Eagam Khaling
Apurva Pradhan was a first-year English honors student, at Saint Augustine’s College, Darjeeling. She had lost her mother twelve years ago. She was provided many things that she demanded, but there were some demands, which her father, Mr. Arjun Pradhan, was unable to fulfill. He had always considered them almost impossible demands. She had ignorantly developed in her many irritating habits, and they were only known by their former servants.
It was a Sunday evening; Apurva was playing her piano. A man with the most known voice shouted for permission from outside after rapping on the door of the room. “Hi, Princess! May I come in?” he asked. Apurva ignored him intentionally and replied with repugnance: “Don’t come; rather go away, and away!”
But the man entered the room, and standing behind the piano, said convincingly, “My princess! Why didn’t you come to receive me at the terminus, and last night, you didn’t also pick up my calls?”
Hearing that, Apurva started playing her piano a little faster than before, without caring to tender a reply. Again, the man sympathetically tried to correct her, with the right of a father: “Actually, I don’t like this, your rudeness!”
Showing zero interest in him, Apurva sarcastically replied to him, making her face: “Mr. Pradhan! I am not your wife.”
“And I am also not your friend.” With that, Mr. Pradhan left the room, slamming the door. Apurva paused for a few seconds and again began to play and sing a song, just to pinch her father:
“You never know what I am wanting,
I never know what you are missing,
And my mother never knows what we are becoming.”
It had been many days since Mr. Pradhan was experiencing little comforts and peace at home just because his daughter had stopped arguing with him. She was spending most of her time playing her compositions on the piano and using her laptop, and that might be just because of the Budding-Mozart-Show, an inter-colleges solo music composition competition was approaching around the corner.
It was a Wednesday morning. Apurva wanted to eat bread with some vegetable-soup for her breakfast. So, after taking the bath, she moved to the kitchen for it, but nothing was cooked in the kitchen. After checking all the dishes, she hurriedly opened the refrigerator, but there was also nothing except some tomatoes. She damply sat upon the dining chair. She suddenly saw a small folded chit below a half-decayed cucumber in the center of the table. She picked up the chit slowly and read it. It was written: “Yesterday, again, you beat the cook-servant, threw foods on his head. From today onwards, you have to prepare your meal yourself. I am helpless until you don’t change for yourself.” Apurva was so angry that she tore off the chit into small pieces and scattered on the table.
After some time, she again went to the kitchen and made a cup of tea for herself. But when she drank the tea, she bitterly squeezes her face. It was such a bad taste that she furiously shouted in anguish, “Mum, I hate you, and I hate myself!”
As usual in the evening, Apurva returned home from college and remained glued to her piano to work on her new piece of composition. She wanted to be smoother and make her composition more beautiful and flawless as she was determined to win this year’s competition. Late at night, she was quite restless because she was not able to connect with her teacher on the net. She was also not getting any reply and suggestions from him. His Facebook and e-mail accounts were not working for many days. She had asked other Facebook friends and had written e-mails to the concerned experts to know about the sudden disappearance of her teacher’s site on the net. She had got much information but not a single one that could connect her to her teacher.
The next day, when Apurva was busy trying to send an e-mail, somebody knocked on the door and politely asked permission to get in: “Ma’am! May I come in?” Apurva permitted the man to enter without giving much attention to him. But after a while, she got angry with the man who had brought bread, a glass of milk, and some pieces of apples for her on a big tray, and was standing like an attendant of a royal family. He was looking quite a decent man. But she suddenly got to her temperament thinking about the last time’s chit written by her father. She pulled the milk glass, poured on his face, and screamed, “You savage! How dare you call me ma’am? Take your rubbish meal, and get lost forever! Man, I hate you!”
But the new servant still stands calm and cool, and he slowly, with his mild disposition, kept the tray on the table and started cleaning his face with a clean white handkerchief. Again, he dared to speak softly to Apurva, “Please, take these bread and apples! I will be back in a minute with another glass of milk!”
There was not any reaction from Apurva because, at then, she was completely drawn to her work on the computer. After some hours, Apurva was going out for her college. Mr. Pradhan was sitting in the courtyard and reading a newspaper. When she reached the gate, he shouted from there to hurt her intentionally, “Apurva! How do you like our new servant?” Apurva turned around and threatens him, “I will kill him tonight!”
Later, in the evening, Apurva was very busy arranging her things for tomorrow. She was having a lot of excitement and worries about tomorrow’s competition. Nobody knew who would win the competition, but some of her friends were expecting her.
After finishing some of her must-do works for tomorrow, she made a mind to take her dinner before two hours than usual time because she wanted to go bed early and sleep well for tomorrow. At 9 pm, she rang the calling bell and asked the new cook-servant to bring dinner for her in her room. He did exactly what she had told. She wondered that the foods were so tasty. Her heart melted for the cook, whom she had hurt without any real reason. She sympathetically looked at the servant’s face. His face had become red and swollen, and in some places of his face, white powder had been pasted. In the morning, she could not know how hot the milk was. However, she ignorantly asked him with some foods in her mouth cavity, “What happened to your face?” He politely replied, “Ma’am, it’s only like that!”
On hearing him calling her ‘Ma’am’ Apurva suddenly got short of her temperament and at once lifted a glass of water targeting his head and barked on him, “I said, don’t call me ‘Ma’am’, you big pig!” The cook-servant was so frightened that he without a breath immediately vanished from there.
The next day, the competition started at the college auditorium on time. It was overcrowded with the invited students of different colleges and their friends, parents, guardians, and teachers. At the end of the program, the honorable juries of the competition declared the result of the competition. Apurva was jubilantly shinning in the auditorium, and all her friends were taking her name, but she was declared the second. When she heard, she could not believe it, and was broken and deserted in her deep emotion. She denied to receive her prize and left the auditorium weeping like a little girl. Her friends tried to console her, but she was not able to help herself.
That day, Apurva’s room at home was decorated with various flowers, and all the things in the room were arranged decently. They were cleaned and looking beautiful. But when she entered her room crying, she couldn’t notice all that. She threw all the flowers and the things of the room in her huge frustration. After crying in that way sometimes, she decided to finish herself but before to do that she wished to leave a letter for her teacher. She quickly connected the electricity to her computer, and after a while, she began to write:
“Dear Sir,
I tried many times to connect with you, but I could not. Why this happened, I don’t know, but at this moment, I desperately need to share it with you. Today, I lost my hope for music. In these moments of frustration and humiliation, I want to be with you. As all know, I cannot be a lucky and worthy daughter. I am beaten, and I could not be like you. I hate the second and hate myself. Now I am going to end my life here. I can’t be a musician. I am good for nothing. Goodbye! If possible, see you in another life.
Yours hopeless …..”
After finished writing the letter, Apurva hurriedly clamped up to the top floor of their building and stood on the grill to jump down. But when she closed her eyes and about to let her body fall, she suddenly heard music sovereignly played on her piano by someone, and the piece played on the instrument was the one that she had played for the competition. Then, she was godly shaken by the composition and cried silently, closing her eyes, on the edge of death. When she cried, she suddenly experienced the word ‘T~E~A~C~H~E~R’ somewhere in her core heart. She forgot everything and hastily ran down from there to downstairs crying and shouting, “T~e~a~c~h~e~r! T~e~a~c~h~e~r!”
Apurva saw the man flawlessly playing her piano from the middle staircase and was breathless. The man was not other than their new cook-servant whose face had been wounded and swollen. She just could not believe herself and speak out anything except a word in a trembling voice: “T~e~a~c~h~e~r! T~e~a~c~h~e~r!”
When the man heard her voice, he quickly moved out from there. She stared blankly running after him, crying and shouting like a mad, “Teacher, don’t go! Please, do not go! Don’t go, please!”
Apurva and her father searched for the man in many places in town, but could not find him. Later, when she was crying before her piano, she finds a message card on the piano’s board, and it was written: “Discover your ‘self’. We the musicians need to be born twice. Once you discover your ‘self’, you are already born twice. Life is so beautiful, live it fully.”
After some time, Apurva sat before her piano with lots of changes in herself, then softly putting her all ten fingers on the piano’s lids, closed her eyes, and whispered to God, “God, I am sorry, and thank you so much!
[Eagam Khaling hails from Darjeeling. He has published an anthology of poems in 2001. Since then he has been publishing his poems in local, national and international journals (and e-sites). He is a teacher and also a research scholar at the Department of Philosophy of North Bengal University.]