Mr. Sen sat in the blue glare of the laptop, his eyes a little too close to the screen, his fingers tracing the line of the six-digit OTP. Just to be sure. He placed the order and a big, green tick appeared on his screen in silent commendation. He quickly opened his bank account in a new tab and when the balance tallied with his calculation, he pushed back his chair in a sigh of relief and triumph. His grandchild smiled back at him from the laptop, a plump, white child in a weird carrot suit. His eyes wore a light blue and his left cheek dimpled with the dazed smile from seeing whatever it was behind the camera that had caught his attention. He looked like a postcard baby, the kind that came with a photo frame or looked down at you from the whitewashed walls of paediatric clinics. He didn’t look like his own blood and on some days, even didn’t feel like it. The last time they had video-called, the baby already had an accent. His Bengali had almost given away to English and spit bubbles and he already hated the ritual call to India. Mr. Sen wasn’t very fond of the ritual either, the exchanges with his son’s wife always sounding a bit too rehearsed, their mutual ignorance of each other’s native tongue restricting their conversations to resemble the pages of an elementary grammar textbook. And yet day after day, he switched on his laptop at exactly 2 pm (IST) and 9:30 am(BST), the only time of the day that his son could afford to accommodate his long, drawn-out inquiries about their lives in the UK. Mr. Sen would watch in amazement as they ran about in the frame, preparing to leave for work, looking for a missing sock or downing a cup of black coffee between feeding the baby mouthfuls of mash, who looked around in as much bewilderment.
It was 11 pm (IST) now. He refreshed the page and checked his balance one last time and then closed the laptop, drowning the room in darkness.
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The parcel arrived a few days later, in a crushed brown box with the retail website’s logo taped from all sides, in a very subtle attempt at branding. Mr. Sen was having his breakfast, a bowl of puffed rice with milk and sliced bananas, taken between reading the column about the aggressive campaigning of the BJP for the upcoming elections in the state. The maid kept the parcel in front of the chair next to him and stood expectantly, her fingers eagerly tapping the sides of the adjacent chair. There were few things to look forward to in the house, and a parcel sent by post was always one of them. The old man hardly ever used the things that his son sent him and often gave them away to Malati, who always found ways to carefully repurpose them in her own household. When he didn’t look down from his newspaper and showed no sign of presently intending to, Malati took the hint, brushed away the scarlet that had risen to her face, and busied herself with scrubbing the kitchen slab a little more vigorously than she needed to. By the time she left, it was well past noon and there lay a neat array of plates covered with more plates, on the dinner table.
Mr. Sen didn’t sit down for lunch. Instead he picked up the box and went into the kitchen to look for a pair of scissors. When he couldn’t find one, he picked at the agonizingly many layers of tape, prying the box open from the side that yielded first. It was a red tracksuit wrapped in even more layers of packaging. When he held the jacket out at a distance, examining it in streaming daylight, the red looked redder and cheaper than what it had looked on the model. The jacket slopped down his shoulders and he had to continuously adjust the elastic of the trousers over the circumference of his slight paunch. When he looked into the mirror, his grey hair had paled out in comic contrast and Malati was smiling amusedly at him. He shrank further in his jacket, his forehead wrinkling up in several layers of embarrassed anger until Malati sized him up one last time, said he should wear it more often and left with a curt wave of the box of betel nuts that she had actually come back for.
The tracksuit lay at the back of his cupboard, beckoning to him from under layers of winter clothing. Invisible mosquitoes sucked at his limbs during the day and the moon hung too bright at night. It made him restless and irritable. Until one day, when he woke up very early, even before the break of dawn and slipped the tracksuit on. The colour looked more favourable in the diffused glow of the night lamp. He liked it better. When he went out on the streets, the streetlights were still on. Leftover food and piles of garbage were strewn outside the gates of a few houses, giving out a faint, foul smell into the last remaining darkness of the night. A few stray dogs barked at him, the others just perked up their heads a little, as they lay curled in semicircles over scattered manholes. Mr. Sen started jogging slowly, picking up speed as he went, the light morning breeze nibbling at the back of his neck. His calves strained deliciously in the memory of a forgotten form but his breathing became uneven a little before he would have liked. He kept running. He jogged past the local laundry with the one-armed owner, the house of a friend who had succumbed to a heart attack a few years back, the grocery store that thrived despite its unreasonable pricing just because things were easily available. By the time he stopped to take a break, the sun had fully risen. A priest stood bathing at a roadside tap nearby, adjusting his sacred thread across the breadth of his chest, the wet, diaphanous weave of his dhoti clinging onto his groin like a second skin. A newspaper vendor idled across the street in his bicycle, with all the time in the world, occasionally stuffing paper rolls into the nooks of collapsible gates or slipping them under the space between the doors. Mr. Sen stopped at a tea stall, took a seat at the adjoining wooden bench and waited patiently as the woman behind it arranged her wares for the day. She came around with a piping hot cup of tea and a rusk that he hadn’t asked for. He didn’t turn it down. The cup was too small and it had been a long time since he had had tea from a roadside stall. He struggled to hold the cup around the edge and his fingers stung from the incompetency. The woman noticed this and gave him an extra cup to put his own cup in which he accepted gratefully. He was halfway through with his tea, when a man came and sat on the bench across from him. He had an office bag going over his shoulder that he kept very close to himself. He carried some files in his hand that he referred to from time to time, memorizing his lines under his breath. When his tea arrived, he replaced the files in his satchel and took in his surroundings at last. He looked at Mr. Sen and a truant smile appeared at the corners of his mouth, that he had the decency to disguise into an exaggerated blowing of the tea. Mr. Sen crushed the two cups in his hand, threw them in a nearby bin and left the place.
By the time he entered his lane again, jogging back past the grocery store, his friends house and the local laundry, there were a lot more people on the street. They were gathered around the tube well, the men with towels wrapped around their waist, the women in their maxis bunched up just above their ankles. The men spoke with mouthfuls of toothpaste while the women jostled to put their buckets under the tube well. Now this wasn’t the kind of neighbourhood where people had to jog every morning to keep themselves fit. This was a middle-class locality where the women wore their bones off looking after the young and the old members of the family, navigating the labyrinth of chores so seamlessly that it went mostly unappreciated, while the men spent their day taking care of underwhelming bouts of family businesses or went from door to door trying to match impossible sales targets. They worked hard and long, raising their children well, providing them with comforts that belied the efforts behind it, in the hope that they grow up to be better established in the society and take care of them and gift them a last few days of dignity, peace and hopefully, some final days of humoured inactivity.
Mr. Sen suddenly became acutely aware of people’s eyes on him, which made his movements conscious, restricting his gait somewhere between a slight jog and an awkward limp. No sooner had the gate clanked shut behind him, that a soft murmur arose from near the tube well. While the woman tsk-ed their tongue over his loneliness and a particularly old one of them painstakingly iterated why a man should never outlive his wife, the men joked about his comical attempt at reliving the days gone by, though ending their discussion on a note of unanimous concern . The water overflowed from the forgotten buckets and braided into a stream just before it flowed into the drain, the soft, lapping sound rising to meet the growing chaos of the day.
Mr. Sen, however, didn’t seem to mind the gossip. Everyday he woke up before dawn and put on his red tracksuit. It made him break into sweat underneath, in uncomfortable patches under the arm, and along the length of his back. But he wore it anyway, like a guise that miserably compromised his conspicuity but turned him into a tacky old man running on the street, who could be from just about anywhere. He clanked the gate shut behind him each day, breaking the numbing stillness of the early morning hours and went jogging into the dispersing darkness of the night, gathering whispered disapproval that rose behind his back in a soft, growing conspiracy to match the increasing brightness of the day. Each day he strayed a little further, discovering new alleys and old fish markets, sampling a new tea stall everyday. He talked to shopkeepers and fish mongers, asking them about their wives and their children. The people didn’t like it at first, showing a reluctance to entertain his rambling as they prepared for the day, but the reluctance mollified as he asked more genuinely invested questions. Mr. Sen listened to them patiently as they spoke about their dwindling business or their ailing children and his brows furrowed with unadulterated concern, only to never meet them another day. One day he went as far as the lake, his knees buckling under him, his breath coming short. Around him, people were jogging or walking their dogs, discreetly stopping and positioning the pups along bushes when the animals needed to relieve themselves. Mr. Sen watched as the people ran around self-importantly, in groups of two or three, their neon sportswear accentuating the progress they had made thus far. He found old people like him, doing yoga or jogging lightly, and for the first time since he had worn the tracksuit, his body expanded to inhabit the full volume of it.
He started visiting the lake more often, his stamina growing to reach the place a little less tired each day. He asked Malati to cut the sides of bread and store them in a jar and kept it near the door. He picked out a handful of these while leaving the house each day. He loved watching the ducks eat them, flapping their wings as they ate, as if to take flight, but then settling down, in reconsideration of the old man watching them. It was on a day like this that he met Mr. Lahiri, an old friend from college that he didn’t remember being particularly close to. They caught up on the old times, Mr. Lahiri introducing him to old friends on Facebook. He was a talkative old man, Mr. Lahiri, afraid of any ensuing silence, always feeling the need to fill them with a staccato of words. He came up to Mr. Sen each day, bringing with him a bag full of news, domestic and national, sometimes even international(which extended only as far as Pennsylvania, where his son was pursuing his PhD), which he conveyed with great enthusiasm between spitting mouthfuls of betel juice, a little too close to his foot than Mr. Sen would have liked it.
It was a Friday morning. Mr. Sen and Mr. Lahiri were watching the ducks waddling along the glinting periphery of the lake. Mr. Lahiri was saying something, but his voice came to Mr. Sen soft and muffled as if from underwater. A sharp pain shot up his left arm and his body was covered in a thin layer of sweat. He tried mumbling something but the world closed down on him. He woke up to find himself in the backseat of Mr. Lahiri’s car. The car had stopped at a signal. All the windows were down but the engine kept running with a soft rumble to keep the A.C on. When they reached Mr. Sen’s house, Malati was already waiting at the gate. She informed Mr. Lahiri that the family doctor was on the way and they both supported him by the shoulders as they led him into the house. The inseam of his trousers had a thin stream of shit running down the length of it and the backseat of Mr. Lahiri’s car had a few specks of yellow.
Mr. Sen didn’t speak a word after that day. Mr. Lahiri dropped by each evening, bringing with him the clamour and bustle of the city but Mr. Sen didn’t listen to any of it. He just lay listlessly on his bed, staring out of the window, his eyes following the sun as it travelled across the square piece of sky. Malati checked on him every few hours, turning him around on the bed for a couple of times during the day. She bathed him and took him to the bathroom, cleaning up after him, the few times he relieved himself on the way. Specks of white talcum gathered in the soft folds of his neck. The room smelled of sickness and phenol.
The day the second attack came, Malati had already left for her home. There was a storm blowing outside and the windows flapped ferociously, threatening to come unhinged. Slanted, swollen drops of rain sprayed in from the windows, wetting the books kept on the table. Lightning tore the sky open, and the dance of the peepal leaves came alive in the intermittent flashes of light. Mr. Sen could hear the planters overturning on the terrace overhead. He dragged himself up on the bed and started going upstairs, feeling his way through the darkness. He started bringing in the small plants, the rain battering down hard on him. He was bringing in a bougainvillea plant, when his knees buckled and he dropped the plant with a thud, himself collapsing soon after. As he lay in the gathering pool of water, a memory came back to him. They were going on a family road trip when his wife noticed a particularly rare colour of bougainvillea blooming over the boundary wall of a house. She stopped the car and walked up to the house, while the rest of them remained seated in the car, betting over the ridiculousness of her pursuit. When she returned, she had a cutting in her hand and a triumphant smile on her face. Shobha, Shobha, Shobha…..
And then the world closed down on him, in a blur of rain and darkness.
Malati was the first to discover him. She sat down beside him and checked his pulse, running a soft hand over his partially open eyes. She then wiped off the tears prickling at the back of her eyes, straightened herself and went out to inform the neighbours. The doctor said he passed away some time during the early hours of the morning. His son couldn’t be there at his funeral and Mr. Lahiri stepped in to perform the rituals.
His son came down a week later, just by himself, to perform the last rites. He settled everyone’s dues and relieved Malati of her duties. He distributed his father’s belongings among the servants, letting them keep whatever they wanted. Malati took only the jacket of the tracksuit; the trousers had been disposed of the day Mr. Sen had soiled them. She said she was taking it for her husband to wear in the coming winter. The other members of the staff disapproved of her choice, one particularly old gardener caring to point out that it wouldn’t bode well for her husband to use a dead man’s clothes. She smiled wryly and took it anyway, saying it couldn’t be more ominous than their poverty. However, when winter came and her husband asked for it, she suggested that it would not be a good idea to use it after all.
The story was also published in the May ’22 issue of the Monograph Magazine.
