Reinventing Memories: Anup

 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