Synopsis
“A Death Day- Story of an Indian Society” reflects the socio-cultural casteism of India from the time of Indian freedom movement to the free India. The story that we like many times, maybe it in itself keeps a lot of pronounced memories of one’s timeline or a sum total of lavishly lost lifetime lifelines. The beginning of this story was set around the era when the Britishers used to rule and govern the country by paradoxically looting it. Rajib, having the good name Mr. Mukul Mukherjee, was not an ordinary person. Besides being a blue blood person, he was a Brahmin by birth but a Muslim by blood. He was living his rich and restricted, reserved and royal, luxurious but lost lifestyle in the city of revolutionaries, Calcutta. Yes, the same city where people eat their self-fish sharing it with the man sitting and spawning soliloquies surrounding them. Though he was a man of Calcutta, Bengal but a product of the British colonial system. At the very first stage when he started his schooling in St. Thomas’ School, it felt pretty uncomfortable to fit his feet with the foot of British English. The sensitive sense of survival had begun from those days. Coincidentally, Rajib had a unique characteristic. He always walked against the flow. It was the time when the world was waging the Second world war boundlessly, he was diving dotingly into the depth of love. A strange but believable feeling blooms in the body of a belittling but beloved boy when she sets foot in, like the season of October. The queen of Rajib’s love emporium. His love was a student of commerce, cultivating the critical commercial calculations while Rajib was from chemistry, analyzing the chemical composition of commonly uncommon components. It was at that time when the Bengal region of India was suffering a devastating anthropogenic famine due to the ongoing worldwide war, in the backroom Quit India kineticism was launched against the dramatically designed policies of the British Raj under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi and his associates. While Rajib was not in Calcutta, Bengal or even in India but he was lavishly enjoying his lifestyle inside the college campus……………….. ……. …. ..
A Death Day- Story Of An Indian Society
” Progressive present is the fruit of a preliminary perfect past and also the seed of one’s fruitful future. The line of life lies in between this fundamental fact fairly fabricated from Monday morning to Sunday sunset.”
Impressive lines were written on the very first page of the diary.
It was a sweet silky sunny summer morning. The race of life was started over one of the streets of Calcutta, India. Wearing western dresses, the city was looking for its last lost religious and cultural essence. Britishers were gone leaving some scattered memories of Queen Victoria in that hall. Once that entrance corridor of the East India company in the eastern part of the country, the city Calcutta remained an example of urbanization through the passage of economic and industrial revolutions. People were not walking, instead, they were running helter-skelter to cross their coagulated limits and jump over the roundabout rogue race for an advanced, exorbitant and better lifestyle. Those retired robust revolutionaries of post-independent India who gossiped hours last night lately at the tea stall beside the road had no time to talk even for a second on that matrixed and manoeuvred Monday morning. This is the beautiful and squalid, cultural and vile city, Calcutta, where people eat their self-fish, sharing it with the man sitting and spawning soliloquies surrounding them.
Alexa may be one of them. She had a small family having two daughters and one son. She was a poor one and thus her basic needs revolved around food for herself and her family. Her life was tailored-fit into a popular saying, “Rich people plan for three generations, poor people plan for Saturday nights.”
As the primary need was food, Alexa always started her journey very early in the morning in search of food. She craved for food here and there, beside and behind the hotel and along the streets. But the local municipal authority seemed very punctual on that day. The surrounding was so clean like that of a mirror of some posh area bedroom. About one-third of the day was swiped away without a single bite of food for Alexa. She had an open mouth and an empty stomach. Utterly, she decided to cross the road to extend her search operation. The great liability was that she was unconscious about the traffic signals and it was then green. Again, it was a day that recalled those painful memories of blood-soaked roads, picturing the heartbreaking scenarios of fighting for freedom of a federal nation. The only difference between then and now was, earlier it was for freedom while now it was for food.
The day that started with a sweet silky sunny summer morning ended as a doomed dark detrimental day for her family as this was the last day for Alexa to enjoy the void but vivid sanctity of life. There had been no F.I.R. registered for her death. Neither any print media nor any electronic media covered the news. Even today, it is still not crystal clear that whether it was an accident or a gut-wrenching brutal murder.
Because like Alexa, street dogs are born to die on the streets.
The investigating officer found this story on the last page of the personal diary of Mr. Mukul Mukherjee. For a deep and thorough investigation of the case, he took some suspicious and selective objects with him and also not forgot to take that personal diary.
CHAPTER- 1
If life starts with no pain or suffering, it can never realize the sensitive sense of survival. Birth is the start of a perpetual, prolonged and perceptive war rather than an achievement of final death.
It was 19th September 1923. The story of the life of Rajib was started by celebrating his first birthday in a maternity ward of one of the hospitals of Calcutta. He was the third child but the one and only son of his parents. From the very first day, he achieved two privileges in his life. First was being a son and next to that was one and only son. And, for a sophisticated and patriarchal civil society that matters a lot. One might say that he was a kind of Aladdin with limitless wishes whose every single wish had to be fulfilled by his genie family in no fraction of time.
A remarkable incident had happened in Rajib’s childhood which his grandmother used to remember for days with excruciating pain. At the age of five, he was suffering from Leukemia. A cancer of blood-forming tissues, hindering the body’s ability to fight infections. But it was a great grace of God that doctors at the hospital detected the critical disease in its preliminary stage. He was then immediately admitted to a super speciality hospital in Calcutta. Of course, money makes moments easy but it was a matter of AB positive. Though it sounds good that Rajib was born in a family of blue-blood persons but life cares with the share of red blood cells.
An attendant of a patient admitted next to Rajib, Arif Rehmeni, came to know about the anxiety of his parents. Do you still remember that self-fish sharing with the man sitting next, a common beauty of the socialized city of Calcutta? Arif Rehmani who had the same blood group voluntarily agreed to share his self-blood for the operation to save the distantly consanguineous child of God.
Since then, Rajib was a Brahmin by birth but a Muslim by blood.
Of course, merely a five-year-old unconscious child might not perceive that pain is necessary for the sense of survival. That day at the hospital passed like all other dates of a calendar. And with the passage of time, all those cries and tears faded from the walls of the hospital but his parents still look back on the day by celebrating the birthday of their one and only son twice a year.
It was the time when winds flew through the flags of the British colonial system. The kid, a kind of a sophisticated new generation, started his primary education in St. Thomas’ School, one of the oldest and finest educational institutions of Calcutta. Rajib, maybe, was an Aladdin for his genie family but the rules of a renowned school roll through the sticks of its master’s strike. At the very first stage, it felt pretty uncomfortable to fit his feet with the foot of British English. He struggled throughout as Freedom Fighters were struggling for freeing their beloved motherland to have the Swaraj back. As a whole, he developed a dual character as that of “the child Einstein” for his classmates and as Brahmagupta by scoring and then computing the consecutively obtained zeros in the subject of Mathematics. The sensitive survival for senses had begun from those days. Mistakenly mistakes manicured him minutely but repetitively reflected as a precise, perfect and precious gift of God with time.
Not more than a hundred days left for the retirement of the investigating officer, he had been seeing more than many cases in his professional life. These are the days that made roads bloody red by the blood of fiery like Flovent fighters fighting for freedom from the British federal system that had been choking the country for decades. Even a split-second earlier, the officer killed a mosquito biting his right-hand elbow while keeping eyes on the personal diary of Mr. Mukul Mukherjee. But beyond all this blood, he never imagined that on a track of socialism, religion could not declassify the blood cells of humanity.
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A strange but believable feeling blooms in the body of a belittling but beloved boy when she sets foot in, like the season of October.
Imprints of love leave both ideological and insightful impressions during the teenage period. The rich and restricted life of Rajib took a transit turn when she opened a hallway of love. The queen of Rajib’s love emporium, Ritu Bharti, a tender beautiful and kind-hearted girl in her early twenties walked in the soullessly scripted, cluelessly conceited and pretentious Piglin world of Rajib. It was the time when the world was waging the Second world war boundlessly. Worldwide troops had been trained and combat arms had been finely formed. Infantry, cavalry and artillery were told to stay on high alert all the time. But Rajib’s world of difference seemed to continue. In the days of the war where many men were loving meticulously, he was against the flow. He, of course, started his struggle as a disarmed, corporal soldier. It took three years to astonish his queen but at last, he was the majesty of his love emporium. Love has many resplendent side effects, proved by Rajib. It altered an impertinent, rough compartment guy into a sober, socialized, solicitous gentleman.
Rajib was not infatuated with love; rather he discovered it serendipitously through a smoky corridor for the first time. Ritu was the spotlight of the crowd, which was crawling and struggling adjacent to him when he was refreshing his youthful body by having a cigarette in his right hand with a cup of tea in the left at a tea stall near College Street.
The world’s worst parasites grow up in the ocular perceivers immersed in love. No doubt he might have realized that cigarettes were not only injurious for health but could also collapse the fortress of love cold-heartedly.
From day one, the first look of the beauty drove his thought through the clouds of pleasantly serene dreams. By the way, whether it was a coincidence or a destiny of Rajib that the crownless queen turned out to be a girl from the same college. She was a student of commerce, cultivating the critical commercial calculations while Rajib was from chemistry, analyzing the chemical composition of commonly uncommon components.
Gradually his unconscious mind and starry eyes were diving dotingly into the depth of love subsequently made him follow the girl as a great fan of her. The radiant face and questioning eyes, through the linear space of the bookshelves of the college library, was sparking a generous heat in the puerile heart of Rajib, soothing and snuggling in the cold breezy winter. Rajib was already the one and only son of his parents, Aladdin of his family but it was the first time when he was turned into a wretched soul beggar for his profound and proliferated appreciation. Then, a day came when for the first time after so many tactics and tricks, practice and plays he verbalized with the girl. But, the first word that came out of his affrighted mouth was ‘ sorry ‘. Sorry for what? the girl questioned him back with an earnest voice. Sorry for smoking that cigarette that day, Rajib replied. Genuinely, he was endeavouring to reintroduce himself as a benevolent guy in front of the girl that somehow started to adore, admire and idolize her all day and all night. Not fascinatingly he recalled the first day when he optically discerned her at the College Street. The girl laughed out loudly. After a single second of silence, she summarised the sensational situation of that day in her sentence as ” I didn’t notice you on that day. My eyes only caught your right hand holding a cigarette while having a cup of tea on the left hand, thereafter my mind started to commercialize the values of these two. For me, it was the best living, real and in-world example of profit and loss.
It was at that time when the Bengal region of India was suffering a devastating anthropogenic famine due to the ongoing worldwide war and dramatically designed policy of the British Raj towards the war. Military and political events along with natural disasters had destabilized Bengal’s agrarian economy. These critical situations fractured the backbone of the weak grassroots level. Increased military presence, the diversion of farmlands and forests into large-scale pressure and trade barriers between provinces had made the scenario even more painful. In the backroom, India was parallelly preparing from the pre to post-independence era. Quit India kineticism was launched under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi and his associates.
Within these vital circumstances, Rajib must not be left in solitary. What about Rajib and his lovely queen? In between the circumventing black and white circumstances, he was diligent in colouring his profound appreciation of life close to his queen Ritu. He was not in Calcutta, Bengal or even in India but he was lavishly enjoying his lifestyle inside the college campus relishing bread and butter beneath the shadow of the British flag with his resplendent and dazzling female, Ritu.
CHAPTER- 2
All buildings of that city remain incomplete where all workers become revolutionaries, either lovers.
The season of October had gone along with the sensational essence of the dazzling girl, Ritu. Rajib’s love emporium collapsed in parallel with the fall of the British colonial system. Only the footprints of Ritu had been preserved within the altered stony heart of Rajib like that of the Howrah Bridge, standing like a skeleton in the heart of the beautiful and vile city, Calcutta. Often standing at a distance, he kept watching the people passing over the bridge while trying to find his lost, tender and warm love in between them. He had never forgotten or even tried to forget the love he lost.There is a common but very true philosophy that compassionate love happens only once. Later on, we merely photocopy that love either as rough or fair. It might be the primary reason that he was unmarried till his last breath.
That was the day when Rajib woke up in the morning of an independent democratic republic country when he optically discerned that the multitudinous dreams of profound appreciation diving with his queen now no longer existed. This city had gone too far while pushing him to a very backfoot while the crowd then were relishing their morning breakfast under the flag of an independent nation. Similar to that time frame of the Second world war, he was standing lonely again against the flow. The flow was ornamented with the casteism and religious differences in in-dependent India.
The conservative casteism based civil society of the post-independent India did not sanction that girl of the lower caste to let her live her life and took her away from Rajib.
Did not know exactly about Ritu, where she is now. The perfectly paved journey left Rajib in the middle of the bridge. By the way, those chemistry classes at his college made him a professional chemist. Wearing a white lab coat he found tranquillity who once was shattered in love. During the mid-age and last days of his life, he was working freely inside the adiabatic glass chamber of the laboratory of a freedom felt nation. His tardy-night dreams made him passionately a lychnobite, who likes to sleep all day and works at night. Now, he had a bad habit of not smoking cigarettes. He used to look at the last cigarette left in his cigarette case for a long time then smell it and try to smoke it without lighting it up. He found this habit very magical. Rajib was afraid of the fact that the sensational essence of Ritu hidden inside him might be erased by the smoke of the cigarettes. Besides smoking unlighted cigarettes, whenever he found any work very difficult, he sat under an open sky and counted infinite twinkling stars. He believed that what could be a difficult task in the world rather than counting the stars in the sky?
In between those days, the intended violence caused during the partition of India led to a shift in the demographics of Bengal, especially Calcutta. A voluminous number of Muslims left for East Pakistan to leave behind all of their tarnished but tormented memories. While hundreds of thousands of Hindus arrived with the dreams of better food, shelter and nominal basic lifestyle. Calcutta was receiving millions of refugees from what became East Pakistan. Not only Rajib but also the entire world was seeing the result of the Divide and Rule policy of the Britishers, based on religion. As he was a Brahmin by birth but a Muslim by blood, it became such a discombobulated moment for him to choose one side. He had to make a choice either to go to East Pakistan to blur the visions of his past or to stay in this city Calcutta with the living memories of his doting queen, Ritu. He decided to run, run far far away from the cruel crowd and isolated himself inside the compact, curtailed and closed glass chamber of the laboratory from where he could facilely visualize the achromic cruel crowd crawling outside. Without a single bite, he locked himself for countless days and nights and patiently waited for the time when that cruel crowd changed its mindset and everything might be okay. He recalled his rich and restricted, reserved and royal, luxurious but lost lifestyle. How from a young, rigid compartment boy concealed in rich pretentious shell transmuted into a sober, socialized and soft-hearted gentleman with the blooming of love in his life. He wished that if the girl and her profound appreciation were here by now it might transmute the mindset of this cruel crowd. But, it was a pity that these cruel people had taken that girl and her profound appreciation captive long ago in the bounds of religion and casteism.
Why were the cruel crowd crawling towards Rajib? What was the most fascinating thing he had left inside his solitary soul? Now he had not much youthful body and adolescent mind remaining in the afternoon of his life. But, of course, he was different from the circumventing. He never endeavoured to relegate the differences of religion in his blood. Never fascinated to calculate the critical commercial value of casteism in his lost love. Too never endeavoured to live independently from the phrenic conceptions of his queen. Handling these antitheses nature, how could he stand against the flow?
Though he was a man of Calcutta, Bengal but a product of the British colonial system. From childhood to his youthful days, he had neither seen himself as a Royal Bengal Tiger nor roared like revolutionaries about the British governing policies. He lived his life likely as a blue blood person of western countries. Till his last days, he customarily took a ticket and travelled in trams to track the trials of his lost love. Even those days, in the sweet silky sunny summer mornings, he infrequently visited the tea stall at the College Street, with a cup of tea while reading the news cognate with independence, democracy, corruption, reservation, religion and casteism in British English.
It was not known when the day that started with reading those impressive lines was turned into the dark starry night. While reading the diary the investigating officer also tried to count the stars looking into the sky. It was a really, really difficult task to count them not only for Rajib but also for him. Yes, he indeed had no love story budding during his college days like that of Rajib but of course, he had a distant and dusty memory of love when he was in 9th standard. He remembered that he had a pet cat who was roundly called Sera. It was just two days before his final examination when Sera died accidentally. A child’s heart lost his lovely friend and in memory of that sorrow, he locked himself for a whole day inside his bedroom. Since then, he often thinks that had it not been discovered years ago the world would not be flat, but round he might die in fear of falling from the end of the world. But he was lucky he knows this now. But he still curses the scientists of the world that they are trying to find the possibilities of life outside the earth but why not they try to prove once in their research that being in love is not fatal at all.
Rajib’s story was person-centric but yes in most of the lines, it was showing a blunt, naked and realistic mirror to the society. It was obfuscated to Rajib what the Britishers gave this country or what they took away from here. Even he didn’t care much more about how nationalism and unification played a vital role in the achievement of independence for this nation. And, how could he know these? During the time of kineticism for liberation, he was living in another world. The world of illimitable consummated wishes and romantic dearie dreams. He neither fought a single day for this unfurled Swaraj flag nor donated a single drop of his very recherche AB positive blood for independence. But at his highest peak of sense, he was realizing that it could never be that independence which might be wished by the revolutionaries including Mahatma Gandhi and his associates. Britishers might have relegated this society to the sub-structure of black and white body colour but not to the substratum of religion or casteism. And if they relegated it then what is the difference left between then and now? In that pre-independent nation and this post-independent nation? Not likely but coincidently, Rajib had been always ambulating against the flow. After getting independence, he rigorously raised his voice vociferously like the revolutionaries of the past decades. He waged a war till his last breath against this casteism and religious predicated sophisticated civil society. After his death, even today, he is struggling in the designation of equipollence and fundamental rights inside but not more than many people. His philosophy is still alive and will be perpetuated till the contingency of apodictic independence of the nation.
CHAPTER- 3
While traversing from time to time it is necessary to take a transit turn to transcend but tranquillize on the track of triumph.
Rajib never believed that he loved that girl in a very unique, unmatched and unprecedented way. His love was very simple. Like that of a child’s love for a balloon or a toy, a busy mind longing for a cup of tea for refreshment, reaching office while holding a handle of some crowded tram. Only one thing, but, was a little different in his love. Different like going to a bird market every day while returning from the office and buying one caged bird every day then liberating it back to the sky in front of the shopkeeper while knowing that even by freeing a hundred birds a day, cage formation in the world will not stop.
Rajib was feeling very lonely in the last days of his life. Neither did he have his genie family to fulfil his fatuous wishes nor his profound appreciation along with him to make him feel happy. He was realizing that he should not love that girl just because he could make a place in her heart or her life. Sometimes he should do love simply so that he could see it for years or wait for its arrival by becoming a pine tree near the window.
It was like last August 15 when the whole country was observing the second anniversary of independence. The city of revolutionaries, Calcutta was also very much busy that day to celebrate this remarkable and propitious occasion. While holding the flag of independent India people were moving sprightly towards the Race Course ground, Calcutta to see the flag hoisting ceremony. Some groups were narrating ballads and poetry about the British rule while few were remembering the fiery freedom fighters by portraying plays like the Salt Satyagraha, Civil Disobedience, Quit India Movement.
On that day on that road, Rajib was also there but ambulating against the flow. In the momentum of those modified moments he was searching for his lost love, Ritu and independence among all those people, all the crowds like Alexa went out to find food for herself, for her family, for her children. That day Rajib met Alexa near that green traffic signal right in front of his car.
Do not know whose fault it was but yes, there was a loss of life. Maybe it was the fault of that traffic signal. Or maybe it was the fault of the Britishers who installed it at that square in the name of urbanization, sophisticated civilization before they had gone away from this country. Or maybe it was the fault of overcrowded crossroads.
Rajib was a liberal-minded person in his gypsy mind and solitary soul. That day that accident had given him a lot of trauma in his mind and soul. He had buried Alexa separately and very lovingly in the very last page of his diary where he had written all the momentum of momentous moments of his whole lifetime.
He was willing to write a very short story on the last page of his diary in which he tried to prove himself as a murderer. But nothing had been uprooted in the last several years and will not crumble any further. Because like Alexa, street dogs are born to die on the streets. It was a confession letter in which Rajib pleaded guilty that it was not an accident that happened that day between Alexa and himself. Of course, the world lost a life that day but those who die, die a little. They only survive by living in this cruel, crumbled and critical world.
Rajib, having the good name Mr. Mukul Mukherjee died too early before his death, in the backroom of this living world. He believed that only two significant events had happened in his lifetime. The first one was to fall in love with that tinder female, Ritu and the last one was that accident with Alexa. He sometimes felt that being a lover rather than a murderer is more dangerous. According to him, this world was round like that of the fifteenth Augustus alphabet of British English ‘O’ within the word ‘foolish’. Two or three days before his death, he was feeling that casteism, corruption, religious discrimination and even his lost love suffocating him and choking his throat. Perhaps if the season of October had not gone too early then he might be able to secure some more days in this foolish world.
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