Fern Road Read online

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Angshu Dasgupta lives in Kolkata, India, with his spouse and two daughters. He is a computer programmer by profession. This is his first work of fiction.

  First published in 2019 by

  UWA Publishing

  Crawley, Western Australia 6009

  www.uwap.uwa.edu.au

  UWAP is an imprint of UWA Publishing, a division of The University of Western Australia.

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.

  Copyright © Angshuman Dasgupta 2019

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  ISBN: 978-1-76080-039-0

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia

  Cover design by Peter Long

  Typeset by Lasertype

  Printed by McPherson’s Printing Group

  For Aardvark

  One

  Fern Road is not a road lined with ferns. It is a labyrinthine lane, lined with practical, sturdy houses, two and three storeys high. Their windows have wooden shutters, with columns of slats that open and shut like giant mechanical eyelids. The houses look like they’ve been here forever, their balconies floating above the narrow footpaths like magic carpets.

  Orko hurries through the maze, turning left, right, right again, then left. In the corner is a two-storey house, its bright green gate framed by purple bougainvillea. In the mornings, an old man reads his newspaper on the verandah, a cup of tea on a teapoy by his side. In the afternoon, the man stands by the railing, smiling at strangers as they walk past. There’s no one on the verandah today – just pyjamas, a towel, a girl’s school uniform and women’s petticoats hung out to dry on a blue clothesline.

  Around the corner are little shops that sell stationery, samosas, mutton; their minders doze behind weathered counters, on stools and in aluminium chairs. Orko walks past the shops, emerging at Golpark, which is not really a park – it’s a little garden at a traffic roundabout, with an iron fence around it. There’s a sweet shop at the corner of the roundabout. Orko casts about for loose change in his pockets; he’s hungry.

  A roshogolla, unlike the parks and roads with their delusions of grandeur, is exactly what it claims to be: a little ball of a sweetmeat swimming in a puddle of sugar syrup. Orko gulps it down, leaving the stainless-steel bowl in the sink.

  He marks time at the bus stop, glancing at watches strapped on other people’s wrists. Petite, with a delicate chain for a strap. Large and chunky, with a black dial. Digital, with a plastic band. After ten minutes or so, the bus he’s waiting for trundles along. He takes the only vacant seat, next to a tired-looking young man with a sling bag across his shoulder.

  They leave Golpark behind and ascend the Dhakuria bridge. To the left is the Children’s Little Theatre; Orko has been there a few times, with his grandmother. From the crest of the bridge, he can see the railway tracks below. A green suburban train sidles along, its horn booming over the noisy traffic. A startled calf hastily moves out of its path. The gears grind as the asthmatic bus nears the foot of the bridge, the dull whine of its engine giving way to a gentle growl. On either side of the street are shopfronts and residential apartments. Five schoolgirls wait patiently at a pedestrian crossing. An auto-rickshaw slows down near them. One of the girls shakes her head, and the auto-rickshaw picks up speed again.

  The bus come to a halt near a crowded intersection. The driver kills the engine. When the lights change to green, the engine doesn’t start on the first try. Just as they’re about to cross the intersection, the lights change again. The brakes let out a mournful howl as they lurch to a stop.

  After the intersection, the footpaths are narrower, skirting high walls punctuated by large iron gates. Some of the gates have arches, marked with uninteresting text in raised metal lettering. Beyond the gates are tall, forlorn buildings, fronted by unkempt lawns and derelict carports. When they’re about to reach the university, the young man beside Orko leaves his seat. He rings the bell and makes his way to the door, just as the bus is slowing to a halt. The conductor demands to see his ticket, but the man hops off without a word.

  The bus continues, making slow progress amid a sea of bicycles, rickshaws and pedestrians. Orko is alert now, looking out for the bend in the road after which he must disembark. He reaches for the handrail as the bus crawls around the bend. He holds out his ticket for the conductor, who waves him on. He crosses the street and makes his way to the mouth of a lane that bleeds off to the right of the thoroughfare.

  The lane is dark and narrow. It winds between high walls plastered with election propaganda in raucous red. It snakes to the right; the walls fall away. To the left is a vacant plot, with a makeshift fence around it. To the right is a rusty green gate, ajar, the latch broken.

  Beside the gate is a dilapidated metal signboard on a rusty stalk. ‘Bidyasagar Kanan,’ it says, in English and in Bangla. At its foot, faded lettering on a slab of marble declares that this residential enclave was inaugurated by the Honourable Minister for Education in January 1973. A narrow concrete driveway leads into the enclave. To its left is a deserted guardhouse; to its right is a parking lot – a rusty old Ambassador, the colour of a withering plantain leaf, its only occupant.

  The car hasn’t been driven in Orko’s lifetime. It looks like it has sprung from the earth – the result, perhaps, of a wayward spell cast by an itinerant conjurer. Its tyres are flat, with tufts of grass growing around them. The round headlights and the chrome grille, curving earthward at the extremities, give it a permanent, forbidding frown. A giant gulmohur tree overlooks the parking lot; crows congregate among its branches, pelting the car with excrement as they wing their way to and from their perch. As a young child, Orko would often climb into the car and sit in the driver’s seat, his legs dangling a few inches above the floor. He would put the car in gear and pretend to drive off. Sometimes he would drive himself to Dehradun; sometimes he would just drive to Gariahat market to buy a fat pig.

  The enclave consists of eight identical buildings, with a tangled web of cobbled paths snaking around them. The buildings, each four storeys high, look like a child built them from a box of Lego on a slow afternoon. Orko lives in one of these buildings – the one closest to the parking lot, beside the gulmohur. There are two bicycles parked beneath the stairs. The red one belongs to Orko; his father bought it for him on his thirteenth birthday. He climbs the dark staircase, counting out forty-two steps. A few strides to the left brings him to the front door of his flat.

  The nameplate on the letterbox simply reads ‘Dr Nandan Sengupta, PhD’. Orko shrugs off his schoolbag and fishes a keyring out of his pocket. The room inside is shaped like an L, with a wooden sofa set occupying the short leg. At the end of the other is a round dining table with three mismatched chairs. The refrigerator is by the dining table, beside the door to his bedroom.

  On the refrigerator, in a wooden photo frame, is the picture of a young woman in a saree, sitting on a park bench. It is one of two photographs Orko has of his mother. There is a wedding photo on his father’s desk, but Nandan keeps it face-down, under a stack of papers and periodicals. Orko looks at it sometimes, and it never fails to startle him. Nandan is clean-shaven in the picture; he is wearing a dark suit, and looks mildly amused. Orko’s mother is in a saree that could be red, or mauve – it’s impossible to tell from the black-and-white photograph. She looks frightening, with the nose pin and the oversized earrings. They’re seated about six inches from one another; they could be strangers, posing for a photograph to commemorate a chance encounter.r />
  In Orko’s room, a simple narrow bed is positioned directly beneath the ceiling fan. Along the far wall is an ancient writing desk that had belonged to his grandfather. There’s a clothes horse to the right, and a pair of box windows to the left. Below the window ledge are four shelves full of cassettes. He counts the cassettes every now and then; at last count, there were four hundred and sixty-three. On the top shelf is an old stereo – a hand-me-down from an uncle. Three of the four walls are completely unadorned. On the wall that stretches from the door to the wardrobe is a poster of Tracy Chapman. To her right is Jack Nicholson, as the Joker. On the door of the wardrobe is a reproduction of the cover of a Guns N’ Roses album, Use Your Illusion, in electric blue. Orko doesn’t particularly like the band anymore, but he can’t rip off the poster – he used too much glue when he put it up.

  There is just one bathroom in the flat. The shower head is caked with lime and rust. It’s a test of patience trying to get anything from it. Orko fills the metal bucket from the tap and hastily pours mugs of tepid water on his head. He doesn’t bother with soap – he’s hungry.

  In the refrigerator are stacks of bowls covered with melamine plates, and the thought of sorting through them makes him wish he was having lunch at Urmi’s. Urmi is in Orko’s class, and up until a few months ago the two of them rode the school bus home every afternoon. They would run up the stairs to her first-floor flat. ‘We’re hungry,’ Urmi would announce as soon as her mother (‘Ketaki-mashi’ to Orko) opened the door.

  Lunch at Urmi’s was a grand affair – a minimum of three courses. When he was sure he could eat no more, Ketaki-mashi would insist that he hadn’t eaten at all; he must have another serving of fish, another helping of dessert.

  Soon after Orko turned fifteen, his father said it was time he stopped using the school bus.

  ‘How will I go to school, then?’ Orko asked.

  ‘Well, it’s easy enough to take the public bus,’ Nandan said. ‘There are many that’ll take you very close to your school. I’ll show you tomorrow.’

  ‘But all my friends take the school bus,’ Orko protested.

  ‘You can’t really know the city and the people that live in it if you don’t share in the daily ritual of using public transport,’ Nandan said.

  Orko couldn’t respond to a sentence as complicated as that. He suspected that his father knew this, and that the sentence had been framed long ago, in anticipation of a conversation in which it might come of use.

  The next morning, they took the bus to Golpark. His father led him through Fern Road – a right turn, a left, another left, then right again, Orko carefully noted. They went past Gariahat market and across the tramline, into a lane that looked like it was a dead end. They passed through a passageway between two houses – a gnarly old house to the right, a newer house with pink walls to the left. The passage was so narrow that they had to walk in single file. When they emerged, Orko was surprised to find himself on the route the school bus took every morning.

  ‘Does this look familiar?’ his father asked.

  Orko nodded.

  Nandan left him there, with a letter for the school administrator, asking that he be allowed to leave by himself at the end of the day. Orko followed the footpath faithfully. Cars and buses overtook him. Someone waved at him through the rear window of a passing school bus. Orko was too startled to wave back.

  At the end of the day, he went to the office with the letter from his father. Mrs Bannerjee, the administrator, read the letter carefully. She looked at Orko over the top of her eyeglasses.

  ‘So you’re all grown up now, are you?’ she said, with a smile. She wrote out a gate pass and handed it to Orko.

  ‘Look right and then left when you cross the street,’ she said.

  Orko smiled. He had been crossing busy streets by himself since he was ten.

  ‘I will, miss,’ he said.

  The next morning, Nandan handed him the bus fare, and ‘a little extra, just in case’. Orko was on his own.

  For the first few days, it was a bit of a bother, especially on the way back. He had to show his pass to the guard at the school gates. He lost his way a few times when he was heading to Golpark. Sometimes all the seats on the bus were taken, and he wished he was in the school bus with Urmi, in the seat they always shared, three rows from the back.

  Now Orko likes walking out of school, to Gariahat and down the boulevard. Sometimes he dawdles, browsing through the racks of magazines and second-hand books in the little stalls. Sometimes he stops at the music shop at the end of the boulevard, blowing all his pocket money on pirated cassettes. When he’s hungry, like he was today, he takes the shortcut through Fern Road and buys himself a snack from one of the shops at the roundabout.

  He doesn’t have lunch with Urmi anymore, because he reaches home a good half-hour after the school bus. Lunch is in the fridge, in the stack of bowls covered with melamine plates. Nandan has taught him to make rice. He makes exactly as much as he wants, and because the rice is steaming hot he doesn’t have to heat the vegetables or the dal.

  He carries his lunch to his room. He sets the plate down on the window ledge and browses through his cassettes. After a few false starts, he settles on the greatest hits of Simon & Garfunkel. He turns up the volume before hoisting himself into the box window.

  Outside, the afternoon is still, the sky an unforgiving blue, with not a cloud in sight. There’s not a quiver in the leaves on the trees – it’s as if they’re frozen in place. Down below, a clutch of buildings crowd around a little playground, its border marked out by a cement footpath. Rusty swing sets, a slide, a seesaw, a sandpit without any sand in it – it looks like the abandoned work of a distracted artist, the footpath its sorry frame.

  Every family living in these buildings has some connection with the university. Orko’s father is a professor in the department of electrical engineering. Urmi’s father, Dr Datta, is an administrator. No one has moved in or out of the enclave in Orko’s lifetime.

  Their flat is among a handful that have a telephone. Every once in a while, the phone rings. When it’s for Mrs Sen, Orko fetches her from the adjoining flat. When it’s for someone living further away, he transforms into a teletype machine. It’s almost as if the message flows directly from his ear to his fingertips, without passing the gates of his comprehension. He carefully inscribes the name and the flat number of the intended recipient on the top left corner of the note. When he’s done, it looks much like a telegram – staccato sentences, missing parts of speech – conveying a message that’s of no interest to him. He folds it in half and runs across to deliver it.

  ‘It’s really difficult to get a phone connection,’ Nandan told Orko when their telephone was installed a few months ago. ‘Sometimes one forgets that one lives in a civilised country. Until everyone has a phone, those of us who do have a responsibility towards everybody else. After all, we didn’t pay for the cable to be brought to our door. The government did.’

  Orko’s services seldom go unrewarded. The first slice of a cake, fresh out of the oven; a bowl of homemade potato wafers; a jam sandwich made of thin arrowroot biscuits. Orko never declines.

  In the kitchen, by the stove, are eight glass jars of varying sizes. The largest jar is half-full of rice. By its side are two smaller jars, filled with different varieties of dal. The smallest jars contain spices – turmeric, bay leaves, cumin seeds, chilli powder, black pepper. The jars are covered in a coat of grime. In the corner, by the sink, is an ashtray overflowing with orange cigarette butts. In the sink, near the maker’s mark, is a fissure, its spidery legs reaching out, upwards, downwards, sideways. Over the sink is a window, its grille coated with rust and grime.

  Orko remembers sitting on the kitchen floor with his mother, the glass jars in a huddle between them. They wiped down the jars with dishrags soaked in soapy water. His mother taught him to blow bubbles, through a tiny hoop fashioned out of a length of insulated electrical wire. They would sit there, in the sweltering he
at, blowing bubbles, eating mangoes, the sparkling jars back on the kitchen shelf.

  Once, Orko threw a mango seed out of the window. His mother admonished him: ‘What if it hits someone on the head?’ She made him go downstairs and bring the seed back. They gave it a burial in the large tub of compost she kept on the balcony by the kitchen.

  In this kitchen of his memories, the walls are a brilliant white. The jars twinkle; their contents glow yellow, and orange, and sparkling white, like dabs of paint on a still-life watercolour. The window grille is so white it hurts the eye. He isn’t tall enough to see Urmi’s flat through the window, although he can see the terrace of the building in which she lives. Above the terrace is the vast blue expanse where he first saw a vulture.

  ‘Look!’ his mother said, kneeling beside him, pointing through the window. At the tip of her finger, against the bright blue sky, was a large black bird.

  ‘A crow!’

  ‘Is that what it is?’ The fingertip was gone now, and Orko followed the shape as it spiralled downwards, in slow, ever-tightening circles, its wings barely moving. When it banked, Orko knew that it couldn’t possibly be a crow.

  ‘An eagle?’ That was the only large bird that he could think of.

  ‘It’s a vulture,’ his mother said.

  Today, the sky is without blemish. Underneath is a patch of earth, with splashes of grass left behind by the monsoon. A badminton net, strung between two metal posts of indeterminate colour. Urmi’s balcony. Urmi’s school tunic, drying on the clothesline.

  Urmi is in Orko’s earliest memories. When they were very young, their mothers met every morning in Urmi’s flat. The children played in Urmi’s room while their mothers shared a pot of tea in the kitchen. Sometimes his mother would leave him there while she ran errands. They shared Orko’s books and Urmi’s toys. They learned to ride a bicycle at about the same time; they would tear around the enclave, much to the consternation of the old caretaker. They played in the old car in the parking lot, pretending they were going on an expedition to the Himalayas. At school they were classmates from the beginning. Sometimes their teachers wouldn’t let them sit side by side, because they talked too much. In the lunch break they would climb the tree in the schoolyard and sit astride their favourite bough, eating unripe guavas and laughing about things that Orko can no longer remember.