The Witch (Part 1): The Arrival of Monsoon

Dark and sullen nimbus clouds appeared over the horizon. They had found their way into the city earlier than what the weather forecasters had predicted. The sun which had ruled over the city sky for the last three months of a scorching summer found itself surrounded by these somber adversaries; its orange rays flickered like dying sighs before it vanished behind the black folds. The dark clouds grumbled potent threats and flashed their swords as they spread across the sky. Mischievous wild gusts of wind carried away clothes from the cloth-lines, rattled window panes in desperate attempts to free them from their iron hinges and rummaged through unattended notebooks to liberate all the loose pages tucked away between them - love poems of a shy teenager, photos of a childhood sweetheart, letters to the beloved that were never mailed.

It was the beginning of the monsoon season in Calcutta.

People scurried for their homes. Little kids pouted their lips as their mothers dragged them off the playground. Only the street urchins continued with their game of football. The black clouds, languid and overweight, swallowed up the sky bit by bit. A heavy downpour followed. People fumbled hard against the strong winds to lock all the doors and windows to keep out the torrential, yet cherished, rain. Only a few who could not resist the temptation of soothing themselves by letting the raindrops trickle down their parched skin came out and stood in the open and got soaked to their heart’s content. Taking advantage of their mother's struggle against the winds at the cloth-lines, the kids sneaked out to dance in the rain and to enjoy the freedom of the street urchins. They sailed paper boats in the puddles formed in potholes. But soon their angry mothers came out, warned them against fever and forcibly dragged them home with a few gentle slaps. The frail paper boats, deserted by their little owners, struggled to float for a few minutes, but were either toppled by heavy raindrops or got crushed under the wheels of rickshaws and bicycles. It rained and rained, heavily and incessantly. The roar of lightning and thunder was met with the monotonous sound of conch that housewives blew in unison to placate Indra, the god of storm.

It was nine-thirty, almost four hours since the rain had started. By then the rain drops were tired of following their predecessor’s way of ricocheting from the windows, tapping against the glass, running down the window sills like a perennial stream of sparkling beads, filling up the potholes, flooding the sewage drains, and had weakened down to a soft drizzle. Lightning continued to flash across the dark night sky intermittently, albeit with a limited arrogance. The thunder had reduced to an occasional rumbling among the moisture drained clouds. The city inhabitants were preparing their beds after the scrumptious dinner of plate-full khichdi and onion pakodas, specially cooked to mark the beginning of such long awaited comfortable nights. As the household lights were turned off one by one, the city started vanishing fast in an expanding grip of darkness. An unusual stillness loomed everywhere, its eeriness being occasionally shaken by the shrill cries of the drenched street dogs. At times their cries were prolonged enough to form depressing moans that sounded more inauspicious than irritating, and added a latent discomfort somewhere deep down in the sleeping souls. A few dim but brave streetlights fought against the fast-spreading darkness to faintly illuminate the city roads, casting tall shadows of Boorimashi on the nearby dank building walls as she made her way back to her hut. Mud squelched under her slippers making it difficult for her to walk. But Boorimashi trudged along carefully till she reached her destination- a tiny hut at the end of Chaulpotti Lane, one of the many slums that dot the city of Calcutta.

Chaulpotti Lane was full of makeshift huts with thatched roofs and some with orange-red baked mud tiles that were arranged adjacent to each other over sloping roofs. Their walls were mostly made of rags and bamboo. Blue and black tarpaulin tents littered with lean and hungry bodies inside occupied the footpaths. The rainwater had spoiled their rags and so they slept on piles of old newspapers and cardboard boxes. The western part of the slum, a comparatively low-lying area, was faced with even a bigger problem of stagnant water that was almost knee deep at places. The contents of the nearby garbage dump where the city municipality trucks came every day to clear off the city’s trash had been washed away in the rains. Filth lay strewn all over the streets and a stench hung heavy in the air. But this wasn’t anything new for the Chaulpotti Lane slum dwellers, they had got used to all these over the past decades. They had learned not only to endure it but also to accept it as the wish of that almighty who determines everyone’s fate, and whom they had been worshiping sheepishly and unquestioningly as an impartial and omnipotent power behind the workings of the vast universe.

Boorimashi was in her late sixties but her wrinkled skin and thin bony arms with saggy lumps of little flesh dangling below gave her the appearance of an octogenarian. She had dense white hair which fluttered in the air and almost toothless gum which made her look like an old oriental witch from the pages of some fairy tale. But in spite of her frail looks she wasn’t very weak. She lived alone and managed all her things by herself . The rain had stopped and the faint murmurs among the clouds sounded like a jostle among birds as they settled down for the night. Boorimashi reached her hut and stood outside inspecting the puddles of water and looking around to estimate the extent of damage caused by the rains. She suddenly remembered the cow-dung cakes that she had left to dry on the factory wall that morning and hurriedly went there to find out if they too had been washed away. Cow-dung cakes* were a source of a small income for her. Boorimashi had managed to coax the old Chatterjee couple who owned the Lodge at the crossing of Chaulpotti Lane and Station Road to allow her to collect the dung of their two cows. Boorimashi had been working as a maid at the Chatterjees’ Lodge for more than twenty years and so this longtime acquaintance made the Chatterjees agree to her request without much reservation. Milkman Bhola Halder’s wife, Champa, a peddler of cow dung cakes, bought the cakes that Boorimashi produced and sold them at higher price in the city suburbs. But Boorimashi was happy with whatever extra money she earned this way. The salary that she got from working at the Chatterjee Lodge along with this little extra income was sufficient to meet her basic expenses and even allowed for occasional little extravagance like a two rupee ice-cream cone or a couple of sweets from the fly infested sweet shop on Station Road. The delight from indulging in this slight profligacy that the extra income allowed was so great for her that she didn’t mind tiring herself with the additional work. Everyday she used to go out to collect cow-dung in the morning and then pasted it in the form of small, flat, circular disks on the old factory wall with her own hand and left them there to dry in the sunshine. And on drying she collected them in sacks and kept them ready for Champa to buy.

The old factory wall where Boorimashi dried her cow-dung cakes belonged to a closed factory that was once known as the Raheja Jute Mills. It was a dilapidated structure with green moss stained walls, lined with deep cracks inhabited by reptiles. The rusted iron frame of the roof jutted out menacingly against the sky with broken asbestos sheets dangling precariously from its chassis. Weeds and shrubs had grown erratically in the factory precincts. The main entrance door to the factory was tinted green with moss. A huge iron lock, red with rust, hang on it. Just above it was a ‘Suspension of Work’ notice, written hastily in black paint some twenty years ago when a labor unrest over due wages forced the management to close the factory for once and all. Since then the factory that once used to roar with the noise of thousand machines, chattering of the workers and hourly whistles fell into a dead silence. Nobody had entered its premises over the years. But its outer walls still served a variety of purposes; the eastern wall was for Boorimashi to dry her cow-dung cakes while the others displayed various graffiti- a hammer and sickle painted in red, notices of political rallies, election promises, and slogans of ‘Vote for a better Government’. These were flanked by arrays of colorful posters of political leaders pasted all over the walls without any reverence for the dead factory’s ‘Stick No Bills’ warnings.

Boorimashi heaved a sigh of despair. All her efforts had gone in vain. The walls were spotted with little remnants of the cow-dung cakes that she had left to dry. The heavy downpour had managed to soften the dung and broke them away from the wall. She cursed her luck as she headed back for her hut. More than the financial losses what pained her was the loss of the cakes themselves for she never thought of them as inanimate entities meant just for selling but had a rather strange affection for them. This conspicuously weird behavior of Boorimashi started ever since she took conscious notice that every cow-dung cakes she made carried the impression of her palm, unaltered, right from the time of their conception as she pasted them on the wall to the time when their pitiable life ended up in smoke. Each one of them had a different shape and size but all of them faithfully carried the same impression -the impression of her hand, the imprint that identified them as hers, somewhat like the faint imprint of parent's facial features that all children carry. And so she sometimes felt that instead of selling them she could as well preserve these little creations of her barren life. But then she knew that it was a crazy thought and she herself would smile at her silliness.

*a cheap fuel still in use for cooking in very few households, mostly in suburban areas.