Short Story: Back?

Arik Mitra shares a moving story hanging precariously between hope and hopelessness when life sends an unexpected jolt to question the unquestioned.

Editor’s Pick

This piece is available for free reading this week

A sudden strong wind in March stirs up the dust on the trees which look older, out of place as they are, here and there, placed variegated upon the concrete, so diffused, so purposelessly arranged in their existence, that it seems impossible that they’ve lived at all, in this city, once not on the roads, the large buildings with unceasing windows, rising higher and higher, more and more impersonal, with the years, this city, as the leaves, taking on a darker hue every decade, seems only to be dying. The strong wind reminds us, as it pushes up light objects, and displaces them with a measured chaos, reminds us of their presence, that of the dust and the quietude, as it has always has been, perhaps as it always will be, an impervious cold; an old pair of shorts being one of these objects, flying off, into a curious locus of the spiral, affectionately reprimanded by another agent in the process, this time a gentler breeze from over the river, brought about just as carelessly, to land upon the naked, glistening, unpolished yet just as shiny steel tracks that ran through, always seemingly misplaced, always untimely, and mischievously eternal. The night’s last local train had not come today. But Bolu could hear it all the same; the engine’s horn-like whistle blowing through the air, without a care for the rain, that had now grown larger in its drops, a pattering veil over the corrugated tins, the cheap finish of the tiles, which in turn uncaring if it had just it’s ever, far-reaching companion, the vibrating, flashing tracks, remnants parallel, of the sometime-ago moonlight.

All because Bolu was born into a nothingness, not economic (though he had practically nothing), but one strangely psychological, effervescing every second, perhaps milliseconds, or dividing further, perhaps every attosecond, to surround him, like a shroud, engulfing him, the purposelessness of his breath, his endeavours at life, and now his silhouette, with its placement, with his ears upon the steel to detect the vibrations of the wheels, of the still absent last local train of the night. A metre or so away from his hearing appendage lay the dreary, overused, restitched in at least six places piece of clothing (graciously called a pair of shorts) lay unattended upon the rail tracks. Ears, important, more so than Bolu was, which, notwithstanding his purposelessness, were better than him, a tad bit extraordinary one might even say, as they could hear better than most only when they wanted to, at other times seemingly so irrevocably uncaring for the surroundings, with an inherent, philosophical nonchalance only seen in great sages, or the totally, hopelessly insane, or one who is seen to have a bit of both, that infamous, vain creature called poet, that one might have said with a certainty that he was deaf. Surprising then it was, that Bolu was not one of these, nothing more than a pure mendicant, unfit to make do even as a beggar for survival, fed only because there were enough visitors at the nearby temple, generous enough to feed the poor out of a sense of devoted philanthropy or simply to serve the needy, either way, fairly frequenting the place.

Unattached philosopher or not, Bolu’s life was no philosophy. He was, from his head to toe, a spent man, not a man at all perhaps, a fellow who had little wants, and in return just as little to give to the world, large or small, in its entire, not perfectly spherical span (geoid it is called), or as it was to him, his world, from Ahiritola ghat to its expanses beyond the ghats, where the dead went on their pyre, the crematorium, and who knew then where onto the other side, for though he wandered a fair bit, here and there in the city, he could never bring himself to stay for long away from the crematorium on the other end of the stretch of the road, for there he had bid his last wave of the hand to his last of kin. The raindrops began to feel tepid, heavy like grease while the wind seemed to be in need to increase its velocity, a steady climbing, forcing Bolu to now shift his focus upon his original intention, to retrieve his pair of shorts. The deep regret, which now foamed up in his eyes like froth, brought upon a strange indulgence in his mind, his mind now gradually closing its windows and entrances to all sensual perception, the rain wetting his back, the frizzy coils of hair on his head, trickling down his face, but his own pace nowhere nearly as interested to pick up as the wind’s, such that the return walk to his little shed, a matter of just a few metres, was any nearer to completion.

The heavy rain had brought on a markedly cosmopolitan silence, with diverse participants of all shapes and ages, all residents from the slum where Bolu had set up residence some years ago. These residents, not seemingly living people at all, except when they quarrelled, such astonishingly lively, remarkably stentorian voices bursting forth from their otherwise emaciated structures, were anything but in positions where life could seem to have any meaning at all, and yet they were there, watching Bolu as he finally entered the shed, now fearing the worst for themselves, for there was never any certainty what could come about, now that Bolu was upset. This premise of their fear formed the crux of the narrative, the reason, as if sentient, being that it kept the poor slum-dwellers, sometimes, awake throughout the night. Tonight they knew intuitively, was such a night. Bolu’s shed couldn’t exactly be called a room, quite inexplicable to the onlooker, though it could be afforded a description. Since it didn’t exactly have anything that could be described as walls, there was no question of a switchboard, light connections or even electricity for that matter.

What he did have was an old oil lamp, most out of place, an ancient piece of equipment, forcibly holding onto its own time, when everything surrounding it had moved ahead long ago; not even the remotest village in Bengal could boast of more than an occasional usage, if at all, of one of these, needing as it did, quite a bit of work to get it to light up; Bolu was quite adept at this by virtue of his late grandmother. After the lamp came out his infamous harmonica, the sleek thing rather well made for his circumstances, a gift from an old foreigner, real white-skin from some other country the others had told him, who had felt grateful to this marsupial featured odd man-like creature, for giving him a night’s refuge from much harsher weather, compared to what the rail tracks had the opportunity to witness that evening. Though interruptions had arrived well before he could begin playing the curiously ornate instrument, his uncaring exhalations were just about to bring some sort of spirit into it (this the old foreigner had taught him), when Duburi came.

Duburi too was an old man, an ex-professional diver, believed to have once known every inch of the Ganges, that ancient river, which had now been reduced to little more than a bin used to store rubbage before its disposal, but otherwise the still awe-inspiring fear inducing Hooghly, which could flood its banks if it so pleased, at least that’s what Duburi (no one knew his real name) would say, and everyone knew he was rarely wrong about such matters as these. The old man had now come to warn Bolu once again, as he had done three times before, every time Bolu had had the ridiculous sense playing that cursed flute or whatever it was, about the consequences of once again daring to set tunes through the god forsaken instrument. But why had the old man, now over eighty, bothered to traverse over fifteen metres in this heavy rain to warn Bolu or rather to stop him from such an innocent endeavour as playing a harmonica?

On some other day as this, the ancient fellow, not sleeping for nearly the entire length of the night on most nights, would’ve sat unmoving in his little huddle, peacefully smoking his beedis, the rising smoke at that time, the only feature about his state that indicated any signs of life. The night was still young for him and the only thing that could unsettle his tranquil ambitions now lay on Bolu’s lap, the metal shining hungrily, lapping up every last of light it could pull from the hazy distant, almost obscure streetlamp. Then comes the howls; the mothers begin to howl crying-like, their children tightly clutched and confused; the fathers begin to look distraught and silent as the fog fathers ever so lightly, as if nothing is happening at all; it gathers as would dust on the furniture inside an airy room, taking them gradually, building something simply due to it being missed during cleaning, a complete ecosystem born of simple neglect. The howls bring reverie to the tune, the eighty year old man entreating Bolu to stop; Bolu listens, but the fog once called cannot be sent back, the white-skin did not stay long enough to teach him that.

The wind swirls on the concrete with a vengeance, but the uncaring fog does not move; the diver looks out of the hole, serving as Bolu’s window, expecting the worst; his visage, dark with fear, is not disappointed. Beyond the perimeter the eyes managed to scan in the fog, there seemed to be nothing there! No buildings, no whizzing vehicles, none of those artefacts that symbolise civilization, a respite so deep that it feels like death to the old fellow’s eyes; he doesn’t feel afraid, but his insides begin suddenly to yearn for a swim, the river’s placid nonchalance inspiring an eerie fear, telling his being he should absolutely not go. Bolu looked to be in agreement, his eyes and features motionless, as if hypnotized. Was it all because of a simple night train? A mere train?

Noone dared to leave their makeshift dwellings at this time, though their voices echoed on, as born in the material realm, fears, hopes and disappointments must continue unceasing, with no amount of silence to alert the motion; not that any attempt to do so is made. Duburi squirms, he wants to live again; he doesn’t speak like the others; doesn’t try to alleviate fear; he wants to go for a swim, wondering meanwhile what the world would look like without civilization. Certainly not quiet. The prehistoric forests couldn’t have been quiet, holding much more life than civilization now allowed, civilization being something man built only for himself. The old man now with an almost withered mass of tissue inside his skull failed to comprehend how these things came into the territory of the remnants of knowledge or memory he still had remaining; names of ancient trees from millions of years ago came as naturally to him as words to troubadour in drunken haze, his mind filling with leaves and branches until he could actually see some of them outside Bolu’s inexact window: Annularia stellata, Cycads, Tempskya weselli, the giant Metasequoia, Wattieza, Atriplex tularensis, Glosopteris, Nesiota elliptica , Orbexillum stipulatum, the Sigillaria, Cooksonia, and many more; his brain tissue was evaporating into ancient foliage names, their bodies rising into some form of a tropic-hybrid jungle where scientific rules were still unborn babies, not yet existing to modulate nature in myriad ways.

Even though Bolu had stopped playing long ago, the tune still haunted the air, reverberating like a thick smog in the dense fog, as the hours, apparently in just minutes, collapsed into night. There were others who had by now gathered near Bolu’s shed, to implore him never again to set that dreadful machinery into action, never to relieve it of its otherwise permanent dormancy, many of advanced age, not afraid of disappearing, others younger, with themselves and families to worry about; gathered though they were they knew entreaties would desiccate, be pulled into whirls of spontaneously generated and just as quickly disappearing thoughts, before the syllables, words, a phrase could form, come out of their mouths and reach Bolu, who was now stone. They tried to speak between themselves, someone gestured, reminding them the common tales they shared about the city, not quite reinstated in exactly the state it was before being swallowed, this keeps happening, somewhere something all changes, so this time too some change must have taken place, someone or something must have gone missing but in this vast metropolitan, amidst the thousands of faces, who would care to look? How else would such civilization be returned if not a sacrifice?

Duburi nodded his head; he could see the lightlessness slowly pass into a glow in their eyes, as they managed to affix themselves upon the ground, standing or sitting; it was a moment of realisation that even meaninglessness requires a language, a tongue, which could get it across the now frankly quite unfamiliar, distant and overwhelming Hooghly river. For cross they must before the fog took their progeny. Was Bolu then already on the other side? The river had given birth to them all in some careless moment of its own reverie, in between its breezes, ever so lightly dipping into the ceaseless flow of evolution. But they had not done rightly by it. Even empty stomachs had breathed more than their share. Perhaps the fog was revenge? Bolu was still motionless; it was common knowledge that he wouldn’t be moving for quite some time. The invisible clock would strike midnight soon, the streets noiselessly announcing a severe emptiness, where otherwise, at some other hour, one could see twenty-five men and eighteen women pass in a few minutes.

Duburi felt the urge to speak, steadfastly holding onto life, his unfulfilled dreams slipping off the edges of the wrinkled contours of his skin; when he finally managed to speak, it was not through what is described as sentences, but an obtuse strange lyric slowly poured out of his mouth, with which, curiously, he made no attempt to convince; instead the words simply passed through the air in indirect experience, like the narration in a documentary, in this case, adding no particular meaning, phrases, hard-forged out of his ancient lips, the last sentence came out from a slightly louder voice, ‘Today will be the last.’

The crowd — saggy faces of poverty, an adverse survival of grit against all odds of ignorance, lit up at the words, not with hope, a question snaking up the blood then coursing through their emaciated visages, the final endeavour of their last meal, hours ago, toward jolting their bodies into some sort of active state. Bolu was still dead like brickwork, which was less important than the fact that no one was able to feel his presence anymore. This was intuitively blatant and inevitable, and it seemed not unexpected to all present there, that the ‘’odd jobs around the slum’ man had somehow been as if deleted from inside his body.

‘’The city feels empty again. The air feels new,’ one of them blurted, forced from within to provide some manner of blank filling against the silence, which was discomforting, taking up too much space between them, invoking a momentary feeling of rootlessness. ‘This time you can even hear the trees,’ another said. This was an imminent comment, for not even once previously, had any sound pervaded the intense veil of the fog, the veil that now began to disperse. Duburi spoke, coherently this time, saying, ‘The fog will not come back again.’ As it disappeared gradually, one could see the structures regaining their existence, pictures, getting pasted back again on black spaces, upon the landscape; there were no howls, no turmoil, no one expressed any surprise, even at Duburi’s words, seeds, who knew unalterable or not, were beginning to get ready to sprout, inexplicable and not meant otherwise, an adventure tailored as if just for them, not their bodies, as all still remained unmoving, almost frozen still, but for their minds, not as was, but beyond it, a consciousness of sorts, though perhaps even then the expression misses the mark. They saw the fog fade into an imperception, enough to doubt whether it was ever there at all, putting the city back to where it was though not quite what it was, this episode more perplexing than the other ones that had so shaken their cores. Bolu was gone. Duburi had gone swimming. Someone would take their place.

Author’s Bio

Arik Mitra lives in Kolkata, West Bengal, India. He writes mainly short stories and poetry in English and Bengali (mother tongue). His work has been published by Clarendon House Publications, Red Penguin Books, Rosey Ravelston Books-Dyst Journal, Writers and Readers Magazine and more.