Free The Blue Bedspread by Raj Kamal Jha

into the distance, so that by the time I finish the story, it’s all over, you’ve gone back to sleep, leaving behind your crying ringing in my ears like a faraway bell.

S ISTER

 
D EAD P IGEON
     
    (A story in two parts)
    They found him in the morning, five thirty or so, hanging from a hook on the bedroom ceiling where his fan should have been. His walking stick was on the floor, the chair he had climbed on lay upturned, its four legs marking a rectangle in which his body swung gently, like that of a lamb, upside down, at a butcher’s shop.
    The police came around seven, in a red and white jeep; a red light on the roof which didn’t work; a constable got up on the chair, held him tight with one hand, loosened the blue nylon rope with the other, lowered him down.
    ‘He’s very light,’ he said. ‘He’s so old he would have died anyway, why did he have to kill himself?’ he said.
    Why did he have to kill himself?
    The constable took this question and walked around the neighbourhood, to as many people as he could, but no one had the answer. No one knew where the old man came from, whether he had any relatives in some faraway village. Or whether there were some people in the city who would cry themselves to sleep that night.
    So they followed the rules, as laid out in the book, typed out a notice at the police station which no one came to read. And, therefore, forty-eight hours later, they cremated him.
    He was seventy, they said, no medical college needed a cadaver so old. He could even have been eighty, it didn’t matter.
    It was one of the four suicides in the city that day; it would become, by the end of the month, one of a hundred and fifty. By the end of that year, one of over fifteen hundred. Multiply that by fifteen for fifteen years and what do you have left?
    Nothing, the old man is gone.
    Gone also is his house, it wasn’t a house exactly, just a four-wall shack, with a tarpaulin roof, beside the road, which they demolished the day after they found him. There was nothing in the room except an extra walking stick, an iron chair, clothes that smelled of his years and some pigeon feathers scattered below the bed, some underneath his pillow.
    They took it all away, leaving behind nothing to mark the fact that once upon a time there lived an old man. And that for a week or so, he changed the life of a little girl, brought joy into her house and filled her little heart with some love.
    Once upon a time, there lived an old man who worked in an oil-refining mill, pasting labels on tin cans, just before the oil was poured into them: bright yellow labels with pictures of Lord Ganesh, in black and red, the name of the mill in blue: Ganesh Oil Mill, Calcutta 700006.
    How long he’d been doing this, no one knows, but it must have been quite a while because if you looked carefully you could see that his fingers were crinkled as if glue had dried on them and merged with his skin.
    When he picked up a piece of paper, any piece of paper, through instinct and habit he made it look as if he were holding a label, he held it gingerly, between the thumb and his finger, looking all around him as if he were lost, as if he were searching for a place to paste it, somewhere, anywhere.
    Just outside the oil mill, a couple of feet to the right of its entrance, were the birds. In a large cage, more like a coop, the kind you will see at the Alipore Zoo, slightly smaller, the size of an average storeroom in an average house. Three sides of the cage were walls, the fourth that faced the road was strong wire netting.
    There were twelve pigeons in the cage, six grey, six white, the prettiest things in the neighbourhood. And although there were several pigeons out in the open, resting on window ledges, cooing in the afternoon, fluttering in the narrow lanes and doing pretty things like scratching their backs or sleeping, people stopped by to look at these dozen birds in the cage.
    Flying round and round, grey and white, grey and white. On