REVENGE

(A short story translated from the original in Bengali)

MANOJ BASU

Uncle Manohar had, along with the letter, sent some amawat for his daughter. I took out the letter and looked at the address. Then I checked the number of the house at whose door I had reached. Yes, this is it, I thought, and knocked.

There was no response. I knocked again and waited.

“Who is it, please,” said a feminine voice.

This was Rina. I told her my name and the name of the village, just in case she had forgotten. But how could she? It was only five years since those fateful days.

“Your uncle has sent amawat for you” I added.

Rina called out “Raghu, open the door. See who has come.”

There was no Raghu and the door stayed shut.

“Pankaj Da, I am coming in a minute,” she added.

It is drizzling, and here I am stranded outside a house. Sheer good luck that I remembered to bring my friend’s raincoat. Even so, if it were not for Rina I wouldn’t be waiting in the rain like this. There’s the lurking curiosity to see what she looks like five years after her marriage.

She has been married to an educated, prosperous man. He works for the Japanese Embassy and draws a substantial salary. What good luck for her. She just escaped being married to, of all people, me!

This was five years ago. I had appeared at the school final examination. In the meanwhile Uncle Manohar’s mother died and to attend the funeral his relations, including his sister and her daughter, that is Rina, came to our village.

What beauty! Our village had no girl even half as beautiful. After decent interval had elapsed since the funeral, Uncle Manohar broached the subject of Rina’s marriage. What did she think of me, he asked her mother. Of course, there was no question of marrying off Rina to a matriculate. But I was ultimately to study law in England, and just before I left for England several years hence we could be married. There was always the danger otherwise, he argued, that I might come back from England with an English wife.

My father was all agog. “She is a fairy. We can have the tilak ceremony right now. The wedding can wait,” he said. Ultimately a date for tilak was fixed. But a bare three days before it my father passed away, suddenly and for no apparent reason. The tilak could not take place and Rina and her mother went back home from our village.

My father was supposed to be a moneyed man. It was a favourite guessing game in the village how many lakhs I had inherited. Few knew until some time later that he had left me a pile of debts instead. He was a past master in the art of raising money. Many money lenders thought themselves lucky to get a client like him.

All my hopes were dashed. But Uncle Manohar reassured us, “Never mind the debts. Even if Pankaj cannot go to England he can study law here. Rina’s father has enough money to bear the expense. He will still be a lawyer, perhaps a judge.”

But mother was an old-fashioned, superstitious lady. She glared at Uncle Manohar. “That girl! Even the prospect of her coming into this house was inauspicious enough to kill my husband. If, she comes here that will probably be the end of us all and of this household.”

Rina’s mother also, it was learnt, told people, “What a narrow escape for Rina. Lucky we discovered just in time about that man’s imposing but hollow facade. Fancy him talking of sending his son to England for studies.”

Uncle Manohar told us about it. Probably he was exaggerating, possibly it was an invention, a disguised reply to the insulting words my mother had said of his niece. Anyway, that was the end of my dreams of marrying Rina and studying law.

That was five years ago. Here I am now standing at Rina’s door–still. The door is still tightly shut and there is no sign of any “Raghu”. I knocked firmly once again.

“Oh,” Rina called out, “my God. He has still not opened the door! Pankaj Da, just a moment and I will myself open it.”

Again a longish wait. Very strange. What could be the reason?

Leaning against the wall I peeped through the window. Inside there was feverish activity. With superhuman energy and speed Rina was peeling soiled sheets of beds decking them with clean, white linen; shuffling, shifting and cleaning furniture and various odds and ends. Perhaps she did not want me to carry a bad impression.

` Rina opened the door. “I thought you were already in the sitting room,” she said shyly, “I was just stretching myself and Raghu has vanished. And cook also is on leave. What torture to depend on Calcutta’s wretched servants.”

“I was wondering what it could be which made you keep me waiting so long. It’s all right, since you were asleep,” I said.

“What else to do? He goes to work and there is nothing for me to do. If he returns early enough, we go to pictures. Otherwise, just sleep through the day.”

Five years ago she was a teenager; today she is in full bloom. I thought as I admired her delicate beauty. She has a full-sleeve blouse on. A portion of the sleeve suddenly slips and reveals a dark, deep wound in a white, round, tender arm. I am shocked.

“It’s this blasted habit of all the time.” she explains, “once while returning from the pictures I dozzed off and walked straight into a barbed wire fence. That did it.”

I at last remembered my brief.

“Uncle Manohar has sent for you this amawat. I was coming to Calcutta, so he said I might as well carry this to you, since you love it.”

“What brought you to Calcutta,” she asked.

I explained that I had been offered a job in the Calcutta Trading Corporation.

‘Weren’t you working as a village schoolmaster?” she asked.

I could perceive her slighting tone, or so I thought. Possibly it was the low pay of schoolmasters. I decided to hit back: “Yes, I am a teacher and make civilized men out of raw material. I got a hundred rupees a month. Calcutta Trading is offering three hundred, but if I shift it will really be because of better library facilities in Calcutta.”

“You are mistaken, Pankaj Da.”

Rina said, “A hundred rupees in a peaceful, honest village is vastly better than three hundred in this cruel city.”

She suddenly got up. “Let me go and see where Raghu is. He must be at the pan shop.” She took the raincoat and left.

Alone now, I wondered at the lies I had spoken to her. Signing on for twenty-five rupees, I get a mere five. The remaining twenty go to the college fund! The school’s secretary says frankly, “You don’t deserve even this because you are not a graduate. And what if it is only five rupees? The status that goes with it, which helps you earn money through private tutions, is a big enough gain.” Five years have passed like this.

An old friend, Ramendra, works for Calcutta Trading. His father is the burra babu. When he came to the village on holiday last, I entreated him with folded hands to get me a job.

Ramendra’s father, a man of wit who has the cleverness that comes from living all one’s life in Calcutta, responded promptly.

“You can get two different jobs,” he said.

“How?” I said hopefully.

“One,” he said with a slight hint of a smile, “is the General Manager’s job. The present incumbent is almost an illiterate, except that he can sign his name in English. He makes two thousand five hundred a month.”

I was staring wide-eyed.

“But,” he said with a flourish as if resolving a big mystery for me,” he has other qualities you lack. He is the brother-in-law of the senior partner.

He smiled dryly the smile of a man hard-boiled in the battle of life.

“The second job you can get is that of the General Manager’s! peon. Full twenty-five rupees a month. But, he cleared (his throat) it needs ‘consideration’ to get this job.”

Ramendra’s father was as good as his word. Back in Calcutta, he wrote to me. “You can get an even better job than I thought you could. You can become our Time Keeper–seventy-five rupees a month. But ‘consideration’–equivalent of four month’s salary in advance.

I wrote to Ramendra in a letter, “If you lend me the ‘consideration’ money until I have money of my own, you will have saved a drowning man.

He summoned me to Calcutta and handed me two tenners. “This is all I can spare,” he said, “the rest you can borrow from father and from other people from our village now working here. This is the only way.”

So this was I who had boasted of the 300-rupee- job to Rina.

The riverie was broken by somebody who asked about Rina and her husband.

“Himanshu Babu, you understand, has gone to office...”, I began.

“Which office,” the new-comer startled me, “since when?”

I was taken aback.

“That drunkard, you mean? He drinks away all his money, beats poor Rina every evening, and has not paid rent for three months.”

“I am the landlord’s rent collector,” he explained.

I recovered from the shock soon enough to remember the twenty rupees Ramendra gave me. Adding two rupees of my own, I paid one month’s rent. On the back of receipt I wrote to Rina: “I have paid the rent. But please do not mind. Time was when we were all set to get married. If that had happened, who else but me would have paid the rent?”

I put the piece of paper under a pillow and reflected on my impulsive action.

Rina came with a packet of sweets. I was hungry and ate the whole of it. As I left, she said: “When you take the Calcutta Trading job, do come again,” she entreated.

“Sure,” I said.

I boarded the tram and took off my rain coat. In the pockets I felt a hard, angular substance. They were Rina’s ear-rings, both of them. It so happened that the letter I wrote to Ramendra from the village for money he had kept in the rain coat’s pocket. Apparently Rina had seen the letter.

I folded the letter morosely to put it back. On the back of it was scribbled in pencil: “Didn’t know you were in so much trouble. I have no money on me at present–we keep our money bank. These ear-rings are a spare pair. Sell them and use money. And don’t mind. If we had been married to each other, this gold would have been the natural thing to fall back on in such difficulty.”

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