The Barber Shop

Every day, at nine in the morning, Mr. Ghosh got his mustache trimmed while waiting for things to happen. Betel juice dripped from one side of his paan-stained lips, his backside comfortably lodged on a rickety chair in the middle of the busy pavement at the crossing of Chowringhee street in Kolkata. Here, an enterprising mind, Motilal had set up his makeshift barber station. An overhead sky-blue tarpaulin stretched across four loosely balanced bamboo poles reined in the rain and sun. Layers of cheap pamphlets, tied to the poles with a fraying twine, fluttered in the air offering essential life advice. From phone numbers of real estate brokers, life-insurance agents, astrologers, masseurs, and henna parlors—each advertisement was rife with potential. Mr. Ghosh read them with interest, but nothing stoked his curiosity these days.

           “Ghosh Babu, did you sleep well?” Motilal’s face was so close that Mr. Ghosh could smell the previous night’s alcohol on his breath.

           “Yes, I did, I did,” Mr. Ghosh replied even though he’d been up all night, thinking about the novel he’s been writing for eight years.

           “The loudspeaker near our house blared till 3am, and then the azaan from the mosque woke me up at 4:30,” Motilal continued.

           Mr. Ghosh stared onto the road, filtering Motilal’s complaining voice away. He was convinced it was a flat day like most other days—when a minor inconvenience caused by a woman in blue sneakers brought the barber station down and changed the nature of things.

           A sharp thud! And then a piercing scream, as the jagged edge of a bamboo pole gnashed the thin papery sleeve of Mr. Ghosh’s khadi kurta.

            “Ouch! Young woman, don’t you see where you are going?” Mr. Ghosh shouted.

           “Sorry!” the woman replied, attempting to erect the bamboo poles again. Next, she fortified her handiwork by placing four thick orange bricks at the foot of the poles. She then pulled out a roll of crumpled posters from her bag.

           The onslaught caused Mr. Ghosh’s spectacles to settle in the gap between the broken pavement and the main road, in the narrow gulley where rivulets of grime soaked phenyl flowed alongside orange peels and cigarette stubs. Bare eyed, Mr. Ghosh struggled to read the font on the poster. It was a poster of a Muslim student activist who had recently been all over the news. A scrawny fellow stared back at him, his hair looking as if a distracted gardener had started running a pair of shears through it and then abandoned the enterprise midway.

           The incredible potential of the moment hit Mr. Ghosh in the face like the blazing sun in his eyes. When wielded in haste, a blue sneaker could dislodge a fascinating working organization—a lot like art, in how a stale metaphor could mess up the internal structure of a revolutionary aesthetic.

           Post-retirement from his job as an English Literature professor at the local public University, Mr. Ghosh made a habit of taking to the streets 9-5 every day. He reasoned it as lowering oneself into the trenches, servicing the muse—just in case. He told the barber, the tea-stall vendor, the pirated book shop owner, and even busy pedestrians that he was writing a novel—that this novel was about the internal quirks of art,  the everydayness of things—but nobody paid attention. Sometimes they teased, “O Ghosh Babu, didn’t your last academic book from the university press go out of print after you cheated from the American?” In another variation, they joked, “When your poetry chapbook came out, didn’t you pay everyone ten rupees to buy your book? Are you going to pay everyone twenty this time?”

           It was true that his only academic book had been criticized for plagiarism. But he had considered it borrowing, even channeling Emerson’s transcendental ethics. When he was up for the inquiry committee in 1984, the Chair had stressed the generosity of the Department’s gesture—“Mr. Ghosh, you can keep the job with a 15 percent fee cut. And please don’t think of plagiarizing from Emerson again. Choose a nobody next time!”

           Mr. Ghosh took his advice, fixated on the prize—a government job spent teaching Shakespeare didn’t require much mental or emotional investment. He had enough time to plan his magnum opus. But thirty-six years later, and a failed poetry book behind, Mr. Ghosh was still waiting for things to happen.

           The woman smeared a thick paste of white glue on one of the bamboo poles, then attached the poster and smoothed it out. Motilal vehemently protested when he realized the nature of the poster was political. Five local goons armed with tennis rackets and cricket bats had vandalized his station two weeks back, tearing down all posters with the sickle-shaped moon, replacing them with saffron lotuses on glossy papers.

            “Bhaiya, I promise there will be no trouble. If those goondas come again, please call me. I shall take care of it. Trust me,” the woman implored Motilal. A wad of notes exchanged hands.

           She fished a pair of sunglasses and a cell phone from a blue Jaipuri handprint cross-body bag with diamond mirrors. Mr. Ghosh was observant but distant. The initial possibility of the scene and its artistic potential seemed a tad diminished. Another young blood working herself into a frenzy over a lost political cause, he thought. There weren’t a lot of subtexts here. Nothing that he hadn’t seen before.

           Mr. Ghosh turned to the sky for inspiration. The mid-morning sun burnt raw. The air hummed with the synchronized rhythm of nearby leather factories. A storm of crows disbanded as black smoke engulfed the air. The crows in flight and the black soot from the factories merged, giving the impression of a post-modernist artwork Mr. Ghosh had once studied on the internet. The art made no sense to him, but then stuff like that made for a great frame of reference—nobody knew what it meant while everybody knew what it meant at the same time. He’d concluded that beauty was irrelevant in the new scheme of things— tiredness of form and structure was exemplary, passing for revolutionary, like the woman’s poster. The reddish-pink font with the phrase “Take back the night” screamed for attention, the cartoon image resembling the handiwork of a disgruntled artist.

           The woman now approached Mr. Ghosh. She wore a mint yellow cotton sari and a combative look. Mr. Ghosh’s penchant for metaphors took him on a journey that enabled typification of her kind easier. He read in her gait the lightness of a wrestler who was also an Odissi dancer—dreamy but resilient.

           She properly apologized, meeting his eyes, “I’m sorry for my rashness. We are trying to get things in order before the protest demonstrations and spread the word.”

           A half chuckle almost escaped Mr. Ghosh’s throat. He controlled the impulse, translating this as a rich moment to excavate the depths of youthful resistance. It was incomprehensible why in this day and age, the youth who’d previously leave the country under the slightest pretext was now choosing to stay behind and actively drown themselves in this political morass. Did they not get the memo that politics did nobody ever any good?

           “We?”

           “Yes, we are members of the City Student Association. Recently, one of our leaders,” she said, pointing to the bespectacled young man in the poster, “Hussain Malik was arrested for protesting the fee hike on the University campus. The truth could not have been clearer; he was convicted because he is Muslim.”

           A dark, swarthy man with a boxy bare torso was seated in the lotus position on a raised cement platform at the base of a banyan tree, a few meters away from the barber shop. A thick admixture of sandalwood paste and grey ash lined his forehead, with strands of brown beads coiled around his wrist. A silent sentinel in the form of an erect trident swathed in several layers of decaying marigold flowers stood beside him. From his vantage point, he had seen the woman put up her poster and then eavesdropped on the conversation with Mr. Ghosh. He now let out a jagged snarl directing a string of expletives at the woman, tearing the poster in a single fell swoop.

           A crowd instantly gathered. They cheered as the man snatched all the posters from the woman’s hand, shredding them one by one in an exaggerated motion that appeared caricaturish to Mr. Ghosh.

           Someone from the crowd, a young man in a tight saffron shirt with a protruding hairy belly, shouted at the woman, “Your Muslim boyfriend is a terrorist. Shame on you for supporting him. You are a traitor to our Hindu brothers and sisters.”

           The woman stood unflinching, locking the man in a stubborn stare. She watched them flee when the police entered the scene after an hour. One by one, they ran, stumbled, rolled over, and crashed to the sides, hitting everything in their vicinity when the police unleashed their batons.

           After things subsided, she took out a rolled joint from her bag.

           The irony didn’t escape Mr. Ghosh. He was struck by how unimaginatively mediocre this whole melodramatic iteration was. Even on the rare day when things happened, none of it took the form of any artistic intervention. For this was the new rigor of the day, men, women, and children radicalized by unimaginative divisive sloganeering raised from the depths of the politician’s blackened souls. The television screens, the newspaper covers, the streets vibrated to the same refrain. But this woman, standing her ground, resolute in her faith, was striking, even though she also belonged to a different kind of torpor—one that time and again seized the heart of youths with its faux liberatory promise of recklessness. But today, in her silent defiance, Mr. Ghosh saw belief that he had never experienced any waking moment of his life. He was too scarred, stripped bare of anything concrete to participate in idealistic revisionism. Nothing he wrote ever forked any lightning. He was convinced nothing he would ever write would move any muscle anywhere.

           Mr. Ghosh had previously moved away from the crowd but now edged toward the woman. She was still standing near the barber station.

           She offered him the joint. After taking a drag, Mr. Ghosh felt he could touch the sound of mosquitos buzzing near his earlobes. He asked her if she was okay.

           “I’m used to this drama,” she said. “At least they did not call me a whore this time.”

           Mr. Ghosh shuddered at her blitheness, recalling that moment in the Chair’s office when he was informed that a portion of his salary would be deducted. He recalled the failed marriage proposal; the girl’s side had been put off by his reduced income from the government job—they wanted someone who worked at a multinational. He remembered the days that followed, when he woke up in a cold sweat, too disgusted with himself, bawling like a child for all he wanted and could not achieve. He’d wanted to scream but, unable to do so, swallowed it—the bile rising up to his lungs.

           “Why are you in this? Don’t you get tired? Don’t you want a good life?” he asked her, almost willing her to express resentment. For it was he who was tired—a failed poet in a failed city. It was unacceptable that one could still dream of something outside themselves in a world where every waking reality was spent chipped away on the anvil of life.

           She didn’t respond to his question but continued smoking, staring out onto the busy road ahead, standing on the broken pavement, lost in thought.

           A song by his favorite singer, Mohd. Rafi appeared on Mr. Ghosh’s lips. He sang about the futility of the cosmos.  She responded with Ludhianvi, “So what? Even if one conquers the world?”

           And then everything culminated into Tagore—the sound of her voice cut through the din of the traffic policeman screeching on the whistle hanging from a thread around his neck. The retinue of cars, buses, and tired two-wheelers in this bottlenecked city came to a halt as the strident chords of “Tear down all barriers, let the captive spirit be liberated” rang through every pore of the city.

           Tears welled up in Mr. Ghosh’s eyes. There was something painful and lyrical about this moment that his brain couldn’t process, like the sound of crashing waves on concrete slabs. He could feel the throbbing of art in his veins, pulsating one at a time, as the sedative influence of the weed saturated his lungs.

           “Come to our demonstration,” the woman said. “You will feel welcome there.” At that moment, Mr. Ghosh felt seen in a way he had never felt before.

           Sunlight poured in through the slatted windows, spreading in a slow puddle over the red mezzanine floor. Mr. Ghosh was seated at his oakwood desk with his back to the sun. The air conditioner made a rhythmic humming sound. A pile of books, some open, lay face down on the wooden desk, while some balanced on an unstable stoop in front of him. Mr. Ghosh was scribbling furiously in a 100-page rule book he had acquired from the local stationery shop. A phone rang in the next room, cutting through the loneliness that had settled in his two-bedroom apartment like varnish on dry wood. His septuagenarian sister, now a resident of Bangalore, was on the other end, inquiring about his health.

           “And have you got any writing done?” she delicately asked.

           Mr. Ghosh knew she was holding her breath, scared that if she let it out, a stone might be dislodged in Mr. Ghosh’s mind—bringing about a veritable landslide.

           “Yes, I have been getting some writing done, di,” he replied.

           “And what else? Did you see the news… students getting rounded up... media channels going berserk, even in the middle of the economic crisis? Who are they even kidding?”

           Mr. Ghosh thought about the woman at the barber shop. He had forgotten to ask her name, but he remembered her invitation.

           A fly entered his apartment through the slatted windows. It buzzed around with a readiness that unsettled Mr. Ghosh. He didn’t know how to inject himself into spaces so readily. He was always hanging in the margins—the monochrome border to a vibrant painting.

           Public spaces had a mysterious rhythm to them. The barber shop was one place where the surface rhythm simply didn’t matter. Mr. Ghosh believed it had a special undercurrent that made itself apparent only to him. It didn’t matter if people brought contraptions down in haste or children in disco light shoes steamrolled strings of marigold garlands laid out on the streets like a curtain. For in the unpredictable momentum of the day—there was a set rigor that only the previously ordained could ever know.

           The woman with her joints and rolls of posters had floated into that space with a readiness that had disturbed the beat of that day. Only Mr. Ghosh had noticed a slight shift in tenor. It hadn’t changed when the saffron-clad self-styled messiahs harassed her—for that was regular on these streets: men ganging up, men filing and defiling new Gods, men looking under women’s skirts, accidentally grazing their breasts and then immediately pocketing their roving hands. This was the city where men hustled, men bargained, moving lightly like the wind between clothes hung out to dry on a clothesline. But this woman and her revolutionary song had entered their territory. She marked her space, transforming the busy pavement into an island. People like Mr. Ghosh, forever hovering in the margins, had now been given an opening.

           Mr. Ghosh knew there would be nothing extraordinary about the demonstration. In his university days at Presidency College, he had been part of a political organization. He’d spent years tracing a revolution, preparing for a coup that had fizzled out with a whimper even before it was staged. He recalled the days spent in hiding and the sharpness of the water reeds lashing against his bare back as he waded through the darkness, escaping from one of the many safe houses that had failed to hold up their side of the bargain. He remembered the impassioned speeches by his constituency leader. Then the reddish-yellow welts on the man’s broken back, staring back at him from the jail when Mr. Ghosh visited him—defiant like the crimson moon on lunar nights.

           He’d once dreamt of being a revolutionary poet. Like hundreds from his generation, he also believed he had a chance to be a mythmaker of his own making. When it came, the revolution had not been the revolution of the underclass like they’d been promised.

           A bunch of Oxford-educated cardboard cutouts ultimately seized the day, locking themselves in their air-conditioned cabins while the world burned outside.

           The demonstration was on the grounds of the local public University. Mr. Ghosh passed a long retinue of weary young men in saffron shirts brandishing their tired flamboyance. Some were lounging in the streets in half-pants, holding iron tridents.

           A man was scratching his groin, listening to a devotional song on a pocket transistor. When he saw Mr. Ghosh headed to the University grounds, he beckoned him to sit on a dusty threadbare floor mat on one corner of the road.

           The man placed a bulging arm around Mr. Ghosh’s shoulders. He put the transistor with the devotional song close to his left ear. Mr. Ghosh felt the man’s protruding belly rise and fall with the swell of the hysterical chanting from the transistor.

           “Do you have weed?” he smiled brightly.

           “No.” Mr. Ghosh tried to get up from his seated position, but his weak knees protested.

           “O, Uncle, where do you think you are going? You look like a cultured man. Do you know which shlok from the Gita this is?” he asked, pointing to the sound emanating from the transistor.

           Mr. Ghosh wanted to snarl, “Do you?” He resisted the urge, staring back at him blankly.

           The man explained the verse to him, saying the path of righteousness required a commitment to sacrifice. Sometimes, that commitment demanded one to take stern actions. Then he conspiratorially looked at him, rolling his sleeves, “Do you know what goes on behind the closed doors of the University? Look! They have barricaded the doors to prevent anyone from entering. Such vile creatures, wasting taxpayer money! Everyone knows what they are doing in there!”

           Mr. Ghosh knew this was that act of the play, right before the climax when things looked like filler elements but portended dangerous consequences later on. It was crucial to buy time before the filler elements took on their own life. He smiled back, feigning interest.

           “A month back, they found thousands of condom wrappers on the University grounds. Today’s youth has no respect for our culture! They even defiled Gandhi’s statue, saying he was a caste apologist. No respect for history. These are the kind of places where we dream of sending our sons and daughters. You must have a granddaughter of your own?” the man whispered.

           Mr. Ghosh replied in the affirmative. “Yes, and this is why I am going to the University to stop her from this nonsense! I don’t understand today’s youth. They have inherited a sense of anger without even knowing what to do with it.”

           And just like that, Mr. Ghosh was part of the ruse, walking the same tightrope of the same fiction this man was peddling to him.

           “Yes, Uncle, you’re right. You must go and get your granddaughter. You must take her back home with you. Come, I will drop you by the gate. The police will soon be here. We are staging a protest of our own,” he said, chuckling, “You look like a good man. You and your granddaughter go home before there is any trouble.”

           Nobody stopped Mr. Ghosh from entering the University. The students at the gates recognized him as an ally. Mr. Ghosh didn’t understand what made them trust him so easily. He thought they were young and foolish. They didn’t know enough about the world outside.

           He first noticed the colors, the graffiti on the walls, and the dazzling splash of copper and charcoal on white colonial-style pillars. It felt like he had walked into a festival. There were women in saris performing cartwheels in the distance. Songs by Tagore blared from the loudspeakers. The air smelled of weed and jasmine flowers.

           About two feet away, five men and three women sat in a semi-circle surrounding the woman Mr. Ghosh recognized from the barber shop. She was seated in the middle, one arm extended in the air as the other played the harmonium; her free arm engaged in a back-and-forth motion as if she was unspooling a yarn of wool. Mr. Ghosh inched towards the circle, recognizing the strain of Raag Yaman being played on the harmonium. He, however, changed course midway, feeling it best to observe them from a distance, for distance afforded rare critical intimacy that inmates didn’t possess.

           Mr. Ghosh felt lost in the crowd. Where were the demonstrations for the unfair arrest of the Muslim student, the hungered sloganeering, the milling crowds frothing at the mouth? There were food stalls and face painting counters everywhere. This resembled a fair.

           During the demonstrations in his youth, there were poetry readings, sloganeering, and incendiary lyrics, but never the festival—for the festival was reserved for the day when it all came tumbling down, when they didn’t need ciphers anymore, and when the revolution wasn’t a dirty word. The festivity unsettled Mr. Ghosh. He felt as if he had gatecrashed a wedding party. From less than ten feet away, the proceedings resembled a wedding morning performance.

           A group of women circled two other women seated in the middle, scattering rose petals. They hummed a popular tune Mr. Ghosh couldn’t place. Another group of women musicians played the tabla nearby, their fingers moving back and forth in a steady rhythm that bound the performance with a fragile thread. When Mr. Ghosh neared them, he realized even though the tune was familiar, the words weren’t.

           He registered phrases as the tabla players increased their pitch. The rotating group of women swelled in size, chanting, “Look how shriveled you have become/ Shame, Shame/ how frail your limbs appear/ one day you will get tired of your darkness/ then your worn limbs will tie the sacred thread around me and my beloved’s wrists/ who are you all to deprive us of our happiness/ when Sri Krishna and Chaitanya Mahaprabhu too were bound by this sacred thread!”

           Mr. Ghosh knew that being a man in this world meant taking desire for granted—and that these women’s desires were political in a way that he couldn’t exactly understand. But he worried about too many conflations, a genre-bending that would be untenable. He had walked into this frame, into this song, and into this space, hoping to find art, any resonance that would help him finish his novel; instead, he found a riot of colors. A precocious child had upturned tubes of paint on an empty canvas—and now the child was just winging it, trying to trace as many patterns as possible.

           The sky darkened. A column of black mosquitos gathered overhead, buzzing around Mr. Ghosh’s ears, drowning out the poetry and music till he could only hear his cynicism ringing in his ears.

           He saw the woman from the barber shop approaching him from a distance.

           Mr. Ghosh gathered his thoughts, addressing her in a melancholy voice, “Where is the demonstration advertised on the poster? Why does everything feel so tepid?”

           “People are protesting multiple things here—the fee hike, the unfair arrest of Muslim students, LGBTQ rights—and they are doing it in ways that feel natural to them... And brings them joy!” she responded.

           “Joy!” Mr. Ghosh scoffed. “You all haven’t even got the fire started, and you are already insisting on the celebration!”

           The woman whispered, “When the Regime commanded that books with harmful knowledge be publicly burned, what did the celebrated writer whose name was not on the list do?”

           “Ah! Brecht’s Burning of Books,” Mr. Ghosh’s eyes sparkled in recognition.

           “Yes, but what did the writer do?” she reiterated, a little impatient.

           “The writer wrote a letter to the ones in power. Burn me! He wrote with a flying pen, burn me? Haven’t my books always reported the truth? I command you! Burn me!”

“And do you think the writer was in the right?” she said quietly. “Look around you. What do you see?”

           Mr. Ghosh saw happy faces, tired faces, people chatting, singing, and dancing. In all his years as an aspiring writer, he had never known what it felt like to be a part of a community. His cynicism stemmed from his loneliness, but art was an infinite frame of reference. Art moved people in mysterious ways. It suddenly occurred to him that he had spent decades pursuing an abstract idea of art. Before that day at the barber shop, he had not viscerally opened himself up to its multitudes. This woman was trying to tell him that the ultimate cure lay in the festival, not the political—but he wasn’t sure if he felt the same way.

           “What purpose is a writer if he gets burnt in the process?” Mr. Ghosh added.

           Another young man, a party worker, beckoned the woman towards the center of the field, where a small podium had been set up. She flashed Mr. Ghosh a smile before disappearing into the crowd.

           Soon after, the tired saffron-clad sentinels surged inside, setting fire to the barricaded University gates. The party worker on the podium was dethroned, his microphone cut off mid-monologue. In this cadence, in the defacing of stone statues and hurling of petrol bombs, in the smell of burnt tires, the onslaught of water cannons, and young bodies hurling themselves at the uniformed police brandishing batons, Mr. Ghosh recognized stories he had witnessed before.

           He realized that the festival was the unwritten preface to a narrative that had already been written countless times, for what do you say or write even? When they came for you when the dams broke, and the waters got to the iron locks—they found singing and dancing inside?

           The next day, a retired English Professor and once widely known plagiarist and failed poet wrote an opinion piece on political will and art in the local daily. The first line read:

           The festival at the University reminded me of the optimism of artistic will and the pessimism of            cynicism. Dear readers, don’t be silent bystanders to the possibility of your own political will.

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Amrita De is a Visiting Research Fellow at Penn State University. She specializes in masculinity studies and global south literatures. Beside working on her first academic monograph on postcolonial Indian masculinities, she is also wrestling with a novel of ideas and a set of interlinked stories. Her creative works have appeared in Café Dissensus, Aaduna, Muse India, Cerebrations, Snarl, Barricade, Hong Kong Review, and are forthcoming in other literary magazines.