In Parallel Worlds

By S.P. Mookerjee

Set in the sleepy sea side town of Gopalpur-on-Sea on the East Coast of India, this is the story of the mock-colonial world of the Coromandel Villa Hotel, whose owner, Arjun Roy tried to escape from the urban life of Calcutta, and his girl Friday Jennifer Da Costa. The story goes back in time and place to trace the early childhood years of Arjun and his beautiful older sister Bula, as well as the unhappy past of Jennifer in Calcutta.
It is also the story of Shanti the demented beggar girl who scavenges food from the hotel and of Feni, her foster mother who picks rags for a living and who had been branded a ‘witch’ in her native village. Gopalpur is a refuge for them too.
On the “accursed day” Appaya the grizzled old cook of the Coromandel Villa Hotel finds a plastic doll on the beach, which he brings back as it might make a present for his daughter back home. This seemingly irrelevant event, sets in motion, in his mind, a chain of events that will eventually change the Coromandel Villa Hotel for ever…

• Language: English
• Publisher: Notion Press
• Release date: Aug 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9789352062416

Book preview

Essex.

Chapter 1

Privately, for he never discussed such a silly thing like a plastic doll, in front of people, Appaya would remember that fateful afternoon as the Day I Found the Doll – or, sometimes when he felt really miserable or a little mellowed by his new found solace in drinking arrack – as the Day the Curse Came Upon Us.

Not that Appaya, cook of the Coromandel Villa Hotel, was naturally superstitious. But things did change after the coming of the plastic doll, slowly and imperceptibly at first, and then more rapidly, and in all directions, and always for the worse. There was obviously no connection that his picking up the doll from the beach had, with the fate of Shanti, the mad girl who used to play with it. But she had snatched it away when she had run off. And again, on his last day at Gopalpur, and at about the same time of day as he had found it in the first place and probably at the same spot of the deserted beach, the damned doll had turned up for a second time, only to haunt him. And if all this was just coincidence, then the world was peopled by fools.

Again, if what happened to Shanti was caused by some sort of a curse cast by the doll, then how and why did the doll affect the lives of Arjun Roy and Missy-saheb who did not even know of the doll’s existence. And the fate of the hotel and all those affected by it, Appaya would wonder time and again in the years to come. He hated being superstitious, but the stuff clung to him like the cow dung he sometimes stepped upon, on the beach.

That afternoon he found the doll on the beach, had been much like any other. It was his habit to come out on the beach at the fag end of the afternoon, after the before and after chores of Lunch were over.

He would sit, on the crazily bent trunk of a coconut palm and under the tattered shade of another palm that soared straight towards the sky, and look out to the sea. The constant rhythmic, repetitive movement in the waters – the swells building up to create the breakers, and the spent froth just inches deep, rushing forward and dissipating itself in the hard wet sand, never failed to soothe him. And he would sit, allowing his senses to be numbed by the sights and sounds, till he was in a mild state of trance, hovering between consciousness and sleep.

That afternoon, he had sat there from a little before sunset, smoking a Trichinopoly cigar and letting his senses go to sleep slowly. His long, grey and frizzly sideburns trembled in the sea breeze and his baggy trouser-legs, always a size too short, flapped noisily. The tide had gone. The receding waters had left trailing strings of seaweed stranded on the wet sand, and they were of a dirty, untidy colour. Yellow-green. Not that he noticed them or anything else in detail, just then.

He was woken from his reverie by the distant shrill calls of the sweetmeat man. The sweetmeat man was hawking down the Beach Road, dangling two large earthen pots from the two ends of a split bamboo pole, which was bent like a bow with the weight and balanced on one bare shoulder. Appaya could now just make out the words of his shrill, plaintive cries, Chhena Pora ochhe…. Rossgulla ochhe…. ochhe Chhena Pora….. There was something desperate and urgent and infinitesimally mournful in his cry as if it was some sort of a warning of an impending calamity rather than an invitation to a feast. A sticky sweet feast of milky sweets smothered in thick syrup.

Appaya’s eyes focused on the yellow-green strands of seaweed that lay strewn out in untidy clusters, where the receding waters had left them. He remembered a Japanese visitor from the year before, who had mystified everybody by collecting a fair amount of a selected variety of seaweed, drying the stuff to take it back to Calcutta. He would eat the seaweed, he had said. Eat the stuff. Appaya had initially not believed him, till somebody told him that the Chinese ate cockroaches and snakes and the Koreans ate dogs. He also knew that some tribal people of his native Andhra Pradesh ate curried bats and barbecued rats. So anything was possible. Anything at all.

Out of the yellow-green of the seaweed and the dull yellow of the sand, something in shocking pink, a foot long and faintly fluttering in the breeze, caught his eye. A towel? A hanky? A child’s dress? The pink material seemed to have substance – stuffing? A body? A morbid kind of curiosity fuelled Appaya.

He reluctantly got to his feet and walked towards the thing. Ten yards away and he got a shock – it was a body. A tiny girl child? He walked closer and was at once overwhelmed with a sense of relief, as he realised that it was just a plastic doll of the Barbie variety, though somewhat larger, dressed in a tattered pink frock made of a shiny synthetic material. The doll lay partly buried in the sand. Appaya picked it up gingerly, slightly embarrassed by his find. He walked a few steps to the water line, bent down and washed off the sand from the doll. He then began to examine it. All the limbs were intact, the head too was firmly attached to its socket, some of the red paint on its lips and white on the teeth had disappeared and quite a lot of the long blonde hair was gone, leaving terrible bald patches with tiny rows of holes on the soft plastic cranium.

Appaya laughed. A gift from the sea. Some Indian Ocean cruise liner perhaps? A little girl – a little memsahib perhaps, looking out to sea, watching flying fish, standing by the railings on deck. Daddy look those fish are flying! One careless moment and something pink and precious eases off her little fingers and plummets towards the blue-green swell. What goes into the sea never comes back again. Unless one is very lucky and at the right time and at the right place, like Appaya. Very lucky. And very lucky will be little Anna Appaya, living with her mother and two brothers, a few hundred miles due south down the same coast line, at a little village near Vishakhapatnam. Appaya lifted the tattered pink hem of the frock and was mildly embarrassed by the revelation of a pair of tiny but perfectly formed and proportioned buttocks in the colour and complexion of memsahibs. He had of course never seen the buttocks of memsahibs, but could only guess. A little above the cleavage, in the small of the back, he could make out

the words embossed in the plastic – ‘Sally Toys – Taiwan’. How small the world was, he wondered.

Appaya turned round abruptly, tucking the doll under his shirt. He was not going to be seen dead with a little doll dangling from his hand. It was already late – almost teatime at the Coromandel Villa Hotel, and his useless assistant Ramu could not be relied upon to do a proper job. Trousers flapping in the wind, Appaya walked up the beach towards the stone steps which led some thirty foot up the side of the stone escarpment wall which held back firmly, the high ground that was the compound of the Coromandel Villa Hotel. At the top of the stairs, there hung a small wooden gate, which wore successive coats of flaking green paint like a partly peeled onion.

The gate opened into a small garden where stubborn tufts of untidy grass battled for survival in soil which was mainly sand. In a corner of the garden, even more stubbornly, stood a Neem tree with its trunk gnarled and twisted with age and its branches twisted and turned in unlikely angles and curves as was the habit of Neems everywhere but only that these posturing branches appeared to bear exaggerated shapes, which might have resulted from the years of battles with the monsoon winds. The thick cover of its small serrated leaves threw a cool and deep shadow. And a couple of small wooden tables, flexibly circular in shape and ten red plastic chairs, had made this a favourite place for breakfasts and teas.

The Neem did not look a happy tree, but it was one of life’s winners. Its determination and will to survive, set the tone of the desolate little garden. A few stunted flowering shrubs, groups of struggling croton with strangely coloured foliage and three reasonably contented looking young coconut palms, completed the garden. One of the palms had recently started to fruit. It was of the yellow Kerala type and bunches of yellow-gold coconuts dangled and swayed in the wind like surrealistic bunches of firm human breasts. They were a picture of voluptuous fecundity, the ultimate, unlikely gifts of sun, sand, salt wind and water.

Appaya walked quickly down the passageway at the side of the building, leading to the little cluster of outbuildings which made up the outside kitchen, pantry, larder and staff quarters of the hotel. In front of these, in a little courtyard, stood an old well, complete with creaky pulley and bucket at the end of a long rope, from pre-plumbing days. For some years now, plumbing had been put in and an electrical pump sucked up the water from the well, three times a day to fill the black plastic tank on the roof.

The pump was housed beside the well in a tiny structure which Appaya and Ramu called the ‘Pump Room’ or ‘Pump Ghar’ both meaning the same thing – a little grandiloquently for it was nothing more than a cupboard made of brickwork with a disproportionately large corrugated tin roof, which made a hell of a racket when it rained. For some months now, the pump when run, would make a continuous whining and whirring noise which disturbed the nesting birds in the coconut palms early in the morning and wake up many of the guests just in time for them to watch Gopalpur’s sunrise over the sea. So, as Appaya sometimes mused, everything had a purpose and everything that happened to happen was in some way useful to someone.

Appaya walked to the dingy little lean-to that was his room; flung open the green painted door and kept the doll in the corner of the cement concrete shelf, which ran down the whole length of one wall.

He paused a little, scratched his chin and had second thoughts about the doll. It might become embarrassing, he thought, the source of ribaldry and so he picked it up again and took it into the shed next door which was used to store all kinds of odds and ends, as well as coal and wood for the kitchen. In a corner of the shed was a pile of old newspapers and magazines used for lighting fires. He wrapped the pink doll in a piece of newspaper and shoved it into the bottom of the pile.

In the kitchen, Ramu was trying his best to lay out the tea and was making a minor hash of it, when Appaya breezed in. In a flash, Appaya reviewed the position, six tea trays wearing tray-cloths; he winced at the tea-stains and jam stains on a couple of the tray-cloths. In an instant he had whisked them away, screwing them up in one movement with his right hand, while snapping the middle finger and thumb of his left hand to order Ramu to replace them with fresh ones. Two more trays were conjured up and shrouded with tray-cloths, as there were seven occupied rooms that afternoon. An unexpected guest had arrived that day after lunch, and Appaya had remembered. The last tray of course, was for the Master himself – the owner of the Coromandel Villa Hotel – Arjun Roy. Ramu always forgot.

An assortment of not so new, small china tea pots – Pink, Light Green and Light Blue were placed, matching cups, saucers, creamers and sugar bowls were magically matched up and placed on to the trays, two cups and saucers for room number three and one cup and saucer for room five and so on. Small jam topped and nut sprinkled biscuits and brown and bulbous-looking cup cakes, brought in daily from a bakery in Berhampur were distributed. Tea leaves were measured out into the little teapots. Strainers of stainless steel, stained to golden with years of use, though sparkling clean, were placed at their customary places on the trays. All the time Appaya was at his usual peak of efficiency, the inside of his head whirring away like a computer, hands working away with precision, eyes focused, all systems alert, the ultimate kitchen machine. Made in India.

Appaya instructed Ramu to take out the completed tea services one by one. Room One and Three to their respective rooms. Room Five were already sitting in the shade of the neem tree. A glass of milk with Room Seven’s tray. There was a toddler there, brown and soft and fat and a great milk guzzler.

After having disposed of the guests’ trays, Appaya picked up the last tray with its solitary blue cup and saucer, blue teapot and creamer and stainless steel strainer. There was no sugar bowl and no plate of biscuits and cake. Appaya grandly picked up the tray and a copy of The Statesman – Calcutta Edition, which had just arrived from the railway station at Berhampur and quickly walked into the main building and up the stairs. The Master’s room was the large room at the top of the stairs on the second floor.

It was a large L shaped room, which opened onto the roof terrace of the hotel. The view was quite spectacular and the room was flooded with the dying light of the day and awash with the salt breeze from the sea. Appaya knocked and entered, automatically scraping his rubber sandals vigorously on the coir doormat outside like a dog that has completed its toilet.

The Master was sprawled out on a canvas deckchair in front of the open door leading to the terrace. He was asleep. He stirred as Appaya came in quietly and placed the tray on a fussy little table by the deck chair.

"Sahib, chai." He said, gently. Gentleness always overcame him when he dealt with the Master at times like this.

Arjun adjusted his position in the brown canvas sling to a more vertical one and pointed an index finger at the tray drowsily. Appaya poured. First the milk and then the aromatic Darjeeling. The strainer was gently tapped and a teaspoon whisked through the amber brew like a fairy’s wand. Appaya handed the cup and saucer delicately, using both hands. The gesture sometimes reminded Arjun of two quite distinct memories. The first was that of a bomb disposal man gently handing over a defused mine or bomb. The other was that of a temple priest offering flowers to the idol.

Have you thought about Dinner, Appaya? Arjun asked, gingerly dipping an infinitesimal edge of his upper lip into the tea and drawing a tentative sip, for the tea was always hot. Scalding hot.

"It’s Wednesday Sahib. Cream of Vegetable Soup, Roast Chicken, Boiled Potatoes – not chips, and boiled vegetables. I had quite a time getting the carrots. Even the ones I got in the end are no good. Sukha ochhe, dried and shrivelled."

Well that’s the problem Appaya, there’s the challenge. Soothed Arjun. This was a familiar round of conversation. What about the caramel custard?

Yes of course, Sahib. Appaya murmured, bowing from the waist. He knew that their conversation was at an end.

He moved back a step and collected a couple of over-full ashtrays and shuffled out of the room. Like every other day, the ashtrays would be emptied out, wiped clean and sent back to the Master. Ramu always brought them back. In all these humdrum little daily acts performed at the hotel, one could almost hear the hum of a well-oiled machine.

Ritual, thought Arjun. Ritual as in any well organised Hindu temple. Arjun smiled.

Arjun sipped his tea tilting the cup and saucer together ever so slightly for the cup was brimming. His lips tentatively held on to the edge of the china cup and as his lips touched the scalding tea, the trick was to suck in minute quantities of tea, puckering the lips in such a way that in addition to the hot liquid, a little cooling air was also sucked in. The resulting spray entered the inside of the mouth, a vital couple of degrees cooler. The tea slaked Arjun’s thirst. And he always marvelled that hot tea seemed always to quench thirst more lastingly than a cold drink, even when the weather was warm.

He drank his tea sugarless and with a tiny dribble of milk. Darjeeling. He never drank any other kind. A little shop behind the High Court in Calcutta sent him their special blend by post every month. He savoured the mildly woody flavour of the brew. The lightness of the brew, gave the impression, quite wrongly, that the specific gravity of the tea was somehow less than that of the water it had been made from. He savoured its taste, the hint of crispness, the premonition of bitterness that seemed to etherealize as the tongue tasted it.

As the tea cooled a little, his sips became more pronounced. The tea soothed him but it also brought about a state of reverie, a private peace where he was self conscious of only himself and where the outside world for brief moments at least, could not intrude.

The sun was setting or perhaps had just set; Arjun could not be sure, as he could not see the western sky. But he knew the time of the day, when the world, his world, seemed to be suspended between night and day. He had foolishly, and idly, once wondered what would happen if one day, the Earth stopped spinning on its axis just at such a time, sort of ‘get stuck’. Would he and Gopalpur-on-Sea, have to be stuck in such a limbo forever? He had chided himself for having entertained such thoughts but he knew that the mind had ways of filling itself with irrational thoughts of all kinds, that one could not consciously debar.

Arjun watched the shadowy figures of tourists walking on the edge of the sea, the women in saris billowing in the wind like tiny sailing ships, but lacking their grace. They held the hands of their little children, some of them. And it was obvious that some of the small children were tugging hard to get free and run about, mess around in the wetness of the sand. Build castles perhaps. Get sand in their hair and into their little Bata Bubble Gummer shoes and frustrate the order and neatness of the world of their parents.

There was a man on the beach selling balloons filled with a gas lighter than air. The balloons drifted about above the man, bunching up sometimes and bobbing against each other, red against yellow, against green against blue – creatures with life and vivacity born out of the laws of gravity. Arjun noted that the balloon seller was doing brisk business, he had already counted seven balloons getting sold.

Another man was hawking green coconuts, which he carried in a shallow but large basket, perched on his head. From his waist hung a menacing looking daah, the inwardly curved machete used for lopping off the tops of coconuts, to expose the thin inner shell which was cut into to deliver the water. This man, an old fellow called Dasu, Arjun knew from his first visit to Gopalpur as a child. The surprising thing about this man was that he did not appear to have aged at all in the intervening thirty years.

Arjun had seen him on the beach in front of the majestic Palm Grove Hotel where he had stayed with his parents and his sister. Dasu then had appeared to be an old man of uncertain age, he could have been sixty, or he could have been seventy-five, it was impossible to tell. He was thin and burnished black by the sun and the salt air and the burning heat of the sand which he trampled with the soles of his scrawny black feet. He had a beak of a nose, thin and hooked and slightly crooked and it shone in its blackness, coated with the dried sweat of the day. He had a mouth crushed by the absence of teeth and when he smiled, all that one saw, were two rows of gums stained by the tobacco he kept tucked in the space between his lower lip and gum. When he had been a boy of eleven, Arjun had been fascinated by Dasu’s toothless grin. He was revolted by it and yet he could not draw himself away from it and would try to peer inside, to see if Dasu had any teeth at all. But he never quite found out. It was also impossible to tell whether Dasu had any hair on his head, because he always had piled on his head a faded red gamchha, tightly coiled, to cushion his basket of coconuts.

His face always had an untidy stubble of beard, the contrasting whiteness of which made his creased black cheeks even darker. The stubble was a permanent feature; no one had seen him clean-shaven and the beard never seemed to grow any bigger.

The most remarkable thing about Dasu was the strength of his arms. Not that they were muscular or fleshy in any way. On the contrary, they were emaciated; bones with loosened black skin and throbbing veins attached. The flesh had dissolved years ago, it seemed. But the arms were long and the hands, though thin and bony fingered and incongruously large nailed, were big hands and there was nothing namby-pamby about them.

When he had a coconut to cut open, his left arm would weigh up the nut, lobbing it imperceptibly as if trying to evaluate its strengths, weaknesses, its idiosyncrasies, the stubbornness and resistance of its outer husk to the swipe of a daah. This evaluation of a coconut done quickly and silently and without any evident fuss was a knack Dasu had developed over the years. Lobbing it gently and at times tapping it gently with the blunt back of the daah, he could tell whether it contained a great deal of water or whether it had any lining of kernel formed inside. And even whether or not the kernel was a thin soft layer of jelly-like white, yielding and sweet, or whether the kernel or malai was thick and mature and almost a meal in itself.

This expertise was very important for there were basically two types of green coconuts, kochi which meant that the nut was in its early youth – before the formation of any kernel at all, and the not so kochi, which was the half or three quarters ripened variety with a layer of kernel formed inside. The kochi nut yielded more water but the water was not sweet and instead tasted crisper and lighter. The partially ripened variety yielded sweet, slightly thickened water and kernel, which could become a snack. It was vital to satisfy customers with the right kind of nut, for some were kochi coconut freaks while others drooled over the prospect of scraping out the creamy young kernel after the water had been drunk and the nut deftly split open in half. So, where all green coconuts looked just about the same, it was essential to be able to read their state of maturity, to give the customer exactly what he wanted. And Dasu was an expert at this. He made no mistakes.

After weighing up the coconut, Dasu would hold it firmly in his left hand, letting the nut anchor itself heavily in the hollow of his palm; and his right hand holding the dangerous looking daah poised and balanced in front of his face, would deliver a lethal blow, lopping off the top of the coconut with a single or at most a couple of blows. Dasu always delivered his glancing blows calmly and effortlessly, but they had the power to behead a goat. After lopping off the thick fibrous head of the nut, Dasu would gently drive the pointed end of the daah into the fleshy exposed surface and make four neat incisions in the form of a square and coax out a small cube like piece of soft wet husk and immature shell to reveal a neat square opening brimming with the water of

the coconut. Clear, unsullied and untouched, the water would reveal itself to the outside world. It was a magical moment every time.

Five years ago when Arjun came to take over the place to run it as an hotel, he had been shocked to see old Dasu still peddling his green coconuts on the beach, for his memory had placed Dasu as an old man twenty-five years ago. He had been initially surprised to see him alive after so many years. But the real surprise had been to find Dasu completely unchanged. He looked just as old as he had twenty-five years ago when Arjun had first come to Gopalpur on holiday.

Time and again, Arjun had tried to observe Dasu in detail. Was he more stooped and bent? Were his eyes that little more dazzled and bleached by the sun? Was his blackened face more filled in with creases? Had he lost any of his almost freakish ability to assess the age and ripeness of green coconuts? Was his glancing blow with the daah any the less effective? And for all his questions he got negative answers. And he was surprised, for in those twenty-five years, he had changed and the world with him. And yet in this God-forsaken little patch at the edge of Orissa, where the land met the sea and the sea seemed to meet the sky, here was a man vending coconuts who seemed to have thrown off all connection with time itself.

But this sunset-time, in spite of his extraordinary ways with coconuts and his special dispensation from Father Time, old Dasu had failed to sell even a single coconut. The little crowds of tourists had not asked him for kochi daabs nor did they want the yielding flesh of the half-ripened coconuts. Perhaps they were on a strict diet of Coca-Cola and salted crisps. Perhaps they were not sufficiently parched due to the weather. Arjun felt sorry for Dasu.

Timelessness apart, Dasu and Arjun were in the same business – catering for the crowd of tourists in Gopalpur. The misery of one could quite conceivably be the lot of the other – anytime. Arjun had a natural empathy for the others who inhabited the town and eked out a living from the thin tourist trade.

For Dasu, he had a special soft corner because Dasu represented however tenuously, a rare link with his own past, his childhood; of course Dasu did not know anything about this.

Arjun got out of his deckchair and ran out to the terrace and cupping his hands to be heard over the din of the sea and the wind he called, Dasu, if you have green coconuts, give us a dozen of them, and he added just to make it all sound natural and not like charity, "and they better all be kochi, or you don’t get paid."

Arjun had noted that in all these years that he had known Dasu, the only visible change that had taken place as far as he was concerned was that Dasu now offered plastic drinking straws with his coconuts. In the old days, he used to just offer the lopped open coconuts unembellished and one had to manage, drinking it from the square hole. You pressed down with your lower lip just below a corner of the square hole and drank quickly, by thrusting the coconut up smoothly, till your eyes looked up at the skies and the nut was empty. Inevitably a little of the liquid would dribble down your chin but that was also part of the pleasure. Then.

Arjun switched on the lights in his room, all five of them. Dimly lit rooms depressed him, unless he was romantically inclined. Slowly, almost sensuously he poured another cup of tea and added a little squirt of milk. He did not stir the liquid just then, but watched the slow mingling of the white of the milk, which appeared like a cloud under water, mushrooming and expanding weakly, contrasting with the thin amber liquor of the tea. With his spoon Arjun gave it the gentlest stir and he watched how the two liquids swirled around slowly in a marble-like pattern for a long moment, before the whole thing turned a uniform opaque gold.

He sipped his tea, standing in his room. He could hear the little wooden gate bang from time to time as the hotel’s guests returned from the beach. He could hear them stomping their feet on the pathway that led to the hotel, by the side of the old neem tree, trying to rid their shoes and slippers of the clinging damp sand. At the end of the little path, and beside the door leading into the hotel, he had constructed a little footbath lined with white ceramic tiles and fed by a tap. And a rectangular iron grating was provided alongside to scrape slippers on. A small painted notice board hung on the wall at eye level. Arjun had never liked putting it up as it sounded officious – pompous even. Bathers are requested to wash their feet before entering the hotel premises.

But it was a battle that could not be won. Every morning, the sweeper woman’s broom would painstakingly collect and remove little heaps of sand. And in every guest bathroom, under the showers, little streaks of fine sand would show on the floor leading to the gratings of the drains. They were the traces of sand that had stuck to the swimming costumes of bathers and the tiny amounts of sand that inevitably got trapped between the toes and all those intimate crevasses of the human body. And in spite of every effort made by the sweeper woman to scrape these up in her little flat-bottomed plastic scoop, heaps of sand got into the plumbing. And at least twice a year the plumber from Berhampur had to be called in to dismantle the cast iron U-bends and P-traps and S-bends to unclog the plumbing.

Ambience – I

The sun had gone down some while ago. And after the briefest tropical twilight, night would come. Blue-black night, soft and smooth, yet unyielding. Tonight there were to be no clouds and as the sky would pass from twilight to evening into night, the stars would come on. One by one and two by two and three by three. And in the time you looked down to the beach and the sea, and tuned your ear to the sound of the waves and the rustle of the coconut fronds in the wind and learnt to distinguish the sound of the one from the other, and looked up again, the stars were all out. The velvet was pierced all over with pinholes of light. The Plough, The Bear, Ursa Major, Orion, they were all there. The mind had forgotten the names, but the eye recognised the shapes of formations. Imagined pencilled lines joined the dots of light to create weird but recognisable patterns which suddenly seemed to leap out of the confusion. Recollections from half learnt lessons in geography.

And into the night sky would pierce the pale cold light of the Gopalpur lighthouse at regular twenty-second intervals. The barely discernable lights of distant ships and fishing trawlers were the only other reminders of the presence of human activity.

If you sailed due south, straight as an arrow, the only land you could possibly get to would be Antarctica. Down the length of the Bay of Bengal, and down, down, down the length of the Indian Ocean, you would make landfall somewhere slightly east of Ingrid Christensen Coast, along the West Ice Shelf and within sight of the frigid peak of Mount Brown. Due south and true as an arrow, but all that was perhaps fifteen thousand miles away. More than half a world away. More than half a world of water and wind and rain and more water. And sun, equatorial and midnight. And night. Nights of short hours and long nights. Nights with the promise of dawn, and night without remission or end.

Here it was night of the black and blue velvet and the murmur of a warmed sea and the sway and sweep of the fronds of coconut palms in the wind. The Neem tree whispers in the cool moist wind. Its leaves jangle. Soft swishing sounds produced by the friction of soft green bodies rubbing against each other.

The waters were rising as the high tide began to come in. Each swell and breaker was gaining upon the last, infinitesimally advancing upon the shoreline, patiently, gradually, inevitably. In the moonless night you could still make out the phosphorescent white foamy tops of the breakers. And the intermittent flashes of the lighthouse revealed more clearly, the advancing shapes of the waters. Slowly the beach would shrink with the high tide till finally, the most aggressive and menacing of the breakers would dissipate themselves on the bottom steps of the stairs leading up to the hotel. The massive stone wall itself would reverberate with the weight and the sound of the crashing waters.

The angry waters would hammer the stone of the retaining wall, even penetrate the crevices between the blocks of stone and dislodge loose bits of mortar and sand. But the stone would stand firm, not giving an inch. Only so much belonged to the sea and only so much belonged to the land. All else belonged to the sky. On nights like this. Especially.

Chapter 2

Ihad first come to Gopalpur-on-Sea when I was eleven. It was my first visit to any seaside. It was also probably my first proper holiday with my parents and my older sister Gayatri. She was fifteen at the time. No one in the family called her Gayatri, her nickname was Bula.

Baba was quite a grand-looking big man with a receding hairline not quite balding and a bristling military moustache which he always kept well trimmed and as I later realised, regularly dyed. He had, what every one took to be ‘English’ airs and graces. He smoked a pipe, and often wore a dressing gown. He refused to eat with his fingers – except when visiting his in-laws during the Jamai Shasti and wedding feasts when of course he would gorge himself silly on four varieties of fried and curried fish, curried mutton, moong dal with an enormous katla fish’s head with bleary eyes sticking out, maroon gills and all. There, like any other full-blooded Bengali with a hearty appetite, he would use four fingers and thumb of his right hand with ease, grace and efficiency. Baba read The Statesman and tended to look somewhat disparagingly, at those who didn’t. He spoke in English whenever possible and probably would have worn a sola topi had the thing not gone out of fashion, at least forty years ago. All lesser folk referred to him Sahib and not Babu.

Ma was always beautiful but delicate in an anaemic sort of way. She appeared to be quickly tired out and generally suffering. Her quietness and soft slow movements were always in contrast with Baba’s exuberant and dignified machismo. Ma wore beautiful saris but nothing was ever garish or discordant about her bearing or her dress. Her clothes were like pastel cocoons of cotton or silk giving her only a fragile protection not only from the elements, but also from life itself. I loved her quite deeply, but somehow without much intimacy, as from the age of seven I had been sent to a public school in the Darjeeling hills, run by Jesuits.

Baba worked for a jute mill near Calcutta, on the banks of the river Hooghly. Everybody referred to the Hooghly, as the ‘Ganga’ after the sacred-most river of which it was only a principal distributary.

Bula, my sister, went to a convent school off Park Street in Calcutta. That winter in Gopalpur when I was still a gawky lad of eleven, Bula was quite the young lady. She had inherited the fair complexion of my mother while also getting some of Baba’s robust good health.

That first day at Gopalpur soon after we had arrived in the morning, I remember, we slipped into swim gear, hurriedly, full of excitement and thrill at the thought of actually getting into the foaming waters of the sea, which tantalized us, glistening through the rows of coconut palms.

When Bula came out of the dressing room of our hotel suite, I was shocked and embarrassed. She seemed to be so full of soft spherical shapes in all the embarrassing places. Her swimsuit had been purchased a couple of years ago, and her body had grown since and seemed to be struggling inside it for freedom. She had donned a white rubber bathing cap and while I kept on staring at her in a kind of disbelief mixed with adoration, she quickly and expertly draped around her shoulders one of those enormous white beach towels that the hotel provided. The towel – ‘Palm Grove Hotel’ woven into it in faded blue capitals, covered her shoulders and smothered her stiff plump bosoms and even curtained off the whole of her back, her slender rippling waist and the powerful thrusting, heaving, upper parts of the cheeks of her behind. What the towel could not shield was the lower half of her swim suits clad buttocks. And as I followed her down the beach, my eyes did not miss the details of the tightness of the stretched post office red material. And how the colour of the skin down below where the two cheeks met, seemed perceptibly darker. And how the hemline of the swimsuit was uneven, the left perhaps three-fourths of an inch higher than the right. And I was able to make out what appeared to be tiny goose pimples just there. I had begun to feel ashamed. At eleven I had given myself my first lesson in sex education and anatomy. They did not teach us Biology in school at that stage.

During that first week long vacation at Gopalpur, we had stayed at the posh and sprawling Palm Grove Hotel, which was situated at the southern end of the beach, away from the more ordinary hotels. The Palm Grove had then, as it still has now, its own exclusive beach, discreetly fenced off from the public beach. Baba was very particular about where he stayed, and the Palm Grove was definitely the best that money could buy in Gopalpur. It was not a large place, the single storeyed sprawling colonial bungalow type building had only eighteen rooms. Each room was the size of a school classroom and the bath and dressing rooms that adjoined, could have masqueraded as bedrooms, given the right kind of furniture. It was on the long verandah in front of our hotel room, sitting on one of the white painted blue upholstered cane chairs and looking out to the sea, some distance away, that Baba suddenly decided to give Bula and me a lesson on one of those idiosyncratic rules of the English language, that sorts out the men from the boys, the skillful practitioner from the rank linguistic lubber.

Now let us see, he had said, and Bula and I instantly, had anticipated a tricky riddle, how would you say correctly in English in a short sentence, that you were the owner of one hotel?

Finding this to be a simple and simply idiotically easy question to answer, we shouted out in unison, I own a hotel.

At this of course, there was much laughter from Baba. Lowering his voice, he said triumphantly, "Carefully now, remember always that it is never – a hotel, but always an hotel."

I don’t know about Bula, but I have remembered.

Walking down the beach, some two hundred yards past the striped lighthouse, was the hotel that I now own the lease of. Only it was then known as ‘Mrs. Campbell’s Lodge’ – some referred to it as ‘Campbell Memsahib’s Guest House’. As a matter of fact it had no name. No signboard. An old Anglo-Indian lady used to live in a part of the building and she would let out a few rooms to tourists, mostly fellow Anglo-Indians, as paying guests. The place was then known among Anglo-Indians working on the railways and in English medium schools all the way from Darjeeling to Allahabad, as a ‘decent’ place to go to if one wanted to take the sea air. Most Anglo-Indians avoided sea-side resorts like Puri also in Orissa, as it was also a place of Hindu pilgrimage – a temple town and teeming with sadhus and religious Hindus whom even so many years after Independence, they found to be, stangely native.

Mrs. Campbell’s Lodge looked impressive then, painted yellow with green louvre windows. It was basically a cloned Calcutta colonial mansion exuding all the stolid qualities of the Raj, set down, perhaps incongruously, on this high ground by the beach beside what must have been then, nothing more than a glorified village. It was rumoured then, that some Maharaja of a petty principality in Orissa had built the place and that Mrs. Campbell had been his mistress.

Thirty years later when I took a ten year lease on the place, I discovered that the rumour had only been partly true, for the property had been gifted to a Miss Lynnford by the Maharaja in appreciation of services rendered as English and music teacher to the Maharaja’s children. Shades of The King and I. Whether this Miss Lynnford extended her duties as school mistress to being the other kind of mistress to the Maharaja will never be known. But I like to imagine that for