Immersion Night

Ishan's grandmother, Sarojini Lahiri, whom the whole household called Thakuma, the Bengali word for a father's mother, forbade it, of course. She did it at dinner that same evening without raising her voice, between the fish and the sweet yogurt, and the matter was considered closed by everyone in the yellow house except the two people it concerned.

They simply moved the lessons.

Behind the Lahiri orchard, where the mango trees gave way to bamboo and then to the riverbank, stood a boathouse no one had used since Ishan's great-grandfather kept a pleasure barge for hunting parties. The barge had rotted to ribs. The roof leaked in four places. But it had a floor, and a door that closed, and a view of the ferry ghat, so that Meghla could see her father's boat and run back before anyone missed her. For seven years it was the only school she had.

He taught her the alphabet, then words, then sentences, and then something happened that neither of them expected: she overtook him. Ishan read because he was told to. Meghla read the way a dry field drinks. He smuggled books to her from the high school library, wrapped in his cricket whites, and she returned them in three days, worn soft, with questions tucked between the pages on scraps of paper. Why does the hero in this one apologise so much? Is Calcutta really as loud as this? What is a tram?

In return she kept her side of the bargain. She taught him to swim in the slow backwater below the boathouse, where lotus leaves grew as wide as umbrellas. She taught him the river's moods: how a brown current meant rain upstream, how the egrets left the sandbanks an hour before a storm, how the water went oddly quiet before it rose. By fifteen he could pole the ferry across in a crosswind while Haren sat on the bench pretending not to watch, wearing the smile of a man watching his own luck, which is to say, a worried smile.

There were hard years in between. In 1943 the rice failed, and the rice that did not fail was carried away to feed the war, and for a long season the people who came to the ghat were not passengers but thin families walking toward the city in search of food. Haren carried them across for nothing and wrote nothing down. When Gopal-babu came for the estate's share, Meghla showed him the empty pages and said, "Nobody crossed." He looked at her for a long time, and then he wrote down nothing either. She thought better of him after that.

In the autumn of 1945, Ishan was accepted to study law in Calcutta. He would leave after the Puja.

To understand what Durga Puja is to a Bengali, imagine every holiday you know, folded together and set to drums. For five days in autumn the goddess Durga comes home. She is a married daughter returning to her mother's house, people say, and the whole of Bengal behaves like a family whose favourite child is visiting. Craftsmen spend months shaping her from river clay: ten arms, a lion beneath her, a buffalo-demon defeated at her feet. Everyone wears new clothes. Everyone eats too much. And on the last evening, called Bijoya Dashami, the clay goddess is carried down to the river and given back to the water she was made from.

On that last night the whole of Shonapur poured down the ghat steps with lamps and conch shells and the great barrel drums called dhak, which you feel in your teeth before you hear them. The goddess swayed above the crowd on bamboo poles. Married women smeared each other's faces with red vermilion, laughing. When the image finally slid into the dark water, a cry went up that Meghla had heard every year of her life, and every year it caught her by the throat: Asche bochor abar hobe. It will happen again next year.

It is the promise every Bengali makes to a goddess who is leaving. Come back, and we will be here.

Ishan found her afterwards, downstream, sitting in her father's moored boat with her feet in the water. He climbed down without asking and sat on the floor of the boat, as he always did now, his palms flat on the boards.

"I leave on Thursday," he said.

"I know. The whole town knows. Gopal-babu has been telling people you'll be a High Court judge by thirty."

"Gopal-babu thinks that because Baba pays him to." He reached into his kurta and took out something wrapped in a handkerchief. "This is for you."

It was a fountain pen, deep green, with a nib of real gold. She had seen it in his shirt pocket for three years. She had never touched it.

"I can't."

"You can. You write better than I do. It's wasted on me." He folded her fingers around it. "Write to me. Everything. The river, the rain, what your father says about the price of fish. I won't survive Calcutta without it."

She had brought something too. She took the newest ledger from under the bench and opened it to the back page, where for seven years she had been keeping a private sum across one book after another.

"Three thousand four hundred and twelve," she said. "Your crossings. Since the day you wrote your name."

He looked at the columns of tiny marks, and for a moment he could not speak.

"You never paid for one of them," she said, trying to make it a joke, and failing. "Not after that first month."

"Then I owe you. Three thousand four hundred and twelve."

"Don't. Don't make it a promise. The river hates promises. Everyone on this bank has promised it something, and it always collects."

"Then it won't be a promise." He took the green pen from her hand, uncapped it, and on the last open line of that day's page, beneath the milk-seller and the priest and a dozen festival-goers, he wrote:

Ishan Lahiri. Departing. Return crossing: owed.

"There," he said, very quietly. "That isn't a promise. It's a record. And your ledger is always right."

The drums were still going upriver. The little clay lamps people had floated after the goddess drifted past in the dark, a slow procession of small flames. Meghla let herself lean, just once, just slightly, until her shoulder rested against his. Neither of them moved for a long time.

When she finally walked home, the hut was dark. Her father sat on the step in his wet dhoti, not smoking, though he always smoked at night. In his hand was a sheet of paper bearing the Lahiri estate seal.

"Gopal-babu came," Haren said. "From the big house. The ferry rent is to be tripled from the new year."

Meghla stood very still.

"He says," her father went on carefully, as if each word were a stone he had to step on to cross a stream, "that it can stay as it is. On one condition."