The Changing of the Guard

FN
01 December, 2012

ABOUT THE STORY Siddharth Chowdhury’s college romance brings us not just the youthful aspirations of his literature-loving protagonist, Hriday, but also the moral and material universe of university and small-town Indian life in the late ’90s—a world that no one has investigated more thoroughly than Chowdhury in works of fiction like Patna Roughcut and Day Scholar. Hriday is one of many impoverished romantics in Chowdhury’s work, trying at the end of the ’90s, as all arts students did then, to crack “the civils” while nurturing in private dreams of an artistic career. But our hero’s focus here is on a woman, Charulata Roy, particularly as he is at that juncture of youth where it seems that all dreams can be realised only when the object of one’s affections is by one’s side, and also since “there are some generous girls in this world who will only love writers and Charu was one of them”. In Hriday’s self-imposed exile from Charu, and his journey to Dhanbad to meet her parents and head off the “trainee civil engineer at Tata Steel” who has appeared on the horizon as Charu’s suitor, we might see opened out the short history of love of an entire generation of the Indian middle-class, trying to slip love past the gates of caste, custom, family and tradition—a difficulty that makes us fear for the protagonist as he begins to swell with self-satisfaction, and then abruptly stops.

THE YEAR WAS 1999 and I was 23 years old. A year had passed since I had done my MA in English from Hindu College in Delhi University. I had missed making the first division by 2 percent but by English Literature standards it was not such a big disgrace. After my MA I had gone back to my hometown Patna to prepare for the civil services as I didn’t want to do an MPhil and pursue a career in academics. I felt I didn’t have the patience nor the crazy-bright zeal that a teacher of literature should necessarily have for such an august profession. With civil services I could go back to Patna and save my family the fairly stiff monthly expense of staying in Delhi. Father had retired from his professorship at the English Department, Darbhanga House a few months back. Though still well-off, the family didn’t have money like before.

Also I needed a job quickly so that I could marry Charulata Roy but then anyone could have told me that the civil services was certainly not the correct option for a man in such a hurry. Surprisingly no one did.

A year of preparing for the civils convinced me of my folly. That one year in Patna was spent writing stories and reading the entire modern literature section of the British Council Library. Even though for the first couple of months I did maintain the pretence of studying for the civils, I gave that up as I sunk deeper and deeper into a phase of monumental indecision. But I did complete three short stories, of which I was quite proud of for some time. The stories were of Charulata and the time spent with her. It was more an act of remembering than fiction and when I read those unpublished stories today I realise how intensely I missed Charulata that year when we had voluntarily chosen to stay apart. She in Delhi pursuing her MPhil in Modern Indian History and I in Patna writing stories and brooding about my deeply uncertain future.

The only certain thing in my life was Charulata. I had met her when I was 20 and in my third year of college in Delhi University. I was in Hindu and she was in St Stephens and we met through mutual friends from Patna. She was from Dhanbad, a small town in south Bihar, now in Jharkhand, known for its many defunct collieries and the raging fire smouldering in its bowels.

A bit about Charulata now. The first thing one noticed about her, apart from her large Durga-shaped eyes, was her nose, which set the tone for her personality. So even though she was not more than 5 feet 2 inches tall in her thick-soled Chinese flip-flops, she was I felt forever looking down at me. A kulin Bengali of the Vaidya caste, fluent for some strange reason in Bhojpuri (her father, a general surgeon, had been posted in Ara for a long time in her childhood, I came to know later), she liked singing ribald bhojpuri marriage songs and playing the dholak. And it was in that avatar I had first seen her on Holi in 1996. I along with couple of my friends had gone to the Mall Apartments on Mall Road, where in one of the servant quarter [SQ] blocks stayed a group of girls from Bihar in adjacent rooms. One of the girls, Swastika Singh, was a cousin of my childhood friend Pranjal Sinha. The atmosphere as you can believe was raucous, as a group of ten or twelve boys and girls soaked in a rainbow of colours and poteen sat singing Holi songs.

Rama khele Holi

Lachman khele Holi

Lanka dahan ho to

Ravan khele Holi

Charulata was the witch with silver poteen-smeared hair who sang the songs as we all joined in the chorus. Thandai laced with Azadpur Mandi bhang and gin and limca was being passed around along with malpua and fiery red mutton curry that the girls had cooked on their multipurpose electric heater. Charulata had recently shifted to the room adjacent to Swastika di’s along with another girl from Dhanbad. But it was only in the evening when Pranjal and I went to Swastika di’s to put abeer on her feet and do the obligatory pranam that I noticed the eyes and that nose of the freshly scrubbed Charulata Roy and promptly fell in love. A week later I met her outside her lecture hall in Stephens and over mince cutlets and nimbu pani at the Stephens cafe asked her out to a movie at Shakuntalam the following Saturday. The movie was the Guru Dutt-Waheeda Rehman classic Pyaasa. We took the teevra mudrika from the Mall Road bus stop outside her room and reached Pragati Maidan half an hour before the 12 o’clock show. As we bought the 12-rupee tickets and waited for the gates to open, to pass away the time she fed me and herself golgappas from the thela nearby. She must have consumed at least 20. Which was a good thing as what with my borrowed budget of Rs 150 for the date, I had barely enough for lunch and the autoride back home to the university in the evening. She had made it very clear that she wouldn’t take a crowded bus in the evening. So that’s how it went and later that year when a vacancy came up in Charulata’s block I moved into an SQ on the first floor. She lived on the third.

Two years went by wherein our love grew and we decided to get married in the near future. I still remember the day I proposed to her. It was December 1997 and I was in Patna for the winter vacations and Charu was in Dhanbad. In the morning while having breakfast, my father suffered a mild heart attack and I drove him to the Kurji Holy Family Hospital where he was kept in the ICU till evening. It was a terrible day and all through it I had been in shock and praying to god that he should save my father somehow. In the evening, when he was finally shifted to a private room from the ICU, I left my mother alone with him and went out to the small bazaar near the hospital gate and called Charulata at home.

I told her about my father and then in the same breath asked her if she would marry me. She was taken aback. I was whispering, she told me later, she couldn’t hear me properly. I have no recollection of whispering. But she is probably correct. I was so emotionally overwrought at the time that I needed something permanent and I wanted to keep holding on to the one thing that I treasured most in my life apart from my parents. It took a crisis like my father’s illness to see with clarity what I wanted most in life and that was Charulata Roy. Fortunately she said yes. I quickly put the phone down lest she change her mind.

So in the summer of 1999, when I had already spent about nine months apart from Charulata, I informed her that when she was in Dhanbad for her vacations, I would come over and meet her parents. Make my intentions clear so to say. A week earlier she had written to me that a marriage proposal from a family friend had come for her. When she was next in Dhanbad, she would have to meet the boy. It would be discourteous not to. But she would say no to him, she promised. He was a trainee civil engineer at Tata Steel. Charulata was not so enthused about my coming over to Dhanbad. She felt it was all a bit premature and I had a feeling that she was plain nervous. But nine months in isolation, when our only mode of communication was a couple of letters every week and a phone call every weekend, had made it very clear to me that coming back to Patna and the forced separation had been a bad decision all round. Also, her apparent lack of enthusiasm made me question her commitment. Perhaps she was having second thoughts about a man who wanted to be a writer and probably would be poor all his life. I refused to countenance the fact that she was only 22 years old and had her feet more firmly placed on the ground than me. She reminded me of Supriya Chowdhury in MegheDhakaTara. Mostly the stoicism, not the sadness. I never told her that.

Brushing all her protestations aside, I went to the railway station and booked a sleeper birth on Saturday evening’s Ganga-Damodar with the return on Sunday evening. I would reach Dhanbad early in the morning, spend the day with Charu and return the same day. When I told my parents about my decision to marry Charulata, they didn’t raise any objections even though she was of a different caste and they had never met her. But even they were not very comfortable about my going to Dhanbad and meeting her parents on my own. They would have preferred if her parents had made the first overture and visited Patna. But I knew I didn’t have time for such protocol as I had to claim Charu for myself at the earliest. To their credit they didn’t even point out the glaring fact of my acute joblessness. They probably realised, looking at me, that I was beyond all manner of embarrassment at that point in time. The months of separation and now this proposal from a “family friend” had made me somewhat paranoid.

I had got an RAC ticket which got confirmed after I boarded the train. I’d got an aisle lower birth and I opened both the windows and read Turgenev’s A Sportsman’sSketches. A book which always calms me down and makes me feel more generously disposed towards humanity in general. In the night the breeze from both the windows cooled the compartment and it was good to read about Turgenev’s aristocratic Russia in the light of the Eveready pocket torch.

I couldn’t sleep. After midnight I closed the book, smoked Gold Flakes and brooded about Charulata and my life. Whether it was such a good idea to get married so early and also whether I would get a suitable job. I thought about my improbable dream of becoming a published writer someday and I knew everything, all my happiness, depended upon two crucial things, that I should marry Charulata and then hopefully write a book of stories that was publishable. To me it was all connected.

To keep writing I needed Charulata and to keep Charulata I had to keep writing because my being a writer was a huge part of her attraction for me. There are some generous girls in this world who will only love writers and Charu was one of them. She was the eternal writer’s wife. So the first thing was to marry her and the rest would necessarily follow. With the help of such logic, my fragile resolve recharged once more, I dozed off finally in the early morning. When I woke up, the train had reached Dhanbad station and half of the compartment had already disembarked. I got down and saw Charulata further up on the platform standing shyly by a magazine stall, wearing the cream and red Cottage Emporium sari I had bought her from Janpath. This was a surprise. Putting the Turgenev into my shoulder bag, I walked towards her. I had not expected her to receive me at the station. I had told her that I would take a rickshaw and reach her Luby Circular Road home on my own. But it was good to see her after such a long time. She told me that her father had driven her to the station and was now waiting in the parking area. Dr Roy, dressed in white shorts and a T-shirt, was cleaning the windshield of his car with a multicoloured feather duster. He greeted me with an awkward handshake as I made to touch his feet, and then asked me to sit in front with him. Dr Roy was on his way to his morning game of badminton at the Dhanbad Club. Once in a while, driving the white Premier Padmini, he would point out the local sights: ‘Ah, the Circuit House on your left.’ He asked me about Patna and the worsening law-and-order situation there. Things were still much better in south Bihar. But it was only a matter of time, he felt, before a new state would be carved out of south Bihar and they would be rid of Laloo Yadav. After dropping us off at the front gates of his house, Dr Roy went off to the Dhanbad Club nearby.

Charu’s mother was distinctly uncomfortable while meeting me but solicitously asked me about the journey and then instructed Charu to show me the bathroom so that I could freshen up. Up until now I hadn’t had a solitary moment with Charu and as we went up the stairs to the first floor I asked Charu about her prospective suitor.

“Dont worry about him. He is nothing to me. I would have rejected him anyway. Like I told you. There was no need to panic, Hriday. But I guess just as well. There is a bit of friction with mum regarding your visit but I am sure everything would be all right.” Her tone, though, was uncertain and then she hugged me and gave me a quick kiss on the lips.

After my bath, I went down for breakfast, buoyed by Charu’s wholesome kiss and reassurance. By then I was already feeling like a newly minted jamai babu and quite proprietorial. I ate ten puris in a flash and only stopped when Charulata arched her eyebrows. She could do that well. The visit in general went off well, I thought. After breakfast Charu’s mother asked me subtle questions about my education and ambition in life and when I told her that I wanted to become a novelist, she said that she was very pleased for me, “that”—here she looked meaningfully at Charu—“for Charu’s sake I hope you succeed”. Charu laughed and said in a teasing manner, “Ma, even if he does I do not think he would ever earn enough to keep me in the style I deserve to be kept.” The uncertainty in her voice was gone now. I felt that the sheer audacity of my act of turning up at their doorstep had won Mrs Roy over to my side. We spent the forenoon drinking lemonade and listening to old Talat Mehmood albums on the Philips record player.

‘Itna na mujhse tu pyaar badha

Ki main ek badal awaara’

‘Sham-e-gham ki kasam

Aaj ghamgeen hain man’

Mehmood’s mellifluous melancholia couldn’t put a dampener on my ever-soaring mood. Dr Roy had joined us by now. He told me about Charu’s suitor, the trainee engineer from Jamshedpur who, unknown to himself, was now eliminated in the first round because of me.

I assured Dr Roy that I would get a job soon, probably in journalism or publishing and that he wouldn’t have to worry about Charu anymore. I proclaimed profoundly, “My only ambition in life is to marry Charulata Roy.” A statement that drew incredulous and loud laughter from the entire Roy family.

“You have a year, to get a suitable job. Then we will see,” Dr Roy said to me in the evening while I was leaving for the station. He then passed the keys of the car to Charulata.

Charu drove me to the station in the Premier Padmini. This time round Dr Roy didn’t accompany us. I felt as if the changing of the guard had already taken place. The marriage was now only a formality and all was right with the world. My optimism was such.


Siddharth Chowdhury is the author of Patna Roughcut (Picador, 2005) and Day Scholar (Picador, 2010).