Death And The River(Sudeshna Majumdar) The river was much shallower than I remembered. Still you could sit by its banks and watch the blue hills in the near distance. They lay on one side like elephants, thinking of other things. The hills looked blue and green and much the same as ever, which is boring. But the wide expanse of white water rolling lightly over the rounded backs of rocks, silent stone beasts that sank under water during the rains, was gone. Instead the rocks dominated the river now. Continual dredging for housing needs had the river doing the vanishing act. Kolkata is one state where houses still come up faster than mushrooms. Each time a house raises a roof, a little bit of river disappears.

We- five of us brothers and sisters, cousins and second cousins- sat by the bank of Ganges, the longest river in the state, till evening fell, borne down by the cold January gusts that sprung from amidst the Western Ghats and rushed in through Sundarbans. The dark stealing up on the river and plains astonished the birds once again into homeward flight. Their shadows, like crosses, were cast on the water for the space of a breath and were gone.

We sat there listening to the wild grass fiddling the air, the mild music to which danced the bestiary of the sky. It was quite a zoo up there and for a moment I thought I could make out a couple of predators I had met in Rourkela among the clouds. After sometime the silence we expected arrived and the only thing we could clearly hear was the fallen days thudding under water like dead bodies.

Some of those days were pretty good because we had access to a random innocence, even, perhaps, that innocence, was the shedding of wisdom. In those days also our immortality was taken for granted. Nobody would die.

But of course they did. Uncles, fathers, aunties and mothers. There are good deaths and bad deaths. Good deaths pull people together and bad deaths divide them. The good deaths empower you the bad ones are a bitter process of dispossession; a dispossession including your senses. The deaths among us were all bad deaths; which was why we were sitting on these white sands in a rare togetherness, remembering the old days as if in a trance and looking across the river towards our ancestral home, orphaned by a people in flight from themselves.

As the moon came up, we shook time out of our sandals and got up to cross the river where it kissed the ankles for a mercy no longer flowing in our blood.

When we reached the other side, we stepped back into our sandals and in mine I found a dead fish dreaming of what it did last summer. I restored it to water, but nothing came of it. The river had lost its magic. Also it was silly to hope to revive a fish long dead, attempting to fit it into another's shoe. "Never get too big for your boots," said one of my cousins, "All right, I won't", I said.

We climbed the steps leading from the river and into the open backyard of the crumbling "Balika Vidyalaya" school. From here we could see through the fronds and foliage, the white walls of the house flashing in the moonlight like squares of linen on a clothesline. We approached the house with misgivings. We were coming back to it from our prodigal vacations after a very long time. In that time we had done everything short of murder.

We did not feel up to opening the heavy four piece door. It seemed an act of violation. Instead we went around the place peering in through the glass windows. In the breeze blown moonlight, we could make out the familiar chairs and huge four posters on teak in which people whom we thought we knew intimately made love, slept and died. We went around the house picking our way through the under growth towards the kitchen at the back. There, hung from its low cross beams, were the big blue pots out of which once cascaded ferns in a Niagara of colours; the pots now collected the night.

This was supposed to be our homecoming. The first after several years. No matter, the house would not welcome us. We did not even try the keys. The doors looked unforgiving. There was treason in the air heaving around us. And all along we thought we had betrayed only ourselves. The house thought otherwise, it was no longer a home. The same night we crossed the river. When we reached the other side, we turned around and looked back. The house was glowing up in a pile of fireflies. I held up a hand and blotted out the sight.

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