My Kind of Girl by Buddhadeva Bose Page B

lantern on the front porch of Hitangshu’s house piercing the dark and shining dimly, at a distance. Hitangshu couldn’t spend much time with us in the evenings; hesimply had to get back home by eight, as his family ordered. Neither Asit nor I was bound by such stern directives: we’d sit there in the darkness, call out to Hitangshu softly on our way back, and he’d interrupt his studies to covertly exchange a few words with us.
    So the three of us were in love with one another, just as all three of us fell in love with someone else, back in Dhaka, back in old Paltan, back in 1927.
    Her name was Antara. It was a rather sophisticated name for the Dhaka of those days. But nothing about her family suggested Dhaka, so why should their daughter’s name smack of it? The gentleman was extremely westernized – or so we felt then – while the lady dressed in a way that made people mistake her for a young girl from behind. And as for her daughter, their daughter, what can I say about her? She strolled in the garden in the morning, sat with a book on the veranda after lunch, went for walks on the road in the evening; practically brushing past us, her voice could be heard at times – back in Dhaka, in ancient 1927, when it was not easy to even catch a glimpse of a girl, when a portion of a sari behind the closed doors of a carriage was a hint of heaven – and here was this girl, whom we would see in a different sari each day, and who was named Antara on top of that . . . We did not have the ability not to all fall in love with her.
    But it was I who discovered her name. I had to sign for the bread every day, and one day I saw a new name in clear Bangla script on the bread seller’s register: Antara Dey. I looked at the register for a while, was possibly late in returning it, and then checked with Hitangshu in the evening, “What’s her name, Antara?”
    â€œWhose . . .” But Hitangshu understood immediately and said, “Possibly.”
    Asit said, “They call her Toru.”
    Toru! There must have been at least two or three hundred Torus in Dhaka, but at that moment I felt, and I realized Asit felt too, that the language had no word sweeter than Toru. Hitangshu, of course, had to say something flippant and knowing, for the subject, or subjects, of our conversation were tenants of the ground floor of his grand house; unless he had more on the family than we did, he wouldn’t be keeping his advantage over us. So he wrinkled his long nose and said, “From Antara to Toru – I don’t like it.”
    â€œWhy not, I like it very much,” I raised my voice, though my heart fell.
    â€œIf it was up to me, I’d have called her Antara.”
    What audacity. What temerity! He’d have addressed her, and that too by her name! My face reddened with the heat of protest, and I was marshaling some sharp expressions in my mind, when Asit suddenly said, “Me too.” Traitor!
    We would have these small quarrels quite frequently. There wasn’t a day when we didn’t talk about her, and there wasn’t one conversation where the three of us were unanimous. She had been in a blue sari the other day, did she look better in it or the purple one? When she’d been walking in her garden that morning, was her hair in a ponytail or down? The other evening, when she’d sat on the veranda with paper and pen, was she writing a letter or practicing arithmetic? We would contend over such issues at the top of our voices. The biggest argumentwas over a strange topic: did her face resemble the Mona Lisa’s a lot, slightly or not at all? I had just seen a print of the Mona Lisa and shown it to my friends; suddenly the words escaped from me one day: “She looks a lot like Mona Lisa.” We expended many words on the subject without coming to a conclusion, but the good thing was that we started referring to her as Mona Lisa. No matter how much melody