V. The Ledger of Debts
Bibhuti Charan lived in a single low room behind his grandson's grocery shop, and received them sitting cross-legged on a string cot with the placid, faraway courtesy of a man who has already, in some essential sense, half-left the world of the living. He was, by his own reckoning, ninety-three years old, blind in one eye, and possessed of a memory that Ishani had learned, over two years of visits, not to interrupt.
He told them what he had told Ishani before — of the annual offering, the banana-leaf raft, the red saree and sindoor set upon the water at moonrise — but this time, prompted by Anirban's careful questions, he told them more.
"Your great-grandfather Debendranath kept the rite faithfully," Bibhuti said, his cloudy eyes fixed somewhere over Anirban's shoulder, as though reading the words off the wall of the room. "I remember him doing it myself, when I was a boy no taller than that trunk there. He would walk to the ghat himself, not send a servant — that mattered, the old people said, that it had to be the zamindar's own hand that gave the offering, since it was the zamindar's own hand, generations back, that had taken her life. He would say the words his father had taught him, and his father before him. I do not remember all of them. But I remember the shape of them — an asking of forgiveness, a promise that the family had not forgotten its debt, and — this part I remember clearly, because it frightened me as a boy — a naming. He would speak his own name, and the names of his children, aloud to the water, as a kind of accounting. As if to say: here is what we owe, and here is who owes it, so that you need not come looking."
"And then it stopped," Anirban said.
"Then Debendranath died, and your grandfather Bimalendu inherited the estate — though there was little of it left to inherit by then, most of the land already sold or lost to court cases, this was the fifties, understand, everything was changing. Bimalendu was not a man who put much faith in his father's rituals. He had been to college in Kolkata, he had read Nehru's speeches, he believed the future belonged to men who did not float sarees on ponds. He kept the offering the first year out of habit, or perhaps out of his mother's insistence — I do not know, I was already grown by then, I only heard what people said. But the second year he did not go himself; he sent a servant. And the servant, being only a servant, did not know the words. He set the raft on the water, but he said nothing to it. He gave the offering without the accounting."
Bibhuti paused, and for the first time in the conversation, his blind eye seemed almost to focus, to see something in the middle distance that troubled it.
"The third year, Bimalendu did not send the offering at all. There was a court case that month, or a wedding to arrange, I do not recall which — some ordinary business of the living that seemed, at the time, more urgent than a promise to the dead. And that Ashwin, on the very night of Kojagari Lokkhi Puja, he went down to the ghat — not for the ritual, mind you, simply to smoke, as he often did in the evening — and he did not come back."
"They told me it was an accident," Anirban said. "A monsoon night. He couldn't swim well."
"He swam better than any man in this village," Bibhuti said flatly. "I fished beside him as a young man. He swam like an otter." He was quiet for a moment, and then added, in a voice gone suddenly gentle, almost apologetic, as though he regretted having to say the next thing at all: "Your father was nine years old that year, Anirban Babu. Old enough to remember his father's face when they pulled him from the water. I have heard — I do not say I know this to be true, I only say I have heard — that your father never once, in the whole of his life afterward, went near that dighi again. Not even to fetch a ball. Not even as a grown man. He left this village at seventeen and did not come back except for his mother's funeral, and even then, they say, he would not walk the path past the water, he went the long way round through the fields, and no one in the family ever asked him why, because everyone already knew."
Anirban sat with this for a long moment, the low room close and warm around him, a single fly circling the smoke-blackened rafters. He thought of his father — a quiet, careful man, dead himself now six years, who had never once mentioned Rajobala, or a curse, or a ritual, who had raised his son in Kolkata with a swimming pool two streets away and had never, not once in Anirban's whole childhood, come to watch him swim in it.
"Dadu," he said — the old man had earned the title, in that hour, more than any blood grandfather could have — "what were the words? The exact words of the offering, if you remember them. I think I am going to need them."
Bibhuti's blind eye turned, slowly, until it was fixed, however sightlessly, directly on Anirban's face.
"You mean to make the offering yourself," he said. It was not a question.
"Three generations have owed this debt and not paid it," Anirban said. "My great-grandfather paid it. My grandfather did not, and the pond took him. My father ran from it his whole life, and perhaps that is its own kind of payment, I don't know — perhaps fear is a currency too. But I am the last of us, Dadu. If I don't pay it, there's no one left to."
Ishani, beside him, said nothing, but he felt her hand find his on the cot's worn string, and hold it, and did not let go.
VI. The Night of the Full Moon
The last two days before Kojagari Lokkhi Puja passed in a strange, suspended quiet, the kind of stillness Anirban would later associate less with peace than with the held breath before a scream. He learned the words Bibhuti gave him — a short verse in old, formal Bengali, half-prayer and half-legal accounting, the kind of language that belonged equally in a temple and a courtroom — and repeated them to himself at odd hours until they sat in his mouth as naturally as his own name. Ishani helped him gather what was needed: a red-bordered saree, new, never worn; sindoor in a small brass box; rice and milk in a clay bowl; a banana-leaf raft that Rakhal, wordlessly, without being asked, built for him on the afternoon of the second day, his old hands moving through the familiar folds and pins with the ease of a man who had built such rafts before, long ago, for a different Roy.
On the evening of the full moon, the village of Noyapara did something Anirban had not expected: it emptied toward the dighi. Word had spread — as word does in villages, faster than any telephone — that the zamindar's grandson meant to restore the old rite, and by the time the sun began to set over the flooded fields, a crowd had gathered along the near bank of the pond, not the horrified, murmuring crowd of Haran's death but something quieter, more expectant, holding the collective breath of people who have lived alongside a fear so long it has become almost a neighbour, and who now dared, for the first time in fifty years, to hope it might be persuaded to leave.
But it was Ishani who brought him the last, worst piece of news, arriving at the ghat white-faced just as the light was beginning to fail.
"It's Tultul," she said. "Bibhuti's great-granddaughter. She's seven. She went to the water's edge an hour ago to wash the family's brass, the way she does every evening, and no one has seen her since. Her mother is saying —" Ishani's voice caught, and steadied. "Her mother is saying she heard the girl call out, just once, as though she'd seen someone she knew standing in the shallows, and then nothing."
The crowd's expectant quiet broke into something closer to panic; torches were lit, men waded into the shallows calling the child's name, and Anirban felt the careful architecture of his plan — the ritual, the words, the slow formal accounting of a family debt — buckle under the sudden, unbearable weight of an actual living child, seven years old, somewhere in that black water while the moon climbed, fat and orange, over the eastern trees.
Rakhal caught his arm before he could move. "Anirban Babu. Listen to me. If she has taken the child, wading in and shouting will not bring her back — you will only lose more people to the water tonight. The old people say Dighir Bou takes what is owed to her on this one night above all others, and if the debt is not paid before the moon reaches its full height, she will collect it herself, in her own way, from whoever is nearest the water. You said you would pay the debt. Pay it now. It is the only chance that child has."
Anirban looked out at the dighi. In the rising moonlight the water had taken on a strange quality he had not seen before — not merely dark now but faintly luminous at its centre, as though something beneath the surface had begun, very slowly, to rise toward the light. The crowd's torches threw long, broken reflections across it that did not behave quite as reflections should, bending and gathering as if the water were reluctant to give them back.
He walked to the ghat's lowest step, the raft in his hands, Ishani a pace behind him, and knelt.
"Rajobala," he said, and his voice, to his own surprise, did not shake. "I am Anirban, son of Sudhindra, grandson of Bimalendu, great-grandson of Debendranath, of the house of Ramkanto Roy, who took your life from you two hundred and eleven years ago in this water, and I have come, on behalf of that house, to pay what is owed."
The frogs, which had been shrilling all evening, fell suddenly and completely silent. Beside him, he heard Ishani's breath catch.
He set the clay bowl of rice and milk upon the banana-leaf raft, and beside it the red saree folded small, and the little brass box of sindoor, and he lit the single oil lamp Rakhal had set at its centre, and he pushed it out onto the water, and as it went he spoke the rest of the words Bibhuti had given him — the asking of forgiveness, the promise that the debt was remembered, was named, was paid; and last, as the old man had told him he must, he spoke his own name aloud to the water a second time, and the names of his father and his father's father, an accounting laid bare upon the surface of the pond for whatever listened there to weigh and judge.
For a long moment, nothing happened. The raft drifted, its small flame trembling but steady, out toward the centre of the dighi, and the crowd on the bank stood in a silence so complete that Anirban could hear his own pulse in his ears, and somewhere behind that, absurdly, the ordinary sound of a night bird calling in the fields beyond the trees, indifferent to everything.
Then the water at the centre of the dighi, directly beneath where the raft now floated, began to move.
It did not ripple outward, the way water moves when a fish rises or a stone is thrown. It moved inward — a slow, deliberate drawing-together, as though the pond had begun, very gently, to fold in upon a single point, and from that point a shape began to rise, pale and slender and streaming, hair first, long and black and thick with the fine dark weed of the deep water, and then a face.
She was, Rakhal had told him truly, very beautiful, or had been; the moonlight caught the shape of a young woman's features, high and fine-boned, the wide dark eyes of the old poet's comparison, though there was nothing in them now that any poet would have wished to look at for long — a blackness that did not reflect the moon or the torches or anything at all, an emptiness with the terrible, patient weight of two centuries behind it. She wore, or seemed to wear, the wet ruin of a red bridal saree, its gold border tarnished black, and about her throat, catching what little light there was, the thin dark line of an old bruise that had never, in two hundred and eleven years, been permitted to fade.
A sound went through the crowd on the bank — not quite a scream, something older and more helpless, the sound a people make when a story they have told each other for generations to keep the true horror at arm's length suddenly, unforgivably, becomes simply true.
"Rajobala," Anirban said again, though his voice shook badly now. "I have paid the debt my family owes you. I beg you — the child. Tultul. She is seven years old. She has done nothing. Whatever this house owes you, it cannot be owed by a child who was not even born into it."
The water-woman's head tilted — a small, terrible, birdlike motion — and when she spoke, her voice came not from her mouth but from the water itself, from every direction of the dighi at once, low and wet and full of a grief so old it had curdled, over two centuries, into something almost indistinguishable from hunger.
"They gave me to the water and called it an accident," the voice said, and the crowd flinched as one. "They held the puja over my unburied body. They married their son within four months to a girl with better land. Two hundred years, Roy's blood, and only three of you ever remembered what an accounting means. Your father ran from me his whole life and thought that running was enough. Was it enough, do you think, boy? Was fear ever payment for a life?"