A City of Strangers

He looked for her anyway.

He found the teacher-training course in the end, at a mission school in the district town, and was told by a nun with a face like a closed door that Miss Majhi had completed six months of training with distinction and had left, and that the Sisters did not give out the addresses of young women to young men, however respectable their families. He wrote to every girls' school in three districts. He received eleven polite replies and no Meghla.

Then the world changed, and took him with it.

At midnight on the fifteenth of August, 1947, India became independent. Ishan heard it on a radio in a crowded Calcutta boarding house, a voice crackling through the static about a tryst with destiny, while boys from four provinces wept and embraced and set off firecrackers in the stairwell. For one night it felt like the Puja, like the goddess coming home.

Then the cost of it came walking into the city. Bengal had been cut in two, its eastern half now part of the new nation of Pakistan, and the line had been drawn through rivers and rice fields and families. People came west across it in their hundreds of thousands, and then in their millions. They filled the platforms of Sealdah station so densely that Ishan, passing through one morning on his way to court, had to step over sleeping children to reach the street. They built colonies of bamboo and tin on empty land at the city's edges. They had nothing, and they had walked out of everything, and every one of them, he thought, was somebody's ferryman, somebody's daughter.

He passed his law examinations in 1949, third in his year. His father wrote to congratulate him and to mention the daughter of a High Court judge. Ishan wrote back and declined. Over the following year his father mentioned a tea planter's niece, a doctor's granddaughter, and a girl from a very old family in Burdwan whose horoscope had been consulted and found ideal. Ishan declined them all. He did not explain. He suspected his grandmother knew why. She had stopped writing to him the year of the flood, and he had stopped asking himself what that meant.

He did not take the cases his father's friends sent him, the quarrels between rich cousins over which wing of which mansion belonged to whom. Instead he took the cases of refugee families whose bamboo colonies turned out to stand on land that somebody, somewhere, owned. He was paid in rice, in thanks, sometimes not at all. He did not mind. The work was, as he had once written to someone who never wrote back, only stories about who owes what to whom.

On his desk, in a narrow rented room above a printing press near the High Court, he kept a swollen cloth-bound ledger. He did not open it often. He did not need to. He knew the last page by heart.

In the monsoon of 1951, a delegation came to see him from a refugee colony in the south of the city, a place called Naya Gram, which means simply "new village." There were three of them: a retired postmaster, a woman who ran a tailoring cooperative, and a very small, very serious girl of about eleven, who had been brought along, the postmaster explained, because she wrote the best English in the colony and had typed the petition herself.

The colony's school was to be demolished. A developer had produced a title deed for the land. Two hundred and forty girls studied there, in three bamboo sheds, and the eviction notice gave them thirty days.

"Our headmistress wished to come herself," the postmaster said. "But she will not leave the girls during lessons. She is very strict about that."

"She is very strict about everything," said the small girl, with deep respect.

Ishan took the case. He would have taken it regardless. But it was something in the typed petition, he thought later, that made him go out to Naya Gram himself the next afternoon instead of sending a clerk. The petition was good. It was unusually good, plain and direct and furious in exactly the right places. And at the bottom, where the colony's elders had signed, there was a list of the girls' names, two hundred and forty of them in a long column, and beside each name a small, neat mark. Not a signature. A drawing.

A pot with three wavy lines. A little flame. A single flower, drawn with great care.

He stood in the rain at the edge of the colony for a long time with the paper in his hand.

The school was the largest of the sheds, with a tin roof that the rain drummed on like the dhak on immersion night. Its walls were woven matting, and through them, as he came closer, he could hear a class reciting, and a woman's voice, low and patient, leading them.

"Again," the voice said. "We don't need the picture forever. The picture is only a boat. It carries you across to the word, and when you reach the other side, you can let it go. Again."

Ishan stopped at the doorway.

She stood at the front of the shed with her back to him, writing on a blackboard propped on two bricks. She was taller than he remembered, and thinner, and she wore a plain white sari with a narrow blue border, the uniform of a schoolmistress, her hair in a single heavy plait down her back. There was chalk on her sleeve. Behind her ear, where he had once kept his pencil, sat a green fountain pen.

The class fell silent row by row as they noticed the stranger in the door. She heard the silence before she saw him. She turned, chalk still raised.

Five years. The whole width of a river.

"Miss Majhi," the small serious girl announced from the front row, very proudly, "this is our lawyer."