A Time Gone By

That old way of life is gone; all the beauty has faded. Leaving a nostalgic emptiness that longs for those days. What could be more beautiful than the past? Memories from the 1990s are beginning to breathe easy, though, blurred by tears long since dried. Each passing year is a fond lament the heart still broods over, over and over again, as if it hadn’t learned its lesson. A beautiful time has passed.

That old apartment, euphemistically called ‘modern’—not as meaningfully modern as it is understood in comparison with a few others that were beginning to be greedily constructed in the vicinity, wiping away the spacious stillness of the place, cutting trees and threshing bushes out of their natural existence, and what have you—still stands today (as a tribute to mankind’s faith in the continuity of the human species in multitude, and Alwal was destined to bear the load, as it were) on a downward slope by the once-swamplands, calm as a quiet sanctuary, which may have seen better days back in the day when Capt. Roy, Mental Uncle, and other retired residents were alive and buzzing, pulling through life. However, loose, expired paint is peeling off its masonry walls, giving it a greasy, chalky façade, forgotten in a time and place that the earlier eras, which relied on their own cosmological reason to wheel forward relentlessly, will never come back to catch the lost way of life here: a subtle essence of reality, richer and more meaningful, that once lived with an excellent moral compass in the hearts and minds of its nostalgic families and their kindred friends and relatives, some of whom have, sadly, passed away, and some have moved on to someplace else. Nonetheless, some households, preferring to put down roots, continue to live with enduring, misty reminders of yesteryear, which once bore all the good times of their earlier lives. Today, the apartment is as old as anyone can recall; perhaps it dates to Alwal’s early urbanization efforts.

Today, that old place and time of the earlier generation, which took great care to ensure their children had better things than they had—especially morally and ethically, of good and bad—and which had always been a continuing reminder for their youth and now for their old age, their declining years as they are spoken of, has more or less vanished without a trace, but left behind a plenitude of teary-eyed, whimpering nostalgia that breaks the heart into a million splinters.

--∞--

The slowly vanishing swamplands on the far western side of this spaciously beautiful, breezy, and often very windy residential district, once cradling a quiet little no-name lake that existed beyond Capt. Roy’s apartment, are now gone, swallowed whole by a housing sprawl that stretched far into unseen lands, once beyond the reach of human society—or the old-timers who never ventured that far before; no one ever imagined those marshes and bogs could be developed or should ever be developed for housing or anything made by the pathetic touch of humankind. Nothing was left the way it was. Human settlement at the cost of environmental degradation has always been our tragic way of life.

--∞--

Capt. Roy and Mrs. Roy’s only daughter, Sangeeta, was already married (not-so-happily, it appeared so, as belatedly decoded by the concerned company of gracious ladies tied to the ladies-only kitty-party circle, but by then it was too late to help resurrect the holy matrimony that took place in the early ‘80s), and eventually made a home in Pune before being blessed with a daughter so jovial and loquacious that everybody began saying that she took after her granddaddy, Capt. Roy, the foodie patriarch of the Roy household.

Pinku, their only son, a non-foodie unlike his ‘Pops,’ Bapi, relocated from overseas to that city after their father, Capt. Roy, died in the mid- ‘90s. The family, now consisting only of Mrs. Roy, who had lived in that old apartment for years, haunted by memories of her deceased husband, decided to sell it after her children started living in Pune, without adding to her undetected stress or making her too personally invested. She finally decided: things would have to move on. Shortly after she sold their prized possession, their 2BHK flat, where they’d spent many memorable years before her husband’s death made it impossible for her to continue living there, she moved permanently to Pune with her son, his wife, and her only grandson. Sangeeta and her only daughter found it easier to look after Mrs. Roy there.

Three years have passed already since Mrs. Roy passed away in Pune, having survived her husband, Capt. Roy, who was undoubtedly the greatest foodie Alwal had ever known—for nearly three decades. Needless to say, she missed Alwal very much, especially her kitty parties. Her friends missed her equally. In Pune, however, she couldn’t stop thinking about her circle of homemakers, including the rapturous gentlewomen of their small ladies-only society: Mrs. Goswami, Chatterjee, Das, Saha, and Srivastava, who reluctantly moved to Varanasi in the early 2000s and regretted the decision within two years of their personally devastating relocation. But alas, the Srivastava family could not return to Alwal because relocation had left them physically unable, emotionally fatigued, and dampened in spirit due to their advancing age. So moving back to Alwal, where they felt they could have stayed on, became an unviable idea altogether. Before moving, Mrs. Srivastava had gifted Mrs. Chatterjee and others a jovial-looking ceramic Laughing Buddha. As it often happens, the Srivastava family has largely been forgotten: a clear instance of out of sight, out of mind. No one knows whether Mrs. Srivastava is aware of her beloved saheli, Mrs. Roy’s passing.

Mrs. Roy would pay a brief social visit to Arin’s house once a year, as well as finding dolorifuge in travelling solo to New Delhi, catching up with her relatives, mostly descendants of the astrophysicist Meghnad Saha (many times he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics but, thanks to Eurocentric biases and explicit prejudices, was never given, passed over), or other pilgrimage centres, such as Kashi, Vrindavan, Mathura, all in northern India, either during Durga Puja or Deepawali, recounting the olden days when Capt. Roy was alive and spent his days peacefully retired from the Army, never forgetting to dine lavishly on elaborate meals and encouraging friends and family to eat well and be happy, making life a full-blown celebration, he’d tell, until death did them part. Capt. Roy passed away long ago, sadly, with the fatal hurt of being forgotten. Death is inevitable; it will come someday.

Life, they say, moves on... It does, does it not? However, for Mrs. Roy, a new chapter had opened: living with emotional hooks and miseries tied to old memories of her departed foodie husband and an unchangeable past—all taken in stride as a normal part of her healing process. She was quite adept at this. Moving on was a possibility, and yet she took it reluctantly because she realized that the past is never really over: her husband’s memory cannot be erased; it must stay in the heart forever—until the day of reckoning. The heart never forgets. However, moving forward into the foreseeable future, while letting the unforgettable past safely stow away in the realms of yesteryear’s remembrances where it belongs, one cannot stop thinking about what went wrong or did not work—or what could have been—because no one needs to eradicate the past to move forward in life. Mrs. Roy could cope with her difficult life circumstances sagaciously, intuitively embracing their deeper meaning. This is how life is. Life is all about memories—good, bad, and unlovely.

Life is in the distant past; the present is especially a transitory unravelling of moments ticking by.

(End of Part 5 of 8)

(To be continued…)
(End of part XV)

By Arindam Moulick

A Name Change Story

Many years after marrying their daughter to a highly socially savvy, sweet-talking, flattering, high-charisma businessman based in Pune, who, though not obvious at first, later became clear, had a strong, impactful flair for convincing anyone he engaged with—both Capt. Roy and Mrs. Roy had been entreating their only son, Supriyo, a.k.a. Pinku, a quick-fix, then popular name and, in accordance with the then socially faddish name Rahul, to return immediately from Abu Dhabi, where he had stuck around after leaving Saudi Arabia, where he had a probably reasonably satisfactory marketing and sales line of work, earning a ‘Riyal’ living.

Heeding his anxious mother over the phone, who had to chide him about “family duties to fulfil,” he returned half-heartedly—as if it were a one-time chore: an obsolete custom he could have been excused from given the nature of work abroad. His mother apprised him of the tradition: “It’s a custom, son, and you need to come compulsorily.”

But it so happened that he immediately pounced on the unconventional undertaking of changing his primary given name from the tonally brilliant Supriyo to a much-used, abused, casual-sounding, carefree, publicly recallable, Band-Aid fix of a name that sounded oh so perceptive to him: ‘Rahul’ (for a young man who spent quite a few years in the energy-dense and economically dynamic region of the world, the Persian Gulf), which no one from the community had really ever appreciated; whether he was privy to that verity or not, it’s a mystery. No one really asked him why, because everyone understood. It didn’t matter to Pinku; it was his wish, his will, and he’d say it and mean it. “So, knock it off.”

Everybody remarked, even the children, in good measure, however, “Hey Pinku, throughout your school and college life, you had that given name your parents gave you, and you changed it because you do not like it? What is the fun? Keno? Etar maane ki?” Why? What’s that supposed to mean? But soon they realized they were barking up the wrong tree; it was the grown-up man’s will, his wish, his name to change, and who were these people really to take umbrage when it was not their circus, not their monkey. Pinku meant business, seriously. His wish and his fish to fry!

--∞--

Arin could hardly visit Capt. Roy’s apartment again. Following Capt. Roy’s sudden demise, Mrs. Roy appeared gaunt and stressed at home, clearly struggling to come to terms with the loss of her husband. As things stood, life without her foodie husband, whose love of socializing and experimenting with new dishes at home meant he’d devour them with great appetite and share his home cooking with anyone who dropped in on his apartment to sample them on most Sunday evenings, had been completely recast in a mould that she’d have trouble identifying with, changing the course of her routine life. This sudden bend in the road of life reshaped her family’s future in the years to come. For widowed Mrs. Roy and her well-brought-up children, Pinku and Sangeeta, nothing would stay the same, as they, like their mom and late dad, had keenly realized that Alwal could be their permanent home, long after they left Meadows Barracks dormitory—and then afterward moved out of Trishul Park, Arin’s unforgettable, idyllic childhood sanctuary.

Arin still remembers the warm, sweetish, almost comforting, nutty fragrance of the cardamom-infused cookies with a whiff of cocoa that he often relished at Capt. Roy’s flat; the dishes were always arranged on their unique bonsai dining table, most likely bought from Udhampur, Kashmir, when Capt. Roy was posted there for some years of his long Army life. The numerous little tree branches underneath held a shiny glass top aloft as guests sat around it, talking and eating the burly, uniformly uneven cookies Capt. and Mrs. Roy had made. (Sometimes, the silhouettes of their homemade cookies looked quite… ahem… gross, like dried cow dung cakes slapped hard to a wall, baked hard, and given for eating! More will come—if we want. Just ask.)

When Pinku came home from abroad, he and Arin would go to the adjoining bedroom and chatter; he would show Arin his newest perfume, Nikon camera, music cassettes, and acid-wash jeans collection; he said he'd bought all of them duty-free.

(End of Part 4 of 8)

(To be continued…)
(End of part XIV)

By Arindam Moulick

Remembering a Beloved Uncle

A Brief Social Account of Obsession, Regret, And Loss

Eating, it seemed, was Capt. Roy’s favourite pastime—his chief joy in life under all circumstances, apart from riding his old, elongated Lambretta scooter in the heyday of his long Army career.

From being healthily pot-bellied, “a little paunch is welcome,” he’d heartily quip, he went on to incur unpleasant health consequences upon himself within a few years of his retirement: A humongous, obese body had emerged, acutely inflammatory from the inside, perhaps to the point of no return. A few years thereon, probably in 1996, the once most socially active, hale and hearty, good-humouredly jovial, come-what-may happy man had sadly passed away from complex health issues that were harder to endure for long.

Binge eating had taken its toll, and a few of us had witnessed its first deathliness up close. Medications did help him, but only so much. Sadly, he entered eternal rest in his late sixties; maybe not an ideal age to enjoy perfect health, but had he lived longer—say into his 70s or even 80s—the Roy family’s history from the late 1990s onwards might have been quite different. Capt. Roy would have continued regaling, riding his Lambretta into town, and writing an inordinate number of letters to the ex-servicemen’s association. Mrs. Roy and her son Pinku would not have migrated to Pune. But under the circumstances, they had little choice but to accept the painful reality of leaving behind an extraordinary legacy of memories: among close friends, shared meals, laughter, and their cherished first-floor south-west corner apartment home in Alwal.

Capt. Roy’s beloved old Lambretta scooter was never seen again on the familiar roads, lanes, and by-lanes of this unforgettable locality. This small town, as its earlier diasporic residents had known it for decades, within a few years, just after the major turning point of the millennium, 2000, had turned strangely unfamiliar, alien, for lack of a better word, unrecognizable, as though stripped of the natural, fresh, and clear beauty it had once warmly breathed. 

Quiet roads and avenues—with their cherished open spaces and breezy grounds—are now dense with asphaltic concrete, glass, and an all-pervading pollution that has slowly embittered the emotional comfort of familiarity we once treasured. Busy lifestyles and loud traditions came to control the lives of all its residents. Over the years, like all other towns and cities, it became oppressively overcrowded, overbuilt, congested, and chaotic.

Capt. Roy sold his beloved old scooter: the two-stroke, blue-and-white classic vintage piece of old-world steel which was the backbone of his household in Meadows Barracks and later in Trishul Park until he retired from service. He sold it to someone who didn’t care for its vintage quality. This clueless, ignorant hombre rode it for a year or so before getting rid of it to someone else who preferred to cavort on a popular new-age, contemporary scooter with several gears, scrapping an antiquated Lambretta that had once, in its long life, seen glory days under Capt. Roy’s most caring upkeep. Oh my God! It’s never gonna ride back into his life. Once it’s lost, it’s lost forever. Those days have long passed.

--∞--

Much has happened in the decades that arrived early. The first loss was the sweet old feeling of freedom and happiness—the kind that immersed one in life—vanquished by urgency, responsibilities, and everything else. Arin and his friends, Subramanium Strong, Satish Gupta, and S. Bhale, had no idea what the future held because it never mattered to them. Perhaps a job would be fine, and everything else would fall into place. For Arin, however, going abroad on a work visa, specifically to the post 9/11 US, would never happen, not even to Lakshadweep! Subramanium Strong completed his master's and shifted to Delhi after clocking a few years of experience in non-IT (yeah, that’s how they’d like to differentiate between IT pros and non-IT pros); Satish Gupta hit an exciting milestone when he acquired a master’s degree in Economics and Accountancy and had been jobbing ever since, settling down to a normal life, sidestepping unnecessarily ambitious activities that the mind perpetrates! And S. Bhale, the Goan lad, whose sarcastic viewpoints were as stinky as a… skunk, took off to being a Medical Rep before he could complete his bachelor’s degree, during which his grandpa had tragically died falling into a water well at their rented house.

India’s multicultural cum multi-religious civilizational blessing has lately been in good stead. Though a tsunami of political and economic troubles has persisted since independence from foreign imperialism, the new Indian dispensation of ‘shining India’ has ensured that such escalating crises are better understood in the context of opening up economic possibilities for all societies, and likewise to be seen through the lens of the lives and livelihoods of the millions in our country, concretizing real development that defines capitalist growth. But unfortunately, Capt. Roy (Ray Kaku) was no longer alive to see, or ‘feel good’ about (or be unmindful of), the blinding changes in today’s data-driven, info-driven, tech-driven society: technologically fluent and digitally savvy. He’d no longer ask Arin to write a few official letters for him because he’d ping messages, type emails, or browse websites instead—all done digitally, tapping away from his handheld device. He died in 1996, too early to get familiar with the Internet, Google, computers, or the alien invasion of AI (artificial intelligence) now. The general takeover is already here, and even the funny-looking robotic humanoids that jab at you, do human tasks, and, surprisingly, dance! That last part leaves everyone in stitches!

(Those are going to be mean machines; they say they can “exterminate humans within the decade.” True or not true, no one knows.) What have we come to? OH GOD ALMIGHTY!

No one to tell those stories of valour, puns, and one-liners from his Army days. Sadly, his scooter was sold and taken; it was his last ride. Thirty years have passed, and not everyone looks back. Nostalgia is hard to accumulate. Many years have passed. Capt. Roy, Alwal’s greatest foodie ever, is gone to perform the rites of death. And now, Mrs. Roy has departed, slowly fading from memory. The tears begin anew, mourning her elderly presence in the former world: the world that has gone on.

--∞--

Mrs. Roy was devastated when Capt. Roy passed, more so because she thought destiny had struck a blow so early in her life that she might not be able to come out, as though condemned to live a widowed existence that would grow lonelier by the moment in her two-bedroom apartment, filled with the indelible yet haunting food-blended fragrance of her husband’s longing for food refreshments, even as he entertained guests and socialized pretty often. For Mrs. Roy, it was a cruel reality to abide by, coming to terms with a patriarchal death in the family. She felt hard done by fate, which could have turned out differently for her, because her spouse was only in his late sixties, destined to enjoy retirement before fate struck a sudden blow.

Ever since then, Capt. Roy’s residence was never the same again. Pinku, their only son, flew from the Gulf to complete his deceased father’s final rites, whom he lovingly called Bapi, performing the Antyesti rituals. Sangeeta, their only daughter, and her mother mourned, accepting that the whirlwinds of fate/destiny had caused this.

(End of Part 3 of 8)

(To be continued…)
(End of part XIII)

By Arindam Moulick

Alwal’s Top Foodie

Part XII of the short story ‘Sayonara’

Capt. Roy’s Food Chronicles Continues… — Part 2 of a possible 8

For a few Sunday evenings, Capt. Roy, the grandest foodie ever to walk on earth, would take a long walk to Arin’s house. A ritual he kept up until he sadly fell ill a few months later.

This is how the story goes: After his father retired, Arin no longer lived in Trishul Park but in the nearby ‘civil area,’ equidistant from Capt. Roy’s ‘modern’ apartment. It sat in the back of beyond, swampy moors reclaimed for random housing neighbourhoods, at the deep western perimeter of the town of Alwal.

Arin explicitly remembers getting peeved on account of an automatically uninspiring gentleman who lived on the ground floor of Capt. Roy’s apartment, half-heartedly bought in 1989, once had to dash off an angry complaint letter—about this waist-deep-in-frustration drongo who came to be known as Mental Uncle, suffering from a particular Main Character Syndrome, a bheja fry, brain fry, ever to roam the earth, or the unsightly compound wall of their grubby piece of real estate—probably titled ‘Not so modern apartment,’ addressed to the editor of the local news daily, which the gratuit also read regularly.

Acting foolishly, it seemed, became his own forte! Otherwise, why would he treat any visitor to the apartment as a potential trespasser? Even as he prowled within the compound wall like a… predator! A behaviour that clearly meant something intentionally mean, befitting a man with an absolute lack of a specific human quality, moral perception, or mental state: character attributes that suggest bad public behaviour when speaking to guests or visitors about entrance into the apartment building. The prowler literally traipsed for potential ‘prey’ to catch and irritate, as if the whole apartment building—bluntly named Modern Apartments—was his exclusive private property; no one could enter without his personal authorization. The flat name was really a misnomer; it might as well have been renamed Swamplands Apartments or given an even more suitable title: A Predator’s Apartments, which could have been the ultimate clincher of a deal for its most bothersome occupant, who really enjoyed blocking every visitor who tried to enter its narrow acreage of apartment premises, sometimes mistakenly intercepting even its hard-luck owners from entering or visiting anyone else’s flat within the compound he patrolled like a man truly possessed, covering every nook and cranny of the paltry parcel of flats.

[More about that part of the story, which is a sort of interpretation of a gruff gentleman who resided in one of the hastily constructed ‘not so modern’ apartments on the swamplands of Alwal, who went on to be playfully known as ‘Mental Uncle.’

Whether or not he deserves that moniker, it is up to your good offices to decide what’s most reasonable for this cranky, impolite ‘gentleman,’ who had at all times been at his inequitable best, trying to prevent every visitor from entering the apartment which he patrolled like a one-man security system—as if there is no life outside of this squat, whitewashed smokestack, a hovel of high rise. The story will be out in the next blog, titled ‘The Old Man and His Apartment.’]

Epilogue:
Capt. Roy corresponded in English pretty well himself. Army Supply/Service Corps, his beloved regiment where he worked all his life, would have ensured he did. When he penned ‘To Whom It May Concern’ like brief declarations or statements, he provided, while certifying that the details contained within the document are true to the best of his knowledge and that it is being shared with honesty; he sent cheerful missives to food suppliers and wholesalers, requisitioning them to ferry more supplies to the supply depots spread across the Army cantonment area. Keeping this in mind, it is safe to say that, throughout his Army career, he kept up the habit of writing in convenient babu English. But in all likelihood, and the point that needs factual reiteration is that Capt. Roy’s industrious food habits had already taken root here at this very garrison command: the large-scale Army go-downs and warehouses were piled up to the ceiling with large stockpiles of military food supplies meant for social clubs, officers’ messes, and canteens. Who wouldn’t feel encouraged by the massive food supplies being loaded, unloaded, and stored in the deep sheds in the Sub Area?

Capt. Roy felt easily inspired by what he commanded and controlled at his workplace: clearly, a veritable foodie was in the making. On off days, especially Sunday mornings, he’d rise early, finish his morning ablutions in a jiffy, and waltz into the smallish kitchen, well stocked with butter, ghee, and the Bengali staple mustard oil for caramelizing just about any food—whether preparing fish, meat, or veggies. With single-minded allegiance to his haute cuisine fetish, he’d rattle and bang whole sets of utensils, kadais, saucepans, and handis, which Mrs. Roy had concealed safely away the night before, though all at arm’s length. On holidays, Capt. Roy employed them in total abandon, no questions asked. Anyhow, Mrs. Roy tried to holler from the bedroom that he needed to be more mindful while he cooked—meaning don’t get too excited and spoil the kitchen! But to no avail, because his culinary experimentation begins now, and no one can interrupt him. The raw provisions have been bought from the Army canteen, stored in the fridge, or set on the kitchen shelves. His mission: to eat a variety of dishes at lunch and dinner, no strings attached. Just eat and enjoy life.

Day-to-day management and logistics oversight required his specialized supervision, juggling diverse duties and responsibilities to ensure all required food supplies, fuel, rations, and other materials listed in interdepartmental company requisitions were transported to the Army corps headquarters and its units, including the combat artillery and infantry divisions, workshops, and training battalions. Broadly, Capt. Roy captained everything well.

Possibly as a direct consequence of that age-old, unchecked pattern of eating habits while in service, give or take a few years into the mid-’90s, he began to sound incoherent: unable to speak in a flowing way. Funny bits of his conversation became less funny. He spoke with an effort, causing obvious strain on himself, whereby disgorging huffs and puffs, breath rasping, while forming even a brief sentence to articulate, morphed into a routine difficulty for him. All of these have probably been induced by high blood pressure and being overweight for many years continuously as he reached his late sixties with far less mental coolness than he’d have foreseen for himself in his retired life. His legendary sense of joviality was largely intact. But on occasions, it did seem it was irretrievably shrunk from social conversations, even as he knowingly suffered from nagging health issues that wouldn’t, he knew it as much, easily heal in old age. Sounding optimistic, he’d usually say, “No problem, my dear. I’d still eat more. Life is for eating good food and living happily!” So be it.

The day-to-day demands of moving around made him feel impatient and unsettled just sitting down to write, let alone putting together a whole letter. So he’d like Arin to help him out with the task. If Arin helped him draft official letters to be sent pronto to the administrators of Praktan Sainik Sangha, an Army ex-servicemen association, based in one of Kolkata’s salubrious suburban outskirts, that would be great. Arin would laugh and say, “Why not?”—always happy to help.

To notify the ‘concerned people,’ Capt. Roy would be interested to know whether he could auction off his Army-assigned plot of land, which he no longer desired to keep. Arin would write by hand on the pre-stamped Inland India letter cards that Capt. Roy always brought along in his cloth bag. He would steer the huge poundage of his body comfortably by settling down, plonking down rather like a sack of potatoes, in a way that made one a touch amused by the sight of the extravagant slowness of an overweight retired gentleman, his breath rasping as he tried to take a seat on a single-seater couch with a cup of tea and crispy thin arrowroot biscuits to go with it.

All the morning walks he had grown intensely fond of every day helped him, not that it didn’t, but, as one felt, only minimally, to keep himself, as he’d often reiterate in a kind of subtle bombast: “fighting fit,” mainly because he continued to eat voraciously at home and kept up the momentum, sustaining success in feasting nicely. And at home only, as eating out was not an option then: eateries or food joints of any kind at all were god-forbiddingly unavailable (unlike in today’s times, you find a glut of oily junk food stalls on either side of every road, on every corner, nook and cranny, and everywhere, and all over) in the quiet residential neighbourhoods of Alwal back at the very last part of the 1980s or till the late ‘90s.

(End of Part 2 of a possible 8)

(To be continued…)
(End of part XII)

By Arindam Moulick

Capt. Roy’s Food Chronicles

Part XI of the short story ‘Sayonara’

An Allegory of Obsession, Regret, and Loss — Part 1 of 8

Prologue:
After his retirement, Capt. Roy’s obsessive appetite for eating an excessive amount of food every time he sat down to feast, not simply eat his daily meals, past the point of feeling full, sounded the death knell for his health, which was, in his own robust phrase, “invincibly hale and hearty.”

In reality, his physical well-being never returned to the hale-and-hearty constitution it once was, nor did his Army-trained ‘bash on regardless’ sagas he loved recounting. It was his life: to live king-size, focusing mostly on food, and more food, as it became the harbinger of something coming, and it would not be nice. Worryingly, it signalled the beginning of the end for the happily retired man, whose joviality and love of decorum was near-legendary.

--∞--

Main Narrative:
So much so that afterwards, in the early 1990s, something changed in the person whom Arin knew was as happy and endearingly jovial no matter what the circumstances dictated, perhaps a hidden breaking point that somehow found its way into his retired life; clearly, a distinctive character shift in his food habits decidedly inflamed by binge eating than anyone, be it his own family or close friends, would at first come to fully realize the full import of his constant craving for food—as if an atavistic instinct from somewhere came over him, bungling up his gastronomic habits forever. No one noticed, not even his able son Pinku, who began his post-college life by boasting that he is soon going to quit this “godforsaken” and “stranded existence” for the sand-dunes of Saudi Arabia or the world-class Dubai or whatever place he could vamoose to, sooner than later but after he finished his oh-so-long-time-coming 12th class exams, nor did his comely and graceful daughter Sangeeta; that a distinct attribute of their recently retired father’s social behaviour, namely his joviality, had furtively become unmistakably flawed.

The retired Army man, between mouthfuls of food, would perk up during the conversation and drop a common Bengali phrase, something like this: “Ami kheye morbo, chinta kisher?” “I will die eating, why worry?” His close friends from the community who once in a while paid a social visit to his nicely done up 1st floor corner apartment would smile and laugh simultaneously but also begin to get concerned about their retired gentleman, Ray da, they knew had never been known to be unduly anguished by anything at all, far less about the amount of food he consumed lately, even back in the day when he was serving in the Army as a Captain, whose joviality was well-known. He worked jovially; he also had retired jovially. So nothing to worry about when one is happy and lucky. But why eat such an inordinate amount of food—and what stopped him from eating normally? It was not as if he had a disorder or something; if he had, it never showed, not at least initially. He kept eating until he became painfully full, and it became his daily obsessive necessity. Maybe it was his binge-eating behaviour through and through, but the retired Captain definitely knew what he had been up to. Retirement or not, it doesn’t encourage you to overeat, and certainly not at that age, regardless of your physical and mental activity. While the casual conversation—over hot ginger tea and crumbly cardamom-infused cookies—frequently careened towards what would be prepared at home for lunch or dinner, or what’s going to be feasted on Sundays or holidays, he would rise, his feet taking extra load with each stride, walk to the kitchen adjoining the dining hall, and, via the alcove spaced into a small enclosure meant for puja room on the right, fetch food back into the sitting room in sundry melamine plates and saucers, even as his wife, Mrs. Roy (Ray Kakima), looked on very amused that her now well-known foodie husband is ever ready to entertain the guests and how! Surely, the snack food he brought was all about his favourite cum choicest delicacies for everyone to have a go at, partake in an activity of eating and merrymaking, and be happy. Mrs. Roy understood that perfectly well; she hardly ever complained.

Satiating a food lover has always been a tough bid for homemakers. Mrs Roy knew this all too well. If it is her husband’s most favourite dish, Macher Kalia, fish curry on the table, then his life is full jhingalala! Capt. Roy would sound expressly articulate, nicely aping a television advert: “Eh fish ko kha dala, toh life jhingalala!” The point is, the world, ahem, food world, is an incredible nirvana epiphany, more than anyone would apprise you of. But he learned how to douse the inner fires of cravings with good food and nothing but food. Apparently, a foodie knows his food well.

--∞--

Capt. Roy’s old, faded but still dependable sky-blue Lambretta scooter was the first casualty he couldn’t quite make peace with; he sold it off simply on a whim. He began living in denial, never coming to terms with what he had done. A couple of years after vacating their spacious Trishul Park dormitory, heedless of his wife’s, Mrs Roy’s, intense nostalgic entreaties to him, he unthinkingly went ahead to get rid of his solid-built, precious transport to someone who, it was presumed, never understood the essential aesthetic rarity of the aged, much-used but reliable scooter: a brand that was slowly going extinct from the market, but was becoming an original antique that in few years it could appeal to buyers as a high-value vintage collectible; that may have been a possibility, who knew. Oddly, the man who bought it had, in turn, sold it to someone else, and it was never seen again. Capt. Roy took all this to heart.

After bitterly realising that his beloved scooter was gone forever, Capt. Roy remained profoundly repentant for days on end, eventually becoming too hesitant to bring it up in family conversations at home or with his family friends, relatives, and acquaintances who came to see him at his so-called ‘Modern Apartments’—which, by the way, was not really so ‘modern’ as the name might imply. Regretting selling off his scooter just like that, on an impulsive whim, he began to overindulge in food, convinced that a pensive binge-like overreaction to what he thought might never resurrect as tenacious as he had time on earth.

Guilt-ridden, he wished he hadn’t sold his prized possession, but to ward off the ‘tension’ he unknowingly had incurred upon himself, or the gratingly gnawing remorse that comes with selling such a practical antique vehicle bought many years ago and ridden happily without much problem, he began taking brisk walks in the early morning hours to keep good health and, by his own admission, a cheerful mind, to bail out the ‘tension’ he bore in his heart since that “inauspicious day” when his scooter was taken away from his garage, emptying the promise of his once glorious privilege of personal mobility in and around the salubrious surroundings of Alwal suburbs, which was once largely unspoiled with very little in it; untouched by humans or creatures, their polluting wares and multi-storied concrete uninviting hovels. It’s unbearably hot, loud and rackety.

In retrospect — Wide-open abandoned spaces that once gave you a sense of quiet isolation, with the horizon visible from anywhere you stood on the ground, as you glimpsed the warm, melancholic golden sun setting on calm, peaceful evenings, the sky casting a bright glow of orange and soft pink, purple, and amber, creating a serene atmosphere that is to be seen or felt to be believed. Now nothing is remaining in this decadent place that has changed beyond recognition. No one, it seems, wants to call it their own, yet picking up their moments to ‘go on’ as if nothing had happened, because everything happened; there’s nothing left to change, because everything changed. Nothing but late regrets, mournful hurts of the heart that would never heal, and muted tears of losing touch with childhood friends who are not going to come back in your life; friendships ceased. Who is going to catch up with you so late in your life? No soul. Everyone had a better choice, while Arin abandoned his dreams long ago, unable to bail out of earlier contexts or renege on beautiful affinities that still enrapture his heart, incapable of letting go of the past; he will not ever. Alwal has seen extraordinarily wonderful eras of the ‘80s and the ‘90s, after which everything went downhill. Life in Alwal now is more of ‘going on’ and ‘moving on.’ It still hurts; no matter what you do in life, memories won’t leave you, and everything has drifted apart: totally consumed by busy life, the commonest, disengaging excuse of all for anyone evermore, or just grown apart for reasons misunderstood. Some went far away, while others passed away, departed. No one could stay to shine a light into the mist of confusion, which life can be. Life is incomplete without one’s nostalgia, remorse, and share of possible regrets. And it’s already too late in life now. Having come thus far, one is not prepared to call it a day yet. Hope springs eternal.

--∞--

But overeating had untowardly become Capt. Roy’s primary recourse to healing his ever-present, bruising, misgiving form of stress he came to highly regret.

(End of Part 1 of 8)

(To be continued…)
(End of part XI)

By Arindam Moulick

Goldie

Part X of the short story ‘Sayonara’

A Pet Story of Trishul Park

Arin had always avoided having a pet dog or, for that matter, any creature at all. The idea of keeping a pet never appealed to him, not in the past and not now; his reluctance to own one was the opposite of liking other people’s or outside pets.

Even a mimicking, speaking parakeet couldn’t be kept as a pet, even though he still deeply adores the extraordinary memory of Mr. and Mrs. Saha’s plum-headed green parrot, which had a special gift for parodying human speech, often in lively, pompous tones that charmed everyone who knew the bird named Mithu-Pakhi perched on a ledge in a cage. And Arin knew that his close family friends, Capt. Roy and his better half, Mrs. Roy, and their children felt the joy of owning a pet: a cantankerous dog named Goldie.

Capt. Roy (Ray Kaku to Arin) was a veteran army man, soon to retire in a few years, who owned a longish Lambretta scooter that could carry not fewer than four or five children and a couple of adults alike at a time, riding his ‘pushpak vimana’ like a stately scion of some anonymous, long-lost kingly dynasty that never existed in the real world. Capt. Roy was, however, a dignified gentleman with a pot belly (which was actually a misnomer; he was more of a veritable food connoisseur who happened to have a curvaceous obesity, that’s all. Who is hell is anybody for blaming him to be pot-bellied!), a fun-loving Army man who loved living life and eating king-size to the fullest and being happy about everything like a Laughing Buddha.

That was Ray Kaku, a round-bellied, ego-free gentleman hardly found in today’s fast-paced world. Their happy family lived in the farthest nook of the Trishul Park and kept a pet, a locally sourced black-and-white dingo they named Goldie. It was always tethered at their dormitory’s front porch. Not ‘Goldy,’ but Goldie was its name—a four-pawed dynamo that had a passion for barking, to say the least. An animal character not far from Mr. and Mrs. Saha’s yapper dog, Roxy!

Now this dog, Goldie, was a cantankerous, restless dog. Compulsively barking nonstop even though there is no obvious trigger—yapping and snarling as though stuck in a loop of its own jingoistic habitual behaviour. Barking ‘politics’ that no one understood was his favourite pastime. At one point, even the owners stopped caring much, probably fed up with its flagrant habits, while being unable to make it learn suitable dog manners. It seemed like the dingo never liked anyone, except its daily bunch of large bones in a soup, bought from somewhere, and of course, not from a pet store. Alwal didn’t really have any in the early 1980s. Arin did not try to find out where the oversized bones came from, but only guessed that they probably came from the only mutton chop shop by the interstate highway. This is how the days of the dog went by, wagging its lilliput-like tail and happily barking away, in high-pitched glory.

Pinku, Capt. Roy Junior, who had been practically all his college and post-college life a highfalutin, hard-core Samanta Fox and acid wash jeans fanatic, often tended to their attention-seeking, whiny dog—as did his gracefully smart sis, Sangeeta, who drew positive attention from a Pune-based business entrepreneurial wheeler-dealer and promptly got wedded to him immediately after she completed, as if in a rush, her Class 12 board exam, and their caring mother, dropping chewable bones bought from a roadside butcher shop, cooked chicken, or an assortment of chopped meat chops, mince, and fish bones in the dog’s regular ceramic bowl placed on the porch steps. Surely, a lucky dog; the four-legged whiner was vaccinated regularly too!

Except that there was no way they could prevent their constantly whining dog from being a public disturbance. It whined no matter what anybody said about its doggy neurosis. But luckily, it was not much of a bother to anyone since the dorm the Roys lived in was on the farthest fringe of the great domestic expanse of Trishul Park, where, except for one neighbour who resided bang opposite, others were far away in the tree-covered, sylvan vicinity, not to speak of a long railway tracks: one pair going north and the other to the south, running a fair distance away to the rear beyond a deep ground growing thick with wild and weedy grasses and overgrown bushes that rendered a lot of beauty to that part of the Trishul Park. Therefore, no one really felt particularly vexed by the Roy family’s overactive South Indian dingo: Goldie’s constant weapons-grade, all-claws-out barking, that is.

Capt. Roy Senior’s family liked having that dog around the house, but he himself couldn’t do anything much except just pet the damn barking dog once or twice a week, that’s all. His duty done, he would proceed to the office astride his much-touted, dependable Lambretta and would be seen again in the evening coming home and shushing the dog before entering through the porch garden. (Because of the inconvenience of using their dormitory’s actual front door, which was at the back of the residence, they almost always avoided it. Instead, they opted for the porch door as the permanent entry point to the house.)

--∞--

Goldie died shortly after. A couple of months earlier, Pinku felt certain their darling dog Goldie, three to four years old by then, wouldn’t survive long, and before the year was out, it would pass. It happened exactly as he suspected: it died, possibly, in June 1983. A few years afterwards, Capt. Roy retired from Army service and took up a rented place in the ‘civil area’ before moving in the year 1988 to a newly constructed apartment, leaving Trishul Park once and for all.

The day Goldie died, Arin went to Capt Roy’s dormitory to meet Pinku and maybe play a little cricket on the outside lawn garden. He did not know Goldie had breathed his last that day. It was a Sunday morning; teenagers from the dormitory opposite would join them, and Goldie would do his typical bidding… by barking away endlessly to let all the world know that such a top dog stayed here, so beware! 

As soon as Arin reached Pinku’s house, Pinku told him that Goldie died a while ago and “we need to go bury it somewhere in the out back.” Down the ravine-like ground sparsely littered with periwinkle plants, wild blooms, and scrawny shrubs at the furthest perimeter of the residential housing, close to the railway tracks that ran along the tunnel-like passage, trudged a sad Pinku as he held Goldie up on his hands: its neck and head lay on one hand and its back half on the other, his friend, and Arin, who was just a school-going kid to fully comprehend Pinku’s grief on losing his pet, and how it affected him after it passed its Earthly life. But he knew it’d be tough for Pinku to cope with the absence of his pet dog, Goldie. 

From that moment on, that part of the deep sylvan corner of Trishul Park, where Goldie lived—nothing less than a flamboyant dog star who loved vocalizing its single status compulsively—would never be the same again.

As Arin watched, Pinku and his friend, both a few years older, took turns with a long-handled garden shovel, digging and pressing it into the ground with their heels to make a deep hole in the open earth for Goldie’s burial.

Out there on the outer rim of the Trishul Park, Goldie lies buried deep in the earth.

(To be continued…)

(End of part X)

By Arindam Moulick

Snow-Strong

Part IX of the short story ‘Sayonara’

Two Anecdotes

In the early 1990s, Subramaniam Strong’s father, who served in the Indian Army, took him to Gulmarg, Kashmir, in the robust belly of an Army base truck to discover the enchantment of ice.

Strong, a snow novice, was astounded. A magical spell held him for days. Even after returning to Trishul Park, Arin noticed he remained enchanted and talked nonstop to his friends Arin, Satish Gupta, and Bhale about the ‘meadow of flowers’ he had glimpsed and feasted his eyes on. He became as though a ‘snow-strong,’ to chat about his one-of-a-kind experience with Kashmir snow with his friends waiting back home.

Once further up north, an endless landscape laden with snow and stunning views of alpine forests rising into the distant mountains greeted him. There, it was the first time he had seen naturally occurring ice (unlike the ice cubes from the fridge), and pristine white landscapes stretching in every direction his eyes could see—north and east, south and west—over a long distance. Gulmarg was a heavenly white winter wonderland in the Himalayan paradise. “White fluffy snow,” he said, was everywhere he looked. It is said that “Heaven isn't a place… It's Gulmarg.”

As far as the eye could see, Alpine trees were rich green; towering, lofty mountains were crowned with dollops of snow like vanilla ice cream; skiers were skiing; and sweeping meadows were covered in such a profundity of whitest white snow that the eyes dazzled in sheer amazement. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for him that he, at that time, had a great fondness for.

Scattered cliffs and sunlit mountain summits were dolloped with the slobbering kiss of snow. Strong stood knee-deep in the numbing, milky-white valley, oohing and aahing aloud in overwhelming wonder—his first experience of the crystalline perfection of snow, a breathtakingly radiant spectacle catching brilliant sunlight right in his bare hands. His father had initially hesitated to take him to the picturesque Kashmir valley: hesitant because he’d be travelling to the command hub of an Army Base in Srinagar, primarily to attend a career workshop, with little to no chance for even a short break from work. But when the opportunity came, Strong immediately jumped into the task of persuading his father to take him along to Srinagar and then to Gulmarg; he had heard it was a land of alpine meadows with white snow and vivid flowers, and he wanted, for once, to touch and feel the snow, for the first time in his life. His father smiled and agreed.

Gulmarg was genuinely beautiful, as he recounted his experience to us once he returned home to his waiting friends. Their Army truck brought them back to the highland base somewhere in Srinagar, where they had lunch at a small Kashmiri eatery serving haak saag, rajma-chawal, and Kashmiri dum aloo paired with wood-fired breads and rotis. Two days later, he boarded a train from Delhi to travel home. Thanks to his obliging father, it was truly an unforgettable experience for Strong, for a lifetime. “All perfectly done,” he exclaimed delightfully to his friends as they all sat on the lonesome rock overlooking the evening lights palely twinkling on the far end of the main road deep across from their beloved Trishul Park.

Strong actually squealed with great delight when he held Kashmiri glacial snow ice in his hands for the first time in his life, exclaiming to his father while holding the ice in his bare hands, “Daddyyy… barafff…!”

His father watched his son with a benign smile on his face, pleased he had made the good decision, albeit made on the spur of the moment, back in their airy Trishul Park dormitory, by bringing his eldest son; the other two sons could wait for some time, to Kashmir during the peak snowfall season. For Strong, it was no less than a dream fulfilled.

--∞--

(Arin and Strong, Their Two-Film Day Adventure: Strong once proposed a plan: that he and Arin catch two Hollywood movies in a single day at the iconic Sangeet. It would be great fun, he promised. Not wanting to let the opportunity go by, Arin acquiesced at once; apparently, Strong had a great many quirky wishes to fulfil. Catching two movie shows in a day, one after the other, is just one of those. Satish and Bhale couldn’t come along because they were busy lazing around their house like usual… slugs!

And so it happened one day in 1991 or 1992: for the first time, The Silence of the Lambs and Sleeping with the Enemy were playing back-to-back at Sangeet, one after the other. The first show was at 3.30 pm, and the next began a little after 6 pm. Both films were released in 1991. That day, Strong and Arin finished their truly enjoyable, yet pointless computer crash course of one and a half months at Keyes, then brisk-walked to the theatre a distance away. They got balcony tickets easily, even though a throng of cinema lovers was waiting to get inside, eager to see the film. Once inside, they took the compact, cushioned seats according to the seat numbers stamped on their tickets. During the intermission, they instinctively planned to buy a 10-rupee clear packet of potato chips or tiny onion samosas, depending on what they felt like at the time of buying them, along with a chilled bottle of Thums Up, which, if unavailable, they would wash the chips down with a bottle of Gold Spot or Thrill instead, their usual cinema-snacking strategy at the movies. Sometimes, without a cold drink and a sandwich, nothing seemed right while enjoying a movie in a theatre, and catching up on a movie at Sangeet was a major event in itself. Every movie they saw there opened their eyes socially, making them nicely self-aware and well-informed about the world as they grew up in a new decade. But more than anything, it was the precious gift of friendship woven tightly into the delightful rhythm of the 1990s, their college-going years, that gave the four friends a golden chapter in the story of their lives. A story worth remembering for the rest of their lives.

That was the first and last time Arin and Strong saw two films in a day. Never did the opportunity come again. Goodness, it was great fun, but it left them slightly physically exhausted, while it was an enthralling experience for them. They considered catching up on two movies in a day once more, but that chance, alas, never came again.)

(To be continued…)

(End of part IX)

By Arindam Moulick

Postscript: ‘Snow-Strong: Two Anecdotes’ was not originally meant to be part of the ongoing ‘Sayonara’ series, but only as a standalone composition to be published at some other time. But deciding to post it here, I thought, would add to the continuity of the short, rather long story.

Piku Mama: The End of an Era

Part VIII of the short story ‘Sayonara’

Piku Mama, a brotherly figure, had a profoundly emotional impact on a teenage Arin, much like Rajveer, his steadfast and cherished childhood friend, who shaped their formative years together at Trishul Park in the mid-1980s.

Arin still remembers the desiderius feeling of being blessed by something of which Piku Mama himself and, by logical extension, the Saha household were the fascinating source during that penultimate chapter of 1988, especially that which spanned nearly one full year in his formative teen years, and hence the writing of this singular reflective journal reminiscing about the fine-arts-loving, generous, and creative gentleman of the latter half of the 1980s.

Oh, so much time has passed since then… Almost far-fetched, yet inherently fixed and finalized in its all-too-liquid continuous avatar, hinging on nothing from the past stories except being free-flowing in its tenaciously single-minded escape onwards and forwards, never backwards, into the unforeseeable future, come what may. No one knows what that is supposed to mean in the timeless, older-than-old galactic roll of the universe of matter and energy, in the cold outer dark of the great wandering space—a far-flung astronomical rock, our forever-bluish Earth, with all its species frozen or roasted or anything in-between depending upon their situation, living in curious wonder but only for a brief period of time, in its relentless drift.

Earth is a mere speck of that cosmic, orbital dusty trap as we know it, and all that, um, jazz-less jazz completing its sphere. And yet it must be the time, after time, after time.

--∞--

Ever since Piku Mama and the Sahas left, time’s march forward meant the near-total abandonment of its earlier era was well-nigh over, and so nothing was going to remain the same. Only a spartan little of that sweet old era, though spanning a year, can be made available as ‘emotional fodder’ for Arin, cry-baby that he is for such a, according to some, vacant thing as a nostalgic memory: that beauty of old you remember and miss every time you think about it. No one tends to confess much because to give it a name is to tell the world. But for Arin, it is offered only to fulfil his nostalgic need to relive the good old days, which bloom in a continual fragrance, time after time, one era after another, in his heart, as it always brings him nothing but… peace? Peace from what? I don’t know; I can’t pinpoint that something. Other than that, nothing could be provided except as consolatory upkeep for those memorable commemorations he wholeheartedly accommodates deep within his heart.

Arin, however, put aside such one-sided, unfair, mothballing stagnancy on Time’s part that it could pose for him what he thought an intractable belligerence that couldn’t be tackled, forget appeasing it. He mournfully understood when to let go when it mattered, when the heart-wrenching ache of nostalgia struck him with a realization so stark that those amazing days he spent with the Saha family were all gone too soon, just within a year before Piku Mama faded into distant memory of the last year. He never meant to reconcile with the fact of their, if you like, permanent absence, and he only much later had to force himself to believe that they would never really come back to Trishul Park. Say, on ‘reverse posting’ of some kind, and time moved forward, not backward, no matter what you pray to (or for) in life: strive for it to stop or heave a sigh of relief if it ever did, or whatever else you could invoke to leave behind its tell-all trail. And as time passed unceasingly, and the past continually fell back from the future, he slowly let go of his passionate hold on that quiet but grim realism, which at long last evanesced into an ocean full of hope and longing, never trusting to leave anything for anything else, but to the inevitable destiny that life is entirely intertwined with: Time. Time heals, they say, but does it really? Nearly forty years have passed now; oh boy, it’s been such a long time already. Sad to say, after their leaving, life changed forever. It felt vastly different as childhood gave way to adulthood. Arin entered the senior secondary academic year a year later, and Piku Mama and Rajveer, his well-beloved close companions of that era, became everlasting icons, but retreated far away into an eternal past never to return. Things changed, as Time itself changed a great deal more strikingly than he realized. And the reality is—taking into account his past and recent experiences and newly forming, yet inchoate, nostalgic emotions a teenager like him could behold unvaryingly towards Rajveer (Raju) and Piku Mama both, his crossing from not knowing to knowing emerged little by little as his teenage life turned a different corner in 1988—nothing ever remained the same again.

Today his mind wanders to the one-year sojourn of Piku Mama in the great environs of Trishul Park, where Arin grew up. He still can’t have enough of that old era gone by, indelibly impressed on his mind. And every so often Raju (Rajveer), his childhood bestie, dawns on his mind and heart, sometimes briefly, sometimes for longer, each passing day as a sweetly plaintive remembrance of a childhood friend who left the Trishul Park wonderland way back in 1988, never to be seen again. Some memories never fade, and time goes on unheeded.

And at that turning point in Arin’s life, which rather turned up—it had to anyhow—a little too early, a shift in time that is constant in an ever-changing world, withdrew unannounced and directly into an old-world anonymity that the present will never feel beholden to reach out to. Except all that lives in one’s ingrained sense of memories, indelible, of course, is that the heart does go on regardless of time and place.

Consequently, as life continued through quiet moments like these, the collective essence of the charming good old days of the Saha family—where Piku Mama had been an intrinsic part and parcel of the way of life as it once was, at that well-loved, frequently visited, unsurpassable 19/4, Trishul Park dormitory of the ‘80s—got turned around in the mist of memory, daydreaming the sweet old time of yesterdays, impermanent as it is, for it will soon change to tomorrow, and then it seemed all good things had gone away, leaving Arin quietly repentant for what could have been in a world that changed too dramatically and drastically for him to hold on to the loving days he was deeply smitten with, holding aloft a sense of longing and belonging in the familiar ‘dormitory of departures’ that eventually Trishul Park had come to be known as, irremediable in the distant shadows of an unreachable past no one, it seems, likes to reminisce about—only a great lone feeling of past echoes of missed relations had shaped Arin’s conscience to leave that very door ajar for all time to come.

The 1986-87 year had been deeply engrossed in Arin’s heart’s inner chamber of longing and belonging to all those beautiful days that had passed into bittersweet oblivion, into historical extinction. That year, for him, had never been emotionally absent despite all these decades of silently brooding about it while trying to figure out the long hours of personal remembrances of friends and family Arin had lost over the years—it seemed to Arin, in an oncoming epoch of obscurity. But that magical year, deep-rooted as it is in its emotional constancy, in his sense of time and place, will never fade, never diminish with time. (Even writing this story can perhaps be proof enough that the memory of Piku Mama of that year endures, and it will in this lifetime).

Speaking on an optimistic note, Arin—in the endlessly long absence of Piku Mama, Raja, and Mr. and Mrs. Saha, not to forget their favoured pets, Roxy, Mithu-pakhi, and Binky bunny—is presumably the only, boastfully speaking, moonstruck romantic of that old era who still enjoys or wants to remember the good old days. Maybe because he lives forward but understands backward, and can’t stop writing or talking about it, as if chronically dipped in the precious joys of melancholy he can’t get enough of; in fact, the more, the merrier. That’s certainly like being moonstruck romantic. Make of that what you will.

--∞--

Alas, for those growing up in the eighties, life was so fun, simple, and unforgettable that largely untethered, tactile experiences, exploring outdoors, overshadowed the 1990s that came afterwards, while the 2000s and the years after kept being—many superfluous specialties besides—unfavourably vain, offering no sensible comfort or escapism for the aching heart that wants to heal all wounds nostalgically and meaningfully. All those years of the ‘80s still linger like a dreamy aroma that refuses to wane in Arin’s mind, and those places he still longs to visit. But those years, which would soon turn into decades, pointed to the sobering truth that life had indeed been better back in the eighties than what we are experiencing now in the present. Wish everybody in this long story had felt the same way, if only for the old times’ sake.

After Piku Mama exchanged his residential address with Arin, he returned to that old but familiar metropolitan city of Calcutta (now known as Kolkata). A city that was born on the banks of the Hooghly River. A city where Arin is from, where his extended family roots are. In that leisurely year, which went by so fast, playing cards, cricket, painting, and cycling long hours in the Sub Area and in and around Trishul Park, Arin had temporarily built his life around Piku Mama, Mrs. Saha’s own younger brother—a rare gem and a beautiful soul who lived a polite artist’s life—who had come to stay with the Sahas at their unforgettable dormitory of longing and belonging.

Those immortalized remembrances are ever-present in the same space as they always have been: Arin’s heart. But Piku Mama (whose sojourn had been only for a year) and the lovable Saha family of three began to favour the strange comfort of normalized anonymity and controlled privacy ever since they moved to Gwalior and, a few years later, as it was heard, to the great city of Calcutta; settling down there, transitioning into a slow and steady permanency while also avoiding all familiar pathways to interaction and engagement with the bygone Trishul Park days, or with what once had been so sunny an association between a school-going teenager in awe of his older friend—a great zest for life, an open heart for the world. Strange truth that all good things must come to an end, slowly but surely.

Wonder what became of the three household pets they owned so lovingly after they moved out of Trishul Park: Roxy, Mithu-pakhi, and Binky. They likely lived happily for many years, enjoying the good care the Sahas used to give their precious domesticated companions—snuggling and playing kissy-face with them while Roxy would flop down on the floor, splooting, wagging its bushy tail with great excitement; Binky nuzzling and pawing, and Mithu-pakhi parroting away on the veranda. Even in those earlier days, they looked after them really well, taking them to all the places they were stationed under the Army posting orders, until the pets’ genetic life expectancy took over and they reached the end of their natural lives.

(To be continued…)

(End of part VIII)

By Arindam Moulick

Piku Mama, A Beautiful Memory

Part VII of the short story ‘Sayonara’

All these years have passed, but Arin still wonders, as though it were the earliest memory of that lost era that had been profoundly entrenched in his mind, as he couldn’t shake the feeling of where his childhood friend Piku Mama went and where all those days had gone. Piku Mama... O Piku Mama...

To this day, Arin often finds himself quietly longing for Piku Mama’s one-year sojourn in 1987 at the Trishul Park residential housing, which has since redefined the course of his life, his personal history, so to speak, redeemed by months of learning how to paint, cycle, or play Cricket in all the best ways imaginable.

The everyday ordinariness of life possessed stirring sublimity that inspired an overwhelming feeling of love and longing for the era gone too soon.

This is a story of a friend whom Arin never forgot and has always remembered ever since, a friend of long ago, really long ago.

--∞--

Piku Mama was an intensely good-looking gentleman with a fine sense of modesty and humility that few of us possess.

Fascinatingly patient, thoughtful, and gentle to a fault, this Kolkata artist was quite the painting virtuoso with a God-gifted natural genius woven deep into his DNA: the double helix bound together by his master-level technical finesse he achieved in creative painting—be it landscapes, oil, etching-style drawings, murals, or even portraits—motivated by endless hours of intense practice and early abortive attempts at creating something fruitful, useful and delightful — a feeling that had then been long adrift, since his childhood days perhaps, in his mind when he worked night and day to create great-looking oil artworks like legendary old masters of yore for home or gifting. An air of quiet charm about him made Arin admire him as a friend, soft-spoken and impeccably polite.

A graduate in fine arts from Kolkata (then known as Calcutta), he rarely had a three-day stubble beard because he liked shaving regularly but every alternate day. Or liked to ‘harvest the ripening home-grown crops’ ‘gharer chaash’ home cultivation, as he’d say, every other day, with a single-blade 9 o’clock steel razor and his staple white-lathered green-and-yellow lime fresh Godrej shaving cream that went for months, and still be good for another two months.

Piku Mama’s personality comes through naturally; no put-ons or making fashionably contorted faces to display an unnecessary emotion while having a conversation. He enjoyed articulating funny Bengali stock phrases whenever the situation demanded, such as “Bekhappa,” “Jaak babba!” “Heavvy,” “Oo babaa!” to give a distinctive cadence to the context surrounding the conversation while he played cards or lay on his back on the cool cement floor listening to music or reflecting on a past happy memory, with Arin and Raja in tow, hanging on to every word, look, or a smile he sent their way. There’s a sense of quiet peacefulness surrounding him that permeates everything he discusses or conveys a perspective, whether it is music being played on the newly bought stereo system, new original oil paintings currently being made, or anything that comes up in their regular long conversations from morning to afternoon, especially on a holiday or during Sundays. He was a congenial artist who painted a variety of aesthetically luminous pictures—in oil, acrylic, watercolour, or pastel colours—during his entire sojourn at his jamai babu’s (sister's husband) Trishul Park dormitory, where Arin frequented long enough to know that it was going to change his life, yes, forever. Piku Mama didn’t leave any space for his painting to flourish, his imagination writ large everywhere in the house: Old kerosene drums, wine bottles turning into flower vases, small portions of drawing or bedroom walls painted with urban-style geometric accents illustrating garden flowers with long blades of grass sprouting among them, and even painted on the portable wooden box in which that yappy little barker, Roxy, one of their three house pets, resided.

Sometimes Mithu Pakhi would holler from above in the veranda, “Aije, ki hochche?” Hello, what’s happening?

Piku Mama would glance overhead and say, “Painting korchi, Mithu” I am painting, Mithu.

The parrot would respond again in a light-hearted banter, "Aaahaha... haahaa... Paintingg kochii…, Mitoo!” “Paintingg kochii…, Mitoo!”

And then again, “Pikoo…” “Pikoo…” “Pikoo…” “Pikoo…”

Raja, his little nephew of 6 or 7 years of age, also learned how to paint, as did Arin, a few years older than him, in their spare time after school hours, which was nearly plenty. Piku Mama became their mentor friend, attempting to teach these two youngsters, showing active eagerness to paint, cycle, and play taash—cards. Days went by so fast.

During the school holidays and often on Sundays, Arin, Piku Mama, and Raja (Piku Mama’s nephew) would indulge in playing cards (taash) relaxingly, as they listened to music on their new Philips stereo recorder. Piku Mama taught them how to play cards and to paint as well. Arin painted (or smeared!) only watercolours and acrylics; not most, but all of which turned out to be scandalous eyesores, prompting hearty laughter out of everyone who happened to even as much as dart a look at his senseless horror-house madness that had been going on with Arin and Raja since the last few days of learning how to paint landscape pictures on white bond paper. When Arin hung them on the wall of his dorm’s drawing room, they post-haste wilted from the corners, and the watercolour paints faded in the shortest amount of time imaginable. When the strings attached to these sheets of paper slackened, they plunged behind the chairs, vanishing under them in urgent shame. Thankfully, no one was discoloured!

--∞--

One time, when Piku Mama was wearing a shirt to go out cycling with Arin, Arin couldn’t help but notice how much body hair he had on his chest, shoulders, and back, exactly like the Hindi film star Anil Kapoor in the movie Woh Saat Din. Piku Mama explained, merely out of polite habit, that his body hair pattern was a natural trait: a genetic characteristic that he likes the way it has always been since his childhood days. He sure looked nicely groomed, manly, and was elegance personified.

Like everything else during those days in Trishul Park, Piku Mama, who was several years senior to Arin, was lost to the past, too. Like all good things, it must come to an end. After 1987, Arin never saw his beloved, soul-brother-like mama again. With the heartfelt, innocent idealism of his youth, Arin exchanged postal addresses with him, but he never received a reply to his letters, more like epistles, written in a smattering of piecemeal Bengali and innocent school-level English embroidered with loads of grammatical corrections his handwritten letters could make room for, which was all he could manage. Two full letters were sent by postal service, but no reply ever came. Maybe they never reached him in the first place. Slowly, that old hope for long-lasting friendship had extinguished. Raja was just a school-going lad, but Piku Mama, oh so dear he was to Arin, was never coming back to Alwal.

Piku Mama went back to Calcutta (now known as Kolkata), likely establishing a full-fledged painting and sketching art school there, for he was, at that point, in Alwal, more than a budding artist. His oil paintings of Austrian and Russian landscapes from one of Arin’s many Embassy of Austria and USSR books had received well-regarded compliments from family, friends, and other discerning kinsfolk who saw them whenever they came over to the Saha household for the pleasure of having tea over a pleasant chit-chat.

Life’s memories are not life’s history, but the original work of an unseen artist – Rabindranath Tagore, My Reminiscences

Calcutta for him was not just a city where he was born and brought up in but an emotional ache of nostalgic longing tied to the charming attachments he has in that historic ‘city of joy’—that’s how he related to Arin in that long afternoon when he was readying to pack up his luggage with thick paint brushes, bottled oil paints properly sealed air-tight, a foldable easel stand that was difficult to fold, three to four blank canvas boards packed in a longish faux leather cloth bag, clothes among which were his prized multi-coloured batik-printed and checked Calcutta lungis, Sando banians, shirts and pants. He started missing home, being away for a year from his painter’s alcove back in his Kolkata residence a little distant from the eastern banks of the river Ganga serenely flowing past the city was enough, as he had become homesick when he moved out of town, pining to embrace the familiar sights and sounds of this part of Calcutta: the aroma of matir bharer cha (tea in an earthen clay cup), adda (hangout), thoughtful conversations with family and friends, the smell of painted canvasses, among many other things. Time stands timeless still in Calcutta.

Shortly after his one-year sojourn at Trishul Park ended, he probably got married as he moved back to Calcutta, a city Arin loved spending time in. His leaving was sad enough for Arin, though not for the first time had he to embrace the grieving curve his boyhood life had dealt him.

Just when he thought his warm, close friendship with Piku Mama—who had, as Arin reflected on reaching the end of his memorable days with Piku Mama, good enough emotional intelligence, humility, and maturity for a man in his mid-20s—had started to strengthen and go on lifelong, Piku Mama had to leave Trishul Park permanently before handing out his Calcutta address to Arin, and saying, “Do write.” Arin stood there, unmoving as he took the address from him, already feeling overwhelmed by the impact of his absence; getting used to this change would definitely make him terribly anxious.

It meant that the days of their playing cricket in front of the Saha dormitory with Raja, Piku Mama’s school-goer nephew, joining them, Piku Mama and Arin, with childlike glee that was only young children’s prerogative, came to a close. The cricket bat, when he (Raja) held it, appeared in size bigger than him, and the ball, no doubt, must have seemed the size of a football in his eyes! The little dynamo, akin to an Energizer bunny power-packed, played valiantly and hit a couple of fours and sixes to apparently slow spin bowling: The ball ran on the downward slope of the meadow ground, went across the road in a jiffy, and hit the lower dormitory wall on the opposite flank and came to rest there for them to pick it up. That’s how hard-hitting batsman Raja had become, my God, over the past few months! The three of them also played cards incessantly, often until mid-afternoon, the hour of lunchtime, when Arin had to tear himself away from their infectious camaraderie and go home to get ready to complete his homework and study while also waving a ‘hello’ to his beloved friend Rajveer (Raju) if he happened to be on the balcony of his first-floor dormitory.

Cycling in the Sub-Area; listening to film songs; or generally lazing around the Saha household on Sundays while Piku Mama sometimes cooked Drumsticks (Moringa) Curry (Sojne Datar Chorchori in home-made Bengali style), in a rich mustard-coconut gravy and poppy seeds ground to a paste; with him chatting about his memorable experiences that old Calcutta accorded him during his school and college years; his mostly self-taught painting beaux-arts. Life in the ‘nillionaire’ slow lane, as it were, of 1980s-era Calcutta was uniquely different, nothing exactly like it anywhere in the country.

His passion for painting was obviously a high point of their conversation; it was his lifeblood. When Arin and Raja got hooked on painting, mostly doing watercolours, thanks to Piku Mama’s enjoyable method of facilitating gentle learning about shading and blending techniques, they often changed course to discuss Rabindra Sangeet that Piku Mama played when he rendered an exquisite Russian or Austrian landscape or a deeply impressive picture of Indian village life, Hindi film songs, and new Bengali songs, such as from the 1987 musical romantic drama film, the songs of which are still etched in Arin’s heart, Guru Dakkhina. Or the lovely songs of the 1987 Hindi film Khudgarz, especially “Zindagi Ka Naam Dosti,” “Log Kehate Hain Ke, Pila Chand Hai Sabse Hasin…,” alongside “Aap Ke Aa Jane Se” and “Yahin Kahin Jiyara Hamaar.” That was how they spent most of their days, back in the day. Raja, Piku Mama, and Arin would prefer to sit on the cool morning floor, and as they sipped slowly, taking small, delicate mouthfuls from tall glasses of lemonade, they enjoyed listening to these romantic songs playing on their precious Philips stereo.

When Piku Mama’s year-long sojourn at Trishul Park came to an end in 1987, Arin’s emotional state became one of existential despair. Feelings of dispiriting sadness crept in. There was something life-altering about Piku Mama’s looming departure. He remembered philosophizing as his teenage mind could muster, as if someone from his own family had gone away and his days of happiness would all be over. Sitting in the easy chair at home, he read the first page of the novel The Guide (by RK Narayan), which he bought for ten rupees from his pocket money; he began to weep, as tears welled up in his eyes for some time. He was a teenager who wept easily. And tears came frequently those days. He understood that Piku Mama would be gone to a place that would become permanently unreachable. After Piku Mama’s departure that day, he took a deep breath and somehow made up his mind to accept the fact that Piku Mama and the Saha family would have to move on, and gradually over the long afternoons after coming back from school he turned reluctantly to the immediate purpose of life that as a school student it was time now to look at it with a renewed consideration. Perhaps his days of fun and frolic were over, and now was the time to get back to studies and other things that needed his undivided attention.

Going back to things felt self-consoling to figure out, even as he faintly understood that Time would, if at all, heal the loss of Piku Mama not coming back, nor the Saha family. Still, Arin found it tough to stay focused on a life that now seemed, after Piku Mama’s going, to have taken a pivot—for better or worse. So, in view of the stark shift in his circumstances, he listened to his inner voice and mentally relived those wonderful moments for long years. Retrospectively, it wasn’t easy to let go of his prodigious days with Piku Mama, Raja, and Mr. and Mrs. Saha. Only a mortified consolation remained: people may go, memories don’t. Maybe, at the end of the day, memories were supposed to be enough for him to move forward in what suddenly seemed the iffy terrain on which he must now begin to tread. What else is there in the trick of this human life? None that he could think of.

Feeling isolated and even more demoralized—despite his dearest friend Rajveer M. (Raju) being there with him (for another year or so) before he too went away, if memory serves, to Baroda (Vadodara)—while also surrendering ultimately to the, in effect, rocketing new changes of the 1990s, the bringer of a small circle of new friends in the town, scilicet Subramanium Strong, Satish Gupta, Bhale, and himself, who were a part of the whole new generational shift that had replaced the unforgettable ‘80s decade immediately after with a cultural mix of post-liberalized sociological and economic landscape, Arin knew he had irreparably lost a truly wonderful person, lovingly nicknamed as Piku Mama, whom he regarded with special affection as a younger brother would. Wish Arin and Piku Mama had somehow been in touch with each other, but it was not agreeable to fate that they do; it didn’t allow it. And Raju, too, was lost in the new decade that was inbound soon after. Friendship and change don’t go together.

Piku Mama never returned to Trishul Park, not for another sojourn that not just Arin, but everybody in the Saha family would have rejoiced with great joy, as it was already time for Mr. and Mrs. Saha and their son Raja, their distinguished pets: Roxy, the yapper Dog; Binky, the carrot nibbler Rabbit; and Mithu Pakhi, the talkative teaser Parrot, to give up possession of their dormitory of a few years, following their posting to Gwalior. Possibly it was after the first quarter of 1988, Arin can’t recall when exactly, after Raja, their only son studying at a Kendriya Vidyalaya school, had written his final exams for the current academic year, the year after Piku Mama left, when the Saha family finally moved.

After 1988, and a few years into the 1990s, Piku Mama slowly became a distant memory. Far removed he may be from the present, he was never forgotten, and Arin, for goodness' sake, could never make that long-pending yet long-forgotten journey after he grew up and pursued a career, to his residence in Greater Kolkata, despite having saved his address to this day. He was thinking about the letters he posted to him, all of which went unacknowledged; maybe he (Piku Mama) never received them in the first place because of the faulty postal address or something. On second thought, would it be right on Arin’s part to just arrive at his doorstep without informing him ahead? What would’ve happened had he done so? At the very most, Piku Mama in his trademark lungi and banian would’ve welcomed him with a big hug; his paintbrushes stuck in his fine fingers. Such quiet contemplations led him to relinquish that important journey that he somehow could not take.

Not even once could Arin meet him... Oh! Not even once. Sigh. He now understands what the word ‘life-altering’ means. God bless you, Piku Mama, wherever you are in life. Arin still misses you and those beautiful days of Trishul Park.

(To be continued…)

(End of part VII)

By Arindam Moulick

An Ode to Piku Mama

Part VI of the short story ‘Sayonara’

Piku Mama, a lovely soul, became Arin’s brother figure for the time he sojourned at the Trishul Park wonderland. For only a year. Back in the year 1986-87.

Arin’s life seemed to take on a fascinating turn just by meeting Piku Mama on the first day at the Saha family’s dormitory, where he went visiting off and on; sometimes to watch Chitrahaar, Udaan, Malgudi Days, Katha Sagar on Doordarshan, or simply to browse through the tabloid-like, image-heavy Mayapuri, Manohar Kahaniyan, and Filmi Duniya Hindi magazines Mrs. Saha, former Bengali cinema actress, acted with Uttam Kumar as his sister in a 1969 movie, voraciously read every week without fail, never missing every issue that came out.

When Mrs Saha was not cooking, she read the popular Mayapuri most lovingly; even holding it in her hands, reading while tackling in the kaṛā'i (cauldron) with a steel khunti (flat-bladed ladle) the Drumsticks curry she cooked often, soaked in a lush golden mustard sauce the flavourful aroma of which filled the house, while her husband Mr. Saha, an Army man, strict in a certain sense but not too lenient, and disciplined as they usual are, took it all easy on a Sunday, doing a little bit of gardening out in the backyard. Watering the maturing shoots of tomatoes, green chilies, even gazing at the drumstick tree that has grown so tall, with lots of drumsticks hanging from its many branches, etc. Plucking out shrubs and weeds of multifarious kinds that grew incorrigibly along the periphery of their moderately sized backyard garden. Their school-going son, Raja, ministered to Roxy, Mithu Pakhi, and Binky the bunny while doing his homework, his books spread out on the bedroom floor.

And Piku Mama, Mrs. Saha’s younger brother and Raja’s own Mama, took off on his oil painting expeditions on the veranda adjoining the kitchenette, holding an oval-shaped paint palette in his left hand and using brush strokes on the canvas with a thick-bristled paintbrush (probably made from some animal hair) in his right. Wearing his trademark lungi and a plain white Sando banian, he painted with a childlike obsessive passion. Dark, curly hair grew like a veritable rainforest, softly aglow beneath the white vest he wore. His concentration was so deep on the canvas board on which he painted for several days together, emphasizing specific areas of his painting, which, he said, is still ‘under construction,’ with rapid but brief brush strokes that he probably didn’t hear the doorbell ring twice and Arin coming in at 4 o'clock in the evening to the veranda to fool around with him and Raja around the Saha household until 6pm. Arin suggested that a Picasso or a Leonardo da Vinci was surely in the making this evening. Piku Mama smiled broadly, liking the allusion to the painting greats, and with a laugh said, “Yes, it’s a Piku da Vinci!”

Roxy yapped away in the backyard garden while little Binky the bunny hopped around looking for a taproot of a carrot to nibble on. Wise old Mithu Pakhi kept saying when she saw Arin approach, 

“Hel…louwww…! Greetings from my cage!”

“Thank you, Mithu Pakhi. How are you? Kemon acho?” said Arin.

“Awlright! Awlright! Awlright...!” replied Mithu, teasingly.

And then again she said,"Bhalo... Bhalo... Bhalo...!" (I am good).

Even before Piku Mama talked about being an amateur creative visual artist, Arin intuitively knew the man, several years his senior, whom he was meeting for the first time, could be broadly defined as an artist engaged, right from school age, in fine arts. Maybe associated with painting, or authorship in an academic field, as Arin noticed Piku Mama’s artist-like long, elegant and graceful fingers that could only be at best be described as someone who is morally and mentally invested in creative pursuit of the arts, such as painting, and that he liked to live—as he related to Arin later during the long course of his sojourn at his sister’s house—in a sort of creative zone of his own at his traditionally, old-world house back in Kolkata, a heritage city which was (is) perhaps more splendidly cultural, and intellectually emotional in the eighties.

For Piku Mama, however, the kind of conscientious artist he was, with a paintbrush that creates marvellous wonders on the canvas, no put-on perfectionism perspective (that even in those days people lectured about every so often, and still do unsparingly) or self-imposed idealism on himself to show the world how hollowly idealistic he was would never do. Just the normal qualities that his friends and relatives around him appreciated—of being simple, polite, with wonderful prosocial behaviour, and tranquil grace that charms anyone who knows him socially had made the man Arin still considers himself more than fortunate, no less, to come into contact with. Piku Mama was truly one of a kind.

--∞--

Arin had been overcome, as he realized many years afterwards, simply with the unrelenting effluxion of time running so fast and that the universal truth in the fact that good things don’t last forever, which had placed on someone like Piku Mama—the truly benevolent person, malleable to a fault—maybe also as nostalgically inclined as Arin, an unexpected excess of denial probably coming from someone else, say Mrs. Saha, maybe something on a sudden whim, exhorting her brother to desist from continuing the cheerful camaraderie with Arin, and this actuality had moulded itself to situate his trusting teenager’s soul permanently in a different direction in life: a life of never-ending nostalgic longing for that lone year of the 1980s.

A continuity of time that never liked to pause or look back, not once, not ever again. Perhaps it was an obstinate churn of History, whose irreversible progress is generally understood among those coming of age—especially Arin, Raja, or, to some extent, of older age, Piku Mama himself—that it never forgets or obscures its own absolute ‘situatedness’ in the centre of all things past and present, except to persist wheeling onward, regardless of life's encumbrances we human folks face. Yet, during its creation and for the first time at the delightful Trishul Park dormitory of the Sahas, which continued to have its three resident pets: Roxy, Mithu Pakhi, and Binky the bunny, time routinely chose to forego the pleasure of placing it in its nostalgic canon and conveniently forgetting it forever after. For time itself, its inevitable succession from the past had always been a festering necessity as it moved forward through the paltry convolutions of human hopes and desires, which are ruined beyond salvation anyway. Nothing else mattered. No one can conquer time or silence its ticking clock, so live deferentially with the present day going by while we lose ourselves in fading history. Time will yet move on.

But Arin grew unwilling to succumb to time’s forgetfulness, as it were; he jogged his memory from time to time to reflect on the past about that particular point of his life, as he had always been doing and overdoing sometimes, no matter what time had granted him for being so nostalgically inclined to the good old days and the old-world grace. For Arin, however, the past is the future. Period.

(To be continued…)
(End of part VI)

By Arindam Moulick

Memories of Lost Year

Part V of the short story ‘Sayonara’

Arin’s mind grew into a veritable museum of memories. Verdant with his vivid longing for the magical span of twelve successive months between the magical years of 1986 and '87, when Piku Mama, Raja, and his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Saha, were staying in a Trishul Park dormitory, not very far from Arin's.

A wistful yearning for the distant past drives him to anthologize every little memory he remembers. Memories that may be faded but never forgotten. As though wanting to revive that particular moment in his personal history that would evoke a beguiling sense of nostalgia for what used to be back in the neon-lit late eighties, he likes orienting himself towards the good old nineteen-eighties era chock-a-block with personal associations, one among them being the charming Saha family, and Piku Mama in particular.

While being a sentimental person, emotionally captive to the faint echoes of what once was, Arin replays those lost moments. As though attuned to an endless, opiate loop of an old saga of songs his heart loved to sing while being firmly rooted in the same home life of the distant, unforgotten yesteryears he wouldn’t forsake for anything—leave alone any suggestion that the fountain of eternal nostalgia had all but dried up. Without pretending, however, that all had faded into a faraway, forgettable oblivion and nothing was left behind, so forget about it. Nope! He still likes to stick to the art of strolling down memory lane, preferring to be a loner in this regard, choosing solitude over any external validation, purely for the reasons of necessary introspection.

Those earliest memories, which now may ring as old and ancient, long-forgotten, left in obscurity or something of that nature, have been encoded in his living cells that formed part of his genetic machinery, so to speak; that is, whenever he took a stroll along this familiar pathway edged by the double-storied dormitories to the remembrances meadows of the 1980s Trishul Park, or even writing about it or relating with someone close now and then, as those boyhood time tales are still raw and has always been relevant to his way of life, he remembers everything at a moment’s notice, recalling every element in photographic detail, as if verbatim, word for word, scene for scene—those absolutely life-changing, simple but magical experiences still count as a throwback as time moved forward becoming his life’s first-loves collected in an imaginary melodious album of Alwal’s ‘greatest hits’ reminiscences, liberally complemented by an inherently deep feeling of nostalgic yearning for that wonderful lone year to come back in Arin’s life.

Arin can still vividly recall a major part of his earliest, seemingly infallible, childhood memories: dates, names, faces, voices, sights, and sounds of that gone world that, every so often, rise in his mind’s eye like the gentle embrace of a warm, golden sunrise. The shape of the chin or the colour of the eyes; the nod of the head or the smile on the face. Every little happening. Nothing malleable or fictional, just purely realistic to the iota.

So could he get on with his life as if those things no longer existed? Nah, he couldn’t; he carried them in his heart and mind through all these years, decades of deep longing. Memories may be lost, but never erased. As far as his personal experiences are concerned, his hippocampal ‘memory retrieval’ has remained strong. Up till now, at least. He hopes it continues, as long as it takes.

But Arin could not, could he, act as if nothing would trouble him anymore if he distanced himself from those slow-paced, good old days that brought so much joy worth a lifetime. What could have happened, really, had he done so? (Maybe nothing, and past the realm of your constantly longing heart, it ceases to remain validly important, perhaps.) Or as if he could stay the same, unchanged and unaffected by the kind of friendship he had cherished and nurtured over the childhood years, somehow learning to finally let go of it when the era of the 1990s came as another promising anchor in his life. Na! He still will not forget and will definitely not. (And nobody is asking him to; he knows). While it must be said that holding on to the comfort of memories of old lost friends, Arin went ahead and made new ones: But yet, his heart was sombrely heavy with an unspoken weight of emotions as though everything had started to fall apart as he felt immensely saddened when Piku Mama’s one-year sojourn had come to an end… A silent weight pressed against his ever-longing heart for the old times and, with the earlier era ending, partly in 1987 when Piku Mama left and partly in 1988 when Raju (Rajveer), on account of his father’s posting, had to leave Trishul Park forever, Arin made new friends, reluctantly. Only in 1990, when the new era (decade) had just settled in, and new friends arrived in the form of Subramanium Strong, Bhale and Satish Gupta, did Arin stumble upon a little solace. That was hopeful enough for this solo rider of nostalgia.

--∞--

That was a really long time ago, and things are not exactly in the nature of memories smudged beyond recall, an imbroglio of sad thoughts that torment night and day, and the hurried deception of touchy-feely what-if scenarios become definite—all these would have to get a silent move on, he supposed to have understood. And Arin finally resolved (with a heavy sigh, not wanting to let go even then: not even a fraction of those nostalgic days) that things would perhaps look after themselves while he went to spend some of the time he got on Earth. Such a thing was enormously difficult to think through and carry on.

Nostalgic thoughts remain, however. No matter where you go, they lurk deep in those corners of your heart. They could strike you in a good way, as those days lift him up every time he pictures Piku Mama, Raja, and Saha uncle and aunty and their collection of animal companions awake and astir in their dormitory back in the late '80s, in the Trishul Park. That’s how it was, beautiful and a heart full of longing.

Arin still remembers that year as the year of life transition, a final reckoning with family and friends as he explored close personal relationships, and quiet realizations that made him see certain things in a clearer light, self-adjusting to soften his presence while navigating the complexities of life, which was about tending to the little things, even if the objects of your admiration and affection disappeared at a distant time in the past. By the end of that year of Piku Mama’s sojourn with the Sahas, tiny mini-waves of grief poured from the heart like a mountain stream; the brain functioned in isolation of itself: a little too much to think normally, as Piku Mama began his departure from Alwal. Arin bore it as an acceptance of destiny, learning there and then the subtle art of letting go, without, of course, fully understanding yet how much it takes to cultivate discernment. If that is too much to deal with, he felt he still had his whole life ahead of him, possibly remaining friendless or having some friends. Just as beloved Rajveer (Raju) made a huge impact during most of Arin’s childhood years in the ‘80s, Piku Mama, for a brief year, had similarly made a lasting impression.

(To be continued…)

(End of part V)

By Arindam Moulick