MRS CHATTERJEE

I had seen that window on many nights
During my struggling writer days in Manali
And glimpsing from the dark alley way below it
I always imagined the lives it veiled-
Their melodrama
Their secrets
Their comedies
Their tragedies
Their stories


So many times, I picked up the pen
And so many nights, they pulled down the curtains
And the moment would pass


She was perhaps forty two or forty three
Some five years younger than my mother
Two children, strangers to her
One husband, oblivious to her existence
Never, a considerate lover


It was at her Terracotta balcony that I saw her for the first time
Mellowed by the winter afternoon sun
Looking down from the North West window
With a sad and longing face


Those searching eyes still haunt me
From time to time
What were they searching for?
I forgot the next lines in the song I was humming


She stuck out amidst those Western Landscapes
With her moon sized bindi
And her dazzlingly colored chiffons


A friendly banter with the colony milkman
(And a ten rupee note tucked into his palm)
Revealed that she stayed alone mostly
That her daughter was either married or dead
That her son studied at a boarding and was terribly ill- mannered
That her husband, a noted attorney often slept at his office
And traveled frequently out of town
That Gopal (the milkman) was certain that he was having an affair
And that he felt sorry for poor Memsaab and that…..


She never confirmed these suspicions
Even to me, later
Only that he did travel frequently
She had been suspicious at first
And then stopped asking altogether
I guess, he was just indifferent to her
He didn’t beat her or anything
I mean I didn’t see any purple bruises
Under her blouse


While her husband’s eyes were vacant
I could see the whole
Calcutta in her eyes-


The coffee house
The college street
The cutlet cabins
The unannounced rains
The tranquil trams
The traffic jams
The student politics
The Marxism
The Romanticism
The intellectualism
The animated Kieslowski discussions
The rhythms in the humdrum
The surreal Anglo- Indians
The Planetarium
The Victoria Memorial
The mustard mackerel
The lights and sounds
The poetic madness


For around a year after I first saw her
Tea was always at the Chatterjee’s
For she had the afternoons to herself
And that was also the time for the neighborhood siesta
Occasionally, she would prepare elaborate savories to go with the tea
That my mother couldn’t make and I, relished
And she would watch me eat, enthralled
As though I was showing her some optical illusion
I learnt later that she planned these meals, weeks in advance
But served with such selfless nonchalance
She was a fantastic cook
Of course, Mr. Chatterjee never appreciated that
Considerate as he was


And there, one afternoon,
In the French style kitchen,
For the first time, we made love


I also still remember their master bedroom vividly-
The thin cushioned, Charulata bed
The yellow and orange bed-sheet
With rows and rows of printed palanquin bearing elephants
The mismatching pillow covers in broad lime green checks
As though hastily stitched from curtain leftovers
The engraved Mahogany roll-top with a silver knob
The antediluvian carpet, coming out in faded clumps
The red lampshades that spouted diffused light at nights
The voyeuristic window that opened to the balcony
With her money-plants and delphiniums
That I observed, were in need of watering


All this
And always a vestige of Mr. Amarnath Chatterjee-
His horn rimmed spectacles
His Holmesian pipe
His erudite books
As though silent, testimonial witnesses
To our clumsy, clandestine, intercourses


But we tried our best to hide our love anyway
From her unsuspecting husband
From her tongue wagging neighbors
From her tormented conscience


We hid it in a hiding place where no one else would go
And here I would like to share something
I knew vaguely back then
That he probably knew about us
But why did he not do anything? Why?
I ponder….
He didn’t tell her anything


And she didn’t tell him
She didn’t tell Ria or Rahul either
But she told me one night
Just like that, draped up to her neck in the sheets,
That on one afternoon, one particular, winter afternoon
After turning off the stove
Looking longingly at her family album
And changing into her best Saree
She had gone inside the bathroom
Searching for one of Amar’s blades
After finding them, she stood in front of the mirror
And toyed with the idea of her touching her wrists with it
That’s when she heard someone humming Rabindra Sangeet
And that was the first time she had seen me from her balcony
With her Calcutta eyes


She confided this in me
The day when my heart too, was broken;
By a woman I’d hoped to marry


And apparently the same December day of the same year
In 2003,
Into her house and mine, came a stray canary.
In two widely separated countries


She believed in serendipity
But she also believed Iraq had WMDs
So one couldn’t always take her seriously


I always remember that conversation
Another thing I always remember
From those get-togethers
Was the incessant sound of the Television
In the background
She later told me later that she slept too, with that sound
A surrogate for conversations
She missed having and never had
Slicing sound of cars passing by in the distance


After that I remember nothing
But her red and white bangles
And her large, dark eyes
Exuding intellectual sensuality


Some days, she would only hold onto me
Refusing to let me go
On certain days, she would be continents away
And then there were days
She cried inconsolable tears


One random day, amidst careless playfulness
She revealed her first name, almost inadvertently, to me
‘Radha’


It was a beautiful sight at twilight
We would sit in the balcony of the house
And sip red wine in the light of little oil lamps
Unless of course it was a full moon
We didn’t need the lights though, did we?


Slowly, I began to miss her
Thinking of her
Looking out of my window five or six times in an hour
I started looking forward to our
Hurried, scandalous unions


Sometimes when I would arrive
I would find her with her purse
She looked forward to my visits
To surreptitiously leaving the apartment
She had spent her day alone in


At one of those instants, it became apparent to me
That she loved me
I was the only totally unanticipated pleasure in her life


It turned out we were from the same part of Calcutta
She would be playfully combative
As we discussed our shared passions
Cinema, Travel, Shesher Kobita
(Among some of the treasures she lost
During the wanderings of her adult years)


Slowly the mist started lifting from her past
Her daughter, Ria was married to an ivory merchant
Who was from another caste and settled in Kent
Theirs was a runaway marriage
Of which she had never approved
And the lovely bitch had punished mother
By severing all ties with her
Their only communication since last June
Was a haphazard, placeless postcard or two


Her son of nineteen was at IIT, Kharagpore
And didn’t need her anymore
The mysteries of anti matter
Of which he could never get bored
When she called, he thought she was being nosy
And that he was supposed to be very busy


And then I got my first publishing contract
And I had to move
Our goodbyes weren’t at all, melancholic
For we presumed, brazenly
That our separation was temporary
That our affair would go on forever
That I would come back on the 24th
And we would elope out of this country
But I never went back


We wrote to each other in the beginning
But then I began writing
And was seldom inspired to write back
It perhaps became clear to her
That I had stopped needing her
Abruptly and definitively
Just like Amar and her children had


And then four months later and exactly four years ago to this day
She died of a stroke on the stroke of midnight
In that very apartment she dreaded
She had wanted to travel
She had wanted to be truly loved


Today, when I see Mr. Amarnath standing alone
On that same terracotta balcony
I wonder if he knows that I’ve been a privy
To some silent secrets in the Chatterjee family