The Doorbell

The doorbell, for me as a child, used to be a weekday afternoon church or a Sunday morning fish market. And in the Calcutta of the eighties, perpetually dangling like a stubborn string of semen from the once stiff, now limping member of the British ‘my baap’, they could both be the same thing sometimes.

The doorbell, more than the sounds it made and the ones it hid, always reminded me of my mother. It is one thing to think of your mother when you are a spot of schoolboy dirt with noise and shoelaces. It is quite another to remember her in broad daylight, with judging adults hiding their opinions of you behind sleeveless smiles and coloured handbags. But if there is any courage here, to lay bare chests that were slammed shut by time and hermetically sealed by age, it comes from my mother. Through the doorbell of my childhood. So I shall write about the doorbell. And the catharsis that comes with it. Even now. And for ever.

The doorbell started making meaning to me when I was under four and above reproach. Being the child of a busy doctor, it was often quite illuminating to deduce that your life was not as important as the nameless mill worker’s wife who swallowed Baygon spray insecticide on a Sunday morning to make a point to said nameless mill worker about the consequences of infidelity. And the doorbell would ring. And ring. And ring. With more such sudden assignments that would call away my mother. To other nameless mill workers’ wives. And faceless factory foremen’s spawns. Every time the doorbell rang, every time, with its shrill chirp or somnolent ‘OM’, I would dread the story it would carry with it. On its back like a diseased horse bearing a mongrel from hell.

From late night house calls to missed board games, unfinished home made ketchup-doused pizzas to Doordarshan static left cackling to itself, my mother would answer the doorbell every time. And get up to go. To save the world. Leaving me to do my own saving. So when the doorbell rang, a million years later, carrying with it a story of misguided vindication, misunderstood hormones and a letter sending me away to college, I bit my lip and in my head told my mother it served her right.

"Go and save the world now. There will be no one waiting this time when you come back"— words that bounced off the silent walls inside my head and fell like dead sparrows into the dark well of my mind.

So today, another million years later when I finally get it, that doorbell morphs into a face smiling kindly at me. Like it always did. All the time. Even while it was saving the world. And I find myself telling myself I shall make that face for my children one day — on home made pizza with tomato sauce. So they never forget it. Ever.