If you walk towards the south west on the Barkagaon road in Hazaribagh you cannot miss the Tamarind Mansion or “Imli Kothi” as we called it . It’s an enormous, ruined, palatial house. There is no paint on the exteriors; the gate is rusty and crumbling. The once heart shaped lawn is overgrown with wild grass and there is no more the rose garden that surrounded it. What are left are tall overgrown bushes. Formally it was the regional office of Indian Bureau of Mines, my dad’s office.
If you try to peek over the high walls you cannot really judge the vastness of the adjoining property around it. The Mansion itself must have got about 60 to 70 rooms with high ceilings and about a 100 acres of unattended gardens and forests encompassing it. I have explored every part of it! The mansion belonged to Deepak Mitra. No one lives there any more.
It’s haunted! That’s what they say.
Mitra was the only son of a very successful Barrister during the British Raj. He had two sisters both settled in the US and would visit once in every two years. A very soft spoken , an articulate speaker and an avid reader Mitra was an intriguing creature. He never showed any emotions and stayed a recluse for most of his life. His library had books that even my school did not have! Books form the late 1800‘s were stacked neatly around his library on wooden shelves and must have been worth a fortune in today’s market. Mitra though was tolerant of my mischievous acts he would not let me take any of those books out of the library. Otherwise I could do anything I wanted, I could climb any tree, break any branch, dig up the rose garden et all and would not be reprimanded. He would call Shushil , his all purpose helping hand, and ask him to fix up whatever disassembling I had done. He once got very upset when I tore a page out of an ancient pictorial dictionary because I liked the paper. It was soapy in texture and I wanted to show it to chanu, my partner in crime!
Dad was friends with Mitra . Not without a reason though. He made the monthly checks for the mansion he rented out to IBM. So he had to be good to dad. Every week there would be a lavish party on the first floor and the who’s who of the town would be seen with champagne glasses being nice and well mannered paying just about all attention to Mitra.
Dad would be invited to those parties every last week of the month. Being a man of humble roots Dad felt out of place and would not attend but he would make sure that the rental checks were made on time. Dad knew that was his only income.
It was not his only income till his sisters found out that he was selling the land surrounding the mansion and else where and came down from the US. They put litigation against him as they claimed they were rightful partners in the ownership of the property. Even though his father left him a fortune in cash he did not have the ownership of the estate entirely. By that time the litigation was filed his cash reserves were empty. More so the rent was to be divided into three and deposited into their respective bank accounts, so was the instruction given to the office by the court till the case was settled. The superficial buyers of the already sold land were peeved off and once when Mitra left alone in his 1920’s Austin, he was beaten up black and blue by some unidentified gooneys. I saw him nervous and shaking the next day, pacing up and down the gravel filled driveway like a caged dog! When asked to go to the police he drew a blank. With a swollen left cheek and appeared as a mongoloid by his left eye he was swearing to take revenge even though he knew he had no way of doing that. “Uncouth, daemons, pests in this society….” He fumed not so much out of rage rather out of shame. So the frequency of his parties dwindled and slowly the dotting friends disappeared from his life. He was left alone. Over the months he became a recluse, refused to meet anyone. Dad came to his rescue at this point. He made sure that the rent checks went on time and sometimes gave him cash advance at his own risk. He even got a bootlegger to deliver alcohol to Mitra’s house on credit.
“Poor thing !” He would say “He won’t be sleeping unless he has had his bottle”.
Through the evenings into the late nights you could see Mitra sitting on the graveled driveway on his trusted recliner with a glass in his hands staring skywards. He would sometimes fall asleep in the recliner and in the morning wet with the dew dripping from his body. Shushil would sometimes wake him up in the middle of the night and take him inside the house. Dad got quite close to him in those days. He would often be requested to stay back after office to give some “company” to Mitra. Though dad never had alcohol in this life he was too gentle a person to refuse such kind of a request. So he kept just the company.
This went on till the bootlegger refused to supply anymore alcohol. Mitra owed him quite a lot by now. The bootlegger tried coaxing the money out of Mitra and when the tricks did not work he simply chopped down two huge sesame trees from the acres of forest around the mansion to recover his money. When Mitra came to know of this he was quite jubilant! He just got an idea to create some wealth! All went well. The trees kept vanishing and Mitra’s liquid diet was filled with the bouquet of the finest scotch!
One fine day I found the gravel driveway give away to a beautiful heart shaped lawn! Mitra ordered a rose garden with some 100 varieties of roses to be built around the lawn and the lawn itself to be of ‘Australian carpet grass’ . In just a few weeks the mansion smelled of exquisite roses. I loved rolling on the soft spongy grass over and over again. Then came trouble in the form of Forest officials at his door. One more case against him was all he needed!
No more cash and desperate for alcohol he started selling books to local shopkeepers who would use the pages to pack spices and condiments for customers. When I saw this, I could not help but ask “Uncle why are you giving the books to the shopkeepers? I want them.” Of course I was too small to understand the gravity of his situation. One night while we were having dinner we found shushil calling out for dad at the door. Dad went out and after a while came back in, took out some money and gave it to shushil. When ma asked what was that for dad said “Oh! Shushil needed some money”. Dad being a petty clerk could not do that often and explained to Mitra about his inability to help him monetarily. One day Mitra came up with an ingenious idea! He explained to dad that alcohol was problem it was becoming a bad habit. “I want to quit, But then I am unable to sleep.” and when dad asked what he thought the solution was , Mitra promptly asked him to request Rehman, the local pharmacist , to give him some sleeping pills so that he could sleep till the time he got rid of the habit of drinking. Dad being a man known for his gentle nature could request Rehman explaining the facts and Mitra was confident that he won’t be refused. After some initial resistance to giving such prescribed drugs, Rehman agreed, but with a condition that in any event of abuse he should not be involved.
Every evening Shushil would cycle to the pharmacy to collect the pills. Without dad’s knowledge the quantity increased from 10 pills a day to twenty. In a few more months it increased to 40.
“Sir, it is unbelievable!” Shushil would tell my dad. “Even after taking 40 tablets of Calmpose , Saheb will not sleep till 1 o’ clock in the morning! And even if he does he is up at 5 in the morning”. Apparently a normal adult will die if he took more than 50 mg of Calmpose. But Mitra was made of tough matter. When the request for 60 tabs was made Rehman refused. So the daily supply was constant at 40 tabs.
At around ten years of age I did not understand anything other than that Mitra had a collection of books which I would like to have and that forest in his backyard were awesome to explore. During dinner ma and dad would discuss various things and more than often it would include Mitra. Even though I understood nothing of it , the audio retention capacity of my brains was phenomenal . Years later when I sat ruminating my childhood I would replay those conversations. Mitra was not to be blamed for his misdemeanor. Probably fate and his own convictions got him to where he was.
Being brought up in an aristocrat family Mitra was packed to St Paul’s Boarding school in Darjeeling, which only the rich could afford and boast about. Once in a year he would be back from school and would not find his father for days. Whatever time he saw him he was either with clients or busy with his cases. This brought a kind of melancholy nature in him.
He would crave for attention and yet no one had time for him as usual in such Noble families. And it was not a norm to cuddle or pamper one’s own child in an aristocrat family. That job was left to the servants! Probably the Bengalis of those days borrowed the culture from the British. His sisters were way too older than him to take notice and by the time he was 10 or 12 both were married and had crossed the continents.
Right after he completed his ten years of education it was already decided that he was going to Oxford for his graduation, but till he got his intermediate certificate he had to find a good college. The options were either Calcutta or Ranchi. Mitra opted for St Xavier’s College, Ranchi, as it was just a three hours drive from home. In those days women attending college were of rare find. They were may be 2 per 100 men. And it was Mitra’s destiny to have his fate bound to one of the two!
Dad never mentioned the girl’s name. He referred to her as “that girl” or “ one girl”. So I would call her Pandora! That’s exactly the Box what Mitra opened when “that Girl” came and introduced herself to Mitra. Mitra fell for her and it was a hard fall. Within a few months of striking the friendship with her he would do anything in the world for her. He would be dotting on her for every little thing .If she was borrowing books from the library Mitra got the whole library bought for her, quite literally. If there was one dress that she liked he got her a whole wardrobe, though she never took any of them with the promise that she would wear all of them once they were married! How could she explain the dresses to her parents? If she liked to eat something he would be ready to buy the restaurant for her! Mitra described everything to dad when he sat with him in the dark of the evenings when he would be drunk and dwelling in his past. Sometimes he would sob and repeat “ Why me, why me ?” When dad saw things out of control he would call Shushil and take him to his bedroom. Sometimes he would say “You know Samadder babu , people think I am an uncouth! I am a rascal. What do they know why I am like this. I am ready to trade lives. Take mine and I will take yours”. He used to quip “You know if a Cobra takes a dig at me I won’t die cause the snake will. I have so much of poison in me.”
Nearing completion of his intermediate college it was time for him to put forth his priorities in front of Mitra senior. He was so confident of his father’s desultoriness towards him that he thought it would be a matter of minutes when he would wave his hand and say “You have my permission, you need not bother asking”. It happened the other way. Mitra senior sat up straight upon hearing his son’s decision to marry a commoner. Apparently the girl’s father was a forest official working in Ranchi and was of North Bihari decent, measly people compared to the Mitra dynasty. The prestige issue was of such high propensity that the senior Mitra was ignited with insult. He made a stern announcement that no matter what happened he would not let the family name be tarnished. Shocked by the turn of events Mitra initially had no clue as to what he should do .But finally something pushed him to stand up for himself and declared that he did not want his father’s property nor his name and walked out of home.
“The thought of being a pauper never occurred to me, I thought I had my life waiting for me back in Ranchi , and that’s all I needed.” Mitra was sobbing uncontrollably one day. Dad could do nothing but listen silently, feeling a bit perplexed himself.
For four months there was no news of Mitra. The father thought of his son as a weakling who can only depend on his money. It was true of course. Mitra junior had no skill-set other than depend on his father. How he lived all those four months he never told anyone. But four months on, his father definitely started relenting of sorts, for he dispatched an entourage of his people to hunt him down with a message of a conditional acceptance that as long as the girl stays within the limit of the Mitra way of life he could bring her home. Mitra came back home, alone! His father’s men found him and delivered his message. There was no girl but her shadow did arrive at the Tamarind mansion!
He never ever mentioned that girl to his family again. Everything was obscure. No one knew what happened and what Mitra wanted. Senior Mitra was too filled with pride to ask his son. Junior Mitra was too remorseful to say anything. He became moody and started to have his whimsical ways with everyone. Sometimes he would go out for long drives and not return for days without any information of his whereabouts. He would donate huge amounts of money to charity. He would do yoga. Quite a few times he expressed his willingness to marry. Proposals were sent out far and near. People came to see him from US and Europe. The local proposals were not entertained! He visited the proposed brides and each time he retuned back without saying a word to anyone.
“You know Samadder babu, I tried every possible madness to get her or forget her. I am still trying”. He would confide in my dad. He had her address to which he wrote almost everyday begging her to come back. He never got a single reply for 20 years. He went to Ranchi countless number of times and sat in his car in front of her house for hours hoping to catch a glimpse of her. He never saw her again. What happened in those four months I came to know much later when I asked my dad once reflecting back on those days.
When Mitra went back to Ranchi denouncing his father and his money, in his heart he carried only his love and knew everything else will be fine if she was with him. But Fate had something else for him. When he reached her house, her dad was there to greet him. After the introduction, which went quite amicably, Mitra poured his heart out of his desire to have a home with his daughter. Society in those days, and even today, knew of only parent power, duty was only for children to fulfill. Parents were there to reap the benefit of their enjoyment they had 20 years or so ago! Love without marriage was a sin especially if it was between different communities. And communities were like air tight canisters as if to preserve food of customs. Parents would die of shame. Marriage was for the society not for individuals.
Mitra was to face the cruelty of the vindictive society. The girl was called and then he heard what he had never imagined. “What is he saying?” The fiery eyes of her father bent her conscience.
“ ‘This guy has been after me since I went to college. I have told him that I am not interested in him’, ‘are you mad?’ that’s exactly what she said, Samadder babu, I never had the courage to tell my father about this.” Mitra had told my dad
“I sat there with my eyes to the ground, I did not know what to say.” Dad told me.
“For the last 20 days Saheb has not slept at all, may be an hour or two every night. I have been watching him.” Shushil was telling dad one evening while returning back from the pharmacy. “I feel something bad is going to happen”.
Two days later Mitra was found dead, frothy mouthed, in his recliner. Beside him were 40 empty sheets of Calmpose tablets, 400 tablets in all. He went through with 20 days of sleeplessness to save those. A life time of savings !
