It was during the
winter vacation at our university in the early 1970s. While returning from
somewhere to our university township one evening, I was to change bus at Keernahar,
a tiny market-town. When I reached there, the last bus had left.
Small market towns in the
Bengal countryside have something forlorn about them. By the time I reached,
darkness and dew were descending on the almost empty bus stand, that is, an old
brick-and-mortar shed which had been taken over by some beggars and vagabonds
after dusk. Some of them were in fact fast asleep. The bus stand also had a few
small eateries and stores selling biscuits, cigarettes, torch cells, and other
life-saving equipment.
There were a few
people around and the shops were shutting down. Soon, the crepuscular darkness
turned the place into a black-and-white watercolour painting when a few dim
Edison-era electric bulbs were turned on here and there. The store-keepers and
the passengers from the last buses were clearly getting ready for sleep, but
the market place had been sleeping already. It was a page from a Shirshendu
Mukhopadhyay story which would be written later.
As I was drinking my
super-sweet milky tea sitting on a bench made of bamboo staves, a gust of
freezing wind blew in from Darjeeling. I realised that my light cardigan was no
match for the frosty Birbhum winter night. I also knew I had nowhere to go.
There were no hotels
in places as tiny as Keernahar and even if there had been, they wouldn’t be of
much help; I had less than five rupees on me. (I don’t recall exactly how much
cash I had, but I certainly remember that I had just about enough for a meal
and the bus fare.)
In such places, the
standard operating procedure was that stranded travellers would spend the night
sleeping on a tea-shop bench. However, the easy camaraderie that had been a
part of rural Bengal was coming to an end. Earlier, people would gladly let in
a stranger and allow him to spend the night in their outer veranda, if not in
the home itself. But in the time I am talking about, before wheedling a free
lodging for the night at a tea shop, one had to establish that they were no
thieves, nor a Naxalite running away from police. I guess I didn’t look like a professional
thief, but given my age, I was a high-risk candidate for the second category.
I suddenly recalled
that a boy two years our junior in the physics department lived in Keernahar. I
didn’t know him very well. But I knew he lived in Keernahar. I asked the owner of the
tea stall if he knew Anup Kumar Roy who studied at …. The shopkeeper, who was
very unlike the usually talkative Bengalis, just grunted. I took another glass
of tea and thought.
In about ten minutes,
Anup appeared, picked up my bag and said, ‘Come home, Santanuda.’ It seemed
someone overheard me enquiring about Anup, and given the proximity of people in
our villages and small towns, the message had reached him soon.
It was the beginning
of a deep friendship. Anup took me to his home which was a very old and very
huge red-brick building. It would have been built by a wealthy zamindar long
ago. By then, the mansion had been partitioned into a few independent dwelling units
– which too were very big – and Anup’s family lived in one of them.
Anup was a brilliant
student. After doing his graduation, he went to Calcutta University to do his Masters
in electronics. Then he began working for the Electronic Corporation of India, a
company people knew for their excellent TV sets.
By then, I too had
been posted in Calcutta and Anup, a bachelor then, was one of the regulars in
the set of close friends who would often gather in our obscenely large flat in
one of the main thoroughfares of the city. We discussed and solved all the problems
of the world and spent glorious weekends together. The most significant
difference between then and now is that the future didn’t look so dismal those
days. We had dreams in our eyes.
Sadly, my peripatetic
profession took me away soon and I lost touch with Anup. Many years later, we
briefly met at the Dum Dum Airport. I was about to board my first flight out of
the country, and Anup was there to receive his wife, who had been living in the
US. That was 25 years ago. We never met again.
I don’t know why I thought
of Anup this morning. Memory plays queer tricks on us, doesn’t she?
Friday, 16 October
2020
