by Tejaswinee Roychowdhury

 I rounded up a few of the young village boys and prepared to take Madan on his final journey. It was customary for the families of the dead to do this but Madan had no family, well, except for the village where he breathed his first and his last. As we plopped his poorly adorned lifeless form onto the white mortuary van, I found a sense of relief amidst the melancholy. Madan was never cut out for this world. I had to believe he was off to a better place. With that in mind and a chant of “Bolo Hari, Hari Bol” slowly fading into the distance, we drove away from the setting sun towards the Hooghly.

It was over soon.

One minute I was performing his last rites, the next minute he was curling up in sombre smoke and ascending to the heavens. I watched as his ashes rested briefly on the Hooghly’s waves before spiraling downwards and vanishing forever. And that was it, Madan was gone. His soul and his body found their ways back to their maker and all that was left was the brass pot in my hands, his memories inside my heart, and his little hut.

By the time we returned to the village, it was almost midnight.

I thanked the tired young boys, paid the driver of the mortuary van, and strolled to my hut. I took my time because I liked the cool breeze that brought with it a scent of ripe mangoes from the orchards nearby. But that feeling did not last. I felt restless as I neared Madan’s hut which shared a fence with mine. I couldn’t help but glance at it. No hut should ever look so sorrowful and hollow like Madan’s looked tonight. I looked at the flickering lightbulb casting a faint yellow light across the verandah and the compound of my own hut.

“That’s how a hut should look,” I whispered.

I looked at Madan’s hut again, and I sighed. The least I could do was go in and light a candle in memory of its final resident.

The mossy and splintered bamboo fence of Madan’s hut hadn’t been fixed in a long time. There was nothing surprising about it given the poor soul barely made enough to eat two square meals a day and buy new lungis to save his grace. The villagers always took pity on Madan and helped him out whenever they could, particularly during festivals, but it was never enough.

Madan’s cluttered compound never made sense to me. There were two worn-out tin sheets, an old jute straw mat, a broken old lantern, piles of old newspapers that would crumble to dust at the lightest touch, a heap of dried up mango leaves that flew in with the occasional wind and storm, a broken shed that housed two cows several years ago, an old bicycle with its chain hanging loose, a couple of broken plastic buckets, and half a bamboo basket. Any request to clean it up always fell on deaf ears. Tonight, however, I was amused. I realized that I had never seen Madan as a collector, much less a nostalgic one.

I walked inside the hut and found the switchboard with ease. A small bulb lit up the place and I chuckled.

The compound was rather clean in comparison, I thought.

It was just one room. There was a cot at one end, a wooden showcase beside it, a couple of open multi-shelved furniture, a small table-fan, and a steel chair. On the other end, there was an electric stove, a few aluminum utensils, and a short stool. The wall-paint had chipped away to reveal the plaster in places. And yet what should appear minimalist was barely so.

He kept tiny broken indiscernible little things, strange trinkets, and random souvenirs, meaningless to everyone except him. But that was not all. This tiny hut held within its walls Madan’s entire life, not just the way it was, but also the way he saw it.

For instance, he still had the framed photograph of himself and his new bride hanging on the wall. Jhumur was her name, from two villages over. I still remember her in her humble bridal saree, her young face dotted with sindoor and sandalwood paste, staring at her Alta-dyed feet as the whole village trooped in to visit her; and I remember Madan beaming with pride and awe. Of course, I also remember the sordid evening a couple of months later when she ran out of the hut like a madwoman, screaming as she did. The men shook their heads and the women tutted their tongues. It was soon the village gossip. The women whispered discreetly while scrubbing ash on their dirty utensils by the village pond; the men debated the reasons over their evening chai under the peepal tree. The general consensus was that Maya Devi should have never married her son off without disclosing the truth to the bride and her family. The ailing old woman thrashed Madan with a cane because of what he did despite his feeble defenses that he was only trying to amaze his wife. The poor fellow was devastated that he ended up scaring her instead, and Lord knows he tried to bring her back, but no one in the village ever saw Jhumur again.

A sad smile escaped my lips. I didn’t know why he kept the photograph hanging on the wall. It must have been painful for him to look at but there it was, in all its glory, as if it was his finest memory. I drew in a long breath and tore my eyes away, and that is when I noticed something I hadn’t before.

Tucked under his cot was a big trunk. The chipped green paint suggested that it was old. I grabbed it on either side and started to drag it out. It was heavy. The metal protested and screeched on the cement floor, but  I wouldn’t give up. After a lot of pushing and pulling, it sat in the middle of the room with me beside it, panting. A man who never bothered with organizing anything had a padlocked trunk. I was curious.

I rummaged awhile in the mess until I found a set of keys. There was a tiny key on the ring. I glanced at the padlock and took a shot. It fit and I popped the trunk open.

My jaw dropped.

Madan had kept every single thing from his days of fame and glory. I didn’t even know he had these – souvenirs from the various towns and cities his circus performed in; hand-painted posters of himself as a little boy, the star of every show; shiny silk costumes in red and golden; gifts from the circus master and other performers; and a large framed photograph of the entire troupe with him sitting on a trapeze performer’s knee. Madan had carefully kept his world, his real family, away from the cluttered mess that was his life in this village. This was his and his alone.

But there was one thing, rather one person that bridged it all.

On the inside of the hood of the trunk was sellotaped a black and white picture of Kochu Kaka; and in its off-white frame were scribbled the words, “Thank you, Baba.”

Madan’s father was the only man in the entire village who saw his ability as something worth monetizing. One could argue that he was an opportunistic man, ready to parade his little boy in front of the whole world for money. But it’s easy to see why Madan still thanked him. You see, without his father, Madan would always be the village freak – the boy who ate glass.

My very first memory of Madan rose from its embers…

He sniffled and cooed as I held him in my arms, wrapped in a thin blanket. I was used to holding babies, even at the tender age of four. But I was afraid he’d slip through my arms; he was so tiny. With a little encouragement from his mother and my own, I held him not knowing of this day, when I’d be old and sitting on the floor of his hut and he’d be… That little boy my mother helped deliver on a rainy July evening was gone… I wiped my tears with the edge of my dhoti, overwhelmed for the first time since I discovered Madan this morning.

I couldn’t leave the hut to mourn alone with a candle. I leaned back on the wall and I wept as quietly as I could. Soon, pain and fatigue took over my body and I knew I had to rest. I locked the trunk and pushed it back to its original place before curling up on his cot and falling into a deep sleep…

My wife would understand, she always did.

About the Author:

Made in ’93, Tejaswinee is a lawyer with a Master’s degree in Business Laws from the Department of Law, University of Calcutta, from the city of Chandannagar in West Bengal who finds catharsis through the written word. She also dabbles in the occasional poetry. Music is her drug, travel brings her peace, solitude is her therapy. And as a critical thinker, an individualist, and a rebel, the causes she cares about finding their way to her socials. 

Her socials are:

Twitter – @TejaswineeRC

Instagram – @tejaswineeroychowdhury