Dilip sat waiting in the car, his legs propped up on the seat, his right arm dangling outside the window. An old Kishore Kumar played on the stereo, again and then again from the beginning, until it was no more than just a part of the background, with the horns blaring, the men shouting and the occasional drones of the planes overhead. He crooned the song under his breath, his mind nowhere, his voice following the difficult composition till where his primitive skills remained faithful. Heat, like the resentment of an old partner, rose silently from the earth, consuming and corrosive, sagging the cable wires that hung low like tired smiles. Little beads of sweat appeared frequently over his upper lips as he wiped at them over the length of his mask, the thin piece of disposable fabric rendered useless from several washings ago.
The airport seemed fairly empty. Amit couldn’t tell if it was operating at a limited capacity or if this was its usual traffic. He lugged his two suitcases slowly behind him, his gait further impeded by his efforts to read the signs in Bengali. The script no longer yielded under his gaze, and he had to slow down, on more occasions than one, to be able to comprehend the full length of the sentences. It annoyed the passengers behind him, who expressed it audibly enough, to which he only moved his suitcase out of their way, indicating for them to move ahead.
The heat outside was at once splendid and shocking. His hands instantly broke out in a sweat, the hairs on them spreading dark and flat. The city, with its many roads and its even more people, glowered in the afternoon sun, wild and unwelcome. There was no sign or sergeant, and yet everybody seemed to know their way, navigating the mangled mess with purpose and precision, an elaborate orchestration where everybody seemed to have practised their role but him. He felt the grip on his suitcases weaken, his palms now moist and clammy. Behind the glass doors, the airport looked cool and familiar, the smell of its clinical air still fresh in his lungs. He took it in one last time, whispering farewell under his breath, the empty airport an overseas appendage of London in his mind.
The Ambassador shone brightly in the sun, in tandem with the world and in defiance of its age, the unmistakable green visible even from a distance. He crossed the road, mulling customary greeting under his breath, the words rolling off his tongue, phony and flat. Instead, he just tapped lightly at the side of the car, and the driver came out, the curtness of the act limiting the prospect of any exchange. He gave up and settled into the backseat, as the driver arranged his suitcases inside the boot, the loudness of the successive thuds, not lost on him.
His clammy right hand left sweat patches on the backseat, as he made himself comfortable, the transparent grey imprints dissolving into the leather even as he stared at them. He thought of things to say. He looked outside for inspiration, maybe a building or a road that he could ask about or a temple they had visited in the past, but the city with her wide roads and her tall buildings, which could be from just about anywhere, wouldn’t proffer anything today. And why would she when he had never actually inhabited the place, just a small room in it, stuffed with books and resources that were supposed to whisk him away? To a better, more promising place. Why, then, was he back today, seeking livelihood in an economy already reeling under the pandemic? Why didn’t his West sustain him? Did Dilip know this? Did he want to ask too? Amit didn’t know and from the way, Dilip kept his eyes ahead on the road and his back straight up against him, there was no way to tell.
He didn’t realize when the car took a turn for his house, the road leading to it sectioned off into by-lanes that weren’t there before. He scanned the car for anything he might be leaving behind, not that he had much on him anyway. The imprint of his palm was still there, faint but discernible, or maybe he was just looking out for it.
The house looked big and small at the same time. Smaller than his memory of it and bigger than any flat or dormitory he had inhabited in the last fourteen years. Even in its dilapidation, it boasted of a grandiosity that could only be a consequence of generational wealth now. Shyamal, the servant who had been with the family since before his birth, answered the door. The warmth of his welcome at once filled his heart, though he suspected it was motivated more by the prior notice of his arrival than the bleak recognition in his cataract-laden eyes. His son followed closely behind, wheeling in the luggage and dropping it without much regard for its contents. The insolence was not lost on Shyamal and neither did it escape Mr. Sen, whose loud, deliberate steps on the staircase made his quiet disdain known. He put a cursory hand over Amit’s head, as he bent down to touch his feet, too rankled by Dilip’s impudence to indulge any more than that. He ordered Shyamal to take the luggage upstairs and then retired to his room, the sharp slaps of his flattened chappal bringing the hammer down on the judgement.
The room smelled of phenol and stagnant air. The windows, against which his desk was kept, no longer overlooked the large, disputed ground. The dispute had been resolved and a building now stood on it, blocking the southern winds that had been a feature of the room. One of the windows was clamped shut from the inside, nuts and screws in place, to block the acrid stench coming from the communal bathroom that now stood behind it. The other, though open, was just as functional. The books on his desk were neatly arranged, not in any reasonable pile, but clean and dust-free nevertheless. He was leafing through one of them, going over the elementary text, the limp, stuck pages falling in clumps between the covers, when he heard the crushing of plastic behind him.
Shyamal was at the door, flattening out a polythene bag, the contents of it now dangling from his right hand. He put the slippers down and arranged them to face Amit and waited as he walked over and slipped on the pair. The classic blue ones with brown soles. Amit walked around them a little, stretching out the straps, the insoles flattening, ever so slightly, to sit the indentations of his feet. Tried and approved, Shyamal’s work there was done when Amit remembered something and asked him to wait.
He hauled up the two suitcases on the bed, and pried them open, searching for the packets that contained Dilip and Shaymal’s gifts. He emptied one packet after another but the gifts were nowhere to be found. At the end of several odd packets, he found the bed inundated with his own stuff and Shyamal smiling kindly behind him. Shyamal mumbled something about the chicken getting burned and promised to drop by later, leaving Amit with his many packets that now littered the entire bed. This last act of exertion spurred on an exhaustion that had only been in his mind till then. He swept aside the items roughly and plopped down on the bed, the smell of fresh rubber still present in the air.
Dinner was a modest affair- roti and chicken curry for Amit, puffed rice with water for Mr. Sen. Silence in between mouthfuls.
‘So, what is the situation like in London?’
‘Same as is here. Lockdowns, curbs, the usual.’
In the dim glow of the night bulb, his father looked frailer than before, the hollows in his cheeks deepened by the shadows falling around them. His jaws, however, were as firm as he has always remembered them.
‘Yeah, and when do you resume classes?’
‘Don’t know. It will be online for now. Hopefully, things will get better enough to go back in a while.’
‘Yeah. With this one, you never know what’s coming.’
And Amit didn’t indeed.
The household kept predictable hours, Amit a silent spectator of its workings for the most part of the day. He kept mostly to his room, venturing downstairs for meals that started being sent up to his room after the initial few days. Dilip came on Wednesdays or Sundays, bearing supplies in both his arms, the daily ritual now turned into a weekly affair to avoid visiting the crowded marketplace any more often than needed. Amit watched from the verandah, as he covered the stretch of the courtyard in long, unhurried steps, a soft, unsure greeting fizzing out in his throat.
They used to play chess in the courtyard, Dilip and Amit, their eyes fixed on the board, their backs sweating under the shade of a banyan tree that was no longer there.
‘It was uprooted shortly after you left.’, Shyamal explained one day. ‘The roots were beginning to wreck the foundation of the house.’
Occasionally his father dropped by his room, not entering, not leaving, quietly watching as he pretended to instruct classes on the laptop. Adjusting his microphone here and there, he pretended to speak jargon into it, continuing his discourse long after his father had left his station at the door.
He would have to find a job very soon.
The city colleges had no openings. He started reconnecting with old classmates on social media, sliding into their DMs, commenting on their posts, waiting for an opportune moment to broach his inquiry. Most of them had left academia, and the few that hadn’t couldn’t provide him with any meaningful leads, not helped by the fact that his oblique, roundabout questions barely hinted at his current predicament. One day, however, he did receive a call.
‘It isn’t really an interview,’ his friend told him. ‘He just wants to know if you are interested. Obviously, you are over-qualified and I know you found the pay underwhelming but fishing for a better opportunity in this market is as good as accepting your own VRS’.
On the way back from the interview, Dilip stopped the car at a petrol pump, instructing the operator to fill two thousand rupees worth of petrol.
‘Thousand will do’, Amit interjected.
Dilip’s small, derisive chuckle rang like a premonition in his ears as he pinched his eyes shut between his fingers, contemplating ways to break the news of his appointment to his father.
The sun was blazing down when Dilip pulled up near the house, the side where Amit sat parked under the shade of a peepal tree. Dilip was about to step out and hold the door open for Amit when he heard it shut behind him. He watched as Amit walked around to the house, the generous shade of the formidable building taking his hurt self under its refuge. The ghost of his voice seldom pursued Amit from the backseat after that day.
Amit and himself, grew up together, in the care of Mrs. Sen, a small, unassuming woman, unaffected by the name of the household she was the lady of. Their days were spent in her shadows, watching, replicating, following her as she went about the day’s work. As they grew older, Mr. Sen started removing Amit from their society, engaging him instead in classes and tuitions that occupied the length of his days. Mrs. Sen began lavishing all her attention on Dilip.
Until Amit left, which caused in her such grief that she relinquished all her duties, resigning to her marital room where the servants were instructed to let her be. A young Dilip, bereft of a friend and a mother, all in the span of one year, took to his own ways, the sudden abandonment a searing lesson on the caprices of the big people.
Every morning, as he entered the house, bearing bread and supplies under his arms, he would feel her watching from the verandah above, a silent, seeking gaze that bore into his back through the banyan leaves that otherwise hid her countenance. He would not look up, nor scurry away, instead just heave the bags a little closer and remind himself to keep walking. Six months after her death, when the banyan tree was felled, and the moss underneath its canopy, cleared under the sun, he found the weight of her gaze finally lifted off of him.
Dilip was returning home from working at a construction site, when the phone came. He knew Mr. Sen had been running a high fever but he hadn’t expected it to get critical overnight. By the time he reached the house, Mr. Sen had already collapsed.
Amit sat in the waiting area, the oxygen cylinder feeling heavy and useless between his legs. All around him, families, their eyes wild with hope and also the lack of it, frantically sought medical attention for their patients. Somewhere down the hall, Amit could still hear Dilip scuffling with the hospital staff for a bed. Born into affluence, he himself was useless. Instead, he sat with Mr. Sen, gently supporting his frame, as he took slow, laborious breaths under the oxygen mask, the lower part of his profile disappearing intermittently behind the condensation on it. And earlier where Amit had feared the inevitability of his death, he now prayed against the indignity of it.
And thus slumped in supplication, he began to weep.
As much for himself as he did for his father.
For how long? He didn’t know. If Dilip cast him disgusted glances, he didn’t notice. Stumped by his own lack of agency, thoroughly emasculated, he knew Dilip was right. Weighed down by the ruins of his father, all criticism felt just.
The body was not returned to the family. It was wrapped in a plastic bag and shoved into the back of an ambulance, along with several such corpses, Dilip and Amit following the vehicle to the crematorium in the darkness of the night. When the body bags were unloaded, Mr. Sen was indistinguishable from the rest.
Prohibited from entering the crematorium, they waited by the car. Dilip wandered off into the dark and returned with teas and a pack of biscuits, which they shared between them over the bonnet of the car. A dog, limp and infected, came ambling their way, hoping for some stray crumbs of biscuit, his low, shrill whimpering jagging holes into the silence between them. Dilip kicked it in the stomach, sending it scampering away towards Amit, who only stared into his cup and pretended not to notice.
They didn’t speak a word. From where he stood, Dilip could only sense Amit’s movements, his peripheral vision not picking up any more than that. As for himself, he felt unsettled. Not sad, just incredulous. Though death was the greatest leveller, some people die better than others. And Mr. Sen, according to that, was supposed to have died better.
They waited till the break of dawn, and when it felt like they had waited long enough, they came back home.
Contrary to his expectations, the demise of his father made the city more negotiable for Amit. While Sen-dar chele had been a useful affiliation, he found himself managing well without it, now that there was nothing to travel back to his house and disappoint his father. Even his ascension as the master of the house proved less complicated than he had expected. In the absence of his father’s more obvious exploits, he felt less motivated to be kind, essentially fortifying the boundaries his father had always encouraged to establish. All he had to do was be indifferent, the benefits of which seemed to grow pretty quickly on him. Until you looked closer, that is. For then the countenance shifted just enough to reveal shame masquerading as apathy.
