Chapter 3: The Night He Came Home Wrong
It was maybe half past eight, full dark, when we heard him at the gate. Normally my mesho announced himself loudly and cheerfully from thirty feet away, calling out to whichever of us happened to be sitting on the verandah, usually with some comment about the size of his catch or a complaint about a torn net. That night there was no calling out. There was just the gate creaking, and then a long silence, and then a strange, uneven shuffling sound on the path, a sound that made my aunt put down the ladle she was holding and walk out to the verandah with an expression I had never seen on her face before — not quite fear yet, but the very beginning of it, the moment right before fear, when your body already knows something your mind hasn't caught up to.
He came into the lantern light bent forward at an angle that didn't look natural for a grown man walking normally, his shoulders hunched up almost to his ears, both hands reaching back and clutching at his own shirt near his shoulder blades as though he were trying to hold something in place, or push something off, we genuinely couldn't tell which. His fishing basket was gone entirely — we never did find out what happened to it, whether he dropped it or left it behind on purpose. His clothes were soaked through, not just damp from the usual splash of fishing but properly wet, as if he'd been fully submerged, and there was pond weed — that same fine, dark weed you find in still, deep water — tangled in his hair and caught on his collar.
But it was his face that I remember most clearly, even now, even after everything else has blurred a little with time. His eyes were open too wide, the whites showing all the way around, and he was staring straight ahead at nothing, not at any of us, not at the house, just at some fixed point in the middle distance that none of the rest of us could see. And he was talking — not to us, not really to anyone, in a low, continuous, exhausted murmur, the same handful of words over and over, so quiet at first that my aunt had to lean in close to make them out.
"Bhari," he was saying. "Khub bhari. Amake namao. Please namao amake."
Heavy. So heavy. Let me put it down. Please let me put it down.
My aunt screamed for my mother, and my mother came running from the kitchen with flour still on her hands, and between the two of them they managed to get him up the two verandah steps — and I remember this part specifically because it frightened me more than almost anything else that happened that whole night — the moment his foot crossed the threshold of the front door, where there was an old iron hinge bolted into the frame, he let out a sound that wasn't a scream exactly, more like the sound of someone having something enormous and sudden torn away from between their shoulder blades, a kind of full-body flinch that nearly knocked my mother backward, and then his knees simply gave out from under him and he collapsed onto the floor of the front room, unconscious, breathing but completely unresponsive, and stayed that way for almost eleven hours.
I won't pretend the rest of that night was orderly or that anyone knew exactly what to do. My aunt wanted to run for the local doctor immediately, and my mother wanted to run for Rotan Kaka, and for a few minutes those two impulses were pulling in completely opposite directions across the room while my mesho lay unconscious on the floor between them, still faintly murmuring that same word — bhari, bhari — even in whatever state of unconsciousness he was in. In the end my mother went herself, at nearly nine at night, walking the two houses down to fetch Rotan Kaka, because some instinct in her, some inherited village knowledge that her Kolkata-raised children didn't share, told her that this wasn't a doctor's kind of sickness.
Rotan Kaka came immediately, without even properly putting on his outdoor shirt, moving faster with his bad leg than I had ever seen him move before. He took one look at my mesho lying on the floor — at the wet clothes, the weed in his hair, the position of his hands, still curled as though clutching at something on his own back even in unconsciousness — and his face went very still and very serious in a way that scared me more than the screaming had.
"Someone bring mustard oil," he said. "And salt. And find every piece of iron you have in this house — kitchen knives, the tongs, anything — and put them around him, close to his body, but don't let them touch his skin directly, do you understand? Around him, not on him."
My brother and I were sent to gather these things, glad honestly to have something to do with our shaking hands, and while we worked Rotan Kaka knelt beside my mesho and did something I had never seen before and have never seen since — he leaned very close to my mesho's ear, close enough that his lips almost touched it, and began speaking, low and rapid, in old-fashioned formal Bengali, words I only half-understood, something about a name, an accounting, a debt, and permission being neither given nor needed for a man to walk home to his own family.
It was nearly two in the morning before my mesho's breathing changed from that shallow, murmuring unconsciousness into something closer to ordinary sleep, and it was not until almost seven the next morning that he opened his eyes properly and looked at us — really looked, recognizing us — for the first time since he had staggered through that gate the night before.