Eyes of the Abyss, Mukul
The boy was standing in the corner holding on to his mother’s sari. He was trying to avoid my gaze. I couldn’t help but notice his ashen face and his skinny legs. He was dressed in my childhood clothes. I recognized the rabbit applique on my favorite shirt. My grandma had stitched it for me. You couldn’t overlook my name embroidered on the shirt in bold red. The boy didn’t seem to mind. It didn’t matter to him. Couldn’t he read? Couldn’t he tell whether it was his name or mine? Was someone playing a prank on him? I gazed at him for a long time. I
noticed his eyes. They were the most opaque eyes I had ever seen. His eyes were on me. It
seemed to linger a little longer on my iPhone. I almost sensed a longing in those eyes. My
grandma came in with a bottle of Johnson baby lotion. She started to massage some on my face.
She said it looked dry. No one noticed that his face was dry too. My grandma announced with
great fanfare that her grandson had arrived from US last night. That was my first encounter with
Mukul. We visited my grandma’s home in Calcutta during summer vacation. I went there for
three weeks. My mother couldn’t get more vacation than that. Mukul and his mother had come to stay in my grandma’s house for good. They were refugees from Bangladesh. I overhead my
grandma tell my mother that she felt an uncanny feeling of familiarity when Mukul and his
mother came knocking on her door one hot afternoon. It was blazing hot and they had knocked
on the door hoping that someone will give them a drink and their thirst will be quenched. They
had come a long way on foot. My grandma had inquired from where. To her surprise she found
that they had come from a village really close to her village in Bangladesh. The boy was covered
with dust and his bare body was full of prickly heat from the unbearable heat. My grandma’s
eyes couldn’t stop the downpour. Mukul’s mother was alarmed, but my grandma assured her that
she had come to the right house for water. She had come to a long lost kin’s house. She was safe
and so was her son. Mukul’s mother had fallen on her knees and prayed to God for her good
fortune. She had called my grandma, Didi, which means elder sister and had fainted on her feet.
My mother chided my grandma for trusting strangers. My grandma had laughed and said, “Now you are the stranger”. They had fulfilled the void left behind by my mother. Mukul made her
forget the emptiness created in the long absences during two summer vacations. Every day during my summer vacation, Mukul would come in the morning with his mother from their domestic help quarters. I noticed that he wore the same shirt day after day. I liked to have him around. My other vacations were awfully lonely before he arrived. Like him I had no friends in this distant place where my parents were born and my grandparents lived. My grandma always tried to make up for that by being my constant companion. But she couldn’t play physically strenuous games. Mukul was my compatriot in hide and seek or badminton. But Mukul enjoyed freedom I couldn’t even dream of. Every morning after breakfast I had to read a book and practice my Algebra. That was my path to freedom to do as I wish in the afternoons. These were the rules set in stone by my mother. But Mukul didn’t have to go through these rigorous routines. He was just learning his alphabets. He was twelve and soon, my grandma
would enroll him in a school once she taught him the alphabets. I complained to my grandma. I
wondered why my mother couldn’t be like Mukul’s mother. She didn’t force Mukul to do math. He could play as long as his heart desired. In fact, most of the days that is what he did, while his
mother worked at my grandma’s house. I always had to finish my assigned tasks. To my surprise,
my grandma lamented Mukul’s plight. She said if only Mukul had the fortune to be born
privileged like me. Grandma narrated Mukul and his mother’s flight on foot from Bangladesh to me; the distant fairyland she always talked about where she had spent her childhood. The mangoes were riper there; the Hilsa fish melted in your mouth like butter and everything else was in suchabundance. Her stories about her school next to the Padma river, where she could spy on boatmen plying their boats lazily, made me long for a classroom like that. My classroom had two windows but there was nothing so exciting outside. Grandma had to leave her village in Bangladesh right after the partition of Bengal. She had to trek a long way from Bangladesh on foot like Mukul after civil riots. She had to leave everyone she knew and start life in India. I had
witnessed the deep abyss in her eyes when she told me those stories about Bangladesh and the
long perilous trek she undertook to cross Indo-Bangla border and seek refuge in India. Every
night when she tucked me in bed she would narrate one incident, one memory. Her family was
lucky because they had property in the undivided Bengal on the Indian side, but Mukul’s didn’t. Mukul almost always interjected with one of his reminisces of his village and his friends.
BY: Veda Chanda