I have a problem. I have had it for a couple of days now and I need to find a solution, fast. I know, of course, that everyone has problems, there is always something or the other to disturb a man's peace of mind. But then, those are usually problems one is familiar with. Sickness, maybe, one's own or one's wife's or one's son's, or maybe one's parents'. Maybe a sickness as serious as cancer. Worries bout a son's career, children's schooling, a daughter's marriage or maybe an affair, even loss of rust between husband and wife, quarrels, accusations, bitterness. All the problems that sometimes come singly, sometimes several together, and in the end people find solutions for them, or maybe they don't and the problem stays with them for life. People like us, nondescript penpushers in city offices, what else can we expect from life?

Problems change, too, they change with time. I still remember, for example, how my father and his brothers came away from Khulna, came away with their families. Of course, my memory is fuzzy, no clear outlines, but there was this dark night when we left home. There was a boat ride, my mother carrying me in her arms, wrapped in a shawl. One or two lights forming flickering tapes on the dark river, like the zari threads they used to decorate Durga. And then a crowded train, a hazy impression of my father fetching us a papaya to eat, cut in the shape of a boat, a yellow boat! That's all. In Barasat, we went to school, and we lived in a shanty. In two years, there were little red and pink flowers growing around our door when the Pujas came around. After that, there was the house in Park Circus.

A lovely house, better even than our old home in Daulatpur. Still, Buli and I missed those red and pink flowers. Now I know that my parents must have found it hard to meet the expenses on my father's meagre salary – he had a new job. But we never caught our parents squabbling about money. There were times when my grandmother moaned the absence of milk and fish in our meals – "in our own land," she would wail, but my parents always stopped her.

"All that is past, it's gone for ever, what's the use of talking about it to the children?" And my grandmother would stop complaining, only a mumbled excuse slipping her lips – no, no, it's only that the memories come back sometimes. Dada was doing well in school, and Buli of course was a good student from the beginning. We really had no choice in the matter, because we knew that if we didn't do well in school it would make our parents sad, and that was something we could not bear to contemplate. Sometimes in the evening, or even in the morning, my father would sit on the bed and read out poetry.

Lakkha bakkha chire, jhake jhake praan pakkhi saman chute jeno nij nire or Engraj sena chute paschate sheshe bahu dure bane niralate sakhyat holo jhashirani sathe bishal nadir tire. On such days, the three of us forgot about our homework, mesmerised by the recitations. And so was our mother. We were just beginning to grow up then, my brother and I. We loved those evenings, when my mother would stand half-hidden behind the kitchen door, and we could make out that she was oblivious to everything around her then. She was overcome by shyness if she caught our eye, hurrying back inside the kitchen. And sometimes, late in the night, we would lie in bed listening to our father playing the flute. We knew he was playing for her. Yet our daily life was ordinary, humdrum, like everyone else's. But we could not bear to think of doing anything that might hurt our parents. But then, so many things happen in our lives without our thinking about them. Those poems that my father read out to us, the rhythm of that poetry of courage and sacrifice, enveloped me in a kind of daze. Later, during my City College days, I somehow got thrown together with the Communist Party. Stranger still, a fair girl with her hair tied in plaits, whom I spotted staring at me in every debate or recitation session in college, suddenly became very special to me. My heart beat faster when I was with her, and also when I was not. I did not really consciously notice how the two involvements started to take shape.

As for the first, I know now why it happened – there was something in the air of those times, 1965 and 1966. The atmosphere was fiery. Actually, the mercury had started to rise earlier, during 1962-'64. Around 1964, my father's health started failing, but then maybe my grandmother's death had broken him some three years before that. I wrote my schoolleaving examination in the year she died. The country was celebrating Rabindranath's 100th birthday. It was not clear what was wrong with her. She stopped eating and hardly spoke.

Her face and limbs were swollen, she ran a slight temperature. When she talked, it was only about our old home in Daulatpur. My father sat with her every evening after he came back from work, sat by her bed till she fell asleep. In those last days, our grandmother seemed to have become completely unaware of her surroundings, and the few words she sometimes muttered were about our garden in Daulatpur, our jackfruit tree, the boy who grazed our cattle. Sometimes she would softly ask my mother, "Nayan-bou, have you shut the rear gate? Take out the clothes from the wooden trunk in the small room and put them out in the sun." It made my mother cry.

Faizuddin Sahib, with whom we had exchanged houses, had a son-in-law in the BSF. It could be this that made it possible, but he would visit us every two years. He called my grandmother Amma. When he came, she always had lots of questions about the house at Daulatpur, the garden, even the shelves in the rooms.

That embarrassed my father, but Faizuddin Sahib – whom our father taught us to call Chachajan – did not mind. He would tell my father, "We keep our mouths shut, brother, we follow the social rules, we can't express what goes on in our hearts. But you mustn't stop people who can talk about their feelings. Like Ammajan here, your bhabi there sheds tears for this house – such a lot of space in your house, there's the garden, fruit trees, the pond, still she weeps for this house. And in their tears, we cry too."

My father would ask after his sons. By the early sixties, Chachajan's eldest son was in college, the same college that my father had gone to. And Chachajan would always take a stroll in the Park Circus Maidan, even if he had to do it in the afternoon sun.

To Be Continued