Milk Of Magnesia

From red earth to Raisina Hill, Poltu has come a long way.

WrittenBy:Indrajit Hazra
Date:
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DEY’S MILK OF MAGNESIA LIQUID

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Composition: Approx. 8.5% (w/w) of magnesium hydroxide IP

Indications: Constipation, sour stomach, heartburn, extreme acidity, discomfort caused by eating, drinking and smoking

Dosage: (As laxative) 6-12 teaspoonfuls in a glass of water

(As antacid) 1-3 teaspoonfuls in equal quantity of water

1

He was small for the chair, a Size 4 foot inside a Size 10 shoe. But that came hardly as a surprise to anyone, least of all to himself.

He had come to terms with his size in his early adulthood, a stage in life that usually comes late to men from places that suffer from having far too many days of wilting summer and far too few nights of bone-stretching cold despite people there wearing giant socks with a hole across their faces while saying, “This is winter. This is winter”, as if coaxing a season like that ever worked.

He had then figured out, the same way he had solved so many knotty problems involving humans over the years, that he was small even by the standards of his fellow students at Vidyasagar College in Suri, a place with red earth, plank-seats standing widely close to the ground and a hopelessly humming-with-heat sky. But it was this knowledge of his smallness that allowed him to prepare for the conditions that he would later face.

It also gave him the unique skill of letting matters slide into the background, turning them into mere coughs and throat-clearings even when people invested with more power, more mystery insist that the matters were of apocalyptic importance. And if he knew one thing, it was that to stop the end of the world, one has to treat the world – let alone its end – as if it was not the be all and end all.

It wasn’t just the giant chair with its plush seat though, that reminded him to take note of how small he was. The room itself was unnaturally large even by establishment standards. In here, large was giant and giant was gargantuan and everything that was above his line of vision seemed to be out of reach.

The painted portraits on the walls lining every room of the palace seemed to hide a giant safe behind each of them. Or in keeping with tradition and heritage, a sealed, shallow chamber with the skeletal remains of a bricked-in virginal Brahmin boy surrounded by untold treasures that his spirit is supposed to protect.

The heavy frames surrounding these paintings, the bottoms of which were probably the only things that provided him with a sense of what was distant and what was close in his new home, had been put to the shine recently. Everything had been polished in his honour. Everything – the furniture, the lights, the light and the air – seemed to be on the cusp of floating away, restrained only by the order of gravity’s high command.

To reach where he had was an accomplishment. At this point in life his body, however small a territory it lorded over, expected him to take things easy, the way things took him easy. And he had finally given himself to believe that this, this opulent boredom, was a reward for all the spading, uncoiling, plainspeak, honeyspeak that had made him what he was and that had served others.

And yet, it was inside this visually, spatially, psychologically luxuriant honeycomb of a presidential palace that he remembered his size after all those years. Disarmed is what he now felt, even though he didn’t know sitting in that giant chair that that was what he now felt.

2

“A mouse, that’s what you are”, he recalled a boy, who must be an old man now if not dead, telling him years ago with a matter-of-fact viciousness that is usually the hallmark of boredom rather than envy.

And that was when he started observing mice, and rats, considering that he would never know the difference between the two.

“Poltu, get that filthy creature out of the house!” his sister Ona had screeched the first time he had brought a mouse-rat home and held it in his cupped hand like stolen prasada. “I’m going to tell Ma!”

It had been a hectic round of negotiations, rimmed by a quick bribe of a five-anna packet of palate-clucking, tongue-on-teeth-smacking hojmi-churan, which had bought her silence that day. By the time he had started working, first as a college teacher and later as a writer for Desher Dak, he knew more about mice-rats than most people. He also knew more about mice-rats (except that they belonged to two different species) than he knew about people.

When he made a quiet, personal visit to Israel, five years after his official trip to the country as defence minister was cancelled, his high point was when he met scientists in Herzeliya, where the next day his daughter Sharmistha was to perform an open-air kathak recital.

He had raised his head up with excitement more than twice to ask the Israeli scientists showing him around the facility one question after the other after he witnessed a demonstration of explosives-detecting mice. These mice had been trained to be better at sniffing out explosives than any full-body scanner or x-ray machine. He thought of telling his colleague in the defence ministry about this amazing security system, but thought better of it when his face shimmied in and shimmied out before his eyes.

There was unlikely to be any mouse (or rat) in the huge house that he would now be occupying for the next five years.

The liveried chaps who had been standing on either side of the door of the room he was sitting in seemed a mile away. They had their eyes planted on some point on the wall behind him. He had a terrible itch to walk up to them, see what they were seeing-not seeing even if his vantage point would be some two feet below their line of vision.

This wasn’t one of his old offices where, in desperation to kick a smoking habit that had become unsuitable and unbecoming for people leading public lives to openly indulge in, he had stuck dozens of well-chewed pieces of chewing gum under his table. Sitting in that giant chair under the painting of the Mahatma that served as a retractable halo, he quietly opened the drawer at the bottom of his giant desk.

Before the over-long function that had preceded his being alone now – alone, that is, with the two still-and-staring chaps at the door – he had dropped a bottle, a cluster of fleece white sticks along with two wooden ladle-like objects into the drawer. He had brought the contraband into the palace in a Government of India envelope along with a slim book he intended to read before his family, hungry after all those years of being neglected, would descend on him.

3

He had got the book 15 years ago as a gift from one of his long-standing bureaucrat friends. “Buddha-babu had first told me about Akhtaruzzaman Ilias when his first book came out in Bangladesh”, the knowledgeable lady had told him in the course of the dinner he had hosted at his Talkatora Road residence after being voted “Outstanding Parliamentarian” that year. “He’s written just this other novel, but he’s quite brilliant”.

The book had been tucked away somewhere, coming into his view only a few days ago when he was making a brief show of overseeing the books that were being transported from his old house to his new palace. The green cover caught his attention, and picking it up he remembered how the opening pages had captivated him, reminding him of something he knew and had found tasteful from his own life. But he had forgotten what exactly had captivated him in those opening pages and now intended to remember.

He re-started reading the book the day before, almost exactly a month after escaping from the blizzard of news that had been swirling around him. Once again he had been transported by the meandering, gathering opening sentence of The Dream Chronicle:

“The spot where Tamij’s dad was standing straight with the soles of his feet pressed slightly into the mud and with the veins on his neck throbbing as he stretched to stare as high as he could, driving away the thick grey clouds by waving his jet black hands – consider that spot carefully”.

Where had he been transported to by those lines? He wanted to pinpoint the time – because it was as much about the time as it was about the place – latch it down with rope, coax it into settling in the cup of his palm like a friendly rodent that sensed no danger because it was a danger to no one.

He knew that the startling image of a man trying to shoo away a cloud while standing next to an ever-shallowing pond was real. It had been real at a time when he had not yet found the second-hand life and its concrete comfort. It had been real some 70 years ago when he was a boy running around with his tail in the air along the red flaky earth of Mirati.

It had been as real as the oversized metal plaque that bore his name at the edge of his table next to the mini-palm tree that was the Indian desk-flag. If it weren’t for the mice and his decades-long slow drowning in other people’s lives and business, he would have been lost, become a charmless nobody, or, most horrifically of all, the pen-pushing man he had always feared he would end up being instead of dedicating much of his life to separating bodies from bodies, quarrels from words, push-pulling the herd until the cows came home after pointless, enervating digressions.

He peered up from under his black-framed glasses to look at the two men who collectively served as original cast models for all those liveried men who stand outside hotel lobbies to greet visitors. Making a slurping sound unbecoming of the position he now found himself in, he swooped out the pouch of tobacco, one of his two favourite surviving pipes from the lowest drawer along with the small bottle of milk of magnesia and started briskly walking towards the bathroom. The nearest bathroom was a walk away.

He locked the door behind him and faced the rather magnificent main bathroom the way a rich farmer who was not always rich faces his fields. Placing his cargo on the expansive marble basin shelf, he plucked out a crop of tobacco from the pouch, using the double-bent pipe-cleaner to push it into the receptacle. But before lighting it, he would have to settle down.

The bathtub would have fit his frame easily. He would have been equally comfortable sitting on the lidded toilet seat closer to where he stood, avoiding looking into the mirror. And then he made his choice.

With his back against a large, smoked window pouring in yellow sunlight that was constantly being transformed into a steady, uninterrupted white sheet of light, he sat on a chair. A normal-sized chair that looked not like a movie throne but like a chair. Took the matchbox out of his pocket, made the flame dip into the pipe-mouth as he puffed in with locomotive breaths, before opening the book to read.

If he thought he saw a scurrying figure much smaller than him scamper from one end of the bathroom to another, he didn’t pursue the matter. With the top three buttons of his jacket already open and a glass with roughly three teaspoon-measures of a milky fluid ready to be reached after a few more puffs on his pipe, he was already somewhere else.

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