Translated fiction: Why does Ranjan look on uncomplainingly as his lover goes out with a colleague?

The first day she couldn’t meet me on account of Ranjan, she had apologised profusely. “Not like I had a great time with Ranjan,” she had said. “I kept thinking you were sitting at this corner table, looking up every time the restaurant door opened.”

“Not to worry, it was obvious why you couldn’t make it,” I said. “It’s never a problem when things are obvious, trouble crops up when they aren’t obvious.”

Shelly has begun spending time with Ranjan, the young engineer from her office. It has been only six months or so. But things have already got to a point where any day now she will tell me, “Ranjan and I are getting married” – and I will have to accept this at once with a “fantastic, what could be better”. She may not even tell me face to face, she may well hold out a white envelope, largish. Turn it over, and there it will be – om prajapataye namah – the giveaway Sanskrit phrase signalling a wedding. That’s the deal between us.

The first day she couldn’t make it, though, it was for a different reason. I waited an hour or so before I could be sure she wouldn’t turn up, although Shelly had told me in no uncertain terms, “Wait exactly half an hour. Leave if I’m not there by then. It’ll mean Ranjan didn’t let me go.”

“Yes, of course,” I had said eagerly. “Don’t worry about me, Ranjan is your priority.”

But it was a different problem that day. I had to wait an hour or maybe longer.

The fact was that I had eaten an entire bowl of pork wonton soup on the assumption that Shelly would pay. One soup was all it took to run up a bill of twenty-one rupees plus sales tax. I had no choice but to wait for Shelly since the total cash in my pocket amounted to three rupees. Eventually, I had to leave the restaurant with an “I’ll pay up tomorrow” meant for the manager Lee Yeong. I’m an old customer there, so Lee smiled and said, “No problem.” He’d caught on, of course, since Shelly paid the bill most days. He knew which department in Telephone Bhaban Miss Mitra worked at, he had had to find out while trying to fix some mistakes in the phone bill for one thousand three hundred rupees that he had been handed.

With Ranjan, though, Shelly’s perspective is quite the opposite. Ranjan must pay for everything. And to the last naya paisa. He will buy the movie tickets. Pay the taxi fare. He does realise how precious Shelly is, doesn’t he?

“The bill came to a hundred and seventy one day…”

“Just food?”

“Naturally. Sheh-naz, after all. There were two beers, too, though…”

“So you had some?”

“Are you mad!” Spearing some fish mayonnaise with her fork, depositing it halfway up her tongue, and forming an ‘O’ with her ox-blood red lips because the food is either too hot or too spicy, Shelly says, “Shoo-shoo-shooo. What would Ranjan think? He’d consider me cheap, he’d think I drink regularly.”

“And then? The hundred-and-seventy-rupee bill…”

“Yes, I’d just opened my bag to get my handkerchief – Ranjan put his hand on it and said, ‘Enn-no, the pleasure is mine.’”

We are still sitting outside, waiting for a cabin to be free. “Ranjan” – since I can see no customers or waiters near us, I put my hand briefly on Shelly’s left breast – “could have taken your hand. He could have held your hand when he said this.”

“Not that he has yet.” Flipping her shoulder-length curls, Shelly lifts her wide eyes towards me.

I cannot help but look for traces of Netarhat blue in her eyes every time she looks into mine.

Shelly had taken me to Netarhat, it was just the other day, it’s not even been a year. To her family, she said she was going with her colleague Basana Sen and her relatives on the Madhya Pradesh government’s tiger safari in Bandhavgarh. That was the plan.

At the last moment, she cancelled her ticket and took a bus to Ranchi with me from Dharmatala.

The Netarhat sky was blue as velvet, you could see the fuzz. The whites of her eyes turned blue whenever she raised her face. I’d seen it ever so often. I’d told her about this. “Can’t be, yours don’t change,” Shelly had responded.

Since it was the Durga Puja holidays, the forest bungalow was full up. A few log cabins stood at a distance from the main building – we were allotted one of them. After dinner in the canteen, we would walk through the pine woods towards the lights in our cabin like entwined roots of plants clinging to each other in a flood. All around us in the dark, the pines waged a cruel – inhuman – competition to keep growing taller.

“No, he hasn’t held my hand yet.”

“Not even at the movies?”

“One day” – wiping away the Netarhat blue from her eyes with her handkerchief, Shelly informs me – “when we want to watch Prem Pratigya… I told you about it, didn’t I? There’s this very funny comic scene with Aruna Irani and Deven Verma.” Shelly laughs as she tells me the story. “Our hands touched when we were laughing, you know.”

“And then?” I’m eager to know. “What happened after that?”

“As long as we laughed, for the duration of the scene, that is, our hands touched.”

“And then?”

“What do you suppose? The next scene was Madhuri Dixit weeping for Mithun Chakraborty. The comedy was over, our hands were back on our laps.”

“Why don’t you,” I say, “provoke Ranjan a bit?”

“How?”

“Say, you tell him about your family. Your father’s retired. Sugar. Blood pressure. No knowing how long he’ll live. Both your elder brothers and even your young sister fell in love and got married. You’re so lonely…soon you’ll be too old for marriage. And then…”

“What’s all this,” Shelly says, smiling widely. “This is how you advertise in the papers. No children. Widower. Forty-two. Four thousand. Own house. Seeking a companion.” Switching off her smile, she’s silent for a few moments. Then, with her eyes on the floor, she says, “He’ll think I’m cheap”

I haven’t met Ranjan. I’ve been told he’s well-built. An assistant engineer at present. It won’t be long before he’s promoted to executive rank. He has a French-cut beard, which Shelly doesn’t approve of. She will convey her objection at the right time. The sunglasses haven’t come off yet. Ranjan’s.

Every time they meet, I ask with great eagerness whether there’s been “any progress”, and Shelly describes everything to me in meticulous detail.

My own situation is a lot like that of a convict sentenced to death. Hanging is certain, but not the date. In The Outsider, the protagonist Meursault’s girlfriend used to meet him in the visitors’ room in jail. A corridor ran between them, they had to shout across it from behind iron grilles. All of Meursault’s responses were terse. Fine, okay, yes, don’t know, thank you, great. At least Meursault had to commit not one but two murders to get there. I didn’t even have to do that.

I have never met Ranjan. My guess is that the first time Ranjan takes her hand, if it’s in a private cabin in a restaurant, he will kiss her the same day, and it might not be a caring and loving kiss like mine. And if the whole begins in a room – might be a hotel, might be someone’s house – then whether there’s a bed or not, it will end in sex. For all of Shelly’s resistance is limited to logic and arguments. I have seen it, her body doesn’t know how to think, how to stop someone. In this, she is like a buzzing bee trapped in a clear plastic jar.

The whole thing is as easy as passing through the revolving gate of Hazra Park. In parks and on benches I have often sat alone. Her park is perpetually fogged out, she cannot see what lies two yards away.

I think – not think – I’m sure Shelly will also tell me from beginning to end the story of that first attack of Ranjan’s and of being raped by him. And I will have to listen to this too, patiently. I have not met Ranjan. I’ve been told he’s always got his sunglasses on. I believe there are two kinds of people in the world, those who wear sunglasses and those who don’t. Ranjan belongs to the second kind.

Disclosure: Arunava Sinha is editor of Books and Ideas section of Scroll.

Excerpted with permission from ‘The Last Metro’ in Ten Days of the Strike: Selected Stories, Sandipan Chattopadhyay, translated from the Bengali by Arunava Sinha, HarperCollins India.

Disclosure: Arunava Sinha is the editor of Books and Ideas section of Scroll.