Letters from Calcutta

The condition was simple, the way cruel things often are. The ferryman's daughter would not write to the Lahiri boy. She would not meet him when he came home for the holidays. If she did, the rent would rise, and if it could not be paid, the lease would pass to a cousin of Gopal-babu's who had wanted it for years.

"I told him I would ask you," Haren said. "I didn't tell him I would make you."

That was the thing about her father. He could have ordered her. Any other father in Shonapur would have. Instead he sat on the step and waited, and in the silence Meghla heard everything he did not say: the hungry year, the thin families on the road, the way a man without a boat in this country becomes a man without anything.

"I won't write," she said.

She wrapped the green pen in its handkerchief and laid it at the bottom of the tin trunk where her mother's two saris were folded, and she did not take it out.

His letters began arriving in November.

They came to the house of Nibaran-master, the old schoolteacher, who had guessed long ago where Ishan's library books went and had never said a word. He handed them to Meghla at the ghat folded inside a newspaper, with a look over his spectacles that said he would prefer not to know. She read them in the boathouse with the door shut.

Calcutta is exactly as loud as the book said, and then louder, the first one began. The trams are like ferries that have forgotten about the river. They clang. Everyone shouts. A man sold me tea in a little clay cup and told me to smash the cup on the ground when I was done, because that is what you do here, and I stood holding it for five minutes because I could not make myself break it. It is on my windowsill. I will bring it home for you.

He wrote about the College Street bookstalls, where secondhand books were stacked in walls taller than a man. About the Coffee House, a cavernous hall where students argued about politics and poetry until the waiters, in white uniforms and turbans, began stacking the chairs around them. About the law, which he found dry and then, unexpectedly, not dry at all. It is only stories, he wrote. Stories about who owes what to whom. You would be better at it than any of us.

He asked her questions. Had the egrets come back? Was her father's knee still bad? He had found a book she would like and was saving it. Once, at the bottom of a page, in smaller writing, he told her he had walked down to the great river at the edge of the city, the Hooghly, and stood on a ghat a hundred times bigger than Shonapur's, and felt lonely in a way he had not known was possible.

She did not answer.

By January his letters had changed. Did my last one not arrive? The post here is terrible. By February: Meghla, if I have done something, tell me what it is. In March there were two in one week, and the second was very short. Even if you are angry, write that you are angry. I will take anything.

She read that one on the floor of the boathouse with her back against the rotten ribs of the old barge, and she wept until the light changed. Then she went down and took her father's passengers across the river for the rest of the afternoon, and wrote their names in the ledger in a perfectly steady hand.

In May came the letter she had been dreading without knowing it.

Baba has found me a bride, Ishan wrote. A jute merchant's daughter from Barrackpore. Her family owns three mills and, I am told, a gramophone. Everyone is very pleased. I have written to tell him no. He will not accept it in a letter, so I am coming home in August, in the rains, to say it to his face. And then I am going to walk down the ghat steps and say something else to your father, and I do not care who sees.

You don't have to write back. You never do. But be at the ghat.

That night, for the first time in seven months, Meghla unwrapped the green pen.

She sat by the kerosene lamp a long while with a sheet of paper, everything she wanted to say crowding into her throat. She thought of Gopal-babu's cousin. She thought of her father on the step, waiting. She thought of the jute merchant's daughter, who had done nothing wrong, and of Ishan standing in the yellow house before his father and grandmother, choosing her and losing them, and of what that would cost him in five years, and in twenty.

In the end she wrote a single line.

Don't come in the rains.

She posted it herself, walking four miles to the market town so that Nibaran-master would not have to carry it. It was the only letter she ever sent him.

The rains came anyway. They always do.

They came hard that August of 1946, harder than anyone in Shonapur could remember, and they did not stop. Upstream, an embankment gave way. The river rose a foot in an afternoon, then another in an hour. By dusk on the eleventh day, the low island village across the water, a cluster of huts on a bank of silt that everyone called the char, was going under, and the people on it stood on their roofs waving lanterns.

Haren was already untying the boat.

"Baba, the current is too strong, you can't..."

"There are children on the char," he said. "And the old Lahiri lady went across this morning to the Kali temple. Nobody brought her back before the water came." He checked the pole, the lantern, the rope, with the same small careful movements he had used every day of Meghla's life. "Write it down," he said. "All of them. Everyone who comes back. The estate will want to know."

He smiled at her then, quickly, the worried smile, and pushed off into the dark.

Meghla stood on the top step of the ghat with the ledger clutched against her chest, and watched his lantern grow smaller and smaller across the black and roaring water, until she could no longer tell it from the stars.