It rained on and off through most of June and July that year. And August was full of a profusion of green the sun couldn’t seem to take its eye off. Everywhere, the lushness was unrestrained. Every leaf on every tree, every blade of grass seemed determined to do its best to hide all that was broken, squalid, and ugly. Everywhere in the city there was much that was broken, squalid and ugly. And everywhere, the reckless, rainfed greenery. And the heat—the heat was inescapable. It rose daily with the sun and hung in the air long after the sun had set. Then there were days when clouds would pile up sneakily above the rooftops, and soon turn into a thick, night-black, all-covering lid over the city. Then it would pour until the whole place would look, once again, like a sad, beaten-down Venice floating in a foul sea.
It was 1995. I still remember how the late-monsoon months looked and felt that year. The color of sunlight, the play of light and shadow on everything around me, and the smell of saturation. Especially in August, especially in the days before and after the 26th, my 23rd birthday. In the dark, barely visible display case of my past, that day is like a 100-watt bulb brightening everything around it.
It was a Saturday. Niharika and I had gone to the Globe for a matinée show. And on our way there, we’d stopped at the Lower Circular Road cemetery. We’d known each other for almost three months by then, and had been out a few times before, but we’d never been to a movie together. Or a cemetery. “Who goes to a random cemetery on their birthday?” my friend Timir had said when I told him about the trip the next day. He was an ex-Naxal, and called himself a failed revolutionary. “Celebrating birthdays and going to cemeteries—bourgeois sentimentality at its most pathetic!” He shook his head as he threw fistfuls of wheat at his pet pigeons in the courtyard. The pigeons flapped their wings and pecked away at the grains like they hadn’t been fed before. “It’s infantile!” He threw more wheat, stirring his pigeons into a feeding frenzy, and shook his head again. I wasn’t sure who he disapproved of this time—me or the pigeons. It was my first birthday since getting to know Niharika, so our meeting that day was special in a way none of our previous meetings had been. Who cared what we did or where we went! The important thing was that I was with her the whole day, which hadn’t happened before. Timir didn’t care about that. The man was almost thirteen years older, and we didn’t see eye to eye on many things. But I admired him; he was different from everyone I knew. My mother, a card-carrying member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), never liked him much. Although she never said why, I had a feeling it was because of their ideological rivalry—moderate left (my mother) versus extreme left (Timir). But she never stopped me from being close to the man.
Niharika and her parents lived in an old house on Circus Avenue. Her mother had asked me to eat lunch with them. She’d cooked my favorite mutton rezala as a birthday treat and Niharika had baked a cake. “Here, a bit more,” her mother would say and ladle more food onto my plate. “I’ve made it for you. Don’t be shy!” By the time the cake was put on the table, I couldn’t eat anymore, and promised to come back for it the next day.
I felt so bloated after that, I wanted to walk. We were waiting for a bus at a stop near her house. The ride was going to take between ten and fifteen minutes depending on the traffic, and the walk to Globe wouldn’t take more than twenty-five minutes, and we had almost an hour and a half in hand. “Let’s do it,” Niharika said, even though the sun was scorching and we hated walking these streets with all the dust, smoke and traffic noise.
I don’t remember exactly what had made us walk into the cemetery. After hurrying across the Park Street-AJC Bose Road crossing we’d resumed our leisurely pace. The footpath was uneven with bricks jutting out in places and muddy water collected in troughs of all shapes and sizes. Niharika was careful with every step, walking around piles of rubble that could either hurt her feet or get her brown leather sandals dirty. Ahead of us, we noticed a sheet of black tarpaulin covering a bit of the footpath against the cemetery wall. It was like a poorly made tent. A pair of feet stuck out of its opening, which was blocked by a wheelbarrow. Walking past the tent we heard someone snoring inside. Then we stood facing the entrance to the cemetery. Was it my idea to walk in? Or was it hers? It’s possible that, both of us were so attracted by the sight of all those big trees in there, and the large areas of shade under them, we’d walked in without even discussing the matter. Plus, we had time to kill.
The place was quiet and empty. A warm, moist smell of vegetation hung in the air. There were smells of flowers that I both recognized and didn’t. Mangy dogs panted in the shade of trees and cats slept in damp gutters. “Look,” Niharika said, pointing at a few vultures and crows. They were scavenging the undergrowth close to the boundary wall on the other side. A dead cat or a dog, I thought, but didn’t say that to her. The sound of traffic on AJC Bose Road seemed somewhat muffled by the wall and the trees inside the cemetery. We found a middle-aged couple standing statue-like next to a new grave, a garish sign on the stonework reading Ghulam & Sons. I remember finding that interesting—a Muslim name in a Christian cemetery. Niharika said something about how sad the couple looked. An old woman sat on the edge of another tomb, not as new as the first one, but well looked after. She had three or four mongrels for company. She didn’t look particularly sad. Not only that, I thought I’d even heard her sing. “Did you hear that?” I asked Niharika. She said she hadn’t; she was thinking about the couple.
An odd sense of sadness infused the thrill of our date. We walked side by side between rows of graves. We held hands, letting go only to take a closer look at old tombs. We bent low to inspect their crumbling, moss-covered surface and read whatever was legible on the headstones. Both of us liked doing that, we discovered—reading epitaphs. Then we found one with the name Edgar Hill, who’d been buried there in June, 1854.
1854! I remember reading the year again and again, trying to grasp just how far back in time that was, and wondering what the place might have looked like back then. He’d been shot by the police, the inscription said. I wondered how many people might have come to his funeral. And who they might have been. Maybe just the undertakers, a couple of policemen and a priest. And maybe his wife, too, if he was married. Or his fiancée, if he had one. I wondered what the whole place might have looked like. Certainly not as many graves, and there must have been fields all around, and goats and cows grazing in them. Clumps of trees dotting the landscape, and huddles of huts here and there and big colonial buildings towering over them, and a church or two. Horses and horse-drawn carriages on dirt roads. And people going about their daily lives—the natives in cotton dhotis and saris and the English in their three-piece suits and silk dresses and bonnets. Just like in the paintings and drawings of old Calcutta. It was the exact same place where I was, but another world! And it was June, I thought, so the monsoon might already have started. I imagined a dark dome of clouds overhead, and the sound of shovels of mud hitting Edgar Hill’s coffin in pouring rain.
“God, just twenty-five!” Niharika said.
“Only two years older than me!”
“Who knows when the family found out back in Canterbury!”
“If they ever did.”
“Who knows why they killed him!”
I tore a tuft of dried-up fern from the foot of the headstone, which tilted to a side with most of the tomb having sunk into the earth. “No one probably looked at it in a hundred years!”
“Poor Edgar Hill,” she said.
Minutes later, still standing in front of that grave we kissed each other for the first time. “Many happy returns of the day,” Niharika had whispered.
“Your birthday reminds me of Edgar Hill,” she wrote to me in a letter in 2004, a few days before my birthday that year. “I remember the epitaph—Edgar Albert Hill of Canterbury, born 1829, shot by the police the 1st of June 1854. Then it says, Forget not the faithful dead.” I found the letter between the pages of a book I hadn’t touched in years. Written on both sides of a single sheet of paper, the paper yellowed, the ink slightly faded. “Pay him a visit some time,” it says. “For memory’s sake.”
A few months after hearing about Edgar Hill’s grave, Timir had surprised me by suggesting I take him there. “You said the man had been shot and killed by the police, right?” He said he too had come close to being killed by the police. “Very close,” he said. “It’s a miracle I’m alive.” He wasn’t for too long after that, dying of a heart attack early next year. We never managed to visit Edgar Hill’s grave.
I miss the man. I miss the warmth of that selfless concern for others he seemed to generate without effort. A side of him my mother never got to see thanks to their ideological difference. In my memory he feeds his pigeons and talks about right and wrong in that prickly way he always did. You took a bit too long to grow up, I imagine him saying about me not celebrating my birthdays anymore. It stopped with my mother’s death seven years ago.
The monsoon has had a slow start this year. Not much rain in June, although July was better. And there’s been a lot of scattered clouds and haze of late. There was an early-evening thunderstorm day before yesterday. The same has been forecast for today, August 26, 2016, and the temperature in the middle 30s with high humidity. The same story as the one back in 1995, except for the greenery—the lack of it. It doesn’t cover the squalor it once did.
It’s a few minutes after five when I leave my office. The walk to the Park Street-AJC Bose Road crossing takes me less than 10 minutes. I remember the spot where Niharika and I had stood on the other side of the intersection, needing to cross Park Street. Hurrying across AJC Bose Road I think of that letter of hers: “I’ll live the rest of my life thinking how different it all could have been….”
Inside the cemetery things look a bit more disheveled than before, and not as green. The smell in the air is of heat, parched earth and dry grass, not the damp aroma of foliage and flowers that I remember. I look left and right trying to get my bearings. I cannot see anyone, and hear anything but the traffic noise and the cawing of crows and the flapping of their wings as they fly from one tree to another, and the rustle of sapless twigs. I get off the wide central path on the left side and walk seventy or eighty feet along the length of the cemetery, looking at the graves on both sides, and also at the boundary wall both in front of me and behind to see if I can remember the location of Edgar Hill’s grave in relation to the surroundings. I walk around reading headstones that look vaguely familiar, wiping the sweat off my face every few minutes with my rolled-up shirtsleeves. After some time, I walk back to the entrance, turn around, and stand there trying to call up the images from twenty-one years ago and compare them with what’s in front of me. And what’s in front of me looks slightly more derelict, and at the same time, flashier in places. More graves with railings around them now, it seems to me. From one on my left with the metalwork painted parrot green a crow watches me. It lifts off as I start walking back into the cemetery and then alights on the same spot as I pass the tomb.
Who am I doing this for? I think to myself. And for what? I have no idea where Niharika is. I haven’t heard from her since that letter in 2004. And Timir, who wanted me to bring him here, has been dead for years. There’s absolutely no one I can share this experience with. No one I can talk to about this solo trip to the cemetery on my birthday, and this obsessive, meaningless search, which is sure to end in futility now that the clouds are beginning to stack up in a corner of the sky, and I can hear the rumble of thunder.
Too many crows, it suddenly occurs to me. They’re swooping down from the trees, the rooftops behind the cemetery, sitting on headstones, and cawing nonstop. The tomb in front of me looks like it could be the one. If memory serves, this is where Niharika and I had stood kissing. But I’m not sure, and there’s no way I can read the marker thanks to the overgrown weeds. I crouch down, trying to remove some of the covering of dried-up moss and fern. As I pull out a tuft of tall grass, three lizards scurry out, and there’s a ripple in the bush at the other end of the grave. There’s no telling if it’s a snake!
The rumble of thunder sounds a lot closer now and the sky is almost half covered with clouds. That’s it, I whisper to myself. Getting to my feet I see something move out of the corner of my eye—a human head rising slowly from behind a tall gravestone on my right, roughly fifteen feet from where I am. I let out a terrified scream. I had no idea there was anyone sitting there, and so close to me! A man with matted hair and beard, his face frozen in a silent laugh.
He comes out from behind the gravestone and shuffles past me, then he turns right, going not toward the gate but in the opposite direction, further into the graveyard. Soaked in sweat, my heart pounding, I take a few steps toward the gravestone behind which the man was sitting. There’s food scattered all over the tomb—two crows and a sparrow pecking busily at rice, pieces of bread, fishbone.
A clap of thunder makes the birds fly away. I keep standing there, as if unable to move. And the first drops of rain begin to fall.
Photo by Marek Studzinski on Unsplash
