Ten Days of the Strike by Sandipan Chattopadhyay

Author:Sandipan Chattopadhyay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: null
Publisher: Harper Perennial India
Published: 2024-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Meerabai

Preamble

IF THERE’S A PARROT AT home, it unexpectedly trills ‘chik!’ during the desolate afternoon when the peddler of pots and pans has left, clanging on his wares. Then, lifting one disciplined foot, it stands with its head tilted, listening. As the footsteps die away in the lane, the parrot next door, if there’s one, answers. At this, the parrot in this house flutters its wings restlessly. Although its throat swells with suppressed pride, its eyes seem to be darting this way and that in their red orbs, it does not express its excitement, only hopping across the stand it’s perched on with measured steps—so that the stand merely sways instead of oscillating.

The friendship between the parrots in our house and in Parekh-shaheb’s is an old one.

Parekh’s house is, in fact, part of ours, we used to call it the chhotobari since it was a little smaller and set just next to the main building—it used to be ours once. It was sold in my grandfather’s time to Parekh’s uncle—his mother’s brother. So even the municipality-set gap of four feet between buildings does not exist between the chhotobari and our house. There’s a white wall between the roof of their single-storeyed building and our first floor terrace, with an enormous window set in it, one and a half times the average height of a person—it was probably a door once. The window is completely covered by a net on the chhotobari side of the bars. Parekh-shaheb fixed it personally after bringing home his second wife—that is to say, Meera-boudi of our adolescence.

No one knew what her real name was, she was a Christian, perhaps it was Mary, but Ma called her Meera. She was exquisitely beautiful, was Meera-boudi! As children we would close our fists around a lit electric torch, I remember the way our fingers looked, and I remember Meera-boudi’s complexion. For a long time, Ma would say, and I remember it still, ‘When she covered her head with her sari, you couldn’t tell its red border apart from her brow.’ I had never seen a body so ripe, I felt it would burst any moment, a body that had not been dented in the slightest even after ten years of marital life.

Her thighs were set so close to each other that I used to have bizarre thoughts about them as a child. I was under the impression Meera-boudi’s legs began below her knees. When she walked with her feet apart, with her feet apart like a swan, her entire foot from ankle to toes would fall on the ground at one go. She ended up giving birth to so many children, and yet when she smiled, it was Rukmini’s smile I was reminded of. Her bangle-covered arms with their golden downy hair resting on the very last child on her lap, a girl, her sloping shoulders, her ears half-hidden behind unfastened black hair like the wig placed on an idol, the eardrops of gold, the circular vermilion dot on

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