“ 12/A, Hashpukur 1st Lane, Jorashanko, Kolkata-700007. The rich legacy pf the Chatterjee’s is hard to be guessed from the old dilapidated look that the mansion wears now, but that could no way hamper the renown it has achieved over the years. In North Kolkata this acclaim is particularly important as walking-talking, flesh-blood google maps are a more dependable option here.
Hence with almost no difficulty, Dhruv has found his way to the Chatterjee mansion and was now standing at the threshold looking around aimlessly while waiting for the response to his knock on the door.
“Sorry, you’ve been waiting long”. The door slammed open.
Charmed by the soft voice when Dhruv turned to his greeter, there was clear disappointment in his face. Up until then he believed ‘ugliness, if anything, is just a state of mind’. Now he kept wondering whether face is really the index of mind.
“Who is it, Buni?” Dhruv looked inside and saw a man in his fifties. Mr. Shashanka Chatterjee. His round belly and no-beard, just moustache face only added to his jovial vibe. As a professor of Physics in Kolkata’s Scottish Church college, his dhoti-kurta look simply conveyed his love for classics.
“That advertisement in the newspaper. We talked over the phone”, Dhruv clarified.
“Oh! Yes, yes, yes. Come in son. Buni, Unlock the room and open the windows. Go, hurry.”
Dhruv crossed the threshold as Mr. Chatterjee gestured to show him around while sharing irrelevant yet friendly titbits about the mansion’s long known history. Dhruv’s room was the one on the roof. “Who lets an attic!”, he wondered. But once he stepped in, he was completely baffled --- a neat and cosy room, fairly large with walls painted a tranquil shade of green. The two big south facing windows stood open causing the cool evening breeze to blow the white netted curtains. The furniture however was minimal --- a single occupancy bed aligned to the eastern wall, a desk and a chair fronting one of the windows and a cupboard standing opposite to the bed. Dhruv’s eyes were devouring the calmness of the room when his eyes finally halted on a tanpuraresting against the south-eastern corner of the wall. Dhruv’s new landlord had been following the direction of his gaze and so immediately offered explanation: “My daughter’s. Buni. You met her at the entrance”. Dhruv gave an uneasy nod. “She must have forgotten. I’ll ask her to remove it. Don’t worry”, Mr. Shashanka added. Dhruv felt ashamed but still couldn’t help the wave of discomfort and distaste that ran through him at the very thought of Buni’s swarthy acne prone face. “It’s okay”, he managed in a subdued voice. Mr. Chatterjee was about to leave the room when he suddenly turned back to Dhruv with excitement, “By the way, prawn or hilsha?” “East Bengal”, Dhruv smiled. The old man broke into laughter, “smart kid”, and gently patted Dhruv’s shoulder before leaving the room.
Dhruv. Dhruvajyoti Ray, age twenty two, non-residential Bengali from Bokaro, Jharkhand. With a chiselled jawline, lustrous wavy hair, mediocre complexion and a six feet stature, he is well fitted to be any girl’s dream. Tired from the hassle of unpacking, Dhruv sat at the desk, playing with his guitarstrings. He was halfway through Tagore’s “Tomar holo shuru, amar holo shara…”, when there was a knock at the door. He opened the door, it was Buni. “Baba, sent to take the..” Dhruv gestured her in, even before she could finish, and kept fidgeting with a book to avoid any conversation. Buni stared at him for a while with a faint smile, amazed at the man’s ability to concentrate so hard in an upturned book. She was so used to this snub ever since her teenage years, that nowadays it almost feels like a Deja-vu. With a deep silent breathe she managed, ”Dinner at 10pm. Dining hall, first floor” and left the room with the tanpura.
Dhruv closed the door and got back to his desk. As he picked up his phone to check the time, the lock screen flashed a Facebook notification --- ‘You have some new friend suggestions’. He was casually scanning them along, when something caught his attention. Surprisingly it wasn’t a saree clad diva style profile picture, but this time it was the name. Yes, a name intriguing enough to bring him to click on that ‘Add friend’ button. Strange, isn’t it? Yeah, strange he of course is; strange enough to be the only son of affluent parents who left his hometown and came to live as a paying guest in a middleclass North Kolkata family, bunking his father’s prosperous business, only to pursue the study of Comparative Literature in the abode of Tagore and all the while celebrating his passion. Within a few minutes Facebook notified him, ‘ Iman Kalyan has accepted your friend request’. Now his eyes fell upon the profile picture --- a four or five year old girl, seated on a swing, held back carefully by a pretty woman in her thirties. After minutes of hard thinking, somehow convinced by the vintage vibe of the photo, Dhruv tried to assure himself that it must be an old photograph and it was definitely the girl whom he had just now befriended and of course not the woman!
A message pops up on the screen. “Hi”
“Hi”, Dhruv replied instantly. “Who’s that with you in the profile photo?” Dhruv just couldn’t resist confirming this information yet his choice of words was careful enough to not reveal the desperation.
“My mother”, she replied. Dhruv smiled in relief.
“Nice photo”, went his courteous compliment.
10:05 pm as it already was, Dhruv rushed downstairs. “Come, son. Take a seat”, Mr. Chatterjee greeted Dhruv as he gestured him to the chair opposite his own. Dhruv has always been a quiet boy, who preferred keeping his socializing restricted to the social media. But this man had something so genuinely genial in his manners that Dhruv couldn’t disregard him. “Where’s Mrs. Chatterjee?”, Dhruv asked trying to reciprocate the affability. “Buni’s mother left us ten years ago. Cancer. We tried a lot, you know. But..”, the old man faltered. Dhruv felt terrible --- this is what happens when he tries to socialize, things go uglier and more awkward than ever and that is exactly why he prefers staying aloof. The last word he uttered that night was a mild “Sorry”. Shashanka babu did try to loosen the tension by praising his daughter, “ Your hand has got magic, Buni. The fish’s fantastic”. But other than that the room was mostly silent that night.
After dinner, Dhruv came back to his room, his heart craving to get back to the newly started conversation. On a social media platform like Facebook, something like this is neither rare nor exceptional. Dhruv knew that. But still it felt so alluring, somethinglike those series of routine ‘wrong number’ calls that keep ringing the landline.
When he picked up the phone to resume the conversation, he found a text from her already awaiting his reply----” Why do I see a guitar where there should have been the guitarist?”
Dhruv read the line again and again in his mind and couldn’t help smile every time. He always believed that he was one of the best in wordplays, but that belief now seemed to be shaken at the very root. “Because the guitarist finds it crazy how music connects two souls”, he replied.
“Ah! That’s a smart replacement of pickup lines”
“You don’t even know whether I’m a man!”
“Yeah. It would have been interesting that way. But sadly you made it very clear with your first question to me.”
“Pardon?”
“The urgent need to have my profile photo clarified”
Dhruv blushed with embarrassment. He didn’t at all see that coming and he hated to appear that clingy. Finally with a laughing emoticon to his rescue, he quickly went offline.
In the coming weeks they discovered quite much about each other, like Dhruv learnt how Iman Kalyanwas a Presidency freshman, hons in Mathematics and she learnt how ‘Antaheen’, for that was Dhruv’s profile name(after his favourite Rituporono Ghosh movie), was a M.Phil. student of Comparative Literature in Rabindra Bharati University. But what they never tried to know about each other were their real names; they felt it kept their fire aglow. He would tease her for her heartless dealing in numbers while she would mock his mindless overdose of romance.
One day when Dhruv sent her a poem that he had worked on for weeks, the reply that came perplexed him. She didn’t write a single word, only a very complex mathematical equation ------- (x2 + 9y2/4 + z2 – 1)3 – x2z3 – 9y2z3/80 =0 . “Was she talking to some classmate and sent it to me by mistake?”, Dhruv kept questioning himself, until one of his school friends finally explained that it was the Mathematical equation of a 3D heart shape. That day Dhruv felt dumb as ever but he was also very happy. But more than anything he felt a different kind of peace today. How beautifully she elucidated the common ground between they shared, only had him fall for her harder.
With long conversations, poems and songs, their bond was slowly and gradually blooming into a meaningful relationship.
A month later, one Friday Dhruv returned from college late in the evening after the rehearsal for the College Fest. As usual he took his mobile to check for her texts. He opened their inbox and there was an audio clip. Curiosity took over and he immediately played it even before freshening himself up. “Abhi naa jaao chhod kar, ke dil abhi bhara nahi…”. Abhi was shocked for a moment. But there was something so tender and soothing in that voice that it soon drove the shock away and wrapped him in its tranquillity. Dhruv lied down on his bed as the melody kept weaving its charm on him. As the voice went “…bura naa maano baat ka, ye pyar hain gila nahi…”, a message popped up. “How was it ?”
Dhruv suddenly ran short of words. “Wow”, he somehow managed.
“Are you alright?”
“I mean, how come you never told me you sing so beautiful?”
“Oh, shut up! Nothing close to you!”
“Of course. You won’t know the charm your voice has. It gives out that rejuvenating vibe, that peace and the calm..”
“I knew it”
“What?”
“I knew you would be tired today?”
“And how so?”
“You’ve been running through my mind all day!”
Dhruv laughed out loud. “Pick up lines? Really?”
“Impressive, right?”, she laughed too.
“Yeah. Very impressive. But you are so beautiful that you have made me forget all my pickup lines..”
When minutes passed and there was still no reply from her, Dhruv again wrote, “You okay?”
But she didn’t respond. There wasn’t a single message for the next days and of course Dhruv did not have her number. He felt completely clueless. There was a crushing sense of misery but he could do nothing. On the third day when he returned from college in the evening and lied down on his bed, he suddenly knew what to do. Soon he was holding his guitar in his hand as he went, “Kabhikabhi mere dil mein, Khayal aata hain, ke jaise tujhko banaya gaya hai mere liye…..mai jaanta hu ke tu gair hain magar yuhi”
He was right. It worked. She replied with a smile, “ You still think I’m non-existent?”
“Prove me wrong then.” Dhruv finally mastered the courage and spoke his hear out, “I want to meet you, I so want to”
“What? I can’t do that.” She kept refusing again and again. “I can’t risk it. I cannot let this dream shatter so soon”
“Don’t you want this dream to get real? Don’t you want to see me?”
“I do, I so do. But it can’t be of any good. You don’t understand.”
“And I don’t want to either. Tomorrow. 5 pm. Prinsep Ghat. I’ll wait.”
Without even giving her a chance to turn it down, Dhruv went offline.
That night his heart and mind conspired to keep him almost sleepless. The next morning he woke up to her message. “Good morning. It is indeed a nice day. I know how you are waiting for today’s evening more earnestly than ever. If only my words could do justice to my feelings, you would have known the ecstasy with which my heart is beating today. I only wish this came without any fear, the fear of impending loss. I still don’t know what awaits us today; I just know, whatever it is, it is going to be the most unfeigned moment of my life.”
Dhruv had fallen for her words time and again before, the depth in her emotions has always enamoured him. But today, these words hit differently. He felt like holding her hands as tight as he could and never let go of it. Today, probably for the first time ever, he felt love. He so loved her at that moment, loved her more than anything in this world.
Inspite of what he felt, to bring back the old rhythm in their conversation, he typed, ”How will I recognize you? Of course you’re not that 5 year old kid anymore! :-D ”
“I’ll come in a red salwar and I’ll have yellow sunflowers for you”, she replied with a smile.
“Okay. And when you see a tall, handsome, bespectacled man in a white shirt and blue denim, carrying a guitar on his shoulders, be sure that it’s me. “
“You won’t bring me anything?”, she teased.
“Aah, You will see.”
4:55 pm, Prinsep Ghat . Dhruv was there way before time. With a guitar hung by his shoulders, and a box of her favourite fruit candies in his hand, he was just losing his patience with every passing minute. Ever since they had decided to meet, his mind had been drawing such surreal images of the woman of his dreams. Thinking about them, he just couldn’t wait more. His phone beeped. Her message –“Where are you?”
“Waiting by the riverfront. What about walking it down together?”
“I’m here. Now stop admiring the waters and turn this side.”
After a deep sigh and a long breathe, Dhruv turned. He was speechless to see her. In a bright crimson red salwar, hair tied in a loose braid , with a black round bindi on her forehead and a bunch of beautiful sunflowers in hand, standing before her was Buni. Buni stood still. Shocked. Scared. Embarrassed to the very core. Tears streaming down her cheeks as he watched Dhruv drop the candy box on the ground only to turn away from her, with his hands gently back-brushing his hair, as if trying to push the stress away.
For a while, there was only silence. A long deafening silence. Twilight fell. The sky turned to a light dusky purple. Sunset is much like the first stab of love, a blaze of colours ---- oranges, pearly pinks, vibrant purples.
Dhruv turned back. Buni was still there, standing as still as the evening Ganges, looking as disoriented as a homeless beggar. Dhruv looked at her and could not help notice her eyes that threatened to engulf him in its depth. As he kept staring at her, Buni slowly placed the sunflowers on the ground near her, ”Love is a gift that cannot be given, Dhruv. It waits, waits to be accepted”. Her voice had that strength of calmness. As she turned away to leave, Dhruv’s mobile screen flashed with an incoming call. The ringtone filled the air with “Abhi naa jaao chhod kar, ke dil abhi bhara nahi…”. Startled by her own voice, Buni stopped. “….hawa zara mehek toh le, nazar zara behek toh le, ye shaam dhal toh le zara, ye dil sambhal toh le zara, main thodi der jeet oh lu…”, the phone kept blaring. She turned back. Dhruv was staring fixedly into her eyes as his went warm. He trudged up to her and held her hands within his cupped palms, as tight as he could. “Buni, can you hear the evening’s Iman Kalyan? (pause) Let it be the welcome note to our Antaheen journey together.”Her eyes overflowed with tears of joy and Dhruv didn’t wipe them as he pulled her closer.
As the two walked down the stretch of the beautiful riverfront, hand-in-hand, the gorgeous waters and the starry evening sky in the backdrop, secretly rained their blessings. “
Mohanpreet Jaiswal put down the manuscripts on the table. Seated opposite to him is a man in his thirties, taller than usual. In a green linen kurta and black rimmed spectacles, he is still quite handsome of his age. “So, Mr. Jaiswal…did you like it?”
“ Oh sir. What ability do I have to judge the great Dhruvajyoti Ray! This is your forte. But, Mr. Ray, I must say, you RBU people have this crazy tendency of over-romanticizing everything. I mean, just see the end of the story. Isn’t it too picture-perfect? Readers nowadays are intellectual, modern. This prince and ugly-duckling love story won’t sell good. How about changing the end? What if you have the boy leave in the end?”
“No”, came the stern reply. “Ugly? Forget it. Listen Mr. Jaiswal, the end has to be this way. He won’t leave her. He won’t. Not this time.” An agitated Dhruvajyoti instantly picked up his manuscripts from the table and left the Jaiswal Publishing House. Outside it was raining incessantly and besides it would soon get dark. But Dhruvajyoti did not feel like going home. Jostling around in the empty streets of Kolkata and allowing his body to get soaked in the rain, he arrived at the gate of an old mansion. 12/A, Hashpukur 1st Lane, Jorashanko, Kolkata-700007. His eyes intensely devouring an unknown pleasure from the very air around when a sweet, very familiar lilt came floating ----
“ Phir le aaya dil majboor kya keeje
Phir le aaya dil majboor kya keeje
Raas na aaya rehna door kya keeje
Dil keh raha usse makammal kar bhi aao
Woh jo adhoori si baat baaki hai
Woh jo adhoori si yaad baaki hai
Woh jo adhoori si yaad baaki hai…. “
Recovering from his trance,
Dhruvajyoti noticed a little girl playing with a skipping rope inside the gate.
As his heart kept thumping, he called the girl to the gate, “ Do you know who
is singing?”
The girl giggled sweetly. “Maa”, she
said with a bright smile. “You know our house has a room on the roof. Maa
always sings there. But she never lets me enter that room. Not even baba or
dadu.”, she added in a sweet complaining tone.
Dhruv couldn’t manage anything in his
choked voice. Heslowly took out a box of fruit candies and held it out to the
girl with a smile, caressing her head.
As he looked up at the attic, his
heart wanted to cry out loud, “ Kartehain hum aajqaboolkyakeeje,
Hogayithi jo humse bhool kya keeje”. But he put his hands in his trousers’ pockets and walked away. His
face staring up at the sky; a gloomy, dark purple from the sunset. “Let my
thoughts come to you when I’m gone, like the afterglow of sunset at the margin
of starry silence.”
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