One time, an Indian gypsy woman told Jibrail Mithu, ‘Come with me, I’ll give you lots of money. Will you come?’ There’s no end to the number of times Jibrail Mithu told me this story. Every time I would say, at the beginning, ‘What did you tell her?’ An animated Jibrail Mithu would respond, ‘You think she waited for my answer? She had my arm in an iron grip. Leaning over the counter. I was terrified. Her pomegranate skin had turned coppery with the sun. And her voluptuous body! Heavy, unrestrained breasts trying to break out of her purple blouse. She was so close to me that I thought she was going to thrust them against my face. And her body gave off a fragrance that was getting me high, saptaparni or nagkesar. The scent of nagkesar hung over the entire shop, the kind that stays on in the folds of each and every book. You cannot imagine such a fragrance. As though she had raked her body over a heap of flowers all night and then come over directly upon waking up.
‘There was no one anywhere. It was Ramzan. Not a person to be seen on Bailey Road. It was summer. June, probably. No sales. The manager hadn’t come to work. Rubel had gone home to eat, and was showing no signs of returning. I was in the shop alone when she came in. Lighting up the entire showroom in her purple-blue-green skirt. A belt around her waist, a dagger in a case tucked into it, no garments around her breasts except the blouse, her hair pulled back tightly and tied. The colourful cloth covering her head was dangling in a braid down her back. Around her neck she wore amulets and a seven-strand necklace of coins and multicoloured glass beads. A clump of krishnachura flowers were tucked between her breasts, their crushed petals and pollen grains sticking to her chest and back, her arms and navel. There was a little fat on her soft spongy abdomen. Her body undulated sensually. How attractive she looked. And she was trying to take me away with her. She was holding my arm so hard that even as a male, not only was I not able to free myself, I was trembling. My palms and soles were sweaty, and my body felt like it was being twisted. Someone seemed to be playing the rabab within me with long drawn out strokes. Meanwhile she was saying she had lots of money, she wanted to buy me.’
Jibrail Mithu would laugh. ‘She would tell me, you don’t have to do anything, just stay with me, I’ll take care of all your needs, I’ll travel around the world with you. I have a passport? Don’t you have one?
‘I’d say, ‘yes, I do’.
‘Where’s your passport?
‘At home of course.
‘How far away is your home. Which way is it?
‘Why, it’s close to Siddheswari, the next lane.
‘By then she had grabbed my hand and pressed it against a sunken zone well below her navel, leaning closer to me and saying, let’s go to your place, let me throw you on the bed and love you. With these words the gypsy woman, this entirely accessible woman, thrust a marauding pink tongue out to lick my lips and said, will you let me savour your body? Come see how there’s a dancer singing here too. Can’t you hear her song? I was touching her vagina now, I could feel a drumming sound, a throbbing beat.’
This was where I would ask, ‘And then?’
The ‘I’ here is in fact a voiceless person, who allows Jibrail Mithu to keep talking.
‘And then?’
‘And then? She pulled me out from behind the counter, wrapping her arms around me, holding me tight. So much emotion! Such passion! She was maddened. I couldn’t free myself from her grasp. My face, my neck, my shoulders were sodden with her saliva. My chest was smarting from her scratches. She was tugging on my penis as though she wanted to detach it.
‘Once she left she wouldn’t come back for a long time, and then she would suddenly invade the shop on a deserted afternoon when there was no one there besides me. The last time she came she told me restlessly, the smile on your face sets my body on fire. If you’ll never belong to anyone why do you let me love you so wantonly? Such pretence! Caressing my face, she would say, there are more lies here than the sales of all your books. Oh lord can’t this smile of yours be buried under the earth?’
When he was done telling the gypsy woman’s tale Jibrail Mithu would turn into a self-absorbed figure. Calm and composed, he would stand in the balcony, gazing into the distance as he smoked. There wasn’t a smile on his lips anymore. Sounds floated in from a distance, sometimes snatches of songs like qawwalis. In one of the neighbouring houses the gate was being opened with a rumble. A car drove in. A baby began to cry. Perhaps its mother pushed a milky teat into its mouth to quieten it. I would look on at the glowing tip of Jibrail Mithu’s cigarette. It glowed, glowed brighter. There I was, a voiceless human, tossing and turning in my bed in Kolkata, wondering which questions to use as shutters that I could press to capture all the images of Jibrail Mithu’s inner world. Here in the glittering black night in this city, my only motive was to know him even more intimately, but Jibrail Mithu was not a forthcoming person. I had a life of conversations with him, but I sighed more than said anything. He tended to suppress himself, while I said very little. Sometimes I would ask myself, what if he sank under the weight of his own disrupted words. Many were the times I stayed upright at night, supported by pillows behind my back for fear of his sinking. Jibrail Mithu was basically a man with whom friendship was possible, but it was a friendship that could not be investigated too deeply. A relationship with him was always stalled in anticipation of an explosion. Even as his wife I would look at him the way I’d look through the window of a halted train at a man stuck in the rain beneath a bridge. Leaning against the moss-covered wall of the bridge with its bricks exposed, while his cycle kept toppling over in the wind. He was distant. Always.
But once in a while Jibrail Mithu would remove the foam from his beer and allow me to wet my lips on the liquid. Holding my jaws lightly, he would bring his mug towards me as though offering a naive little girl a sip from a secret personal collection, all right, take a sip, take a large sip. Poor thing, he wasn’t quite completely drunk on such days. When this happened he would become garrulous, whenever he wasn’t overcome by drunkenness he would behave in this wayward fashion. And his stories from Strada Afosa would drift down from his temporarily tender breast on my wound. It seemed to me he was using a pulley to lift the stories with great care, along with a cluster of fireflies. Strada Afosa means Sultry Road in Italian. An old, faded book with this name was kept in the window display of Jibrail Mithu’s bookshop. A book no one had ever bought, a book no one probably even knew of, and therefore did not enquire about. A book that Jibrail Mithu had rescued from neglect in a second hand bookshop in Kolkata’s Sudder Street, taken to Dhaka, and placed within his own view. Jibrail Mithu would pull books out of the crevices of College Street and New Market and Sudder Street in Kolkata. I had even seen him burst into tears on locating particular books. As though a piece of his heart had been missing till then. One day he was hell-bent on cooking for the person who delivered books to the house. He would buy some of the books for himself, but then put them on display in the bookshop. Having learnt all there was to know about the book, having gathered all the readings that had come before or after, he would put on a milk-white silk kurta and some Burberry perfume, and then wait in anticipation on a slow afternoon for a bright and curious reader who would ask him endless questions about that book, all of which he would answer by joining the dots. I don’t think Jibrail Mithu would ever have agreed to sell those books to anyone, he would definitely have averted the possibility.
He knew very well how to avoid certain situations. For he spoke very little. But on those loquacious nights it had even happened that Jibrail Mithu had risen to his feet as he was telling stories in his drunken state, and begun to totter as though his knees would crumple and he would collapse on the floor, hit his head, and die. In this state he would hold his glass up and shout, tell me, what more does a fakir like me need? My Strada Afosa, my Bailey Road, my Memories of Melancholy Whores, my bookshop, my music room, my music room of books. I don’t want anything more. Then he would flip his palm over as though emptying a pot.
I went to Dhaka once after Jibrail Mithu’s death. Then came back. Then went again. Came back. Went again. Less than a week after I came back the last time, a partial lockdown was imposed. The age of corona began. When it did, it took me quite some time to wrap my head around the idea of the lockdown. My head, and that of many others like me. Worried about the future, many people began to eat fried potato peel from the outset. My concerns were about food and water. What if there was no water to drink? I had lived on bottled water all this time. It took me several days to recover from my apprehensions about what would happen if the water supply was cut off. I needed a few days more to understand the situation around me. Suddenly I realised there was no alternative but to see the familiar world in a new way. Blue masks swayed in the breeze in a corner of my living room. I remained desperate all day, for updates on the coronavirus on news channels and social media, as did everyone else like me. It seemed strange. Soon it became evident Facebook was a blind lane, where a festival of virtue was being played out round the clock. Everyone who went in there became a good person, saying good things, spoke of eating with a sprinkling of salt on the worries of starving people. They said they were being pricked by their consciences day and night because they were getting two square meals a day. News of some people who had starved to death did surface on their timelines. But because Facebook was a blind lane, there was no getting out of it in the guise of a good person. That exit route was closed. So when they went out it was to once again have coffee with cashewnuts and breathe a sigh of relief. Meanwhile migrant labourers overcame obstacles two-hundred-and-fifty miles long to either arrive at a camp or to fall into the ditch of death on the road. And, in obeisance to the cycle of seasons, dark clouds from the north west took over Kolkata’s skies. A storm sprang up, there were claps of thunder, the glass windows rang. And when the rain came, the sky was reunited with the earth, which became so soft and malleable that you could carve it with just your fingers. Amidst all this, the sight of jagged lightning splitting the sky one day made me tremble with spasms of memory. Where was Jibrail Mithu? Where was Jibrail Asad Mithu? I had forgotten to check where Jibrail Mithu was. Was Jibrail Mithu so dead that in this age of corona, in this lockdown-induced isolation, in this coronatime of ventilators, of mass graves, of the spread of poison, I had not even indulged in the luxury of speculating how Jibrail Mithu would have lived had he been alive? I was reminded at once of Nietzsche’s words, when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. At once I called Lutfunnisa to ask, where is Jibrail Mithu? Where is Jibrail Mithu in this coronatime? Where has he been hidden? I cannot wrap my head around it.
Lutfunnisa was quiet for a while, then she scolded me gently. Haven’t you seen there’s a lock on his front door? Haven’t you seen there’s a lock on his bookshop? Haven’t I shown you all of these things? Why are you behaving this way suddenly in the dead of night.
It was true that we did go to Jibrail Mithu’s Strada Afosa after his death. It was an afternoon in the first week of March. There was no dearth of people then, on Bailey Road. Dhaka’s rich and poor were jostling with one another on the street, luxury cars and horses were inching along, numerous rickshaws too, the same crowds as always, the same congestion, street snacks being sold, scores quaffing blackcurrant juice at the juice centre. With winter having ended, cold-season sweets were no longer available. There was a string of food shops opposite Jibrail Mithu’s bookstore. Cakes, patties, Chinese food, Indian food, South Indian food, nothing left out. Jaamdani silk saris worth sixty or seventy-thousand takas were selling out in the blink of an eye. There were hawkers, men transporting goods in pushcarts, women covered from top to toe in burqas, girls in jeans and hijab. There were the teachers of Viqarunnisa School in their cotton saris, along with their students in blue and white, there were migratory birds from Europe and America who were doing their last-minute shopping on Bailey Road before flying back home. And yet it seemed to me the street was deserted, that this part of the city had been emptied out. For no matter how intense the hubbub and the business being done on this winding road flanked by highrises, teeming with life, the shutters of Jibrail Mithu’s bookstore were closed, weren’t they? Wasn’t that so? Wasn’t that alone enough for everything to be a void – when the lowered shutters and the iron bars reinforced each other, when several heavy locks dangled like the inanimate testicles of dead men?
I was reminded of Nietzsche’s error of the imaginary cause. I was reminded that there were more stories from Strada Afosa that Jibrail Mithu hadn’t succeeded in telling than those that he had. After talking to Lutfunnisa I saw Jibrail Mithu that night in my sleep. He was crying, his tears flowed incessantly. Jibrail Mithu was weeping because Jibrail Mithu was dead. I had no difficulty realising that Jibrail Mithu wanted to violate the coronatime lockdown and I knew where he wanted to go. In my sleep I unlocked his bookstore. A wild wind buffeted its glass doors. Bailey Road was swept away by moonlight. So what if it was the age of corona? Like the last scene of a play, all of Jibrail Mithu’s women lined up on stage from wherever they were at the time. The woman who had swooned on Jibrail Mithu’s chest just as the bookshop was closing appeared. And as soon as Jibrail Mithu lowered her to a bed of books, she opened her eyes and drew him to herself. Rubbing her heated breasts against him, she popped open all the buttons on his kurta. Jibrail Mithu had never sought love from anyone, never demanded anyone’s body, never held his hand out to anyone, never fulfilled anyone’s desire for love. When women grabbed clumps of his thick hair and shook his head, he only gazed with great affection at these would-be lovers, allowing, with a smile, their lips to descend like turbulent weather on his. He offered his axe to the plaintive women, frightened but not retreating. At the end of the perfunctory ritual, Jibrail Mithu came out and stood in front of his music room, reflecting as he lit a cigarette and took a long drag on it, that all the confirmation offered by pleasures and sex and love in this life, hurtling downwards like a falling meteorite, comes only from women. This was probably why Jibrail Mithu had not put anyone’s love for him in his own safekeeping. Jibrail Mithu had given himself to everyone. The woman who sought shelter for one night, the woman who wanted to walk with him one evening holding hands, the woman who wanted to read the Fazr namaz together with him just the one time, the woman who hadn’t meant to buy books and had wiped the dust with the scarf around her neck. Women who had left behind their bags, their stethoscopes, their notes, their photocopies. Gypsy women, dancers, women who had walked out of folk theatre groups. Vagabonds, whores, beggars. The women of Modigliani and Gustave Courbet. And houris and nymphs. Jibrail Mithu opened his bookshop by moonlight to wait for them.
No one knows when the age of corona will come to an end. In my sleep the lockdown keeps getting extended. All of us are impatient to be set free. Meanwhile Jibrail Mithu has long surrendered to beauty.
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Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay is a prolific writer, with over nine novels including the controversial Panty, translation into English, Arunava Sinha, Penguin, 2015, and over fifty short stories. She is a newspaper columnist and film critic.
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Arunava Sinha is a prize-winning translator of classic, modern, and contemporary Bengali literature from India and Bangladesh. He is an associate professor of practice in the Creative Writing Department at Ashoka University, India, codirector of the Ashoka Centre for Translation, and the books editor of the online politics and culture magazine Scroll.in.