A Definition

“This is not a story to pass on”, she thought.  It was about  the toxicity of silence.  She loved that phrase.   Crooked. Ominous. Dark. Befitting. Growing up in the seventies wasn’t easy…lean, mean and hungry times, when parents whispered, thinking the girl was asleep. The night outside and the street lights were ready and waiting for the shuffling under the windows, a shrill whistle… a few rat-a-tat-tats… and then…

Mornings would wake up to the known rhythm: the early morning knock on the door and the arrival of Shyamoli Didi, who had a complex role to play in her mother’s life. She was a little more than the maid who did the stale dishes, cooked and cleaned. She brought in shards from the outside world and fed an averagely curious woman’s thirst for sharing other lives; then there was the newspaper man sliding The Statesman under the door. The father had some strange notions about a competing Bengali newspaper and it never saw the light of day at 8/E Chandra Mandal Lane. “This isn’t Bengali” was the verdict passed. The clock worked its way up to 7.30 a.m. The red ribbons were tightly secured to the two curly tufts of hair that her mother called ‘a head of jungles’. That being done, the white uniform and the red belt,  shoes and socks and the march to the Park and a short wait for the dark chocolate bus to arrive. Ramlagan, the multitasking Man Friday of the school opening the bus door with a wide smile that betrayed the betel abused teeth, happy, gleeful .  But that was a sunny interlude and gave the lie to what befell the previous night oftentimes. A scurry just under her windows past midnight and her mother’s cold hand reaching out under the mosquito net to cover her mouth. ‘Shhh..”  then the noise of some heavy boots…  a sharp whistle, perhaps?
Rat- a –tat-tat
Rat -a- tat -tat-
and then Darkness in the face of the Deep… but that was a phrase she had learnt much later. That was another story. The next morning was toxicity of silence. The ribbons were tied. Father’s face looked dark as he turned the pages of the newspaper.
— Do not look around, go straight to the bus stop .Don’t talk to anyone!

Silence.
The street that led up to the bus stop was unusually quiet. Umesh-da’s stationary shop was closed. The tea shanty just opposite had a small cluster of unshaven old faces over steaming dirty gasses of orange-ish tea.  Did the street look extra clean, washed, as it were?  the not-quite-boys,  who attempted to sing Bengali film songs on her appearance in the street and made her draw a deep breath were missing too. The strangeness in the street brought back some broken lines that she had overheard between Shyamali didi and Ma.

–Last night.
–How many?
— don’t know…

–in front of Tollygunj Police Station.

Rest had been smothered by the hissing cooker in the kitchen and the tinkle of spoons and ladles.

Comrade. A strange word she had learnt to fear in those days.  It wasn’t quite the printed word for her. They were graffitis in the mornings that suddenly grew up at nights and showed their claws and fangs on walls the next morning, all along the walk to the Bus Stop, with a promise that sounded like a threat: Memory was for ever. Comrade Amitava, Comrade Laltu, Comrade Ranajit..  sprawled in black and scarlet…Laal Salaam.. that blob of red bothered her ..  She had learnt somehow to relate colors to the whispers in the kitchen deaf-mute. Synaesthesia …another word she had fallen in love with a little later.

***

Life otherwise was not too bad. That is, when there were no shuffling feet under the windows, when the helmeted CRPs did not punctuate Rashbehari Avenue on surprised afternoons and made all crossings self conscious and furtive.
Good times, when grandmothers held her chin and told her that a prince must be lurking somewhere. Princes didn’t look like men. They were strange boyish creatures, straight from fairy tales and folklores and fused incompatible seas and mountains: Wales, Denmark, Bengal, Mymensingh . They rode horses at night, sported ornate swords. They rode the seven seas, fought the demons…  rescued girls who had red ribbons dangling from their hair jungle.

Next morning it so chanced that the king of that country came to that forest to hunt. As he was pursuing a stag, which he had pierced with an arrow, he came across the king and the lady of peerless beauty. Struck with the matchless beauty of the lady, he wished to seize her. He whistled, and in a moment his attendants flocked around him. The lady was made a captive, and her lover, who had brought her from her house on the other side of the seven oceans and thirteen rivers, was not put to death, but his eyes were put out, and he was left alone in the forest—alone, and yet not alone, for the good hiraman was with him.

But all these magical spaces were spun when there was light; when cars honked, trams tingled and little girls and boys opened their lunch boxes during recess to snigger at slices of apples, wilted jam sandwiches or cold omelettes.  Days were transparency and quite the elixir. It lingered in the air even when Shyamoli Didi waited for the chocolate bus to open its door and eject a girl with unlaced shoes and a tired schoolbag, late afternoon. Red ribbons hung limp. Evenings were getting ready.Nights were different. Dark. Pregnant, a wait for the shrieking whistle or the distant alarm from a red brick building not too far;

II

To overcome lies in the heart, in the streets, in the books
from the lullabies of the mothers
to the news report that the speaker reads,
understanding, my love, what a great joy it is,
to understand what is gone and what is on the way.
Hikmat

Urmila-Di lives with a damaged uterus… boiled eggs did that…

‘Understanding’ was a momentous word, like the epitaph or the national anthem at the end of a film … or the cognitive moments in a Greek tragedy: “I understand; therefore, I resign”, she thought.
Looking out of the window she saw Maple leaves turning red on Pickford Street… another metaphor…  radiant in Fall. Her hands moved into her cropped greying hair… did she overcome the many lies that she had lived? Or did she nurture them with a secret pleasure, caressing them as she did her teenage face when she had fallen in love with it? “Lies are good”, she thought. They were lullabies, made you long for more. But the strangeness of toxicity bothered her… the graffiti, strange encounters and coded gestures that made up her own existing definitions of tangibility.

How does one purge silence? There was the smoking coffee on the table, and a coffee spoon… the tingle was not quite as toxic as the one she had heard in Ma’s kitchen.

She cradled the silence and  she cooed into its years:

‘Thus my story endeth,
The Natiya-thorn withereth”

Dearly Beloved.