The Fortune-teller

The man was looking outside the window at the fast receding urban jungle which was now showing signs of the greenery of rural Bengal. His eyes were half closed and held a steady focus which dispelled any thoughts that he was sleepy or even daydreaming. His nose, rose like a shark fin from his forehead, and the nostrils with the nose hairs peeking out twitched from time to time.  He was humming a tune  and a thick exercise book with a green cover – the thickest you can possibly get – was open in his lap. Now and again, he would retrieve a ball point pen from behind his right ear, which was hid from view by a head full of untidy hair -  a cross between Rastafarian dreadlocks and Baul  like coiffure. His clothes were a standard Sadhu variety; saffron and orange with the colours faded to an almost indiscernible pale white in places.
We were travelling to Kumardhubi on a slow passenger train which stopped at every whistle-stop station on the way - literally. Bishuda, my cousin and greatest of friends, had a firebrick factory in the outskirts of the coal mining town and this was his treat for me, for getting into Medicine. The hot summer day was bearing down on us and the compartment had none of the ceiling fans working, and with the humanity crushing you from every side, this wasn’t a pleasant journey. In the heat which pored out of everybody in the compartment saturated the air with the sweaty body odour mixed with the bidi smoke, made the journey seem even longer. We certainly needed a diversion; a pass time.
Bishuda was itching to do something. He had three bouts of sugary tea with elaichi from the vendors and endless cigarettes and I could feel that he was looking for something, anything, to occupy himself. When he noticed the guy sitting next to the window, the man was writing into his notebook in a script which was somewhat familiar but indecipherable. Bishuda has this amazing quality to make friends. Let me rephrase that. He can make people fall in a friendship with him; be it a man of eighty or a child of eight. As soon as he laid his eye on that man beside the window, I knew what was coming.
Dada. You a poet?
The man looked at us. ‘Oh. I write a little bit.’ His eyes were less dreamy.
Can we hear it?
He hesitated. But when we pressed him, opened the tattered exercise book and  recited something which was clearly Odiya. His voice had a rough quality and he almost sang the poem. I’ve forgotten what it was but I remember his face and the tone of his voice and the crescendo and diminuendo of the tune. We came to know that he goes from place to place, country fairs to country fairs and that the road was his home. When asked how he survives, he replied almost apologetically, that he’s a prophesier.
Really, said Bishuda. Would you be kind enough to read my palm?
The man seemed hurt and somewhat offended. He was not a palmist or an astrologer, he said. Those are inaccurate science. So, how does he predict the future, we asked. By looking at peoples faces, he said.
Amazing, said Bishuda. Can you tell me anything about this brother of mine? He’s really in trouble. He’s left school you see and is mixing with the wrong crowd. Can you tell us what’ll happen to him? His mother is so worried about him.
I could see the man hesitated. He could sense the hint of challenge and the grain of mockery in the conversation. Look at me, he said. I looked at him.
Look at my eyes, he said. They were brownish black and very very still. I remember thinking at that time that his eyes were almost like stone; hardly any flicker of a movement. He put his thumb on my left temple and applied a gentle pressure. 
Not true, he abruptly said. You’re going far far away. You’re going to take care of sick people. You’re going to be doctor. But it’ll be far, far away.
He predicted a lot of things to me and Bishuda that day. They were mostly rubbish as far as I remember. But the fact of the matter is: he somehow got, two important aspects of my life exactly right.

The Rejected

I saw Kharij in a grubby, crumbling movie theatre near Sealdah station. It had discoloured corduroy seat covers with yellow foam poking out from numerous holes like adipose tissue and a projector running the movie in such dim light as if I was watching the movie wearing sunglasses. ’The near empty hall was a testimony to the fact that the movie, based on a Ramapada Chowdhury novel which came out a few years earlier in one of the puja editions of Desh or Anandabazar, was unlikely to give the two pennies worth of entertainment to the general public.  Furthermore, Mrinal Sen the auteur was an always uncompromising and frequently blatantly disdainful artist with his non-conformist leftist views on society, more often than not rather explicit in his depiction of those views in celluloid; which in turn made people very uncomfortable. 

The story had a simple premise. In an unusually cold winter morning in Kolkata, Anjan (Anjan Dutta) and Mamata (Mamata Shankar), a middle class couple find their eleven year old child-servant dead in a locked kitchen, apparently from carbon monoxide poisoning, by trying to keep warm from a open wood fire oven. What follows this tragedy is a masterful examination of the middle class emotive process in a crisis - guilt to self preservation and finally fearing retribution from the boys father who had left the boy to be looked after by the couple as their 'own'. The final scene of the movie is a masterclass of understated filmmaking by Sen - a significant departure from his style. The boy's father, wonderfully portrayed by Debatosh Ghosh, looks at Anjan and though his eyes asks the question 'why did this happen?' But simply states, Babu, Jai (Sir, I'll be on my way). I've never ever seen a movie end with such a simple piece of dialogue with such a devastating effect. And for this reason, for all the Mrinal Sen films which with overt and covert socialist overtures, none can come close to Kharij in terms of the lasting effect it has on your senses. 

Recently,  a fifteen year old employed as a helping hand to my mother, spent the very first night away from home. We wanted her to sleep on the bed but she declined saying that she'd always slept on the floor. The next day when I asked her how her sleep was, she said she was cold. The kitchen in my parent's apartment was small with a minuscule hole as a window but the saving grace was there was no wood fire; only modern gas. 

The next day, I flew back home and hoped that the extra blanket given to her would be enough as Kharij had been on my mind. Few days later, I got a ring from my mother. The girl was homesick and had gone back to her village.