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 THE ELUSIVE MAYA

 Udayan Majumdar

Siddharth Sinha, Finance Manager at Bullfinch Company, the Kolkata-based manufacturers of refractory bricks, was a reticent but witty man who loved figures¾of the numerical variety. He would spend the entire lunchtime in office solving number-puzzles while munching a cold sandwich he would have “assembled” with his own ten thumbs in the morning before catching the 8:30am suburban train to office. His colleagues, especially his genial boss, the Finance Director, who had lost his barren wife to a cholera epidemic in North Bengal two years after their marriage, had given up on Siddharth. They had tried to marry off the workaholic to many a matrimonial-column-advertiser lest he turn into a recluse, but Siddharth would parry such proposals saying he was interested only in figures, as in numbers. Marriage and romance (in whatever order) were for madmen, he would console his widower boss, citing the singular story of his chance encounter with a gifted artist. The story’s link with his avowed conviction was at best tenuous, but Siddharth never tired of relating the incident to any prospective (or retrospective, as in the case of his boss) romancer.  

The venue of Siddharth’s enlightenment was Netarhat in the Palamou district of Jharkhand. It was in the rarefied heights of this impoverished hill station, dubbed as the Darjeeling of undivided Bihar, that Siddharth (as he put it) forsook his likely future wife and unborn infant to emerge from the depths of innocence to experience. The artist, he would chuckle, had transformed an undecided Siddharth into a Laughing Buddha, with a fetish for numbers.  

The encounter with the artist was, as Siddharth put it, a meaningful coincidence. Actually, the Finance Manager of Bullfinch had been sent to Ranchi to deliver a mild threat to a certain slippery customer of the Company so that he cleared his dues without, of course, signing up with other brick-makers for future supplies. But as luck would have it, the smooth-talking customer had to leave for Patna on the sudden news that his wife had delivered. He would return only after three days, if there were no post-natal complications. Siddharth had wanted to return to Kolkata, but his Finance Director would not hear of it. “Stay put,” he had ordered over the trunk line.  

Ranchi in summer did not turn out to be a particularly hospitable place. True, it was the summer capital of the larger Bihar in colonial times, but senseless deforestation had turned the climate perverse. Moreover, being chronically power-deficient, summer nights in Ranchi were unbearable. The air conditioner in Siddharth’s hotel room, with an impressive grille, was more a decorative piece than a cooling device and would not run on the power supplied by the noisy diesel generator set. With three days to while away, Siddharth was at a loss. Finally, sick of being cooped up in a muggy hotel room, he left for the soothing cool of Netarhat, a mere 150 kms uphill from Ranchi, on the pan-chewing hotelier’s counsel.  

The journey, unlike his regular commuting in an overcrowded local train, was exhilarating. As the privately-run luxury bus wound its way on the hilly road, the view from the window kept changing. First, it was the broad leaves of the mahogany with flocks of garrulous parrots preening their olive green feathers that stirred his imagination. Then, as the bus gained height, he could see the tall pine trees, swaying in the gentle zephyr, with poinsettia, marigold, wild rose and myriad other nameless blossoms colouring up the undergrowth. Siddharth, who was more accustomed to the flat Gangetic basin, let his mind wander in the varied and changing landscape.  

But as the bus took the final turn to Netarhat, Siddharth sensed he was in for trouble. The whole place was teeming with summer tourists of various shapes, sizes and colours. There were young people in garish clothes, old ones in traditional dhoti-kurtas, bewitched pale-skinned foreigners, and regular tourists sporting shorts and eager looks. The caretaker at the Forest Bungalow, which offered a panoramic view of a green marigold-spotted valley against the backdrop of distant blue hills, very courteously told Siddharth that there was no vacancy, and he would best return by the 4 o’clock bus. Siddharth pleaded, even dropped names, but the wiry old man would not listen. Finally, it was a bottle of bilayti (India-made foreign liquor) that did the trick. Hariah, the caretaker, relented saying Siddharth could be accommodated, provided he was willing to share a room with another guest.  

Reluctantly, Siddharth followed Hariah to one huge room with large bay windows and a fireplace. There were two beds on either side. The one that faced the wall would have to be Siddharth’s. Hariah explained that the other guest was out for a walk in the nearby village and was unlikely to be back before evening. But no sooner had Siddharth put down his suitcase and washed, than the other occupant walked in. He stared at Siddharth for sometime, stroking his unkempt pepper-and-salt beard, and then introduced himself in a deep baritone as “Chhabi, Chhabi Ray, an artist”. Then, rather abruptly, he turned and got back to his corner to gaze out of the window at the winding cobbled path leading to the bungalow gate.  

Siddharth did not know how to react to the somewhat jerky and temperamental artist whose age, he estimated, could be anything between 30 and 50. Feeling that he ought to know a bit more about his forced acquaintance, Siddharth approached Hariah in the kitchen. The caretaker-cum-cook said the artist was a nice man but rather unusual¾given to sobbing rather loudly in his dreams¾and had been occupying the room for the past three months with no signs of departing. Apparently, he had some influential relative in the State Government, and would, therefore, continue occupying the double room till he wished. Siddharth lost his appetite and skipping lunch decided to explore the surroundings. Hariah informed him that there was a small lake nearby and he was most likely to find the place unsullied by obstreperous tourists since it found no mention in most published guides.  

Trudging along the narrow hilly path out of the Forest Bungalow Siddharth wandered among unfamiliar trees and wild conifers whistling in the breeze beneath an azure sky till he reached the promised lake. It was a magnificent sight. There were no tourists around, and Siddharth sat down on the bank watching the ripples emerge and spread out towards the opposite end. There was a small wind-mill on the side where the ripples journeyed, and a small boat tethered to a post on the edge, rocking in the small waves of the wind-spurred lake. Never in his hurried life had Siddharth, the city-dweller, seen anything so simple, yet so pleasing. He sat there, silent, as disparate thoughts and images welled up from the forgotten corners of his figure-obsessed mind. Hours passed, and only when the sunlight began to give way to a crimson twilight behind the whispering conifers, did Siddharth get up to return to the bungalow, and the artist.  

Back in his shared room, Siddharth found Chhabi poring over a large painting. As he looked closer, he realised that the artist was crying, and tears streamed down his cheeks to be lost somewhere in the tangled overgrowth. Feeling rather awkward, Siddharth was about to leave the room when Chhabi called him. “Look at this,” he said in a broken voice pointing to the painting before him. Siddharth complied. It was certainly an extraordinary canvas, though crumpled at the edges. There were distant blue hills, with a deep green valley spotted with golden flowers in the foreground. Right in the middle of the valley there was a figure, that of a milkmaid, with a pitcher on her head. With one hand the milkmaid was balancing the pitcher, and with the other trying to hold down her flowing dress fluttering in the wind. The milkmaid, Siddharth noticed as he looked closer, was exceedingly beautiful. A tribal girl with sharp, frank features, she seemed to exude a kind of mystic beauty.  

On Siddharth’s query, Chhabi confirmed that the girl, Maya, was a milkmaid, and immediately drew from under the bed a ream of paintings, all with her face catching the light from various angles. Each one of the paintings was a marvel to Siddharth, who was more used to photogenic images on billboards enticing consumers. As Siddharth marvelled over the paintings, Chhabi kept staring at his face as if recording the changes in his expressions. At length, Siddharth asked Chhabi if the milkmaid was real or imagined.  

“Of course she is real; what do you mean?” the artist retorted, and then lapsed into silence. After some time, he added in a pathetic voice, “But I’ve met her only once, and that too long back. She keeps eluding me. For aeons have I roamed the roads of the earth, from the seas of Ceylon to the shores of Malay… To be with her, hold her hand, look into her eyes…”  

The chance encounter, as Chhabi recounted, had taken place perhaps two decades back, and as their eyes had met, he had known their destinies would meet too. She had smiled at him, and her smile was like the golden marigold growing wild in Netarhat. She did not speak his language, nor he hers, but did language ever stand in the way of true love? She was a tribal girl, simple and honest. City-life had not polluted her, and never would, for Chhabi had resolved to settle down with her in a corner of her village, may be by a small river rushing over polished stones. But while the future was known, the present was loathsome. Chhabi was on the verge of wasting his entire youth, and his sanity, trying to find her. “How long, oh god, will I have to wander about till I pluck her delicately from among the golden marigolds in a forgotten valley? How long?” Chhabi asked Siddharth in a voice on the brink of tears.  

Somewhat baffled, Siddharth asked him where exactly it was that he had met Maya? “Do you think I remember?” Chhabi replied sadly. Siddharth was at his wit’s end. He did not know how to offer help. He had another long look at the painting he was shown first. The landscape bore a striking resemblance to the terrain of Netarhat, and he said so. At this Chhabi got very excited and shaking his head claimed that his hypothesis had been vindicated yet again. When he had first arrived at Netarhat a few months back, the first thing that had struck him was the landscape. It was as if someone had lifted the panorama from his painting and placed it in this corner of Jharkhand. One look around and Chhabi had known that at last he would find Maya here. Of late, he had made some progress towards tracing his love. He had found a village nearby and it was most likely that she stayed in one of the mud houses there. Of course, Chhabi had to be very cautious in trying to locate her, for the villagers did not like intruders. Currently, he had no option but to wait on the fringes of the village and keep a watch on the people moving about. May be Maya was not well and was confined indoors. Perhaps, like Chhabi, she too was love-sick. Chhabi paused, and then broke into another “how long?” as a hapless Siddharth watched.

(The author is Senior Editor, ICRA Limited, New Delhi, India)

3u pwMÉ¡, 2003