan nodded.
“Yes, a long time.”
“My exile has lasted thirteen years and yours has lasted fourteen.” I realised I’d made a small mistake. I corrected myself quickly. “Actually, I’m the one in exile, not you.”
Suranjan smiled. An enigmatic smile.
I was keen to find out what kind of life he led now. He was an honest, sincere, idealistic young man who had been led astray; that was as far as I knew. I felt nothing but pity and sadness for him, just as I do for the Taliban. The difference between them and Suranjan was that they had been offered no alternative to fundamentalism. And, while Suranjan had indeed turned communal, he had had the option of taking a different route.
In fact, he now looked like the idealistic young man he once used to be. It hadn’t occurred to me all this time that he had changed, that he had become small-minded. Now that I remembered, I felt compassion for him, what we call maya. And that reminded me of Maya. She wasn’t here any more, she had been murdered and her body flung into the lake. Suranjan must have suffered very much, and his mother, even more so. Kiranmayee. I wanted to ask if his father Sudhamay Dutta was alive, but I didn’t. Instead, I asked where he lived.
A faint reply.
“Park Circus.”
Excerpted with permission from Shameless: A Novel, Taslima Nasrin, translated from the Bengali by Arunava Sinha, HarperCollins India.
Disclosure: Arunava Sinha is a consulting editor for the Books and Ideas section of Scroll.in.