Arun pushed the curtains leftwards to block the intense, fading sunlight. He had skipped lunch, being absorbed in the final pages of Nationalism by Rabindranath Tagore. He placed the book on the table and kept staring at the cover, lost in clumsy thoughts. In order to focus, he closed his eyes. Snapshots tired him out in a few seconds. Images; white misty souls circled him. His face was vividly clear, although his body seemed to be made of thick grey smoke. He gave up.
For a few days, nothing seemed to help him. Ideas flooded through him, breaking any semblance of framework. The journey from thought to words is beyond human capability. Suddenly the line struck him.
"An idea is a raindrop. Some people need umbrellas. Some."
Now the lines rushed to his fingers and he began to write the scene he had been struggling with for a week. In an instant, he was unafraid; free of the self inflicted suffocation of finishing the script. The images started to move and the movie began to form. Yes! Arun thought. Cinema has reciprocated.
He wrote for four straight hours, took a print out and ran out of his room. He ran through Middleroad, an unknown lane in central Calcutta, turned right and continued his motion till he reached the Phillips stop. As he waited for bus No. 45, he took out his cell phone. He scrolled down to the producer's number and sent him a message. Script done. You free?
The reply arrived within a minute. In a meeting. Tomorrow?
Arun felt his heart sink. He could see the bus arrive at the boundary of his vision. He folded the story, put it in the safety of his jeans pocket and started walking towards his house. As he reached Middleroad again, he paused. For the first time in his life, the lane seemed to communicate. He decided to listen to every brick and the stories it had to tell.
To his left was an extended building with a blue door. Somehow, Arun had always had the image of this door in his head. Like most buildings in the lane, this one too housed multiple families. The blue door opened into a bedroom with a small window, a smaller TV and a little-too-large-for-the-room bed. Through the window Arun glimpsed another door that opened into the inner domain of the house. The Uthon. He imagined, depending on the perimeter, that there were eight-ten similar rooms inside, a common toilet and a bathroom. For someone who talked frequently of searching for roots, suddenly a neglected housing seemed to rattle all the beliefs. He was born in Middleroad, had grown up among its crowd and yet he didn't even know all his neighbours by name! The worth of twenty five years felt questionable. Opposite to this house was another similar structure. Arun glanced at the walls. White, with unevenly distributed black lines, like those of a scratched face, glanced back at him. He closed his eyes. The familiar smell. The smell of his lane. Each time he passed this house in his childhood, he would notice the distinctive smell of the rice-mill. As years progressed, the smell failed to hit Arun's sensors. Until now. He breathed in a lot of air. Childhood flashed in front of him. His uncle taking him to the local Park, his aunt buying him a 300 ml Pepsi which he couldn't finish, his mother carrying him to the NRS hospital for injections, his grandmother telling him stories of Gopal Bhnar and him smiling through all of these events. Arun stepped forward.
Each building opened a new blue door in his heart. He gladly flittered through the door and imagined the uthon, the playground.
Then he reached 38, Middleroad, Entally, Calcutta- 14.
All of a sudden the door colour hit him squarely in the chest. Green. Arun smiled to himself. He was reminded of the Ludo game. Four colours make up the four sectors of this board game. Red, diagonal to yellow and blue, diagonal to green. Players can team up to play four persons at a time, each choosing a colour or the game can have two players with either any two diagonal colours or all four. In case all the four colours come into play, the diagonals team up. In a way, Arun thought, blue was either an ally or an enemy of green. There was no middle ground. This prompted him to think further. May be this is why I don't know these people at all and may be this is the reason why I feel so connected to them today!
He stepped inside his house.
An old bench was stationed at the entrance below the meter and letter boxes. He remembered the joy he felt as his eyes fell on Sweta's first chithi in one of these boxes. Nine years, he thought. She had lent him Samaresh Majumdar's Kaalpurush. Deeply moved by the story, Arun had written her a letter and hid it inside the book as he returned it. In reply, she had written just one line :
"এই চিঠিটা বাড়িতে কেউ দেখলে কি হত তুই ভেবে দেখেছিলি?- স্বেতা "
and had smartly dropped it into their letter box. It was only by chance that Arun had found it before anyone else. Sweta used to live next door; she, with her parents and her thakuma; and she was two years older than him; and it was in her thakuma's room, eight years ago that they had stolen their first kiss.
Thakuma would tell them stories of her youth, of her brothers. Sweta would at times get bored but Arun would ask for more. In one such after-lunch session, as thakuma dozed off, Sweta looked up at Arun. Arun put his left palm over her wrist that lay on the bed. They heard a snore and couldn't help a giggle. Arun slowly moved closer to her. Sweta kept her eyes down. He took his right palm to her soft cheek, while keeping the left one unmoved. She looked up. He moved in closer. Then her lips, velvet soft, tender like an orange fruit, caressed his. He slowly pulled her closer and held her face between his palms. Their lips had separated for a second when she hugged him tightly. He hugged her back, never wanting to let go.
Arun, expressionless, moved away from the letter box, into the outer-uthon. A locked room lay to his right. It used to belong to one of the house-owners. Again he was thrown back to his childhood. He had woken up one evening to sobs and loud voices. His mother informed him that Mrinmayee Amma had fallen from the roof. She was resting near the edge after lunch and had dozed off. Arun let out a breath. He looked at the roof. Or where the roof once was. The house was now a two-storeyed building. He walked straight into the inner corridor. To his left was the toilet, in front of him was the choubaccha. To its side lay the stairs. Arun looked around. To his left lay the rooms. Even today, an evening worth of rain would flood his house. He slowly walked back into his room. The other rooms were alive with voices. Real voices. His mother walked into his room. "Ki re? Porota kore di? Kichu na kheye kothay beriye gechili? Dupure ghumiyechis?"
Arun smiled at her and hugged her. "Dao," he said.
He looked out of his window. Sweta's corridors smiled back at him. Thousands of houses in Calcutta share boundaries. Rather, the boundary doesn't exist. Generations merge, amalgamate and these bricks hold on to every story for the few Aruns who come in between.
The sound of Ricky's laughter made way to Arun's ears. Owners and tenants drift through space and time. Arun looked towards Sweta's room. Her family had moved to Bombay a few days after their first kiss. All he knew was that Sweta was now in Houston, working for Microsoft. He was figuring out his first script.
Arun called towards her room, "Boudi, O Boudi! Ricky ta ke edike niye esho to ektu."
In reply arrived a single line : "Alun Kakuuuu, tochlate daaao."
