Flame Tree Road by Shona Patel

Author:Shona Patel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIRA
Published: 2015-09-15T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

38

Nitin, who was now in his second year of medical college, wrote to say he would be coming home for a visit. The last time Biren had last seen him was five years ago, before he left for Cambridge.

Biren could hardly recognize the strapping young man who waved back at him from the steamer deck. Dressed in a handloom cotton kurta and horn-rimmed glasses, Nitin looked distinguished and scholarly.

“Dada!” he cried as the steamer neared the bank. He leaped onto the shore without waiting for the gangplank to be lowered, and they embraced each other.

“I would have never recognized you,” Biren said, stepping back to appraise him.

Nitin laughed. “You sent us a photograph from England but I had none to send you. So yes, I suppose you did not know what to expect.”

“Would you like some tea before we start back for home?” Biren asked, still trying to recover from the fact that this young man was his baby brother. He remembered Nitin as the small boy with a pensive face and hair falling over his eyes who liked to play with ants.

“I would love some tea,” Nitin said. “You have no idea how I miss the fisherman’s tea of home. In Calcutta, they flavor the tea with cardamom. I can’t stand it.”

They walked together to the tea stall. Nitin’s luggage consisted of only a cloth bag slung across his shoulder.

“I didn’t realize you would not have any luggage,” said Biren. “I got the bullock cart to take us home.”

“Forget the bullock cart, Dada. Should we send it back?” suggested Nitin. “I could do with the walk, if that’s all right. I need to stretch my legs. Besides, it will give us time to talk. There’s something I want to tell you before I see Ma and Uncle.”

They lit their cigarettes with the burning end of the hanging rope in the tea stall and carried their cups of steaming tea out to a log on the water’s edge.

“I got married,” said Nitin abruptly. “I don’t know how to break the news to Ma and Uncle. You must help me, Dada.”

Biren’s first thought was Nitin had got a girl into trouble. But that was not the case. Her name was Bela, he learned, and she was the sister of his friend from medical college. Bela came from a conservative business family of Calcutta. Her father owned several sari shops. Nitin and Bela had been meeting in secret for two years with her brother acting as the accomplice between them.

“I had plans to propose to her family after I finished college and got a job,” said Nitin. “Not that her parents would have approved of me—a village boy from Sylhet. No matter how educated I am, I will always be beneath their status. But still, I was prepared to propose formally when the time came. In the meantime Bela’s parents arranged her marriage to another.” He paused, crushing his cigarette into the mud cup.

“Then what happened?”

Nitin threw the mud cup into the river, startling a heron hiding in the rushes to take flight.

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