Mr Deb’s Shop

“You must go to the cremation,” my mother said. I had already made up my mind to go. Mr Deb had been my father’s friend and our neighbour for years. For as long as I could remember, he had owned a small shop in Police Bazar in a lane that was a couple of minutes’ walk from where the newsagents had their stalls. My father had always gone to Mr Deb’s shop when my brother or I needed a new pen, or my mother wanted her brand of hair oil. As a small boy, I often accompanied my father on these trips. Sometimes our whole family would go to Police Bazar. My father and mother would sit on little stools in Mr Deb’s shop, talking and laughing. Mr Deb would order tea, and when the boy brought it, he would emerge from behind the counter to serve it courteously himself. Later, when I was  older, I was sometimes sent to do the shopping but I never went to Mr Deb’s shop. I preferred the bigger ones.

I was working for a company that had its head office down south when my father  died suddenly one afternoon at home in Shillong. Mr Deb had found my phone number from someone. He had broken the news to me gently, speaking with genuine feeling. I managed to reach Kolkata in the evening. However,  I couldn’t  get a flight to Guwahati until the next day. The cremation was over by the time I had reached home. Less than a year later, Mr Deb was dead. Attending his funeral would be a little like attending my father’s funeral.

Mr Deb became our neighbour when he bought a house near ours. This was after the hill state movement, when Meghalaya was created, and most Assamese families were selling their houses in Shillong to move to Guwahati. It was a difficult time for my parents, since so many of their friends were leaving. In the end, they decided to stay. This was a great relief to my brother and me. We boys loved Shillong, and could not imagine a life elsewhere.

There was the usual bickering over a boundary wall, and for a couple of years, relations between Mr Deb’s family and ours became quite strained. I never returned to the old job  after my father’s death. In Shillong, I found myself  seeking  Mr Deb’s company, and it  was then that I noticed how frequently he was away from Shillong. When I had asked him about his absences, he had told me he was building a second house in Silchar. Mr Deb was on one such trip  to supervise the building of the house. But this time, he had  a heart attack on the bus itself.

They brought Mr Deb’s body home a little before noon. The driver and the conductor of the bus stood around for a while, and then quietly disappeared. In the cramped drawing room, Mr Vaswani, a couple of his tenants, and a Bengali gentleman who worked in the Account General’s Office, sat on the cane chairs. I sat on the bed that was pushed up against the wall. Babu, Mr Deb’s son, is much younger than me. He has graduated recently from college. I often see him in the evenings near Police Bazar with a group of young men who idle away their time near Mr Deb’s shop. He is a rather quiet young man, and now the shock of losing his father has further subdued him.

Mrs Deb entered. A fragrant smell of incense seemed to emanate from her. Her thin gray hair was loose, and hung down her shoulder. She is the kind of woman who rarely leaves her home. I had expected her to scream and wail, but she was almost composed as she received our condolences.

“I told Babu’s father not to go”, she said to us. “I told him you are an old man now. But he would not listen.”

We did not say anything. All of us knew why Mr Deb had been building a second house in Silchar. The recent communal troubles in Shillong, the resentment against dhkars, like us, had made him nervous. A former refugee from East Pakistan, he wanted Babu to have a secure home. Though Mr Deb had never actually said so to anyone, it was clear that he was planning to sell off his house and shop in Shillong and move to Silchar. Mr Deb did not want Babu to go through the uncertainties he himself had faced when he had come to Shillong as a young man, soon after Independence and the partition of Bengal.

From my place on the bed, I got a glimpse of the next room. I could see a broken harmonium placed on top of a wooden almirah. I wondered if the broken harmonium had belonged to Mr Deb and when he had played it. The house was  beginning to fill up with relatives, friends and other neighbours. Assured that my absence would not be noticed, I left.

I sat on the verandah of our house watching the mourners walk down the sloping road to Mr Deb’s shop. Aged men, some in tweed coats, others in home-knitted sweaters, and their wives were coming from Laban, Rilbong, Jail Road and other places. As they passed, I heard them talking about Mr Deb in the Bengali they had brought with them decades ago, from their towns and villages in the Sylhet region. The tin-roofed, wooden-floored houses of my father’s generation needed care, but Mr Deb’s house had not been painted in years. The roof was dark with rust. The house wore a dull, enclosed look because you rarely saw it with its doors and windows open. Its owner’s death had given it a new kind of life.

I sat on the verandah for several hours. When I heard the sound of bamboo being cut, I knew they were making the bier and that it would not be long before they carried the body past our house.

I joined the procession when it reached our house. There were nearly fifty men, young and old, in the procession. I recognized a few shopkeepers from Police Bazar, Polo Ground and the Jail Road area. The young men were mostly Babu’s friends.

It was the first time I was seeing the Mawlai cremation ground. Babu’s friends had lost their evening indolence and were full of energy. Some of them went off to the nearby cottages  to buy firewood, while the men gathered in small groups. I chose a spot at the edge of the ground and sat down to watch the preparations for the cremation. Mr Vaswani, noticing me sitting alone, came over and began to make conversation. He was a tall man, almost always jovial, a little stooped now, because of his age. He owned a hotel in Police Bazar and had shops all over the town. I liked  that he had found the time for  the cremation.

“Philosopher!” he teasingly chided me. Then he lit a cigarette and became serious. “That boy was here a few days back,” he said, pointing to one of Babu’s friends who was arranging the funeral pyre. “An uncle of his died. He knows what to do.”

It was a shock to see Mr Deb lying naked on the pyre. I remembered how, before he became our neighbour, my brother and I were so used to seeing Mr Deb behind the counter that he looked a little strange to us whenever we saw him whole, as on those occasions when he served tea to our parents.

I had not  thought about my father’s story till he was gone. “At Police Bazar point,” Mr Deb had replied when I asked him where he had first met my father. My father was living alone in Shillong at that time. It was the period in his life when he was still sending his salary home to his brother. He had married recently, but my mother was at her parents’ house in the village. My father had gotten into the habit of walking over to Police Bazar in the evenings after his work at the State Secretariat. He would buy a copy of the Assam Tribune and stand reading it near Police Bazar point. He and Mr Deb had met each other then. After this, my father’s evening routine had varied slightly. He would go to Mr Deb’s shop to read his paper and chat for a while before going back to his rented house.

I could easily picture my father at this time of his life, as  there were a few photographs of him from his early days in Shillong at home. They revealed a dapper man, handsome despite a receding hairline. As boys, when my brother and I  first came across these photographs, it was something of a wonder to us that our father had dressed in nice-looking suits and worn well-chosen ties. But we also thought this was a thing a man usually did when he was young, just as a young man usually had more hair.

In the shop, Mr Deb and my father often talked of owning houses. Owning a house was a priority for them, like all those from their generation who had left their homes to settle in Shillong. During the early years of his employment, my father saved all he could to buy a suitable plot of land. His parents had died when he was small. He had brothers and sisters, but my brother and I were not acquainted with them. We never visited the village, and often heard my mother complaining about the brother who sold my father’s share of the property. But I sometimes wondered who had taken the responsibility of educating my father. After all, it was this education that allowed him to leave home and find employment in Shillong, where the Five-Year Plans had led to an increase in government jobs.

Sometimes, I wondered if his eldest brother had helped my father complete his education and avail of the opportunity of a government job in Shillong. After all, it was the norm for the eldest son of the family to take on parental responsibility. At some point, after my father had stopped sending them money, his eldest brother would have felt justified in selling off my father’s share of the family land. I think my father too accepted this as fair, because I never heard him express any regret or bitterness.

My father did not like to talk about his earlier life because he had started life anew in Shillong, and wanted to forget the past. Mr Deb, however, enjoyed talking of the past. He had arrived in Shillong as an almost penniless refugee, and had many dramatic stories to tell. He was a small man, an ordinary man. Yet he had a connection with history.

My father had no such stories to tell. So, I clung to something that my mother once told me and my brother. She told us that my father’s graduation had been delayed by a year or two because of his participation in the Quit India movement. There was another story my mother used to tell us, one that made me smile: when my father graduated, he had become an object of curiosity in his village, where college education was still a novelty. It was only after he died that I realized that my father too had broken with the past. He too had taken his life in his own hands.

There was a breeze blowing, and Mr Deb’s son was shivering a little in his dhoti. Sorrow had given him a chastened look. But he had composed himself and now, like a sincere schoolboy, he was following the directions of the priest. I wondered what he would do with the shop. In his own way, Mr Deb had made something of his life. Babu had received an ordinary education. Unlike my father, who had sent my brother and me to the best school in Shillong, Mr Deb did not have much faith in education. He admired our school uniforms, but without envy.

“Sarma sir,” I heard him say to my father once, “quite a bit of your income must be going in paying the children’s fees”. My father had laughed, pleased. As for Mr Deb, he had sent Babu to a Bengali-medium school in Jail Road, even though there were plenty of English-medium schools in Shillong, and he could have found an affordable one. His aspiration was that Babu should successfully run the shop after him. This was not much to expect, but the certainty was robbed from him in his final years.

The young men were prodding Mr Deb’s body with bamboo poles to make it burn well. They were arguing about wind direction and the placement of wood. Mr Deb’s body had lost its human softness and had become a charred object. Soon it would turn into ashes.

One afternoon, two weeks after I had attended Mr Deb’s cremation, I took a taxi to Police Bazar. It dropped me near the tourist taxi stand, where some touts accosted me shouting, “Guwahati! Guwahati!” I walked past Police Bazar point, past the newsstands, past the pharmacies, past Bijou cinema, till I came to the lane where Mr Deb had his shop. It was open. Babu was standing behind the counter, talking to one of his friends who was busy installing a photocopier. “It’s second hand,” Babu said to me. “But it’s in good condition.”

He invited me to sit. “Mr Vaswani came,” Babu said quietly. “He asked me if I wanted to sell the shop. I said no.” I nodded.

“My father, my father …” Babu began. Then tears welled up in his eyes, and his voice choked. I looked away, waiting for him to recover. Two girls, wearing  grey and green school uniforms, came into the shop. They wanted photocopies of some certificates. They looked at Babu’s face curiously. I took the certificates from them and went to the photocopier.

I stayed in the shop until that evening, talking with Babu. His friends dropped in, and soon it had turned into an adda. It was very pleasant sitting there and chatting about nothing in particular. On the way back, I decided to walk. At Police Bazar point, near the spot where my father had met Mr Deb all those years ago, the touts were still shouting “Guwahati! Guwahati!”