Old Pathak hailed from a tiny village in Orissa that fails to mark a speck on even a considerably detailed map of the state. The village was by the side of a small railway station that was not listed in the latest edition of the timetable since no long distance train stopped there. There is an erratic appearance of a local train in the first quarters of the morning that stops for a minute and half. The absence of shoveling feet eager to alight or board the compartments and the creative cries of the traveling vendors sheathed by the uneasy calm of the place justifiably attributes to the apathy of the engine-driver to linger on at this particular juncture.
The yellow concrete board that boldly announced the name of the station in Oriya, English and Hindi like the rest of the stations that dot the state, had been long taken down by the authorities for a probable face-lift; yet a replacement had failed to grace the solitary platform. The narrow letters on the backrest of the dusty cement seat that drawl the name of the place has been muffled by a flyer of a twenty-four hour state wide strike that stalled national business five years back.
But of course Pathak is aware of none of this for when he left home back in the early 1950s, the station was just being built. And there seems to be nothing to tell that Pathak will ever come to know all this.
He barely stepped out of his teens when a neighbor who seemed to be the uncle of the whole village though related to none, asked Pathak to come along to Calcutta to find work. Pathak had not known his father who died before he was born. His mother fell victim to pneumonia and died waiting for the doctor to arrive from the town of Malkangiri, seventy-five miles away; he was still twelve.
Pathak grew up with this uncle of his and often stayed with his relatives who were gradually disappearing over the years.
So when Shambhu, the village uncle put before him the proposition of moving to Calcutta, Pathak didn’t feel any strong attachments, sentimental or material holding him back. He remembers he was somewhat excited to travel to a real city for till then he had had little adventure. But he had never shown contentment nor disgust with life and it would probably have caused no serious disappointment if Shambhu had not come up with this novel idea. Pathak did not grow up to be a very expressive person.
On the other hand neither was he too optimistic about building a fortune in a new city. He never was, as he never is till today in his aching seventies, an optimist. For Lady Luck was in a strange habit of springing up nasty surprises when he was not looking. Such frequent encounters with her oddities left Pathak somewhere, he doesn’t know exactly where, between an optimist and a pessimist, as if he were neither for he seldom looked into the future.
Pathak works as a durwan in an apartment in the south of Calcutta, although in the books of the loosely formed association of the flat owners he is identified as the caretaker of the building. But for the near fifteen years of existence of this eight apartment building any one had seldom called him a caretaker.
He has a room barely ten feet by eight in the ground floor, the lion share of which is occupied by a khatia —a rectangular wooden frame on four feet with the surface woven with strong ropes made out of dried coconut fiber. His belongings are few —a stove, an earthen pitcher, a plate made of bell metal, a glass made out of orange plastic, a radio, a pair of slippers, two sets of lungis, a kurta and some other odd commodities that a monthly salary of seven hundred rupees can afford. Besides he owns a large four-cell torch light and a thick, long stick that the association had provided him with, to carry out his duties effectively.
His perquisites are simple as well —batteries for the four-cell torch light and for his radio.
Pathak had married in the 1960s and led a married life punctured with the highest order of misery the city’s cost of living could impart. His wife relieved him before their twelfth anniversary though, when she flirted with jaundice and went away.
They had a son who never saw his ninth birthday when his malarial bout turned malignant in the government hospital.
For around five or six years after his wife’s death did Pathak struggle with a lonely existence trying his luck at all sorts of odd jobs. But as the satire called life would have it, he did not have any. Even his own line of life played a brutal havoc on him steering him clear of any predicament that would do the favor of giving him a lift to the better worlds.
Pathak was a strong man, even more strengthened by the trek of life. He had an advantage that stemmed from the pranks of Lady Luck and like the eternal traveler he had developed absolutely no affinity to any definite surroundings, anything material or a particular person.
But then about fifteen summers ago, the winds changed direction and blew in his favor. He became the durwan of this apartment. He did well in his job possibly out of the enthusiasm of his first and probably final permanent appointment.
His periodic raise in pay and the continuation of his Draconian lifestyle quickly saved him some money. That particular autumn afternoon, how many years back, he does not precisely recall but Pathak bought a radio.
He no longer went over to the neighboring building since that November to listen to the news broadcast with the caretaker of that apartment house.
He sat with an unprecedented pride in his own little room tuned to the medium wave broadcast. And thus he sat every evening since, with his radio, nurturing his longest ever relationship besides that with misfortune.
Pathak never felt the urge to learn to read and write; nor did he have the leisure to discover the necessity of literacy. He knew how to count and recognized the Arabic system of numerals, skills he acquired through the little amount of currency that crossed his path. Although he seldom could exercise his faculties of counting, as a bland laugh would echo, that there was never enough to count.
Pathak never complained in his lifetime and even if he did, no one knew. But a constant observer, as if there were any, would find the quality of his tolerance nowhere other than the Book of Job.
Pathak had learnt Bengali within two months of his arrival in Calcutta. In the beginning his speech was diluted with occasional streams of Oriya but gradually such frequencies faded out and presently his utterances are as Bengali as a Bengalee’s.
Only twice after his arrival did he chance across his Oriya brethren but like his other acquaintances these were as short lived. He spoke to them with a tongue of a non-resident and surprised himself every now and then with his own articulation. Soon after however one of them went back to his home town and the other succumbed to mishap on the road.
Of late the weather in the city drifted into a gloomy disposition successfully inducing in the city folk an air of skepticism. Pathak too would come out once in a while from his ten by eight constriction and look up to the sky with his yellowish eyes that hid a fading vision behind them. It seemed to him yet another hazy day for the sun is never too strong at twilight.
That evening was slightly cooler, the breeze was moist. It carried in it an indication of having rained somewhere near and a faint odor of wet soil. After finishing his muri, which is actually rice grains processed and fried and mixed with oil and onions, Pathak neatly packed away his utensils, washed his hands and with his fan made out of a dried palm leaf and an air of satisfaction sat down on his bed.
The newsreader’s grim, expressionless voice that evening seemed to be even more stern and impersonal. There had been a mammoth flood in Orissa, which had claimed innumerable lives. Vast areas were submerged under water. The little amount of land that was visible was crowned with corpses of humans and cattle alike. The places were remote. The government was trying to organize relief work.
Pathak abruptly switched off the radio. He went outside and looked at the starlit night sky. There wasn’t any trace of clouds.
Pathak did not sleep well that night. Glimpses separated by a span of fifty-four long years crisscrossed his mind. For the first time it occurred Shambhukaka must have died, for he was already around fifty when he left Pathak in Calcutta. Fade faces of old time neighbors in the village, his relatives down that dusty brown road circled around in a haze of disbelief and uncertainty.
Perhaps for the first time ever Pathak felt homesick. A sense of attachment bubbled somewhere deep within his heart. Restlessly he turned sides.
The following morning the north Indian Colonel looked down on almost a sea just after crossing Malkangiri and saw a long stretch of concrete barely surfacing its dull gray body above the water level. After bellowing a tacit “Badly affected… no movement below!” into the mouthpiece with a thick Punjabi accent, he looked into his papers and mumbled, “Strange, this place is not even marked!”
The quivering waters that covered the tracks beneath caught the blur reflection of an army helicopter flying towards the southwestern horizon.
Calcutta, January 2001
