That mysterious force inside us…

Reading time : 6 minutes

What are these marks on the wall? A doodle? A diagram? Does this
inscrutable drawing, if we can call it one, say something? Is there a message to
be decoded? Perhaps a clue? Or, perhaps, one fears, they are mere playful marks
someone made out of boredom, devoid of meaning or significance

EXCERPTS:

Here are some excerpts from the book, Bhusokalir Naksha, 2024; Bengali; Gangchil Publishers, Kolkata), translated from Bengali by the author: Shubho Roy

The Beginning

Perhaps, it was Nishapati Das who saw the stranger first. In the morning,
the kathaal-wood boat floated in the lake not far from the steps of the ghat.
And Charbak, Nishapati swore, was sleeping right in it.

Then again, Dulu Bhandari, the local barber, claimed it was he who first saw Charbak, on the
narrow bridge over the old canal – the stranger was sizing the width of the
bridge with his measured paces. Soon, rumour spreads that he was a fugitive,
wanted for no less than three murders. In fact, after all these years, he is still a
wanted man, being chased by the police for the murder of Hilton sahib, a
British cotton cultivator.

He might have been spy, some said, working for the
Americans. It was the winter of 1941, and the war was afoot on the eastern
frontiers of India. A deathly silence shrouded the vast rice fields of Burma –
perhaps it would rain bombs from the skies above in the coming monsoons,
they feared. The Americans planned to set up base in Calcutta, and hundreds
of airstrips would be laid on the rice fields of Bengal.

“Why is that stranger sizing up the fields like that?” Annadacharan Majumdar had asked.
It is very much up for debate, but schoolmaster Tinkari Pal claimed it
was he who first met the stranger.

Wild storms over the Bay of Bengal had caused the winter to arrive late that year. A cold fog descended on the village on Tuesday, the 8th day of the month of Poush.

On 23rd of December in year of 1941. In the morning, Indusudha, the widow, had dreamt of a
wooden boat laden with sesame seeds floating on the lake. And on that very
day, Tinkari Pal was returning to the village, by way of the mustard fields,
having just posted a letter at the newly lime-coated tin-roofed post office in
the neighbouring town of Dhalga.

By the sides of the narrow aisles between the crops grew tall grass and
shrubs of water spinach, their leaves still wet in the mist. The mynas, on the
thorny branch of the sleepy Erythrina tree, looked restless. Even the intrepid
drongo bird, a regular sight in the field, was nowhere to be seen. Tinkari Pal
saw the stranger as he stepped on the dirt road from the narrow aisle.

The bird’s nest

Beyond the shrubs flowed the river Ruibasa. One could hear the constant
rolling babble of its stream. Indusudha spotted a tunnel-like passage through
the thick unbergia vines.

While crawling on the ground on all fours, her
bare knees grinding against the dark gritty soil, she spotted in the dense of a
shrub something bright, jewel-like, partially hidden in a refuge of leaves. She
gently pulled the leaves aside to create a window into the tangled inner world
of the shrub. She gasped. It was a whirl of dry grass, golden straws deftly
woven in the thicket of sprigs—a bird’s nest—nestling a clutch of three
speckled eggs, teal, almost blue, and the size of damascene grapes.

Lampblack doodles

And, yet, the mind draws connections, joins the dots, compelled as it were to create
images where there may be none. Perhaps it is that mysterious force inside us
that stares at dead, distant stars—separated by immeasurable space—and, yet,
conjures images and stories – Orion, Sagittarius, Aquarius, Cassiopeia.

Walking backwards
“That gentleman, is he suffering from anxiety?” Charbak asked.

“Why do you ask?” Tinkari Pal said.

“Looks like he is taking strong medicines to calm his nerves,” Charbak
observed. “All the signs point in that direction. And, contrary to what he said

He has been up and around for sometime. I suspect he was up very early and
went off the road…perhaps into the woods?”

“Of course,” Tinkari Pal said. “He is a healer. You will always find him
in the woods, looking for herbs – ivy gourd, velvet beans, snakeroot, turnsole.”

“And,” Charbak said, stretching his arms and drawing a long yawn,
“he was walking backwards, through the bushes.”

“Walking backwards?” Tinkari asked. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, we walk forward, at least in most normal circumstances,” said
Charbak. “But this gentleman, was walking backwards.”

When he paused for a while and said, “Maybe I am just sleepy. So my mind’s taking me to wrong
conclusions. Why would he walk backwards?” Charbak stamped on the
cigarette butt with his foot. “I noticed fine scratches just above his heels. Horns, I suspect.
As if he was walking backwards, while keeping his eyes trained on something ahead of him.
In short, retreating. Now, when do we act like that?”

Winter

The blanket, as it was called, was coarse and itchy, and in her sleep she
had kicked it away, lying curled up in the bed and shivering all night. It was her
Uncle, Jaharchand, who had bought the blankets in bulk from a traveling Tibetan
vendor at the Baishakhi Purnima fair. Close to the dawn, she woke up cold and
pulled the blanket back again.

The home-sewn khero quilts were locked away in
the clothes room, and she fought shy of begging Ruparani for the keys. The cold
had suddenly sharpened. Insects and lizards, tiny creatures of the world, hurried
into dark, unseen crevices of the world. Nature sunk to a state of near lifelessness.
And, yet, something breathed on, slow and labored, in the dark, bottomless chasm
of life.

Kumudini had told her how the onion seedlings in the seedbed suffered
cold burns last winter. As soon as the first light cracked through the window gap,
Indusudha ran downstairs to the kitchen. The cold had slowed life down to a
pause: the moong beans soaked overnight, she discovered, didn’t sprout. The water
felt cold as ice. She must keep pouring warm water in the bowl to coax the
stubborn beans to life. Two hyacinth beans, she remembered, were dried
and left hanging from the vine. She covered the bowl of moong and went to the
backyard. Standing in front of the bean trellises, she wrapped her shawl again and
tightened her sari around the waist. She had barely crawled under the scaffold
when she noticed it – at the base of the bamboo stake, the ruby-cheeked sunbird
from yesterday lay dead on its side in the wet grass. A victim of cold, she
surmised.

She hid the two bean pods in the folds of her shawl and headed
straight for the staircase. The door to her brother’s room opened at her touch. On
the southern wall, by the window, was a wooden shelf; she stood on tip-toe and
hid the dried pods behind the row of books.

Description of the boy who was found dead in a boat

“From what I heard,” said Tinkari Pal, “he had a deep wound on the
throat, but not much blood. The body had paled terribly, as if all blood has
been drained out. When the throat is slit, blood should gush out of the wound, no?
Don’t you get the impression, as if the blood had been sucked clean?”

Balaram was listening to the story with bated breath. Every time, without fail, he felt
the same tingles. He went back to mind the tea as Tinkari concluded the story.
“Do you have any explanation?” Tinkari asked Charbak. “Ever heard of
anything like this?”

“There could always be something supernatural about it,” Charbak had
said.

“That, that is the word,” said Tinkari Pal, “supernatural.”

“But there are perfectly rational and scientific explanations to all this,”
said Charbak. “What about the eyes? Were they open, or shut?”

“I heard they were open,” said Tinkari. “Wide open, his irises dilated.
Like he had seen something terrifying just before he died.”

The paddy fields

In the months of Bhadro and Ashwin, as the monsoon subsided slowly,
the fields were still pooled with water, and the rice grew taller by the
day. The brown pond-herons waited, hunched in anticipation, for frogs and
mud crabs. White egrets would stride alongside buffaloes, waiting for the
insects to spring up from the mud. Then the rice panicles would start to form.

On the last day of Ashwin, the farmer would stand amidst the growing crop
and call — “Dhaan falo, dhaan falo.” Grow, Paddy, Grow Paddy.

In the month of Karthik, if the water and earth willed, the land would respond. Day and night,
something grew, almost secretly at first. The wind at night made the paddy
shiver and rustle, as if the field sighed in patient expectation.

It was time, for all creatures, big and small, to prepare for winter. You may even hear the rustle
of the soil, the busy susurration of small bodies scurrying about, tiny hearts
beating rapidly, as the field mice burrowed into the ground, preparing to store
stolen paddy for the cold months ahead.

The owls would descend silently, then
venture into the dark forests of rice in search of prey. As the milky rice formed
in the panicles, the weaver birds in flocks would storm the field like tiny flying
raiders. Carried by the northern winds the migratory birds would also start to
arrive. They would roost by lakes and rivers, they would haunt the rice fields
by night.

Description of the Majumdar house of old days

During the great feasts at the palace, he would observe the hustle of their
busy kitchens, overflowing with people, women with teary eyes fanning
monstrous mud stoves to stoke the flame, grinding spices on flatbed mortars,
stirring large pails of boiling milk for hours. There would be heaps of calabash
vines, taro suckers and waterlily stems, seasonal tubers and leaves and shoots.
River carps and large catfish turned and tossed in great tubs, shrimps flittered
and sprang in shallow pots. Young Jaharchand took it all in with wide-eyed
wonder.

The women of the family used conch spoons from Ceylon, scaled fish
with pearl clam shells. They wrapped in heart-shaped betel leaves, over the spread
of catechu and licorice and lime and rose-petal jelly, a dash of crystal mint, palm
sugar and a pinch of mastic resin, a measured blend of spices, scrapings of
camphor, and ambergris bought from the traveling traders of Kabul.

And there would be bottles everywhere, of varied shapes and color, where the men reclined
on large goose down cushions drinking, and smoking long-pipe hookahs made of silver.

Preparations for Puja

It was shukla shashthi, the sixth day of the waxing moon, in the month
of Poush. In late Jaharchand Sen’s house, Ruparani Debi was busy preparing
the rice-offering for the goddess on Shashthi. The light jingle of keys, tied to her
sari, travelled across the courtyard and reached Indusudha. Sona’s mother,
hunched on the kitchen floor, diced fruits on the bonti-blade.

Putting the cotton gamcha on her shoulder, Indusudha went up and stood by the kitchen
door with a frayed neem twig in her hand. While scrubbing her teeth, she
watched the fruits being cut, and then her eyes travelled, first to the long
strands of bena grass that lay bunched on the floor, and from there to the palm
leaf fan, then the small earthen bowl with sesame oil, the sifting tray made of
long strips of bamboo, and the small heap of popped water-lily seeds in it.
And for some reason, it reminded her of the pond.

The harvest festival

On the thirteenth of the month, the day before Sankranti, villagers
untied the consecrated bunches of sacred rice-stalks. The girls proceeded to
braid the stalks into slender baunri ropes, and tie them ceremonially around
Door-knockers, granary posts, lintels, iron chests, cupboards. “Now go and call
Indu,” Sona’s mother instructed the children as she prepared the rice paste for
decoration, mixing it with spurge tree sap. Every year, it was Indusudha who
drew the alpona in and around house, resting on her haunches with a piece of
rag in hand dipped in rice paste, drawing sacred motifs and vines at doorsteps,
in the courtyard, around the tulsi altar, along the granary.