The Fifth Man (18 page)

‘You were drinking too, Mahanam-da, I saw,’ said Esha. ‘Weren’t you?’

‘Yes of course I did. I drank quite a lot. I’ve been drinking since I was twenty-one. It doesn’t affect me at all. I don’t get drunk. I have no addiction. See this pipe? I can give it up in an instant if you tell me to.’

‘Really?’

‘Really? All it does is help me think. Like they say, smoking out the ideas. But habits can be changed.’

‘My life is devoid of men, you see. I don’t trust these male entertainments that you people indulge in. May I sit here safely?’

‘Considering I called you here, how can you not? Can I ask you something personal, Esha?’

‘Of course.’

‘Why is your life so devoid of men, anyway? Why did you leave that gentleman? Was he a very bad man?’

‘No Mahanam-da, not at all.’

‘What was it, then?’

‘Whatever went wrong was always my fault. Amidst a crowd of people, my own habits make me aloof.’

‘Tell me what these habits of yours are.’

Esha remained silent. And remained silent. Much later she said in a small voice, ‘He was a very mechanical man. I’d accepted that too. But then he wanted to be a father.’

‘Was that wrong?’

‘No, it wasn’t.’ Esha lifted her eyes, looking through Mahanam, at the wall behind him. ‘Not wrong. But I’m not just a womb.’

‘You’re right, Esha,’ said Mahanam. ‘When the world needed to add more people, the idea that motherhood is the ultimate fulfilment was ingrained in women. Society no longer has this need, womanhood should not be equated with motherhood anymore.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ Esha said, ‘all I know is that unless my heart is full, an exhausting mechanical act will not fill my womb. I cannot give birth to a child that way. I could not. Can a unique creation like Pupu come from a factory, tell me.’

Mahanam looked sharply at her. He put his pipe down beside the ashtray. ‘Do you know the history of Pupu’s birth?’ he asked.

‘I do.’

‘Did you know beforehand?’

‘No. Only a few days ago.’

‘Why are you crying, Esha?’

Esha looked up. ‘But I’m not.’

‘I feel you’re crying, trembling.’

‘I’m not crying. Not trembling either, believe me. Why couldn’t you hold on to Neelam?’

‘Perhaps I didn’t want to strongly enough. I was quite immature myself then. Neelam was the only woman whom I could touch without sinning.’

‘Meaning?’

Mahanam smiled. ‘The history of my birth is also something like Pupu’s. She has parents. I have no antecedents. The person who gave me her affection and property, Dr Kasturi Mitra, was not really my aunt. She had brought up an abandoned child in a hospital. Whenever a woman appeared attractive to my young eyes, I used to imagine that my unmarried mother had given birth to her after getting married. Or perhaps my father. In which case that woman was my sister.’

‘You didn’t think that way about Neelam?’

‘No. She was Kasturi Mitra’s friend Savitri Joshi’s daughter. Savitri married a Gujarati. I knew Neelam’s background through and through. And Kasturi Mitra had told me that my mother was a Bengali woman whom she did not know.’

‘Do you know how old she was?’

‘Not a particularly tender age.’

Esha said, ‘My mother died while giving birth to me at just sixteen. I was a caesarean baby. My mother was rent apart giving birth to me. There is no way I can be your sister, Mahanam-da.’

‘And your father?’

‘Do you want to know my entire genealogy? My father observed perfect widowhood for three or four months. He didn’t eat meat or fish, dressed in white cotton only. When anyone asked, he said, “If I had died this is what you would have forced her to do. So I’m doing it.”’

‘And then?’

‘Unable to bear it anymore, he willed himself to die. The larger family brought me up.’

‘Which means you too are the creation of pure love. And you were born when your mother was sixteen, before she was even of marriageable age. Like Draupadi or Sita, you too have come out of moist earth.’ Mahanam sat up. ‘And this is the immaculate whom Aritra rejected.’

‘Aritra was probably not to be blamed,’ Esha said softly.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I realize it now. Aritra is the kind of man who cannot tolerate a second sun in the sky. He has to be the one and only. I did not understand, but his soul had understood that I was breaking out of his spell, the spell of his words, very rapidly. Thanks to your company. Gradually I shed the lies from my life and leaned towards the truth. Towards you.
Asato ma sadgamay
. Lead me from the unreal to the real.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, that was probably why he took Neelam and tried to break both you and me together.’

The wind had thrown Mahanam’s shawl into disarray. Esha said, ‘When Ari left me at that time, I must have been furious. My self-confidence, my faith in the world, my pride, all of it was in pieces. But even before you recognized me, it was I who went to you first, with all the questions in my life, expecting correct answers. When you ignored me and chose Neelam, what I felt was the dirge written in the Padavali—my shrine is empty. Although I had not understood its nature then. But my work, my studies, living, Aritra’s flattery, all of it tasted bitter. Nothing felt good, Mahanam-da, nothing.’

What she said about Mahanam began to widen like a ripple in water. My shrine is empty, my shrine is empty.

Mahanam said intensely, ‘It was to fill your shrine that I have kept mine empty all these years. Is there anyone who cannot recognize the first one, the eternal one? If she is still not desired, it is only because history and myth create a treacherous gulf in the middle. I’m thirsty for nectar, but I quench my thirst with other things. Esha, you are my pitcher of nectar which came out of the churning of the seas.’

Mahanam’s passion was stronger than the passion of the sea. He spread himself out wider than its waters. He was loftier than the waves. His body pulsated to a sense of expectation, but what he got was far beyond even those expectations. In astonishment he saw that this was not Praxitales’s generously endowed Aphrodite with formidable thighs, the contours of whose headless body of inanimate stone were so alive that viewers still ran up to embrace her. He saw—how perfect!—that this was Sandro Botticelli’s Venus, whose entire body was made of the light and shade of suggestive poetry.
Sa
Esha. She is this woman. Esha
sa
. This woman is she. Balanced on pearls like teardrops in an ocean of desire, she stood with her face pointing upwards. Because her feet were on the ground and her face was in the sky, no one understood her. As in the Egyptian imagination, a body of clay and heart of fire. Her expectations were not to be met by earth or fire or the world or the sky alone. She was shrouded in linen like a mysterious melancholy. Her promise was unfathomably deep. He would never be able to measure it. He could never reach its shores. One wave after another crashed on his familiar boats, setting them adrift. With a broken rudder and ripped sail, he set off on an exquisite voyage to an unknown destination. He had an abundance of supplies, but he himself would never be equal to this journey.

Mahanam had fallen asleep. His right arm was stretched out. He was sleeping with his head resting on it. His face held the intimacy of death. An enormous release. Setting his other arm back on the bed with a liquid fondness, Esha sat up. Outside, she realized that in the final phase of its journey, The Condor was speeding along like a rocket. Thousands of waves were breaking the sky into pieces with its clouds and stars and planets. The water of the Arabian sea was boiling in bubbles around the ship. The deck was sunk in the glow from the sky, as though a cascade of water was flowing over it. Only a handful of chairs were floating, like pieces of wood in an ocean. Floating away, then floating back.

Resting her hands on the railing, Esha asked the sea and sky, whom shall I give my wealth, then? It will not run out even if I give it away with ten hands instead of two. Will something of me always be left over? Forever? What sort of cruel fate is this?

At that precise moment, as her nameless yearning rose from her intense sadness at feeling incomplete, someone on the deck of The Condor touched her from the back with a hand of air, calling out to her sonorously.

Esha felt goose pimples on her skin. Her veil trembled. All her resistance willed itself to fall away. If she turned around to look, she would burn with the unbearable joy of seeing him. Balling her fists, she tried with all her strength to restrain her heart, her lungs, her blood-bearing veins and arteries, all of which wanted to leap out of her body. Finally she turned around. There was no one there. It was empty. The top deck was absolutely empty at midnight. But she was certain that someone had come. No one she knew. And yet someone she had known for a long time. An indistinct form, his garments of uncertain colour, a deep, masculine fragrance. Had he left faster than the wind?

Restlessly she went downstairs. Wrapped from head to toe in blankets and sheets, whatever she could find to guard against the extreme cold, the passengers on the upper deck were swaying with the ship. Sleep all around her, only sleep. Rows of men, women and children were deep in sleep. A few young men had been trying to huddle behind a sheet and play a game of cards. They too were asleep, with the cards strewn around. A deckhand in uniform was passing. In desperation she asked, ‘Did you see anyone climb down here?’

‘I thought I saw someone, he went to the lower deck.’

‘The lower deck?’ It wasn’t very easy to go there. Every inch was covered with people. And this terrible wind on top of it. But she had to go. The lower deck was even more crowded. The assault of the wind was less here, though. Esha scanned almost every single person. Like the widows of the brave warriors searching for their husbands’ corpses on the battlefield after the Kurukshetra War. But Esha knew he wasn’t dead, he was exceptionally alive, he had made her feel an ecstasy that still pulsed in her. He knew, too, that she was searching for him. But there was no need to scour the ship for him, for she would be electrified as soon as she went near him. And so she went back to the upper deck, and then up the stairs to the top deck adjoining their cabins.

The night had lightened by then. Clouds of different shapes were becoming recognizable in the sky. Slowly the nocturnal wind was bringing itself under control. The birds on the shore would soon wake up and begin their song. Opening the door of his cabin, Mahanam came out to discover a dishevelled, sleepless Esha standing with her hands on the railing. With her back to him. Going up to her, he found her face awash with tears. ‘Haven’t you slept, Esha?’ he asked.

Esha turned. ‘Someone made me rapturous and left,’ she said.

‘Who was it? What was it?’ Mahanam asked in surprise.

‘I don’t know. I looked for him all night. Lower, even lower. See, I still have goosepimples.’

Mahanam listened with close attention. Night was breaking into dawn. The sky was neither black nor blue. Colourless, luminescent. Looking at it, he said, ‘Why search any more, Esha? Don’t you understand? You’ve found him. Found him already. He will flow in your blood from now on, sing in your blood. He will take all you have to offer without emptying you out, and will return it to you with thousand times the ecstasy. Can a pilgrimage ever fail, Esha?’

VINTAGE BOOKS

Random House Publishers India Private Limited, 7th Floor, Infinity Tower C, DLF Cyber City, Gurgaon – 122 002, Haryana, India
Random House Group Limited, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 2SA, United Kingdom

Published by Random House India in 2014

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Copyright
Pancham Purush
© Bani Basu 1990
Translation copyright © Arunava Sinha 2014

Cover design: Bhavi Mehta

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN: 978-8-184-00572-1

This digital edition published in 2014.
e-ISBN: 978-8-184-00666-7