What Guest On This Autumn Day

Translated by Aishani Misra

There is something in the open-mouthed wonder with which Joy Goswami gapes from classroom windows and offices, dreaming of pujo. I remember being completely captured by it when I first read his essay Shorote Aj Kon Otithi in his book, Hridoye Premer Shirsho (Love’s Reign Over the Heart). Here, the great festival is always at a distance—mischievous, fleeting, ever at odds with our hapless narrator. There is a buoyant intimacy in Goswami’s lines; they meander and stutter and linger childishly. Yet they shoulder the ache of being left out of a time that dazzles even the grimy drains and alleyways of your own neighbourhood. It is an ache through which I translated this during my first pujo away from home. As another pujo flies by, leaving us to our own solitary devices, this essay is my best guess at consolation.

Joy Goswami has warmly approved the publication of this translation.

---

I

A holiday. I stand at the door. I look out. I squint. Sunlight, a little harsh but brilliant. Light in which wings soar. Houses stand half dipped in the sun. The rays strike the wall and drip down. My eyes adjust to the brightness. I have been inside for too long. Did I not see the radiance of these homes before? I look to the sky. Had it always been such a splendid blue? And in that blue, clouds sail away to some faraway country. Mounds upon mounds… like a mountain of curly hair. So high up, isn’t it?
How many beams must hit those clouds and scatter, from sky to distant sky… immeasurable. Some of that light must fall here, to our small, provincial city. Some small kitchens with clay roofs, where the lady next door grows a gourd vine… if you step inside, you’ll see sunshine pour in through two half-broken windows, dazzling the cobwebbed kitchen. The light collects, dancing off the washed utensils, and the simple household is aglow.

I sit down cross-legged on the floor. Warm handmade ruti and spicy potato-brinjal mishmash. Breakfast will be delicious. Across from me, coconut leaves stir the shadow-light again and again. Half the pond is in shade—and from the shadows two ducks emerge into the sun. By the road is a Kolkata, festive and radiant. That ancient hand-pump by the footpath looks brand new. As if it had been paved just before I woke up today. Even the broken-down, grumpy house is grinning. It must be the sunlight’s doing. Just the way a girl can speak softly to a grim, angry man, scold or threaten him suddenly, and turn his frowning face shy and boyish and glad. A cloud floating some distance away is now at an angle with the sun. Sunbeams collide with the cloud and scatter, like long panes of glass. Down below, the bustling, careless world is laughing, frolicking, weeping, or preparing for the great festival…

I no longer remember when I first saw this light that marks the start of pujo. One afternoon in class, I turned from the teacher and the blackboard to the cloud-mound above a clump of mango trees—sun rays streamed out from behind, a few wisps of cloud floated below. The sky behind was an impossible blue… the moment I saw it, I knew pujo was close. My heart leaped. Yet pujo was a long time away. Still, I knew in my heart that I had glimpsed the festival that day… Like when a girl you barely know gives you an unfamiliar look, and you realise she belongs to the autumn season. “The white clouds demand that you see only me…” wrote the poet Alokeranjan Dasgupta. Though she won’t say it aloud, she, too, will find a way to make this demand: look at me. And the festive day will echo her. Today is not for staying in. Go out.

We can go to the banks of the Churni river. It’s a ten-minute walk from my house. A hundred-year-old school building, and the river before it. A banyan tree by the banks. A ten paisa ferry ride to cross the river. Suddenly, the rain begins drumming down. I stand under a tree. The rain reaches me in flecks. Large drops fall from the tree on my head. Beside me is a tea stall with a bamboo roof. And there, suddenly, I see Chandan.
—Let’s have some tea? —Why not!

We stand with a glass in hand as the rain drips through the bamboo. Why don’t I go on a boat? A rainshower boat ride. Once I cross the river, the rain softens to a drizzle and then halts. This is Aishtola. From here on, the brick-laid streets go on to mix with the cement of the main road and become Ramnagar. Westward goes the NH34. Not that way, I’ll go left. From both sides, large, disorderly trees perch over the road. Two kids make a bridge with their hands, the rest hold each others’ clothes to make a train and run beneath the arm-bridge. I will also reach a bridge soon. A real bridge. This road, with its lattice of shadow-light, that is waiting to turn, will turn and climb up to the high bridge. There is a field there. Beside it, the Churni. From here, some even and some steep path twists and turns and reaches the bridge. I know what it is like to lean over the bridge and look at the river. A couple of young girls and boys are leaning over it now. They laugh among themselves. I am standing in the grassy field down below. They see me from above. Should I wave? They don’t know that the sun is my friend. That the rain is the boy next door. That I’m here because the clouds are on their way. The clouds, who asked me to come. Then we shall all go to the house of the kaash blossoms by the rail lines. Why don’t those boys and girls come with us? Every year during pujo, this is where we go. To the house of the kaash blossoms, where we have fun. Such fun, every year…

II

No, it’s no fun at all. All nonsense, the girls say. Well, nonsense it is then. Most of what I just said was made up, I lied. Ever since I was a child, I have found the pujo sunlight unbearable. Fever sets in the moment the autumn light touches my skin. As I was saying, sitting in class, I saw flocks of white clouds drifting across the deep blue rain-washed sky, and my heart leapt—pujo was coming. And then what? Pujo came along, yes, but with it came a raging fever. I could not go out to a single pandal. Almost every year, it was the same.

My friends in their new clothes would band together and head to the neighbourhood pandal. Red-eyed and rough-haired, I would make my way to sit on the veranda. Afternoon would begin to pour out its slanting light through the nearby trees. Slowly, this light would trickle away and blur. Then it would die. The trees would turn black. Another pujo would come along. Pass by. No going out this time either. Soon, the leaves of the trees would become yellow. The wind of examinations would blow. A chill would set in, and with it, a sense of dread.

What is the wind of examinations? Back in the sixties, when we were in school, annual exams were held in the third or fourth week of November. Just when winter had begun to soften the sunlight, and the scenery had wilted after pujo, the festive air would evaporate somewhere. Hands would busy themselves with books. As soon as dusk fell, voices, high and low, learning up their lessons would drift out of the houses. From the second battle of Panipat to physical and chemical changes, Newton’s law of motion, speed, distance, time, to Saratchandra’s Chhinath Bourupi or a host of golden daffodils… various lessons from various classes chanted from the houses would form a strange chorus—partly discernible, the rest echoing as a booming aftersound. Everywhere, this hum of lessons being learnt up. A cold breeze through the window. Listen close, Babu and Milu have already started studying. Hear, hear! Soon you’ll be nodding off. Bilu’s mother says he gets up at four in the morning to sit with his lessons. They are so far ahead…

How far ahead are they? How far? How far behind is the boy who is too ill, too absentminded to study all year, whose every moment is haunted by the fear of exams? The final couple of days of pujo slipped by without going out, but after sitting feverish in the veranda all day, my head filled up with worries of yellowing leaves and exam-wind. Worries and fears. Head ached to sleep. Lay down on the floor. In the veranda. Shouldn’t lie on the floor, come inside. Ma takes me inside… sitting on the veranda red-eyed and rough-haired, going inside in a while to lie down—this was festive fun to me. Year after year. I’d have one new shirt. Sometimes two. But no going out. Let it be. Maybe next time. The clothes would be packed away. They’d fly into the next year. Exams? Couldn’t sit for them either. Couldn’t prepare in time. Maybe next time. Moving up to the next class? That too—next time, then?
—What’s there to be afraid of?

By evening I’d be in bed and hot tears would fall from my eyes. Don’t cry, don’t cry. The fever will rise again. The pandal is near, you can hear the ritual bell, the dhaak. This is the South. From the west, more pujo. There’d only been one pandal before. A row had broken it up into two, one pujo on each side. So many people must be gathered in the pandals now. Amid all this, I don’t know when I drift off to sleep. In the dream, everyone has woken up in the dead of the night to learn their lessons by heart. On one side, Babu and Milu are studying, on another, Alo and Shankara are reading out loud, across the pond are Ashish da and Taposh, from the house at the back, Reba Di and Khutu Di are studying, Rama, Bulu, Rani, Jhumur, all reading with complete concentration… I stand in the school compound in the middle of the night. Everyone from my class is shouting out their lessons, all the boys from all the classes. The teachers, who are scratching their canes on the tables, are also studying. Someone in a dhoti and shirt sits at the table and nods into his books, another, back turned, writes his lessons on the chalkboard and studies, yet another studies while wiping the board clean with a duster, everywhere everyone, the whole school, hunched over and swaying, learns up their lessons in the midnight air. And I cannot enter the class, I stand out in the compound. How far ahead are they?

Suddenly, all the teachers and students still yelling out their lessons come out into the field and form a line—will there be a prayer now? No, our NCC teacher comes forward, calling out some lesson, when all of a sudden, everyone begins to march. Chanting and marching, students and teachers cross the school grounds, heading towards the large pond in Keshtopur. They march so far ahead that they vanish from sight, leaving the great big school building behind—and me, standing with my notebooks alone on the midnight compound. Right then, the exam-wind starts to blow, and I begin to weep in fear. Someone puts a hand on my shoulder and says, no, no, no, don’t cry, come inside… Since then, I stay in during autumns. Even now, after so many years, the pujo sunlight is poison to me. Touch it, and I have a fever. Even the rain—poisonous. If I get drenched, that water won’t trickle down my legs to the ground. Won’t dry in the wind. No, it’ll settle in the chest. Pool in the heart. Flood the lungs. Pleurisy? Now I live in the city. I go to the office, wary. Tread carefully. Yet I know autumn will find a way to trouble me. Just like the other day. Had a light fever. But I had a piece to write. Couldn’t finish. Had to shake the fever off. Couldn’t let it rise. There was no time, I needed to lengthen the piece. —Left office early to get home and sit with it. A walk to the metro station, off at Kalighat, then an auto to Gariahat. From there, a short way to Dover Lane. Home. It should’ve been quick. But at Waterloo Street, the rain came down hard. I ran for shelter under a shopfront, but it was already packed. Made it to the metro station somehow. Got down at Kalighat. Thankfully, no rain. Overcast sky. Almost got a seat on the back of an auto—but no, they were all full.

After a hundred more failed attempts, I gave up and got on the front of an auto. Just then, the sky cleared. In the harsh, slanted sun, my skin began to burn. Rays like glass. At Triangular Park, the sunshine switched to another burst of rain. I was drenched. Once I had made it home, I was trembling. A few days ago, I was standing in the awning of a footpath stall for over half an hour. Couldn’t step out. The road and footpath across were awash with sunlight. And I already had a fever. People stand in the shade to guard themselves from the rain. There I was, trying to save myself from the sunshine. Once again today, fever struck me like thunder. All within an hour. No more office. No more writing. Back then, my pujo clothes would come out the next time, my dreams of going out would be held back until next time. Next time was when I would clear my exams, move up to the next class. From now, will my writing, too—like Shibram Chakraborty said—have to wait until tomorrow?

III

When I was in class seven, we had a recitation competition on Tagore’s poem Autumn. “Autumn has come and a touch of dew…” Fifty-five students across three sections. At first, I was listening with rapt attention. When someone stuttered or forgot a line, I thought—what an idiot! A great enthusiasm. Probably lasted until the tenth person. After that, I could not register a single thing anyone said. Don’t even remember when it ended. Since then, I’ve read countless descriptions of autumn scenery. Some are priceless literary treasures—I’m not counting those here. Priceless treasures are far and few between. Yet so much is written down.

Around this time of year, with local pujo souvenirs and festive newspaper supplements, a certain nostalgia spreads everywhere. There’s no end to man’s thirst for knowledge. He looks at the night sky and wonders—where is that star? How can I reach that star? He looks at the sea and wants to plumb its depths, or cross it. When he sees a mountain, he wants to conquer it. Or reach the peak, plant a flag and bite into a chocolate bar. Every year before pujo, he must research the autumn season. From the birth of the Devi to the death of the Asura, he must get the complete picture. The time is also ripe to discover what kinds of powders and creams make the neighbourhood girls sparkle like advertisement stars. Man has a great longing for knowledge. I hope one day my own desire to know also crosses all limits…

What famous people eat on various days of the year is also something man longs to know. And once he finds out, he must come home and grumble about his own lunch—Ugh! Uff! Ugh! I’m not much of a foodie. Can’t tell good from bad. But I hear all kinds of things from my neighbours, the ones who keep me company for twelve months a year.

Bishu’s father says: Goodness, four days of feasting, and we can’t even manage one! Chandan says, look at what he’s written first. I can’t count how many jumbo prawns I’ll gobble—God! Tilak, will you come? Come, let’s go corner him at lunch, say we’re huge fans of yours, came all the way just to meet you. Mantu da says, well, not this time. Next time, when I get a bonus… let’s decide right now what the menu will be for all four days of pujo. Write it down. Don’t waste the paper. Atoshi di frowns. “Enough! Next time, next time—everything will happen next time!” Just like my pujo clothes, my going out, exams, class promotions—middle-class life is full of these next times.

It’s their luck, Atoshi di says. How many people get to live like that? How many? What’s it to me? My stomach can’t even handle such good food—how nice! How fun! All these people live in little provincial towns. Lower middle class. Bishu’s father runs a radio repair shop. His son works in Bihar. Some kind of a job. Sends back what he can. Somehow, the days go by. Mantu da works at the cinema hall counter. Chandan is a medical representative. Eldest son. They all read the paper. Some can’t even afford it every day. Whenever a free book comes with the paper, there’s always a tug of war to read it.

Shefali di has a son, Tapu. Ten years old. Goes to school. Shefali di is forty, or forty-five, or maybe fifty—it’s hard to tell. She travels from Ranaghat to Howrah every day. Works in the factory of a medical company. Her husband has passed. Once, she had been a beauty. No trace of that remains now. Now, Shefali di is a black spot. Tapu wants to know—“Ma, what is caramel pudding? I want some!—What are appetizers? Do you get rabri in Phatik Babu’s sweetshop? Why don’t you get rabri when you come back from office?” All this. Lying in bed, he prattles on. Shefali di gives him curt replies.
—Ma, why don’t you make prawn malai curry? I want to eat some!
—Hey, you have! Don’t talk nonsense. I brought some from my boss’s son’s wedding. Remember?
—Oh was that it? But that was just once. I want to eat it again!
—You will. Work hard, grow up. Then you will.
—No, I want it now! Now!
—Fine. Study hard for your exams, pass with good marks, then we’ll see.

—Really?
—I told you, we’ll see.

Tapu, too, is human. When he sees a mountain, he wants to conquer it. He says: “Fine. But I can’t say how many prawns I’ll eat.”
—Hey, don’t be greedy. Don’t you get to eat at home? Why on earth does he write all this…
“What’s that, Shipu?” Now Shefali di’s mother comes in, she is over seventy— “Whatever we get to eat
or not, getting to know what those famous people are having, that’s no joke!”

Man has a great thirst for knowledge. May my desire to know cross all limits.

One of my friend’s fathers, a lover of literature, once told a begging woman who came into the courtyard with a child in her arms —“Can’t you all give it a rest for the pujo days? Even the shops cut down their prices for the festival…”

My experience is different. One ashtami afternoon after lunch, I was sitting in the veranda, flipping through the annual pujo issue. An elderly man came in. Help if you can, baba. I looked at his face. He said: “If not money, any help…” He had a bamboo umbrella. Wore slippers, torn. Did beggars—besides those with diseased feet—wear shoes? A blue half-shirt, also torn. When I asked where he lived, he broke down. “At the station.”
—“Don’t they trouble you? Other beggars?”
—“Yes…The youngsters, born wretches. But that’s just how it is.”

Evidently, this man had only just begun begging. It showed, just as it does when one is newly employed, newly married. Only a few months ago, he had still been a poor householder, burdened with debt and misfortune. Now, the professional beggars at the station wouldn’t take kindly to him. Another extra, they’d think. As if there aren’t enough of us here already. The man was still uneasy sitting around or lying in the dirt. He hadn’t yet learned to see himself as a beggar, he clung to his pride. The seasoned beggars and the kids born and bred at the station—they would be after his life.

The man was truly in crisis.

I gave him the change I had. He accepted. But then he noticed the caste thread peeking out from my kurta. I had put on a new one only yesterday.
“Apnara bamun?” he asked. You are Brahmins?
“Yes, why?”
“Then please give me some rice.”

But lunch was over. There was no rice left. Ruti would be made only at night. There were some vegetables, that was all. What would I give him? I tried to explain. He wouldn’t listen. I took out some more change. Now I was getting annoyed. One rupee gone. He continued to plead. Then, as he was finally leaving, disappointed, he called out from the door, “Any other bamun households nearby, dada? I’ll ask there. Can’t eat rice unless it’s from a bamun, you see…”

Just think! To have lost everything. From nothing to less than nothing. Yet he wouldn’t eat except from a brahmin household. Absurd! But aren’t we the same? We know it’s of no use, but we write anyway, we take jabs at these senseless codes of our society, speak up, stir up noise. Not a thing will change. Our wasteful revelry will dazzle like thunder over small villages. Our garish mirths and our paan-mouths will foam up like scum. And the grandeur of all this saying and knowing will gradually cover up our little rooms. We will gape in surprise, and watch. Gape, and listen. Gape, and swallow. Our stomachs will fill up.

I go to Chandan’s house in the afternoon. Tapu is running around. They are Chandan’s neighbours.
—“Mama, look at what I’ve drawn!” He draws something or the other every day, and shows it to us.
We understand nothing! We praise him to the skies. We let him draw. Today he’s made a long and strange creature across two pages—are those whiskers at its mouth, or a trunk? Hanging from the mouth is a bucket-like object. “What have you drawn, Tapu?”
—“This is a jumbo prawn, which I shall eat..”
—“How massive it is, a monstrous prawn!” Chandan says.
—“Let it be, I’ll eat it.”
—“And what is this in its mouth?”
—“That is a bucket of rabri. The prawn is eating rabri…”

A humongous canvas. Kept in the centre of the room. Over the canvas are several delicious foods floating around at odd angles. Oil paint. One of them is a giant prawn. Cooked. On the other side, a plate with a great mountain of fried rice. Below floats an open-mouthed pot of rabri. On one side, a bowl of fish curry filled to the brim. A roast chicken leg drifts about. No one is around.
Suddenly, someone jabs a hole into the canvas. The prawn has vanished. Another hole. The chicken leg has run off. All of a sudden, another jab. The rabri is gone. I stoop over to take a closer look. Tapu peeks out of the hole. “Hey, where’s the prawn?” “I am eating it!” Mouth caked in thick curry, he smiles. Then, half-eaten prawn in his hand, he disappears again into the vacuous darkness behind the canvas…

I peer into another hole. Vast, empty field. A couple of parched coconut trees. A few battered, abandoned huts. No trace of human presence. Dust is rising from the ground. A vulture flies overhead.

Round and round. Is that the ancient footprint, then? That village from the famine era of two centuries ago, when man became extinct? Dust is blowing, swirling—like an airplane flying in and out of the clouds, the scene floats up into view and then sinks into the dust storm… beyond this, nothing more lies within our grasp.

IV

That village, the distant horizon, the soaring kites and vultures drifting into view through the hole in the canvas, will anyone ever reach that village, that ancient footprint from long ago? Will man ever rise above time and touch the past? I must ask Samarjit babu. Or Pathik Guha. For now I’ll sit inside. In my room. My office. I go to the cinema for a bit. Lovers drift around in the roads, the fields.
Look how the sunshine spills here. In this light I can see storybook characters take to the streets. I sit in my office. Somebody walks in. Or in my house. They wipe the sweat off their forehead—Uff, how hot it is outside. Well, isn’t it autumn. Why not take an umbrella? Nah, it’s a bother, carrying it. Gets lost. I’m good.

I’m good—is that something I can say? No. Boys and girls will step out into the sunshine. Clouds will sail where they please. White clouds. By the rail tracks of our own Nadia, Madanpur, Ranaghat, Payradanga, Birennagar, kaash blossoms will sway from side to side. Only I won’t be there to see. To touch. To wander.

I stand at the doorway. I gaze from the window. Pujo sunlight. Girls with packets in their hands walk out of shops into the street. Somewhere, kaash blossoms nod. Girls lift their eyes gracefully. In my head, I look. In my head, I lower mine. I tell no one. They’ll laugh. They laugh. It’s foolish, the normal people say. The world is split between the brave and the meek. I tell no one. I glare up at the sun. My brow knots deeper. In the sunless shade of the window, a face breaks apart. Shadows set the face on fire.

If you have the time, care to take a look—in the shadow-dark behind the window bars is an ember, smoldering. It burns, it burns, and after burning and burning a long, long time, it turns to ash…

But when it is ash, it cannot be bound. The wind, like a sea-wave, will whisk it away. Then, it will stray everywhere under the sun. The rains will wash it now and then. In the small neighbourhoods of Madanpur, Shimurali, Payradanga, Palpara, on the flat kochu leaves afloat on ponds and puddles behind the houses, on the film of fine dew droplets that wait there, in the cracks of the ramshackle houses from which green shoots press through or in the narrow brick-laid alleyways, nudged on by the quarrels or the laughter of the wives carrying water from a hand-pump beneath a tree it will go on, floating, mingling with the footpaths and roaaks and the unruly tea-stall crowds, where it will linger for a bit, chattering in silence! After a while, it will drift to some neighbourhood field, sink into the grass, and fall asleep.

Then, one day, Devi Saraswati will send her pupil. Who will know everything, and will still want to come. She will know everything, and find her way there. From dew and shiuli trees, grassblades and florets, from sheafs of paddy and clumps of kaash, she will craft a new face. Not a shattered one. A young face, gentle and firm. Then she will take it in her hands, and ask: Why did you hide around for so long?

Why did you long to lose yourself to the darkness? Were you not stirred from the depths of that gloom again and again, by sunlit greenery, rainswept fields? Are they not etched in your memory? Have you forgotten everything? Why? Why have you stayed this way? Look—pujo is here. Look, the world has flung itself open like a book. On one page swells the sea, on another, the forest is swaying, on one page the sun is beaming, and the rain pours down on another… You have so much left to read—come, let us read together now. Come.

And they set off toward the horizon.