It was some time in the early eighties… I was just out of college and had landed a job in Calcutta. Being a migrant in the city, I needed a place to stay. My childhood friend Sajal, at that time staying in a guest house at College Street, had arranged for my lodging with him and I had moved in there just a month ago. Besides the two of us, Daktarda was the third occupant of the room. A darkish, bespectacled person, three or four years senior to us, a bachelor; his warm smile seemed to spread across his cheeks to his kind eyes. Armed with a medical degree from a reputed college of Calcutta, he ran a modest practice in the suburban town of Hind Motors. Most of his clients came from the labour force of that industrial ghetto. Many could not even pay the very modest fee that he charged, and it was quite common that he would return with a pumpkin or gourd under his arms which would go into the common kitchen of the guest house. On the days he earned more than the usual, I and Sajal (and sometimes a couple of others) were treated with a movie in the night show and then dinner at Dilkhoosh or Nizam’s.
Guest houses like the one we occupied, more known as Mess-baris, used to serve a great purpose in the city’s life in those days (and still do, I guess). An assortment of lower middle and middle class immigrants in search of cheap boarding and lodging in the city – students and clerks, aspiring professionals and unhappy executives, plain vagabonds – would flock to such spots to find an affordable shelter. Put a harassed and grumpy looking owner-cum-manager on top of the boarders and you get the complete picture. Ours Mess, too, was no exception to this general description.
* * *
It was only seven in the morning and the ever-busy College Street that had woken up as early as four with the first truckload of vegetables and bananas arriving at the wholesale market lying within a stone’s throw had fully shaken off its slumber and was bustling with life. Just below our window on the first floor, trams and double-decker buses packed with the early morning passengers rambled along; the chaawallas in the side lanes were doing a brisk business. The weather was humid but pleasant; it had rained in the early hours and now the sky wore a bright blue hue, with white puffs drifting across it – the perfect picture of an autumn morning. It seemed as if a whisper rose from everywhere around – Durga Puja not far away, not far away!
Such a morning would usually find a young man leisurely getting up and preparing for the day, but alas, not so in my case. I was huffing and puffing, to the delight of a sizeable audience that had assembled in our room to witness the daily fun.
Three forty-one, three forty-two, …. my tired feet protested and my mind felt dumb as my spot jogging progressed painfully in front of half a dozen of watchful and highly critical eyes. Comments flew thick and fast from all sides:
“No, no, not like that, you must raise the knees more… bring some spring into your steps … come on, old boy, it’s not that tough, in our time we had had to run ten rounds around the field before we were even allowed to kick the ball. ..”
It seemed when it came to physical activity, there were undoubtedly more experts than practitioners, especially in Bengal!
* * *
It had all started on a Sunday evening a few days back. While on a stroll with Daktarda around the College Square grounds, I had casually mentioned about my asthma and he had promised to cure it. He had seen one of his senior professors doing it successfully on a patient and was sure the same principles would apply on me. (The principle, in short, is that asthma cannot be cured but the threshold of an attack can be pushed out gradually by taking up incremental aerobic exercising. A time comes when one does not get out of breath under normal exertions or triggers.)
“You’ll have to chuck smoking”, D-da began (knew this was coming). “But no need to despair. You can occasionally indulge in something more pleasurable, like drinking,” he comforted me putting his arm around my shoulder.
Well, at least he was being honest and straightforward with me, and deep down I knew there was no other way.
And thus my drill started from the following morning.
* * *
Things went nicely for another three months. The treatment was showing some results already. Other than that, nothing spectacular happened except that my first month’s salary was picked by a bunch of gentlemen, a grief that were to be partially offset by D-da and Sajal by treating me generously to a series of night shows and dine-outs. Then I changed my job and moved far, far away. Life got tough, the time was fully occupied, and since I knew only one way of writing letters (which was long mails), soon the thread of friendship ruptured. Daktarda too, I assumed, must have left the place and gone somewhere else. The smiling face of him were to remain in my memory, and that was, as I thought, the end of a very pleasant association.
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