Rana was swimming in the Ganges, stroke after stroke after stroke towards the opposite bank. Suddenly there was a clammy sensation beside him, and a large sushuk - the black Ganges dolphin - surfaced terrifyingly close to him. That was when the nightmare broke and Rana realized that there was no Ganges, no sushuk, no swimming, and that he was safely in his room in Advaitaananda Bhavan, Narendrapur.
But the feeling of wetness was still there. As the mists of sleep lifted, much as Rana wished otherwise, the dark truth became clear. Once again, he had wet his bed. Rana became wide awake lying there on his bed pondering this newest calamity. In the other corner, the corridor bulb cast striped shadows through the window bars onto the bed where Hathi slept. But Rana stared straight up, into his corner of the ceiling where night had gathered in layers of darkest gloom.
First, how was he to prevent his roommates from finding out? Especially, one needed to worry about Abir, the relentless bully, and nosy to boot. How was he ever going to get the mattress dry, the toshok that dadu had specially gotten made? Rana could still hear the twang of the toshok-makers' strings as they fluffed up the cotton sitting in the porch of their house. The toshok already had some stains from earlier incidents when he had first come, but this term he had not wet the bed at all. Ugh! What a predicament.
Hours passed by. Rana decided to try to wash and dry the sheet with his gamchha. Making sure his roommates were sleeping, he got up and went to the bathroom. Alas, almost immediately, there were footsteps approaching, and Ranjanda entered the bathroom. Ranjanda was slightly balding, and always wore a khaddar panjabi with dhoti. He stayed across the corner from Rana's corridor, and handled administrative things like distributing goods to the students. He knew Rana well; just last month, Rana's stainless steel thala disappeared one day, and Ranjanda had replaced it with a thala from the older, heavier stock. The newer thalas were shinier but thinner, and did not bear up as well to the rigours of thala-rotation, the pastime that kept students occupied on their daily trips to the dining hall. Once or twice, Rana had also played chess with Ranjanda, who used old-fashioned rules where the king went two-and-a-half squares instead of castling.
"What are you doing Rana?", asked Ranjanda. From under heavy black eyebrows, his eyes held Rana transfixed. What a sorry spectacle, thought Rana! Here he was, in clammy nightclothes, surreptitiously rinsing the heavy bedsheet (also of mission issue). It did not take much for the truth to out, but nothing catastrophic happened. Ranjanda seemed to grasp the seriousness of keeping the matter secret immediately; indeed, he even found a dry sheet for Rana. Just the fact of having an adult co-conspirator was an immense relief.
But Rana could not get back to sleep. A door banged somewhere. A train went by on the distant lines at Sonarpur. With his eyes shut and body bent in the posture of sleep, Rana's thoughts turned philosophical. Here he was,
Gradually, the sky lightened outside. Not long afterwards he heard the morning bell ringer starting on his tour at the other end of the building. Each month, a new student was given the bellringer's job; fortunately, this duty had escaped Rana so far. Slowly the bell came closer and closer, and then it was in this very corridor and then it went off to the rest of the Bhavan, calling the residents to morning PT. The world stirred, but not so Rana. Abir and Hathi got ready and went down for their tea, and Rana took the opportunity of their absence to inspect the toshok and the sheets, and cover them up in a respectable way. Abir returned with his thin arrowroots and sat on his bed, nibbling carefully at each biscuit, preserving the contours of the alphabets and then gradually biting them off one by one. Rana was putting on his keds now, a little apprehensive that Abir may have sensed something, but nothing happened and they went down to Debuda's PT formation without event.
In hindi class that day, as Amrish-da was discoursing in his pedantic hindi-english, Rana went into a despondent trance. He was a no-gooder, he felt. He wasn't good at soccer - yes, he could tackle the lesser skilled fellows and kick the ball away, but he was no superstar. In cricket he was a straightbat, and didn't have any fancy strokes at all. He couldn't even sing or play the tabla, or do anything useful in the prayer hall. His handwriting was awful, and his Bengali was atrocious, even worse than many of the non-Bengalis in the class. He also couldn't wear the dhoti properly. So what good WAS he, thought Rana, doodling with his Writer pen on the last page of the notebook, and staring at the spot on his index finger where there was a stain from the leaking threads of the pen. But then for a moment, his mood lifted. At least he was a reasonable swimmer, he felt. Someday soon, he would swim right across the Ganges. Also, Derek Peters, their english teacher, liked Rana, didn't he? But then what good is all that to someone who wets his bed!! And so on, Rana went weaving in and out of despair the whole morning session.
At lunchtime, Rana ran up to his room and found that his toshok was missing. No doubt Ranjanda had put it out to dry. Thank God none of his roommates were there yet. He quickly put his satchel and some clothes on the bedsheet to camouflage the thinness of his bed. On the way to the bathroom, he noticed the mattress laid out in the sun over the balcony, but affected an air of nonchalance while passing it.
After lunch, there was sock-cricket in the next room. In this game, you stuff some socks into others and then invert the outer sock to form a ball; the inside of the door is the wicket and a bat can be fashioned out of just about anything. Normally Rana enjoyed this game but today he declined and chose to read a book lying on his hard mattressless bed. Though he dreaded discovery every minute, Abir was playing and Hathi was not too observant, so nothing critical happened.
The afternoon session was a lot better. In crafts class, they had woodcarving today. Rana had made a mother and child figure - a palette shaped cutout from thick masonite board, and he had a pleasant time sanding its edges smooth, keeping his mind occupied in the work with his hands. By the time he got back from school, the mattress was back on the bed. This was an immense relief to Rana. Now it was almost as if he had not wet the bed to begin with! No one would know, unless..... Unless Ranjanda and Haruda decided to send a letter home. But there wasn't too much time to brood; at least for the moment, no one had found out. With this Rana went off for soccer.
At evening study hall Rana faired out some notes he had made earlier in the week from the Hindustan Year Book on the capitals of some countries. He and Dipankar had this competition on quiz - who could remember more capitals, presidents, and that kind of thing. He faired out all such "permanent" treasures into a pink-cased diary given by his doctor uncle. He used the old Parker pen given him for sitting the National Merit Scholars Exam, now reserved strictly for such special occasions. Today he was copying the last twenty-five or so countries. Particularly impressive was Ouagadougou, the capital of Upper Volta; he must remember this for the next time he caught Dipankar. The pink diary also had other useful stuff, such as cricket scores and records, snatches of poems, important dates and events, etc. There was also a sketched map of Buckingham Palace that Rana had found in a magazine somewhere. But then, like all good things, the twenty-five countries were over, and Rana had to return to the math homework for tomorrow; the dark inanities of (a+b) times (a-b). Rana found himself quite sleepy, but struggled through the homework and managed to finish it.
Dinner today was dal and fish, and the refugee milk-powder curd which was of such brick-like consistency that it could be thrown right across the dining room. The insider joke, probably apocryphal, had it that the powder was surplus from the mission's refugee relief operations. Actually, Rana quite liked the taste of this concoction. Once there was a hilarious scene when Subrata, who had been sleeping in study hall, was dragged into dinner, and fell asleep in between picking up the food and putting it into his mouth. Consequently the curd was deposited inside his shirt collar, causing much amusement. Rana liked the fact that as English medium students, they at least got to eat at a table; he remembered going into Niranjanananda during Ramakrishna's birthday last year and being surprised by the absence of tables in their dining hall. Initially, he had presumed that tables had been removed for the occasion, but later someone told him that in Bengali medium they sat on the weaved-mats on the floor itself.
After dinner in their room, there was some light banter between Abir and Hathi. Poor Hathi was always the butt, for he was a somewhat spoilt child, and every Sunday his fashionable mom would come and fuss and bustle over him, much to his embarrassment. He was generous with his supplies from home, but this did not spare him any of the barbs. Suddenly Rana was shocked by Abir's accusation -
"So, you bed-wetter, how come your toshok was out on the balcony this afternoon? At it again, huh?" But it was still directed at Hathi, who protested vehemently. It was so obvious that poor Hathi had had nothing to do with the wet mattress that even Abir relented. Rana took the opportunity to mention that he had also noticed the mattress, and that it was a white one, whereas Hathi's was coloured. This led in turn to speculation about the mattress - whose could it have been? Several names were thrown up, and suspicion gathered on Kiran, a small UP-ite a few rooms down, but of course no conclusion was reached.
Everyone turned in for the night, and Rana heaved a silent sigh of relief. He felt quite smug about his adroit handling of this near disaster at the last minute. The day was over now. For all intents, the bedwetting had never happened, although there was that doubt in his mind about Haruda writing home, but even this seemed more and more remote every minute.
Tonight, Rana visited the bathroom before going to sleep, and dreamt not of the Ganges, but of a game of danguly, in which he was sending the guly further and further, unbeatably across banana groves and railway tracks, inexorably far, beyond the paddy fields, to the very spot where the sky curved down and touched the ground. Rana would lift his vision skyward looking at the guly, and even in his sleep, his head moved up, following the heavenly trajectory of his marvelous shot. And in a distant way, the applause of the onlookers blended with Abir's snoring and made for a very comfortable sleep.
Copyright © 1995 Amitabha Mukerjee (Khuto) Narendrapur R.K.M. Vidyalaya, 1974