Table for Two

“Table for two, Sir?”

Actually the first conversation he remembered after having met her was this same line, many years back. How time passes.

“I’ll be back”, he said, and crossed the street again, with the air of someone who had forgotten something in the car. Just this morning in the hotel, he was having this conversation with Mukherjee over tea – about how the art of repeating words in English writing was a dying trend. The example he had used was ‘many, many years ago’.

He blinked, and stood there.


Calcutta, many people feel, is more than a city. He remembered reading in a Hindi book called Aadha Gaon about how for people of a little village called Gazipur it was just another name for parting – better translated, for apartness. For some other people like him, it was the only place he felt togetherness. Just this morning, when he got down the train at Howrah, took the subway to the Ferry-Ghat and took his ticket. He was wondering how he still remembers where the counter was, and even what the fare was the last time he took that ride. Calcutta, in its muddy red colour, was etched somewhere among lines on of his palm. To him, the city was a time warp. Some things had changed. Quite a lot of things were new for him in fact, bridges, flyovers, fancy cars with loud stereos and crazy cosmopolitan kids that were trying hard to make Calcutta like any other city. But when he scratched beneath the surface, or knocked with his knuckles on some freshly plastered wall, the city, as he remembered it, still resounded with a familiar ring. Like that time – many, many years ago.


He paid the taxi driver, walked to a little cement mound on Bishop Lefroy Street and stood there. The Pipal tree was no longer there. Maybe it was a thunderstorm, or maybe just another new beautification measure. Thankfully, they had still left the small pit as a marker of where the past stood. And on the wall behind it, among with ageing posters of some political rally and old algae, one could make out slogans urging students to give up drugs and to keep Calcutta green. There was still a faceless cigarette stall and some new tea vendor. Around the perpetually shouting tea vendor, there were similar green wooden benches, scrawny shameless children who worked at the tea stall and kurta-trouser-clad stubbly men sitting around with newspapers and discussing the latest cricket match India lost and how it could have been won. The customary yellow ambassadors lay open in the shadows, with the taxi-drivers sleeping on the rear seat, mouths and shirts open. Nothing really had changed.

The momo place was just a lane away from his old office, his lunch hangout. Of-course, his mother never accepted what he had as lunch; she called these momos snacks at best. But that was fine with him. Not many people knew of its existence then. He was sure a lot of people still did not. Again, guided by the same map in the lines of his hands, he walked automatically from the Tata Tea office, crossed the road, crossed the Metro station, and walked into the small by-lane that most people didn’t even know existed. And like always, he smiled when he saw the same yellow board in the stylized English font, to make it look more Chinese. He remembered how he’d come with a bunch of friends here and how they had been convinced when they saw ‘Tibetan Delight’ written in that weird font, that it was a hidden whorehouse. There had been no whores, but the best momos they had had in Calcutta.

The first time he had met Esha, he had brought her here. Not so much for the food, but to show off his knowledge of hidden places in Calcutta. That was his ultimate proof to her, of being a ‘true-bong’. He had been born and brought up outside Calcutta, and wasn’t as fluent in Bengali as Esha was. In fact, in those days, in the time he took to read where the bus was going, the bus used to pass him. But then someone who knew Calcutta so well had to be a true-bong. He remembered all that clearly, she had been impressed. “Very, very impressive”, she had said as they walked the narrow alley into the dimly lit place – another double-word expression.


“Table for two, Sir?” asked the waiter.

“Table for two, non-smoking” answered Esha. It was funny how she completely familiar she was with the place as soon as they were in. She was one of these people who are born comfortable in their skin. She seemed to know everything from some previous birth where all of it had already happened.

“And now you’ll tell me that the table wouldn’t smoke anyway?” her eyes twinkled, lighting up the poor place. He smiled, she knew that one too. He still didn’t understand why his chest swelled with pride as she gave the waiter a polite nod and ordered after just one cursory glance at the menu. And as she launched into her daily routine of how the day before and after this lunch would be a harrowing time, he smiled and just couldn’t stop feeling happy. He felt then, like he did again, as if his lungs would burst with happiness. He had felt like shouting out loud. She was a journalist with the Statesman. He was a beginner with Tata Tea. They both we felt the other person was doing an important job in his or her organisation. They were young. Those days both of them still felt we would ‘really-really’ be someone significant one day.

Memory is a funny thing. About Esha he remembered everything. How they met for the first time in an advertising workshop, and then he had shown her some of his writings. They had gone on to discover things in common, as is customary in the initial days. They travelled together after finishing work, and how the wind wove into her hair, and how she pushed the obstinate curls back with her hand. She almost always had a pen in that hand of hers… long thin, expressive fingers. When they ate in Tibetan Delight, her foot would always hit the stand of the table and she’d say sorry to him, thinking that was his foot. And once when it was really his foot, she’d casually hit it many times with the beat of the song in the background, thinking it was the foot of the table. He had not removed his foot, and not mentioned it again. It was strange that he did not remember so many things about other women he had known after that, some for very long times and on quite intimate terms.

Not that she gave him a lot of importance. On the other hand, it was more like she took him in her stride. She’d casually joke about him, not let him smoke, imitate his seriousness and then, after he had finished some tale about something very important in life, she’d just say, “Ok, but listen, did I tell you about this time I went to the Mother Teresa home?”

How we find the most irritating things endearing when the time is right. And when we find ourselves behaving strangely, making allowances for someone for things we can’t stand in others, we convince ourselves we are in love.

“May I help you sir?”

“What?”

“You’ve come here before sir? I remember having seen you.”

“Yes”

He had, in his reverie, walked along the same alley again and come to the door of the place. He didn’t even realise. Signs of growing old, he told himself, and shrugged and took off his coat.

“Sir, if you don’t mind, are you Mr. Bhubhon? You used to come here with that lady, right sir? Table for two, Sir? Non-smoking?”

Sometimes people in Calcutta are painfully nosey without meaning harm. It takes a while to realise the poor people are just trying to be friendly, or maybe this one was genuinely happy at having located a customer from the early days of the struggling restaurant. He smiled at the waiter.

“Table for one, smoking”

“Uh, of-course Sir. This way Sir. But if you don’t mind my asking, you had been trying to give up smoking, right Sir”

“Yes, I gave up. But I smoke now. There were other things I gave up. And anyway, all that was a long time back… a long, long time back.”

He lit up his cigarette and kept staring at it.