Anirban always thought he was like a flower. Small, pink, slightly soiled, the sort you see lying unheeded on the ground beside some trees in a park or on desolate roads, trampled upon by some indifferent traveller. Or, as later Anirban reasoned, one of those flowers which would have fallen off from a handmade garland without anybody noticing the difference that it was not there.
When he was a child, barely a boy of six or seven perhaps, Anirban, tiny and pink himself, used to sit beside his mother who cooked the two-member family meal in an old, worn-out stove. From time to time, even as he listened wide-eyed to the stories that Ma told him, he picked from the broken, chipped aluminum bowl which he always kept beside him and where his mother kept serving him whatever she was cooking. It could be a spoonful of steaming, frugal vegetable soup or maybe just a few oily, potato chips. Sometimes, on better days, chingri bhaja, the almost friendly-sounding Bengali equivalent of small, fried prawns.
Anirban relished these tiny offerings immensely. They added spice to the tales that he heard on those days he didn't go to school, which was every Thursday and Sunday. Anirban, friendless even at that age, looked forward to those hot forenoons in Kolkata, the easternmost, impoverished city of India, which had attained cult status after Dominique Lapierre's City of Joy or, for better reasons, for its association with Mother Teresa.
He had never seen his father. During one of those oily, potato-chipped humid story sessions, made more interesting for the young boy by the wet sweat falling off his pink, bare back and forcing his glasses down every time he bent to pick a morsel, Ma, as he called the woman who gave him birth, had told him his father's story. Anirban found no particular interest in the man's life who had sired him. Even at that tender age, failures forced him to look the other way. His father had been a clerk with the Food Corporation of India, came over as a refugee from East Pakistan much before the riots, married Ma when he shouldn't have, and died of a strange, undiagnosed illness shortly after his son was born.
His father was 43 years when Ma became a widow without a penny to fall back on. She was 32.
However, Anirban was fascinated by one little story which Ma told him about the man whom he never had to call Dad. When Anirban was born at the Campbell Hospital, now named after the famous Dr. Nilratan Sarkar, and even as he lay sleeping in the dormitory cot beside his mother, his father had arrived for a first look at his son. He had spent the better part of the day borrowing money from relatives and friends to buy medicines for his frail, anemic wife.
Ma always told this story without changing a word; it was as if she had, like a born actress playing out her part, memorised the lines. Even the pauses, the blank, faraway looks at suitable intervals, the moist eyes, one hand bent with indifference towards the cooking pot, another stretched over her knee, always touching some part of his body when she spoke; it was, as if, she was in some sort of a communion. Sometimes, Anirban tried his own little tests; he would shift his leg or his hand where Ma would be touching him. In an instant, she would reach out to another part of her son. Anirban was convinced that this was not coincidental.
His father, a shy man, had entered the Campbell dormitory. Ma would tell Anirban later that he wouldn't even look at his son. Natural shyness, maybe. Nobody else in the packed dorm gave them any attention. There were too many babies lying around, anyway. And far too many relatives and new parents. They were alone. The frail woman with a smile for her husband and pride in her eyes; the man, who had just become a father but had no means to celebrate, had carried just a packet with him. A small, tiny, brown wrapper sort of thing usually reserved for flowers and sweets with little dreams inside them, like those which the temple priest forces on you before you enter the sanctum sanctorum. Tied with thin, red strings that Ma always used when she was tying little things that had to do something with her gods and goddesses.
Ma's lines were rehearsed; this had been told so many times before. "He came in, I could make out he was happy, proud also...but he would not show it. He sat beside me: 'Madhu, you have given us a son. I have nothing to give you but this. Tomar bhalo lagbe bodhoi. Maybe, you will like this.' I opened the wrapper. There was a small, pink Madhabilata flower inside and a pair of tiny slippers... padukas...made of sandalwood. I had never known your father to be religious; nor that he loved flowers so much either. But...this had a different meaning. My name is Madhabilata, was it because of that? But the slippers? Janish, ami ekhono jani na keno tor Baba amakey ogulo diyechilo. I still don't know why he gave me those...."
Anirban had seen those little slippers, not an inch bigger than his school eraser, kept on the shelf where his mother had her gods and goddesses lined up. Every day, after her bath, Ma would light up an incense stick, fold her hands and mutter a silent prayer. And, the little boy did not fail to notice, after every prayer, she would look at her husband's photograph which had, since he died, also become part of that sacred shelf. Since she did not get any Madhabilata flowers in the market and, actually, because the maid did not care, Ma put the brown wrapper which her husband had carried to the hospital on the first day beside his photograph, not forgetting to weigh it down with a small coin.
She had kept that wrapper, only shreds of them as the years passed, till the day she died. Ma loved his father very much.
Ma would look far away. Then, the story would take a totally different turn. Far away from the man who gave birth to him. Mandrake, Phantom, Superman, sometimes, even Sherlock Holmes and Jules Verne. And he loved Ma's version of Lorna Doone. She, merely a high school passout, was well-read.
Anirban, picking from his bowl, continued to listen. Till it was time for his bath and lunch. Mother and son would sit together and eat. And then, holding tightly on to his mother's saree, the little boy would fall asleep. Thinking of a small, pink flower which he had never seen, a young woman on a hospital bed, two tiny wooden slippers and a shy man whose face he could never remember once he woke up.
Anirban never dreamt. He woke up only when there was load-shedding. And the beads of sweat started gathering on his face and shoulders, wetting the thin, stained yellowish pillow. And that was sharp at 3.30 every afternoon. Those days, you could time your clock with the load-shedding hours. By then, Ma would be ready with his milk and a large plate of puffed rice. Anirban didn't have much use of the plate; he put all the rice in the milk and, using a wooden spoon, made a paste as he crushed the cereal in the milk. His mother watched him do this every day as she sipped her tea. This routine continued till the day Ma died. She was not even 40. Anirban never quite understood why both his parents had to die so young.
