Pallab Bhattacharyya
(Pallab Bhattacharyya is a former director-general of police, Special Branch and erstwhile Chairman, APSC. Views expressed by him is personal. He can be reached at pallab1959@hotmail.com)
The grenade went off while the fish curry was still hot
Sagarika remembered that detail more clearly than the blast. It was 1995, and the Guwahati winter was settling in. For once her husband had said, “Let’’s eat out, just the three of us.” Rohan, four years old, was swinging his legs under the table. Shekhar was laughing. Then came the boom, flat and heavy, somewhere across the city.
The laughter left her husband’s face. His mind was already somewhere else.
“I have to go,” he said, reaching for his keys. “It’s close to the secretariat.”
“Shekhar, the food…”
“Take an auto home. I’ll call.”
He didn’t call. She and Rohan rode back through blacked-out streets, her son asleep against her shoulder, his untouched rice still wrapped in a napkin in her purse. Shekhar came home at dawn, hollow-eyed and smelling of smoke. The city praised him for weeks.
She never told him that night had taught her something. Love, in their house, would have to be built by her own hands.
Twenty-nine years later, Shekhar sat on the veranda of their Guwahati home with a cup of hot coffee and a retirement he didn’t know how to use.
Thirty-eight years in the civil service had left him with a framed commendation, a pension, and a silence that rang. No files came. No phone buzzed at midnight. Mornings were the worst, because he had nothing to be urgent about.
Sagarika was inside, sorting through an old trunk.
“Come and see what I’ve found,” she called.
He found her cross-legged on the floor with a bundle of letters tied in red thread. Thin blue inland letters, school report cards, a photograph of a girl in a faded uniform.
“Who’s this?”
“Mitali. Dilip’s daughter. Your cousin, from your grandparents’ village.” She smiled. “You wouldn’t remember. You came for two hours that day and spent one of them on the phone.”
He did remember something: a mud-floored veranda, a man ashamed of his empty hands. Shekhar had left a hundred rupees and a promise to “see what could be done.” Nothing had come of it, because there were always files to attend to.
“I paid her fees,” Sagarika said quietly. “Class nine to graduation. Dilip didn’t want charity, so I said it was a loan, and he insisted on paying me back in jaggery and mustard oil every winter.”
Shekhar stared at her. “Twenty years? You never said a word.”
“You never asked.” There was no cruelty in it. It was simply true.
The invitation came three weeks later, a cream-coloured card with a gold border.
Advocate Jiten Bora requests the pleasure of your company at his enrolment ceremony.
“Who’s Jiten Bora?” Shekhar asked.
“Rohan’s colleague from the training institute. The one with the law degree and no salary.” She was buttering toast without looking up. “The institute was nearly bankrupt, and nobody could rent a room to a man on probation. So, he lived in the flat above the garage until he passed.”
“The garage flat? I thought you were letting it to a tenant.”
“I was. I let it to him. I paid the rent myself, in my own name, so he wouldn’t feel like a guest.”
Shekhar set down his cup. A man had slept above his own car for two years, and he hadn’t known.
I protected this city from bombs, he thought, and I never noticed the person living above my own garage.
The ceremony was held in a crowded, humid hall near the High Court. Jiten, thin and trembling in a new black coat, touched Sagarika’s feet before anyone else’s.
“Maa,” he said, and his voice cracked. “If you hadn’t…”
“Stop it. You did the studying.” She wiped his cheek with her thumb the way she had once wiped Rohan’s. “I only kept the rain off.”
Across the hall stood a young woman in a doctor’s white coat, talking to Rohan. She turned, saw Shekhar, and walked straight to him with her palms joined.
“Shekhar Uncle. I’m Mitali.”
“Dr. Mitali,” Rohan corrected, grinning. “Gauhati Medical College, final year.”
Shekhar’s throat tightened. He looked at this woman, at the confident tilt of her head, and understood what Sagarika’s quiet love had made possible. A girl in a faded uniform was now holding a stethoscope.
“Your aunt,” he managed, “is a remarkable woman.”
“I know,” Mitali said. “She’s the reason I’m standing here. Every winter Baba still sends her mustard oil. She refuses to stop accepting it, because it makes him feel equal.”
Shekhar nodded because he couldn’t speak.
That night, Sagarika found him on the veranda again, staring into the dark.
“I wasn’t there,” he said. “For Rohan’s birth, the transfer, the dinner. I left you in a taxi in the dark, with a child, in the middle of a war.” His hands shook around the cup. “Everyone says I was a good officer. I was a good officer. But I was a poor husband, and I can’t get any of it back.”
She sat beside him and said nothing for a long while.
“No,” she said at last. “You can’t.”
It hurt to hear, and he was grateful she didn’t lie.
“But I didn’t keep a ledger, Shekhar. I never counted what you owed me. I counted what other people needed.” She took his hand. “You can still sit at the table. That’s all I ever wanted.”
On Saturday, Shekhar booked a table at the same restaurant. It was older now, with fresher paint and the same crooked ceiling fan. He arrived early and pulled out her chair himself.
“Table for two,” he told the waiter. Then, after a pause, “No. Three. My son is coming.”
Rohan arrived, laughing, embracing his mother. The fish curry came steaming, as it had thirty years ago.
Halfway through the meal, Shekhar’s phone buzzed. An old reflex tightened his shoulders. The screen read Chief Secretary’s Office, Retired Officers’ Forum.
Sagarika watched him. Rohan watched him. Neither spoke.
Shekhar looked at the phone for a long moment. Then he pressed the button on its side, and the screen went black. He slid it across the table to his wife.
“Keep this for me,” he said. “I’m having dinner.”
She held it, smiling, her eyes bright. Outside, Guwahati hummed with evening traffic, and nothing exploded.
Shekhar picked up his spoon and stayed.