Debabrata Basu came home from his final examination at Presidency College on a warm afternoon in March, still in his good shirt, with the particular loose-limbed exhaustion of a young man who has just set down a weight he has been carrying, in one form or another, for the better part of three years.
He came through the rust-coloured gate to find his mother waiting for him in the courtyard, arms already crossed in anticipation of good news, and Satyen Babu standing a half-step behind her, attempting, with only partial success, to appear as though he had not spent the entire morning too restless to concentrate on anything at all.
“Well?” Bidhu Ma demanded, before he had so much as reached the gate.
“Well,” Debabrata said, and let the silence stretch just long enough to be thoroughly unkind before his face broke, at last, into the wide, unguarded grin that gave the whole answer away before he ever spoke it aloud.
“I believe I may actually be finished, Ma.
Properly finished.
A graduate of Presidency College, God and the examiners willing.”
The noise that followed — his mother’s delighted shriek, his father’s booming laugh, the general commotion that brought half the household spilling into the courtyard within moments, Kamala arriving from the blue gate at a dead run with her hair coming loose from its plait, having heard the shrieking from clear across the lane — was, Debabrata would say for years afterward, one of the finest sounds he had ever caused in his entire life.
“You’re finished,” Kamala said, arriving breathless in front of him, some private and entirely wordless communication passing between the two of them in the half-second before either spoke another word — the understanding, arrived at instantly and completely by both, that a particular door they had both been quietly waiting for had just, at last, swung open.
“I’m finished,” Debabrata confirmed.
“Which means, unless I am very much mistaken about the conversation my father and yours have clearly been having behind our backs for the better part of a year, there is rather less standing between us now than there was yesterday morning.”
Kamala, nineteen now, and not nearly so given to public sentiment as her mother, found that she did not, in this particular instance, especially care who was watching, and reached for his hand in front of the entire assembled courtyard without the smallest hesitation.
The formal proposal, when it came, arrived with all the careful, unhurried ceremony that two families who had spent twenty years as neighbours and one as prospective in-laws could bring to bear on the occasion — which was to say, with considerably more ritual than either family strictly needed, given that the outcome had been privately settled for the better part of two years, and considerably more joy than most such occasions manage, given that neither family had the smallest doubt about the match they were formalizing.
Satyen Babu arrived at the blue gate on the appointed morning with a small procession behind him — Bidhu Ma, carrying a tray of sweets covered in red cloth; an elderly aunt of the Basu family, brought along specifically for her reputation as an excellent judge of a proposed bride’s temperament, though everyone present understood this particular judgment to be a formality; and Jamil, who had been unofficially adopted into the occasion as a family friend close enough to warrant an invitation, carrying, at Hashem Sheikh’s insistence, a second tray of the good imported dates the grain shop kept specially for exactly such occasions.
“You didn’t need to bring this much,” Bipin Babu said, receiving them at the gate with the particular formal warmth of a man who had, in fact, spent the previous week privately hoping they would bring exactly this much and rather more besides.
“Some occasions,” Satyen Babu said, “deserve rather more than they need.
I intend for this to be one of them.”
Inside, the two families settled themselves in the good front room — the one reserved, by unspoken household law, for guests of genuine importance — and proceeded through the whole familiar, beloved choreography of a proposal properly made: the exchange of sweets, the elderly aunt’s careful, entirely predetermined pronouncement that Kamala was, indeed, a girl of excellent character and evident good sense, the formal request, offered by Satyen Babu with a gravity that made Bidhu Ma dab her eyes despite having known the outcome for years, that the Sengupta family consider his son Debabrata a worthy match for their daughter.
“We have known your son since he was in short trousers,” Bipin Babu said, in reply, with the same careful gravity, though the corner of his mouth had begun, despite his best efforts, to twitch toward a smile.
“I do not believe there exists a single reasonable objection either of us could raise to this match, unless it is that we have both waited rather longer than either of us wished to say so plainly.”
“Then let us stop waiting,” Satyen Babu said, and the two men, nineteen years deep into a friendship that had survived arguments about salt and sleep and strategy and nearly everything else besides, embraced each other in the middle of the front room with an unguarded warmth that neither would have permitted himself in any political disagreement, however heated.
There remained, of course, the matter of the stars.
No marriage in that lane, however settled by affection and family history, proceeded without the careful comparison of the young couple’s horoscopes — a ritual that both families took seriously enough to have already, some weeks earlier, quietly sent word to Pandit Haridas Chakraborty, the astrologer three lanes over whose services had presided over nearly every significant occasion in the para for the better part of three decades.
The pandit arrived on a separate morning, some days after the formal proposal, with his palm-leaf charts and his careful, deliberate manner, and spent the better part of an hour in close consultation with two increasingly anxious sets of parents while Kamala and Debabrata waited, with rather less patience than either would have liked to admit, in the courtyard outside.
“What if the stars say no?” Kamala asked, not for the first time, twisting a loose thread on her sleeve with an intensity that suggested the thread itself had done something to deserve it. The source of this chapter is novelping.com.
“The stars are not going to say no,” Debabrata said, with a confidence that was, in truth, rather less certain than he let on.
“The stars have been watching us since we were nine years old.
I imagine they made up their minds some time ago and have simply been waiting for the rest of us to catch up.”
“That isn’t how astrology works, Deba-da.”
“It’s how I intend for it to work, regardless of what the pandit says.”
It was, in the end, an unnecessary anxiety.
Pandit Chakraborty emerged from his consultation with the particular satisfied gravity of a man delivering excellent news he had half-expected from the start, and pronounced — to the visible, collective relief of every adult present — that the charts of Kamala Sengupta and Debabrata Basu aligned with a harmony he described, in terms both families would repeat happily to every subsequent visitor for months, as “rare, and worth remarking on, even among matches already blessed by twenty years of family closeness.”
“You see,” Debabrata said to Kamala, the moment they were informed, with the particular insufferable satisfaction of a man who has just been proven correct about something he had no actual authority to be correct about.
“I told you they’d already decided.”
“You did not know that.
You were guessing.”
“I was confident.
There’s a difference.”
“There is no difference whatsoever, and you know it.”
“There is a very great difference, and I intend to remind you of it at every opportunity for the rest of our lives together, starting now.”
A date was set for the following spring — early enough, Saroj Bala reasoned privately, that Kamala would still be young enough to settle comfortably into her new household, late enough that Debabrata could establish himself properly in his new position at the small but respected law firm where he had, on the strength of his examination results, already secured a junior clerkship.
There was, in the weeks that followed the formal proposal, a particular quality to the lane’s collective mood — a settled, golden contentment, the sense of a thing long hoped for finally, unmistakably arriving — that Kamala would remember, years later, as one of the last truly untroubled seasons any of them would know.
It was not, of course, entirely untroubled even then, though the trouble, in that spring of 1937, was still small enough to be discussed over tea rather than shouted under a mango tree.
“There is a man in Congress,” Satyen Babu said one evening, some weeks after the proposal, over a newspaper he had been reading with rather more intensity than the article strictly warranted, “who I believe is finally saying the things that need saying.
Subhas Bose.
Elected president of the Haripura session this year — did you see the speech, Bipin?
He speaks of planning, of industry, of a free India built on something more than good intentions and patient waiting.”
“I read it,” Bipin Babu said, with the careful neutrality of a man who had, in fact, found rather more in the speech to disagree with than to admire, though he had not yet decided how much of that disagreement was worth airing on an evening otherwise devoted to happier subjects.
“He is a gifted speaker.
“He is right about this much, at least — that patience alone has never freed a single country from an empire that has no intention of leaving on its own schedule.”
“Patience has freed exactly as many countries as impatience has, in the long accounting of history.
Perhaps rather more, if you count the ones that survived the freeing with something left standing afterward.”
It was a familiar shape of argument, worn smooth with nineteen years of use, and it ended, as it always did, in a shrug from each man and a shared, comfortable silence rather than any real heat — the disagreement of two men who trusted each other completely, arguing about ideas rather than each other, the way they had argued about a hundred things before and would, either of them would have said without a moment’s hesitation, argue about a hundred things more, for as long as they both lived, without the smallest danger to the friendship underneath it.
Neither noticed — or if they noticed, neither remarked on it, that particular evening — that something in the shape of the argument had begun, almost imperceptibly, to shift.
That where once they had argued about strategy within a single shared cause, they had begun, in these last months, to argue about which cause deserved their loyalty at all.
That somewhere in Delhi and Haripura and the corridors of a Congress party growing increasingly uneasy with its own most brilliant and most impatient son, a rupture was beginning to open that neither man yet understood would, within two years, reach all the way down a quiet lane in Kolkata and pass directly through the middle of their own friendship.
On the evening of Kamala and Debabrata’s formal engagement — the small, joyful gathering that marked the end of the proposal season and the beginning of the year’s wait for the wedding itself — Arun found Uma sitting alone on the low wall by the tank, watching the lamplight from both houses spill out across the courtyard, and settled himself beside her without needing to ask whether he was welcome.
“It’s strange,” Uma said, after a while, watching Kamala across the courtyard, laughing at something Debabrata had said, her hand resting easily in his.
“I’ve watched the two of them my whole life.
I always knew this was coming.
But now that it’s actually happening, it feels like — ” she paused, searching for the word, and did not quite find it.
“Like something is ending, even though everyone keeps saying it’s a beginning.”
“Maybe it’s both,” Arun said.
“Maybe it always is, when something this good finally arrives — some other, smaller thing has to end to make room for it.
Childhood, maybe.
Or just — not knowing yet, what everyone’s future actually looks like.”
Uma was quiet for a long moment, watching the lamplight, watching her brother and Kamala, watching, though she did not say so, the particular easy warmth with which Arun had settled beside her on the wall, close enough now, at fifteen and thirteen, that neither of them any longer pretended the closeness was accidental.
“Do you think,” she said finally, very carefully, not looking at him, “that everyone already assumes the same thing will happen to us?
Eventually?”
Arun did not answer immediately.
When he did, his voice had gone quieter than usual, careful in a way that matched hers exactly.
“I think,” he said, “that I would very much like it to.”
It was, for two people who had spent six years circling slowly toward exactly this admission without either quite having the courage to make it plainly, about as close as either would come that particular evening — but it was, Uma thought, watching the lamplight and feeling something warm and frightening settle into place somewhere behind her ribs, entirely enough, for now.
Neither of them could have known, sitting together on the wall that golden spring evening with the whole lane glowing with the joy of one engagement already settled and the quiet, unspoken promise of a second one still to come, that the world arranging itself so carefully around them — the stars matched, the fathers embracing, the two houses drawing closer together with every passing season — was already, somewhere far beyond the reach of that lane, beginning to come apart at exactly the seam that would, within three years, run directly between the two men who loved each other most.