On a summer trip

Not many people in India relish summer as the grand period of the year, in fact a major portion is happy to bade farewell to it bathed in monsoon. I never enjoyed the scorching summer heat, but in all that is bad their is something good, the best part of summer was the long respite from school we would get. It was almost a tradition for our family to visit our grandfather every summer. So loaded joy I would acompany them to Shantiniketan (a small place in Purulia district of West Bengal home to Rabindranath Tagore) where my grandfather lived solitarily the last few years of his retired life. My grandfather and I were very close, he never tried to win over me with his past experiences neither did he try to feed me a dose of moral vitamins. He quite nicely bridged the seventy years gap between us with his incredible ability to make anyone smile. The mango trees all crimson with sweet mangoes, red earth steaming heat and above all the soothing south-westerly winds, grand father, each of them had a magnetic impact on me. However apart from them their was one other factor. 'Opu' , his real name was very complicated, but that’s what my grandfather would call him tenderly. He was the grandson of the old gardener who attained the last remains of our once prosperous garden. He was only a year older than me, we were partners in mischief. And sometimes our pranks got unbearable. It was one such occasion when our grandfather engaged us in a hectic job of clearing up the attic, a place I had harbored fantastic fears since I was five. The smell of that moratorium of defunct items, broken furniture, the cobwebs lying untended, but most important those spiders, freaked me out. Opu however had no problems with spiders and would be happy to put one on me. So locked we started serving our sentence, cleaning up the attic. I was bored to sleep, infact I actually did doze off half looped in a broken chair when Opu woke me up, "See what I found!" He held a bunch of letters, old and tattered ones. What a discovery worth ruining my nap! "So what do we do with them...I don’t eat letters cause I don’t moo..." He got even more excited at my reply, "Look at the top name...". I read it, the ink had almost faded, and the damp letter made Bengali as unreadable as if it were Hebrew to me. "Trailok...", Opu interrupted me, "Honestly cant you read, its Trailokyanath Gangopadhyay", so what does it have to do with me! "Shut up and let me go to sleep..." Opu dragged me up and made me sit straight, "Don’t you see, its the old grumpy man who lives up the town, I know him, he is so old and so creepy even crows don’t get near his house its virtually haunted..." My eyes glistened at his last remark, we had tried to get a taste of ghosts in that house last year, and instead we ended up getting a taste of his wrath. "We can go and give him the letter...",Opu smiled at my late wisdom,” Yes we can and we will.", "Oh jolly, when do we go?", "Tomorrow dawn before Dadu(We call grandfather Dadu in Bengali)wakes up.". And of course yours truly didn’t get any sleep that night. The next morning we found ourselves hovering about the old "porobari"(Haunted house). We had secretly kept our appointment although all through the journey I had to hear quite a few times the disadvantage of being a girl in accompanying him in this dangerous mission. The sun was just preparing to get to office and the eastern horizon was a brilliant display
in itself. We tiptoed into the bald patch of land, which now ruled by weeds perhaps once used to be a garden, that led to the ghastly two story house . The door was all ate up with termites, whatever was the inner locking facility, it helplessly surrendered to Opu's cricket bat. Crossing the gate we found ourselves in a damp and mossy portico, the four inner quarters stood facing each other with the portico in the middle barely lit with the nascent sunray. In front of us was one wing of the ground floor quarter, we could make out just an old staircase rest was dark, "lets go." Opu marched right ahead and was climbing the staircase. I followed him and by the time I had climbed a few stairs I lost sight of Opu completely, childish pride prevented me from calling out to him, I tried to feel what was around me, all that I felt were wet-cold and mossy walls I could barely see in the dark as by now the portico was covered by the wall of the house. Amazingly amongst the bare darkness I could make out a spider sitting stealthily at one corner of the ceiling. Fear inspired courage in me, and tripping and screaming I jumped up the stairs and was standing clear of them, as to where I was I couldn’t make out, but their were no stairs. However I felt something cold and slimy around my leg, I tried to shake it off, but it just kept climbing.
. Then suddenly I heard a hoarse voice, "Don’t move", a faint figure emerged out silhouetted versus the pitch-black background, I had seen the ghost of my adventures, and he had a long thing in his hand. He approached close to me, I could make out his face, it was deadly pale, made even more fearful with the hide and seek of light and shade. He raised the long pipe at me, I had forgot to breath, "Don’t move" he spoke in a cold stern voice, in a moment it happened, I heard a loud blast
and Opu scream "Look out", and then all was dark. I woke up in an old bed in an equally gloomy room with faded distemper, I looked up Opu was standing chin up, interrogated by a very-very old man, his figure had almost crushed under the burden of age, "Why did you come here? Did you forget the last warning I gave you?", his voice hauled through the room, not quite one would expect out of him. "I had to give you something" Opu's reply was short and direct,” Nobody owes me anything." Opu didn’t budge "Please sir may be this is yours, kindly check it" It was hard for him to sound so well behaved after the elaborate encounter I had slept through. The old man snatched the letter from him and glanced through, and in just a few seconds everything changed, he lost all his rudeness, "Where. Where did you find this?” tears welled up in his eyes...A light tap on the door, Dadu came in, "I had it", We were absolutely stunned at the turnout of events, the old ghastly man, cried like a child, and Dadu popping out of nowhere, tried best to compose him.
The cold slimy thing as many readers would be able to guess was a snake who reigned the uninhabited quarters of the old house, shelter to Troilokyanath Ganguly, a once upon a time gallant member of The Azad Hind Faug set up by one of India's no world's braves't man Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose. My Dadu, trying to get involved in the struggle. And the letter.... It had only a few lines scribbled on it, the message delivered was_"Baba tumi kemon acho("Father how are you?)".The letter was addressed to Giridhari Bandhopadhyay, my Dadu(He maintained correspondence between General and his family, The British administration was not to fond of the battalion, so my Dadu was a bypass.)And General Ganguly's childhood friend, by his five year old boy, General Ganguly was then in South east Asia, The Azad Hind Faug breaking up with the sudden demise of Netaji. General Ganguly was effected deeply and the moral was down. It was October the festivals were approaching General Ganguly had not returned home for the past five years, he had never seen his son after birth. My Dadu who by then was a hard-core freedom fighter decided to delay the forwarding of the letter to his friend, out of the fear of defocusing him. The delay was planned initially for a few days, but in the end he didn't need it. General Ganguly lost his son to cholera even sooner, common in earlier part of nineteenth century rural Bengal. General Ganguly had never seen his son alive. After he got the news General Ganguly became what he is now, in one night he aged so much. My Dadu never had the courage to look him in the eye any more, and the letter it rested peacefully in the stomach of an old iron trunk up his attic until we found it. My Dadu suddenly thought of the letter that morning and went up to check if it were their, when he found it was not their he knew who took it and also where to find them.
Am I angry on Dadu! May be not. That one incident changed him forever and he became the person he is now, a man who desperately wants to draw a smile on the face of whomever he meets.
General Ganguly didn’t live much longer, in fact the next summer I was their, well he wasn't any more. But he died peacefully.
One small message brought a lifelong transformation to two human beings, none of them being good or bad to start with. Fate played a cruel game with their lives. And what did it teach me_ never go to old haunted houses without a flashlight, realize a snake when it grips you and a human being is neither good nor bad, it all depends on how they see the world, it takes moments to transform someone (Who knows someone like Bin Laden might wake up tomorrow morning as a better man). And last but not the least, the most philosophical definition of life _Its not philosophical at all.