Going Back Home

The final exams arrived. And Bimal passed with flying colors and earned his scholarship. He got admission to one of the best colleges in Calcutta – the Residency College. He touched his parents’ feet when it was time to leave. His mother wrapped her soft arms around him, tears streaming down her face, "Write home often, son, and come and visit whenever you can," she said. His father patted his head and said, "You must study hard in college too, son. Remember, there will be many more distractions there."

But Bimal’s heart sang. He was free. Free at last of this small village town with its dirt streets, its paddy fields which smelled of cow dung, and its small people who talked of nothing but the rain and the crops.

Calcutta was exactly as exciting as Bimal had always dreamed it would be. He was thankful his brother, Amal, had come to receive him at Howrah station, or else he knew he would never have managed on his own. How many people there were! They rushed about here and there and everywhere. "Be careful of pickpockets," Amal warned him as they pushed their way through the crowded railway station into a taxi which took them straight to his college.

The college was housed in a sprawling building built in the Gothic style – a relic of the colonial era. But it was not maintained well, everything had a shoddy air about it. But Bimal didn’t care. He had arrived in the city of his dreams. And college would be his passport to other better places. Better things. Perhaps even journeys outside, into the great big world.

The firm where Amal worked was a little outside the main city, so Bimal had to live in the college hostel. Amal had arranged everything in advance, so when they arrived at the college, they went straight up to the room allotted to him.

It was a small room with two iron cots, one on either side of the single, barred window, two study tables, two wall cupboards, and nothing much else. But Bimal did not care. He was happy. The ride through the streets of Calcutta, his first, had him transfixed. His brother had pointed out all the landmarks – busy Bou Bazaar, the street where every new bride’s trousseau was bought, especially the gold jewelry, the broad avenues of Chowringhee, lined with up-market stores and heavy buildings, behind whose thick walls frenetic commerce took place discreetly, the Monument and the Victoria Museum, and Bimal knew he would be exploring the city on his own later.

He took the bed on the left side of the window, putting his trunk under it he spread out the rolled mattress, spreading a bed sheet on it – thereby claiming the bed – and went downstairs with his brother to bid him good bye.

College was a breeze. Bimal had always been good in studies, and with better teachers and access to better-stocked libraries, he sailed through his college years with flying colors. He made friends, but not close ones. There was something more important he had to do. He wanted to get into the best engineering college. He studied night and day. His room-mate, Prashant, tried to get him to go to the movies, or simply to hang about the city, outside girls’ colleges, or in the coffee shop to argue about politics – but Bimal declined.

At the end of two years, when he appeared for the entrance exams for engineering, nobody was surprised when Bimal got the highest percentages. He got admission into the best engineering college in the city. He went home briefly to his village, Kishen Nagar, and was struck by how stagnant in time it still was. It seemed his family, his neighbors, his boyhood friends, everyone he saw, were rooted to the same spot, like the gnarled trees of the village. He felt restless, stifled. And though his mother pleaded for him to stay a few days longer, he fled from there as fast as he could.

The five years of study and the engineering degree came easily to Bimal. He worked hard for it, and got excellent marks. He joined one of the few multinational companies that still remained in the country – most having wound up after the country got its independence. For Bimal, it was time to move on. Calcutta, which had seemed such a great, big exciting city, though it still held its charms for him, had nevertheless diminished in his eyes. The big world outside beckoned. He wanted to travel. Visit the great cities of Europe – London, Paris, Rome. And in the east, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore. He wanted to go to Australia, and the Americas – the world held out her seductive arms and called to him in a sultry voice.

But, in the meanwhile, a marriage was arranged for him by his now aging parents. Srilata, his wife, was a pleasant natured, attractively plump girl, with long, black hair and round, big eyes. She quickly turned into a portly mother of their two children – a daughter and a son – soon after marriage. She was a good cook, and looked after their home and their children with domestic competence. She didn’t have any other ambition than to look after her husband, her children, and her home.

When the company Bimal worked for sent him abroad, to England, Srilata was content to stay back and look after the children. Bimal was not unhappy with that arrangement. It gave him the freedom to travel all he wanted. He bought a great overcoat, a few woollen suits, and he roamed the streets of London, marveling at the city and its residents – erstwhile rulers of his land. He traveled the underground trains, and he shopped at the great stores, buying clothes and toys for his children, and chiffon saris, perfume and glittery jewelry for his wife.

In Paris he went up the Eiffel Tower, and wandered around the Champs Elysees, and wondered why French women were so renowned for their beauty. To his eyes they looked rather ordinary. He enjoyed Rome – the Coliseum and the carved fountains.

He traveled to the Far East. To Japan. And was entertained by geishas and tasted his first sushi. He came back home and described it to his wife and children. And they burst out in exclamations of horror – "Raw fish? Baba, you ate raw fish! How did it taste?"

His children were growing up fast. Reena, his daughter, was going to get into college this year. She wanted to study journalism. His son, Kamal, wanted to be a doctor. He was an intelligent boy, and did well in school. Bimal knew he had a future doctor in his son. His parents had been dead for a few years now. His sisters had married and moved to their various husbands’ towns. His younger brothers too had moved on in life. Amal, his elder brother was married and was well settled with his own children. There was nothing to pull Bimal back to Kishen Nagar. It lay forgotten, with its tiny railway station, its dirt roads and paddy fields, probably rooted to the same spot in time as he had left it so many years back.

The company had given him many promotions over the years. And now it was time for retirement. On his last day at the office, his junior officers gave him a farewell party. While dressing, Bimal looked at himself in the mirror and saw a face that had fleshed out pleasantly, with thinning salt and pepper hair. His wife had gotten rounder, but her black hair had now turned silvery-ash in color. They had bought a spacious, well appointed flat in one of the best areas of Calcutta. Bimal congratulated himself silently as he gave his farewell speech. It felt good to retire at the topmost post, the Managing Director of the company.

His bank balance was good. His retirement years would be comfortable. His son had made the US his home. His daughter worked for one of the leading newspapers of the country in Delhi. They came sometimes to visit their parents.

It was a few days after his sixty-fifth birthday that Bimal suddenly felt ill one night. He was surprised. He had never been ill in all these years, except for the occasional fever or chill. But now he knew there was something seriously wrong. He couldn’t breathe. He gasped and called out to his wife, "Srilata… Srilata…"

Srilata woke up with a start. "What…? What’s the matter…?" But she took one look at her husband and knew it was bad. The ambulance arrived and took Bimal straight to the hospital where he was rushed into the ICU.

---***---***---***---

Bimal woke up. His throat still hurt, though the tracheal tube had been removed the day before. He was still in the ICU. His daughter Reena sat beside him reading a book. But when he woke up she looked up from her book and asked, "How’re you feeling, Baba?"

He smiled weakly to tell her it was alright. And then he looked around the room. And felt a huge weight of depression crushing deep into his chest. He felt trapped. Trapped in a room full of dying old people with tubes and masks stuck on their decrepit faces and bodies. He felt tears rolling down his cheeks and was ashamed of them. He tried to hide them from Reena, but she saw them, and said, "Baba, it’s going to be ok, don’t cry."

From the corner of his eyes Bimal suddenly spotted a man moving from bed to bed. He was not a doctor. He was going to each bed with a male patient and giving him a shave. Bimal lifted his hand, encrusted with intravenous tubes, and felt his chin and jaw. And suddenly he had the unbearable urge to get a shave for himself. He needed it. His very life seemed to depend on it. "Reena," he said urgently, "get that man to give me a shave too."

Reena beckoned to the man and he arrived at Bimal’s bedside with all his tools – a shaving blade, a shaving brush, a small round cake of soap, a small bowl into which he poured water, and a small, oval shaped mirror – and he began lathering Bimal’s face.

"How are you feeling now, Babu?" said the barber, trying to make small talk.

As soon as Bimal heard the man speak, he began choking. That dialect, it couldn’t be from anywhere else. This man belonged to Kishen Nagar. "Are you from Kishen Nagar?" he asked the man in a hoarse whisper.

"Yes… yes, Babu, I belong to Kishen Nagar. Have you been there?"

And suddenly Bimal’s heart filled with the green fields of Kishen Nagar. Its little dirt streets. The tiny dilapidated house where his mother cooked on an open chulah.

"The big pond… is it still filled with fish?" he asked, tears rolling down unchecked now.

"Yes Babu… it’s still there…"

Bimal saw the puzzled look on Reena’s face. And a great sorrow filled his heart. She would never know the mango trees and the great jamun trees he had climbed and plucked forbidden fruit from. She would never know how the village people would sit under the great peepal and while their days away sleepily, smoking their hookahs. She would never know how the rain-storms would lash across the tiny village town until it uprooted trees and the single line of telephone poles right out of the soil…

"And the paddy fields…? Do they still grow rice? And do the women still put out the grains and the dals to sun…?"

Slowly, painstakingly, his voice choking, he conjured Kishen Nagar up with this barber who still belonged there. He could smell the fish curry his mother had made everyday. He could smell the hookah his father smoked after dinner. He could smell the jasmines that his mother wore in her hair. He could smell the raw aroma of the earth. Calcutta, London, Rome, Paris… they were erased from his memory. He was going back home. Home to Kishen Nagar.