The postmaster was a young man from Calcutta. Stationed here, away from the known limits of civilisation, he often felt like a fish out of water. His “house” was a thatched hut with failing light and a little across the horizon was a wild pond surrounded by the woods. The plantation workers seemed to have their own community. Social miscegenation between two different classes of people seemed all but impossible.
In truth, the boy from the city wasn’t good at mixing with people. Uprooted and exiled to a foreign land, his feelings oscillated between arrogance and shame. He rarely met any of the villagers. It didn’t help that there wasn’t a lot of work to begin with. At times, he tried writing. He wrote poems: poems of endless waiting, poems in which the marrow of life seemed to resonate with the faint tremble of young leaves, where the memory of existence was rejuvenated by the sight of rain clouds—and yet, in his heart of hearts, he knew that the only way he’d welcome the sight of a new life would be if some fantastical djinn from the Arabian Nights arrived at night, unawares, and secretly swept away this maze of maddening vegetation. He longed for the security of metalled roads, of tall houses which blocked the sight of clouds in the open sky. The city was spreading its tentacles, calling him back.
The postmaster’s salary was meagre. He had to cook his own meals and his housework was under the care of an orphan girl called Ratan. Ratan was thirteen years old and called him dadababu. Her marital prospects seemed bleak.
Evenings would arrive with plumes of smoke rising from the cowshed. Crickets would start chirping and the songs of minstrels would hang in the air like an intoxicant. The evening would be as still as the cadence of lost poetry, the silence all around would shake the fault lines of the heart; and as all of this would take place, the postmaster would light his lamp. The flame would sputter as he’d call out, “Ratan?”
Ratan would be waiting for this call. But on its arrival, she’d rush into the room, feigning surprise.
“You called, dadababu?”
“Are you busy?”
“Well, I need to go and make the fire . . .”
“You can afford to do that later, can’t you? Do be a dear and dress my tobacco . . .”
Ratan would enter with the coal-filled hookah, blowing on it feverishly, as beads of sweat danced on her forehead. The postmaster would snatch it from her hands and ask, quite suddenly, “Ratan, do you remember your mother?”
Memories would flow back in; memories of yore, fragmented, fractured, half-remembered, half-forgotten. Her father, she remembered, loved her more than her mother. She remembered his smile clearly, the smile he’d carry home when he returned every evening. His face would return to her like a revenant, and the little girl, still lost in thought, would proceed to sit on the floor by the postmaster’s feet. Looking at the young man, she’d remember how she had a brother once. She’d remember the past like it was only yesterday; how they’d played by that old pond, using a branch as a fishing pole! She’d find herself remembering bits of insignificant things. The larger tragedies of life were murky. Blurry. Their conversations would often run till late at night. As the evening would mix into the night, the postmaster, overcome by a sudden lassitude, would decide to forego cooking dinner. Then they’d heat up the leftovers from the afternoon and have their fill.
There were days of magnetic nostalgia—sitting on the wooden plank by the hut, the postmaster would find himself remembering his own history—his mind would spin outward, centrifugally, as he’d think of his little brother, his sister, of everyone he’d left behind. Everything he felt had already been written somewhere within; he knew what to say, and yet he never shared any of it with the people around. Instead, he’d share his stories with this little girl. It seemed to fit, somehow. In time, Ratan began referring to the characters in the postmaster’s stories by their relational names—ma, the brother, the sister. Personal history became mutual memory. She’d visited all of them in her dreams, painted their faces on the canvas of her own imagination.
One cloudless afternoon, a soft breeze wafted towards the old hut. The grass seemed to be soaked in sunlight, and a fragrance beckoned from the dense undergrowth. The warm breath of the tired earth was swimming on the skin, and it seemed as if a stubborn bird, exiled homeward, was singing its song of disquiet at the Gates of Creation. The postmaster had nothing to do—the very sight of dewy leaves coupled with the castles of grey in the midday sky seemed to fill him with a sense of the sublime. But sublimity was the tension of opposites. He was infinite and infinitesimal, engulfed by a gaping emptiness—if only, if only he had someone to share this with!
And just like that, all of nature was echoing his abyssal vacancy.
My heart is in free fall. Won’t anyone catch it?
This was the song of the migratory bird, this was the whisper of the shimmering leaves.
But then again, who’d believe—who’d even know—that such thoughts occurred to a poorly paid postmaster in a village?
The postmaster sighed. “Ratan!” he called out. The little girl had been playing under the guava trees. Hearing her master’s call, she rushed into his room.
“You called?” she asked, panting.
“I want to teach you how to read.”
And so began their voyage on the steady sea of intonations, consonants, vowels, and pronunciation. Soon, Ratan could read simple words.
Monsoon was a metaphor of melancholy. The rain was continuous; all the ponds and drains were spilling over. The sounds of incessant downpour drowned the voice of the village. Traffic had come to a standstill—boats had become amphibious, climbing onto land. You had to navigate unsteady waters to reach the bazaar.
On one such afternoon, the sky turned menacingly dark. The little student had been waiting outside for a long while for her scheduled call, but when it didn’t arrive, she mustered up her courage and walked into the postmaster’s room. Her master was laying on his cot under a pile of blankets. Believing that she was, in fact, intruding upon his hour of leisure, Ratan slowly tiptoed out of the room. As she reached the threshold, a familiar voice pulled her back.
“Ratan?”
The girl turned.
“Were you sleeping, dadababu?”
The postmaster’s voice was weak, tremulous as an autumn leaf.
“I don’t feel so good. C-could you touch my forehead?”
Stuck there, in the middle of nowhere, his broken body ached for a touch of familiarity. He thought of his mother. He longed for the gravity of her hands on his burning body. He wanted to believe that his mother and his sister were right there with him, in that room.
But there was someone in that room.
Something was happening to Ratan. The pale fire of steady resolution crackled under her skin. In the force of an instant, she assumed the authority of a mother. Rushing out of the hut, she called the local doctor, stayed awake for the entirety of the night, crushing herbs, and feeding them to her patient, punctuating the stillness of this frightening night with the words, “Are you feeling better, dadababu?”
It took the postmaster weeks to recover from his illness. When he had completely recuperated, he thought to himself, “Enough is enough!” He had to get out of here. He had to. He immediately wrote a letter to his superiors in Calcutta asking for a transfer on medical grounds.
Her duties relieved, Ratan spent her days outside his room, book in hand, waiting for that old call. But the call never arrived. She’d peep into the room from time to time only to be greeted by the sight of a strange weariness: her dadababu would be there, sitting quite still on the small stool, or in bed, looking up at the underbelly of the thatched roof. And while Ratan waited for her familiar call, the postmaster spent his days waiting for a reply to his letter. Not wanting to be caught off guard, the little girl could often be seen sitting outside the postmaster’s room, studying her old notes diligently. Finally, after weeks of waiting, Ratan was called in one evening. Nursing secret excitement and tender trepidation, she walked into the room.
“Dadababu, you called?”
“Ratan,” he began, “I’m leaving tomorrow.”
“Where are you going, dadababu?”
“I’m going home.”
“When will you come back?”
The postmaster pursed his lips.
“I don’t think I will.”
Ratan stood still for a while. Words seemed to be losing their way in the labyrinth of her silence. Oblivious, the postmaster continued, “I’d written a letter to my superiors in Calcutta, you see . . .” He then proceeded to tell her how his request had been accepted, and that he’d be leaving the moment the new postmaster arrived. A long, pregnant silence ensued. The world was still. Utterly still. The faint flame of the earthen lamp flickered meekly; the rain had sliced through the skin of the roof. A steady string of raindrops formed a puddle in the corner of the room. Drip. Drip.
After a while, Ratan slowly got up. She walked to the kitchen and busied herself in preparing dinner. It took longer than usual. The wait was filled with words to say, but the silence, deafening and absolute, seemed to fill the distance in between. Once the postmaster had finished eating, Ratan looked up at him.
“Dadababu, will you take me with you?”
The young man stared at the girl and then laughed.
“That’s ridiculous!”
He didn’t feel the need to explain to the little girl the incongruity of her innocent plea.
That night, suspended between the fields of dreams and wakefulness, a single phrase echoed in the caves of Ratan’s heart. The sound of familiar laughter. One phrase.
“That’s ridiculous!”
The postmaster woke up the next morning to find his bathwater ready. He’d carried across his habit of bathing indoors from the city. Unable to ask him when he was leaving, Ratan had left the hut early in the morning and kept the water ready for him, as one last act of service. When the little girl was called a while later, she slowly walked into the room and stared at the man standing in front of her.
“I’ll ask the new postmaster to take good care of you, Ratan,” the postmaster said, “You won’t even notice I’m gone.”
It was true that these words were born out of feelings of love and sympathy, but they fell like flames on the petals of the girl’s heart. Ratan had spent her days tolerating ridicule, numbing herself to insult. What she wasn’t ready for was this unexpected gift of kindness. Shaken, she burst into tears.
“No no! You don’t have to say anything! I don’t want to stay here!”
The postmaster stared, taken aback. He wasn’t used to Ratan’s outbursts of emotion.
The incumbent arrived shortly after. Once he’d explained everything, the old postmaster got up, ready to leave. Reaching the maw of the open door, he turned to Ratan.
“Listen, Ratan. I never thanked you for everything you did. Now that I’m leaving, I want to give you something. Keep this. It’ll make your ends meet for some time at least.”
The postmaster handed her a pouch. Peering inside, Ratan found that it contained all of her master’s earnings. Stunned, the little girl fell onto the floor, clutching the postmaster’s feet.
“Dadababu!” she stuttered, “I b-beg of you! You don’t have to give me anything! Please! Please! I don’t want your kindness! No one—no one has to take charge of me!”
And she ran out, vanishing into the mist enveloping the hut.
Sighing, the postmaster gathered his things, he slung a carpenter bag across his waist, picked up his bags, and walked to the riverbank where a boat was waiting for him.
When the boat finally slid into the current, the rain-kissed river trembled like an ocean of endless longing. It was then that the postmaster felt the sudden weight of crushing grief that his heart was gravitating with, swimming against the current . . . towards a familiar face, that little girl’s face; that face filled with words left unspoken. “I should turn back,” he thought to himself. “Let me take her with me; she, who has always been neglected. She, who has never been welcomed.”
But by then, the wind had begun pushing the sails; the monsoon river was churning its waters, the village lay far behind, and a graveyard could be seen at a distance. The lukewarm heart of the voyager consoled itself with eternal philosophy: life was a river of partings and departings, of death and uprooting, of longing and belonging. What was the use of looking back? Who belonged to whom in this world?
But Ratan’s little heart harboured no such philosophy. She had been circling the old hut cradled in the river of her own tears. Perhaps she nursed a tender hope that her dadababu would return one day. Anchored by its roots, she refused to move away from the debris of her own heartbreak.
Oh, heart! How irrational, how human! Denying the erroneous, we turn a blind eye to the dictates of reason. Courting disbelief, we go on, clinging to false hope with unending might. We go on, until the day the cords are cut. Until the day the heart is bled dry and finally cracks. And then we wake up; opening our wounds once more, we run back to the same places, to those same faces, to that same precipice of disaster, welcoming danger, challenging life with all its misadventures, ceaselessly, back to the start.
