Silverfish by Saikat Majumdar

Author:Saikat Majumdar
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-9-3511-6059-5
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2007-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

He wasn’t going to look back anymore. There was only the present, the thunder of ancient streetcars, the dying call of street-vendors, the sweat-and-petrol-breathing air of summer mid-afternoon.

The past, even when less than a day old, tended to be overrun with sprouts of ungrown time, when getting a life back had appeared to be simple, like putting a few files in the bag, slipping into shoes, boarding the crowd-jammed bus. The tomorrow that lay a few hours ahead, the clear light of day that cleared knots.

The stirred dead of last night, less than twenty-four hours ago, when she had slowly, dreamily joined him, the veiled phantom, through long hours when sleep had come only in fits and bursts.

Why, he had left the bed this morning with the unwashed excitement from the night before clinging to pores on his body, the dried mucus in his eyes, the grogginess in his limbs.

Even with the sun streaming through the wooden shutters, it was as if his mind had never last night’s lingering, unreal hours.

It had been past two in the morning.

Long after the last of the drunkards had passed singing along the street below, and long after the stray dogs had let out the last of the staccato barks after their shadows, he had left his bed to roll a cigarette. Turning on the light, he had marvelled a little, as always, at how the left side of the bed had been left tidy, not slept in. The bed, crafted at a cheap carpenter’s in Bowbazar, wasn’t big, just about enough for two people. And yet, there hadn’t been a night in these seven year’s of Ila’s death when he had rolled over to her side of the bed, even in the middle of his sleep.

Nor would he roll his cigarettes in bed – that was a habit Ila frowned upon, though she rarely said so openly. Nothing as dirty as tobacco granules strewn all over the bed.

Stepping out of bed, he stood near the window, breathing in the night air of the city. There wasn’t much air to breathe in. Rows of houses stood cheek by jowl in an indistinguishable mass of pale, cracked concrete and jutting bricks where weather and smoke, limecrust and water from sewage pipes had imprinted strange graffiti. It was a patchwork of fungus and leathery banyan leaves straddling the cornices like giant cobwebs, the roots leaving a trail of cracks and fissures that had left the façade locked in a ghastly grimace. The street lamps rarely worked in this corner of the neighbourhood, and the municipal corporation never worried about them.

After rolling the cigarette he sealed the end with saliva.

Through the rusted mullions of the window, the neighbouring house, a rabbit warren of a dozen tenant families, looked ghoulish in the pale hue of the night sky. Between the wooden shutters of the windows, one could make out bricks jutting out under worn off paint, and a giant trinity of the sickle, the hammer and the star – the emblem of the communist party of India.

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