As I lay contemplating HARBART, a shadow betwixt the jaws of my dreams emerge. Despite the gruesome influence that pervades me -a rhythm bares its formless and lazy banter. I hoard each of Bhattacharya’s words as they burst in front of my eyes. Though while also disheartened by a tale as somber as this, it is one of sublime nature. Just as consciousness, like death, is mandatory. Our anti-hero, Harbart, receives a divine message in a dream from his closest friend Binu, one of the recently deceased. Binu who came to Calcutta to study Geology Honors at Asutosh College. Binu, who taught Harbart his first rhyme: “Chop-sticks, broom-sticks, nothing scares the Communists.” Harbart follows the instructions from the dead to reveal the truth about Communism. Thus an implausible rumor spreads across Calcutta. Neighbors, from the broke to the notoriously well-off, are knocking down his door, hungry for their turn to converse with the dead. A yellow signboard above Harbart’s office in the house is nailed up, and painted onto a sheet of wood-framed tin— in red letters, “Conversations with the Dead: Prop: Harbart Sakur.”
Harbart Sakur. The unwanted. Trapped in a world he never made, and born September 16, 1949. Father Lalitkumar. Mother Shobharani; both whom were killed shortly after his first birthday. Harbart Sakur is known to attract death, or rather, death seems to follow him. The conscious fascination started when he was only fourteen, when he had unearthed a tin trunk which contained a human skull, as well as other bone fragments. He kept the remains for a while, and told no one of his findings. Eventually though, he felt ill from keeping such a seceret, and decided to dump the remains into the river behind Keoratala Crematorium. Soon after, a close friend, Khororobi, commits suicide.
Despite all of these occurrences, Harbart manages to find sanctuary. He slept outside on the veranda, lush with foliage, thick with the remnants of his nightmarish life. Atop the veranda, which often survived the monsoons, served as his bedroom. He would read and write his poetry from here. Most importantly though, from his veranda he would watch the object of his affection, Buki, returning home from her studies. I guess things were kinda sleepy in the small suburb where Harbart was raised. Although, a one Ghutiari Sharif once kept wild tigers in the seventeenth century there — later a drought pervasively took over, and the town was left famished. Out of nowhere appeared a man named Pir Ghazi Mubarak Ali Sahab, who meditated until the rains finally came.
But Harbart didn’t care much for these facts, he was too busy living in fear of the torment from his family. Harbarts only escape, were his books, and Buki. He would watch her —and she would watch him —both from their terrace. The cranes fly in, the two fall asleep. These shy lovers first spoke at the local library, which was also the very last time they would ever see one another; as Buki is leaving town. Harbart asks her if she would write him, and it’s the question she’d always wanted him to ask.Although what Harbart quickly realizes is that the address he gave her was to the school he had recently dropped out from. Now Harbart himself was responsible for this lost affair. For a while he stayed away from his top terrace. He imagined Buki still there, waving to him.
Harbart was sixteen. Five feet six inches tall. Fair. Deemed a sleeping beauty, especially by his Jyathaima. He would often visit the cinema with his Krishna-dada, to view The Fall of Berlin, and other Communist Party flicks. Yet all that Harbart felt he had left were the evenings where he would crawl into the Ganga-water tank on the top of the terrace, and collect small creatures. Slugs, shrimp. When the tank dried out he watched the rainwater collect, and listened to the swarms of locusts fly into the empty water tank. There were elections, but Harbart never bothered to vote. This is Bhattacharya’s Calcutta.
“At the base of a golden mountain, vast cave from whose ceiling hang slivers of stone…Slime on the face of the moon…by the video shop—Gyanobaan and Buddhimaan had been the first to take the revolutionary step of setting it up…crow shit slowly smear-soil the glass.”
Our unlikely hero spent most of his time living in fear, and he would have inherited many precious things from his deceased parents — color photographs in an album which featured the idols we still to this day worship: Lillian Gish, Bogart, Garbo, and even Valentino. Nonetheless, Harbart idolized this pictorial museum of dead ‘revolutionaries’. But these items would be forbidden for him to enjoy, as would the family fortune. It was spent frivolously on the cinema by his father, before Harbart’s own birth. Any leftover inheritance was stolen by young Sakur’s uncle, Dhanna; “a bundle of bastardy, greedy as hell”, who was a thief, and a slave to the mother of his two loafer children. Despite all of this, Harbart’s new business of conversing with the dead is going quite well. Yet as soon as he finds his courage, and in turn finally obtains an income, a broker named Marik and an actress called Tina turn him in. Shortly after, our Harbart receives a letter from the West Bengal Rationalist Association, who deems his work as a medium, a sham. Harbart is now considered a criminal, a threat to the Bengali community.
At the crux of his demise, Harbart had always dreamed of being able to afford a portable television. A lizard crawls across his chest, and red ants fill his nostrils. Harbart was dead. Yet not from the dengue fever he, “full of filth”, had recently suffered. Now, almost middle-aged, his body is whisked away to the crematorium. His only belongings; umbrella and Ulster, notes, and the books from his grandfather—sold for scraps and given away to the beggars who cleaned up Harbart Sakur’s remains. There were two books that our Harbart cherished: Accounts of the Afterlife by Mrinal Kanti Ghosh Bhaktibhushan, second edition; and, Mysteries of the Afterlife by Kalibar Bedantabagish. There were other books as well, left behind by Biharilal Sarkur to his grandson-such as Haldar’s A History of the Philosophy of Grammar, Volume One. Yet that one, Harbart had not ever opened. He simply had no interest in such studies. In conclusion, the closest Harbart ever got to real love was a fairy imagined at his window…a lady doctor who flashes a longing glance, and then there was Buki. The only one who actually loved him.