Canto

Imagine all the people (and this is not John Lennon) desperate for love. The romantic kind, not the kind that comes from family, which is unequivocal and still a matter of chance and luck, but the kind that needs work, and the kind that needs to be earned and the kind that you call all your own.

Now imagine that all of them as motes of dust in a darkened room. Even dust glitters as it floats into the light. And then as the very ordinariness of it becomes illuminated and there are all these speckles of golden wonder, interesting and beautiful and charming and lovable, not all of them, but those lucky to be in the light (A miracle! Can’t believe it!), they notice these other golden specks, and inevitably, as if in a trance, drift toward each other (and then they slowly drift out of the light, but then they are together and it doesn’t perhaps matter).

All of this is to say is that he did believe in the romantic ideal of love. But he kind of despaired of finding it himself. And he also believed that perhaps that idea of love is limiting and while it wouldn’t hurt to have it certainly, there were other things that were as important, or even more important. Maybe sour grapes and all that. He liked to read and write and draw. He enjoyed his own company and he had a good set of friends. He loved his family (parents and brother) and he had a decent job. He had mostly stopped drinking but hadn’t quite lost his rep yet, which meant his friends expected him to drink and he then had an occasional couple of beers (or Old Monk, it still remained difficult to say no to Old Monk). He needed to quit smoking (but he had a hard time kicking habits).

He had not looked for love really. He had found it sometimes, but he was foolish (and extra-ordinarily cautious, which is stupid if you think about it) and hadn’t had the faith (or the character) to really fight for it then and then the love had gone away.  He was past thirty and now his friends were all married, heck a few of them even had kids and their own lives. The parents were understandably worried and had placed ads in the local papers (Anandabazar Patrika (naturally), such a middle-class thing to do) and had set up a profile in a matchmaking service. He had even met a few prospects (and the word ‘prospect’ probably tells you how cold he found the entire exercise), the ones that passed muster with the parents and that he hadn’t outright rejected. It was onerous and dispiriting mostly. And sometimes it was just weird, flipping through the matches, choices determined through preferences, algorithmic certitude, allowing for no surprises.
_____________________________________________

He sneaked down to the road, choosing stairs over the agonizingly slow lift, almost imagining before the fact how the familiar acrid drag of smoke would feel after the rich food that gets served in these Bengali wedding receptions. He was at the wedding of one his cousins and between being pulled in to do a hundred different things and needing to be polite and welcoming as part of the hosting family, he had missed smoking. And now he needed one, badly. The guests had mostly left and even the crowd spilling out of the mall opposite had slowed down to a trickle.

He nicked a paan from the serving area and grabbed a water bottle on his way down, patting his back-pocket to check for the reassuring presence of the cigarette pack. The evening had brought one of the first kalboishakhis of the season, showers bringing the unbearable April heat down to manageable levels and the weather outside now was almost idyllic with the stiff breeze almost magical on fevered skin. He took a sip from the water bottle, popped the paan in his mouth and placing the bottle on the hood of a parked car, lit up the cigarette. The first drag was the smoothest and the most welcome.

“Uncle! Uncle!!”

He ignored the female voice at first, he really needed to smoke in peace. And he was not that old yet, surely? But the road was mostly empty, except for a few loitering cabs.

“Uncle!”

The voice was quite urgent now. He looked up, reluctantly. A girl, in jeans and black tee, was walking purposefully towards him. As he stared at her, she got in a good look at him and then said, “Bhaiyya.”

“Which way are you headed?” She asked. A woman, he corrected himself, one of a certain age and a certain flair (he called it shop-girl élite), and one who was used to getting her own way.

“Nowhere really. Just having a smoke.” He said, lifting his right hand with the cigarette, to show that he wasn’t lying and really was busy, smoking.

“Can you just walk me to my house? I am really afraid of dogs and they are really out this time of the night.” She had gorgeous eyes, big and kohl-lined.

“How far is your house?”

“To the end of the road, on the right. Near that Vodafone hoarding.” She said, pointing. It was at least half a kilometre away.

He sighed. His brother too couldn’t cross a road if there was a pup on the other side. He said, “Come on then.”

Well maybe he’d get a story out of it.

______________________________________________

Manna Dey would have been 98.