WHEN YOU SAY NOTHING AT ALL

This weekend I was sitting and watching a Bengali movie on Amazon Prime. The protagonist’s role was being played by one of my favourite actors, Soumitra Chatterjee. This was probably one of the thespian’s last performances. It hardly seemed like he was acting, it was all too natural.  A simple story about friendship, integrity, principles and some values lost in time. A cynical, old man, for whom self respect is everything, gets on with only three people and they happen to be his bedridden wife, who soon leaves him alone in the world, his old school friend and his youngest grandson. His three children feel that their father never used his contacts or else each of them would have climbed the social ladder much further, their father’s strong principles and integrity had got them nowhere. Their prime accusation against him was that he neither made use of his position and contacts to go places nor did he use them for furthering the cause of his children or grandchildren. There was nothing great about the story centred on this middle class family but somehow it rang a bell somewhere and certain words and expressions the protagonist used reminded me of my own father. But what really came out beautifully was the friendship between the two octogenarians who had been friends since their schooldays and there again I was reminded of another such devoted friend.

Kanai Kaku (Kaku being the Bengali word for paternal uncle) is what we called him. As far as my memory goes, I can still see him reclining in an armchair next to my father. One of them is following a match on the television while the other is scanning the newspaper.  I asked my mother, “Don’t they talk to each other?” Ma replied, “Of course they do, but they can also sit for hours without exchanging a single word.” Being a chatterbox schoolgirl at that time, this was truly incomprehensible to me. Every evening, after office, Kanai Kaku would come to our house overlooking the River Hooghly in Garden Reach. Whether Baba was early or late in returning, whether he was on tour or not, it did not matter, he would wait patiently for him. Together they would enjoy their cups of tea and evening snacks, watch a match, exchange views on some headlines of the day, sometimes argue or simply sit quietly without saying a word. Kanai was his old school friend from the Government School they attended together. Baba was a self made man, having lost his father at four. His grandfather had said that with his meager pension he would be able to take care of the education of his eldest grandson. So the younger grandson knew from an early age that he would have to make his way in life through scholarships and hard work. So working and studying simultaneously from the age of sixteen, he completed his post-graduation and then went on to become a Chartered Accountant and, finally, after clearing the UPSC examination, he joined the Indian Railway Accounts Service (IRAS). His friend Kanai, who also had his own cross to bear, was by then working for the Indian Railways too.

Kanai Kaku was tall and thin, with a fast receding hairline, always dressed in his spotless white dhoti and crisp cotton or khadi kurta. Kanai Kaku was a bachelor, who never married as he was asthmatic, and lived with his elder brother and his family. He helped raise his nieces and nephews, who took good care of him in his later years too. My mother always spoke very highly of this family and told me how Kanai Kaku’s elder brother and his wife had taken her under their wings when she first set up her marital home. Kanai Kaku’s nieces and nephews, two of whom were studying Medicine and Dentistry, were closer to her in age and were her first friends in the Railway Colony in Garden Reach.

My father’s job took him all over India while Kanai Kaku remained in Calcutta but their friendship survived all the transfers and travels. 

Kanai Kaku visited us in many of the places where Baba was posted. Once he came to stay with us for a few days in Durgapur where Baba had shifted on a deputation. Kanai Kaku had his own quirks and idiosyncrasies and as we grew older we came to be quite familiar with them and often laughed about them behind the two friends’ backs. My mother was a good cook and generally her culinary skills were appreciated by all and even the cooks working under her supervision served mouthwatering platter to the guests. So at a Sunday lunch, Ma asked him, “Did you enjoy the mutton dish? Would you like some more?” Kanai Kaku’s reply came, “No it’s not cooked well- too bland.” We were quite taken aback and both my brother and I tried hard to stifle our giggles on seeing the expression on Ma’s face and anticipating the explosion that would follow. As luck would have it, the next morning Ma found a carelessly thrown cash memo, in the corner of the verandah, which turned out to be a bill for a plate of mutton cutlet from a local eatery! He must have tried their bestseller on his way back from the evening walk. I leave the rest to the imagination of my readers for, as is well known, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

Anyway, these minor setbacks never came in the way of the two friends and Kanai Kaku kept up his visits the frequency depending upon the proximity of the place of my father’s postings to Calcutta. Once, when my mother was hospitalized and had to undergo surgery, one of the most regular visitors, apart from the family, was Kanai Kaku . Every evening as soon as the doors opened for the visitors he would reach with  a tiny box containing two diabetic sandesh ( sugar-free or made with some sugar substitute) as in the course of the hospital investigations she had been tested to be borderline diabetic. He was so punctual that the nurse in charge asked, “That man, in white dhoti kurta, who comes to visit you every day…is he your elder brother?” And my mother’s reply was, “You couldn’t have been more right.” That was Kanai Kaku… not one to land up with expensive gifts or fancy stuff… but suddenly he would appear with a bunch of rajnigandhas  on my parents’ anniversary, or may be a pot of rosogollas to celebrate my passing high school, or piping hot pakoras wrapped in newspaper on a rainy day. I can recall so many evenings when we would go off to a movie or go shopping leaving the two friends glued to the TV screens watching a football match or each doing his own reading without bothering to exchange a word. Many a times the whole family would go off to attend some social event and Kanai Kaku would not mind being attended to by our Man Friday, Bhola or Shankar or even being left alone. Now I realize we were his family, not his friend’s family.

He was there beside us when our father suffered his first heart attack. He was there sitting beside my father when we lost our grandmother.  He was there when my father built his house, post his retirement, in the same ancestral town from where the two boys had begun their journey. By then Kanai Kaku’s nephews had also shifted back there and he had moved in with them. One day I returned from the university to find my father sitting with his head bowed down in the verandah of our house while the evening darkness crept in. He had not turned on the lights. I asked my mother what had happened. She replied, “Kanaida is no more. He just came back from there.”

I remember my father always wore trousers and shirts, occasionally formal suits and the Jodhpuri bandhgala when officialdom demanded, and kurta-pyjamas while at home. We rarely saw him in dhoti- kurta except for family weddings, that too of very close ones. But on the day he passed away he put on a dhoti-kurta early morning to attend a Tagore birth anniversary celebration organized by his old school. Everyone who saw him that day commented that he looked good, for he was a truly handsome man. And within a few hours he was gone. The doctor who certified his death was his friend Kanai’s nephew. I never got a chance to say goodbye, none of us did. Perhaps he had dressed that way specially to meet his friend up there.

DS