FOR A PINT OF PLUM LIQUOR

In puffs the kettle on the old oven sends the smoke. Pictures of elders have moist frames from the heat generated in the room. He sits at his desk, trembling hands, hands trembling from having drunk a little bit too much of his cherry brandy yesterday. Outside, the apple tree has shed its foliage. The pear tree is nearly bare rising into the cadre of the window, piercing it. Beyond, you see the bare mountains now almost brown from the gone sheen of the sun and a year past. He looks at his mother in one of the photos, sheepskin coat and turning over the beads, and then he looks down on the desk in front of him, at the square pocket of brown paper that is the postcard.

He lifts it from his desk, takes a stamp and puts his saliva to the back of the tampon, before putting it with a thumb on the top right corner. The light is dying outside. A few apple wedges bake on the oven with a view of conserving the extras giving in the room a weak mouldy smell.

He looks at the address on the envelope beyond the glasses:

M. Bijoy Saha
St. Xavier’s College Hostel
Bombay 400 001

He takes the tea from the kettle and mixes it with butter and pistons it three or four times in the hand-mixer before pouring it on to his porcelain cup. The smell of old tea and rancid peels is strong in the room. He takes out his reading glasses from the inner pocket of his great coat and reflects on the draft:

Dear Friend,
You passed a night in our town fifteen years ago. I remember it because that is the only year we received tourists. They had given our name in a tourist brochure and with the only hotel in town, in which you stayed, you received us, I mean me and my wife, who was 42 then and I quite young as well. You might remember us looking at you from the bar as you climbed the stairs. It was a cold night and the Kinner Kailash shone in its white majesty against the dark blue of the sky. We saw you stuck on the stairs, paralyzed either by looking at the moonlit night or looking at us. My wife was quite beautiful then, and her beauty would have struck you, the young man you were then, quite freshly out of college, and a good college it was. We were not used to doing it often, it was the first time I had come out with the wife with a view to earn some money. You scampered then, to your room, but I knew you would come back. No young man would not come back who has seen my wife’s eyes then. You were the only guest staying at the hotel. I enquired about it. It was a difficult time for us and that was the only reason we had come out, wife and I, to have a drink on the terrace of the bar which overlooked the hotel and from which we had a nearly clear view of your room. We kept sitting there drinking brandy for some time till you came to the bar and asked for a drink. I knew you would come for my wife, so I did not hesitate but walked up to you at the counter and invited you to a drink. My wife did not speak much then, as she does not now, but she was not proud of doing it, whatever the circumstances. You told me about your studies and about your future career as a journalist. I was shy to broach the topic but tried to introduce you to my wife. I told you she would spend the night with her for Rs.500 if you wished. You looked at me strangely. My wife looked at you as well, curious what your reaction would be. She had very beautiful green eyes, and white skin, a real mountain beauty she is. No man who has looked at her can look away again. I looked at you anxiously, anxious to earn the money that would have allowed us to fend off the season. My wife looked at you as well. I could see weakness coming over your face as you melted under the charm of her aquiline nose and the façon of looking at you then being absent forever. You asked for how much? I had already told you, and I was a man of my word, and I allowed you to go for what I would really think would be a just price. For we needed that much for the thatch repairs to the outhouse and getting a pair of spectacles for my old mother who had glaucoma. The wife accompanied you. You asked to send a pint of our mahua liquor. I did not dare ask you for the money then, but in the morning we met, and you supplied me with your address saying to write to you if I was ever in need, along with the money for the evening. It is to you I write now, for now our children have left and we are alone in the house now, and she has gone to forage for grass for the bêtes in the High Alps. She does not know anything about it but now we desperately need money, and I had conserved your contact in case I ever require to write to you in this façon. It is to you friend, now I implore, in the name of my family or whatever is remaining of it, to send us Rs.500 by money order. That would allow us to reach the end of the season without much fuss, for tourists are not coming anymore, and you are the only one we ever entertained. I write to you with great hope, and if I could send it easily enough, I would have packed you a litre of my brandy made from my own plums, but I do not know how to go about it, and the man at the post-office would scoff if I were to attempt that. We look forward to receiving you, I and my wife, if you ever feel like revisiting these lost environs.

Do not forget us.

I send you my address so that you can find us easily.

Best Wishes

X... Bahadur

Darkness has come over outside. These are the last of the logs and soon it would be hard to find firewood in the open forests. If there is one thing he regrets it is that his parents did not leave him a lot of land so that he could have grown many trees, and always had firewood for the winter, evening or morning, for his wife gets sullen when she has to step out into the cold out of the rug every dawn.

Arjun Razdan is a Kashmiri writer based in Europe. He has been educated in the Humanities and the Social Sciences at the Universities of Bombay (St. Xavier’s College), Oxford, Lyon, Paris (Sorbonne) and Brno. He is currently studying for a PhD on the question of la pudeur in Flaubert’s women characters at the University Autonomous of Barcelona. He has been a print journalist in the past writing on cultural affairs, and a professor of languages. He speaks French, English, Hindustani, Kashmiri and a smattering of Italian, Catalan, Spanish and Czech.