(from a childhood in India)

by Prosenjit Dey Chaudhury

The sun shines upon the town, and the streams turn their ways. Those who stand to gaze upon the waters soon mingle with the earth. In their turn, the leaves of the trees on the banks fall to the ground. Men and women talk about the high prices and the low prices that prevail in a number of markets.

Often, over the streams, a board of bound poles set upon stilts in the water leads across to shops, sheds and consulting cabins that are invariably made of bamboo. While the not-so-clean waters move by slowly but surely, the practitioner hears the cases of the visiting patients and prescribes a few medicines that do not fail to be in his box. On two benches along the walls of the room, those who have come to see the medicine man sit with their heads bent and look up occasionally to see if the current patient has quit his seat in front of the doctor’s bench. In the shed next to the consulting chamber, a few bicycles are parked, having been towed there in expectation of a quick lubrication for the sprocket and chain. The third room in this row across the water is the shop of a figure behind an old counter of buckling wood and timeless glass. He is making tea for those standing in groups of twos or threes with their hands in their pockets. When the tea comes to the hand in a dented cup, the pockets are quit, and the free hand moves in rhythm with sparkling eyes as a point is discussed. The melancholy inspired by the sight of the turgid, unrelenting waters is gone.

On payday, in the evening, the people come out of the offices without sagging shoulders. They spend a little more than usual on provisions and other items before going home. The following days are spent in easy frequentation of the markets large and small in the town and on the fringe. In summer, this is usually the time of month when amusement fairs are held and bazaars spread around them. On the barren unclaimed fields within the town and even on the streets, stalls station themselves to uncover special products brought from select locations in the region for which the town stands as capital. The items that attract the greatest attention are handicrafts, cosmetics, toys and utensils. In a forgotten corner, a spry man with a white beard is sitting patiently in a chair, waiting for someone to see his collection of old books. In the next corner, an older man, again with white beard, is sitting cross-legged on the ground; he is explaining efficaciously to potential customers the benefits of reciting the verses personally inscribed in the cloth-bound prayer books stacked in rows that grow to the height of a child.

All at once the attention is drawn to a man crying in a shrill, steadfast voice and holding out a rosy mass of fibrous candy at the end of a thin stick. In the open, a small queue is forming outside a tent. If you are curious, you are informed about what supposedly goes on inside the tent; if what goes on inside is reasonably safe for young eyes to view, you will be standing in the queue next to your mother and your aunt. Inside, a little crowd is standing upon upturned brown earth with a few tufts of grass and watching a stage of old grey-brown planks where a magician and his assistants are in motion. Sometimes the magician’s mother graces this august stage; she lifts the magician off the floor and carries him one way with one simple swish of a wand and the other way with another simple swish.

The old grand offices dating from those times when the kings acknowledged the dominion of the foreign rulers now serve as the site for regular markets in the centres of the town. The town really does not have one centre but concentrates its buying and selling in irregular spots established from long before. Books and wares are on constant display at the wide entrances of those grand offices where formerly the representatives of another power considered applications for travel and commerce outside this land. The wares always wear a solemn aspect of authority, in marked contrast with the glittery, thrusting items of the monthly fair. In those grand offices, dark stairways lead up to upper rooms where unknown business is conducted. That, however, is not a matter of concern when you come to shop here. Sometimes you find an unusual book where there is everyday consumer ware. This in itself is a reason for being well-satisfied and coming back home with a sense of conquest.

A little farther from the town, there is a market of smuggled goods that have arrived from across the border. Here, there are certainly products that you keenly desire. It is wise, nonetheless, not to reveal your appetite to the vendor. As a rule, he quotes a very high price for any item in which one evinces an interest. The technique to employ on such occasions is to quote a comparatively very low price in turn and walk away. Before you have taken five steps, you are hailed and informed that the terms have been accepted. For making the journey towards such acquisitions, the rickshaw is of no avail; instead an office car is requisitioned, usually a hardy and trustworthy jeep. To bounce in the back of a jeep and watch the rough trail lengthen under you is an experience undertaken in reverential silence. Sometimes the jeep pulls up beside a gate and parks itself there. Behind a wall of aged saplings where grow flowers and orchids, there appears a house with lights shining within. If you descend from the jeep, stand outside and cast your eyes far down the road, there might appear the blinking lights of another country beyond the border.

The town is the seat of government for one of the many provinces that are in effect ruled from a distant hub. Periodical elections are held to bring one of two main parties to power, of whom the notable propagandists and activists are known in local circles. It makes little difference who is in power; the two contending enterprises speak in contrasting ways in the period before the elections, but once in power their actions are quite the same. The elected go to an imposing, chaste edifice that has columns in its façade and fountains in gardens to one side; there they rule and answer criticism. They continue in power or make way for the other party. While the typewriters run clip-clop in the white rooms across the town, funds arrive from the distant centre; these have to be disbursed in accordance with traditional rules. Roads have to be built and rivers have to be tamed.

The kings are gone, but their traces remain all over the town. Those who can claim descent through the royal line, or those with names similar to those of the kings make business and draw business. The trucks come to the land by road and go away by road. There are only a few industries; agricultural and forest produce go to other provinces for eventual exchange with manufactured bicycles and other essential commodities. Rickshaws are assembled in the town itself, partly from the remnants of these cycles. There are a handful of banks in the town and hardly any outside the town. Someone comes once every two or three months to a family house to sell either a savings scheme or an insurance policy. Shares and stocks are a phenomenon that goes on somewhere else. There are no great conventions, conferences or gatherings in this land, save those at weddings and festivals, at which traditional works in the form of sculptures and wood furniture are shown. The festivals do produce plays and dramas that revolve around the images and icons on display. The people of the town go to them in large numbers; they are quite fond of the live theatre, though few are the theatres and fewer still are the shows.

Flipping through a collection of stamps in the evening, a boy in a big house sometimes hears conversation in the drawing room. Before long, however, he has to get up and prepare himself for a visit to relations in another part of town. This action is performed with no small reluctance, as he was comfortably settled in a world of his own, sitting in bed and leafing through his collection.

Sometimes laziness steals over him, and he longs for a warm and delicious broth that would liven up the spirits and pave the way for a sleep of dreams. On both accounts—slothfulness as well as diversion from joy—the declaration of a sudden visit across a quite large stretch of the town cannot be all that palatable. Add to this a third reason for clinging to the world of stamps, picture postcards and comics in the evening: the mouth-watering assortment of crackling and spongy edibles that comes on a little plate, to be followed by half a cup of special flavoured tea. The edibles have really been prepared for the guests in the next room, but the law of lumpiness makes sure that there is enough to go around for all the children.

The guests who have come unannounced finally get up to leave, and though it might be a little late, the implementation of the decision about the visit begins. You must finally forsake the warmth and comfort of position and bed. You will wince at the thought of travelling in the colder air outside in a cycle rickshaw that will be open on all fronts, even with the hood hitched up. The hood is meant more for the rain than for the cold, the latter not being really substantial at any time of the year, unless you are a boy who has just left behind a warm room to come into the mid-evening air and who is sometimes susceptible to a running nose. The cover of the cycle rickshaw is more often than not a rickety affair, being held up by a few lathes that are mouldering away in the ultimate stage before dissolution into the dust. The wind can get to one from the back if it is open, certainly from the front, and in very partial diminution from the sides. To be honest, the hood of these cycle rickshaws is more a frill for the voyage than a protection against the elements. Nevertheless, it does protect the passenger from falling on the road in the course of the journey as he or she bounces edgeways on the finely rounded but sometimes hard seat.

The guests depart, and everybody scurries to put on outdoor habits for the evening visit. There is a particular admonition to the children to put on something warm. In the drawing room there are already two persons who have finished their toilettes and who are shuffling impatiently in wait for the others to finish. Finally, the doors are locked from the inside, and almost always the oldest person stays behind and closes the front door when the others have gone. The party walks down the stoop and embraces the open air of the mild winter with a certain kind of steeliness. The feeble street lights on the other side throw only the faintest of glimmers upon the walls of the house, while the dust lies in a rich yellow hue just outside the gate. The conveyances on the metalled road flit past with their wavering lights.

One rickshaw is hailed and its owner enlisted in the search for other empty rickshaws. Eventually a cavalcade of four rickshaws, of which three are hypothecated to the state bank, set off at a rapid pace in a northerly direction along the road. After one and a half kilometres, the convoy turns left to cross a bridge over the stream that runs with the road. If the load is heavy—as it sometimes is when three bulky adults squeeze into a single rickshaw—the rickshaw man gets down and pulls the rickshaw up the incline to the bridge. He gets back on his saddle and pedals away, resting his legs at the descent at the end of the bridge. There, the rickshaw accelerates down and then moves swiftly along the level road at a speed that thrills the children, and perhaps the elders too.

The busy street has been left behind. Now, in the midst of largely open space, houses and shops are encountered at intervals and left rapidly behind. An occasional street lamp bathes the rickshaw and its occupants in amber of the night and then retreats evermore while the next rickshaws advance towards it. The silent and inky waters of another stream softy reflect unseen lights behind closely huddled trees on the far bank. All of a sudden, you will see lights upon a clearing and people gathered around a source of music. The sight will appear as if in a hallucination, and then you are again on the open road, rattling past trees and houses. Another bridge is crossed and then the houses take on a distinctive shape; you know of the proximity of your destination.

When you visit another house in the town you come largely to confirm impressions of the people of the house as conveyed by someone’s words or retained from a long previous visit. The inhabitants all come alive and speak of their professions and their travels. Sometimes it is a little difficult to digest the variety in the experiences recounted. As you eat the offering of the hosts and sip the tea, you are filled with a sense of awe and wonder at what the world holds in waiting for you. Sometimes they will speak of you, and you will lower both your eyes and your head in modesty. Sometimes someone will clutch your hand, and you will look up to see a face with the friendliest smile and the friendliest eyes placing a little gift in your palm. Every gift unfurls a world of exciting possibilities; every gift carries you high in your dreams and gives you new dreams.

The photographs in the room in which you sit tell of those who have gone away from this earth or away to another country upon this earth. You know you will follow them one day, but you are also certain of going where they have never been able to go. The families that you visit often live in apartments in the noisy part of the town or in the spacious block that is reserved for college teachers. However, equally often, you enter a leafy courtyard through a portico that was built in the grand old style and find a range of houses at the sides and at the end of the yard. These houses have modern walls but old roofs, or tiled roofs but thatched or caked walls. As you walk step-in-step with the accompanying elders on this visit, you find yourself turning to a path that is marked by a few flat stones sunk in the earth. You ascend two steps, part a light sendal curtain of vermilion and white, then descend two steps. There is a kind of sitting room with a bed at one side graced by an antique almirah and a commode of hardwood almost next to the headboard. To the maid who is bent down sweeping the floor under a table of more recent times, the word goes out that visitors have arrived.

Soon, an endearing auntie in a white starched garment with a blue slightly crocheted hem steps in gracefully through an inner door again decked by a curtain, this time a heavy golden-coloured one hanging by quite a number of prominent loops. Sometimes she wears glasses, sometimes she does not; but irrespective of this, the smile on her face is always captured in the cheery twinkle in her eyes. Those aunties are not always young; they are well past middle age and might or might not have husbands.

It is a universal feature, nevertheless, that they are happy, content and lively. At least this is how it is in their company. If there is any sorrow, it is never shown or spoken of, as if it had been overcome. In speaking of a sad event, the auntie lowers her head, touches the border of her folding garment, holds it between her fingers and speaks in a voice just a little abased, while her eyes remain bright in admirable forbearance of sorrow. Before long she will get up, despite protests, to make the guests more welcome with delicacies made by her own hand. Any offer of help in the preparation will be quickly met with a firm refusal. In the meantime, the guests will be talking amongst themselves.

The child, on the other hand, will be either sitting still or leafing intently through a book or magazine with plenty of pictures. The gastronomic prospect in the room is sufficient to make the present life, with its absorbing plethora of impressions, an unfailingly inviting one. Yes, the warmth of that prospect can make up even for the unwelcome evening ride in the nippy air of a provincial town. The child’s patient, almost disregarding mien belies his eager expectation of the little feast that is on the way.

All the same, he perhaps knows that entertaining aunties do not stay around forever. Moreover, in a much larger journey, little feasts may one day become unworthy of attention. The world that once was remarkable may become, almost dutifully, a little too familiar.

As a citizen of Canada and resident of Quebec, Prosenjit Dey Chaudhury has carried his nonfiction previously in the Maple Tree Literary Supplement (in three issues) and the Wilderness House Literary Review. He has published academic papers in economics, but does not plan to return to this discipline until many years have passed. He worked with a mentor in developing his first novel (unpublished) under a program of the Union of Writers of Quebec (UNEQ). While presently experimenting with ideas in fiction, browsing through foreign language books and devouring literary travel memoirs, he looks forward to writing, in the near future, an account of a personal voyage through peri-urban and peri-wilderness Canada that includes both ruminations and people’s stories. At the moment, he has begun a narrative that tries to capture in detail the sights, sounds, tastes, colours, voices, vistas, journeys and people of his previous country, India, in the context of a less flurried past.