Translated fiction: After escaping a deadly bomb blast, Jibon returns to life having lost his memory

Perhaps the news spread through the railway station and its vicinity, in the neighbourhood and the railside squatter settlement more speedily than a flame in a forest turns into raging forest fire. Jibon is back! Our Jibon-da has returned!

Pa-khara Kedar, or Lame Kedar, who ran the small tea shop at the western end of Platform No. 2 of the railway station, was the first to spot Jibon, and he passed on the news to everyone. “When I first saw him, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Was I seeing right? So I kept looking, and realised it was none other than Jibon.”

Kalipada Shikari lived on the canalside in Rajdanga. He was a rickshaw driver in the rickshaw stand on the western side of the railway station. There were four rickshaw stands here. There was one on the left side, and one on the right side of the railway line at the end of the eastern platform. Another one was beside Kedar’s shop, at the end of the western platform, and the fourth one was beside the Platform No. 1 exit, near the ticket counter, in front of an ancient banyan tree. There was a temple under the banyan. There were idols of various gods and goddesses in the temple. There was a straight road going from there to the heart of the suburb, the 8B bus stand crossing. News of Jibon’s return or reappearance spread in all directions.

Kalipada was standing at Kedar’s shop now. He had just taken a sip from a cup of tea, when Kedar informed him. “Hey Kali, do you know, Jibon isn’t dead. He’s alive. He’s returned here too.”

“What rubbish!”

“I swear, I swear on Ma Kali! I saw him with my own eyes! At first, I could hardly believe –”

“Where was he all these days? Did he say anything?”

“I couldn’t speak to him. I was busy making tea with my head down. The moment I raised my head, I spotted Jibon. But the way he looks now, I think he was in prison, or something like that. Long hair that covers his ears. He’s become thinner.”

“So where’s he now?”

When Anjali, the liquor seller, arrived at Platform No. 1 to tell everyone, she discovered that someone had already done that before her arrival, and taken all the credit. He had said, “He’s back, Jibon’s back!” The news seemed to bring back a bunch of sorrowful, almost-dead people to life. Perhaps a dark cloud of dread descended upon the minds of some. Perhaps the veins on the clenched fists of some enraged people were swollen.

But the people who were the happiest at the news of Jibon’s return, the ones whose survival and growth revolved around the station – Haat Kata Ganesh, Boro Gopal, Kalo Gopal, Shiva, Boro Bimal, Chhoto Bimal, Bachcha Amal, as well as several others – set off in a group for Anjali’s place. It was like party workers going to the airport to welcome a mass leader returning to the country at the end of a foreign tour.

It was only Kaliya who stopped short. He was unable to walk in step with Ganesh, Gopal and the others. He was seized by an unknown fear, which made him tremble. It made his throat turn dry. He said, “You people carry on, Ganesh. I need to go to the toilet. My stomach’s acting up.” And he walked away in the opposite direction. It would be more accurate to say that he ran, rather than walked. An unintended crime weighed heavily on his chest. From which he was simply unable to free himself.

To the south of the station was the high wall of the TB Hospital. When the wall was being erected, hospital employees themselves had removed the bricks from a section on the station side. Or else, they would have had to go all the way around, and walk almost half a kilometre, to get to the station.

Kaliya entered the TB Hospital compound through the break in the wall, and ran breathlessly towards the east. And thus, he reached the very end of the hospital compound, with the sweepers’ quarters, the waste incinerator, the morgue, the large drain carrying the city’s sewage, and pigs grazing in the dense dholkamali thicket. This was where Nanu’s illicit liquor den was.

Nanu was the son of a ward-boy in the hospital, he used to be a member of the action squad of a political party at one time. Because of that, he had to leave the locality for a long time, running from one place to another. A hoodlum away from his locality was something like a fish out of water. The only difference was that the fish died at once, while the hoodlum lived in fear of his life. Nanu decided to return to his locality. He had resolved that he would not leave his neighbourhood, even if that meant getting killed.

The Congress party, for fear of which Nanu had fled the locality, was, of course, not as aggressive as before. Earlier, if they got the slightest trace of a member of the Marxist party, they thrashed him, and broke his bones. They were somewhat peaceful now, and weary with inner conflicts. A leader of a small faction of the party, and a former mastaan of the station area – Sadhan-da to everyone in the locality – had assured Nanu: “Stay in the neighbourhood, no one will tell you anything. I’ll keep a lookout for you. Reopen your booze den. Once you start making some money, give me a share of that.”

Owing to lack of maintenance, what was earlier the morgue was completely dilapidated now. Someone, or some people, had taken away the collapsible gate and the grilled windows. And so, it wasn’t possible to keep dead bodies there. There was a pile of torn mattresses and blankets at one end. People now used the place for their own purposes. Nanu used to run a liquor vend here all day. After he fled, the evidence of what some people sometimes did here was found the following day in the haphazardly scattered practical item by the name of “Nirodh”.

It was this spot that Kaliya came running to, and when he found Nanu there, he breathlessly informed him, “Nanu-da, Jibon-da is not dead. He has returned.”

“What are you saying!” said the stunned Nanu.

“Are you sure?”

“What the hell, would I lie to you?”

“No, I don’t mean that. But how on earth did he survive? I saw Jibon stumble and fall with the bag, with my own eyes. You know the bag had country bombs. Two of them, powerful ones. Remember the sound of the explosion? Could anyone survive that?”

Bathed in perspiration and gasping for breath, Kaliya retorted, “All talk of what happened or didn’t happen is useless now. The main thing is that Jibon-da didn’t die. I think he was critically wounded in the explosion. And then whatever had to happen, happened. The police must have arrived and picked him up, and admitted him to some hospital. He recovered and returned from there.”

Kaliya was still gasping for breath, and his wild buffalo-like dark-skinned, strong body was perspiring, but so was Nanu. The difference was that Kaliya had exerted himself, running a long distance, while Nanu was in great terror, anguish and a sense of guilt.

He clutched his hair and said in a deeply injured tone, “I did something terribly wrong, Kaliya. But what can I do, tell me! I saw it with my own eyes, and I also read it in the newspapers the next day, that a miscreant was killed in a bomb explosion. What would I think after that?”

Nanu hit his head in despair. That was why he never sought to find out about Jibon. Since he was dead! It would have been a different matter had he survived. “You know how we all felt at that time. All of us could have been in trouble because of him. The one who was killed is no more. But if we dug too deeply to find out about him, and the police got wind of us, we would all be finished. You remember how scared we were! That’s why I told you and everybody else to simply keep mum. There’s no need to tell anybody. Let it stay between the five of us alone.”

Nanu was a veteran when it came to fisticuffs, murder and bloodshed. When a stone was thrown into a pond, there were ripples for a while, and then everything returned to normal, leaving no trace behind. Nanu’s character was something like that. When some incident took place, it stayed on his mind at best for a week, or ten days, and then he forgot all about it. He had witnessed many deaths in his life. He was never really upset. But that a dead person would have survived, and then returned, was beyond his imagination.

Excerpted with permission from The Interloper, Manoranjan Byapari, translated from the Bengali by V Ramaswamy, Eka/Westland.