Millionth chance for the Billion

By Jyotishman Chatterjee

The lush green Sector V, beside sprawling lakes on the outskirt of Calcutta, is sparsely dotted by a handful of low-rise buildings. An offshore project kick-starts at the dawn of the Indian software industry with a state-of-the-art 64 kbps remote link. Idealist project manager, Ritabrata, envisions it as a rare opportunity to help his nation lea

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ukiyoto Publishing
• Release date: Dec 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9789360494469

Book preview

Initiation

Chapter 1

F

or years Kallol has been coming to this tea garden – with family, with friends and alone. He has been here under every possible mood and colour of the sky. He comes to cherish his happiness and heal his pain. People say it’s lovely. He thinks it speaks – with the unspoilt stretch of the green, the unbroken dome of the sky and most of all with its blessed emptiness – a language of peace and tranquillity that one can feel only deep inside. Today it spoke with an air of melancholy, transpiring its emptiness into his heart. The wavy green landscape spelt sorrow. The setting sun, a cold red lollypop, slipping through the edge of an anaemic winter sky, looked sad. And so did the dry westerly canal, and the gnarled tree beside it, now leafless – his old bicycle with its overused tyres bulging at the spots of repair reclined against it – like one wrinkled man supporting another. Alas, those wheels, which were like his legs, would be no more after today. Tomorrow some other wheels, quicker and heavier, running on iron tracks, would carry him far far away, to a place many times bigger than this insignificant town.

Young man, Mr Chowdhuri, their neighbour who comes to their house every day to read the newspaper, had said in the morning, the wheel is turning. Hold on to it. Turning which way, Kallol wondered now – forward or backwards? Leaving this – he gazed in despair at the half-gone sun – for a place with people, hundreds of thousands of them, squirming all over, like ants! Can you hear the excitement in your blood? the elderly gentleman had been all excited. Go, explore the world. Sitting here is like a frog jumping within a well, detached from all the wonders of the world. You must sail across seven seas before you settle! Kallol had sniggered, unimpressed. Even the man who would think five times before travelling five kilometres could put on Robinson Crusoe’s shoes so naturally when it came to advising others. There will be plenty of opportunities knocking at your door every day in Calcutta, Mr Chowdhuri had paused as he readjusted the newspaper with that unbearable screechy sound of turning and folding of large newsprints. This practice of coming to someone else’s house to read the newspaper, Kallol couldn’t help thinking – was it not unique to places like theirs? That was the second biggest city in the British Empire, next to none, but London. Imagine a city with a population a hundred times more than that of ours! All they knew was the blitz and riches of a city, not its heart. The ponds, the trees, the people, vast open space, the tea gardens – nothing mattered to them.

Last few days, he has been aimlessly paddling his bicycle through the same roads and lanes that are known to him like the back of his own palms – rolling languidly – now moving, now stopping – eager to discover anything he hadn’t noticed all these years – the shape of a pond, the pattern of colour or size in the rows of discordant ordinary houses dwelt by commoners like themselves – eavesdropping day-to-day roadside conversations – the market places, the shops and the wilderness around. He went on stuffing his memory with the intense craving of an overfeeding reptile before hibernation. In his old school where the vagrant wheels took him twice, he looked with nostalgia at the closed windows of those rooms where it seemed they had their classes just yesterday, reminiscing six long years of his growing age behind those locked doors.

Mr Chowdhuri was not the only person who considered him lucky. Yesterday he went to meet Ujjal, his closest friend. His sister Shiuli looked awestruck. You are going to Calcutta! she exclaimed as if she was witnessing someone just about to embark on a Mars mission. Sisir was also present there at that moment. Three of them were classmates in school. Later he and Ujjal studied computer science at the same engineering college, the only one in their town, while Sisir graduated from a degree college. The moment he saw Kallol entering, Ujjal leapt to his feet with a welcoming voice, What a surprise! Come in, come in.  He hurried with a broad smile to hold his friend’s hand. When are you leaving, I mean starting for Calcutta? He was warm, very warm, and that troubled Kallol. Until now, they had always been companions – going side-by-side to school – prodding on the dust with their tiny feet and splashing over the puddles. And later, as their legs grew long enough to straddle bicycles, they raced and languished on their two-wheelers to college, but always together. Now destiny was going to place one ahead of the other. Destiny! Or was it the wealth of their parents that made the difference? Ujjal’s parents couldn’t afford to send him to Calcutta, at least not at this point. Despite strong nostalgia, Kallol knew that from a professional point of view, he was lucky to get a chance of moving to a metropolitan city where job opportunities were much more.

I will start the next year on the train, Kallol said, and uneasy as he felt, his voice trailed off, giving away unnecessary details. Tomorrow my father and I are going to Guwahati. My train will start a little after nine at night. My father will spend the night in his cousin’s place after he sees me off. He may stay there for another day before he returns. Then he settled on the sofa and looked at Sisir for support. So? What’s up? he asked.

A wave of a mischievous smile played across Sisir’s face before he opened his mouth. Kallol will now have all the city cuties of Calcutta! Umm, umm! His lecherous tone made Kallol blush awkwardly. Sisir was so loud that his voice might have reached Shiuli in the hallway, the thought of which turned Kallol red in embarrassment.

What nonsense! Kallol is not like you. Thankfully Ujjal came to Kallol’s rescue. Kallol and Ujjal never talked openly about things related to girls or romance. It was too low a topic for their discussion. They would rather keep themselves engaged for hours talking about academics or the perpetual social problems or general knowledge or the pros and cons of Nehru’s Kashmir policy or, for that matter, the causes of Hitler’s downfall. But each one of them, when they talked to Sisir in private, enjoyed his company because of his jovial nature. Sisir was always full of stories about the local people and their secret adventures - the vendor of the forbidden fruit. I thought you were to go next week, and so I have a few more days to visit you, Ujjal continued.

Never mind, I think it’s me who should have come earlier. Somehow I got busy with small things till the last moment. Shopping for essential things also took up a lot of time. I hope I am not missing anything important, Kallol said, well aware of his pretension because he knew, more than work, it was the embarrassment of his comparative privilege that had held him back in hesitation.

Before long, Shiuli brought sweets, so much that it would be enough for dinner. You must finish all these, she insisted. Who knows when you will come next? Sisir promptly picked up one from the plate and added, We are very proud of you. Now, this is in honour of your voyage. He put it in his mouth. Oh! Delicious! Then he reminisced, The school days were wonderful! We had a picnic in the tea garden before we left, you remember? He looked at Ujjal, who cast down his eyes as if contemplating the sweets. Yes, he said when he looked up, his eyes shining like mercury vapour lamps on a foggy night, it seems, only last year, isn’t it? We were so immature then. I had sailed my hair, saying that I wished to go to America. Everyone fell silent. Realizing that he had landed on a soft patch, Sisir tried to veer the conversation. There must be many theatres there! he observed, turning to Kallol.

Hundreds and hundreds, Kallol replied emphatically to encourage him.

I heard that the cinema halls start there at half-past eleven, and they are open till midnight, said the pleasure-loving man. Just imagine! You can watch Mandakini bathe on a chill January night. And then under the quilt, as hot as a furnace, you will be oohh oohh! oon oon! Kallol laughed heartily at his vulgar expletives, relieved from the creeping tension. Ujjal too chuckled indulgently at his friend’s imagination. None of them tried to put a rein on him as the undesirable cloud of jealousy and pity dissipated with the lightness of his impudent remark. So Sisir carried on, doubly enthusiastic to talk his heart out as he got, like never before, his two old classmates, the best two in the class, to listen to his nonsense stories together.

The evening was cold when Kallol and Sisir came out. They walked up to the end of the lane where their ways parted. The settling mist with the thick smoke of the coal ovens from the shut households gave the street a deserted look. Is there any computer book – the name of the author is strange – Knuth? Sisir spelt the name.

Yes. Why? There are a few volumes by him.

There is a boy called Kabir who is studying computer science – now in the first year. He came fifteen minutes before you entered. Ujjal disposed of all those volumes of Knuth to him for just one hundred rupees, can you imagine? He seemed too keen to throw them away.

Really? Those were his heart and soul. He slept over those even in the semesters when we didn’t have any related coursework.

He is extremely down. That’s why I kept blabbering all those rubbish. You know how reserved he is! He can manufacture a smile even with a knife jabbed between his ribs.

The tea garden brought him a weird feeling of insignificance and a sense of being lost in the panoramic expanse, which was now even more pronounced standing at the crossroad of life before he left for an unknown world. He looked at the gnarled tree under thickening darkness. That’s where they had their picnic – below it. Then, probably there had been leaves, and the canal had a transparent flow. Let’s sail wish-boats, Ujjal had said enthusiastically. What’s a wish-boat? people had wondered. The whole world is connected through water. This canal falls into a river. The river goes to the sea, and the seven seas touch all the continents and their rivers. Tear a hair and sail it on the water with your wish for the place where you want to be. Having said so, he had sailed one over the gentle stream with an upbeat call, America. Although amused, Kallol hadn’t followed suit as he did neither have faith nor any specific destination in mind. Now standing alone beside the dried ditch, he felt no different. Yet, with a sense of protracted languid nostalgia, he knotted one of his hairs around a thin tea plant stick and threw it into the canal before he returned, leaving time and tide to course his destiny.

Chapter 2

I

t was the spacious bathroom and, more specifically, the white bathtub within it that Ritabrata liked most about his apartment here. The simple daily practice of rubbing his feet over the white towel spread alongside the tub and then slowly stepping into the water never ceased to thrill him, not even after having done the same thing day after day for nearly three years. He wondered if memory resided not only in one’s head but was spread over the skin too, like butter over toast. It was because the buoyancy of the tepid water and the touch of it into the pores of his brown, hairy skin, as he immersed himself each morning into the large ceramic pot, took his mind to Calcutta. The luxury of ablution there meant drawing a few mugs of water in quick succession from a bucket and pouring it over one’s head and body while tightly seated within a closet-size bathroom, crowded with a toilet on one side and a washbasin on another.

The difference in bathing styles in the two cities wasn’t the only aspect. Whatever Ritabrata did or witnessed or heard, quite involuntarily, brought a comparison between the current lifestyle and the one left behind - between Auckland and Calcutta – the people, office, roads, shopping malls, restaurants, parks, night clubs and whatnot. The smooth traffic here reminded him of the perpetually clogged roads there. When he saw racks full of alcoholic beverages openly kept on display in the departmental stores, he couldn’t help thinking of the liquor stores in Calcutta with a metal mesh between the seller and the buyer, as though between a prisoner and his visitor. The bottle, well-wrapped with a piece of newspaper, would be passed through a hole under the mesh; the clandestine manner of the transaction would always make him cast a few careful glances for any known faces before slipping the bottle into a bag. In all such comparisons, Auckland scored over Calcutta and New Zealand over India. The parameters of judgment might be different for different people. Srinivasa liked it here solely because of the saving potential, a term in vogue among the onsite-placed Indians. Ritabrata’s wife had a radically different reason. It wouldn’t have been surprising if it were the pollution-free environment with plenty of trees that she admired. But it was the location of the city straddling vast oceans on both sides, as seen on the map, that she found most liberating, as though two windows on the opposite walls of the same room could be flung open at once to the view of limitless blue waters. Queer psychology. She could never set eyes - if one had to believe her - on the thin neck-like part on the map of her home state, West Bengal because she felt choked. Height of claustrophobia!

Fix reported bugs during user acceptance test, travel thirty miles for a requirements gathering session of an upcoming project, and travel back for a team meeting, followed by another hour of bug fixing. When would it be possible to spend such a working day in the city that once used to be the glorious capital of British India? And here, Ritabrata was sitting in the beachside pub at his favourite corner spot as fresh as though the day hadn’t started yet. First of all, to travel a distance of nearly a hundred kilometres, one would need at least five to six hours there and the remaining two-three hours to recover from it.

The traffic speed and the showcasing of wine bottles were not the only differentiators. There was another crucial factor - the office environment - that impacted people like Ritabrata most. He found the work culture of this island nation quite open and highly energizing, about which Srinivasa always disagreed. He pulled Ritabrata’s leg. In his opinion, it was because of Jennifer, his co-worker in the requirements gathering team, that Ritabrata felt so energized. Jennifer was an admirable person indeed - sincere, energetic and fun-loving. But Ritabrata knew that the fabricated link-up was baseless because he had felt quite the same way about her even before they started working together on the new project. Still, he was unable to protest vehemently for fear of adding steam to such gossipy insinuation. Life within the office space, Ritabrata believed, was mostly determined by the attitude of the supervisor. The one he had in Calcutta was a man of mid-forties whose full-time job was supervision. The juniors were not to ask questions, despite the fact that they had to prepare even the status report for him. Ritabrata had heard him boastfully confide to his peers, It’s long since I stopped making my hands dirty with coding. It was Steve who changed his perception of a boss - that it might be different from a heavy sack of potatoes on the shoulders of the subordinates. Steve truly believed in teamwork and generously lent his hand in any crunch situation, be it coding or negotiating with the client about a pre-set deadline. Was it just a difference between two men from two countries, or was it a mere reflection of a more fundamental difference between the two societies, with the Indians being more feudal?

Good evening! What would you like to have? Beer? the bartender asked Ritabrata warmly with a smile of familiarity. She knew the brand he liked as he came here occasionally.

Good evening! Yeah, a beer would be great. Thanks.

Any starter with it? she asked.

Just a bottle of beer would be fine for now. I would wait for my friend, he said.  It was Srinivasa who had called him here. Last week, Ritabrata had seen very little of Srinivasa. He, too, had been highly occupied in many different activities. Busy? he had asked when he saw Srinivasa today near the vending machine, a little before the team meeting.

Call me a dead man, Srinivasa grumbled.

What’s the matter?

"The Faringi, Srinivasa said and abruptly stopped as he glanced at the far end of the corridor. Following his eyes, Ritabrata saw Steve approaching in long strides towards where they were standing, perhaps to grab a cup of coffee. Let’s meet in the evening at Helmholtz’s at half-past six," he said under his breath and before Ritabrata could utter a word, he slipped into the side aisle, with Steve still a few paces away.

Good afternoon, Steve wished in his usual cordial tone. Everything fine?

All quiet on the Pacific front, Ritabrata said so whenever he asked this, and he always offered a good-natured laugh as he did now.

Steve had a strange relationship with Srinivasa, which at times seemed on the borderline of hostility. Of course, Srinivasa saw things that way. But to be fair, one must admit that Srinivasa didn’t have the same level of seriousness as the rest of the fourteen-member team, and he had a natural tendency to slack unless tasks were imposed upon him. Srinivasa was a man who placed little trust outside his community. To him, Steve was a perfect Faringi. Indians were few in New Zealand; otherwise, with all the peculiarities of a Bengali, Ritabrata was sure, he too would have been no less a pariah. According to Srinivasa, Faringis were not to be trusted. Their men were lechers, women whores, and probably with very few exceptions, they were pleasure-loving people with no family values. Look at him, he would exuberantly articulate. He is barely thirty-five, already divorced once and recently remarried. In his lifetime, he is bound to divorce and marry a few more times. For them, it’s like a swing – going back and forth – now married, now divorced. He spoke convincingly, leaving little room for scepticism. Sometimes Ritabrata resisted, I think they don’t believe in living together when a marriage goes beyond repair.

That’s what it is! he would immediately put an end to the feeble argument. They treat a marriage just the same as a pair of shoes – throw away when it gives trouble. Then he would summarize with a final blow on the nail, his large eyes rolling under the bushy eyebrows, Lust, Ritabrata! Pure lust! That’s the only explanation. Unable to put forward his ideas with convincing arguments, Ritabrata would be seething with an unpleasant sense of guilt for his passive participation in such unfair criticisms. Srinivasa’s opinions, in contrast, were simplistic and without any moral burden of introspection. ‘If it had been in the domain of programming,’ Ritabrata silently reflected at times, ‘I could have written a complicated program that would catch all his faulty logic, and I would serenely smile, looking at his bewildered face. But alas, here we are talking life, a topic where a subtle argument stands no better chance than a clear mountain stream in the desert.’

As soon as Srinivasa arrived, the bartender came over. Beer for you too? she asked.

Yes, please, he replied.

Fosters, Budweiser or Heineken? Ritabrata was pleased to notice that she didn’t know which beer Srinivasa liked, while she knew his choice.

Heineken, please.

She turned to Ritabrata. Would you like to order your starter now? You may go for some fish today if you want. A fresh catch has arrived.

Fish! Ritabrata doubtfully looked up at his companion, who he knew wasn’t a great admirer of the aquatic delicacies. He appeared gloomy with his body slumped into the chair. I think we will go for poultry. Do you have your usual crispy chicken wings? She retreated with a nod.

Are you okay? he then asked.

So-so, said Srinivasa and turned his face towards the sea. He was evasive, not his familiar talkative self. Ritabrata patiently waited. At length, he spoke, but not until he gulped one glass of beer. You didn’t come last weekend. His voice was subdued and sentimental. He had invited Ritabrata’s family on his younger son’s birthday. But they couldn’t make it because his son had been running a fever.

Sorry, Rupak didn’t recover until last Tuesday. How was the party?

Party! There was mockery in his voice as he refilled his glass with a sneer before lifting it to his mouth. What kind of party can a couple have with their children alone?

Why? Ashok was supposed to come with his wife. You had invited Steve also.

Nobody turned up. My wife cried. My son also cried. It was hell. I couldn’t sleep that night.

Why didn’t Ashok come? Ritabrata asked. Ashok was the third Indian in their project team.

A loyal dog always follows his master, Srinivasa said after draining the rest of the glass down his throat as he thumped the empty glass over the table. Ritabrata knew what he meant. He and Ashok were inseparable friends until a few months ago. They moved around in the office together, and their families went shopping together. Friendship was a flimsy bond, Ritabrata thought, especially when it got combined with profession and family. Did you see how both Ashok and his wife behaved around Steve at their home? Srinivasa asked. Last month Ashok had invited them all on the occasion of their marriage anniversary. Ritabrata didn’t respond. Srinivasa needed no encouragement. All the while, she flirted with him, he continued with renewed bitterness and cracked a chicken wing into his mouth. "I was astonished and ashamed – how could an Indian woman be so disgracefully cheap? Where was the remarkable modesty of an Indian woman? And Ashok! He was grinning sheepishly, as though he could make everything look straight just by showing his yellowish teeth – even if his wife slept with some Faringi. Actually, that would be beneficial; his calculative mind must have reasoned."

It was evident that malice and hatred had got better of Srinivasa. He was furious, beer adding to the strength of his loathing. He carelessly emptied the tall bottle into his glass in preparation for another draught. Ritabrata had noticed his displeasure ever since that party in Ashok’s, like a burning piece of charcoal, which now turned into an inferno – never before he had so bluntly and so abusively blamed Ashok. Ritabrata looked on in penitence. He hadn’t anticipated that their absence would upset Srinivasa and his family so badly. Usually, Srinivasa drank a tad quicker than him but not quite as fast as today. By the time Ritabrata finished the first bottle, he was emptying his second. He came down heavily upon Steve. "I told you, never trust a Faringi. Did you notice how he was laughing and talking to Ashok’s wife? As if he knew her since childhood. Just show them a pretty flower, and they won’t stop until they can pluck it and smell it holding it within their fist. Why will he come to my home –