He got on the empty elevator, sweating profusely. ‘3’. It was a weekday, but there was still a considerable crowd inside the shopping mall. Barring a few unaccustomed ladies in sarees who would visibly express their nervousness, most of Kolkata had got quite used to the escalators over the last few years. They weren’t a source of added excitement for kids any longer. Prasun remembered when he was growing up, he’d look forward to journeys by the Metro precisely because of the rare escalator rides that came with the journey. Just as soon as the elevator had started, a voice rang out of the announcement unit.
—Please pay attention. You are requested to report at the Office immediately.
This took him completely by surprise. Was he the one being addressed?
—Yes, Sir, you. We have observed your movement inside the shopping complex since morning. Please report. Immediately.
He always knew that there were eyes all over the shopping mall but he had no idea that there were people tracking his every move. He got off the lift at the third floor and rushed to the gents’ toilet located in the left wing of the complex.
...
Prasun Bhattacharjee, originally from Uluberia, has been staying for the last four and half years at a paying guest accommodation near Jadavpur. It is a neat, two-room apartment: a bedroom-cum-living room, and a kitchen. There’s a common bathroom for two or three adjacent quarters, but since one of these is perpetually empty, he had to share the toilet with a single neighbour. A wrought-iron camping bed, a few stable pieces of furniture, a gas-oven run on pirated cylinders, and a few books strewn tastefully around, form the sum total of his earthly possessions, as he sees it. There’s no point journeying back to Uluberia. Over the last few years he has visited his parents about eight times. He doesn’t feel particularly attached to the place since he settled into his part-time job. What job? He didn’t care much, so why should we?
He has a few friends with whom he’d hang around at the university close by, mostly after working hours. Behind his back they have many questions about him, but politeness kept them from asking him directly. They assemble for a few rounds of tea. The tea itself is uninspiring. To be honest, so is the conversation on most days. Over the recent past, however, things have been different and this has not escaped Prasun. On one occasion he was even been asked by one of the guards to produce an identity card. He had walked past, as if in a hurry, but felt distinctively uncomfortable. He had used a different entrance over the next few days, which meant that he had to take a bit of a detour, but it saved him the trouble of more confrontations.
Within the group, he hardly ever speaks. He doesn’t think that he has much to contribute anyway. He listens eagerly. The students and researchers he is friends with talk a great deal. He values their opinion although in most cases he doesn’t feel too affected by them. One or two of them have visited his apartment in the past. Prasun had first met a couple of the members of the group shortly after arriving in Kolkata and getting his job. He had gone to buy roti and egg-tarka from one of the three contiguous shops inside the Jadavpur CIT market. He liked the fact that these shops saved themselves trouble by not chopping the onions into salad strips and just handed one big quarter slice of an onion with each purchase. What had sparked off the initial conversation is forgotten, but it can’t be too difficult to guess at. His friends had stopped buying from those shops after a dead mouse was discovered in the tarka about a year ago. Justifiably so, Prasun thinks, but because the discovery of the mouse or anything before or since hasn’t made him seriously ill, he has persisted.
There is one peculiarity about Prasun, which his friends, even the closest ones—those who have visited him—have been unable to solve. From time to time he disappears for about an hour without warning. This caused a fair amount of confusion within the group at first. Then someone, unable to handle the suspense any longer, ended up asking him. He gestured vaguely in a westward direction. Gradually, his friends observed, a pattern emerged: more often than not he disappears almost immediately after a cup of tea. Now they barely notice, given that his presence seems to make very little difference anyway.
…
Prasun walks down towards the remains of the Bengal Lamp factory, turns left, then right, into Katju Nagar. Through Katju Nagar he goes till he reaches a small bazar that sits on a triangular plot of land at the intersection of three roads, maybe lanes: two of which, eventually lead to the shopping mall. When it’s not that urgent he pauses a brief while at the pukur ghat, where many, aged and young, assemble to exchange niceties and news. If he’s in a hurry, he ignores all that and goes straight on ahead.
It’s a relief, he sometimes thinks, that most places these days employ security guards through private agencies. The faces at the entrance to the shopping mall change from time to time, not offering much scope for familiarity. He is sure that they do see him with a degree of suspicion anyway, but he doesn’t let that bother him too much. If it’s morning, he knows he must visit the toilets in the left wing of the enormous shopping complex. Prasun knows that the ones that are located in the right wing are cleaned in the first hour, about the time he usually reaches. He enters the mall, walks straight down, turns left and enters the cubicle without making eye-contact with too many people. Normally, it isn’t very crowded in the first hour. Most people, he optimistically thinks, have jobs to which they must attend. His only rivals to the toilet seat are some of the employees who don’t have places to live close by.
There was a time when Prasun would feel obliged to pause awkwardly before a few of the shops pretending to eye something or the other, sometimes not clearly noticing what shop he was standing in front of. When he felt one too many suspicious eye glancing in his direction, he had on occasion gone so far as to enter some random shop, left his bag at the counter and walked around inside for a bit. People who visit these malls, he has seen, don’t strictly go about their business. They watch one another, or check to see if they are sufficiently seen. Over the last year, consciously or unconsciously, he has started moving around less apologetically. He feels that he doesn’t offer much by way of spectacularity. He has learnt to ignore glances. He observes the people instead—couples, young and old, families, kids laughing and quarrelling, groups of teenagers furiously snapping selfies in front of the Christmas tree or the plastic gods during the Pujas. But he doesn’t think much about all this.
The toilets too have changed over time. One day when he was already late for work, he realized upon reaching Jadavpur Thana that he had a toilet emergency. He had two options: to return to Jadavpur, to his own place, or to hold it in long enough to reach his office, still another forty-five minutes away. Seeing that he was anxious and sweating, a friendly student in the auto-rickshaw had suggested cheekily that he go relieve himself inside the toilets of the shopping mall. They have automatic flushes, he had advertised. Whether they had automatic flushes or not, Prasun didn’t care. He thought it was a life-saving idea. Nor did he have time to measure the accuracy of this statement as he rushed in to the toilet cubicle. Both cubicles in the toilet were unoccupied. He had never felt so inexplicably grateful in his life. The seats were dry, the floor was dry, it even smelt nice. It was not before a few minutes had passed that he looked around. He heard a strange tinkling music that was being played, he noticed that they had toilet paper, something he had never used before. He wasn’t even sure how it worked. This was the first time. On the way out, he had remembered to verify that student’s claim. Yes, they were automatic flushes. An eye-like opening a few feet above the urinal—probably some kind of an LED or infrared sensor at work. A couple of weeks later he had ventured again, on another similar emergency.
The visits started getting more frequent. Till the time came when Prasun had to confess to himself that he was visiting not simply in cases of emergency. He was beginning to enjoy it. He was starting to observe things and creating patterns out of the chaotic comings and goings of human beings within the shopping mall. Although he restricted his field of study almost entirely to the toilet cubicle, he was venturing this way and that. Once he had even managed to eat a surreptitious brunch that he had got packed elsewhere inside—because it really wasn’t the open space that it claimed to be—the food court upstairs. He had to make do without the napkin because that would have made it too obvious, and ate out of the tin box, without even taking it out of the plastic bag. On the way down he had rinsed luxuriously.
From inside the toilet cubicle, which he formed the base of his observations, he could see nothing. As a result he did not study people. He didn’t study anyway—let’s say he ‘noticed’. He noticed anonymous habits instead: habits that were not only anonymous but also lacked faces. He would have judged people based on their habits had he known who they were. One day, about a couple of years back, he noticed that the toilet-paper rolls had disappeared. They had been replaced by some kind of mini telephone shower he had never seen before. This was probably on popular demand, Prasun concluded. He didn’t care much for toilet-paper, but he did miss the many games he had devised. There was relatively little that one could do with this new shower. For one, he used to fashion little origami boats out of the toilet-paper. They would be very feeble and far from satisfactory, but he enjoyed letting them down on the water bowl after he was done. He had also started scribbling on the paper with a gel-pen he had bought. They’d all get flushed down by the next user.
What he hates most about the newly installed showers was that people tend to leave the seats extremely wet. Especially in winter months, this does not amuse him. If he were to write them all down, he could easily compile a large compendium of toilet habits. Apart from the obvious distinctions based on the amount of noise made and suchlike, he notices various other nuances: that some people are economical with unfamiliar waters. They use very little of it and are in a hurry to get out once done. There are others who believe that it is safer to wash everything that a stranger had touched before. They create a mess. Prasun hates it especially when water from the next cubicle trickles into his own. He hates it when people spray the shower backwards, that is, in the direction of the cistern. This dirties a part of the pot that is not accessible to the flush nozzles, and then, of course they don’t bother cleaning it. There is a right way and a wrong way, he has decided. Seated on the pot, some people hum English songs, while others hum Bengali or Hindi songs. There are a few who know the words to the tunes that are played on the shopping mall’s music system. One day he had heard someone in the next cubicle hum all through one of the songs and join in only at the chorus—“Nothing’s going to stop us now”. Prasun can identify this song now and hums the tune to himself, often unconsciously.
He loves the apologetic smile that a person waiting for him to get out greets him with. Usually he can tell when there’s someone waiting. People try pushing the door even if they see that the knob is indicated ‘occupied’ (red), when it’s really urgent. Even when they don’t touch the door knob, he has learnt to make sense of the shifting of feet that takes place outside. When he gets out they exchange awkward glances—there is a mixture of frustration and gratitude. When he doesn’t hear the knock, Prasun tends to spend a fair amount of time. After the disappearance of the toilet-paper he has resorted to playing games on his mobile phone. He has an old Nokia 3315. He never liked it as much as the 3310, and he hates the jelly-like keys, but it’s faithful. He plays Space Impact on ‘Silent’. The longest he has spent inside a cubicle is twenty-five minutes: a record he doesn’t intend to break. In summer, he rounds off his visit to the shopping mall with a few glasses of chilled water from filters that are installed on the right wing of the mall. Two quick glasses, a bit of loitering, and he is off.
…
On this particular day, Prasun had an actual emergency. For one reason or another all the toilets on the ground, first and second floors were occupied. He wasn’t sure how this was happening. He had rushed in, as usual. Seeing that the doors were shut, he had gone to the ones on the right wing as well. They were being cleaned, as he had guessed. He had waited awkwardly pretending to adjust his hair with his fingers at the first floor basins, all the while keeping an eye on the doors that he could see in the reflection. No luck. Second floor. The same. He had never used the ones on the third floor and so he had climbed down hoping that the ground floor toilets would have emptied by now. Again, no luck. He finally decided that he must try the top floor. He got on the elevator, and that’s when the message came. He realized as he walked to the toilet that his movements had been far too obvious today. Once he was done, he walked out, avoiding the lifts. He would have to stay away for a while or try some other place that was on his route.
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