Читать книгу Flame Tree Road - Shona Patel - Страница 13

CHAPTER

4

Every morning, Shamol Roy took the passenger ferry to the jute mill dressed in a spotless dhoti and a starched cotton tunic, with a handkerchief perfumed with rose water folded in his pocket. At sundown he returned, wilted and worn, smelling like the rotting dahlias in a flower vase.

The stench of decomposing organic matter clinging to his clothes and hair came from the raw jute in the mill storage godown where he worked as a bookkeeper along with his assistant. For ten hours a day Shamol Roy sat in the windowless godown of Victoria Jute Mills as sweaty laborers went in and out of the single door to unload the bullock carts lined up outside. The laborers hoisted the heavy bales on the claw hook of the large industrial weighing scale; the assistant squinted at the scales and shouted the weight, which Shamol Roy noted in neat, precise rows on his red tombstone-shaped ledger. The floor of the godown was black and sticky with dirt, and vermin of all kinds—cockroaches, rats, even predatory snakes—squeaked and scrabbled in the dark corners.

A small, tidy man, fastidious by nature, Shamol Roy sat on an elevated wooden pallet with four bowls of water placed under each foot to discourage the creatures from crawling up. There was little he could do, however, about the rotting smell that pervaded the godown; it came from the jute stalks that had been submerged in stagnant water to ret so that the useful fibers could be pulled out and dried for use.

The sun was already deeply slanted in the sky when he caught the ferry home. A sweet river breeze caressed his face and a great flock of cranes crossed overhead to roost in the marsh. The boatman sang a soulful river ballad accompanied by the beat of the oar as it broke the water into pleats of gold. As the boat turned the fork in the river, the flame tree of Momati Ghat first appeared like a gash on the horizon and blazed into full glory as the boat pulled up to shore. The tea shop was closed and a mongoose scrabbled among the broken terra-cotta cups. It streaked off into the undergrowth at the sound of his approaching footfalls.

As Shamol Roy walked down the crooked path to his basha, his heart skipped to see his pretty wife dressed in a fresh sari with jasmine twisted in her hair. His two little boys, scrubbed and clean with their hair combed, ran up to meet him. They each held a hand and walked him back to the house. Biren was bright with chatter about his first fallen tooth, which he rattled in a matchbox, while little Nitin toddled along sucking his thumb.

Shibani went inside the house to prepare his tea. She never waited to greet him at close quarters, knowing well that Shamol was embarrassed by his disheveled appearance and the smell that came off his clothes. The boys didn’t mind. For them it was the smell of their father coming home. In the bedroom Shamol Roy found a set of clean home clothes laid out on the bed: a chequered lungi, cotton vest and his wooden clogs on the floor.

He picked up the brass lota from the kitchen steps and headed down to the well, where he washed down the smell of the workday from his skin and hair. Only after he had changed into fresh clothes did he begin to feel human again.

He sat in the courtyard, a tumbler of hot tea warming his hands, a happy man.

“So how was school today?” he asked Biren.

“We had English lessons, and the new boy spelled elephant starting with an L.” Biren rolled his eyes as if to say, What an idiot.

Shamol Roy feigned ignorance. “Oh, elephant is spelled with an L, is it not?”

“Baba!”

“Then what is it?”

Biren mouthed E and his tongue poked through the gap in his teeth, reminding him of his recent toothless status. He opened the matchbox and looked momentarily stricken when he couldn’t see his tooth, but there it was in the far corner.

“So what should I do with the tooth?” he asked his father.

Shamol Roy looked at the sweet, solemn face of his son. “Let me see, now,” he said gently, pulling down Biren’s bottom lip. “It’s the bottom tooth, isn’t it? Then you must throw it on the roof of the house and ask a sparrow to get you a new tooth.”

“But how can I do that, Baba?” Biren cried. “I’m not tall enough. I can’t throw it over the roof. Then the sparrow won’t get me a new tooth.”

“I’ll lift you up. You’ll throw it over the roof, don’t worry.”

Nitin plucked at Shamol’s sleeve.

Shamol turned to address him. “Yes, what is it, Nitin mia?”

Nitin pulled down his lip to display his own pearly whites.

“Now, let me see. Good, good, you have all your teeth. No need to throw your tooth over the roof. You don’t need any new teeth right now.”

Shibani emerged from the kitchen with a ripe papaya on a brass plate. Next to it was a dark knife with a white sharpened edge.

“The first papaya of the season,” she announced, setting it down. “Perfectly tree ripened. Will you cut it for us, please?”

“But of course, my queen.”

The boys settled down to watch. They never got tired of watching their father cut a papaya because he did it with such ceremonial style. Shamol Roy held the papaya in both hands, turned it over and pressed down with his thumbs to examine its ripeness. He then picked up the knife, and with clean easy swipes peeled away the skin in even strips. The bright orange fruit was laid bare and the juice dripped onto the brass tray. Then came the sublime moment, the lengthwise cutting open of the papaya. The boys leaned over and gasped to see the translucent seeds nesting like shiny black pearls in the hollowed chamber. The seed and the fiber were scraped away and discarded on an old newspaper. Nitin amused himself by pressing down on the seeds and making them slip around like tadpoles. The peeled fruit was segmented into long, even slices. The boys were given a slice each and the rest disappeared into the kitchen.

No matter how wilted and crushed Shamol Roy looked at the end of the day in his foul-smelling clothes and the jute fibers trapped in his hair, he became God in the eyes of his sons when he peeled a papaya. They were convinced no other person in the world could peel a papaya as beautifully and expertly as their own father did.