He: (Shey) (Modern Classics (Penguin)) Read Online Free PDF Page A

sunshine; halfway here, it began to rain. If you’ll give me your bedspread, I’ll get out of these wet clothes and wrap it around me.’
    I couldn’t refuse. He pulled the Lucknow-print bedspread off the bed, dried his hair, stripped off his sodden clothing and bundled himself up in the bedspread. Thank goodness I hadn’t brought out my Kashmiri Jamewar 2 quilt!
    He said, ‘Dada, I’ll sing you a song.’
    I had no choice. I put down my paintbrush.
    He commenced:
     
    Oh Shrikanta, you handsome young charmer,
    One day you’ll quake in the shadow of Yama. 3
     
    I don’t know whether my expression made him suspect something. He broke off to ask, ‘How do you like it?’
    I answered, ‘You’ll have to spend the rest of your life practising the scales, far from the rest of civilization. Chitragupta 4 must take over after that, if he can stand your song in the first place.’
    He suggested, ‘Pupe-didi 5 learns singing from a Hindustani ustad , how about my joining her?’
    I retorted, ‘If you can get Pupe-didi to agree to your joining her classes, there should be no problem.’
    ‘I’m very scared of Pupe-didi, you know,’ he confided.
    At this point, Pupe-didi laughed out loud. Like the other mighty men of the world, she is always very pleased to know that somebody can be afraid of her.
    The kind thing said reassuringly, ‘No fear! I won’t scold him!’
    ‘Who isn’t afraid of you?’ I pointed out. ‘You drink two bowls of milk every day—think of your strength! Don’t you remember the tiger who took one look at the stick in your hand and fled to hide under Aunt Nutu’s bed, his tail between his legs?’
    Our young heroine was vastly pleased. She reminded me about the bear who, trying to run away from her, fell into the bathtub.
    My hands alone had begun to build up the history of this man, but now Pupe keeps adding to it wherever it takes her fancy. If I say that at three in the afternoon he came to my room to borrow a razor and some empty biscuit tins, Pupe informs me that he has made off with her crochet hooks.
    Every story has a beginning and an end, but my ‘There lives a man’ has no end. His elder sister falls ill; he goes for the doctor. A cat scratches his dog Tommy on the nose. He hops onto the back of a bullock cart and gets into a great argument with the carter. He slips and falls at the washing place in the yard and breaks the cook’s earthen pitchers. He goes to watch a Mohun Bagan 6 football match and someone swipes three and a half annas from his pocket, so he misses buying sweets from Bhim Nag’s. 7 At his friend Kinu Chaudhuri’s, he devours fried shrimps and spiced potato curry. Day after day passes in this way. Nowadays Pupe contributes to the saga as well. One afternoon, he visits her room and asks her to find the cookbook in her mother’s cupboard, because his friend Sudhakanta wishes to learn how to cook banana flowers. Another day he borrows her scented coconut hair oil: he’s afraid he’s going bald, you see. One day he went to Din-da’s 8 house to listen to some singing. Din-da was fast asleep, slumped against the couch.
    This ‘there lives a man’ of ours, he certainly does have a name. But only the two of us know it, and we can’t tell anyone else. Here starts the fun of my story. ‘Once there lived a king’—he doesn’t have a name; neither does the prince. And as for the princess whose hair hung to the ground, whose smile sparkled like jewels, whose tears were like pearls—no one knows her name either. They are not famous, but every household knows them.
    This man of ours, we just call him He. When people ask us his name, all we do is glance at each other and smile cunningly. Pupe says, ‘Reckon out his name; it starts with a p.’ Some say Priyanath, some decide on Panchanan, some think of Panchkari, some insist it’s Pitambar, others suggest Paresh, Peters, Prescott, Peer Bux and Piyar Khan.
    Arriving at this point, my pen pauses. Someone asks