I. The Water Remembers
The bus from Bongaon dropped Anirban Roy at a crossroads where the tar road gave up and became packed red mud, and from there he walked the last two miles to Noyapara with his suitcase banging against his knee. It was the last week of Bhadro, when the sky over Bengal turns the colour of a healing bruise and the paddy fields lie flooded and green, and the air smells of wet earth and something older beneath it, something that never quite dries.
He had not been to his grandmother's village in eleven years. As a boy he had come every Puja, sticky with mango and mosquito bites, chased by his cousins along the bunds between the fields. Now he was thirty-one, an engineer from a firm in Kolkata, and he had come to close up the old house before it was sold. His grandmother, Charubala, had died in the spring. The house — a long verandah, a tiled roof gone soft and green with moss, a courtyard with a tulsi altar cracked down the middle — was, by the terms of her will, his to dispose of as he liked. He liked the idea of being rid of it quickly and going home.
The path to the house ran along the eastern edge of a great pond, a dighi so old that no one in Noyapara could say who had first dug it. It was called Kajol Dighi — the kohl-black pond — for its water was dark even at noon, dark as a woman's painted eyes, and it did not reflect the sky so much as swallow it. A row of ancient banyan and ashwattha trees leaned over its banks, their roots trailing into the water like the fingers of something reaching up from beneath. There was a stone ghat on the near side, its steps worn concave by centuries of feet, and it was here, as he passed, that Anirban saw the old man.
He was crouched at the water's edge, an unlit bidi between his lips, staring at the surface as though he expected it to answer a question he had asked it. When he heard Anirban's footsteps he turned, and his face — a landscape of wrinkles the colour of the mud he sat in — arranged itself first into surprise, then recognition.
"Aren't you Charubala Thakrun's grandson?" the old man said. "The Kolkata boy?"
"Yes. Anirban." He set down his suitcase. "You knew my grandmother?"
"I am Rakhal. I looked after your family's land for forty years." The old man rose slowly, joints cracking, and did not offer his hand — instead he pressed his palms together in a small, formal namaskar, the gesture of a man greeting not a boy he'd once chased off the mango trees but a landowner's heir. "I heard you were coming. I have kept the house open, aired the rooms. Your grandmother, may she find peace, she asked me to look after it herself, before she went."
"Thank you, Rakhal Kaka." Anirban glanced at the dighi. Even in the flat grey light of late afternoon the water held no reflection of the clouds above it, which struck him as odd enough that he almost mentioned it, and then didn't, because it was, after all, only water. "This pond — it hasn't changed at all."
Something crossed the old man's face, quick as a fish turning beneath the surface. "No," he said. "It doesn't change. That is the trouble with it." He picked up Anirban's suitcase before the younger man could protest, and began walking toward the house. "Come. It will be dark soon, and you should not be standing at the ghat when it gets dark. Not this time of year."
Anirban laughed, a short city laugh, the kind that doesn't really believe in the things it's laughing at but wants credit for finding them charming. "Are there thieves, Kaka? Snakes?"
Rakhal did not laugh with him. He walked a little faster, and did not answer until they were well past the last of the banyan trees, on the raised path that led to the house, and even then his answer was only: "There are worse things than snakes in Bengal, Anirban Babu. Ask your grandmother's God to forgive me for saying this, but there are things in that water that were old before your family owned this land, and they do not care whose grandson you are."
He said nothing more on the subject that evening. But he did not leave when the sun went down, as Anirban had expected; he sat on the verandah, chewing paan, watching the darkness gather over the dighi with the fixed, unblinking attention of a man keeping watch.
II. What Rakhal Kaka Knew
The house, once Anirban had lit the hurricane lamps — the electricity in Noyapara was intermittent at best, and that night it did not come at all — felt larger than he remembered and smaller than it had been in his childhood, the way old houses always do, shrinking and swelling at once with memory. He found rice and dal warming on the clay oven, made by a neighbour woman at Rakhal's instruction, and the two men ate together on the verandah in the sticky, frog-loud dark, the dighi a black absence beyond the trees, more felt than seen.
It was Anirban, restless with an old, delicious fear he only half-believed, who asked. "Tell me about the pond, Kaka. What is it that lives in it?"
Rakhal was quiet for a long moment, turning his empty plate on the stone floor as though reading something in the grain. Somewhere in the dark, a dog began to howl and was answered by another, farther off, and then a third, farther still, so that for a moment the whole night seemed strung with howling, before it stopped as suddenly as it had begun.
"You will hear many versions in the village," he said at last. "Old Bibhuti will tell you one thing, the fisherman Haran another. But my mother told me this story, and her mother told her, and I believe it is closest to the truth, if a story like this can have a truth.
"Two hundred years ago, more, this land belonged to your family — not this small house, but the whole zamindari, from the river to beyond the temple. Your ancestor was a man named Ramkanto Roy. A hard man. Not cruel for cruelty's sake, you understand, but hard the way stone is hard — he did not bend for anyone, not for his tenants, not for his wife, not for his own son.
"His son, Nabakanto, was married when he was sixteen to a girl from a village three days' walk from here. Her name was Rajobala. They say she was very beautiful — skin like the inside of a shonkho shell, eyes that a poet in Kolkata once compared to the dighi itself, dark and deep and giving nothing back. She came to this house as a bride of thirteen, as girls did in those days, God forgive us all, and for two years she lived in the inner rooms of the zamindar's house, and she did not give her husband a child.
"You must understand what that meant, in that house, in those days. A daughter-in-law without a son was worse than no daughter-in-law at all. Ramkanto had already begun negotiations for a second marriage for Nabakanto — a richer family, a girl from Murshidabad with land of her own. All that stood between him and that new alliance was Rajobala.
"No one knows exactly what happened on the night of Kojagari Lokkhi Puja, the full moon of Ashwin, two hundred and eleven years ago. What is known is that Rajobala went down to the dighi that night to bathe, as women did, before the puja, and she did not come back up.
"They found her three days later, floating near the far bank, her red bridal saree still on her, her hair full of weeds, her wrists — this is the part my mother always said very quietly, Anirban Babu — her wrists marked, as though something had held her under. Ramkanto called it an accident. He held the puja anyway that year, with his daughter-in-law unburied on the far bank of his own pond, and within four months Nabakanto had married the girl from Murshidabad.
"But before Rajobala died — and this is the part that matters — a fisherman's wife who lived by the ghat swore she heard her, in the last days, standing at the water's edge at night, speaking to it as though it were the only thing in the world that would listen to her. And what she said, over and over, was this: Ei jol amake nebe. Ar ei jol e-i amar shodh nebe. This water will take me. And this water will take my revenge."
Rakhal fell silent. The lamp between them guttered, throwing his shadow huge and trembling against the wall of the house, and for a moment Anirban — despite the city degree, despite the eleven years, despite everything in him that did not believe in such things — felt the small hairs rise along his arms.
"And people believe," Anirban said carefully, "that she is still — that she's in the pond?"
"They call her Dighir Bou. The Bride of the Pond." Rakhal spat a stream of paan juice neatly over the verandah's edge. "Every few years, someone drowns in that water. Not many — the village has learned to be careful. But every few years, someone forgets, or is a stranger, or is too proud to believe, and the water takes them. Always around this time of year. Always near the full moon."
"That's — Kaka, that's just what happens near any deep water. People drown. It doesn't mean —"
"I am not asking you to believe me, Anirban Babu." Rakhal rose, brushing rice from his lap, his old knees cracking in the lamplight. "I am asking you to be careful. Do not go to that ghat after dark. If you hear your name called from the water, do not answer, and do not look. And if you see a woman sitting at the water's edge combing her hair, with no comb in her hand and no mirror before her — go into the nearest house, whosever house it is, and do not come out until the sun is up." He paused at the verandah steps, looking back at Anirban with an expression the younger man could not read in the lamplight — something between pity and warning. "Your family put her in that water, Anirban Babu. She has not forgotten whose blood you carry. Sleep well."
He walked off into the dark toward the village, and Anirban sat alone on the verandah for a long time afterward, listening to the frogs, and beneath the frogs, so faint he told himself he was imagining it, the soft, patient sound of water lapping against stone, though the dighi was a good three hundred feet from the house and there should have been no way to hear it at all.