The waiting room was overflowing with alarums and excursions, we were sitting in an orderly fashion with an ultra-plaintive look. Our foreheads and upper lips were beady with sweat while our stomachs growled, emanating a choral music, infected with hunger. Our warden Ma’am gulped down the last dregs of tea, which was exuding a lemony aroma, in an impatient manner. Our eyes were cooperatively tethered to the double door of the surgical intensive care unit where Ramu Kaku was. The unit was frequented by nurses, chasseing in cartels with no room for talk. The day was an inauspicious one.
That morning Bindu Masi, our hostel maid, had fortuitously ended up bruising her hand while tossing freshly minced onion in the oil on a substantially high flame. All the hostel girls huddled around her and canopied her hand with slabs of ice, in an attempt of assuaging her pain. My roommate Mita was anomalously quiet that morning with a slight frown on her face, gawking at Bindu Masi’s misfortune, but bemused.
Mita was a colourful raconteur; we would relentlessly hound her for stories. She would twist, stitch, plaster and convey anecdotes procured from her mother She possessed an enigmatic glint in her eyes that would plague us to pursue her more and more. She had the capability of infesting our dishevelled four-seater room with gaiety, our faces disfigured with exhilaration. Mita was an all-rounder, the only child of her single parent mother.
Mita wouldn’t miss any of the school debate. She derived a sadistic pleasure in employing her unsheathed tongue to slaughter her opponents with arguments. During school recitals she would stand out fumigating the audience with her sweet voice while also remaining indifferent to the boys adamantly cheering for her to grab her attention. During final examination she would secure top grades, toiling and tossing under the ineffectual fan in our room unperturbed by the prickly heat and the multiple bites of mosquitoes.
In the small town where we studied, six hours from Kolkata, our hostel was accessible through the road diverging from the National Highway. All the chaotic energy that the town somehow gathered in the daytime would come to a halt by seven in the evening. It was a determinedly quiet town with no congested roads or the clamour of established commerce.
The road to our school, twenty minutes walk from our hostel, was jostled with motor workshops and interspersed with eateries, culpable for bloating our abdomens with their junk. One or two beauty parlours had sprung up in the colony, run by migrant women hailing from cities carrying a lot of clout, and hoping to promote the beauty industry in this small town.
Mita could pass for a muse of Leonardo Da Vinci. She could be conferred with the title of the most beautiful girl in the town. She had a prominent nose, slender arms, and tarred regal eyes that could serve as a distillery. Her lips were thin with a peachy hue that could bifurcate wide enough to devour a rosogolla. Even in our modest salwar-kameez school uniform and a sleek long braid she could captivate her viewers, especially the roadside boys who would lecherously peer at her like crows ogling at meat.
Vacations were long and ponderous. Mita would be the first one to leave for home and the last one to arrive. I would eagerly wait for her, with the silent acknowledgement of all the times she amazed me with her evenly modulated crooning, an art that Dibyasha, the green-eyed girl next to our room, struggled to perfect.
I would petulantly giggle remembering the moments Mita struggled to clad herself in that crisp Korial saree, one that she borrowed from her mother for special functions at school, and the times when she would oil her hair in desperation to tuck back the fine strands of frizzy hair erupting from her neatly tied braid. Mita would inconsolably whine when Bindu Masi would flood our plates with half fermented arahar daal slumped on the mound of half cooked rice.
She would click her tongue everytime in disappointment when the bananas would foully reek, bunches that we occasionally bought from the roadside vendor while marching towards the hostel from school. She had the habit of retiring from her study table at dusk to indulge herself in an infantile dementia by partaking the smell from washed clothes crisp with heat and perfumed with detergent.
On humid evenings, while aspiring for big city jobs, our stomachs would brashly pester us with the thoughts of jalebis, pakoras, samosas and a plethora of food items. We would unabashedly target Ramu Kaku, our guard uncle, to satiate our avariciousness. Ramu Kaku was a man of sixty-five with a wrinkled dark face and ever-vigilant eyes capable of piercing through our unuttered thoughts and motivations.
He was living a tedious life encumbered by a low income and often disrupted by our childish whims. Apparelled in blue diagonal stripped shirt, paired with black trousers and finely polished shoes, he resembled a seasoned officer. His wife would limp down the gravelled path to the hostel to deliver an antiqued steel tiffin box on her forearm, nursing her sagging breasts sealed in her loose-fitting blouse.
The couple lived in a decrepit one room house few acres away from our hostel. Ramu Kaku previously used to serve as a priest in the Hindu temple right next to his house, when their son, a shrewd learner, was pursuing his PhD in IIT Kanpur. They had taken a housing loan and were making preparations to shift into the teeming locality of Kanpur where their son was desperately trying to secure a job.
Amid the numerous giggles, dreams and plans exchanged over cell phones, they received grim news, one that had shattered their lives, the loss of their only child. Ramu Kaku left his job at the temple and perhaps his faith too, and secured a job in our hostel.
In spite of his mental drudgery, he had neither disappointed us with a ‘no’, nor crushed our dreams of relishing savouries. With a hardened face he would walk down the lane crunching on the gravel and return with a handful of items catering to our selfish commands. We would flock around him with greedy eyes like puppies ready to be fed.
After paying and hefting our goods, we would dismiss him shamelessly without even offering him a morsel of our evening snacks. At times Ramu Kaku would offer us handmade thekuas, an assortment of wheat flour and jaggery topped with diced coconut flakes, a revered dessert offering to God in Chhath Puja. Mita and I had often caught him rooted in anguish, vacantly staring at a snippet of his dead son that he used to carry in his tattered wallet.,
Ramu Kaku would remain diligent in his duty when school closed and we girls scuttled back to the hostel. He could shoo away the boys, the ones who would infiltrate our lane and our privacy by following us to the hostel. It had never occurred to us that one of Mita’s unrequited lovers could go beyond limits to woo her.
An unethical local goon, Jaggu, had been pursuing Mita for a year. He would intermittently follow her to the hostel hurling lewd remarks. She would pass by without meeting his eye. In spite of Mita’s rejections, he continued to pester her.
The day before, Mita stayed back late in the school for submitting her practical. She was walking towards the hostel in an unusual speed that day squeaking on the pebbled pavement with her shoe, without any companion. Her momentum came to a halt when a crunching a harsh pounding sound hit her ears from behind.
It was Jaggu, demonstrating his raving criminality by professing his love yet again. his This time, threatening to scar her for life if she denied him. Mita slapped him reflexively and slinked away, running as fast as she could As she reached our room, she huddled on the bed, gripped the sheets and covered her full body, the image of Jaggu drifted through her head sending her into tremors of terror. That night she didn’t get up for dinner.
The next morning as we were leaving for our rooms, a demented roar met our ears. It was Jaggu with a knife in his hand. He was attempting to make an incursion into the hostel. Few pedestrians stopped to look at the gangster-like young man pushing back old Ramu Kaku. Some cranky dogs began to yelp. Their squabble in sync with the two men engaged in a hubbub. Our foreheads were wet and our palms clammy., A throng of distraught people ran towards the gate.
Ramu Kaku lay unconscious on the floor, bleeding. Jaggu had shoved his knife in and ripped open Ramu’s abdomen. Nauseous by the spectacle, Mita broke down, the black patches under her sleepless eyes drenched in tears.
She was dragged to the warden’s room and her mother was informed. A First Information Report was lodged. Jaggu was arrested. Mita suffered a breakdown and had to take a gap year at school. She saw a psychotherapist. Ramu Kaku was discharged from the hospital. He was never seen in the hostel again.
Anindita Sarkar is pursuing Mphil degree in Comparative Literature from Jadavpur University India
