Chapter One A wonderful evening

In the dark, Naru (a young man of about 23 years) was lying alone, facing the southern sky. The location was inside a kilometre-wide river channel, on the flat, smooth bed of sand, freshly washed and cleaned by nature's own hands (maybe for Naru only). He was lying on the edge of one of the few narrow streams running through the relatively raised sand beds of that considerably wide channel.

It was about 8 o'clock at night. The area where Naru was lying inside the river channel at the centre of southern part of West Bengal, India, 8 o'clock meant night, not evening. Although the word is riverbed in English, but in the proper grammatical parlance of the local language, that river is a male one (not any river), named Dwarakeshwar.

In the source of grammar for every Indian language, Sanskrit, every noun has a gender. That river was marked as a male one by the guardians of that land at the dawn of the present phase of civilisation. The basis of that categorisation is unclear to date. Nobody knows who, when and on the basis of what invented that categorisation. Through the ages, the residents of such areas have followed diligently something that has been determined at an extremely long time ago. That place was at least thirty kilometres away from any nearby urban environment, i.e., places with paved roads, closely built houses, congregation of various types of shops at one place, etc. For a short distance, in that place, the river was flowing from north to south.

In the darkness, Naru reached the riverbed after walking about one kilometer through submerged, muddy, ploughed but yet-to-be-planted fertile paddy field. In that environment, it was impossible to find the traces of any path. Until that period, those areas of South Bengal were a free range for snakes. In that village, Naru had seen the presence of several Russell’s viper on a number of occasions. There is no antidote to the venom of that snake. Russell's viper generally avoids wet environment, but there were other deadly ones, including cobras, to fill in that void. Two days of incessant rain created that atmosphere in which Naru could not stay inside of a deserted residence with no electricity connection even after knowing all the risks involved in the way to the river.

The river channels of the South Bengal region originating from the adjoining Chota Nagpur Plateau in the western direction are generally illogically wider than the amount of water they carry in normal conditions. On the face of it, it is difficult to find any justification for the wide size of those riverbeds. Where Naru was lying, the riverbed was about one kilometre wide. A few thin streams were flowing through the different parts of that wide riverbed. The east bank of the river was about 20 feet high from the riverbed. The drop of the height was abrupt. In that direction, a small isolated village was situated about a kilometre away. Naru was staying in that village. Due to the wall-like riverbank, no sign of human settlement was visible in the east from inside the riverbed. The area between the river and the village was as fertile as the other areas lying within the radius of a few kilometres around that village. In the early 1990s, the village would become quiescent at 8 pm, with no sign of light. The west bank of the river was quite far away. The nearest village in that direction was at least three kilometers away. Towards that direction, the riverbank was also covered with the silhouettes of dense vegetations. A tiny congregation of flickering light was visible at least a few kilometres away in the northwest direction through the open space at the end of the vegetations on the riverbank. A distant light source flickers a little, that phenomenon has a scientific explanation. That day, that cluster of light might have flickered a little more because of the continuous rain of a couple of days that ended only at the beginning of that evening. The air had a feel of purity.

At the end of the prolonged session of torrential downpour, a large number of torn clouds, which were accumulated in the eastern sky, were visible over the silhouettes of the vegetations on the eastern bank of that river. The sky straight above the riverbed was almost clear. The colour of the sky was not the regular light blue, but dark cobalt blue. The moon was behind a piece of thick chunk of cloud of dark slate colour in the middle of the sky. The light from the moon could not come down through the layer of that cloud. White light shone through the edges of that cloud. There was another piece of cloud, located a little to the east, hanging at a relatively lower altitude. Beams of bright moonlight fell on that cloud creating another bottom-dark disc of radiating white light. A magically illuminated atmosphere was created. Two slate-coloured top-illuminated sources of soft white light were hanging in the visible pristine cobalt blue sky over a generally dark land surface. The water level of that characteristically dry river was slightly swollen due to prolonged rains of a couple of days at the onset of the monsoon.

For Naru, the faint gurgling sound of the flowing stream a few feet away from his ears was in perfect harmony with the very quiet environment. Intermittently, small piles of sand on the edge of the stream were crashing down into the stream of water on Naru’s side, creating some kind of mumbled sound of falling.

That universe comprised of mesmerising nature, Naru, horizon-wide loneliness, a faint whisper of an unhindered flow of air through the river channel and near ubiquitous silence. Suddenly, a very faint discontinuous trail of the sound of Sanai (one kind of clarinet) could be heard from the direction of that small but glittering light cluster that was seen in the northwest direction. The discontinuity of that sound was due to the distance of the source as well as the wind-flow from the opposite direction. That very faint trail of sound was there with Naru for the rest of the session that he was there inside the river channel. Surely, someone was getting married. Clarinet music is the signature of a marriage ceremony in Bengal (almost without any exception). Several electric lights were installed in one place for that occasion only. A small step was being taken towards the continuity of the journey of the human civilization with the course of time.

That exotic ambience was perfect to take Naru’s mind on a transcendental journey. Taking a cue from the world famous song by Paul Robeson, it

Impressum

Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

Texte: Dibyendu Chakraborty
Bildmaterialien: Google, Dibyendu Chakraborty
Cover: Dibyendu Chakraborty
Lektorat: Dibyendu Chakraborty
Korrektorat: Dibyendu Chakraborty
Satz: Dibyendu Chakraborty
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 08.11.2021
ISBN: 978-3-7487-9885-9

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ॐ श्री विष्णवे नम: Late Bishnu Pada Chakraborty My Father