2008. Kolkata.
The autumnal rain swept across the gravelled streets of Kolkata. In the darkest hour of the night, the occasional thunder rumbled across the sky, now covered in thick grey clouds. The street lights reflected on them as though a shower of golden light was flooding the streets of South Kolkata. It was widely believed that such torrential rain with thunderstorms just before the Durga Puja was a sign of Maa Durga having a marital spat with Baba Mahadev, whose possessiveness and love for his wife made him want to stop her from coming home with the four children for the five-day extravaganza. The rain was her tears, and the thunder rolls were the arguments between husband and wife. Such was the tale told by grandmothers across Bengal when the children flocked around her, scared of the thunder god’s wrath. As the raindrops suddenly changed course and rushed into the room of the boarding house near Southern Avenue with a sudden gust of wind, she was jolted from this romanticised imagining of the scene happening up in Kailash. In the light coming from the street, she could see her packed suitcases and duffel bags. She was all set to leave the place she called home for the past five years. The place she was going back to after nine years was the shelter she had left when she was fifteen and joined a boarding school in Dehradun. From there, she came to study at the Department of Law, University of Calcutta, a lifelong dream she had carried in her heart. She longed to see Thamma and have home-cooked meals, talk to her as Thamma would oil her hair like old times, and tell her about her experiences…perhaps an anticipation that made her sleepless. On the other hand, she dreaded the ever-changing address she kept calling home. She badly wanted a place, a corner to herself to call her own. She knew quite well the place she was going back to was one they were indebted to forever, but in no technical sense was it “home”. She was nobody there; she did not even belong to the place. However, in the true form of the word and the emotions attached to it, that was the only home she yearned to go back to. The thought brought back memories of another place she had called home since she knew what it meant. A place she could never go back to without a threat on her life. But the debt she could never repay in this lifetime suffocated her self-esteem.
They say people keep boxes of memories, but her life taught her better. She knew memories could not be kept in boxes because no matter how large a box one chooses, the memories keep overflowing. It was better to remember them like secrets in one’s heart. That place held so many of those adolescent secrets she had once dreaded to be revealed. As dawn broke on the horizon after the torrential downpour had stopped and the crows, sparrows and Bulbuls started crowing and chirping, the bang on her door woke her from her slumber. She did not know when she fell asleep, half-sitting on the bed.
“Someone’s here to take you home.” The Matron of the hostel’s voice was heard in the corridor. “Hurry up, the car is blocking our entire driveway.” She exhaled as she sat up in a hurry to check the time. It was 8 AM. Her head felt light with the sleeplessness as she navigated through the fairly empty room and dressed in a hurry. It started raining again when she carried her luggage out of the room one last time. She wondered why Thamma never listened to her, never believed that even after eight years of living away from home, she could manage to take a train from Kolkata to Chandannagar. She did not need a car or a driver. She was sure Thamma insisted otherwise, and Jyatha Moshai gave in like always. He also did not believe she could make it on her own. She carried the lighter suitcase down the stairs after braiding her hair and adjusting her long checked shirt over her jeans. She was hoping to ask the driver to bring the others downstairs. While she was saying goodbye to her friends on the floor, with whom she had shared sleepless examination nights and bad result days, it started to pour heavily again.
“For God’s sake, does it look like Pujo is in a few weeks?” One of the girls sulked. That was when she realised she had mistakenly packed her umbrella in one of the trunks. Perhaps Thamma was right; even when she was almost twenty-five, she lacked common sense. Contemplating what to do, she walked to the porch, struggling with the lighter suitcase she carried, as she caught a glimpse of the black Scorpio car with the logo of Jyatha Moshai’s political party on the windscreen. She was about to leave the shed of the stairs in the rain when a black umbrella shielded her from it. She involuntarily looked up at the one holding it, murmuring a thank you when her heart skipped a beat at his sight. There he was in his black formal trousers, white loosely fitted shirt, sleeves rolled up to expose his expensive watch and a pen placed in his pocket. He adjusted his black-rimmed glasses, smiling pleased through the stubble he now kept. At her surprised face as he said, “I had promised you I would seek you out when you are in Calcutta. So I am here… just a bit late.” She opened her mouth to speak, perhaps to protest. He did not keep his promise; he did not seek her out. Jyatha Moshai gave him her address and asked him to fetch her from there. He was doing a duty like he always did. But no words came out of her parted lips. “Bondita? Do you not recognise me?” he snapped his finger, making her smile faintly and nod. “Good, I thought… come along…” He opened the front door of the car, making her brows arch. “I thought the driver… I have other luggage.” She tried hard to sound as normal as she could, as normal as she remembered being with him. He nodded and called on one of the peons hovering around the porch, paid him a crisp fifty-rupee note and asked him to bring her luggage downstairs. She watched him as she silently took the seat up front. He was pacing the front stairs and checking his watch. Was this a hindrance to him? An obligation forced his way by the elders, perhaps? Was he eager to get home to his wife? Children perhaps? Bondita inhaled at her thoughts.
Bondita had played out their first meeting after a decade a thousand times in her head. She believed he would look older, wiser and different. She believed that once she saw him, in his late thirties, married and settled, her heart would not stir the way fifteen-year-old Bondita’s did when she had a crush on twenty-nine-year-old Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury. Watching him pace, with a familiar demeanour, hand in his pocket, tapping his feet on the marble of the stair, as the peon rushed out with her luggage and filled the back of the car, watching him smile reassuringly at her as he reminded her to put on the seat belt as he turned the key to ignition and started towards the highway, she was not sure anymore. It scared her to the core, and with each song that played carelessly on the radio came back a rush of memories she thought she had long forgotten to haunt her all the way home. It was a long journey that had just begun.
