Hello writers!
It's
August and it's time to get back to Write...Edit...Publish... where the prompt is the delightful film Chocolat based on the book by Joanne Harris. Mine is a scheduled post this time as I am relocating from Fiji back to Calcutta, so forgive me if I am a bit late with my reading and commenting.
This post continues the story of Shovan and Mukta, Sam and Janhobi that began last December. It's turning out to be a kind of double scoop sundae romance story in a story...
What's happened so far:
The MC finds a B/W profile picture on a social media platform intriguing. He writes on an impulse to the woman and finds that the picture is of her grandmother and was shot in a studio that once belonged to a relative, now dead.
The MC goes back to his hometown and explores the derelict studio. He finally comes upon a series of nudes of a woman in different stages of life, the last of which he recognises as the grandmother.
He finds a letter that breaks the bombshell news that his Great Uncle Sam, the studio owner and the grandmother had an ongoing relationship in the past.
He meets with the granddaughter in their common hometown and shares the findings...which naturally shocks the granddaughter. The MC assures her that the secret is safe with him and he will support her through this bombshell discovery. They say goodbye but he feels she will not want to see him again.
Read on to find out what happens next...
Chiaroscuro V : Engraved
The
surroundings deepened in colour as one travelled out, even as the bridge was
crossed. The skies were incredibly bluer, the earth verdant with a million
shades of green and the air was a clear invitation to breathe deep.
I had been so firmly embedded in urban spaces that I had forgotten how
beautiful everything got once the city was left behind.
Sometime
in the 17th century, a merchant forefather of my mother’s had
prospered on the back of the European jute trade. He acquired a tract of land
and built a modest home close to a bend in the river. His descendants were to
live there and carry on the family business happily ever after. A few centuries
down the line however, plastics happened, jute declined, first the World Wars
and then Independence and Partition changed the old order.
The
descendants had quietly eroded away from the river bend to the city. The land
had had to be portioned and sold off, but the house remained. By the time my
mother got married, the old homestead only drew occasional visits by the
family. I had only ever been there as a child, just a hazy memory.
Two weeks
had passed since Mukta and I had met. It had ended as awkwardly as I had
feared. I desperately wanted to ring her but did not know if it would be
appropriate. This entire molehill-exploded-to-mountain was quite unnecessarily
stressful. Getting out of the city was an escape too.
***
It was
smaller than my memory of it. Entering through the gate into the
traditional courtyard everything felt cramped, the columns not as lofty, the
dust adding its own dingy colour to the doors, the round knockers pitted with
rust. The front room with its low divan was bare of any mattress or pillows,
the old teakwood armchairs were shrouded in yellowed dustcovers, brittle with
age. Footsteps echoed eerily on the floors, voices seemed to ricochet round the
walls. Mother got busy with her helper in making things habitable. I drifted
from room to room, the bustle of people gradually receding as I climbed to the
upper floor.
A long
verandah ran the entire length of the house connecting the rooms. I walked
along it into the last one. It was dark inside but I rattled a window open.
Light poured in and picked out an arrangement of furniture that felt
vaguely familiar – a Victorian table with an empty vase, an art deco radio, a
chair with curved claw-and-ball legs. I dusted it off and sat down. Where had I
seen these before? It eluded me for a minute. Of course – in the photo! In
Mukta’s profile picture, her grandmother’s B/W photo. I sat frozen to the
chair.
Twilight
came and laid a gentle hand over the village in a crescendo of birdsong and a
fluorescent arc of lilac light. The peak hour traffic rush was substituted by
the field workers winding their way home from the paddies. The post office
staff on tinkling bicycles, a distant local train’s chugging making the air
throb vaguely without any perceptible sound. Peace made almost tangible. But on
the outside only.
My
thoughts rolled around my brain like pebbles in a shoe, sharp and uncomfortable
in whatever positions I jockeyed them to. I jackknifed up from the chair
– the walls closing in suddenly unbearable – and ran down the
stairs.
Someone
called out behind me. I threw an answer over my shoulder.
“Take a
torch.” My mother pressed one into my hands. “It’s dark.”
Indeed
the lights were quite dim, quite a few were missing bulbs. The sky was bright
with stars though. The house abutted the river at the back, just a couple of
hundred yards from the waterfront promenade. If it could be called that with
its half tumbled brick parapet, missing paving stones and ever present litter.
The birds had fallen silent giving way to a chorus of crickets. Peace lapped
alongside the river, the water ran with a low, continuous chuckling. The moon
rose and prodded the waves with a shining finger of light. A breeze started up
from somewhere. It was enough.
The path back
was narrow and dark, surrounded by thickets of bamboo. I switched the torch on.
I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere because the gates were nowhere to be
seen. It should not have taken this long. Had I really wandered this far? Lights
broke though the gaps in the foliage, there was the buzz of voices somewhere,
so I kept on mechanically, mulling over this new discovery of the room and its
contents.
The
groves thinned out after a while revealing the house just ahead. There was a
huge neem tree against the boundary wall, planted more than a century ago. Its
branches soared up many feet above the house, dribbling its leaves over the
roof, casting deep shadows on the grounds. My feet stopped of their own accord.
I shone the torchlight over it.
The beam
played up and down over the great trunk of the neem and caught a gleaming
speck, it flashed gold as the light fell on it. I drew nearer – it was a
chocolate wrapper, plastered flat against the bark by the breeze. I slapped my
hand over it. My fingers sank in unexpectedly. Underneath the fluttering
wrapper was a small hollow – a piece of bark had been stripped off.
As I
lifted the foil away, the torch revealed the mark scratched on the trunk, one
of those eternal acts of love, or vandalism, depends on your opinion – names
carved on trees. This one looked decades old, the edges had healed completely,
the exposed wood buffed and smoothened with age. The letters had been slashed
deeply, vehemently, into the grain. They were now
blackened with accumulated grime, but no less emphatic than when they were
first made – Janhobi + Samudra, shaped into an elongated but unmistakable
heart.
WC - 987
FCA
Read the other entries here :
We have heaps of great stuff going on at WEP - there's the How To Series on various aspects of the writing life. The Anthology Page is now live so that's something we are all super excited about - go check that out for details and get writing!
And there are always the Challenges, the next prompt is in October and it's based on The Phantom of the Opera - how nifty is that for the Halloween month?!
WEP was also at IWSG earlier this month figuring out the fascinating links between chocolate, writers and books. That's worth a shufti too if you're into chocolate, or writing, or both!
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