The station in tears
Dulal Chandra Bandyopadhyay
“I am not a born Coolie. I have been brought up as a Coolie. Destiny Babu, Destiny! All is written here,”
He lifted his hand, gave a few strokes on his forehead and sat on a stool at the corner of my well-furnished room.
Today is the fifth day of the historical Rails-Strike (in the year 1974) and consequently the Howrah Station is gaping empty. Among the people who are obliged to remain here I, myself a Railway Guard, am one, reclining most of the time on an old, wooden pinnace-like chair at the Retiring room allotted for Guards. Cleaners, drivers, few officials, some non-official staff are also there, scattered all around. Shiv Suhan (peculiar name indeed), aged about forty to forty-five five, tall, lanky, having an indifferent look, always in porter’s apron but neatlier than those of others,’ has been staying with me all the time since the commencement of the ‘Bandh’ and helping me in getting what and when I am in need of.
Noiseless evening. The whole atmosphere of the station platforms is gradually getting subdued as the Bandh agitation is becoming intensified throughout India. Ordered by the higher authority Emergency workers have to stay on spots. Obviously me too, as guards, drivers are indispensable.
As workless duty and inactivity are stretching time longer and longer so I have grasped Suhan and almost have sunk into his narratives. He goes on,
“Babu, I cannot tell you how, when, from where I came here ; but I can tell you, for sure, something about the place of my native habitation as this river ,the Ganga, bearing the same name, is coming through that land. I can still faintly remember a cluster of huts, half encircled by the river and other half was open, surrounded by corn fields extending up to the horizon. Except that blurred, dreamlike vision I had heard some fragments of cut-up or rather mangled stories from an old woman related to my coming here at the age of six. She would tell me that she had discovered me crying alone by the side of another woman lying dead on a Railway platform. There erupted a hullaballoo when policemen arrived and took away the corpse, and she told, after showering plenty of ill words on me, that she had no other options but to carry me, an unbearable burden, through.
Though slapping, beating and bandying abusive words on me were my daily allowances yet she did not leave me. Every morning she would goad me to the Ganga, help me in taking bath, putting on pants and shirts, very big in size though, and serve food off and on. She, then, would sit quietly just outside of the main gate of the station keeping a dented alms-bowl before her and keep on murmuring. Every now and then, all of a sudden, she would ask me violently to sit calmly by her. She had her bed, a roll of tattered sack which she used to bring out from nowhere and lay flattened during nights at the outside corner of the abandoned warehouse away from the diesel-engine shade and said to me,
“Lie down and sleep.”
Thus, I was treated, thus I was taken care of.
After a fairly long time (months, years were then unknown to me) I came to know that I could do things by myself and that too happened when she started telling me to do this one or that and I, myself, realized that I came of age. She, day by day was becoming feeble, incapable of doing even her own maintenance and as a result I had to do what she had been doing so far, except asking for alms. She had with her a bagful of coins and few bunches of paper money deep inside her bed.
Every morning she would give a handful of coins with a clear indication that I might have my breakfast. I could not have that at food-stall, instead I would fetch tiffin for both of us and have that together. That would make her delighted I could feel. We had scarcely conversations between us.
I do not know why, may be instinctively, at the beginning, I used to call her ‘Ma’, but she had vehemently discarded. That too sounded mysterious and since then I preferred to be reticent before her. But now, as she could hardly walk and I was always at her service her attitudes towards me got changed. Her ever-irritating, shrill voice became milder, sometimes she kept staring at me for a long while with her sunken, moistened eyes as if she wanted to tell me something serious. Her gesture looked frightening and I was apprehending an ominous consequence was about to take place. It happened to be the same day as these days, ‘Bangla Bandh’. West Bengal got totally collapsed. The Station looked deserted. By the noon time she got up from her bed and to my utter bewilderment she, in a low, but very tender voice called,
“Suhan”.
I walked swiftly up to her side, kneeled down and kept looking at her askance.
“Go to Chacha, tell him to come to me.”
Chacha was a mysterious person over here, he was everywhere around and about this entire station premises. In long, red cloak the tall bearded man stirred up in almost everyone like us –coolie, cleaners, hawkers, beggars –awe and admiration simultaneously. Afterwards I came to know that he was the guardian, banker, debtor and above all he was the god of fate and regulator of circumstances of those unfortunate people in this historical, old Railway junction.
After a long search I traced him sitting on a bench beneath the bushy banyan tree, at the far corner of the yard, preparing ‘khaini’, (tobacco) on his left palm with the help of right hand’s thumb and was talking to a gang of coolies around him. Informed by a hint by someone he looked at me and to my surprise he stood up, started walking. Almost stupefied, I followed and reached my Ma (I would call her so within myself, at heart) after he already had reached out her. Having stood up quietly at a distance I tried to determine, by their conjectures what they were talking about, but in vain. After A fairly long while I could see Ma was handing over her black, corpulent wallet to Chacha and pointed her skeletal finger at me.
Chacha rose up, stood erect, turned about, concealed the wallet under his long, heavy cloak and came to me and said in a low voice,
“Meet me tomorrow morning.”
So horrible a night it was! I had not experienced up till then. All nightmarish! Firstly, one after another fiendish apparitions of apprehension had been haunting my mind. What would be done with me from next day, and secondly, having my sleep spoiled, my sight fell upon some scenes that were, so far, beyond my understanding.”
Suhan suddenly makes an abrupt pause; but I am so absorbed and excited within that I cannot wait for the next any longer. He has felt my solicitude and said,
“I cannot tell you what scenes I had to see that night but what I should confess before you that that was a night which brought about a complete change in my life. By the end of the night, I got up, went straight to the Ganga, had bath, put on a not-so-shabby shirt and pants and went to meet my destined Caller. There, inside an abandoned boggy, I was introduced to a gang, all in red coolie uniforms, and counselled, given instructions on how to perform the duties of a coolie. I was baptized as Shiv by Chacha. I was told to offer ‘Pranam’, (bow down my head on his feet). Chacha handed me over a pair of red uniforms and a two-rupee pink note. At that time, at least thirty to forty years back from now, that amount of money for a boy like me was more than sufficient. That times age was not a bar, neither it mattered to be a coolie, for I looked big enough to portage passenger’s belongings.
Excited, I hurriedly came back to Ma to tell of the whole story. She was still lying on her bed. I sat almost jumping down beside her. Carried away by emotions, forgetting her disapproval I called out loudly,
-Maa…a.
What! Not even stirring about! She seemed to be a fixture! Grisly fear gripped my whole. With trembling hands I pulled off the black veil she was covered with and found ……..she was lying flat on the back, with mouth gaping, hollowed, lack-lustre eyes. I put my hand on her forehead…cold…cold, tried to lift her…stiff…stiff!”
He covers his face with both hands. His entire body is trembling. Slowly his head is drooping down and, when a deep, mournful silence is about to engulf the whole atmosphere of the room his out-burst of grief makes me aware that so far, I have been listening to a story! Such has been my involvement in his life.
Since then, more than forty long years have glided by, more than an ocean of water has streamed through the Ganga, more than a million people I have come across here, inside and outside of the Howrah Station, before and after my service; the situations and scenarios are changed beyond imagination, yet whenever I get a chance to visit this Station I am, as if possessed by an unseen spirit, clime upstairs and enter into that retiring room. Paying little heed to persons who are sitting there, or being indifferent to newly added furniture, I walk up to that corner where Shiv Suhan’s tears rolled down and dropped on the floor, now hushed up with white marble slabs.
His every droplet of tears was real, genuine, oozing out of such an innocent heart which even an Angel feels shy of and which, to me, is more sacred than ‘All the water of the Ganga’.
Dulal Chandra Bandyopadhyay
09/12/2021
Bangalore.
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