Not long ago, a madman worked the Gariahat crossing.
He showed up at dawn with the traffic sergeants and stayed till the sodium lamps came on. Matted hair, a beard that had long since stopped being a beard and become something geological, an oilskin shirt, trousers held at the waist by a length of nylon rope, a clay cup dangling from the knot, a garland of dried marigolds around his neck. His own mother would have walked past him. The police abused him, the shopkeepers abused him, passing strangers told him to get lost — none of it moved him an inch from his post. He directed traffic with the full conviction of a man who had been doing it in a previous life and intended to do it in the next. People said exactly that: must have been a traffic sergeant once, died in an accident, came back unfinished.
Then something shifted. Nobody could say when or why, but the crossing absorbed him the way a city absorbs everything it cannot explain. The sergeants stopped chasing him off. The kochuri wallah started keeping a portion. The rice hotel down the lane fed him rice and dal at noon without being asked. Children loved him. Adults, slowly, came to love him too. Some commuters began deliberately routing through Gariahat just to see him — one harmless, hilarious, oddly dignified madman making the morning bearable. If you gave him a cigarette he said thank you in English. If you gave him a bidi he said dhanyabad. He knew the difference.
Late nights, when the sergeants retreated behind their booth and passed a bottle around, they’d call him over when two inches remained. Haque’da — the senior man, belt buckle with the Ashoka Chakra perpetually loose — would peer at him with the particular benevolence of the pleasantly drunk: Ei pagla, maal khabi? The madman would consider this with great seriousness and ask: Ki maal? And Haque’da would laugh and say maal maal, ki aar, and the madman would look at the ground with a small shy smile and say: No sir, I don’t drink unless it’s whisky. He said this every time. It broke them up every time. Paatra’da — the handsome one, the most restrained drinker among them — would shake his head and say jaate maatal, taale thik, which is a way of saying the man is drunk on his own nature, which is the truest kind.
The sergeants’ motorcycles would disappear one by one into the dark beyond the lamplight. The madman would watch them go. Then, much later, he would retrieve a hidden packet of cold rice and watery dal from somewhere, eat it, spread a torn jute sack in front of Anandamela, and lie down. In the shopfront window, a cardboard girl in a small dress stood with one hand resting on a refrigerator, forever. He was in love with her, in the private way of people who understand that some loves are safest when they cost nothing. After a while his eyes would move to the sky, which came lower at night above Calcutta, and he would trace the constellations his father had taught him — or someone had, he was no longer sure — until his eyes closed. A stray dog settled against him without waking him. An immense satisfaction held him as he slept: he had worked hard all day, had not cut corners, was loved.
Months passed. Then years. Perhaps a life.
***
Then one day a doctor noticed him.
The doctor had trained in England and drove past Gariahat every morning. He was a psychiatrist, which meant his profession was the restoration of people to themselves. He watched the madman for weeks. What he saw troubled him in the specific way that competence is troubled by a solvable problem: this man was clearly intelligent, clearly from somewhere, clearly treatable. He stopped one morning and spoke to him. Then again. Then again. Eventually he was certain.
He admitted the man to his own nursing home. Six months of treatment. The man’s name, it turned out, was Bodhisattva.
What a name, the doctor said. Bodhisattva what?
The man considered this. Leave it, sir, he said.
After six months more, the doctor bought him a new set of clothes, pressed some money into his hand, and said: You are completely well now. Go. Live a normal life like everyone else.
Bodhisattva looked at him for a moment. Achha sir, he said.
Yes. All the best for your new life.
The nursing home’s large gate closed behind him.
***
He went, naturally, straight to Gariahat.
New trousers, new shirt, a belt at his waist, shoes on his feet, his beard and matted hair gone, spectacles on his face. He stood in front of the kochuri stall, hungry, smiling, expecting recognition.
The young assistant looked at him briskly. Kochuri or parota, sir?
You don’t recognise me? It’s me.
The owner looked up from the oil. Who’s me?
I worked here. At the crossing. With the traffic police. Don’t you remember?
He stopped himself there. He was well now — that was the problem. He could see himself as they had seen him, and he could not finish the sentence.
The owner waved him off. Money or move on, bhai. This is a busy time.
The tea stall didn’t know him. The sergeants didn’t know him. Haque’da looked through him. The constables touched their caps and said please step back, sir, you’ll get hurt. At the rice hotel they called out the day’s specials. At Anandamela a security guard told him not to loiter. When he tried to sleep on his old spot that night a group of pavement men beat him and took the doctor’s money.
For several days Bodhisattva moved through his former world like a man pressing his hands against glass. He drank from road taps. He understood, with the awful clarity of restored reason, exactly what he now needed: an address, an income, a history, a family, a self that could be verified. The list was precise and reasonable and completely impossible. The more precisely he understood it the more his head felt like it was tearing open. On the third or fourth day — he had lost count — in the full blaze of a Calcutta afternoon, in the middle of the road, Bodhisattva lost consciousness.
A car that could not stop in time ran over him and drove on.
The crowd gathered. They went through his pockets: no address, no wallet, no phone. Nothing to say who he was or where to send him.
Then the young kochuri assistant pushed through, bent low over the face, and shouted: Arre — this is our madman.
Everyone leaned in. One by one they confirmed it. Yes. Yes, that’s him.
Someone said: Who did this to him? Some idiot dressed him up like this and sent him out. That’s why none of us recognised him. God, how sad. One person’s mistake — trying to do him good — and it cost him his life.
Everyone agreed. Then, slowly, they drifted back to what they had been doing.
Haque’da called a constable over and told him to send the body to the unclaimed dead ward.