The Miraculous Phantom and His Beautiful Companion
Translated from the Bengali by V. Ramaswamy
It was three minutes past midnight. Autumn. Nine days remained for the beginning of Durga Puja. In a tiny room in Santoshpur bazaar, near Metiabruz, a twenty or twenty-one-year-old girl stitched away on a sewing machine, making a red checked T-shirt. Her shoulders almost touched her hands as she hunched forward, doing her work with great care. Her eyes weary and fingers stiff after a whole day’s hard labour, the stitching went awry, and in every fibre of her being she knew she would have to pay the price for it. She had been working for almost eighteen hours and this was her fourth shirt. Of course a little time went in bathing and meals. She had an arrangement with a shop on Lindsay Street. She got about two-and-a-half rupees per shirt, although the shop charged its customers eighteen rupees. Behind her, a few yards away, stood Phantom, the superhero. Wearing something like striped underpants, a pistol on his hip, blazing eyes on a massive body, he brought peace wherever he went, his faithful dog always behind him. Tell me: what’s the name of Phantom’s dog? Yellowish light hovered now on the muscles of Phantom – symbol of the defeat of evil-doers and the nurturing of good-folk. The light came from a thin candle placed beside the girl’s sewing machine. All along, between them, between the ever- stitching girl and Phantom, all along, a page from Anandabazar Patrika swayed in the gentle breeze – it fluttered in the breeze – a companion page to the matrimonial page: Seeking a female friend to spend my retirement with, age between eighteen and twenty-two, must be beautiful. The newspaper page swayed in the gentle breeze, cut out from Anandabazar Patrika – I have been seeing so many strange desires and wishes seeking fulfilment in your much- publicised newspaper advertisements – job-land-flat-matrimonial-tutor-pen- pal – and so another new desire is added now: Seeking a female friend. Some sought openly, the language used: Seeking a female friend. In last Sunday’s paper, at least two dozen advertisers sought female friends or companions. One of them explained the reason for his desire in this way: a cheerful, golden-voiced female friend, free of all sanskars, to fill an industrialist’s days of retirement with song and unfettered joy. The other advertisers did not explain their need, but if unfettered joy was a permissible reason, then, it can be borne in mind, that is because there’s not an iota of matrimonial intent... So there’s no end to the desires and wishes seeking fulfilment, especially when there is in currency the expression that if you put money on the table you can even get tiger’s milk in this country.
Hey – did Mohun Bagan depend principally on Prasun all these days? I think so! In last Saturday’s big match, while struggling against the other side, Prasun pulled his hamstring. Throwing supporters into deep gloom, and notwithstanding his strong reluctance to do so, he had to go off to rest. There have been four games after that. And in all the four matches it was clear that without Prasun, Mohun Bagan were simply floundering.
Visible in the background, close by, was the old bullock, fettered. It had a bad wound on its shoulder. Flies kept sitting on the wound and the bullock kept trying to drive away the flies with swipes of its tail.
Free of everyday tiredness and fatigue, the great mighty one, Phantom, combined in his person rebel and ruler, beyond competition, transcending all social regulations and prohibitions. In this way, slowly, without anyone knowing it, the seeds of romantic rebellion are sown within us. It goes without saying that this symbol of freedom, Phantom,
In 1961, Tarzan books were removed from the library of a school in California on the complaint that he was living together unlawfully with Jane, without marrying her, and Tarzan fans from different parts of the world – they were a few million in number – were shocked. Quite a few teenage boys and girls in Europe and America went on a fast. A debate began. Scholars went into action. Poring through the pages, they proved that Tarzan and Jane were married in 1915 in The Return of Tarzan. A large number of people in the world heaved a sigh of relief, many began dancing in the open as they took to the streets, threw parties, fountains of booze flowed and a holiday was declared in schools and colleges on the occasion of this festival. This brought such an immense demand for the Tarzan books that the publishers were unable to meet the demand even after working the press all day to print new editions.
All the supernatural impossibilities that we can’t ever render possible lay in the palm of his hand, and were performed with ease. Through the medium of films, television and comics, this protean prophet was transformed into one of the cult figures of this age – he keeps rescuing beautiful Jane from the alligator’s jaws, the female body with scantily concealed breasts and buttocks, Jane... He was He-Man, captivating the modern age, a supernatural sex symbol...
A short distance from the bungalow was a forest, dense with saal trees. There was a stream beside the forest, and across the water a clump of kaash, almost touching the bank. The water was about knee-deep. The bed of the stream consisted of sand and pebbles. Their jeep stood nearby.
Light was rising steadily over the sky, trees and earth. The come-for- fun babu and bibi were sleeping in the bungalow. They’d sleep till ten or eleven in the morning. After lunch the jeep would set off towards Calcutta. The hill-boy came to sell chickens and milk to the babus in the dak bungalow. Learning that the babu-bibi would not open the door before ten, he felt dejected. Danced naked all night long... and boisterous drunken revelry... only went to sleep at dawn.
Temptation
Sin
Destruction
Is the Formula alright
Check it out
At about twelve at night on Saturday, a youth named Motilal was driving a jeep and entering Calcutta via Howrah Bridge. Beside him was a young woman, Aloka, twenty-one, and on the rear seat was Rajinder Singh. There was a gentle breeze, winter was setting in. Rajinder imagines: Will you have the suit collected from Bandbox Drycleaners? The Mrs, having just finished dinner, was applying cream on her face and chewing a cardamom pod. She asks: Cardamom, want one? That’s when the accident happened. As the jeep turned at the Brabourne Road intersection, it suddenly banged into a concrete post. Going out of control, it then banged into another post nearby. The front of the jeep was badly smashed. There had been a loud crashing sound, people from all directions came running, although there weren’t many people at that time of night. The first to arrive was a rickshaw-wallah wearing striped- underpants. He was at the roadside, making rotis on a stove after day-long labour, his body exhausted. All his rotis were burnt to cinders. A large piece of glass had pierced Aloka Ghoshal’s throat. At first nobody in any of the cars passing by wanted to get involved in any unnecessary hassle, they kept speeding past, merely craning their necks to size up the situation. A little later, a Punjabi taxi driver was forcibly stopped. After the three persons were taken in their injured state to PG Hospital, Aloka Ghoshal was declared dead. The other two persons left the hospital after primary medical care to inform the deceased’s family. They did not return. Later the police found out that all the identity details provided by them were false. The mystery deepened in the city. Who were they? Where had they gone? Who was the girl? The number plate on the jeep was from Bihar. Both the men had been wearing expensive clothes. Their faces looked tired, as if they hadn’t slept all night. The girl’s face too. The nurse had seen wads of notes in the tall man’s wallet. The girl wore an expensive silk sari, but it was crumpled all over. A new blouse, brand new, a bit too tight, it looked as if it had been bought recently, it smelled new. Dirt under her neck. A new bra. Three petticoats under the sari, the one on top made of silk, a bright red, that was new too, and of the two underneath, the lower one was quite old, the stitching had come apart in a few places.
In this way, exactly this happened, but
the story could also be different – that is to say, the girl
did not die then –
After reading the advertisement in the Anandabazar Patrika, she called the specified phone number with trembling hands. She was given the address of a flat on Camac Street and a time to arrive there. The girl hesitated at first, but finally she went. Here, needless to say, the description of the girl’s family situation is left out – readers, you already know about all that. She had no other option besides this. The gentleman advertiser – actually he was over forty years of age, he had a thirteen-year-old son – saw the girl, her fresh dark-skinned virginal body and figure – everything in this city is second-hand – damn – he craved for a babe exactly like her. Actually the man – Arunangshu Dutta Choudhury, industrialist – despite being of his class, was somewhat different – he had a master’s degree in economics, had lived for several years in the United States, kept himself informed about everything in the contemporary world, on Gurudev’s birthday, at dawn, wearing a sparkling dhoti-punjabi and parking the car at a distance, he walked towards Rabindra Sadan, and most of all, he had read Marx and adhered to it too, especially euro-communism. He knew that millions of people in Calcutta lived in bastis, and it pricked his conscience to keep a poor girl as an object of pleasure merely with the power of his money, without giving anything in return. Simply identifying the man by his class was an over-simplification...
Given his elite credentials, his gentlemanly conduct, and the fact that he was also good-looking, ordinary girls would definitely fall in love with him. And this girl’s youthfulness and fickle mind, she had no notion at all about life’s dilemmas, whatever she knew came only from watching cheap Hindi films and imitating that
... I’m terribly lonely... too lonely...
... Hold your tongue and let me
love...
An ancient bungalow with a huge compound, a tennis court behind the garden-house, a badminton court on the left, a red pathway of crushed brick in the middle, a spacious dining hall, at least six hundred square feet, with antique furniture, a piano, paintings on the wall – in the middle, a Kashmiri carpet spanning about two hundred square feet.
The man pulled the handle on the door of the cellar, there were expensive bottles of scotch whiskey inside... and bottles of cognac and wine
The man, Arunangshu Dutta Choudhury, was pouring whiskey from the bottle for the girl...
The man: Mister Writer, I am so sorry for you, will you ever be able to think and fathom what side I will take, and at what stage, when the time of killing arrives... Think about it, writer.
And then, from behind the scenes, Ramayan Chamar blazes up, a terrifying pair of eyes, sunk deep beneath his forehead, the region between his thighs covered with angry red sores, part them and take a look, you’ll see it all... how much longer, how many more days, with these people.
Subimal Misra is a Bengali writer and lives in Kolkata. A retired teacher, he taught for many years in a school near Sonagachi, Kolkata’s infamous red-light district. He has written exclusively for little magazines since 1967. Departing from conventional narrative form, as a self-professed disciple of filmmakers Sergei Eisenstein and Jean-Luc Godard, Misra sought to introduce film language into Bengali literature. His stories and novels are often referred to as ‘anti-stories’ and ‘anti-novels’. He is known to write ‘with venom instead of ink’, for his scathing social critique and the ‘planned violence’ on the reader. Misra is considered the only anti-establishment writer in Bengali literature, and the father of the experimental novel in Bengali. About thirty volumes of his stories, novels and essays have been published.
V. Ramaswamy lives in Kolkata and is engaged in a multi-volume project of translating the short fiction of the Bengali writer, Subimal Misra. The Golden Gandhi Statue from America was published in 2010, and the second volume, Wild Animals Prohibited, was published in 2015. He was a recipient of the Sarai Fellowship for urban non-fiction writing in 2013, and the Toji Cultural Foundation residency in 2015. The translator gratefully acknowledges the Ledig House writers’ residency for enabling the translation.