by Arun John
There were birds in the cooler. They whistled through the vents and shuffled about inside the pipes over the hum of the great big fans that churned endlessly, blowing gusts of cold air into the shivering corners and crevices of the room. The birds would flap their wings and flutter, as if in defiance of the chill and the restricted spaces that imprisoned them. In the beginning he searched for them--looked down the pregnant darkness of pipes, banged at echoing cylinders, and beat little fists against hollow walls. Then he stopped. Maybe he had tired, or maybe he guessed if he found them, they would all go away, veering off in a great V toward the north. So he came to accept them as entities: part of that cold room with its grained wood shelves, dwindling bottles of ancient wines, soggy cardboard boxes, and humming fans.
The day the cooler arrived, tied on to a truck, Dibbya was only five. Clanking of metal, the workman shouting to each other, and the villagers following in silent pursuit. Everybody had come out of their houses, abandoning their devoirs for the rumble of the wagon and the driver that sat upon it. Even the soldiers from the barracks, their sentry duties forgotten, had come to gape open-mouthed at this luxury of over-indulgence. The truck rolled on to stop at the foot of the house. In silence, everyone drank in their first close look. Then like the sound of a swarm of bees approaching from afar, a murmur grew. High-pitched voices interspersed with men shouting; and the village children came screaming round the corner of the house and started to clamber up on the truck and slap their hands against the steel walls. Dibbya felt an irresistible urge to join them in their desecration, but as he started forward he found that his hand was caught in the wizened palm of his grandmother who was staring, dismayed, at the half-naked bodies crawling all over the truck.
“Thakurma!” Dibbya shouted, “Let me go.” He tried to squirm his hand out of her grip, but the old woman was strong and held on to Dibbya with all the force her body could summon.
Everyone was so taken aback by the scene that nobody ventured to do anything about it. There were children everywhere, dancing on top of the truck, pulling at ropes and clamoring in an orgy of discord. Yet there was a kind of order in their commotion and they went about their task with a method. Dibbya saw one of them lying with his face to the floor of the truck, his mouth chewing at a strand. The rope snapped, the door swung open, and the children disappeared inside the cooler taking their voices with them. There were slight motions from inside, but after all the confusion it seemed peace had finally returned.
The men jumped back to life and some of them started to climb onto the truck cursing. Dibbya’s father who had stood by and watched dumb-stricken threw his shock away, and with a kind of pompous animosity started to shout orders to the men who were climbing on to the truck. But the children hadn’t finished--this Dibbya knew. Just as some of the men got a foothold, they rushed out in a roar, and once again there were little bodies running about wildly on top of the truck. The men scattered, as streams of piss ran down the walls with a drumming sound. Dibbya’s father could not take this defilation any longer. He stood below the truck and shouted that he would call the soldiers to come out with their guns and shoot the whole bloody lot of them. The children’s attention did not waver, and a little boy bouncing on top of the truck emptied himself onto Father’s head.
The worst affected was Dibbya’s grandmother. In spite of washing the cooler down with detergent, and sprinkling holy water on it, she never really recovered from the shock of that day. Dibbya overheard her saying to the maid that she had nightmares every night--of those children standing around her urinating, and that Dibbya too was among them, laughing gleefully like the others.
Dibbya’s father started to go blind in one eye. It happened all of a sudden. One morning, two weeks after the incident, he woke up to find that only his right eye could see. The other one had closed shut in a vice and, however much he tried he could not pry it open. It had festered over and the pus had caused the two lids to be welded together. After he had tried all the methods suggested to him by Thakurma, like washing the eye in cotton soaked in boric powder and water, putting cool slices of cucumber on it, and dabbing it with little bags filled with tea, he lost patience. He started to shout like he always did when he was angry or helpless. He yelled in a loud voice, cursing the children and their piss, cursing Thakurma and her ineffectual medications, and cursing the very day he thought about getting the cooler. As he was shouting a strange thing happened. His left eye began to cry. At first it started as an insignificant little speck, but as the intensity of his distress increased, the speck welled into a drop and condensed into a little rivulet that flowed down his left cheek. When Dibbya’s father felt the tickle of tears on his cheek, he stopped shouting. He looked quietly at everyone and said, “Maybe the water will open it up if I shout a little more.” So he started to shout again, and kept it up for about an hour, and the eye kept on weeping but did not open. All that came out of it were tears which soaked Father’s clothes and made salty drops at his feet.
The doctor from the barracks as well as village physician came and took a look at the eye. But their medicines did nothing. After that the journeying for the cure started. Dibbya’s father visited doctors all over the country. He would leave for days and come back with his suitcase overflowing with pill bottles and vials filled with strangely viscous fluids. He applied the ointments to his eye and popped the pills religiously everyday for a week, but when nothing happened he grew impatient and threw all the pills and vials into the yard where they lay glistening and playing with the light of every new day.
One night he came back after five days in Bombay and left the next morning for Europe. For two months nobody heard from him or received any news as to what he was doing. Then one day a telegram arrived stating that he was coming back, but it did not say when. After the telegram came, Thakurma started to sit outside on the verandah every evening looking at the road where the dust blew into swirls; grit-like, collected around, and as night came on went to sleep peacefully beside her.
Soon she started to sleep on the verandah, lying calmly with her eyes on the road, as the dust cuddled against her like lost children.
In the big house with its frozen chandeliers and fading photographs of his mother, the cooler and its inhabitants prevailed. The rest of the house crumbled slowly with age, breaking down in fragments and falling into dusty decrepitude. Even the iron pillars which withstood the weight of the house for generations had started to waver. A thin veneer of rust had wrapped itself around them and had begun to feed on the metal. He sometimes thought that he should try and reverse this process of decay. He saw the music rooms and their doors sealed by rusted locks, the verandah with its cracked floors and sagging balustrades; the big lawn overlooking the rice fields where he played and he wondered if he should do anything about it all. Then the lethargy and helplessness of his existence overcame him and he sought comfort in the disuse and gentle corrosion that surrounded him. It was almost as if the house understood his dilemma and sympathized with him, like a close friend who was also seeing troubled days. And sometimes when the compassion of the house failed to satisfy him, he went down to the cooler and listened to the sound of the birds.
When the Monsoons came, Dibbya’s father had still not returned and Thakurma stopped sleeping on the verandah. The rain came down with a fury and washed all the dust away.
Monsoon passed to winter, and winter held out a little longer against the swirling dust storms of summer that year. Still Father did not return. Then in the third month of the summer, a parcel arrived.
The day the parcel arrived, Dibbya was lying with his ear against the floor of the cooler. He heard the earth turning under his body, revolving around on the breeze created by the fluttering wings of his birds. For that moment he was one with them, floating along, staid and assured, listening to the inner working of his world--the sanguine bubble of rice on the stove, the vaporous protest of frying vegetables, the whisper of words, the tropical hum of fans, the metronomic tickings of unwinding clocks in the house where sounds mingled into one undiminished language.
The parcel contained a brass urn in which a glass eye lay mingled, ashen and bloodless, among Dibbya’s father’s cremated remains. There was a big label on the side of the urn. “Mr. Ghosh. PROPERTY OF THE BRITISH POSTAL SERVICE,” it said. On the other side, a lion and a unicorn embossed themselves in a gesture of officialdom into the already fading and greenish brass.
“There should be a letter,” Thakurma muttered, as she rummaged through the packing paper, but there wasn’t. All she found were little weevils that moved their blotched brown bodies through the piles of paper that kept the ashes company. Thakurma threw the paper out into the dust road where they fluttered and danced away with the breeze, rising higher into the sky, dipping and weaving through the air until they merged with the dust filled landscape, becoming as inconspicuous as the little tufts of grass that poked their heads through the cracks in the cemented grounds surrounding the barracks. Her son’s ashes and eye she transferred to a little pickle jar that she sat up on the kitchen shelf, among the conglomeration of spice bottles and tinned food she bought from the surplus store in the barracks. She told Dibbya that she would throw the ashes into the Ganges but for some reason she procrastinated. She started to spend long hours alone with herself, the ashes and the eye. Dibbya would see her in the evenings when he returned from school, sitting in the kitchen holding the pickle jar, rocking back and forth in her chair, and looking out through the window into the shadows of a dying sun.
Her energy began to fade and waver. She rarely moved around, and even when she did, it was only to reach up to the kitchen shelf to get the jar. She would take out the eye, place it on the table, and cradle the ashes in her hands. Then when the evening rolled into the early hours of the morning, she would return the jar and eye to the shelf. But even this ritual waned, and one morning the maid found her sitting in her chair with the eye on the table and the ashes still in her hand.
When Dibbya realized that Thakurma had become stone, it was already too late. All he could do now was go down to the cooler and listen to the sound of the birds.