The Good Priest addressed another listener, a more capable ear and mind. He described a dream from Calcutta, long ago, before the big war, before there was a free India. It was a dream lodged in his chest since, often he saw reruns of it, in full color and texture, its knot around his heart just as tight as the first time he dreamt that dream in the din of coolies and pilgrims, thieves and lords. Around us, frogs croaked all night, houses across the valley twinkled like close stars, somebody shouted a song – slow and filled with longing. Birds left the fields to crowd in trees. The Good Priest spoke his story to the night, treating his younger self with affection, as if young Siddhidhar Nyeupane wasn’t of flesh and bones but of dew-strung wisp of light; a careless tug, and the world would come unstitched.[break]
Young Siddhi, as he was called by his friends when he was a young student, had a dream in a train station in Calcutta. It must’ve been a grand terminal because he was waiting for the train out of Calcutta, to Bhagalpur, from where he’d walk to Bhirkharka. Siddhi, twenty-one years of age, itinerant Arya Samaji and student, possessor of a tin box full of books, had just said goodbye to a family of Mukopadhya Brahmins after a full stomach of rice and fish in mustard, and had dozed off waiting for the train. Large ceiling fans rotated twenty feet above the terminal and barely stirred the air enough to shake the flies from their languorous flight from turbans to teacups, to the bulk and nostrils of babus fallen asleep.
Siddhi was in a room, as are only in dreams, with familiar avenues and trees outside but the interior completely strange and dreamt up, with a bespectacled, bald man with a round face reading in a corner. Siddhi had never met nor seen a picture of Premchand, the writer, whose stories he often read and admired, but in the dream he was convinced that the man sitting next to him in a house in Kashi was none other than him. Premchand was laughing at something Siddhi said, or perhaps they together laughed at something Premchand said, but there was laughter in the room and from where they reclined on pillows, the sky outside the window was unobstructed, except by a corner of the house itself.
“This house won’t be here next year,” Premchand said. Siddhi remembered that he had heard that before, in the very dream, nowhere else. This house where we’ve shared laughter won’t be standing next year. These four walls splashed with our camaraderie.
Illustration: Sworup Nhasiju
It was just then that Siddhi felt the presence of another person. At first it was merely the presence of a person he knew too well; there welled inside him a deep comfort and abandon that’s felt in the presence of a loved one, someone with whom decorum and debate don’t exist. He looked over his shoulders and tried to paste together a form from fleeting parts: laugh, hair, the curve of hip, tinkle of earrings, and a shoulder softly leaning into his chest.
Slowly she congealed, the line of gums above straight teeth, the corners of a mouth, the ring on her second toe of the left foot, knobby knees, dress bunching up around the hip as she sat by him: Mitthu, his forgotten Mitthu, in flesh and in love with him.
“This is a dream, isn’t it, Premchand?” Siddhi asked.
“What rubbish,” Premchand snorted and wiped his head with the end of his white dhoti.
“What rubbish. This roof under which we shared, it won’t be here come next spring.”
“Tell me this is a dream, Mitthu,” Siddhi reached for, and found, her. The same wrist he had caught across his chest so often, or so he remembered in the dream, for in each dream it’s possible to remember an entire new life leading to that moment.
She stood above him now, his face near her knees, her wrist still in his hand. He pulled her closer by grabbing the silver pendant she always wore around her neck, something that reminded her of where she came from, she liked to say. “Tell me this is real,” he said, his voice now eager to rush. “Tell me this is real.”
“Of course,” Premchand laughed again, good-humoredly, beads of sweat above his brows, spectacles slipping down the nose. “Of course, this is real, boy. The road that brings us to this room will be dug up before June.”
Mitthu laughed like she always did—not the snort and cackle laugh when she found something hilarious and couldn’t contain herself, neither the giggle that she shared only with him, but the full-faced, luminous laugh that had nothing to do with humor but everything to do with joy and abandon, the one she laughed when she called him a fool and didn’t mean it a bit.
“Here,” she said, a piece of cloth in her hand.
It was a yellow cloth, not very big. In it were a dozen fine pictures in black ink: all of Mitthu, as a child in what must be Kashmir, as a singer at Kamini’s hall, at the window, along the ghats, watching Siddhi from a corner.
Siddhi looked at the pictures and saw how each was Mitthu, each was alive and each loved him. This is too much, he thought, this has to be a dream. Premchand, why do you lie? Why don’t you tell me this is a dream and be over with your cruel scheming?
“What rubbish,” Premchand laughed. “This is no dream, boy. More real than merely real, this here. Original stuff, whatnot. The tree where I picked this flower, it won’t survive the storms this year.”
Siddhi looked at Mitthu who sidled next to him. “What does this mean?”
“It means I’m your something,” she said, except that she didn’t say something. She said a word, one Siddhi had never heard before, and even in the dream he knew it to be no word at all. But he understood what ‘something’ meant. Or perhaps Premchand explained it: it means she’s everything to you. It means there’s no happiness in your life if it isn’t found with her. It means she’s the keeper of it all. Without her, there’s nothing for you.
All of this Siddhi understood, whether through Premchand’s explanation or because of the mechanics of the dream he couldn’t recall, but he understood at the moment that without Mitthu there was nothing in the world. All was dust beneath her feet.
This understanding became unbearable for Siddidhar Nyeupane, student of many a learned ones, wanderer and seeker, Siddhi, who had discussed all shades of metaphysics with equally sharp minds. What of infinity, his head asked Siddhi, what of the godhead? What of Krishna’s compassion? Surely, something can’t measure up to those lofty ones.
“I’m your something, Siddhi,” Mitthu said. Her hair fell on one side, like a dream cascading from cold mountains and catching the sun that fills the air above high clouds, and hung as a screen between them; and Premchand, who still whinnied in a corner, protesting against the disappearance of that which had just one more year to its name.
Siddhi closed his eyes to form a double sanctuary: Mitthu was still with him, but the world shrank. At one edge of the universe existed the curls of Mitthu’s brown hair, at the opposite edge existed the warmth of her hip melting his palm. In the center was a lump which Siddhi knew to be their union, the brief flash of timelessness that’s forever. He was nowhere, just a hovering consciousness, while the fences of universe ran around her, a corner composed in the taste of her mouth, another a smell in the roots of her hair, another down on her back, another the laugh that sprung from the womb and radiated from the eyes. The lump at the center of the universe set around his heart.
“Is this a dream, Mitthu?” Siddhi asked.
“What rubbish,” Premchand said.
“This is no dream, Siddhi,” said Mitthu. It was at that exact moment that Siddhi woke up, with a sore neck and dying legs. Someone had kicked him in his rush to get to a train compartment. A bewildered Siddhi stood on weak knees and looked about him. There wasn’t a face to gaze upon; everyone rushed in this direction or other, some called names, some called prices.
What of the dream? Would it be stuck to the ground beneath his feet if he jumped into a bogey and left Calcutta now? Awaking didn’t convince him about the realness of the world around him: afternoon light shafted in swirling clouds and the cacophony of foreign flesh and smells made it difficult for the eyes to believe and the mind to grasp.
A Marathi woman ran past him with flowers in her hair and her sari hitched between her legs. A trail of children followed, oldest daughter leading the youngest bare-bottomed boy, others with bundles on their heads. That was a dream and this is real, it dawned upon Siddhi when he realized how strongly disgust swelled in him, surging up, up to the throat.
Mitthu, he thought, Mitthu! Why now? Why this day?
For on that day (and Siddhi no longer remembered what month it might have been, but by a simple calculation it must’ve been the month of April, perhaps just a day or two into a new year), Siddhi was headed home, for a sojourn of indeterminate length, to alight at Bhagalpur and trek for three days to Kathmandu, there to meet with the family of a friend for a day or two and on to Bhirkharka, where his wife (second) waited, alone, in a house left empty by the death of his father.
On that day he had reached the sixth month of a muted farewell with Mitthu, and at least forty two days since he had really pined for her the last time.
During the weeks with the Mukhopadhyas, he had focused on establishing goodwill with a few families in Calcutta, inviting them on pilgrimages to Muktinath, Kailash and Pashupatinath, and quietly sealing away the detritus of his erstwhile wandering life. He had been enchanted by many a notion over the past few years—theological, political, economic, erotic, aesthetic—but each spell had broken most unglamorously; he had let most friends fall by the wayside, retaining only the most persistent ones who refused to abandon him to what they saw as a self-destructive, alienating way.
Most of all, he had spent energy in reclaiming the foreigner in him—that part of him which had left a home and a valley a long time ago, and had now become buried under many thick crusts that the passing years had put on him: a moustache that looked like the film star Jeevan’s, hair oiled and sleeked back like a Bongla Babu’s, or the affected speech of a Kashi student, lilting with Sanskrit in the company of teachers and spouting Urdu in darker alleys and dimmer lights, discussing Vivekananda’s vision and seeking out translations of Chekhov and Freud, arguing against the creation of a Muslim nation and of a secular one; he had spent energy excising that part of him which had falsely come to believe that he belonged in Kashi, or Allahabad, or Calcutta. He had forced himself to forget the taste of food prepared by Irani cooks at roadside stalls. He had reclaimed the child who had been bewildered by India some thirteen years before from the shells of the young man who had shouted “Quit India!” and thrown bricks at soldiers who, with rattan shields and bamboo canes, defended the Empire’s stripes.
He had prepared for the journey back, purchased painful tickets, cut off parts of himself, literally and figuratively, to reclaim an identity that hinged on not belonging where he was. As souvenirs, he had collected thirty seven different varieties of mangoes. And yet. On that day. Mitthu. Oh, Mitthu!
The station at Bhagalpur soon became desolate. Even the tea sellers stifled their hawking and each slumbered with head buried in knees, reaching for the phantasmagoric lamp Siddhi had failed to light in his head. Mosquitoes and flies told one story to the right ear and changed the tune by the time they reached the left. It was still the deep well before dawn; the syrup of darkness was thick enough to gel around knees and pull any man to the ground.
Siddhi stood up with his trunk, looked this way and that, found himself the only stranger, awake among the asleep, restless and rootless, as if a noose around his liver pulled him in a direction that the thick night refused to reveal.
Adhikari is a writer of screenplays and fiction whose first collection of short stories ‘Carrying it Home’ is being published in June, 2013. The authors portrait is by Nayan P. Sindhuliya.
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