Generally, no one touches the feet of young college lecturers as a mark of respect. I did. My brother and I had learned to eat rice at home with the same natural ease with which we’d learned to touch our teachers’ feet in greeting. This earned me affection among the teachers as a “well-bred boy.” Trying to maintain this “well-bred boy” image was an extremely uncomfortable and irritating business. “Well-bred boys” suffer a great deal. When I was studying at Chittagong College in Inter First Year, I took private statistics lessons from Kamrul Hasan Sir. He was one of the most amusing people I’d ever met. He could spin the most fantastic tall tales with absolute conviction. Sir knew we were catching on, yet without the slightest hesitation he’d continue producing these stories. We loved Sir for three reasons. One: He hardly taught in class—mostly just told stories. Almost every story featured one or more “beautiful maidens” (in his words). Stories about beautiful women are quite delectable to teenage boys. Two: Though he assigned plenty of homework, he never checked any of it. If any girl made a slightly coy request before exams, he’d postpone the test date. Later, we’d all treat that girl to ice cream. Three: To parents he’d say, “Your son is incredibly gifted. He’ll go far in life.” Parents were delighted by this and would send him even more students. Many such “incredibly gifted” boys failed four out of six subjects, including statistics, in the First Year finals. In our time, Chittagong College had a full-blown “First Year, don’t care” attitude—there was only one exam at the end of First Year, and dozens would fail. Things have probably changed now. Students study harder than before, get more A-pluses, and after passing Inter, when they can’t get admission anywhere, they enroll in private colleges.
After enrolling with Sir, I touched his feet in greeting out of habit in front of everyone. Tears welled up in Sir’s eyes with emotion. The mischievous boys in class started giggling. Tears in Sir’s eyes, laughter on the students’ faces—what an unprecedented scene! I found it very funny. Suppressing my laughter as much as possible, I maintained a proper, respectful appearance while looking at Sir. Sir got very angry and said, “You rascals! Why are you laughing? Learn from this boy. Mark my words, this boy will achieve great things. I’m giving him one hundred percent blessings.” Sir had this funny habit of always quantifying his blessings in percentages. The boy who always received the lowest percentage of blessings in our batch ended up topping the board exams. Girls received the highest percentage of blessings. Sir knew that girls understood such matters a bit less. Girls are born to be won over by sweet words. Once, when the call to prayer was sounding, a girl covered her head with her scarf. Sir said in a voice brimming with joy, “This is an extremely good girl. This girl will never have to worry about marriage. She’ll have a wonderful marriage.” The girl looked at Sir with a dejected expression. Sir said, “What’s the matter? What’s wrong? Why are you sad? I’ve given you such a wonderful marriage! Show some gratitude. Say thank you!” From then on, her nickname became “Good-Marriage.” Students are born with an extraordinary talent for giving their teachers and classmates bizarre nicknames. The reason Good-Marriage was upset that day was because she’d just broken up with her third boyfriend that very morning.
Sir would virtually force us to listen to his many self-composed poems about Joypahar in Chokbazar. We’d digest these inedible verses with smiling faces, happy that Sir wasn’t actually teaching. Of course, the main targets of Sir’s poetic talent were the beautiful Arts students in class. Watching them, I’d formed the notion at one point that Arts students were naturally beautiful. While studying at Chittagong College, I’d decided in my mind that if I ever had a daughter, I’d definitely have her study Arts. In all his poems, either Joypahar was weeping or he himself was weeping. Every poem was of the “Joypahar’s Lament” variety. The poems dealt with problems like how Joypahar itself was weeping because someone had rejected him. “Hearing Joypahar’s tears… I have seen Joypahar weep… Joypahar’s sorrow falls today as tears…” At some point during his terrible recitation, emotion would bring tears to his eyes. The beautiful Arts students would giggle. This reinforced his old conviction even more deeply—all beautiful women are heartless. Compassion and beauty are inversely proportional. Sir’s recitation style was many times worse than his poems. Of course, he believed that both writing poetry and reciting it were his natural talents. We’d pray with all our hearts: “God! Let Sir’s labor pains not begin again!” Once, to embolden Sir, I casually asked, “Sir, is your home in Pabna?” By sheer coincidence, Sir’s home was indeed in Pabna. Sir asked in wonder, “Sushanto, how did you know?” I said with double enthusiasm, “Sir, it’s impossible that your home isn’t in Pabna.” Sir laughed heartily and said, “Look everyone, this boy possesses rare talent. His IQ is very sharp. Sushanto, listen, have you ever heard Nazir Kantha’s songs?” Everyone asked together, “Sir, what name did you say?” Sir said, “Why? Nazir Kantha! I was amazed hearing this boy’s songs. He apparently writes his own songs, composes the tunes, and sings them. Rare talent! I think he should be given a Nobel Prize for music. What do you say? Oh right, you haven’t heard him. After hearing his songs, I’ve decided I’ll start writing songs too. How’s the idea? Hehe… Yesterday after hearing his song, I wrote a ‘self-composed song’ (this is how Sir would put it). Let me sing it for you…” We were all overjoyed. We realized that Sir had either forgotten or been unable to prepare questions on “Synthesis and Analysis” that day too. No exam—the happiest news in the world. In celebration of such joy, if necessary, one could even watch those snake-dancing Bengali films where people become snakes and snakes become people. And a song? That’s actually quite pleasant! Sir’s singing voice was sufficient to ruin anyone’s mood—I learned that day.
I remember Sir for another reason. There was a girl named Shotobroti who studied there. She liked me immensely; I later understood she loved me. We didn’t have a grading system in our time. The first twenty from the merit list of each group—Science, Arts, Commerce—would “stand.” Standing meant being among the top twenty of that board. (Our sacred duty was to carefully memorize how many times the students who “stood” went to the toilet each day, and to use the toilet accordingly. All this would be written in the papers, exaggerated as much as possible, and at home, parents would hand you the paper and say, “Look carefully! You must become like this person too.” The most painful blessing in the world is being told to become like someone else. It’s better not to bless at all than to give this blessing. One must become like oneself, or better than that. The practice of surpassing oneself is the highest practice. When you compare yourself to others, either complacency or an inferiority complex takes hold. In that case, you can’t move forward at all.) She had stood from Arts at Chittagong College. Shotobroti was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen face to face; still is, to this day. When she smiled, dimples appeared on her cheeks. When the last light of evening fell on her rosy cheeks, I’d think, let me just touch them once. I was extremely introverted when I studied at Chittagong College—I mixed with very few boys, and mixing with girls was out of the question. I was secretly terrified of girls. Yet I’d pretend that I didn’t care about them at all, that I didn’t have time for such nonsense as liking them. I’d hunt down and read everything written against women. My experience says that teenage girls are like shadows. If you chase them, they run away. If you run away, they chase you.
On the first day at Chittagong College, in Bengali class, a very senior madam had each of us stand up one by one and asked about our feelings on the first day of college. Everyone spoke in their own way. Since childhood, one thing has always worked in me: instead of thinking about anything the way ten others do, I think differently, speak in a different style. That day, about my feelings, I had said—thrilling. The whole class burst into laughter. Laughing to humiliate someone in class was also a kind of smartness. When a few laugh, the rest start laughing too; even if they don’t hear what they’re laughing about, they laugh. Laughter is purely contagious. Madam asked everyone, “Well, since you all laughed like this, let’s see you tell me—what does the word ‘thrilling’ mean?” Some tried to answer but couldn’t get it right. Madam then asked me to explain. I said, “Madam, it’s a strange mixture of unknown feelings and delight.” (This was exactly my answer.) Everyone fell silent after hearing it. Madam said, “Excellent! You boys! Why are you quiet now? Everyone clap, everyone clap.” Everyone clapped. From then on, I was incredibly reliably gifted at instantly producing definitions and quotes on the spot with tremendous showmanship. Everyone at college knew me more or less for being able to write incomprehensibly in the style of Komal Kumar or Joyce, using difficult English and Bengali words. Almost every saint has got a devil’s spirit! I wouldn’t even look at girls, but I did all this to impress them. Some were impressed too. But alas! Most of them were intellectual types! Girls who’d fall in love just to copy notes.
I was talking about Shotoabdi. A friend of mine first pointed her out to me—the famous discoverer of the Amin-Salwar Formula. My friend recently had a very adorable baby daughter. For the father of a daughter to become a researcher of women’s salwars doesn’t quite seem fitting. So I’ll assume my friend has no name; my friend’s name is Friend. (If anyone from Chittagong College’s 2002 batch knows, please don’t give it away in the comments.) After tireless research, he suddenly discovered one day that the two lower parts of women’s salwars never stay at the same height. He, I, and several of our other classmates would sit for hours at Chittagong College’s Parade Corner, carefully observing, and we never found any exception to this discovery. The research continued. That day Shotoabdi’s enchanting face, her coal-black hair reaching her waist, her large, elongated dark eyes—my researcher’s gaze got stuck there. Even when I liked a girl, it wasn’t in my nature to pursue her further or find out more about her. I never had any enthusiasm for such matters. Now I understand, that was a mistake. The strange arrogant ego of youth teaches you to think that all the Shabnam-Margarets of the world are sitting with mouths agape, waiting for you. Not caring about girls felt like the most pleasurable sensation in the world. That day Shotoabdi came, walked by, and left. She didn’t even turn to look at us once. Later I learned that she didn’t look at boys, let alone talk to them! I met her again when I went to study Statistics privately. She already knew me. Knew me, meaning she had inquired about me. She studied Arts. Sometimes she would come to C Section for Bengali-English classes. I was in C. Later I understood why she came.
She was in a different batch at Kamrul Hasan Sir’s private tutoring. (Later she told Sir and moved to our batch.) Their batch was the morning batch. After their batch ended, she would stand on the street, hoping to see me from afar. Their batch ended 15 minutes before Kabir Sir’s batch. Hasan Sir and Kabir Sir taught in the same alley. Kabir Sir would somehow sway his body and teach in a dancing manner. Sir liked me for two reasons. One: I could instantly create notes for any English prose-poetry question right there in class. I would think of a beautiful sentence and write the first line on paper, and the rest would flow naturally in my head. I used difficult synonyms in every line. I would play with sentence structure as I wished. I didn’t read Sir’s notes. They seemed too simple, so I would spend hours at the public library, digging through books and creating my own notes with quotations. Later I wouldn’t even memorize those; I would make them up while writing. At that time I played English vocabulary games with some friends. A competition to see who could learn more words. I didn’t know it was impossible to memorize a dictionary, so day and night I would immerse myself in Longman-Oxford-Chambers-Samsad dictionaries, Roget’s-Penguin thesaurus and such. Like a fool, I thought I would memorize every word. It’s good to be foolish while learning; you learn more that way. Too much cleverness destroys talent. A boy or girl who starts thinking they’re wise in matriculation-intermediate can’t go very far. We had many dictionaries at home, from A.T. Deb onwards. I still remember, if any synonym or antonym wasn’t in the thesaurus, I would write it there with pencil. I read dictionaries with great effort and patience and solved many foreign grammar books. When I was studying intermediate, I knew twice as many English words as I know now—not even half of half. Two: Instead of following the rules Sir taught for solving grammatical exercises, I would do them following alternative rules. I read English novels. I learned English more through sense than grammar. From class seven-eight, solving Nesfield, Wren and Martin, Standard Allen, Thomson and Martinet, Michael Swan, Raymond Murphy, Eastwood, P.K. De Sarkar with my father resulted in winning girls’ admiration. Thanks to my father. Sir would tell my story to different batches. Many didn’t know me, but they knew Sushanto. Sir would ask me jokingly, “What’s the matter, Sushanto! Don’t you like any of the rules we use for grammar?” How could I explain to Sir that learning grammar through rules wasn’t my way? I learned grammar through practice-practice, through sense.
After studying English with Kabir Sir, I would enter college through Chittagong College’s back gate. While walking past girls, I would keep my head down. This also happened: while walking on one side of the road, if I saw from afar that some familiar girl was coming, I would cross the street and move to the other side to avoid meeting her, so I wouldn’t have to talk. That’s why I hadn’t met Shotoabdi before. Walking right in front of each other, yet not meeting. Isn’t that funny? Even now I laugh thinking about it. She knew all this about me. A hijab-wearing, extremely beautiful, petite, mischievous girl at college had named me Robot. BTV used to show RoboCop then. My walking style, looking style, getting up from sitting style, turning neck style, speaking style, head shaking style—everything… everything was apparently robot-like. I never saw that hijab-wearing mischievous girl walking with any other girl. She looked like Monica Lewinsky. So the boys had named her Monica. That name was so popular, many of us didn’t know her real name. She often walked with another close friend of ours. We took full responsibility and performed his akikah under the name Clinton. In this type of akikah, no goat is slaughtered; the one whose akikah it is gets slaughtered. Our Clinton didn’t become president; he became a doctor and very recently completed his FCPS. Monica’s closest friend was another chief of mischief. Her name was Ammajan. Needless to say, no one in her family deserved credit for this name. One of our other simple-minded friends liked her. We joyfully named him Abbajan. Abba-Amma never married, yet they remained everyone’s Abba-Amma forever.
I was talking about Shotoabdi. I keep returning to other stories again and again. I don’t have the mental strength or capacity to write all her stories directly today. Why I don’t, I’ll come to that later. Calling me Robot, mimicking my gestures—these were extremely favorite activities of my friends and potential girlfriends. That I was around yet they weren’t calling me Robot and laughing was a rarest occurrence. They would say in the style of Bengali-dubbed RoboCop, “The number of criminals in the city has increased. We must find them,” and so on… And laughter would roll. One day it was going on like that. Girls were making fun of me at Kamrul Hasan Sir’s private tutoring. Sir hadn’t arrived yet. At that time I used to carry around Bengali dictionaries, Cholontika, Bongiya Shabdakosh, Jothashobdo and such. The house was packed with all kinds of fiction and non-fiction. I could write Bengali in a very difficult style. Everyone made fun of this too. They would say, “Thrilling Robot!” We had ‘Shakuntala’ as our text. That day the girls were saying, “Why doesn’t our King Dushyanta come? Has our RoboCop gone on a mission?” Shotoabdi was there. She shouted, “Don’t talk nonsense! Just because he doesn’t pay attention to you doesn’t mean you can say whatever you want! What harm has he done to you?” The girls stirred up trouble: “Oh dear! Poor Shakuntala! The king won’t even remember you! Hehe…” I heard this incident later from one of my friends.
Talking with Shatabrdi always made me feel somehow uncomfortable. She was a girl, for one thing, and she spoke in perfect, standard pronunciation. Her family home was in the other Bengal, near Santiniketan. After our college classes ended and before our tutor’s private lessons began, we had plenty of time on our hands. We’d go to where the tutor taught and wait outside for him, chatting and gossiping. On days when we had statistics tutoring, Shatabrdi would skip her last class at college and come running to talk with me. I was intensely idealistic in those days. One day I was telling her in conversation that I didn’t like riding in cars paid for by my father’s money. It lacks self-respect. From that day on, she never came by car again—she’d come by rickshaw. The sandals she wore weren’t completely flat—the back was a little raised—but you couldn’t really call them “heels.” She didn’t need to wear heels anyway; her height was close to mine. I was about five-nine then, I think. I’d casually mentioned to her one day that I didn’t like girls wearing heels. After that, she always wore completely flat sandals. I used to wear a decorative conch shell ring on my left ring finger just for fun. Seeing mine, she too had gotten a similar ring from Calcutta, so that seeing one of us would remind people of the other. This made me angry, and right in front of her I pulled off my ring and threw it away. She cried a lot that day, her lips trembling. I made her cry even more. I used to carry Gitabitan in my bag then, to read secretly during breaks between classes. She knew this. She already sang Rabindrasangeet, and to make me happy, she’d started reading Rabindranath too. On my birthday, without telling me, she bought me a Sanchayita. I didn’t like receiving gifts from anyone—certainly not from a girl. When she brought it and put it in my hands, I reacted violently and returned the Sanchayita like a fool to a teenage girl whose tears were rolling down her rosy cheeks like pearls, soaking her chin. Ugh! What cruelty! Can you imagine! One day I couldn’t attend Kabir sir’s English class because of fever. That day the teacher had given quite a few notes. She had photocopied two sets—one for herself, one for me. When I went to class two days later, she came to give me the notes with a very happy face, and I said, “Why did you photocopy them? I’ll do it myself. I don’t need yours.” Even after she pleaded sorrowfully, I didn’t take it from her. What an impossibly intense middle-class sense of pride I lived with that hurt people! Does that make any sense? Now I think, how terribly rude I was in those days! Yet even after all this, she didn’t leave me. How could she? She was in love! Let me tell you about one day. We were coming out from Hasan sir’s house, picking up sheets from the photocopy shop, crossing the street. Suddenly my old sandal somehow tore. Everyone started laughing about it. She said irritably, “What’s your problem? Why do you have to laugh so disgustingly when a boy’s sandal tears?” Then she threw her own pair of sandals into the drain beside us and started walking barefoot. When I was studying for HSC, I kept long hair, often wore punjabis—I was possessed by Michael’s ghost. One day she brought me a fine white punjabi. She said, “I bought this entirely with my own money. I saved up the rickshaw fare money that mama gave me and bought it. It’ll look great on you. Take it, please take it.” In exchange for this boundless love, I made her cry again, as usual. All her hurt would search for language in her sad, magical eyes. Hard to look at—once you looked, you only wanted to keep looking.
Later I thought countless times: didn’t I love her? I did love her! Very much! So much! Then why did I always push her away? Because mother would scold me if she found out? Thinking about what people would say? Because everyone would call me a bad boy if I fell in love? Thinking it would harm my studies? Was I afraid of girls? Had I assumed I was superior—that no girl deserved me? Or was I afraid that love would hurt my results? She had no fault. She had only loved. That’s all—she only wanted love, nothing else. Wanting love from the wrong person is a great mistake. It only increases suffering. Most importantly, she wanted me not in her way, but completely in my way. How much she gave up for me! Old habits, her father’s car, her aristocratic ways, the comfort of not studying—even her youthful ego! And me! Shame!
I looked for her much, much later, and I found her too. Alas! Long before this, the hand I had abandoned had started wearing conch shell bangles; the forehead that had never received a single kiss despite all her pleading had been marked with vermillion long ago. She had married in Delhi about seven years ago. Birth, death, marriage—these three are supposedly written by God. In her case, that didn’t happen. Carrying a five-month-old child, she went to the land of no return herself. Everyone says suicide—poison. The postmortem report said the same. Her husband was highly educated—graduated from IIT, master’s from IIM; he had a high-paying job, but career, alcohol, and women were his three obsessions. He had assumed that all women live only for saris and jewelry, not for love. I heard he was drug-addicted and used to beat Shatabrdi regularly. He would beat her until blood flowed from her body, until she fainted. The day she left this world, he had thrown her on the floor and kicked her chest and stomach many times. If no one else knows, I know how proud she was. She would sit quietly with her hurt, cry softly with pouting lips, and leave if necessary—but she would never try to explain her language to someone who couldn’t understand the language God had given to her eyes. Oh God! If you don’t create them so beautifully, at least give them a beautiful life.
We want the official name for such deaths to be murder, not suicide.
P.S. For obvious reasons, the character names in this story are fictional. However, the story itself may not be fictional.