In another letter he had written, “For sure someone has imposed a curse on our line, whose burden we bear over successive generations.”
Sometime later, informing his younger brother of his newfound love, Bordada had written, “I could not but fall in love. Insofar as I can tell, she is partial to me as well. I am seized by the fact that it is improper to disclose one’s own amorous affairs to one’s younger brother. Especially considering my advancing years and the conservative character of the rural society you live in. I have seen the world. I have lent my ear to the messages as well as the lamentation of humans everywhere. I have not as yet succeeded in acquiring an unambiguous perspective on what it is proper to disclose and to whom, and what I should allow to be disclosed to me. I can aver, however, that I have overcome more than one traditional belief. Be that as it may, the maiden in question is the youngest daughter of the renowned merchant Pranoy Kanti Roy. I have pledged my troth to a lady of Hindu faith. You can apprehend the extent to which I have deviated from the orthodoxy. My life remains secure only because this is the city of Calcutta. Had this been a village, the local administration would have taken a whip to me by now. The maiden is pleasant of appearance, soft of speech. Her name is Kanta. As all of you know, I had decided never to partake of matrimony. It is becoming increasingly difficult to adhere to this vow. Despite being progressive in many ways, Calcutta society clings to antiquated notions when it comes to the nature of the relationship between man and woman. Fresh food in this city is made available only to those who have bound themselves in the bonds of marriage to live in the manner of imbecilic infants. Those who have remained unmarried and live in boarding houses in this most exquisite of urban agglomerates are deprived of the means to procure for themselves a hearty meal and elegant quarters. The word employed for the above-mentioned boarding houses is “mess,” which, as you are aware, is a polite way of referring to a culinary disaster. Our lives are nothing but those selfsame dinnertime debacles. Not that even such wholesome refreshment is within my reach. I earn a pittance with my journalism. Writing stories and painting pictures may fulfil the desires and mitigate the agonies of the creative soul, but they seldom feed the Bengali stomach. And yet, my artistic life necessitates that I live here. It is also hypocritical to deny the need for female companionship in my life. I can discern clearly that this is infatuation, indeed, that this is nothing but infatuation. Still I have chosen to surrender. As Tagore wrote, ‘This is a willing sip of poison.’ I have tried to transcend the quotidian existence, but failed on account of being an illegitimate disciple of the creed. I am suspended in the void between domestic life and renunciation. I am a devotee of pure love, for all artists are necessarily lovers. Therefore I have fallen in love. This requires neither bemoaning nor celebration. A woman and a man have resolved to live together, they shall do so in a suitable residence. Considering this background, no pomp and ceremony is required. I discourage you from travelling with your indisposed wife to attend my wedding and offer your applause. There is nothing more I am inclined to say. Look after Bouma’s health.”
“Postscript: I have been informed that a handful of politicians have dedicated themselves to engineering a rift between you and me. Apparently I shall have to seek written permission should I wish to call on you.”
The next letter: “Kanta has manifested herself in my lonely artist’s life like a waterfall in spring. She has tuned our daily existence to a symphony of serenity. For now, I have taken a single room on the ground floor of a building on rent. Of late I awaken at the same hour every day. I consume my meals with clockwork regularity. Barring some financial difficulties, you could say I live in a degree of harmony. I shall resume journalism as soon as I have overcome the influence of the honeymoon. Several plots are whirling about in my imagination. Two paintings are lying incomplete.”
About seven months later: “You wish to know when my bride and I shall visit our ancestors’ land. You have assured me that no one in the village shall have an inkling about Kanta’s religion. For your edification, I do not consider a place my ancestral home or my motherland if my consort’s faith prevents us from reposing our faith in one another as man and wife. It is as though my mother has adopted someone else as her son. Moreover, Kanta is with child. It will be detrimental to her health to undertake a long journey. A strange emotion has been born in my heart. I am to be a father! Eternity alone knows when, at which moment, I sowed the seed. It is eternity which is the progenitor of the life that is yet to come. I am merely the tool it wielded. I will take my brush to my unfinished paintings as soon as the first phase of Kanta’s indisposition has come to an end. Incomplete art pains me.”
Within a year and a half, the letters had brought news of the birth of a child, as also some black-and-white photographs, taken in Bordada’s studio, which he had sent to his younger brother. These photographs were not in my father’s possession, however. A three-line letter was the next one to engage our attention. In it Bordada had written: “Can you lend me some time? Not a great deal of it, let us say three hours. So that I have three additional hours in my day even after twenty-four hours have elapsed. You are the only one whom I can call my blood.”
This letter alerted Dada to the possibility that Bordada was in some trouble. He wrote to his elder brother, seeking details, without getting a reply. The letter that did arrive much later had no answer to Dada’s queries. It began abruptly and ended the same way: “A row of coffins on the bookshelf. Rabindranath Tagore collapsed on the desk, a visiting card plunged into his breast like a dagger. An overwhelmed look in Jibanananda Das’s eyes. An oblique glance at the fallen women of Calcutta with one eye and half-parted lips.”
It was in this incoherent state that Bordada materialised suddenly in his birthplace in 1947, the year of the Partition. Dada was bewildered and the villagers, inquisitive. Bordada had succeeded in returning to his stepmother’s arms moments before losing his mental balance. Barring a clothed body, he had forsaken all his possessions. My father feels it was fortunate that the two Bengals were still one, or else he would have been lost the labyrinths of passports and visas. His stories and paintings, his family and child, his social connections, all remained behind in Calcutta. On the fifth day after his arrival, Bordada went insane. But this insanity was restricted to certain activities. Primary among these was painting or drawing pictures, in places where no sign of his art was to be found afterwards. He made epoch-making art on the water in the lake. He alone knew what stories he scribbled on the grass with a twig. He stared blankly when asked about his wife and child. After drawing on the water, he destroyed the work by jumping into the lake and swimming across it. By then word had spread of his having married a Hindu woman. People were saying there were riots in Calcutta, that Hindus and Muslims were slitting one another’s throats. Religion first or husband? That Hindu woman must have used black magic on Dada. Those people knew witchcraft.
Bordada did something exceedingly strange one night. Winter was advancing from the Himalayas, breathing heavily. The mist had arrived already, and winter itself would soon make its presence felt. The villagers’ granaries were stacked with mustard seeds. Everyone would begin sowing very soon. The sharecroppers were ready to start their work. On such a night, Bordada decided he could not brook another moment’s delay. He stole the seeds from several of the granaries. It was not known whether anyone had seen him loitering, or had decided to ignore him since he was a madman. Because Bordada was considered insane by then, his flawed vision did not take into account the peculiar geometric lines of partition drawn by the best mathematicians on the land to the east of the village. Ignoring all the ridges separating the plots, he appropriated the entire expanse as his own and indiscriminately planted mustard seeds all night. Another nocturnal lunatic, Mochhlu, observed this exercise from a distance with close attention. All he did was watch, a half-burnt twist of tobacco clamped between his teeth, while scratching his genitals. The villagers did not get to know that while they were being assailed by a barrage of questions from their unconscious minds during their deep winter sleep, the newest madman in the village, had, unbeknownst to them, quietly and single-handedly covered the dividing lines between tracts of land with seeds pregnant with the grain that was yet to arrive.
Bordada was once lured to a local Ayurvedic doctor to be diagnosed. After he threw a bottle at the doctor, all but blinding him, he was chained up. Bordada did not object. Only, whenever anyone passed by, he began to chant, “Have house have chains, have house have chains . . .” Even Dada, in the course of his daily perambulations up and down the staircase leading to the room over the yard, completely forgot that his artist brother was languishing indistinctly right next to that very staircase. When it rained, Bordada clambered on to the front veranda, still chained. Three meals were placed close to the chain every day, however, in observance of one of the many rules followed in the house. Whoever happened to notice Bordada saw that he would be busy gathering dry grass and leaves. The cowherd might drop some hay while taking the feed into the stables, and Bordada would promptly gather it. A dry branch might fall off the guava tree, and Bordada would stash it by the staircase. The goats and gusts of wind also presented him with bits of grass and straw sometimes. The villagers did not get around to sowing mustard, nor was the thief caught. Most of the people could not afford a fresh stock of seeds. The fields remained uncultivated, bringing the cold wave from the Himalayas into the village. There was a new turn of events after Bordada had remained imprisoned in this way for seven months. As he was smoking by the lake after his day’s work, Dada was startled to hear Bordada say, “Gimme a cigarette?”
Dada was setting eyes on his elder brother after a long time. His appearance had not suggested madness earlier. But after seven months of being chained, exposed to the sun and the wind and the rain, and completely unshaven over this entire period, he really looked like a lunatic now. Going closer, but beyond the reach of the chained figure, Dada said, ‘‘I didn’t know you smoked.”
Revealing his long-concealed teeth through a gap in his moustache, Bordada said, “Smoked Charminars in Calcutta. First time I feel like one after going mad. Gimme one.”
Although there was no history of violence, Dada had no faith in Bordada. Convinced that trusting a madman amounted to madness, he tossed a cigarette at his brother from a safe distance. Turning it round and round in his hand, Bordada stuck it between his lips. Thrusting his neck out, he said, “Light.” Dada did not hold a match for him. He had just seen Bordada’s yellowed incisors, and he could not rule out the possibility of being bitten. He threw a matchbox at his brother. Grabbing it, Bordada cackled at Dada. “Coward! You didn’t have the balls to light it yourself, or I wouldn’t have done it. But now I will. They said mad, you said mad. Gimme proof I’m mad. Any proof. If you can, won’t hurt you. But you can’t. Now watch.” With a matchstick, he set fire to the bundle of dry leaves, grass, and hay he had collected over seven months. As soon as he threw the flaming bundle on the straw roof, the whole place caught fire. My grandmother managed to escape with her newborn son, but the house could not be saved. Bordada could be seen amidst the flames and smoke, lighting his cigarette at the fire and smoking calmly. When the villagers arrived they could hear a maddened chanting in an ecstatic voice, “No house no chains, no house no chains, no house no chains . . .” By the time the flames could be put out, the veranda and the front room had collapsed. Although the villagers were happy enough to think of Bordada as being mad, they didn’t want him to die. He was rescued with great care. The post he used to be chained to had been uprooted, scraping against his skin and drawing blood. He wasn’t harmed in any other way. Unable to break out of his chains, he had broken the very structure to which he had been tethered. No one had expected him to escape with his life from the fire he had started himself. But very soon, on a hot April afternoon, he ushered in a self-composed end to his own life. Freed of his chain, he had resumed creating his formless art of yore. That afternoon he was sitting on the edge of the lake by himself, drawing pictures on the water with a fishing rod lacking a hook. Dada arrived to tell him, “I have located your wife. She is on her way here with her father. Go to Calcutta with them. Get treated by a specialist.’ Having paused to observe Bordada, who went on drawing, unmoved, Dada continued, ‘People are saying things to me. You set my home on fire, they are afraid. No one knows I handed you the match. They think you’re a wizard. You need treatment.”
Without raising his eyes from his indivisible work of art, Bordada told him coldly, “I set your house on fire. Why are they saying things to you? My responsibility. They’re not wrong. If there’s a wizard in this village, it’s me.”
“What do you mean you’re a wizard?”
“Can’t see the picture I’m drawing, can you? I can. Either I’m mad, or I’m a wizard. Soon’s this is done, I’ll go.”
The moment he finished, Bordada jumped into the water where he had drawn his picture. He didn’t surface this time.
Within a month of his burial the eastern side of the village was drowned in yellow mustard. A strong, headache-inducing scent hit everyone. For some inexplicable reason, the mustard ripened in April that year. The entire village set off eastward as though under a spell. The dazzlingly explosive harvest, from seeds sowed aimlessly in the darkness, in desolation, away from view, defying partitions, made the villagers weep. They wept, in memory of the man who had been either a lunatic or a wizard. Suddenly Machhlu the madman broke through the crowd and dived into the crop-covered, partition-less field of mustard and disappeared from sight. This incident could not interrupt the weeping of the villagers, and that was the one occasion when everyone in the village sobbed at the same time for the same reason.
