The House on Raja Nabakrishna Street

Notes of S. Gangopadhyay, Advocate, Calcutta High Court. Re: partition of premises 19B Raja Nabakrishna Street, Kolkata 700005, estate of late Haraprasad Bhattacharya. Note 1. 11 March.

Site visit with all four parties: Shri Sudhin, Shri Ashim, Shri Pranab and Shri Tapan Bhattacharya, sons of the deceased. No will. Parties have agreed to a physical partition by rooms in lieu of sale, Shri Tapan dissenting on record but agreeing to proceed. Premises: ground floor with courtyard, thakur-dalan, kitchen, two store rooms, privy. First floor, five rooms and verandah. Second floor, three rooms. Roof, with a thakur-ghar and a small room behind it, door painted over, not shown on the plan of 1938. None of the parties recalls entering this back room. Shri Ashim believes it held “grandfather’s books”. Shri Pranab believes it held nothing. Agreed to leave it undivided for the present.

I have marked the provisional lines in yellow tailor’s chalk, with the initial of the allottee in each portion. The plaster takes chalk well. I have advised the parties not to touch the lines.

* * *

I was the only one who watched him do it. The brothers stood in the courtyard and shouted about the thakur-dalan, who would have the pillars and who would have the steps, and Bordi, Sudhin-da’s wife, kept saying the word nyajjo, fair, fair, as if fair was a thing you could hold in your hand and wave at people. So I went up with Mr. Gangopadhyay. Somebody had to show him where the switches were.

He was a small, clean man with a bag of tailor’s chalk, the flat triangles that come in a paper packet, and a steel tape that he let out with his thumb. He measured everything twice. He drew the lines along the floor first, in long yellow strokes, then up the walls a little way so you could see where a room had been cut, and inside each piece he wrote a letter. S, A, P, T. In my husband’s rooms, T. In the corridor on the second floor, which nobody could agree on, he drew a line straight down the middle, the length of it, and wrote S on one side and P on the other.

On the roof he stopped at the back room.

The thakur-ghar itself was the size of a lift, a shelf for the Narayan shila, the brass lamp, a picture of Haraprasad’s own father with sandalwood paste gone brown on the glass. Behind it there was a door. I had lived in that house eleven years and I knew that door the way you know a mole on your own back. I knew it was there. I had never looked at it. It was painted the same green as the wall and the paint ran over the gap at the edges, so it had not been opened since someone had painted it, and the green was the old green, the one from before the 1980s, when the house was still whitewashed every Durga Puja.

Mr. Gangopadhyay tapped it with his pen. He wrote nothing on it. He drew a short yellow line in front of the threshold, a little box, and left the box empty.

“Undivided,” he said, to himself. Then to me, “Who lights the lamp?”

“I do.”

He nodded as if that was a reasonable answer to a question I did not know he had asked.

* * *

My husband is Tapan, the youngest. Chhoto. Everyone in the family is called by their place in it, and I am Chhoto Bou, the youngest wife, the one who came last and got the room at the top of the stairs because nobody else wanted to climb to it. That room was mine more than Tapan’s. He slept there but he lived on his phone, mostly in conversation with a promoter from Ultadanga called Bapi who wanted the whole house for a G+4 with car parking and a shop on the ground floor. Tapan wanted the money. Sudhin-da wanted the thakur-dalan, because he was eldest and the Durga Puja had been in that dalan for a hundred and thirty years and he wanted to be the one who stopped doing it. Ashim-da wanted to be left alone with his blood pressure. Pranab-da wanted to win.

I wanted, I think, to keep lighting the lamp. That sounds holy. It was not. It was the only part of the day nobody shouted at me.

The morning after the lines were drawn I went up at six with the matchbox and the ghee and I saw the corridor on the second floor. The line down the middle was gone. There was a new one. It started at the foot of the roof stairs and went along the left wall, close to the skirting, and then turned and went across, so that the far end of the corridor, three or four feet of it, was boxed off from both S and P. Inside that box nothing was written.

The chalk was the same yellow. The stroke was finer than Mr. Gangopadhyay’s. Neater. I stood and looked at it a while with the matchbox in my hand. Then I went up and lit the lamp, because that was what I had come for.

By nine o’clock Sudhin-da and Pranab-da were shouting on the stairs.

* * *

Note 2. 14 March.

Called to premises by Shri Pranab, who alleges interference with the lines in the second-floor corridor. Inspected. The corridor line has been redrawn so as to allot approx. 4 ft x 7 ft at the north end to no party. This area adjoins the roof stair and is directly beneath the back room of the thakur-ghar. Each party denies drawing it. Shri Pranab alleges Shri Sudhin. Shri Sudhin alleges Shri Pranab and used language I do not record.

I have photographed all lines. I have restored the original corridor line. I note that the redrawn line was made in chalk of the same type as mine, which is sold everywhere, and is not evidence of anything.

I note also, for completeness, that the north end of the corridor is approx. 4 degrees colder than the south end. This is likely due to the stair.

* * *

They fought for a week about the corridor and in that week the house took the corridor and three feet of Sejda’s room.

I mean that plainly. Every morning I went up with the matchbox and every morning there was a new line, and every new line was a little more generous to the empty box. It did not jump. It crept. A hand’s width. Two hands. It took the corner of Sejda’s room where his almirah stood, and drew the line around the almirah carefully, as you would draw around a sleeping dog, and the almirah was outside his share now and inside the box, and Pranab-da stood in his vest in front of it and said, “This is criminal trespass,” to nobody.

Mr. Gangopadhyay came and redrew. The next day it was back.

They put a padlock on the second-floor landing. The lines moved behind the padlock.

They accused me once, Bordi did, in the kitchen, because I was the one up early. I was cutting potatoes for the shukto. I said, Bordi, I have been cutting potatoes since five. She looked at my hands. My fingers were yellow at the tips. Turmeric, I said, and she went away, and I went on cutting, and then I stopped, because I had not touched turmeric that morning. The packet was still sealed on the shelf.

I washed my hands with Vim. The yellow came off easily, the way chalk does. Not the way turmeric does.

I did not tell anyone that. Who would I tell?

* * *

There was a woman who used to come to the house to clean the brass, when I first married in, an old Bangal woman with one blind eye, and she told me about the brahmadaitya in my second year. I was standing on the roof at dusk and she said, don’t stand there with your hair open, that is his corner. She meant the bel tree. There is a bel tree that grows out of the parapet on the north side of the roof, out of a crack in the cornice, the way trees grow out of every old house in North Calcutta, roots down into the brick, and nobody can cut it because it is a bel tree and you do not cut a bel tree.

Who is he, I asked her, and she said the one who built the house. Haraprasad’s grandfather’s elder brother. A pandit, unmarried, a man with no sons. He gave the land money and the house went to the younger brother’s line, and he lived on the roof and taught Sanskrit to boys in the thakur-ghar and died there, and they never did his rites properly because there was a dispute about who should pay for them. That was 1904 or so. So he stayed. A brahmadaitya does not frighten anyone, she said. He just doesn’t leave. You keep a glass of water for him on the parapet and he keeps the house.

Keeps it for whom, I asked.

She looked at me with her good eye and laughed and did not answer.

After that I kept a glass of water by the bel tree. Out of habit. You understand, in a house like that, a habit is the only kind of prayer that gets done. Every evening, a steel glass. Every morning, empty. The crows, I thought.

* * *

Note 3. 29 March.

Revised schedule of allotment circulated. Parties’ respective areas, as measured this date (sq ft, approx.):

S: 812 (previously 1,040)
A: 790 (previously 905)
P: 611 (previously 980)
T: 744 (previously 870)
Undivided (roof back room and adjoining): 1,388 (previously 54)

I record that these figures are not the result of any agreement. They are the result of measuring the lines as found. I have restored the lines four times. I have now been instructed by all four parties, for once in agreement, not to restore them again but to “find who is doing it”. This is not within my brief.

Shri Ashim asked me privately whether the figures could be reversed if the parties stopped quarrelling. I said I had no instructions on that point.

* * *

It was Ashim-da who worked it out first, I think, or he worked out half and his heart worked out the rest. He was the quiet one. He used to sit on the first-floor verandah with his BP machine and his Anandabazar and fold the paper into a long strip to read one column at a time. And he noticed that his share was shrinking slower than the others. Not because he was good. Because he was tired. He did not have the breath to fight.

“Every time Dada shouts,” he said to me one evening, when I brought him his tea, “it takes from Dada. Have you seen? He shouted on Sunday about the Puja money and on Monday his line had come in past the window. Every time Sejo goes to court, Sejo loses a wall.”

“Who takes,” I said.

He looked up at the roof. Not at me.

“Don’t tell them,” he said. “If they stop shouting it will stop.”

They did not stop. You cannot tell four Bengali men from the same womb to stop arguing about a house. It is like telling the Hooghly to stop being brown.

Sudhin-da collapsed in the courtyard on the second of April, in the middle of a sentence about his grandfather’s pillars, and lay on the cement with his mouth open and Bordi screaming and the pigeons going up off the dalan all at once. He lived. His son took him to Salt Lake in a hired Innova, with his pillows and his Horlicks and his blood thinners, and after two weeks a letter came from his son’s lawyer, giving up his share in exchange for a sum. The sum was small. Nobody argued with it. I think his son had seen the lines.

The day after the Innova left, the chalk around Sudhin-da’s rooms was gone. All of it. Every S. And around those rooms, around the dalan with its pillars, around the old ironing room with the window on the courtyard, there was one long fine yellow line, unbroken, joining them up with the empty box on the roof.

* * *

The fine line had a way of going around things. I want to say this exactly because I have thought about it many nights. It did not go through furniture, it went around it. It went around the pots of tulsi on the roof. It went around Bordi’s sewing machine, which she had left behind, and around the framed photograph of Haraprasad at his retirement from the Port Trust, and around the little brass ghoti I used for the lamp. It treated the house like someone who knew where everything was in the dark.

It did not go around people. That is the other thing I noticed.

* * *

Ashim-da went to his daughter in Bangalore at the end of April. He signed before he left. He did not argue the sum. On the morning he went, while the taxi waited in the lane and the driver honked and honked, he stood with me on the landing outside his room and showed me the floor. His share of his own bedroom, by then, was a strip of floor the width of a bolster, between the bed and the wall, with A written in it in Mr. Gangopadhyay’s thick hand, the only thick line left in the room.

“I was not even angry,” he said. “I was only thinking angry things.” He touched his chest. “In here. It heard that also.”

Then he said, and I remember it because it was the last thing he said in that house, “Chhoto Bou, you never fight with anyone.”

“There is no point,” I said.

“No,” he said. “That is not why.” And he went down to the taxi.

* * *

Note 4. 8 May.

Shri Sudhin and Shri Ashim have relinquished their shares by deed (copies on file). Remaining parties: Shri Pranab, Shri Tapan.

Visited premises on complaint of Shri Pranab. His bedroom on the second floor, south side, no longer has a door. Where the door was, there is a wall. The plaster is old and has the same cracks and stains as the rest of the wall. A calendar for Bengali year 1381 (a Kali image, from a sweet shop in Hatibagan) is hanging on a nail in it. Shri Pranab’s clothing, files and personal effects were found folded and stacked on the landing outside, his files tied with red tape in the manner of a lawyer’s office. He states he did not tie them. He states that he does not own red tape.

At Shri Pranab’s insistence a mason was called. The mason removed plaster and found brick. He removed one course of brick and found brick. He declined to continue and did not request payment.

I have no professional explanation and I do not offer one.

* * *

Sejda slept on the landing for three nights beside his folded clothes and his red-taped files, with a torch and a crowbar he had bought from Bagri Market, and on the fourth night he packed his suitcase and went to a hotel in Esplanade and filed a suit against both remaining parties and against “persons unknown”. The suit is still in the High Court. It will be there after all of us.

And then it was only Tapan and me.

* * *

I should say something about my husband. People will read this and think I am telling it against him. I am not. Tapan was a man who never had anything of his own. Youngest of four, he wore his brothers’ shirts and sat on the end of the bench, and when the house came he wanted to sell it the way a boy wants to sell his cricket bat, just to feel his own money in his own hand. He was not cruel. He was loud. In that house that was enough.

He brought Bapi the promoter in the third week of May. Bapi wore a white shirt and gold-rimmed glasses and he had a laser measure that put a red dot on the wall, and he went through the house pointing his dot at things and saying numbers into his phone. On the roof he pointed the dot at the back room door. Nothing came back. The little screen said ERR. He pointed it again. ERR. He laughed and shook it and said, Chinese maal, and pointed it at the bel tree, and it read 2.4 metres, and he pointed it back at the door and it said ERR. He stood a while. Then he went downstairs without measuring the rest, and on the stairs he said to Tapan, very kindly, like a doctor, “Dada, sell to someone else.”

Tapan shouted at him in the lane. Then Tapan came back in and shouted at the house.

He went up and down the stairs, shouting. He shouted that it was his father’s house and his father’s father’s, that he would get a bulldozer, that he would get the Corporation, that he would get the police and the party boys from the club. He kicked the line on the landing until his chappal was yellow. He said the name of the old pandit, which I had told him once, as a story, years ago, and he said it with a word after it that I will not write.

I sat on the stairs with my hands in my lap and I did not say anything. Not because I was frightened. Because I could feel the house listening, the way you can feel a person listening in the next room, the little change in the air when someone holds still.

* * *

The next morning our share was a rectangle.

Not our room, our share. The room at the top of the stairs, my room, still had its own chalk line, Mr. Gangopadhyay’s thick T around it, and nothing had touched that. But everything else of Tapan’s in that house, the store room downstairs, his half of the first-floor verandah, the little room where he kept his bike, all of it was gone, swallowed by the fine line, and what was left was a rectangle drawn on the floor of the second-floor corridor, just outside the place where Sejda’s door had been. About six feet by two and a half. Neatly drawn. Inside it, very small, the letter T.

Tapan stood and looked at it in his lungi with his phone in his hand.

“This is mine?” he said. “This is my share? This?”

I said, come down, I’ll make tea.

He did not come down. He went and got the bottle of Royal Stag he kept behind the gas cylinder and he sat on the stairs and drank, and I went down and cooked, and through the evening I heard him talking up there, to the house, sometimes loud and sometimes not, and around eleven I heard him laugh and say, all right, all right then, it’s mine, they can’t take this, nobody can take this, and the creak of him lying down on the floor.

I left him there. You leave a man like that where he lies. I went to my room and closed my door.

In the morning the rectangle was there, the line fresh, the T small and neat in the corner. The floor inside it was clean and a little damp and cool, like a floor that has just been laid. There was no one in it.

* * *

Note 5. 9 June.

Smt. Mitali Bhattacharya, wife of Shri Tapan, reported her husband missing to Shyampukur police station on 30 May (GD entry on file). His phone was found in the second-floor corridor. Under the law a missing person cannot be presumed dead for seven years, and his share cannot be dealt with in that period.

I visited the premises on this date to explain this to Smt. Mitali. On inspection of the lines I am obliged to record that the question appears already to have been dealt with.

* * *

I lived alone in the house that summer. People asked how I could. Bordi phoned from Salt Lake and said, come to us, you’ll go mad there. My own mother in Barasat said the same. I said I was waiting for news of Tapan. That was true, in the way things are true in police stations.

The truth is the house was very quiet and very kind. The lines did not move any more because there was nothing left to move. I went up every morning and lit the lamp. Every evening I took the steel glass to the bel tree. It was always empty by the morning. In the corridor, in the rectangle, the T stayed exactly where it was, and I did not walk on it, and the floor inside never quite dried.

Every room in the house had lost its door by July, one by one. Not with violence. I would go past a room in the afternoon and find a wall with a calendar on it, and the next day another. The kitchen kept a door, then lost it, and I found my pots and the gas and the rice drum moved out onto the verandah, arranged the way I would have arranged them. The privy kept its door. A brahmadaitya is a Brahmin, after all. There are things one does not take.

My room at the top of the stairs kept its door. I slept there. I ate there. I sat there with the window open on the lane and listened to the rickshaws, and the bel tree’s shadow came across the floor in the afternoons and lay there like a long arm, and I was not afraid. I want to be honest. I was not once afraid in that house. I was only, some nights, aware of not being alone in my own head, as if someone was going through the rooms of it with a measuring tape, gently, writing small letters on the floor.

I found the chalk in August. In the pleat of my sari, tucked into the waist, where women in my family keep keys. A flat yellow triangle, worn down to a stub at one corner, the corner you draw with.

I put it back where I had found it.

* * *

On the last day of August I went up with the matchbox and the back room door was open.

Only a finger’s width. The old green paint had cracked along the edges in a clean line, all the way round, the way paint cracks when someone has been pushing very slowly from the other side for a long time. There was no light inside. There was a smell like old paper and sandalwood and the inside of a brass pot.

I did not go in. I am not a fool. I lit the lamp and I put the steel glass of water on the threshold, just inside the little yellow box Mr. Gangopadhyay had drawn in March, the box he had left empty. Then I went down and had my bath.

In the morning the glass was gone and the box was not empty any more. There was writing in it. Fine, neat, in that yellow. Not a letter. A name. I could not read it. I was taught to read Bengali by my grandmother with a slate, but this was not my grandmother’s Bengali, it was older, the letters joined along the top in a way I have only seen in the almanac and the backs of very old photographs.

I thought it might be his. Then I looked at it a long time and I thought it might be mine.

* * *

Mr. Gangopadhyay came on the ninth of September to close the file. He looked thinner. He sat on the only chair left on the verandah and took out a printed deed and a pen and asked me to sign as the surviving party in possession.

I said, I am not a party. My name is not in it. It was the brothers’ house.

He looked at me for a while. Then at the stairs. Then he put the pen down, very carefully, square on the deed, and said in a low voice, the way you speak in a room where someone is sleeping, “Then who am I closing it for?”

I did not answer him. I went up to fetch him a glass of water.

* * *

Note 6 (final). 9 September.

Partition of premises 19B Raja Nabakrishna Street is complete. All lines are as found. The whole premises, including the back room of the thakur-ghar, vests in a single heir. I have entered the heir’s name in the register as written on the roof, copied as exactly as I am able. I cannot read it. I have shown it to a pandit at Kalighat, who could not read it either and asked me where I had got it and then asked me to leave.

The heir did not sign the deed. The deed was signed. I have not asked by whom.

My fees have been paid in full. I do not propose to visit the premises again. File closed.