The story came back to me suddenly. Was it the news of teenage suicides that triggered it? Maybe.
What is clear to me even now - is the exact setting, the point in time - when I heard this tale. That it was a grey monsoon evening when the dark cumulus threatened a biblical deluge. Our teacher, a man in his forties - I'm sure he was in that age group but seemed so old then - was in a story telling mood. We sensed an evening without trigonometry and pounced at it. ' Pour me a cuppa,' he'd said and somebody had handed him the pale sugary concoction that was supposed to be the tea, from the dented aluminum kettle that served as the teapot and he'd settled down by lighting a fag. We were expecting a ghost story or something supernatural; the final product surprised us. Here it goes.
The young man was the only earning member of the family of six. The family consisted of the young man and his parents and sister and his aged grandparents. They lived in a two room shanty in a locality where many refugees from East Bengal had come and put their tendrils around, in the hope that this alien land will embrace them with time.
They were a poor lot. The young man, barely in his mid twenties, worked in a book shop by day and coached schoolchildren in the evening and not surprisingly the money was scarce and the living was bordering on dire poverty. His sister was getting to a marriageable age - at nineteen - this was the norm at that time. His dad was chronically ill, more from the partition sucking the life out of him than physical ailments, though the chronic coughs he had day and night could be result of the endless bidis he smoked. His mother - her aging hastened by the hardened life - looked the same forlorn figure wrapped in the same faded saree, each day going through the daily chores of cooking and cleaning.
Every day he came back late at night and the quiet boy he was, spoke little about his day, had his meager meal of dal and roti and went to bed. His best friend was his grandfather, with whom he'd play chess regularly on a Sunday afternoon. Granddad couldn't but help notice on this evening sessions with his grandson, the weariness and sadness in his eyes. Whats the matter, grandad would ask. I’m ok, grandad, he would say.
One day, grandad looking for a pencil to do the daily crossword he did on the newspaper he borrowed from the neighbours, found a sheet of paper amongst others in the desk of the young man. Grandad stood a while looking at the scribblings and finally went to his room and sat on his bed thinking; the crossword forgotten.
Late that night, when everyone's asleep, grandad silently went to the lightless, dingy kitchen and hanged himself with his dhoti.
What? We asked. Why did he do that?
Our teacher paused, relishing the denouement.
The explanation lies in the sheet of paper the grandad saw, he said. What he saw was a sheet of paper with a lot of figures and calculations. After a while, it dawned on grandpa. The boy was trying to figure out how to add one extra family member to his family with his income. And no matter how much he tried, he couldn't balance the books. The boy wanted to get married.
Afterwards, our discussions revolved around the fact that whether it was an original story from our teacher - as he said - or lifted from someone else. Some people said, must be Bonophool, some said Naren Mitra. Somehow it was hard to imagine our teacher capable of writing such a story.
To this day, I don't know whether it was an original story or not. What lingers in my mind is the tragedy of the tale that was hard to forget.
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