On the 14th day, when Anju appeared on News Live to talk about her mother's death, she wore a white salwar and covered her head with a dupatta. Maa, Pulakesh mama, and Poornima baido sat so close to the TV – weeping silently and wiping one another's tears – that Baba had to scold them for behaving like lunatics. They held one another's hands as if in preparation for an apocalypse, while Anju stared blankly into the camera and said in a voice, completely unlike her own, that before her father could run to the bedroom to get the blankets, Moromi Khanikar, her mother, after throwing herself onto the burning stove, glowed wildly like an insect held over a candle flame and collapsed on the floor. The whole house had already started smelling of burnt flesh and Boroplus – an ointment her mother liked applying to her cracked soles before going to bed. And now, since Anju had already lost her mother, she could not afford to lose her father. If need be she'd appear in court to say the same and testify against the empty threats from her mother's family. News Live reported it as one of the most tragic suicides of the year: the death of the wife of the much-loved Dr Pritam Khanikar – a powerful candidate from the Hajo constituency for the 2010 state elections.
A month ago, that year, I had just returned home having spent some time at Dr Deepen Kalita's psychiatric rehab in Sonapur and had still not resumed classes at the hospital. I had suddenly developed a pathological aversion to hospitals and couldn't continue going to classes. I had flunked my seventh semester examinations and was almost certain I'd eventually give up medicine. My days were spent sleeping on the cold marble floor of the attic to beat the unbearable summer, completely indifferent to my mother's pleas to resume college. By six in the evening, I'd wake up and sit down to write my unfinished experimental novel – a series of love letters to a future lover in Auvergne. And almost all of them would begin with the same pent up desperation:
Dear X, I'm writing this to you with the sad knowledge that you will never reply back. But then I guess there is, after all, no comfort in the world of knowledge. Also, no eagerness in the event of a reciprocation. Of all shapes, both can coexist, only in the linearity of the line. Where things just leave you. It only follows itself. And never comes back.
Baba would come back late those days because he'd go to my college after office, to each of my professors from every department, and plead with them to allow me to sit for the next semester examinations, though I had stopped going to classes and had zero attendance. When he'd come back home, Maa would already be asleep and I still writing my love letters. I had stopped speaking to my father because there was nothing to talk about. He'd never understand how a man was capable of breaking my heart and leaving me so damaged. Even when Dr Kalita tried to explain it to him, he was furious, saying such people are born only in 'foreign places' and no one in his family has been ever 'like that'. This young, 30-year-old man in question, Dr Niloy Bora, who'd come to our place almost every alternate day, was a very good friend and a mentor to his son, he'd tell Dr Kalita. He was a resident at the Department of Microbiology and belonged to a respectable family of lawyers and doctors in Kharguli, Uzan Bazar. Such people were dignified, had high moral values and were completely harmless. Such people could never lead anyone down the wrong path. When my father met Dr Bora at the microbiology department, a few days after he came to know the entire story from my mother, he thought Niloy seemed genuinely worried that I had stopped going to classes and that my falling grades might affect my career graph as a medical student. "How can such a person be of any harm to my son? This is all rubbish. All these men loving men and women loving women. Nonsense!" He had shouted at Dr Kalita and told him that he'd take me to a better psychiatrist.