The Green of Bengal and Other Stories

By Gautam Benegal

A guest with epic gastric trouble, the besieged political campaigner, the cruel critic, the secret murderer, the homophobic ruffians, the reluctant nude model, the talking dog, the frustrated illustrator, the grandfather who pines for the home he lost. Gautam Benegal's short stories are peopled with characters we almost recognize - a neighbour, an uncle, a niece - bringing alive the Calcutta of the late 1980s and the early '90s. There is nostalgia here, but it is shot through with darkness. A political pulse runs through the whole, informed by Benegal's own preoccupations with gender and class, his keen interest in people and the workings of their minds. Yet, there is a lightness of touch, a desire to engage the reader in a story, even an occasional twist in the tale.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Nov 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9789351363736

Gautam Benegal

Gautam Benegal, writer, National Award-winning animation film-maker, cartoonist and artist grew up in Calcutta. The milieu he explores in this book is of Calcutta in the early 1990s. He has been associated with various publications as a freelance columnist and illustrator from the age of sixteen, starting with Sandesh where he was invited by film-maker Satyajit Ray to contribute. Gautam has previously written a book of short stories, 1/7 Bondel Road, which received critical acclaim. He lives and works in Mumbai with his writer and film-maker wife and their son.

Book preview

THE GREEN OF BENGAL

AND OTHER STORIES

GAUTAM BENEGAL

CONTENTS

Author’s Note

1. Manorama Cabin

2. Perspective

3. Lobby

4. Ping Pong

5. The Eager Bride

6. Homo

7. The House Guest

8. Effort

9. A Figment of the Imagination

10. WBF 6590

11. The Green of Bengal

About the Author

Copyright

AUTHOR'S NOTE

These stories germinated during the last two decades, while living in Bombay. They are drawn from the mosaic of people and incidents as I remembered them during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Those were the wonder years of growing up under the banner of the hammer and sickle, knowing that one’s two greatest enemies were the Foreign Hand and the Centre Which Neglected Us. Those were the days of polemics and jargon that sounded downright funny – especially in the vernacular – furious debates over Derrida and platonic romance over lemon tea in petromax-lit teashops with girls who called you ‘—da’ (brother). Very few of us probably noticed the paradox of Leftists (among them, the ruling party’s own student body) carrying on demonstrations on the streets every other day against the System, burning trams and buses and causing financial loss to the state, while their own people were in power.

Although these stories do not engage directly with the politics of those times, much of the elements in them have to do with the general climate. The degradation of a grassroots political activist in ‘Ping Pong’, an otherwise light-hearted story, the complete and utter hold of the lumpen elements over a helpless middle-class family in ‘Homo’, the obsession with food in ‘The House Guest’, which symbolized the emerging decadence of the new middle class, the hypocrisy and sexual repression in ‘Manorama Cabin’ and, finally, that one ever-present scar that took generations to heal, or perhaps is festering still – Partition. ‘The Green of Bengal’ was a story I conceived when I was fourteen years old. My grandfather had passed away when I was ten. His heart was broken, like that of many others of his generation. Every time our family would come back from a holiday outside West Bengal, my mother would point to the greenery as the train entered Midnapore district and say, ‘Look, that shade of green. Nowhere else in India is there a shade like that, other than in Bengal.’ And I would think of my dead grandfather, his stories and the Other Bengal, and that utterly useless, pathetic and tragic dismemberment of a nation.

Of all the stories in this collection, two – ‘WBF 6590’ and ‘The Eager Bride’ – have been written from the point of view of a young girl. It is an attempt that many would say borders on presumption, but it would have been impossible for me to write these from a male’s gaze.

1

MANORAMA CABIN

I still don’t know where it went, that notebook I found in the pile of old books that came from my mother’s colleague’s house. The colleague’s father, a famous journalist and editor in his time, had passed away recently, leaving a veritable treasure trove of old books and periodicals, which his widow had distributed to her nephews and nieces. Since my mother was close to the family, some of the books had found their way to our house too in a large cardboard carton. One afternoon, while rummaging through the carton, I found an old notebook, written in Bengali, in the most beautiful handwriting I had ever seen. It was this strange account, like a diary but without any dates. It is a little old fashioned and the prose tends to be high-flown. I have reproduced it as best as I can from memory.

N

You cannot see the cabin from the road; in fact, you hardly get a clear view of the building it is housed in through the pall of exhaust fumes that constantly surround it as the traffic seethes like angry fire ants at Hazra crossing. Like some primeval barnacle-encrusted reef swathed in seaweeds, the amorphous hulk of exposed bricks and peeling paint is obscured by signboards that mushroom out messily – wires, girders and awnings clinging to it at random. Perhaps there was a time they clung to it for support, but it is they who now prop it up, protecting the scurrying pedestrians and shopkeepers below from catastrophe.

You step over the gutter and onto the broken pavement, squeezing past a watch repairer’s shop and a paanwala, push your way through the human tide, and there it is in front of you: an opening into a dim ochre space, lit by a few naked bulbs and cooled by three ancient fans that hang from the grimy ceiling. The faded green signboard in English and Bengali is inscribed in vine-and-leaf lettering from another age, the kind that adorned the covers of old books like Thakurmar Jhuli and the posters at Star Theatre.

Manorama, it says. Manorama Cabin.

This has been my place of momentary succour for many years now. Every evening, after leaving Writer’s Building, I take the bus from Esplanade and get off at Hazra-mor, settle myself down here and spend some time over a snack and a cup of tea. Sometimes I linger on and have my dinner here too, before the short walk to my house in the lane around the corner. I am single and there is no one and nothing waiting for me at home, except a bed, an almirah and the few possessions of a lifelong bachelor.

I take my place in a booth adjacent to the cash counter. What shall I have today? Perhaps an egg devil and a cup of tea? There is an old song playing from an Uttam–Suchitra film on the transistor.

‘Ei poth jodi na shesh hoy, tobe kamon hoto tumi bolo toh

Jodi prithibita swapner desh hoy, tobe kamon hoto tumi bolo toh...’

The waiter, a reedy middle-aged man with a lean face and sallow complexion, thick glasses on his sweaty nose and an unruly mop of wiry grey hair on his balding head, tells me that the bhetki is fresh. He smiles as he does so, revealing paan-stained broken teeth, wiping his thin, veined hands on his stained dish rag.

The cabin is on its last legs and it is his refuge too.

‘In that case, a fish fry, Ashok,’ I say, shaking out my handkerchief and mopping my greasy face.

It has taken me the better part of an hour today to get here, standing on one leg, squeezed by the press of bodies in the crowded minibus. I take a sip of water from the glass. There is no need to draw the thick velvet curtains, heavy with the dust and grease of years. I have no need of privacy. They do, that young couple in the booth diagonally across me, sitting side by side in the shadows, he holding her around the slender waist, crooning something softly, she looking up at him shyly, two cups of tea growing cold in front of them on the marble-topped wooden table. The two come closer, like nodding flowers in a Hindi film shot. The girl notices me watching them, her dark eyes widening in alarm and she whispers something to the boy. He reaches out with alacrity and yanks the curtain, closing the inadvertent little gap and they are a world unto themselves again.

Will all this bear fruit?

My eyes stray over the smoky yellow walls, rough and patched with oil stains. I hear the plaintive strains of a shehnai, the rustle of Banarasi silks in the stifling heat of a wedding hall; I see the arch at the doorway decorated with flowers and a large tinsel butterfly.

Gold jewellery glisters in the harsh tungsten lights, rouge runs with sweat on the powdered faces of boudis, kakimas and mashimas, the overblown roses of yesteryears. The long wooden trestle table is set; the roll of white paper unrolls over it; a table cover freshly laid for the dinner guests and changed with every batch. The ubiquitous maternal uncle urges the servers holding brass buckets of steaming mutton curry to pour some more on the guests’ banana leaves. ‘Over here! Over here!’ In another room, the bride blushes into her veil as the old pishishashuri lifts her chin fondly and says, ‘Let me see you, ma … Oh, she is so painfully thin! Sweet child!’ adding drolly, ‘Well never mind, she’ll fill out after a few days of her husband’s attentions, just wait and see!’

The unmarried sisters-in-law rib the bridegroom. ‘How well will you cherish our sister? Show us!’ They fall on each other with peals of laughter. Kohl-lined eyes flash at the bachelor friends, eyes that hold the promise of trysts in magical half-light under Durga’s benevolent gaze to the thudding of dhaks that set fire to the blood…

And beyond that too, I see in that corner there, in those cobwebs, the hammer and anvil of life that beats even the most ardent lover into pulp. The fetid exhalation of recurrent tedious days. There will come indifference, perhaps even neglect. But not today.

Not today.

‘Are you sure this is bhetki?’ I ask the waiter as he puts the plate on the table. ‘The Farakka barrage just about finished them all off. Are you sure this is not one of those estuarine dolphins?’

It is a poor attempt at a joke and one he has heard before from me, but Ashok still juts out his tongue between his teeth to show chagrin at such imputations as he always does and says, ‘Chhee, sir, as if we would!’ and ducks his head and leaves.

As I finish and pay my bill, the couple is still there, behind the curtains. The owner has thrown a few token glowering looks in their direction and Ashok has poked his head inside a couple of times pointedly, asking them if there would be anything else, but they have refused to take the hint.

As I pass their sanctuary I hear the girl saying in a low voice, ‘Your sister is nice. She is on our side, I’m sure of it.’

Over the next few evenings I find myself sitting in the booth behind theirs, with only a thin wooden partition with a crack in it separating us. I must confess I am curious. With the rise and fall of their conversation, I begin to make out words, phrases even. The girl is called Runu and the boy, Sayan. He comes from a Barendra Brahmin family, and his father is a schoolteacher, a man with a fine temper, who, as the saying goes, flies into a rage if even a bit of lime drops from his paan. He is vehemently opposed to anyone in his family marrying outside their community and caste. Runu is the only daughter of a jeweller who has a shop in Gariahat. She is a Shonarbeney, that is, the gold-trading community of the Vaishya caste. It is unthinkable for them to get married.

It is risky for Sayan and Runu to be seen together in public, so they meet in the anonymity of crowds in dark cinema halls, on the ghats along the Hooghly, and in enclosed

booths in cabins like this one. This is their favourite spot because the management isn’t too impatient and doesn’t hurry them along. Hardly anyone comes here. Shoma, Sayan’s unmarried sister who studies in the same class as Runu in Sri Sikshayatan College, passes their notes along to each other.

N

‘Runu…’

‘Yes?’

‘Do that again?’

‘What?’

‘That thing you did just now when I called your name. That lift of the eyebrow. May I kiss it?’

‘Jahhh! You are always looking for an excuse!’

‘Opportunistic, would you say?’

‘Hmmm … maybe that’s good.’

‘How so?’

‘You might make a good businessman one day.’

‘Ohoho! So it’s money you are interested in?’

‘Jahhh!’

Silence. And then she says softly, ‘We just need enough for us. We just need each other.’

‘Tomorrow let’s meet in front of Gorky Sadan? They are showing Battleship Potemkin. I want you to see that film.’

‘Yesterday Bulapishi had come—’ Hesitancy. Awkwardness in her voice.

‘Bula … oh, that pesky aunt of yours from Uttarpara? So?’

‘I was late getting back. I told you we’d get late. But you didn’t listen.’

‘They said something? Scolded you?’

‘She said grown girls shouldn’t be out so late. Where had I gone? Who was I with?’

‘Why? Tuitions. Your student is a slow learner, so you had to spend some more time with him.’

‘It’s not funny. They listen to her. And what if they find out I stopped teaching that kid a month ago?’

‘But how will they find out? They don’t follow—’

At this point Ashok pokes his head in and grumbles, ‘Dadababu … it’s been some time. Now order something.’

Sayan gruffly says, ‘Okay okay … a moghlai porota and … a chicken cutlet.’

Ashok leaves.

Sayan says, ‘I’ll have to borrow some money from you today. I’m—’

‘That’s all right, ’ Runu says quickly.

‘I feel so bad, taking money from you. I am the one who should be—’

‘Don’t say that, please. When you get a job, everything will be fine.’

‘And I’ll keep you like a queen?’

‘Jahhh! As if!’