The Book

It is the begining ofthe end. Bare footed men in checked lung is and sweat-stained vests move from room to room. One carries out a crateful of books. Two others struggle with the wardrobe, tilting it sideways so that it can pass through the door. Ma gets up on a stool and takes down the sketch of a reindeer I had drawn. lit sits on a pile of suitcase, biting his nails. Baba is outside, arguing with the truck driver over the fare. They have taken out everything from my room and it looks stripped and bare. A shaft of afternoon sunlight pours in through the window. Five years, I think with a dull pain throbbing inside me. Five years of living in a house that memories made into a home. This was the house where I turned sixteen, where I read Louisa May Alcott and learned to make pudding. This was the window through which I watched the evening star and the water hyacinth bloom in the dense green of the marsh stretching beyond our backyard. Our backyard? No, not ours. The house was not ours. It belonged to someone else.

Mr. Choudhury who came in the beginning of every month to collect the rent and inspect the house. And suddenly last month had hemmed and hawed, smiling apologetically and said we had to move somewhere else as he was going to tear the house down for a block of flats. Just when I had come to love the house, its blue doors and the loft above the bedroom and the three front steps where I spun out my dreams and the pinewood shelves on the kitchen wall.

Everything has been loaded. The home has become a house. Voices echo in the emptiness. I watch mother sweep the rooms.

I am too miserable to help her and she ignores me. She is the earth­mother, accepting, always accepting. Today, later in the afternoon she will bustle about in the new house arrange her pickle jars and clay gods in a strange kitchen of a strange house. She has become adept at chang­ing houses. It is her destiny.

I hear the truck start. Voices call out to me. I drag my feet out of the empty house and squeeze myself into the auto. As the auto moves behind the loaded truck on the street I feel weary, drained, half-alive. Weare halfway between an empty house and the other house waiting for us. This is always how we've been, between houses. Waiting to move out, to start afresh. Perpetually in a state of flux. How I envied my friends Anjali and Reena and Manju who had permanent addresses. Who didnot have to see strange men loading furniture on ugly trucks. And drift, rootless, without anchor. Why doesn't Baba build a house? I had asked my mother many times, yearning for permanence, stability. And each time the answer had been different.

Your father is a scholar, a dreamer. What would he know of land prices and bricks and cements and iron? Your father is an incorruptible man. Such men cannot build houses. Where would the money come from? Once I dare to ask Baba when he has two pegs in the evening. He is in an expansive mood. The world is my home, he intones in his deep, poetic voice. Sweetie pie, let me tell you Tolstoy's story about how much land a man needs. I turn away - I had heard it all before and it did not answer my question.

our new house is a gloomy flat in an ugly building block. The stairs are steep and narrow. The doors creak gratingly. The kitchen sink is clogged. There is a thin partition between the two

bedrooms. The window beside my bed looks down to a slum. Half-naked children play gilli-danda beside an open drain black with slime. The stench of dried fish makes me gag. Ma smoothes sheets of newspapers on the kitchen shelves. On the top most shelf she arranges her clay gods. Even the gods keep moving with us, She lights incense sticks and joins her palms. Her eyes are closed. There is a pleading look on her face. What is she praying for? That we get to stay in this dump for at least a few years? For a blessed release from this endless cycle of packing and shifting? I don't know. In the night I wake up suddenly and sit up, my mind blank, wondering frantically where I am. In the other house I still call home the door was at the foot to the bed, the window to the right. Now there is a window to the left. I fall back knowing it would take time to get used to this new house. And one day, just when I would find it familiar, even grow fond of it, we would have to go.

Four months pass by. The steps do not seem so narrow now. I am no more embarrassed by the thin partition of our rooms. It is comforming to hear my parents conversation in the darkness. There is a roof-top terrace lined with cement pillars and iron rods protruding from the top. Sometimes crows drop bones there. In the evenings I go up there to bring down the washing. Inevitably I stand there and dream. The clouds, suffused by the light ofthe setting sun, drift in fantastic shapes. I hear the muezzin's call for prayer and watch a flight of sparrows winging homeward. It is in these moments that I wish I would live in this house forever and ever till my hair greyed and the eyes dimmed.

Six months after we move in the landlord raises the rent~ hear him and Baba talking in raised voices. Ma tries to intervene, pleading, helpless. Samar Sen is a heavy man with beetle brows and blood shot eyes. A gold chain dangled in the matted hair on his chest and there were several rings on his stubby fingers. He thumps his fist on the centre table and claims that certain parties were willing to pay a much higher rent than we were paying and that he was after all a businessman and was not running a charity. Baba remains obdurate. Samar Sen leaves in a huff, warning that he would serve the notice to vacate. I move like a zombie to my room. I think of the terrace, the clouds and the muezzin's call for prayer.

The next day Baba scans the "To-Let" column of the newspaper.

He takes the day off from the office to go house-hunting. When he comes home in the evening he is greyfaced and haggard. There is a tightness around his chest and he cannot breathe. Between Ma and me, we hold him and stagger down to the street. The taxi roars off to the hospital, horn blaring. We run behind the stretcher. The doctor checks his pulse and gives him an injection. It is a heart attack. For two weeks we shuttle to and from the hospital.

Samar Sen serves us the notice. We have a month before we move. There is a stubborn look on Ma's face. She will not give up. She comes up to me and gently lays a hand on my shoulder. "I have changed eight houses since I got married," she says grimly. " I thought it did not matter as long as we were together. But now I'm tired. We cannot afford the rent Samar Sen is asking for. I am weary of going to search for another house. Apama, go talk to Samar Sen. Do it, for our sakes. Rough men have a soft comer. Who knows, he may give in."

Ma lays out her pink sari and seed pearls for me to wear. We must show him we've got class, she mutters. Show him we are not riff-raff.

Samar Sen looks pleased to see me. He waves me to a sofa and plonks himself opposite me. Slowly, hesitantly, I speak out my well-rehearsed lines of appeal to the human-side of him.

He listens, his beady eyes travelling slowly all over me. I think of Baba lying in the hospital cot and my mother' s lined face and my voice trembles. Tears roll down my cheeks and sobs rack my body. He comes up to me and puts an arm around my shoulders.

"I'm a businessman", he says. His voice is strangely hoarse. "But I'm not a monster. And why should a pretty girl worry about such matters?" With one forefinger he traces my spine. I begin to shiver. I feel his bristly moustache on the nape of my neck. I twist my body to escape him but he is strong. He is panting. My mother's face hovers over me. Rough men have a soft comer. Who knows, he may give in. I close my eyes and think of my terrace, the birds wheeling homeward, the muezzin's can for prayer the clouds piling up in fantastic shapes.

Baba is home from the hospital. All upheavals are past. The notice

to vacate the house lies forgotten.

At the beginning of every month it is I who take the rent to Samar Sen. And as I look back, J. think it is a small price to pay for a place called home .