One night when her husband was away on a boat, her father-in-law had come home drunk and forced his way into the room where she was sleeping with her children. In front of her children, he had held the sharpened edge of a dá to her throat and tried to pull off her sari. When she attempted to fight him off, he had gashed her arm with the machete, almost severing the thumb of her left hand. She had flung a kerosene lamp at him and his lungi had caught fire giving him severe burns. For this she had been turned out of her marital home, although her only offence was that she had tried to protect herself and her children.
Here, as if to corroborate her story, her voice rose and she cried out, ‘And this is where he cut me, here and here.’
At this point Kanai, unable to restrain his curiosity, thrust his head through the doorway to steal a glance. The woman who had told the story was hidden from his view, and since everyone in the courtyard was looking in her direction, no one noticed Kanai – no one, that is, but Kusum, who had averted her eyes from the storyteller. Kanai and Kusum held each other’s gaze, and for the duration of that moment it was as though they were staring across the most primeval divide in creation, each assessing the dangers that lay on the other side; it seemed scarcely imaginable that here, in the gap that separated them, lay the potential for these extremes of emotion, this violence. But the mystery of it was that the result of this assessment was nothing so simple as fear or revulsion – what he saw in her eyes was rather an awakened curiosity he knew to be a reflection of his own.
So far as Kanai could remember, it was Kusum who spoke to him first, not on that day but some other morning. He was sitting on the floor, wearing nothing but a pair of khaki shorts. He had his back against a wall with a book on his belly, its spine propped up against his knees. He looked up from the page to see her peering through the doorway, a strangely self-possessed figure, despite her close-cropped hair and tattered red frock. Scowling at him, she said, in a tone of querulous accusation, ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Reading.’
‘I saw – you were listening.’
‘So?’ He shrugged.
‘I’ll tell.’
‘So go and tell.’ Despite the show of bravado he was rattled by the threat. As if to keep her from carrying it out, he moved up to make room for her to sit. She sank down and sat beside him with her back to the wall, and her knees drawn up to her chin. Although he didn’t dare look at her too closely, he became aware that their bodies were grazing each other at the shoulder, the elbows, the hips and the knees. Presently he saw that there was a mole on the swell of her left breast: it was very small, but he could not tear his eyes from it.
‘Show me your book,’ she said.
Kanai was reading an English mystery story and he dismissed her request with a shrug. ‘Why do you want to look at this book? It won’t make any sense to you.’
‘Why not?’
‘Do you know English?’ Kanai demanded.
‘No.’
‘Then? Why are you asking?’
She watched him for a moment, unabashed, and then sticking her fist under his nose, unfurled her fingers. ‘Do you know what this is?’
Kanai saw that she had a grasshopper in her hand and his lip curled in contempt. ‘Those are everywhere. Who’s not seen one of those?’
‘Look.’ Lifting up her hand, Kusum put the insect in her mouth and closed her lips.
This caught Kanai’s attention and he finally deigned to lower his book. ‘Did you swallow it?’
Suddenly her lips sprang apart and the grasshopper jumped straight into Kanai’s face. He let out a shout and fell over backwards, while she watched, laughing.
‘It’s just an insect,’ she said. ‘Don’t be afraid.’
After Piya had dressed and changed, she crawled back to the front of the boat with the chequered towel in her hands. She tried to ask Fokir the name of the fabric, but her gestures of inquiry elicited only a raised eyebrow and a puzzled frown. This was to be expected, for he had so far shown little interest in pointing to things and telling her their Bengali names. She had been somewhat intrigued by this for, in her experience, people almost automatically went through a ritual of naming when they were with a stranger of another language. Fokir was an exception in that he had made no such attempts – so it was scarcely surprising that he should be puzzled by her interest in the word for this towel.
But she persisted, making signs and gestures until finally he understood. ‘Gamchha,’ he said laconically, and of course, that was it; she had known it all along: Gamchha, gamchha.
How do you lose a word? Does it vanish into your memory, like an old toy in a cupboard, and lie hidden in the cobwebs and dust, waiting to be cleaned out or rediscovered?
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