The story
The Phuchka Incident
There are men who can stroll into a room stiff with strangers, pump the hands of three of them simultaneously, memorise the lot of their names, and get off a happy remark while doing it. Aranyo Sen was not of this fellowship — surprisingly, since Aranyo, known as Rono to practically everybody who had known him upward of twelve minutes, had been raised in a household where conversation was pursued with all the zeal of a competitive sport. The Sens of North Bengal owned tea gardens, warehouses, transport concerns, and, at one murky point in the family chronicle, an elephant, purchased for reasons no living relative had yet explained to the satisfaction of a court of law.
Rono had inherited the ancestral gift of looking, at all times, precisely as though he knew what he was about — a useful sort of face to have. At nine-and-twenty he stood six foot two, broad about the shoulder, and equipped with the sort of forearms that suggested he could either mend a broken-down Ambassador motor-car or throttle the Ambassador motor-car, according to which struck him as more convenient. At university he had boxed, with rare enthusiasm, and had once deposited a singularly unpleasant senior into a rosebush.
He was also, and this was the sort of detail that caused strong men to sit down suddenly, a teetotaller.
“No drink?” a distant uncle had once enquired, with the air of a physician delivering unwelcome news. “Not even whisky? Rum? Beer?”
“No. No. No.”
The uncle had regarded him with the sorrow of a man who has just learned that his favourite nephew has gone off and joined a monastery. Rono had accordingly cultivated the sound policy of arriving at weddings early, eating with quiet efficiency, and slipping away before anybody could corner him and demand a full accounting of his moral position on Scotch.
On this particular evening, however, a friend’s wedding was to prove a good deal more perilous than usual.
He got himself up in a cream silk kurta — his sister’s choice over his mother’s blue, and a man ignores his sister’s counsel in matters of dress entirely at his own peril — and presented himself at one of those vast Calcutta venues where the lawn is roomy enough for a modest political rally and the food counters are laid out with the precision of a general disposing his troops. Strings of lights blazed everywhere. A band, under the settled impression that volume and talent were interchangeable, made itself heard for a considerable distance.
“Finally!” bellowed his friend Debu. “The tea-swilling monk has arrived.”
“I don’t drink tea either,” said Rono.
“You don’t drink tea?”
“I drink coffee.”
“Thank God,” said Debu. “For one dreadful moment I thought you had no personality whatsoever.”
The next twenty minutes passed off in the usual style — indifferent jokes, enquiries after the tea estates, the standing question of whether Rono was still unmarried, to which he gave his standing answer of “Yes,” and shrugged off the inevitable “Why?” The matter, on the whole, failed to grip him.
Then he saw her, standing near the phuchka counter, and for reasons no mathematician of any repute has yet worked out on paper, this small circumstance altered the complexion of the entire evening.
She was tall in the grand manner, with a carriage that made the surrounding furniture look faintly apologetic about its own proportions. She wore a saree of a deep, luminous silk that caught the fairy lights as she moved, so that the general effect was of an unusually expensive sunset attempting to make its way, with poise, through a wedding reception. She was eating phuchka.
Rono stopped. Not slowed down — stopped, dead. His friend Debu carried on talking for a good seven seconds before noticing that his audience now consisted entirely of the back of Rono’s head. “Rono?” Nothing. “Rono?” Still nothing. Debu followed the direction of his gaze. “Oh.”
The girl laughed at some remark of the phuchkawala’s, and Rono’s heart performed an action which could not, by any stretch of medical terminology, be described as professional — less a flutter than a table-tennis ball dropped without warning into a pressure cooker. He had taken a straight right from a man weighing ninety kilos. He had broken his own nose in a boxing bout. Nothing in this varied curriculum had prepared him for a woman eating phuchka.
A thousand things occurred to him to say, and not one seemed fit to be said aloud by a sane man in public. He could, of course, simply ask her name — a simple, civilised transaction he had performed on bankers, lawyers, and customs officials since childhood. Yet the prospect now presented itself with all the logistical complexity of a moon landing, and considerably less certainty of success.
She was perhaps ten feet away. Tonight, by some sinister process, this had transformed itself into the Himalayas, complete with base camps.
He weighed the merits of approaching her against every conceivable disaster that might follow. Suppose she thought him a fool? Suppose she had a young man in tow? Suppose she was married? — a possibility that caused disproportionate anguish until he recollected that Calcutta was not noted for any shortage of unmarried women. Suppose —
“Are you proposing to fight her?” asked Debu. “You have been standing here for five minutes.”
“I was thinking. She is beautiful. I ought to speak to her. I do not know what to say.”
Debu regarded him with frank astonishment. “You are six foot two, you run a tea business, you once boxed for the college, and you are frightened of a woman holding a phuchka?”
“I am not frightened.”
“Then go.”
Rono did not go. He remained precisely where he was, a splendid and useless statue, until the girl finished her phuchka, dabbed at her mouth, and moved off. He had, in short, muffed his opening. Regrettable, he told himself, but not fatal. There would be another chance. He had watched a sufficient quantity of Hindi films to be entirely confident on this point.
Five minutes later he saw her again, standing with two other girls near the stage — no phuchka, no crowd, a clear field. He took a step, at a pace calculated to suggest easy confidence rather than aimless wandering. Whereupon somebody stopped him.
“Rono! Come here. The groom is asking for you.”
“Two minutes,” he said, and went, telling himself it would be perfectly all right. When he returned, she had vanished.
For the better part of the next hour, Rono developed a curious and highly specialised relationship with the geography of the wedding, discovering in himself sudden and pressing interests in whatever counter, stage, or item of jewellery happened to be nearest wherever she stood.
“Still?” said Debu, catching him at it. “You have been tracking her for a solid hour.”
“I have not. I am an observant man. I notice things.”
“Apparently one thing.”
In the end curiosity got the better of pride, as it generally does. “Who is she?” he asked, with the elaborately unconcerned air of a man enquiring after weather in a district he has no plans to visit.
“The tall one, by the stage — the one you have been staring at since you arrived?”
Rono sighed. “Yes.”
Debu grinned. “Mala. Mala Choudhary.”
Rono repeated the name to himself, silently, the way a man tests the ice on a pond before trusting his full weight to it. It struck him as an entirely suitable name — the sort that sounds less chosen by parents than patiently awaited, and finally put to good use.
Over the next half hour he weighed the business of approaching her on some eleven separate occasions, each attempt collapsing under its own particular species of misfortune, until — on the eleventh — he discovered he had been standing beside a potted palm for some considerable time, thinking about it, while the potted palm made rather more progress with the young lady than he had.
Then the bride and groom came down from the stage, the band grew louder still, and people began to take their leave. Rono was seized, quite suddenly, with a powerful sense of urgency. This was the moment. Mala was over by the entrance, with her cousins, saying her goodbyes.
He set off towards them — one step, another, then rather faster. He had covered perhaps twenty feet when a car drew up at the gate. Her cousins began climbing in. She turned, and for one brief and shining second looked back towards the wedding hall.
Rono stopped where he stood.
She smiled — at someone behind him. He had not the faintest notion whom. Then she got into the car, the door closed, and it pulled away, Rono watching it vanish through the gates with the fixed expression of a man watching his own fortunes depart by the same route.
Debu came and stood beside him. “You didn’t speak to her.”
“No.”
“You were going to.”
“Yes. Absolutely, definitely.”
“When?”
Rono regarded the empty road. “I don’t know.”
Debu nodded, with the sympathy of a fellow sufferer, and after a decent pause added, “Well. At least you know her name.”
Rono smiled faintly, in the manner of a man who has salvaged one small trophy from a general and comprehensive rout. “Mala Choudhary,” he said again, as one commits something valuable to memory, for safekeeping, against a rainy day.
Then he turned back towards the wedding hall, where the band played on with undiminished and largely unwarranted enthusiasm, the phuchka counter remained open for business, and some four hundred souls milled cheerfully about the lawn. And Aranyo Sen — who could negotiate the purchase of an entire tea estate without blinking, who had once stood in a boxing ring with the blood running satisfactorily down his face, and who could tell a banker exactly what he thought of the bank’s interest rates without ever raising his voice — had contrived to spend the better part of an evening standing ten feet from a beautiful woman, and had not managed to say so much as hello to her.
He went back inside. After all, he reflected, there was still phuchka. And so far as Rono himself was concerned, the evening had been an unqualified and roaring success.
He had learnt her name.