Batuk Batbyal’s life was as inglorious as his name, something for which he had often been derided, all the way from his school days right down to the present in the office where he worked as head clerk. A below-average student who always messed up memorised lessons at exams, Batuk was hopeless in every aspect of life. Luckily he got a clerk’s job right after his graduation through his father’s connections.
His father had been a contractor who supplied sand and stone-chips for building construction. He wanted Batuk to become a college lecturer, and bring glory to the family in a pedagogic profession. Batuk failed his father, like he failed almost everyone else at different points in life. Having lost his mother at the age of nine, Batuk never knew any other woman before the arranged marriage with the woman who became his wife; she saw through him quickly and started despising his weakness and anxiety attacks. They had two sons, both cleverer than Batuk, who looked nothing like him, who soon learnt that their father wasn’t anyone worth respecting or even paying attention to.
Growing up in an old and decrepit neighbourhood in North Kolkata marred by mosquitoes, long power-cuts, and waterlogged lanes, Batuk had not seen much of the world outside except for occasional trips to the sea towns of Digha and Puri. He had seven more years to go before retirement, having been promoted to the second-highest position available in his wing to someone with his educational qualification.
His sons – one year apart from each other – were both studying computer engineering in private colleges for which Batuk had to take massive loans.
He went to the office taking a tram every single day, number 23, always sitting in the second-class compartment, which cost him two rupees less. He had tea twice a day. Paid all his bills on time. Never smoked or drank. Had mostly rice and potato gravy for lunch at the office.
Batuk Batbyal had one out-of-the-ordinary habit. He bought lottery tickets every week, trying his luck at getting rich, making the kind of money that he could only dream of. He did this secretly, fearing resentment and wrath from his wife. He always bought his tickets from the same shop, two corners away from his tram stop, where nobody from his family would ever visit. He changed lottery companies frequently, running various complex combinations in his mind, praying to his family gods each time. He always bought tickets worth fifty rupees, always paying in cash, not wanting to make any visible change in the monthly budget which was given to him. The most he had ever won was five hundred rupees, an amount which had seemed astonishingly big that time when he first saw the result in the newspaper. He hadn’t known what to do with that money at first, till he realised he could use it to pay for new lottery tickets.
The man Batuk bought lottery tickets from was called Panchanan, a chain-smoking betel-chewing figure who could be anything between thirty-five and fifty-five years of age. They seldom spoke; Batuk would mostly go there with the name of a lottery and ask for a ticket worth fifty rupees, and Panchanan would spit his betel out on the ground to murmur a half-greeting, get up from his pillow and unclip the ticket from the line, checking the price before handing it over to Batuk who would walk away immediately after paying; a transaction ritual that had run for almost half a decade.
Something happened one evening when Batuk was returning from office in tram number 23.
He’d had a not-so-normal afternoon in the workplace. A colleague whose son had won a scholarship to do PhD in biochemistry in the USA had brought a pot of rosogollas, something Batuk was forbidden from eating at home, due to his diabetes, indigestion, and much else. Not sure if he actually shared his colleague’s happiness, Batuk had eaten two pieces of the sweet, followed by an extra cup of sweet tea from the office canteen.
As he left the office, he thought of his own sons, wondering whether they too would make it just as big, bigger than what he had been able to achieve. He walked to his tram stop and waited for the number 23 to come, boarding the second-class compartment at 6:35 pm. He had stared at his watch then.
The wooden bench he sat on in the tram was mostly stained with tea and betel juice and Batuk did his best to avoid touching anything with his hands or bag. He spotted a newspaper someone had left behind and thought of using that as a shield from the stains. It was a strange colour, the newspaper, and Batuk had a sudden urge to open it fully and check what was inside. As was his habit, he went straight to the page where lottery prizes were announced and checked the familiar names of the licensed lottery companies which issued tickets and gave prizes: Lakshmi, Minerva, Mahadeb, Durga. Noting the numbers casually, Batuk realised that none belonged to the ticket he had bought recently. He put the paper down, folding it back to the front page. He looked at it again, focusing on the strange yellow colour, before spotting the date.
The date printed on the paper was 17 June. That of the next day.
Batuk could not process this for a few seconds; he picked up the paper, holding it so hard that it crumpled in his palm. He looked at it more closely this time, realising it had only the front page, which was filled with advertisements and the lottery result page, with no news stories anywhere else. He checked the date again on both pages. It was 17 June. The date of the next day.
Getting off the tram two stops before his home, Batuk almost ran to Panchanan’s shop, clutching on to the crumpled newspaper with the strange yellow colour. He panted as he asked for the ticket numbers he had noted down, three in total, surprising Panchanan to such an extent that he forgot to spit out his betel. Taking all three tickets, Batuk almost darted away before Panchanan leapt from his pillow and screamed at him for the money. After handing in all the notes he had in his wallet, Batuk started walking back to his home like a paper boat in a puddle, wobbling without agency.
He was about to make it.
About to become very rich.
About to get respect from his wife, sons, and colleagues.
On reaching home, he called for a cup of tea, something outside of his routine, much to the surprise of everybody. But there was something in his voice, that commanded something like reverence. He was listened to. Obeyed.
He sat down to have dinner and asked for an extra chapati, something he never did or was allowed to do. Again, he was obeyed. Batuk felt bigger, stronger. More muscled.
Before going to sleep, he thought of the only memory of triumph from his childhood, the winning goal from a perfect volley he scored with his right foot for his North Kolkata neighbourhood team in a football match where he came in as a substitute. He remembered the touch and sound of his foot kicking the ball, the swish with which it swung and cut into the air before crashing into the net from what must have been at least fifteen yards, the celebration afterwards where he was carried on the shoulders of his team-mates, who poured Coca-Cola on him. He felt like a hero then and his father smiled at him from their window, proud of him perhaps for the only time in his life. As he dozed off, Batuk Batbyal dreamt of the life that was to unfold ahead. He would have a garden full of flowers of all kinds, whose smells would remind him of his mother who used to wear flowers in her hair, especially when she sang. Batuk loved listening to his mother sing although he had difficulty remembering her voice. He remembered his mother best through those flower smells. Now he could grow them all and feel his mother close again.
On waking up the next morning, Batuk experienced a warm wave throbbing inside his head, even as he still lay on the bed. Something strong and shrill, something electric passed between his ears, again and again. It was 7 am. He tiptoed down and opened the main gate to pick up the newspaper. 17 June. Not yellow but fresh from the press. He walked past the kitchen and asked for his cup of tea, rustling up the voice from the previous evening, still sounding like someone respectable.
He then sat down and opened the paper, the corners crackling at the touch of his fingers. The front page had the news of a major share collapse, some big company was suddenly shutting down, crashing, liquidating all assets. He turned to the lottery page inside to look at the results. He had memorised the three numbers by then.
They were not there in the winning list, or in any list.
Batuk looked again. And again. The winning numbers were different, distant, alien.
Breathing heavily, he put the newspaper back and went up to his bedroom, brought out the crumpled yellow paper from his trouser pocket and tiptoed down again. He spread it out on the table and saw that it had turned to an advertisement for a memory clinic someplace which claimed to improve memory through alternate medicines and experimental therapy. There was no lottery, no winning numbers, no date, just a brochure for a memory-enhancing place. Batuk crumpled the paper back again.
A cold cup of tea was rudely and roughly kept beside him, so hard that it spilled over onto the newspaper open in front, the real one, with the news of a major share crash. His wife was reminding him that the electricity bill had not been paid and that he was given the money to do so the previous day. Batuk’s mind meandered away, across the smells slipping away from the flower garden he would never have, like the mother he had lost, failing again, across the fading faces of friends who carried him and sprayed him with Coca-Cola bottles after he scored that goal. His only winning shot in life.
*
Avishek Parui is an Associate Professor in English at IIT Madras and Associate Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy. A faculty coordinator of the Centre for Memory Studies at IIT Madras and founding chairperson of the Indian Network for Memory Studies (INMS), he researches and publishes on memory studies. He is the author of Postmodern Literatures, Orient Blackswan, 2018, and Culture and the Literary: Matter, Metaphor, Memory, Rowman & Littlefield, 2022.