Why am I hesitating to tell you the story of Madhumati? I have asked myself this question over and over again but I don’t get an answer, an answer that satisfies me. It is not that I don’t want to tell. I do. After telling you about Smita, Monideepa and Shrababati, I have been meaning to tell you about Madhumati too. Just as Atanu had urged me to, Atanu who believed that I am the best person to do so. Simply because I was his sole confidante, or was there another reason?
On a misty winter evening, when darkness descends all too soon, Atanu, my friend from the college days, suddenly barged into my house. I was surprised at his appearance, completely unexpected as it was and dishevelled and distraught in manner. True I had not met him for a year or so but I definitely remembered him as a cool, dapper individual. As far as I knew, he was working as a Medical Officer in Sadasiv Tea Estate. Now he blurted out that he had left his job. I was surprised. People don’t quit well paid jobs when these are so hard to come by around our parts. Atanu told me that he was here to tell me all about it. He even made me swear that I would tell his story to the world. By the way, he did not reveal the name of his heroine. Madhumati is a name I have chosen.
After reading my stories about Smita, Monideepa et al, Atanu commented that I was taken in by appearances. I had not been able to delve into the psyche, get beneath the skin as it were. Perhaps he was right. It is not always possible to unravel the intricate emotional network every individual presents. We come across so many of them in our lives. Maybe we make do with the outer framework most of the time.
But let me not digress. Let me tell you about Madhumati instead.
In the month of Magh, when the vivid crimson of the Simalu sets the forest afire, Atanu saw her for the first time. Saw her beneath the Kadam tree, the dusky Santhal girl wrapped in a knee-length coarse cotton sari with a garishly patterned blouse setting off her earthy appeal. He was stunned to encounter such beauty amidst the women toiling around the tea bushes. The colourful glass bangles, the silver anklets, the chunky necklace, the kohl lined eyes, the bemused young man took it all in. The sensuality of this untamed creature as wild as the nameless flower stuck on her tightly coiled hair set his pulse racing. Atanu saw her everyday, morning and evening, coming to fetch water from the tap near his house at the end of the Babu Line. Everyday he waited for her to come.
Apart from Madhumati, life in the tea- garden had no variation for him: to the hospital and back. Returning from work one day, he noticed a crowd near the factory. The labourers looked anxious but Atanu didn’t wait to enquire. The life of these people always seemed to revolve round some incident. There was never a dull moment, the mundane placidity that comes with ease. He had no wish to find out and involve himself in their affairs. However it turned out that he had to. Line sardar Malia called out and the urgent “Daktor Babu, come this way” could not be ignored. He was led to a woman with a toddler on her lap. The skinny little thing had a rag bandage on his right leg and the blue of the face said it all. After examining the fang marks, Atanu brought him over to the hospital. Very carefully he tried to draw out the blood from the affected area but after a while realized that the child had become colder than the needle in his hands.
He broke the news to the people waiting outside. This was a part of his job he hated. The shock, the grief, the hopelessness haunted him, made him aware of his inadequacy. Now he could hear a woman wailing. He looked at the boy lying deathly still on the impersonal hospital bed. Reminded him of a wan little flower robbed of its lustre and felled to the ground by blight. Suddenly, the door to his room was pushed open and a woman burst in. She looked at him, her eyes flashing fire. She was drenched in sweat and breathing fast. Atanu recognized her. Madhumati. Without a word, she picked up the boy and put her cheeks against his ice cold face. Crying all the while, she stumbled out of the room. The boy’s mother was lying unconscious on the verandah outside. Someone picked her up and they left, a line of people crawling along like a spineless, insignificant caterpillar. At the very end was Madhumati. In her arms she held Etuwa Tanti’s dead child.
Atanu was depressed. Though he knew that he could not have saved the child, he had a feeling of guilt. It was as if he had flicked off an ant creeping up his arm and then felt sad at having crushed out its tiny life. Sukhdeo, the chowkidar, came in and lit the hurricane lamp. He too seemed weighed down with sorrow. That was Etuwa’s only child, he said. The couple was childless for a pretty long time. Then they met a Babaji who had come from the mainland during Holi once. He had given an amulet which had worked wonders. Etuwa’s wife was still unconscious, it seemed.
A doctor does not have the luxury of spending sleepless nights over a patient’s death. The unexpected and unprecedented quirks of the human body see to that. Atanu was no exception and was kept busy combating fever, festering wounds, and various stomach ailments, besides the stubborn bouts of superstition. A few days later, he noticed a woman sitting in the garden outside his hospital chamber. Madhumati again. She had not come to fetch water since the child’s death. He supposed it was her misplaced anger. As he was writing out the prescription for the last patient, Sukhdeo came in with a stranger. He was a strapping young man with a scarf round his neck. In his hands, Adivasi style, he carried a bow. Atanu acknowledged his salaam and enquired about his problem. He replied that it was not he but his wife who needed a doctor. Hiding his irritation, Atanu asked him to bring her in. He did so and in came Madhumati, strangely subdued and almost pleading in her manner. She stopped her husband from answering the doctor’s questions and went out with him. Then she came in alone and confided in Atanu about her problem. He examined her, told her not to exert herself and prescribed some medicines. As she went out, he noticed that her husband Budhan was standing near the trolley tracks aiming an arrow at a pair of doves flying past.
In the peaceful ambience of Sadasiv Tea Estate, Atanu was not at peace. The lush green of the tea bushes extending to the horizon, the gigantic chimneys belching black smoke, the small row houses of the Labour Line, the sounds of Madol and Jhumur, the Sunday revelry of the men and women dousing their week-long fatigue with heady draughts of Haria, all these transported him to a world of magic. He wanted to lose himself in this world of unending greenery and carefree abandon and drown in the black pools of Madhumati’s eyes.
The eyes seemed to follow him everywhere and the owner filled his waking hours with thoughts utterly mad and disquieting. At times he wished that he could go back to being his old sober self but Madhumati had other ideas. She presented herself in the hospital and at his house at odd moments. Her roles were varied: sometimes to sweep his verandah, sometimes to bring him fruits and vegetables from the garden, sometimes even to snatch the stethoscope and hold it against her breast. It was as if she was using all the wiles at her disposal to tempt him with the forbidden fruit. Her tinkling laughter and come hither looks were pregnant with unspoken promise. He didn’t know how long he could hold out with his weapons of prudence and superior breeding but so far he was.
About a month later, Budhan came and told him that his wife was unwell and wanted to be admitted in the hospital. The small establishment had no such facility for the labourers but a new Female ward was being built and he as MO could allot Madhumati a bed. When she came with her husband, she was no longer the seductress but a tired woman weighed down with months of pressure and worry.
“Please give her back her laughter”, Budhan pleaded.
A few days passed and Atanu heard the laughter again. This time it expressed unalloyed happiness rather than tingling allurement. She clasped her newborn with a mother’s infinite tenderness. When Budhan came to fetch her home, he was full of gratitude for the doctor. He held the infant in his arms with the fierce protectiveness of a kite shielding its young. Bidding them farewell, Atanu wrote out a prescription and told the man to bring his wife and child for a check up at the hospital soon. As the couple left with their baby, Atanu remembered an earlier scene, a totally different one, of Madhumati trudging along, holding Etuwa Tanti’s dead son in her arms.
Post childbirth, the temptress seemed to have disappeared into thin air. Gone were her sudden appearances at all hours of the day. At first Atanu missed the sensuous presence he had got used to in the last few months but, gradually, she ceased to trouble his conscious self.
One evening, he was on his way back after attending a patient at a distant Labour Line. The sky was overcast and ominous black clouds threatened a downpour at any moment. As he crossed the gate to Line No. 4, he noticed Madhumati sitting with her infant on her lap. He approached her to enquire about her and the baby’s health. She started as if she had seen a ghost. When he reached out to examine the baby, she clutched it to her heart and screaming maniacally, rushed off in no particular direction. Seeing her run, a few passersby followed her. Utterly flabbergasted, Atanu hesitated, and then slowly made his way home.
Darkness descended with the swiftness peculiar to this easternmost tip of the country. The shadow of the surrounding Patkai hills loomed large, deepening the gloom of the sultry evening. Atanu’s mood matched this gloom. He was just sitting down with a cup of tea when there was a commotion outside. An alarming scene met his eyes when he opened the door for a look. Fifty odd men and women were gathered in his compound. They were calling him the worst possible names in voices raised in anger. Taken aback, the doctor, who was used to reverence rather than abuse, asked them what the matter was.
“You have tried to molest our woman. An educated Babu, you have behaved dishonourably with somebody else’s wife,” they screamed.
Bristling in righteous anger, Atanu asked them to shut up. Somebody in the crowd retaliated by throwing a spear at him. The situation threatened to get out of control but Sukhdeo’s presence of mind saved the day. He pulled the doctor inside and slammed the door. He, along with several Babus who lived nearby, managed to placate and eventually disperse the mob.
The next day, the manager called him to his office and asked him to resign. The labourers had come to him with the complaint that Atanu had dishonoured Budhan’s wife. The woman herself had complained. Things had become volatile and it was no longer possible to retain the doctor’s services. Atanu told me that he did not try to prove his innocence and left Sadasiv Tea Estate the very next day. Thus ended Madhumati’s story.
Atanu confessed that his infatuation for the Adivasi woman was almost adolescent in fervour but he had kept himself in check. He had never made any sexual overtures. In fact, it was the woman, married and about to become a mother, who had tried to seduce him. Then why the sudden change of heart once the baby was born? It was as if she wanted to remove him, Atanu, from the scene. She tried to keep her son away from the doctor at all cost. When I sat down to pen this tale, what ending would I devise, he asked. Would I seek a reason for Madhumati’s strange turn around? In the fact that she had attained motherhood at a great cost, her two earlier pregnancies having come to naught? In her belief, perhaps, that the doctor would be careless in his duties unless she offered herself as a bait? Once her purpose had been served, her baby born without a mishap, he could go to hell, or at least out of her territory? Did Etuwa’s child having died, literally in Atanu’s hands, play in her mind? Did she see a similar fate for her precious infant if he was around?
Would I portray Madhumati as a selfish, calculating, heartless female or as one suffering from an undecipherable mental turmoil?
Or would I leave her story open ended? Without an effort to delve, to explain.
I simply do not know as I do not know what has become of Atanu Dutta or his lady love that never was. That is why after telling you about Smita, Monideepa and Shrababati, I took so long to tell you about Madhumati.
