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My Playmate’s House

Rongili Biswas

    My playmate’s house had an indigenous tub in the shower room. None could go inside those. All one could do was to look at the age-old copious darkness that had settled down on its water and the hoary spiderwebs crisscrossing the hind wall to form a background. There, in that house, at the back of which water got stored in the ancient reservoir, one room would be perpetually locked. The small space in front of the two other tiny ones led to a flight of stairs for the terrace and another couple of wide steps to the narrow courtyard.
    There was a shed to the right of the courtyard. I remember flies buzzing around that and the holes in the tattered canopy giving out a miasma of hay and stale dung. Three burlap sacks would half-hide one side of the shed, and I would intermittently hear the sound of the hoofs clattering on the floor. The shed was as much a part of the house as the boundary wall, the lone pomegranate tree and the cramped small rooms — visible and yet not perceptible at some level.
    The house was built at an angle to the lane at whose end it stood brazenly. In that house and in the dusty lane by it, thick white bunches of flowers on a creeper gave away the smell of an unmitigated summer. When a sudden breeze blew, I tried hard to endow them with a name, but I was forever dismayed with the ones that came to my mind.
    We played hopscotch in the narrow courtyard, no matter the season. At the end of the game, when the rectangular court drawn in a shaken hand melted into darkness, I would feel a closure around myself for reasons unknown.
    One summer day, as I was tossing the smoothened cobblestone dice in the court and hopping along, my game partner gave me a push. Then I saw it. A man was coming out of the dark, permanently locked room, dragging a chain behind him along the floor. He was huge, stark naked and his buttocks moved in strange concordance with his private language of defiance. I could see only a portion of his disheveled hair, and it was hard to tell upon what his faraway gaze was fixed.
    His mother, an aged widow, clad in a white chemise, came running from the back of the house shouting, ‘Excuse us, what a shame, if only he had told me he wanted a shower right now’. Her humiliation was so obvious that it seemed nothing in the world was good enough to alleviate that.
    This was the mad man, who along with his mother were given shelter in the house. They were some distant relatives of my friend, she told us later. Before that day I did not know he existed. At least, there was nothing that could make us think about him. From that moment on, the room acquired a significance for me, and each evening before going back, I would always check if there was any gap in the door through which I would get a glimpse of him.
    I still wonder whether his mother could ever come to terms with the moment when she thought a primordial nakedness, that belonging to her own son, was being exposed to the world’s eyes. To her, her own public nudity would have been far less ignominious.
    The only other time I saw the two of them together was after her death. She was still in her white chemise lying in the cot that was waiting to be taken in a hearse. It was the hour of the daybreak, and people were whispering in the narrow lane. I heard, although faintly, the birds trilling. At some point, the room was unlocked and the man was led to the cot kept at the end of the lane. He trudged along with his chain looking at nothing, and when he reached there, his eyes seemed to search something intently in her tranquil face.
    Many years later I had him in my dream — the mad man. I could hear the heavy chains rattling behind his steps. Although in that dream I heard the rains falling, he told me there was no such thing as rain. It was the eternal summer of my childhood and a perpetually suspended dream of bathing that made me look for him all these years, he said. The un-nameable scented creeper, the holed canopy of the shed, the strangely built angular house and his unguarded nakedness all blended together to form the denial destined for me. That day I came to know that love would elude me forever.
     It was he who foretold it.

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