Arrival

‘I want to count people,’ said Charu to her father.

‘Your brother has started with buffaloes.’

‘Let him count buffaloes,’ she responded.

‘All right,’ he conceded. ‘Do it from the window.’

‘The door is bigger than the window,’ she argued with a three-year-old’s determination.

‘Fine. Concentrate, don’t miss any.’

She gripped his fingers tight and swayed by the train door, concen­trating. He felt clever, even wise, for deflecting the coin crusade. It showed on his face as he waited for the bridge over the River Bhombal, and receded as he reacquainted himself with his worry: what if it got dark? Darkness, on top of the short halt, would make it hard to extri­cate the trunks and suitcases and all six family members – seven if you were to include the clothes horse in the brake van.

But everything went well for the Chitols. The infant slept at the breast in milky stupefaction; the children ran up competitive tallies and forgot to campaign for yet more new paise to fling into the water when they crossed the bridge – which arrived while it was still light, and so did their halt, where all the luggage and family members, including the clothes horse, successfully alighted.

Near-blemishless limewash coated the bricks at the railway station. Long fans hung off the iron beams, modern-sculptural in their repose. From the stationmaster’s cabin protruded a sleek two-faced clock, bearing modern sans serif numbers, and the cabins too were marked in brisk lettering, of such gloss the paint still appeared wet. As before, they gave Chitol the feeling that here was potential, promise in the future.

Now too the modern feeling did not last, there being hardly any sign of modern life once they left the station. One-horse and two-horse carriages pucked and pocked on barely paved roads. Few electric lights came on to greet the evening. But it was invigorating, calling to mind the title of deceased eminence William ‘Hilly Billy’ Tomkin’s booklet, which Chitol had taken care to peruse: Observations, Records and Witterings from a Salubrious Railway Transhipment Point. The mild altitude was perceptible; the air had a fine, calibrated nip. The beginning of spring was in the mauve and orange flowers where none were a week ago. Here and there great sal trees rose into the sky, and here and there, sure as fall and spring go hand in hand, their large yellowing leaves wavered towards the earth. A foresty fragrance accompanied the Chitols as they passed from the town into the township, under the curved iron banner that stated, incontrovert­ibly, ‘Bhombalpur Railway Workshop, estd 1960’.

No sooner did they arrive than they were counted. It was February of a year ending in 1 and the decennial census was under way – the ninth general census, the second of independent India. This particular enumeration, the first of her life, Charu would retain no memory of. But she, too, was counted. Afterwards, the figures found her to be one of approximately 439 million in the country.

Of these fewer than ten thousand souls lived inside the nascent rail­way township of Bhombalpur, and no larger a number in the town outside. Chitol did not mind the absence of clamour. Mughalsarai had been busy enough for him. All he wanted, frankly, was to live in a cottage with its own garden, where he could drink tea, read and write among his family after a sincere day’s work.

In Bhombalpur he got his cottage, of sorts. In the ascending town­ship nomenclature theirs were C-type quarters. These comprised a small front and back yard, a little front and back veranda, three rooms and a kitchen. The quarters were of exposed brick painted a dull mustard yellow, theirs the last on the lane, their lane the last in the ward, facing on to the wild grass and bamboo-fenced backyards of the lane in front. The quarters formed half a bungalow; identical quar­ters the other. The Chitols quickly and crowdedly occupied their half, turning all rooms into some form of bedroom.

Their life in the township acquired the rhythm by which time moves along without being paid special attention. In the small front garden, where he set up two cane chairs, a cane table and a cane stool, Chitol spent his evenings amid growing plants and children. The backyard was wet, containing a bathroom, a separate Indian-style lavatory connected to a septic tank outside, an open cement tank to catch the water supplied in the mornings and evenings and a washing area on to which the kitchen activities spilled; there were no taps indoors.

Nistarini Debi controlled the back of the house. Although she had long surrendered to the requirements of widowhood, relinquished coloured saris and jewellery and meat, her zeal for daily living had barely diminished. She rose before dawn for a cold bath, collected whatever was blooming for the deities, and oversaw kitchen and religion in the home of her only living son, who had unaccountably married a woman outside community, caste and colour.

Towards the end of their second winter in the township, she, the wife, fell into a persistent fever.

At first it was thought to have something to do with the jolo hawa or wet breeze. But the fever stayed, intensified, brought headaches and bouts of shivering. A change in the weather, said the doctor at the health centre (a hospital was only yet a sanctioned project). Sudden drop in mercury, he pronounced with doctorly dispassion, may be a viral fever; she will be fine. She remained unresponsive to medicine, however, to bedrest, to Nistarini Debi’s potions and prayers, to her husband’s worries and compresses, to her own reassurances that it was mere exhaustion playing out. Then she started to develop grotesque symptoms. Her hands and feet bloated up oedemically; she suffered brief convulsions. There rose a ring of fever around her that those who came close felt on their skin, until one morning the children were no longer allowed into the room.

Charu, now five years old, prised apart the wooden windows to look inside. Her fingers sweated on the vertical iron bars, her round eyes marbled with tears.

All day she had noted the fretting around the word ‘ambulance’. When at sunset it appeared, its siren was silent and the lights did not blink. Her father, his friend Pal, and the coughing, injection-poking doctor helped her mother into it. Before leaving, she pressed each of the children’s hands and said with a tired smile, I’m coming back.

The words encouraged Charu. Her father was taking her mother to a big hospital, she understood. She watched the ambulance draw away, the neighbours spectating, her grandmother by the gate, the two boys standing by her. The older one, Dhrubo, now broke into a run behind the automobile. Their father sent him back. He returned to bang his head against a wall, and their grandmother hobbled towards him with the words, ‘Na, na, that is not to be done,’ and he kept trying to break through her grasp and reach the wall with his head.

Charu rested her hand on her younger brother Anando, certain that although Dhrubo was the older he was not the wiser, at least not wiser than she. She led the boy away into the house.

From underneath an almirah she pulled out a pair of wooden dice, shook them about in a tumbler and released them over and over. Anando gurgled victoriously each time the dice rumbled out of captivity. They were foolish, all of them, she thought. Her mother had gone to a big hospital, where they know what is wrong and make it all right; a hospital, where people went in order not to die and fly to Thakur. Only those who did not go to hospital, they died and flied to Thakur. On closer examination, she could not tell if Anando was enjoying the game as much as usual. She leaned across to kiss him, lanced his madman hair with her bobby pin and recited him a recently learned verse. Amader choto nodi, chole bake bake. Our little river, curves this way and that …

But a bend in the river felt very far. It was not summer as in the poem. With neither parent around, and the skies opening weakly for yet another spatter of cold rain, an unbearable tension fell upon the house. Over the next two days, the messenger brought telegrams that were read aloud to their grandmother, being in English, by Dhrubo; the following evening, just as one telegram intimated, the slightly younger of their father’s older sisters arrived with her husband.

Because Kolkata Pishi added immeasurably to the feeling of crisis, Charu began to resent her presence. In any case, she had noticed that Pishi could subdue her mother, sometimes into total silence, and in the past she had embarrassed both women by asking about it. For she knew that her mother was not quiet, she had her own way of making fun. Somehow her mother’s silence – her absence – seemed connected to this arrival. Kolkata Pishi herself was not in usual form, not mock-scolding the boys at high volume, nor broadcasting her woes garrulously.

Charu felt a desperate need for her mother, in this fraught house with its prayer and dim lighting and cold air of catastrophe. She wanted her mother to tell Anando and Dhrubo what to do with them­selves, and sing to her, just make her feel good. She felt indignant at the state of affairs that obtained, and went to bed in a blaze of confu­sion and tears, wishing Ma would come back and explain to everyone what a hospital was.

Instead, more relatives came the day after next, and more the day after.

When they were gone all that remained was the amazing absence of her mother.

Copyright Rahul Bhattacharya, 2026. Reprinted by permission of Bloomsbury