Chinese Whispers | Rohit Chakraborty

When the auto-rickshaw engine roared and trembled like the annoying vibrato of an un-trained Jean Valjean, I was reminded of Deena Gopalan. She was a friend who was very dear to me when we were in high school. In that fleeting decade that I had known her, I had learnt that she preferred men with trimmed beards, the barrel-chested kind who spoke as deeply as the asuras in the Ramanand Sagar television epics. She was tiny, her head reach-ing my shoulder only just. But she was quick as the strides she took in corridors of the school where she was a prefect, sharp as the nibs of her pencils and untainted as her pressed, starched white blouse. I recall the pungency of the coconut oil on her hair that was parted in the middle. She often spoke of streaking the ends of it Prussian blue or cherry red or dirty green after we graduated.
We never hung out, she and I. I’d like to think that she had been firmly policed. Going to cafés with friends, unattended, was looked down upon, more so if that friend belonged to the opposite sex. Good luck with the dyeing. Also, she lived below my flat. Of all the hours that I spent with her: riding rickshaws to and from school, Hindi and Economics classes together (we belonged to different sections—she was in C while I was in A), inter-com calls and run-ins on the staircase, she must have had enough of me. Oh, and every Friday and Saturday evening we went to the same Accounts tuition which included more rickshaw rides.
In thirty-five years, Deena hadn’t crossed my mind until I was inside an auto-rickshaw, wedged between a stocky woman in a noisy sari and a greying, pot-bellied man a decade older than I. On the round mirror that sticks out of the metal edge in the front, I caught three faces. The woman studied the man with the corner of her kohl smudged eyes, with chastisement and disdain. The man studied the perspiring exposed back of the young woman in the front whose chiffon dupatta had slid off her shoulder, with wonder and hun-ger. The young woman in the front, whose face masked mine, was baffled by this network behind her when she momentarily chanced upon her reflection on the mirror. She hopped out of the rickshaw like a toad off a leaf once it came to halt at the foot of Bijan Setu.
I recall my last memory of Deena fresh as the fish the mongers claim at the bazaar: I was on my way for my final ISC. She was clambering into a rickshaw with a petty robber’s un-settlement when I had called out her name, waving frantically.
‘Good luck,’ she had cried. Her ISCs had concluded a week before mine because, ac-cording to the Board, Computer Applications required an extra week of study. ‘Read my letter.’
‘Where are you going?’ I had yelled over the din of horns and mingled voices of the passers-by. I had craned my neck over the roofs of the passings cars and taxis. But the rickshaw had already taken a plunge into a thoroughfare and I never saw Deena Gopalan again.
*
For the next two weeks since I thought of Deena Gopalan, it became quite troublesome to be riddled with her memory. I wondered what had become of her. In my youth, I always quizzed my mother about her school mates and their fates. She came from Kokrajhar, a sorry town where girls were given away at twenty to boys who had learnt how to mount the motorbike only recently, the motorbike that their uncles had driven all the way from a dealer in Guwahati.
‘Obviously, when your father’s parents sent his photo in,’ she said, ‘I was hesitant. He was never the looker. But he was a graduate. And he lived in Calcutta. Kokrajhar, it’s a dy-ing town, I tell you. You’ll get no happy news from there. It’s just he died or she died. It was never he had a baby or she had a baby. If someone had a baby, they had it in Guwahati or Jorhat or Dispur. Everyone came to Kokrajhar to die. And that’s where I was born.’
It was in Calcutta that my mother had first ridden an auto-rickshaw, eaten pork, and bought her first padded bra without my grandmother breathing down her neck.
She was quite right about Kokrajhar being the town of the dead for when I asked her about her school mates once again, we had a rather grave exchange, excuse the adjective.
‘Dolly, my best friend, she was about eighteen when her parents found her a husband. Dida had Dolly and her groom-to-be over for lunch. He was very, very handsome. I wish he had walked into my hall asking for my hand instead. Oh, he was beautiful. A square face. Thick eyebrows. Chest hair. And so tall—’
‘Even taller than I?’
‘Yes, yes, he was extremely tall, like he was reaching for the Gods. Such long, slender legs. He wouldn’t need a ladder to fix the fans is what I thought when I saw him. So, they took a train to Jalpaiguri. They got married. A few months later, she called me on the tele-phone saying that she was carrying. I was elated. She wanted to name the baby for me. But I said no. I don’t know why I did. I think I was a little embarrassed when she had asked. Exactly a month later, I heard from my neighbours that Dolly was back home.’
‘What happened?’
‘Her husband was a beautiful man. But he was an alcoholic. He had a job, thank god. He carried bricks all day. But he came home drunk one night and kicked her right here.’ She rubbed her belly. ‘Poor Dolly. She was unharmed. But, she took a train back to Kokrajhar the very next day. Then, I got married and I lost all touch with her. I heard that she lived with her parents all her life. Raised her daughter.’
‘What happened to the husband?’
‘Lived alone all his life. Drank, worked, slept. Then, he died two years ago. Cancer. In the liver. When Dolly heard, she jumped on a train to Jalpaiguri. Stood by his side. Nursed him. Fed him. Cleaned his arse. And then he died. All those years. No contact. She was alone. He was alone. And then she dashes to him.’
‘Did Dolly work?’
‘Haan. Her parents had very little money. She had a sewing machine. Repaired tears and rips all her life. Ironic, isn’t it? Dida tells me she was fantastic. Not a sign of any damage on the cloth once you gave it to her. She told me that every weekend, she went to Guwahati for lessons. And when she came back, she started selling these kameezes and salwars and suits and saris. The embroidery on her shawls they say was unmatched. Of course, no one else made shawls in Kokrajhar.’
‘How old is her daughter?’
‘A little younger than you.’
‘What happened to her?’
‘Dolly married her off to someone rich in Delhi as soon as she turned eighteen. And last month, Dida called me up and told me that Dolly had died of a heart attack. ’
‘Oh no. Did you cry?’
‘No.’ She looked at her lap. Did I detect a morsel of guilt marring her face? Who can tell? ‘I’d known her a long time ago. When I was just a girl.’
‘How old was she?’
‘Forty-two.’
‘When you were in school were you close?’
‘Very.’
‘Tell me about it.’
‘I don’t remember much.’ After a full minute of silence, she heaved a sigh. ‘These handsome, tall men are always the animals. God gave them beauty but no heart, I tell you. Look at your father. Short. Looks like a mongoose. Smokes a little bit. But a heart of gold.’ My mother pulled at her heart-shaped gold pendant that I was told was a gift from my fa-ther on their first anniversary. I was very suspicious of this. I had never seen him place a hand on her shoulder in my presence.
*
Deena Gopalan was a model student: an unnerving force known to every debater in the metropolis, a formidable coach during Inter-House contests, and, of what little she offered me to read, an extremely sensitive being with a penchant for long, fancy sentences. Her thoughts were always unorganised: once, we were homeward bound on a rickshaw and she broke my hazy mid-summer stupor with ‘Cesare slept for twenty-three years. Outdid Rip Van Winkle, eh?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, that German movie they showed us last Friday?’
‘Why’d you bring that up?’
‘I don’t know. It just popped into my head. What do you want to do when you grow up?’
‘I dunno. You?’
‘I’d like to write short stories. I’d like to write about someone who sleeps longer than Cesare.’
‘OK, now let me go to sleep.’
‘Don’t. We’re almost home.’
My ears and their greying curls still ring with her distinct laughter: raucous, throaty, in-stantaneously recognisable, as if she were a wicked witch that had been let out of the pag-es of a Grimm’s Fairy Tale. Whenever the Accounts Teacher, whose name for the life of me I cannot recall, attempted to crack one of his unfunny jokes complete with a dull pun, Deena would erupt first. The rest would follow suit precisely because her well-meaning evil cackle was worth their applause in the value of giggles and chuckles.
When she was twelve and I thirteen, she had picked a fight with the alpha male in our class who was railing against the English teacher She was retiring in a week and had failed him in her last essay test.
‘That cunt! Gave me a seven. Out of twenty! That dried up ancient cunt!’
‘Excuse me, Ronit,’ she had spoken up, ‘there’s no need for that sort of language.’
‘Why’re you even talking? You don’t know me. Go yap somewhere else.’ Then he turned to his posse and titled his head in Deena direction, ‘No one’s fucking her anytime soon either.’
And it was I who rubbed her back in the rickshaw as she buried her wet face in her cupped hands. Truth be told, Ronit had just turned thirteen and had puberty approach him swifter than a thick tongue of avalanche. His chest looked more like a canary’s, his voice had dropped an octave or two, he had shot up three inches, and the faint dark line above his upper lip had announced his foray into manhood before the rest of the boykind in the class.
‘These pretty people are the shit bags, I tell you, Deena. That’s what Ma says. Stop cry-ing now. He’ll probably end up cheating on his wife someday. Then, he’ll have to buy love like groceries. No one will give it to him willingly.’
‘That’s profound.’
*
Mr Gopalan was a fantastic being, an anomaly, actually. He towered over us Bengalis. He was always to be found in a flat pastel shirt neatly tucked into his tailored trousers. The grey streaks in his hair were artfully taken around his ears to make it seem like the breeze, enamoured by him, had combed it so. His camel Oxford shoes were always polished, so much so, that you would see yourself gaping back at you from the toe cap when you were far too dazzled by his presence to lock eyes with him. He was always polite, always cour-teous when we met him the Jadavpur Bazaar. He exchanged pleasantries with us in that se-ductive baritone of his.
Mrs Gopalan was every hardworking mother. A short, thick-set woman, her hands were always stained with turmeric. It always made me suspect that her fingernails had turned irreparably yellow which is why she wore a thick coat of scarlet nail polish. Her grey hair was coarse and wild, held by the common rubber band with which one secures sweet box-es. Her eyebrows needed trimming and so did her nose hair, thick as bottle brushes as they were. She shared a tremendous camaraderie with the women and maids of the building. Yet, she was infamous for her steel in the presence of her daughter or husband.
Deena was short and plump, like her mother. At school, she was brilliant and chatty, like her father, charming to a fault, especially with teachers. Much like her mother, clean-liness and order she abided faithfully: every plaid in her skirt was perfect, not a strand in her hair was let loose or orphaned and her backpack had two separate compartments: one for the notebooks and one for the textbooks which she arranged according to size. At home, in the presence of her mother, she minced her words and was often clipped and re-served with her replies.
‘I am a little scared of her, I won’t lie to you,’ she had said when I asked her what ail-ment she was struck by that she was rendered with idiocy at home. ‘Plus, she thinks that there’s something going on between the two of us.’
In our final years of school, Deena underwent an alarming metamorphosis. Her silhou-ette shrivelled and her torso began to resemble an inverted triangle. Her thinning hair was allowed to fall loose across her face. She began applying heavy kohl on her eyelids but the teachers always overlooked it for she had recently been nominated the House Captain. Bags under her eyes aged her and rendered her enigmatic. Her cheekbones became fresh gossip for the girls, her collarbones, their envy.
‘Is the hair colour change happening soon?’ I had inquired one day. ‘Are you going through some sort of a revolution?’
‘Renaissance, darling,’ a deep red lip colour and a powdered ginger wig would have been ideal accoutrements to the voice of the femme fatale of a forgotten noir that she had put on, ‘It’s a fucking Renaissance. I feel sick and pretty at the same time.’
‘You look very pretty today,’ Ronit had poked her in the middle of a Commerce lecture.
‘Oh, thanks. And Ronit, Genghis Khan called. He says you’ve had his moustache for far too long. He wants it back.’
My chest had heaved with pride.
Every Friday, before our tuitions commenced, you would find us in the company of Phuchka Dadu, an old codger who stood with his wares right at the bend of the road. Deena and I enjoyed his trade every Friday but in our last year, she had grown averse to putting those punctured golden orbs filled with spiced tamarind juice into her mouth. She stood in silence, almost statuesque, as I scooped them into my mouth. Silences reigned our rick-shaw rides as well when I studied her arched lush eyebrows that she had borrowed from her father, the cleft in her chin handed down by her progenitor, and the mesmerising cof-fee irises copied from her Appa’s, with a chocolate speck or two on them. When I brought her inheritances to her attention, she mumbled a muffled ‘Fuck’.
‘That was supposed to be a compliment. Your father’s a looker.’
‘I know. And that is the only thing that he has going on for him.’
‘Why so bitter? Did you two have a fight? I don’t understand half the things you say these days.’
‘Which is why we are still best friends.’
As school dusked, I saw lesser and lesser of her. And the midnight cries and brawls un-derneath my feet grew louder and louder.

II

Over the years, my job as a high school teacher taught me to assess students beyond the written word and the mark. I learned that Sagnik Chattopadhyay, the dimwit whose emo-tional expanse was almost as large as the football he kicked around, had written a fantastic test on La Belle Dame Sans Merci precisely because his athletic build and reputation as a dependable striker had earned him a flighty girlfriend from another section. I learned that Vignesh Kalidas, the round oaf with a poisoned mouth, was the reason why Satyaki, a pu-pil I was quite fond of, kept turning in mediocre essays that read like memorised pieces from a run-of-the-mill essay book. Satyaki lacked the fervour and personality that he had once delivered. Reading his unapologetically intimate essays. I had deduced that he was a troubled soul coming to terms with his sexuality. Unfortunately, that miserable asshole, Kalidas, was aware of this boy who liked boys, and thanks to him, so were the rest of the class. As I was doing my rounds around the classroom during one of these essay tests, I saw an inscription on Satyaki’s desk written in Kalidas’s handwriting which was as plump as his build: he had scribbled, with a permanent marker no less, “Bobby Darling”, com-plete with an arrow pointing at Satyaki’s heart. Satyaki tried to cover the inscription with his notebook when I walked past him. And then there was the school darling, Avinash; in the staff room I heard praises aplenty of his academic brilliance. However, he was a boy of facts and figures, lacking any understanding of how a fellow human thought or spoke. He was a robot with an eidetic memory, a memory that was hailed as a treasure. The posse of Science, Mathematics, History, and Geography teachers who occasionally gathered around to sing peans to his ability to parrot the passages from their textbooks had banished me from their lunches in the canteen because they thought that my poor marking of Avinash in every Literature and Language test was tantamount to a personal vendetta I harboured. Those petty pricks.
During our final days at school, I hadn’t been as intelligent with my deductions about Deena. Yes, I observed how she withered away, the skeleton of a jovial being that once was. But, as our Boards drew nigh, despite my best intentions, I began draping that skele-ton of hers with layers of borrowed gossip.
I recall a sudden buzz in the building. Whisperings of the maids in the corridors that ceased momentarily when I was found lurking around but resumed with a renewed vivaci-ty once I was invisible. Intercom calls my mother answered for hours on end, giving a vo-cal performance befitting a radio personality, a plethora of noises registering shock, dis-appointment, and disapproval, in that order, dominating her performance. And then there were the muffled exchanges between my parents when the television was allowed to blare in the living.
The spark in the gossip-mongering had led to the Gopalans retreating from our lives. His camel Oxfords hadn’t seen the light of day for weeks. Her voice did not traverse the wires of the building. And Deena slipped from people’s minds towards the end of school year. Although Ronit constantly inquired me if something was wrong with her.
I had been absolutely certain that Deena would confide in me if I decided to call her. But, calls went unanswered now. And when I went downstairs and rung their doorbell, I would see the shadows shift behind the peephole but the door would never swing open.
Reluctantly and covertly, I peered into the gossip that had rent the air of our building thick. Mrs Khandelwal had just returned from the salon, smooth and brunette, when she ran into Mr Sarkar on the stairs. Mr Sarkar was en route to the same salon where he dis-creetly had his chest waxed. ‘Do you know about the Gopalans?’
‘I do. It’s shocking, isn’t it?’
‘He is known for being quite the charmer. But this — what I heard — absolute no-no.’
‘And he’s a doctor. Not a roadside mongrel.’
‘We send our children to schools for degrees, Mr Sarkar. Curbing their animality is not what they learn there. Contests. Tests. Awards. Makes the blood thick doesn’t it? Swells the mind. How has time to learn that pushing away someone to get ahead is wrong when you’re so focused on getting to the line? When was the last time you have a subject called Value Education when you were in Class Ten or Twelve?’
And then they launched into a detailed critiquing of school systems.
A week later, as I waited by a hot stove for an Egg Roll, two old geezers behind me, sit-ting on a bench, sharing a fag were discussing the mother.
‘Stiff as a cock, that bitch. She picked a fight with me in the middle of the road when I wouldn’t let go of the last seat in the rickshaw. You, with your bags of greens and meat and what not, if you can’t overtake me as we run, I can’t help it. Life’s a race. Don’t complain, bitch! Go suck your Doctor Husband’s cock. Oh wait, someone got there before you did. You lost there, too.’
‘Is that really what happened?’
‘I don’t care. But, she’s stick up. I wouldn’t blame him if he branches out.’
And then the conversation segued into motion pictures.
The very next week, my mother received a phone call from Dida. And when I caught the mention of Mrs Gopalan, I simmered the volume in my earphones.
‘Yes. That’s what I heard. Yeah, she’d hired a maid from some agency. Some ayah cen-tre. She had just had her uterus removed so she couldn’t do any housework for three months, the doctor said. No, Ma. Just because they have a daughter doesn’t mean they can skimp on the maid. You’re in the wrong decade. That’s not how things are anymore. The daughter’s home a lot thought. She could have helped. Anyway. Mother and daughter weren’t home. And I hear the father tried something with the maid. Lata told Usha. Usha told Damini. Damini told Sukumar. Sukumar told me. I don’t know who told Lata. Grabbed her from the back. I don’t know. Things get lost in translation. But it was definitely some-thing…you know…not very right.’
‘It’s very easy to blame the man when you hear something like this,’ my father chas-tised the insurance salesman who lived next door when they crashed into easy other in the bustling Jadavpur Bazaar.
Two weeks later Dida had called again.
‘Every day I hear something different, Ma. Yes. Now, I hear that the mother and father were out and the girl was home, revising. They have their Boards soon. And the maid came into her room and all she said was that she would not be coming in tomorrow. She would tell the mother that she found the daily travel cumbersome so she would be leaving and that her father was a horrid man. Horrid? What’s that supposed to mean? And then I hear that the maid had told the daughter that she was not that kind of a woman. Now tell me what that’s supposed to mean. Hmm. Hmm. Hmmm. Uh-huh. Ah! Could be. The maids on-ly get a part of the total sum that you write out to the agency. She could have been asking for a raise, you know, under the table stuff, something extra. More than what the agency had approved of her. And Mr Gopalan must have said some things. But then the maid did say something to the mother which is why there is such a ruckus. Who knows what she said? The woman’s a bit crazy, too. Too friendly with any maid. Too gullible.’
I was rattling with horror and uncertainty. No sooner had the phone call ended than I began drawing character sketches of the Gopalans.
Mr Gopalan, a successful gynecologist. An unsuccessful husband. A beautiful, lecher-ous being who had ripped out his wife’s womanhood. Alluring but venomous. A snake. Or. Mr Gopalan, the just and right employer, intolerant of opportunists. It depended on who told the story.
Mrs Gopalan, the wronged, misty-eyed matriarch riddled with a faithless husband and his shifty allegiance. Or. Mrs Gopalan, the Amazonian feminist, prizing the words of a crafty maid, a woman, over those of an honest man, the man who is taken to wreck cities and souls, marriages and homes. It depended on who sang the blues, Norah or Adele.
And then there was Deena, forever contemplating the meaning of “horrid”, forever vac-illating between the lascivious father with whom her biological association was permanent and the father that was of the past.
‘These handsome, tall men are always the animals. God gave them beauty but no heart, I tell you.’

III

I remember Deena Gopalan like the first showers of the year. On the eve of my final Board examination, I was handed a letter by my mother. Deena had left it in her possession a week earlier. It was sealed and held firmly fast with several layers of adhesive. I thought the envelope held resolutions to the fragments of gossip that marred my memories of the Gopalans. It was probably the stainless façade and not the prism through which I would witness them.
When I had returned home after the examination, I was told that the Gopalans had va-cated their flat and were off to Mrs Gopalan’s mother’s. Mother had heard it directly from Deena’s mother’s mouth, their first exchange in weeks, and their final. I sped to my room where I ripped apart the envelope.

Dear Sammya,
I hope your examination went well.
I write this letter with a grievous and heavy heart. What I am about to write and reveal to you is a misfortune that no mother, no wife, no daughter should be the recipient of. I write to you explaining why I have been inaccessible, changeable, and excitable over the past few months.
I wasn’t prepared for the manner in which my life has unfurled. But every time I climbed out of the auto rickshaw and saw your mother standing in her balcony gazing downwards at me, I felt pity cascading from her eyes. And shame marring mine. At the risk of sounding dramatic, but not giving up on the opportunity of seeming poetic, her gaze felt like the scavenging eyes of the dragons barring my entry to the castle within the walls of which I would secure anonymity and peace. They would breathe fire with their disengag-ing and contemptuous faces, those poor souls who thrived upon our scandal. And I would spread my arms around Amma and Appa, throwing my chest out, lest they be burned by the ferocity of their gossip-mongering.
Calmly read as I speak…or write. That is all I ask of you. It is a long letter I agree but I shan’t bother you further with anything as long as this letter.
It is strange when it dawns upon you that elders are as receptive to fits of passion as an adolescent is. You spend much of your time being angry with them or hiding things from them that you fail at times to comprehend how similar you really are in spite of being sep-arated by this gulf called age.
You fail to comprehend that they have a wandering eye, as you do, hunting for lust. That they have childlike fetishes, that they like to throw tantrums once in a while. We are all un-grown here—tall children with facial hair or breasts. Children who know how to be-have in front of strangers, but who lose our composure at the sight of sweets. We make the streets our playground, our living rooms our cot, our children our dolls and teddies, our spouses our playmates.
So wrapped up we are as adolescents that we think that teachers, and parents are cast in marble: never rotten from within, only corroded by a shower of acid. We tend to forget that they too were adolescents once; they too had had their share of first love, the fright of their bodily changes, the exhilaration at slicing their chin with their first razor, their first brassiere. We’d like to think that they’d skipped these ordeals and luxuries altogether. And we wouldn’t be farther from the truth.
But, we also fault those who aren’t swayed by sweets, who have outgrown the carou-sels. They are beings who are too alien. Too un-human to be true. We fault those who cast away their toys and laughter. We accuse them for being closeted, instead. For wearing masks. For stealing those sweets.
Whom to trust, Sammya? How I wish you were there: to clarify if a dungbeetel beget me or clarify if a chink in our fortress made our walls crumble.
Oh, the shame, Sammya, the shame. I cannot undo what he did. I cannot un-claim what she claimed. That’s what being us is all about: we’ll just be angry. We can’t do anything about it. Biology binds me to my doubt. History binds me to my scandal.
Let my history not mar what we have shared. Let my pathos not silence the laughs that joined us in harmonious existence. Every time I climb into an auto-rickshaw I shall always think of you. When it sets in motion, it’ll churn memories of our laughter, our secrets sur-reptitiously swirling together indistinctly like the tamarind water, our sorrows mingling like the auto-rickshaw driver who mingles with you and me every day when he asks us where we are going.. Every time the rickshaw halts, it’ll remind me how my final words would be inadequate to bid this decade-long friendship a proper farewell. I’ll recreate you from the sojourns I take on auto rickshaws. I’ll imagine you there beside me every time the engine roars to life.
It’s unlikely you’ll ever hear from me again. But, we’ll always be the butterflies of these canvassed tricycles. We’ll share wings.
Goodbye, Sammya.
Love,
Deena.

From what I had made of that letter, Deena belonged to the eye of the twister, stationed smack in the centre as she saw debris and destruction swirl around her. It has been decades since Deena slinked out of my thoughts and memories. That cryptic letter confirmed that Deena and I looked at the same untended mirror. Her face masked mine. Like the young woman who had leapt off the rickshaw. I saw them, Mr and Mrs Gopalan, through her words, and through the churning gossip of the residents. And I wasn’t certain whom to blame. But I was certain that Deena didn’t either.
And, the two weeks since I had thought of her passed and so did Deena. I realised that I had never mourned her departure. The progenitor of this chain of Chinese Whispers had furtively slipped out of her flat while we were all still filling words into the next person’s ear. Naturally, I bowed out due to lack of interest. But, like my mother had said, I had known her a long time ago, when I was just a boy.

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