Title: A House of Rain and Snow
Author: Srijato
Translator: Maharghya Chakraborty
Publisher: Penguin, Vintage Imprint
It rains outside one of the windows, snows outside the other. This happens in Pushkar’s house. Well, not their house exactly, they are tenants, but this does happen there. Not every day, only from time to time. No one other than Pushkar knows about this, neither does he wish to tell anyone. There are two windows in his room, side by side, one almost touching the other. Outside one of them it rains the entire day and snows throughout outside the other. On the days this happens, Pushkar finds himself unable to leave the house.
The light in rented houses has a pallor of its own, a unique dimness, as if it never wishes to fully brighten. As if it knows it has been confined within the walls of a leased property. So every evening it flickers into life in a blurry, understated manner. Like it lacks self-confidence, lacks the courage to be loud. Thus the walls of the rented property, the calendar hanging on it, the door that refuses to shut properly and the ancient curtain sticking to it—they all look a bit pale in that low, dim light.
This is not a lie, Pushkar is well aware of that. It is hardly possible to know how one’s house looks from within. Like one has to be in space to truly understand how the earth looks, one has to step out of one’s house to see it, from afar. Pushkar has never really managed to do it that much. There’s a narrow lane just outside their house and rows and rows of walls and houses of the tiny neighbourhood beyond it. He has never managed to examine his house from a distance. So one must wonder how he figured out the matter of the paleness of the lights. It was quite easy. Whenever he had to take the local train back from a friend’s distant house in the evening, he witnessed the lights of the houses coming on one after the other. Various kinds of lights coming on behind big and small windows—a scene he watched many a time from the moving train. Such scenes immediately made him aware of the houses where families were living on rent, the ones where the lights were yellowish, slightly oil-stained and diffident. He used to count them on his way back and arrive at the conclusion that there were more tenants than landlords in this world. Or else the world at night would have been far more luminous every day.
Such was their house too. The only consolation being theirs was visible from aeroplanes. He has never seen it himself, but many a time he has seen the planes up close from the roof during their descent en route to Dum Dum Airport. If any passenger were to look down from the plane window that very instant, they would be able to spot Pushkar’s house and tell it was a rented one. That was nothing to be ashamed of, at least not for Pushkar. Many people don’t even have a roof over their heads, those who are barely discernible as human beings from planes and trains.
Although, in his own sliver of a room, he hardly switches on the lights most evenings even after it’s dark. Not because he is embarrassed or anything. Rather, he is fond of watching the light die out slowly and darkness descend all of a sudden. To wrap that feeling around himself—as if the only reason the day had dawned was to bring him this cover. Thus, many an evening he spends in the darkness of his small, square room. Just above the study table is a light on the oil-stained walls, one that he does not switch on every day. Like he will not today, he thinks.
It’s still early afternoon though, he just finished lunch a while back. Baba is on a day shift today, he will be late. Ma is getting some shut-eye, for soon she will have her singing classes in the adjacent room. This is what he is used to since childhood—his father’s job as a journalist in the newspaper office and his mother singing at local concerts and teaching music at home. This is how things have been for them, how they still remain. So, the days don’t really change for them, they mostly remain the same and Pushkar, too, can predict what will come to pass and when. Like today, like how he was not going to switch on the lights this evening.
Most days, he gets held back in his room, does not get to go out. His first-year classes have just begun. Geography. An excellent subject and it’s taught very well at their college. Yet, he is absent more than half the days. It’s not that he does not want to go, it’s just that he cannot bring himself to do so, always getting stuck. Mornings roll into afternoons and afternoons into evenings; he shuts the shaky doors of his room and sits alone on the far end of his bed, unable to leave. Perhaps because of the windows divided by the rain and snow. He cannot seem to fathom what he needs to do to go out, how he must prepare so he can walk down the narrow lane of their locality towards the main road, where the evening gathers together streams of light that split and disperse all around again.
About the Book:
Pushkar, an offspring of the most incredible of times, has next to nothing to call his own. Except for a seasoned but out-of-work and disheartened father, and a defiant, uncompromising mother with a truly astounding gift for music. It is only in the gradually widening chasm between his parents that he discovers his world of poems, which he desperately tries to hide from everyone.
Everyone else except Saheli, that is, only she gets to read his poems. Saheli, his school friend who he is in love with. Abhijit, another friend from school, is unwilling to leave it all up to fate and insists on dragging Pushkar to meet Nirban and their independent publishing house—at least to ensure that Pushkar’s poems manage to see the light of day.
In this entirely strange, magical and leisurely course of life swirling all around Pushkar, there is but one entity with whom he shares all his secrets. A milkwood tree, a chatim is privy to everything in his life. And so time moves on, leading him to eventually confront a truly secret equation of life—the change made possible by the transformative power of love.
A House of Rain and Snow is a testament to an era, a witness to an astounding journey of a young poet.
About the Author
Srijato, one of the most celebrated Bengali poet-lyricists of our times, is the recipient of Ananda Puroskar in 2004 for his book Udanta Sawb Joker (All Those Flying Jokers).
About the Translator
Maharghya Chakraborty is a well-known translator. He teaches at St Xavier’s College in Kolkata.
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