Allan Brown was a simple, squat man. He possessed solitude, a blind Alsatian bitch called Sheba and some wisdom. And, he met Jesus the day he died. Though Allan Brown did not live to tell about the encounter, Jesus knew that he knew what Jesus had known all along. That Allan Brown was a good man, give or take a few vices that all lonely, good men collected like stamps.
Allan Brown was what you called in post-colonial Kolkata an Anglo. Anglo-Indian, that is. Do-anshla, the Bengalis sneered in Bangla. And, Allan Brown, simple and squat that he was, cringed every time his brown skin was matched against his non-Indian name and conclusions were drawn about a wayward British forebear’s liaison with a native Indian woman to produce what eventually watered down some generations hence to Allan Brown.
Allan Brown did not mind his provenance. In fact, there were few things that he actually minded. A deeply religious man, he accepted that neighbours would be nosy, colleagues mostly insufferable and family fallible. Those who admired his religiosity, called his ability to conciliate with reality wisdom. Those who did not, called him a fool.
Allan Brown’s brother Russell Brown had no job, three children and a beautiful wife. The children went to the city’s best missionary schools because the Bishop knew and pitied Allan Brown. Their mother, Rachel Brown, who liked to be called Richie after the rich, little, poor cartoon character, was known to tell her lovers that if she could choose pragmatism over passion, she could have been Richie Rich too. Russell mostly forgave her infidelity because she was once brave enough to choose the impecunious him over more suitable men. Allan Brown did not because she had committed her first adultery with him.
The Browns lived in a 150-year-old house in Doctor’s Lane which was in that part of the city which the non-resident Bengalis fondly called North Kolkata and the inhabitants of the city’s posher, southern addresses simply North. The residents of Doctor’s Lane and its adjoining bylanes never failed to shake their heads at such branding and always reminded a newcomer that the locality was, in fact, Taltolla. No more, no less.
The house that the Browns shared with two more Anglo-Indian families had been rented by their great-grandparents and the landlord thought that the lease paid by its current occupants was a cruel exercise in tokenism in these hyper-inflationary times. But most houses in North Kolkata were infested with such tenants, who, when it came to paying rent, stubbornly adhered to sensibilities and loopholes that went back at least 50 years, if not more. Landlords could only seethe.
So, when the question of maintenance arose, the landlords refused to do their bit. Tenants who could agree among themselves to keep a hundred-year-old house habitable, did that. Those who could not or would not, continued to risk their lives occupying a slowly disemboweling building until the municipal bosses drove them away or the house collapsed on them. Even land sharks steered clear of the North Kolkata bylanes because they knew that the return on their investment would not be worthwhile because most of the lanes were not broad enough to let a car in. In resurgent India, where realty rode on new money, no fresh owner of a flat could bear to be seen without another vehicle of affluence – an automobile. And localities which weren’t motorable, simply weren’t the places to relocate to.
The building in which the Browns lived, the tenants had a lot of regard for the benefits of a procrastinating judiciary. The realistic rent that they did not agree to pay, they resolved to put away a part of it towards the building’s maintenance. That’s why the structure stood even a century and a half after an upwardly-mobile Bengali doctor had built it. Mildewed yes, undeniably old and unpainted for long yes, but apposite for inhabitants who valued solidity over superficiality and value for whatever humble money they earned over flamboyance.
In the Brown family, Allan Brown did the earning and sometimes, when he felt like it, Russell Brown. What Richie Brown had in her purse, which was occasionally full, the brothers did not enquire into. Just as they chose not to explore the possibilities of its provenance. When Russell’s humiliation got the better of him, which happened sometimes, Richie started unbuttoning her blouse. Always after midnight, always after Allan Brown had got home at the end of his hotel receptionist’s shift, and always positioning herself such that Allan could get a full view of the goings-on inside his brother’s bedroom because a mirror there was positioned at just the right angle to facilitate such voyeurism from where he reclined. On such nights, Richie would be particularly passionate. And, Allan Brown, unable to tear his eyes away from such feast of altruistic filth, would masturbate. Weeping and seeking mercy, afterwards. And, every time, he would renew his hatred for Richie for systematic annihilation of his self-esteem.
But they continued to live together. Because Allan Brown had promised his dead parents that he would. Because he loved his brother and hated his sister-in-law. And, because, when holding close their firstborn, Allan Brown could not help wondering each time if the boy was, after all, his.
Richie Brown bedded Allan Brown two days after she married Russell Brown. She simply entered Allan’s room when her new husband was sleeping away his post-passion languor and holding Allan by his organ, taught him how to enter her, move with her and bring her to a climax satisfactory to her. Buried in her breasts, Allan Brown could only weep helplessly.
Richie knew that when ordinary men preferred God more than they did desultory love, it was not because they wanted to but because they were doomed by their lack of will to confront their inadequacies. She was generally correct, as beautiful women were, in their assessment of men but just as Richie was aware of what drove her to take advantage of such men, she also knew that if she did not, she would be lost. Surpassing beauty was her only objective quality and, it was its continuous validation by way of peremptory conquests that made her what she was when she was not a reluctant mother, an unfaithful wife and mistress to many men who did not ask from her anything more than guaranteed, transient possession. Sometimes, for a price.
The devout who visited Allan Brown because his piety had earned him the somewhat reputation of a touch-healer, wondered how a man of God abided such an abjectly Godless woman in the same house. But because they needed to be healed more than they cared for the domestic arrangement of the Browns, they only stared long and hard when Richie went about housework without her bra. Her defiant breasts, despite three children and countless men, were as inviting as a jug of water in a tropical afternoon. The male visitors would lean back, close their eyes and break out in a sweat as they would be overtaken by the vision of a pair of naked breasts whose topography was trammelled by beads of perspiration – some as steady as a tall glass of lemonade, some struggling to break free like a river in spate. In the presence of Richie Brown, nearly all men felt the incandescence of intense desire. And, some kept coming back to Allan Brown, with or without the need to be healed for maladies that could not be cured otherwise. The others did because what they felt for Allan Brown bordered on their sentiments inspired by, say, a roadside mongrel. They admired the mongrel for its powers of survival but could not help condemning the animal to casual kicks because it represented something they did not want to be reminded of – the limitations of the soul, the body and the silent humiliations that the weak must suffer.
When Allan Brown died, it had been raining steadily for three days. Monsoon in Kolkata was always as bitter as a scorned woman. After months of fiery sun that would soak up the spirit of a malcontent metropolis, it was always caught unawares by the rains. The weathermen sharpened their forecasts but monsoon proved every year that it was no less malcontent than the city it would assail for three months in a year. It came, when the sun and its minion earth willed it to, but always after making their orbital copulation almost irrelevant. When the child bending over under the burden of textbooks had given up asking its mother to stop dragging it to school in this heat, when a baby or ten of the city’s thousands of homeless had died of dehydration, when the number of heatwave deaths had defied another statistic, taps in the indigent quarters had started running dry and when the afternoons had turned as brittle as a whisper and as unbearable as thirst, the rains would come with the studied dispassion of a dancer. Teasing. The first band of clouds would straddle the horizon reluctantly, unwilling to lose their moisture to a steaming pit of coagulant humanity. Then the skies would suddenly part, innards illuminated. The first thunderclap would sound like a cymbal cue. And, the drizzle would start.
Homeward-bound commuters would turn up their faces, glance happily at complete strangers and exchange smiles of children getting their first taste of icecream. The urchins would hoot and descend like a wave on the streets, waving their shirts and hooping in delight, their tender age glistening on their tough bodies. The housewife cradling a baby would part the curtains drawn earlier in the day to keep out the sun and extend her hand out of the window as if to invite monsoon in. With a palm turned upwards, she would snatch the taste of rain and curl a fist like her own baby. The baby would smile with all the wisdom it had brought from the womb and nod knowingly at its mother’s delight – the role reversal as complete and as momentary as unblemished pleasure. Only the weathermen who relied on machines to bear out their gut-feeling and the very elderly who did not need to, would shiver a little. Because only they knew without doubt what others chose not to – that the rains were indeed becoming reluctant, dangerously so.
Within a few days, of course, monsoon would completely come out of its shell. The mighty river which mothered the city would rise like a thousand militant prayers, the green of the foliage would shine like jewels and the gutters would gurgle happily again. But the bowl shaped city, which retained more water than its municipal pumps could disgorge, would start overflowing. And in some parts, boats would be brought out. After days of negotiating waterlogged streets and power cuts, the malevolence displaced by the capricious monsoon would slowly seep back. Any comparison with Venice would then be met with hard, glittering stares of a people condemned to hate flooding as much as they despaired of droughts. A few would die, of course. And millions would live to tell the tale of another monsoon no longer welcome.
The day Allan Brown died began with cruelty and chaos. The Brown children didn’t want to launch themselves like little ships in the dark lane that shone like slick in the smoky dawn. It seemed as if a gigantic canister of engine oil had been tipped out onto the city and its viscosity had crawled into its each artery, vein and vessel, sniffing like a dog, weighing down like stale breath.
Richie’s voice rang out shrill and spare, remonstrating with the two older children for not willing to go to school. Her feverish youngest had kept her awake the night before and Richie, trapped inside home for three days, domesticity pressing against her like a crowd in the rush-hour Metro, was feeling the hollow despair of a woman doomed well and truly into marital martyrdom. The children feared her, seeking her comfort only in times of illness, never in distress. But the dark morning and the still water standing on the lane outside emboldened them in the manner the defeated often were and Richie’s eldest cried out: ‘No! I’m not going to school today!’
The child’s cry swelled like the flapping wings of a thousand miserable pigeons and drew Allan out of his morning reverie. Hastily pulling up his pajamas, he rushed to the verandah opening to the building’s concrete compound to find mother and children as still as a tableau. The newborn defiance on the face of his favourite, the child’s pursed lips, lapidary eyes and pinched face, sucked out his urgency and Allan stood rooted to the ground, his heart breaking at the sight of such induced end of innocence. Spray from the drizzle outside robbed the room of whatever familiar warmth it retained and the four family members stood in momentary icy aloofness as if discovering each other for the first time.
‘I’ll kill you!’ keened Richie and lunged for her elder son. Throwing him on the slippery floor with a push, she slapped him once. The whimper of a hurt child had nothing to do with the almost-adult declaration uttered instantly: ‘I will not go to school. I will not. I’ll not.’ Allan started back to life at the sound of a child’s head being bashed against the cement floor again and again. He leapt and clawed at Richie. ‘Leave the child alone! Rachel, leave the boy alone.’
‘It’s my boy. I’ll do whatever I want to with him. Get lost, you wimp!’
Allan lifted Richie and heaved her out of the way. Then he bent over the little boy, gently picked him up from the floor and started patting the back of his head with water scooped from a growing puddle in the verandah. He soothed the boy, holding him tight, muttering: ‘Don’t worry baba, I’m there for you. Always.’
‘Oh really?’ screeched a phlegm-stricken Richie from her desolate corner. ‘So that’s what you think Allan Brown? Is that what you think, you bloody fool?’ Cackling like a vicious hen, she turned around to the spot where her husband had materialized, his sleep-sodden limbs placed precariously around their whimpering daughter, who, for all the allowances that she had made for a deficient mother, seemed incapable of comprehending that she could actually be in danger from her. ‘Allan Brown and Russell Brown, the brown fools of Doctor’s Lane, why do you think I got married when I did? And to a certified loser like Russell Brown? Because I needed a father for my first child.’
In the silence that was more deafening than the shattering of a million mirrors, Allan remembered to cover the ears of the child who clung to him desperately. Russell crumbled to the floor.
‘Now you know? Do you know now? You dumb fools, now you know?’ Richie, housecoat torn open, crouching and turning slowly on her heels, screamed and screamed till the cries of her sick child pulled her back to her familiar life of genteel fraud.
Allan stirred when Sheba started nuzzling his knees. The blind Alsatian, who could not no longer see but only remember what a weeping Allan’s face looked like, nudged closer. Her restless tail tried to shoo away the incremental dampness the resolute rain was intent on depositing in the long, mildewed verandah.
The children stayed home that day. Richie did not come out of her room. Russell planted himself in the verandah, staring vacantly at the concrete compound, regarding the raindrops collecting like ammunition on the sunshades of the houses on either side, ready to roll down whenever the incontinent sky bid them to. The hours rolled by. The maid who came every day to do the cleaning, raring to rant about waterlogging yet again, flinched at the sight of the hungry, sullen Brown children – the eldest still clinging to Allan on his bed, the little girl asleep next to her brother, dried tears making her face as fragile as a crisp petal. She cooked without being asked to and put down steaming plates of food in front of each member of the family before leaving for the day.
So Russell Brown ate. And Richie Brown. And her children. Each as remote as an island buffeted by a stormy sea, the steam rising from their plates the only sign of life.
Allan Brown gently disentangled himself from the spent tendril that the arm of his sleeping nephew was and slipped off the bed. The shadows in the room were those of a rainy day readying to welcome dusk. He checked the clock ticking away the memory of his train driver father’s railway past and confirmed that it was the time to get ready for work.
Allan prepared to go to work like he did every day. He took a shower in the dark bathroom and ate his cold meal with only Sheba for company. In the bedroom where he returned to look for loose change, Allan stopped at the end of the bed and breathed in, deep and full, the fragrance of sleeping children. He picked up a bill, hesitated before putting it down back on the bureau. Combing his hair, he took a last look at the children before dithering in the corridor. He wanted to check on the sick child and to find out if medicines had run out. Minutes dragged and Allan Brown decided to make a call later from the hotel.
The evening passed like it did every day. Allan Brown took calls, made calls, connected guests to voices in parts of the world which would never visit and was uncharacteristically firm in pleading inability when the hotel manager asked him to stay on for a few more hours after his shift. From a man generally acknowledged as malleable, even an extra stress on a syllable could be deemed radical and was. The manager stared at his receptionist and because he had chosen to see the world more intently than Allan Brown ever would, decided not to take offence. He leaned over Allan and let a hand rest on his shoulders.
Before punching out, Allan patted his trouser pocket to check if the medicines for his niece, bought without verifying if a refill was needed, was in place. When he shook open his giant umbrella outside the hotel’s portico, the drizzle had acquired more determination. Picking out his steps in the whorls that water made on the dirty soil, Allan could feel it and not see when he hit the tarmac. Water was ankle-deep and threatening to climb up. The beggars hounding the hotel’s arcade were in retreat and the hucksters subdued. Only the whores were to be seen – as if driven by the rain out of their hovels like ants. Their unseen feelers begging for some warmth and custom crawled down Allan’s back of the neck like a trickle and he did not nod as usual at them in nocturnal camaraderie. The younger prostitutes, bold and unbeaten, still called out. The older ones retreated to the shadows – already relinquishing the world to a more persuasive breed.
On SN Banerjee Road, it seemed that the Ganges had poured herself onto the city. The thundering trucks were breaking waves as ambitious as a sea and in the light of streetlamps that shone reluctantly in the distance, it seemed the city’s artery was suddenly bloated with a generous infusion of blood. The rain was beating down now and Allan Brown could barely hold his umbrella steady. He would have missed the wail had he not stopped momentarily to rest before cleaving the treacle lapping at his knees. He heard it again, this time clear and urgent. The unmistakable peremptoriness of an infant. The demand for feed and care amplified like birth right, projected like a beacon to draw in all who felt the churning of life in their bosoms.
Allan Brown determined the general direction from which the increasingly insistent cries came and trudged steadily through the water. The baby was on the topmost stair leading to the front door of a porticoed house on the street and had freed its tiny arms from the swaddling. It had been called back from its cocooned oblivion by the water slowly sucking at its protective clothing and was wailing in protest. Allan Brown immediately picked it up, peeled off the wet sheet it was wrapped in and watched with some regret his umbrella bobbing on the water at some distance. The baby looked at him with luminous eyes and grinned the toothless grin of a wise reprobate before letting out another cry. There was no milk or water at hand so Allan Brown wondered if its mother was a street-walker, working nearby. But when no one turned up even long after the time needed to entertain a desperate client had elapsed, Allan knew for sure that the baby had been abandoned. With the water rising steadily and the clinging moisture as heavy as milk, he decided to take the infant home the moment there came a lull.
Half the night had elapsed before the rain started faltering. The baby had been squirming and eventually, the dampness too intense for its womb-cosseted limbs, had begun to cry. First in protest, then in deathly desperation.
When Allan Brown launched himself in the reptilian water, he had no idea that the gigantic machines at the nearest pumping station had given way and a young, frantic civic councillor, pushed to the walls by angry residents demanding their due share of dry streets, had ordered that covers of all manholes be removed.
His faced as crunched up as the baby’s, Allan Brown sloshed his way to death. He was tracing the infant’s forehead with a wet finger when the earth opened up under him. When a knee shattered in an effort to break the fall, Allan managed to hold the baby up even as he felt the water rushing up to devour his face. Gasping, sputtering, clutching the baby with his erect, unbeaten hands and without all the secret disdain for life that he liked to hoard, Allan Brown saw the baby’s face pucker and break into a smile.
Allan Brown had seen Jesus. And it was not even Christmas Day.
Allan Brown did not mind his provenance. In fact, there were few things that he actually minded. A deeply religious man, he accepted that neighbours would be nosy, colleagues mostly insufferable and family fallible. Those who admired his religiosity, called his ability to conciliate with reality wisdom. Those who did not, called him a fool.
Allan Brown’s brother Russell Brown had no job, three children and a beautiful wife. The children went to the city’s best missionary schools because the Bishop knew and pitied Allan Brown. Their mother, Rachel Brown, who liked to be called Richie after the rich, little, poor cartoon character, was known to tell her lovers that if she could choose pragmatism over passion, she could have been Richie Rich too. Russell mostly forgave her infidelity because she was once brave enough to choose the impecunious him over more suitable men. Allan Brown did not because she had committed her first adultery with him.
The Browns lived in a 150-year-old house in Doctor’s Lane which was in that part of the city which the non-resident Bengalis fondly called North Kolkata and the inhabitants of the city’s posher, southern addresses simply North. The residents of Doctor’s Lane and its adjoining bylanes never failed to shake their heads at such branding and always reminded a newcomer that the locality was, in fact, Taltolla. No more, no less.
The house that the Browns shared with two more Anglo-Indian families had been rented by their great-grandparents and the landlord thought that the lease paid by its current occupants was a cruel exercise in tokenism in these hyper-inflationary times. But most houses in North Kolkata were infested with such tenants, who, when it came to paying rent, stubbornly adhered to sensibilities and loopholes that went back at least 50 years, if not more. Landlords could only seethe.
So, when the question of maintenance arose, the landlords refused to do their bit. Tenants who could agree among themselves to keep a hundred-year-old house habitable, did that. Those who could not or would not, continued to risk their lives occupying a slowly disemboweling building until the municipal bosses drove them away or the house collapsed on them. Even land sharks steered clear of the North Kolkata bylanes because they knew that the return on their investment would not be worthwhile because most of the lanes were not broad enough to let a car in. In resurgent India, where realty rode on new money, no fresh owner of a flat could bear to be seen without another vehicle of affluence – an automobile. And localities which weren’t motorable, simply weren’t the places to relocate to.
The building in which the Browns lived, the tenants had a lot of regard for the benefits of a procrastinating judiciary. The realistic rent that they did not agree to pay, they resolved to put away a part of it towards the building’s maintenance. That’s why the structure stood even a century and a half after an upwardly-mobile Bengali doctor had built it. Mildewed yes, undeniably old and unpainted for long yes, but apposite for inhabitants who valued solidity over superficiality and value for whatever humble money they earned over flamboyance.
In the Brown family, Allan Brown did the earning and sometimes, when he felt like it, Russell Brown. What Richie Brown had in her purse, which was occasionally full, the brothers did not enquire into. Just as they chose not to explore the possibilities of its provenance. When Russell’s humiliation got the better of him, which happened sometimes, Richie started unbuttoning her blouse. Always after midnight, always after Allan Brown had got home at the end of his hotel receptionist’s shift, and always positioning herself such that Allan could get a full view of the goings-on inside his brother’s bedroom because a mirror there was positioned at just the right angle to facilitate such voyeurism from where he reclined. On such nights, Richie would be particularly passionate. And, Allan Brown, unable to tear his eyes away from such feast of altruistic filth, would masturbate. Weeping and seeking mercy, afterwards. And, every time, he would renew his hatred for Richie for systematic annihilation of his self-esteem.
But they continued to live together. Because Allan Brown had promised his dead parents that he would. Because he loved his brother and hated his sister-in-law. And, because, when holding close their firstborn, Allan Brown could not help wondering each time if the boy was, after all, his.
Richie Brown bedded Allan Brown two days after she married Russell Brown. She simply entered Allan’s room when her new husband was sleeping away his post-passion languor and holding Allan by his organ, taught him how to enter her, move with her and bring her to a climax satisfactory to her. Buried in her breasts, Allan Brown could only weep helplessly.
Richie knew that when ordinary men preferred God more than they did desultory love, it was not because they wanted to but because they were doomed by their lack of will to confront their inadequacies. She was generally correct, as beautiful women were, in their assessment of men but just as Richie was aware of what drove her to take advantage of such men, she also knew that if she did not, she would be lost. Surpassing beauty was her only objective quality and, it was its continuous validation by way of peremptory conquests that made her what she was when she was not a reluctant mother, an unfaithful wife and mistress to many men who did not ask from her anything more than guaranteed, transient possession. Sometimes, for a price.
The devout who visited Allan Brown because his piety had earned him the somewhat reputation of a touch-healer, wondered how a man of God abided such an abjectly Godless woman in the same house. But because they needed to be healed more than they cared for the domestic arrangement of the Browns, they only stared long and hard when Richie went about housework without her bra. Her defiant breasts, despite three children and countless men, were as inviting as a jug of water in a tropical afternoon. The male visitors would lean back, close their eyes and break out in a sweat as they would be overtaken by the vision of a pair of naked breasts whose topography was trammelled by beads of perspiration – some as steady as a tall glass of lemonade, some struggling to break free like a river in spate. In the presence of Richie Brown, nearly all men felt the incandescence of intense desire. And, some kept coming back to Allan Brown, with or without the need to be healed for maladies that could not be cured otherwise. The others did because what they felt for Allan Brown bordered on their sentiments inspired by, say, a roadside mongrel. They admired the mongrel for its powers of survival but could not help condemning the animal to casual kicks because it represented something they did not want to be reminded of – the limitations of the soul, the body and the silent humiliations that the weak must suffer.
When Allan Brown died, it had been raining steadily for three days. Monsoon in Kolkata was always as bitter as a scorned woman. After months of fiery sun that would soak up the spirit of a malcontent metropolis, it was always caught unawares by the rains. The weathermen sharpened their forecasts but monsoon proved every year that it was no less malcontent than the city it would assail for three months in a year. It came, when the sun and its minion earth willed it to, but always after making their orbital copulation almost irrelevant. When the child bending over under the burden of textbooks had given up asking its mother to stop dragging it to school in this heat, when a baby or ten of the city’s thousands of homeless had died of dehydration, when the number of heatwave deaths had defied another statistic, taps in the indigent quarters had started running dry and when the afternoons had turned as brittle as a whisper and as unbearable as thirst, the rains would come with the studied dispassion of a dancer. Teasing. The first band of clouds would straddle the horizon reluctantly, unwilling to lose their moisture to a steaming pit of coagulant humanity. Then the skies would suddenly part, innards illuminated. The first thunderclap would sound like a cymbal cue. And, the drizzle would start.
Homeward-bound commuters would turn up their faces, glance happily at complete strangers and exchange smiles of children getting their first taste of icecream. The urchins would hoot and descend like a wave on the streets, waving their shirts and hooping in delight, their tender age glistening on their tough bodies. The housewife cradling a baby would part the curtains drawn earlier in the day to keep out the sun and extend her hand out of the window as if to invite monsoon in. With a palm turned upwards, she would snatch the taste of rain and curl a fist like her own baby. The baby would smile with all the wisdom it had brought from the womb and nod knowingly at its mother’s delight – the role reversal as complete and as momentary as unblemished pleasure. Only the weathermen who relied on machines to bear out their gut-feeling and the very elderly who did not need to, would shiver a little. Because only they knew without doubt what others chose not to – that the rains were indeed becoming reluctant, dangerously so.
Within a few days, of course, monsoon would completely come out of its shell. The mighty river which mothered the city would rise like a thousand militant prayers, the green of the foliage would shine like jewels and the gutters would gurgle happily again. But the bowl shaped city, which retained more water than its municipal pumps could disgorge, would start overflowing. And in some parts, boats would be brought out. After days of negotiating waterlogged streets and power cuts, the malevolence displaced by the capricious monsoon would slowly seep back. Any comparison with Venice would then be met with hard, glittering stares of a people condemned to hate flooding as much as they despaired of droughts. A few would die, of course. And millions would live to tell the tale of another monsoon no longer welcome.
The day Allan Brown died began with cruelty and chaos. The Brown children didn’t want to launch themselves like little ships in the dark lane that shone like slick in the smoky dawn. It seemed as if a gigantic canister of engine oil had been tipped out onto the city and its viscosity had crawled into its each artery, vein and vessel, sniffing like a dog, weighing down like stale breath.
Richie’s voice rang out shrill and spare, remonstrating with the two older children for not willing to go to school. Her feverish youngest had kept her awake the night before and Richie, trapped inside home for three days, domesticity pressing against her like a crowd in the rush-hour Metro, was feeling the hollow despair of a woman doomed well and truly into marital martyrdom. The children feared her, seeking her comfort only in times of illness, never in distress. But the dark morning and the still water standing on the lane outside emboldened them in the manner the defeated often were and Richie’s eldest cried out: ‘No! I’m not going to school today!’
The child’s cry swelled like the flapping wings of a thousand miserable pigeons and drew Allan out of his morning reverie. Hastily pulling up his pajamas, he rushed to the verandah opening to the building’s concrete compound to find mother and children as still as a tableau. The newborn defiance on the face of his favourite, the child’s pursed lips, lapidary eyes and pinched face, sucked out his urgency and Allan stood rooted to the ground, his heart breaking at the sight of such induced end of innocence. Spray from the drizzle outside robbed the room of whatever familiar warmth it retained and the four family members stood in momentary icy aloofness as if discovering each other for the first time.
‘I’ll kill you!’ keened Richie and lunged for her elder son. Throwing him on the slippery floor with a push, she slapped him once. The whimper of a hurt child had nothing to do with the almost-adult declaration uttered instantly: ‘I will not go to school. I will not. I’ll not.’ Allan started back to life at the sound of a child’s head being bashed against the cement floor again and again. He leapt and clawed at Richie. ‘Leave the child alone! Rachel, leave the boy alone.’
‘It’s my boy. I’ll do whatever I want to with him. Get lost, you wimp!’
Allan lifted Richie and heaved her out of the way. Then he bent over the little boy, gently picked him up from the floor and started patting the back of his head with water scooped from a growing puddle in the verandah. He soothed the boy, holding him tight, muttering: ‘Don’t worry baba, I’m there for you. Always.’
‘Oh really?’ screeched a phlegm-stricken Richie from her desolate corner. ‘So that’s what you think Allan Brown? Is that what you think, you bloody fool?’ Cackling like a vicious hen, she turned around to the spot where her husband had materialized, his sleep-sodden limbs placed precariously around their whimpering daughter, who, for all the allowances that she had made for a deficient mother, seemed incapable of comprehending that she could actually be in danger from her. ‘Allan Brown and Russell Brown, the brown fools of Doctor’s Lane, why do you think I got married when I did? And to a certified loser like Russell Brown? Because I needed a father for my first child.’
In the silence that was more deafening than the shattering of a million mirrors, Allan remembered to cover the ears of the child who clung to him desperately. Russell crumbled to the floor.
‘Now you know? Do you know now? You dumb fools, now you know?’ Richie, housecoat torn open, crouching and turning slowly on her heels, screamed and screamed till the cries of her sick child pulled her back to her familiar life of genteel fraud.
Allan stirred when Sheba started nuzzling his knees. The blind Alsatian, who could not no longer see but only remember what a weeping Allan’s face looked like, nudged closer. Her restless tail tried to shoo away the incremental dampness the resolute rain was intent on depositing in the long, mildewed verandah.
The children stayed home that day. Richie did not come out of her room. Russell planted himself in the verandah, staring vacantly at the concrete compound, regarding the raindrops collecting like ammunition on the sunshades of the houses on either side, ready to roll down whenever the incontinent sky bid them to. The hours rolled by. The maid who came every day to do the cleaning, raring to rant about waterlogging yet again, flinched at the sight of the hungry, sullen Brown children – the eldest still clinging to Allan on his bed, the little girl asleep next to her brother, dried tears making her face as fragile as a crisp petal. She cooked without being asked to and put down steaming plates of food in front of each member of the family before leaving for the day.
So Russell Brown ate. And Richie Brown. And her children. Each as remote as an island buffeted by a stormy sea, the steam rising from their plates the only sign of life.
Allan Brown gently disentangled himself from the spent tendril that the arm of his sleeping nephew was and slipped off the bed. The shadows in the room were those of a rainy day readying to welcome dusk. He checked the clock ticking away the memory of his train driver father’s railway past and confirmed that it was the time to get ready for work.
Allan prepared to go to work like he did every day. He took a shower in the dark bathroom and ate his cold meal with only Sheba for company. In the bedroom where he returned to look for loose change, Allan stopped at the end of the bed and breathed in, deep and full, the fragrance of sleeping children. He picked up a bill, hesitated before putting it down back on the bureau. Combing his hair, he took a last look at the children before dithering in the corridor. He wanted to check on the sick child and to find out if medicines had run out. Minutes dragged and Allan Brown decided to make a call later from the hotel.
The evening passed like it did every day. Allan Brown took calls, made calls, connected guests to voices in parts of the world which would never visit and was uncharacteristically firm in pleading inability when the hotel manager asked him to stay on for a few more hours after his shift. From a man generally acknowledged as malleable, even an extra stress on a syllable could be deemed radical and was. The manager stared at his receptionist and because he had chosen to see the world more intently than Allan Brown ever would, decided not to take offence. He leaned over Allan and let a hand rest on his shoulders.
Before punching out, Allan patted his trouser pocket to check if the medicines for his niece, bought without verifying if a refill was needed, was in place. When he shook open his giant umbrella outside the hotel’s portico, the drizzle had acquired more determination. Picking out his steps in the whorls that water made on the dirty soil, Allan could feel it and not see when he hit the tarmac. Water was ankle-deep and threatening to climb up. The beggars hounding the hotel’s arcade were in retreat and the hucksters subdued. Only the whores were to be seen – as if driven by the rain out of their hovels like ants. Their unseen feelers begging for some warmth and custom crawled down Allan’s back of the neck like a trickle and he did not nod as usual at them in nocturnal camaraderie. The younger prostitutes, bold and unbeaten, still called out. The older ones retreated to the shadows – already relinquishing the world to a more persuasive breed.
On SN Banerjee Road, it seemed that the Ganges had poured herself onto the city. The thundering trucks were breaking waves as ambitious as a sea and in the light of streetlamps that shone reluctantly in the distance, it seemed the city’s artery was suddenly bloated with a generous infusion of blood. The rain was beating down now and Allan Brown could barely hold his umbrella steady. He would have missed the wail had he not stopped momentarily to rest before cleaving the treacle lapping at his knees. He heard it again, this time clear and urgent. The unmistakable peremptoriness of an infant. The demand for feed and care amplified like birth right, projected like a beacon to draw in all who felt the churning of life in their bosoms.
Allan Brown determined the general direction from which the increasingly insistent cries came and trudged steadily through the water. The baby was on the topmost stair leading to the front door of a porticoed house on the street and had freed its tiny arms from the swaddling. It had been called back from its cocooned oblivion by the water slowly sucking at its protective clothing and was wailing in protest. Allan Brown immediately picked it up, peeled off the wet sheet it was wrapped in and watched with some regret his umbrella bobbing on the water at some distance. The baby looked at him with luminous eyes and grinned the toothless grin of a wise reprobate before letting out another cry. There was no milk or water at hand so Allan Brown wondered if its mother was a street-walker, working nearby. But when no one turned up even long after the time needed to entertain a desperate client had elapsed, Allan knew for sure that the baby had been abandoned. With the water rising steadily and the clinging moisture as heavy as milk, he decided to take the infant home the moment there came a lull.
Half the night had elapsed before the rain started faltering. The baby had been squirming and eventually, the dampness too intense for its womb-cosseted limbs, had begun to cry. First in protest, then in deathly desperation.
When Allan Brown launched himself in the reptilian water, he had no idea that the gigantic machines at the nearest pumping station had given way and a young, frantic civic councillor, pushed to the walls by angry residents demanding their due share of dry streets, had ordered that covers of all manholes be removed.
His faced as crunched up as the baby’s, Allan Brown sloshed his way to death. He was tracing the infant’s forehead with a wet finger when the earth opened up under him. When a knee shattered in an effort to break the fall, Allan managed to hold the baby up even as he felt the water rushing up to devour his face. Gasping, sputtering, clutching the baby with his erect, unbeaten hands and without all the secret disdain for life that he liked to hoard, Allan Brown saw the baby’s face pucker and break into a smile.
Allan Brown had seen Jesus. And it was not even Christmas Day.
Anisha Bhaduri is an award-winning journalist and writer from Kolkata, India who lives and works in Hong Kong. Her debut crime novella Murders in Kolkata 26 was published by Juggernaut Books in 2020. Anisha has been longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and her work of literary fiction was first published by Random House India in a bestselling anthology. In 2022, her first short story published in North America earned her a Best of the Net nomination. Also in 2022, her short stories have appeared or have been accepted for publication across five countries in Joyland Magazine, Tampa Review, Harpur Palate, Touchstone Literary Magazine, Sonder Magazine, the other side of hope and Kitaab.
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