The Afterlife of Singer Niren Rajkhowa
Photo: Karan Madhok
Short Story: ‘It was only after the state police’s operations were over, after the troops with sniffer dogs scoured every nook of the city, after the NDRF’s neon orange jetties sliced across the grey Brahmaputra, that the body of singer Niren Rajkhowa washed up on the banks of the river in a quiet and leafier corner of Kharguli.’
It was only after the state police’s month-long search operations were over, after the troops with sniffer dogs scoured every nook and cranny of the city, after the NDRF’s neon orange jetties sliced across the grey Brahmaputra, that the body of singer Niren Rajkhowa washed up on the banks of the river in a quiet and leafier corner of Kharguli. It was discovered by two young boys who had gone to watch the river on a chilly January morning. They had run, their arms windmilling, hearts hammering in excitement to a group of adults who had huddled around a bonfire a little way off the bank. The police were alerted, and moments after, as they always do, the press flocked to the site like droves of shrill geese. VETERAN SINGER NIREN RAJKHOWA FOUND DEAD IN THE BRAHMAPUTRA screamed the headline. His fans, family members, colleagues—who were themselves on their last legs—were in tears. The most recent photograph of the singer dominated news channels, captured a year previously at a concert in Srimanta Sankaradeva Kalakshetra, which presented an emaciated and shrunken man in his seventy fourth year, wheelchair-bound, wearing a snow-white, albeit grotesque, crystal-studded boiler suit, speckled ludicrously with sequinned letters of the Assamese barnamala, his thin golden-brown dyed hair flyaway and luminous with sunlight, hand raised in his trademark Hitlerish greeting to the small coterie of faithful fans and the unchanging, dark cats-eye glasses. It was this photograph that went on to flutter from shopfronts, hang from billboards and adorn community centres for a long time. The rehashed facts of his life were telecast over all news channels. One such channel—yearning for higher TRPs—went so far as to film and air a biopic on the singer with AI visuals that showed him being ushered into the world with the calling of kulis which positively bordered on the burlesque. The equivocal epithet of “Presley’s disciple” given by Dr Bhupen Hazarika was mouthed by news anchors and correspondents ad nauseam—one really wondered if they understood what it meant.
The audience and the organizers were equally aghast. People held their phone cameras aloft to record this strange event, their fondness now overcome by thrill, until an organizer berated the members of the audience for their insensitivity and ordered everyone to stop recording.
Niren Rajkhowa was born in 1951 in Sivasagar to a family of classical singers. He took his school leaving examination in 1967, securing a second division and then, left Sivasagar for Gauhati to pursue BSc at Cotton College only to drop out and go to Calcutta in 1970 where he listened to a lot of Elvis Presley while staying in tiny, cramped lodgings in Gariahat. 1978 saw his return to Guwahati, with a wife and a six-year-old son in tow, and the launch of his solo albums that received a temporary burst of attention until the Assamese music lovers, their ears attuned to the sublime and earthy tunes of Bhupen Hazarika and Khagen Mahanta respectively, turned faithfully back to their regulars. Cut to 2015, with the spread of social media and proliferation of singers left, right and centre, Rajkhowa’s forgotten albums suddenly made it to the top of the charts, Spotify listing him under “Top 20 Assamese Singers of All Time”—and it was just the beginning of his resurgence. Soon after, intellectuals caught on to the hullabaloo surrounding Rajkhowa and labelled him the ‘dark horse’ and ‘the betrayed avant-garde singer’.
In the winter of 2019, Zubeen Garg organized a fundraiser for the singer’s declining health—he was reported to be in the grips of Alzheimer’s—and in 2023, Garg recorded in his own voice a slew of Rajkhowa’s shelved songs, the proceeds of which went to the septuagenarian’s treatment with one of the finest neurologists of the country. On 14 January of the next year, on a pleasant winter’s afternoon, Rajkhowa was wheeled up an open stage at Srimanta Sankardev Kalakshetra, to the loud cheers and whistles of audience which had grown to a sizeable number by 2024. Fans were heartened to see him in his white suit. A few wept. Zubeen proffered him the mic which he accepted with unsteady hands. There was a silence. The audience waited with bated breath. The sequins glinted in the sunlight. And then, his deep, gravelly voice, worn by age, the edges slurring, delivered its swansong: “Runu tumi etia xagoror tolit”. Initially, there was applause but it died down as soon as the singer stuck on the same line, like an obdurate reel on tape. There was a pin-drop silence; in the background, Zubeen lowered his red-hatted head. And then, Niren Rajkhowa burst into tears. The audience and the organizers were equally aghast. People held their phone cameras aloft to record this strange event, their fondness now overcome by thrill, until an organizer berated the members of the audience for their insensitivity and ordered everyone to stop recording. Just as the instruction was being delivered, Zubeen leaned into Rajkhowa, and the singer allowed himself to be wheeled deftly around, and then, disappeared from view. Rajkhowa receded away from public attention once more, and he returned again, in 2025, this time in the form of a bloated corpse glimpsed by two bone-thin kids.
They clamoured for this Runu, who had been the muse of one of his most well-known songs, and who had caused him to expose his shrivelled member to folks from the upper echelons of Bombay society. Tabloids of “Kun ei Runu?”, “Runu Kun?”, “Ei Runu kun?” flashing across the screen were accompanied by enunciations in a typical newsroom voice that sounded both ominous and titillating.
The news anchors did not seem to run out of steam replaying the arc of his life. Young children now knew more about a singer of modest repute than they did about anything taught at school. Doctors were roped in for talk shows and Alzheimer’s, that scourge of the elderly, discussed in detail. The neurologist who had treated Rajkhowa—a dour-looking woman with a tall forehead and thinning hair—walked everyone through the singer’s treatment and spoke at length in frank, uncensored detail about the depredations of the disease. It seemed she took a perverse delight (although no one could be sure, so expressionless and statuesque was the doctor) in describing an evening when, the nurse-in-attendance having been off duty, Rajkhowa quietly and with remarkable agility left his room and headed for the foyer where, upon reaching, with eyes of the crème de la crème of Bombay’s elites on him, swung his limp penis left to right like an etiolated, ebony-coloured pendulum and shouted for a “Runu!” Naturally, the foyer, said the doctor, erupted in shrieks of horror. It was only when she stepped in that Rajkhowa could be put at ease but he had to be dragged back to his room. As if the day’s horrors weren’t over, the still-gabbling but considerably subdued Rajkhowa left a trail of watery faeces in his wake that only a vigorous scrubbing with Lysol and cut-glass vases of thick-stalked tuberoses could mask. The doctor could have been sued for defamation by the family, for such a brazen chronicling surely amounted to a disrespect of the Hippocratic oath but Rajkhowa’s son being drunk to stupor at the snug, dimly-lit Freemason’s Brewworks and the singer himself being a smaller fish whose death couldn’t muster much of public sentiment save for tapping on the feelings of vicarious thrill and idle curiosity, no one did anything about it. Platitudes of life being cruel in many variations were reeled off, though.
After that, even the most avaricious news channel seemed to agree that they had milked Rajkhowa’s death enough and that too much had been said already. That was, until, a hawk-eyed news editor, wearing in an ill-fitting suit and a bulbous mole above his thin, triangular lips, threw his hook around that hiding-in-plain-sight Runu. They clamoured for this Runu, who had been the muse of one of his most well-known songs, and who had caused him to expose his shrivelled member to folks from the upper echelons of Bombay society. Tabloids of “Kun ei Runu?”, “Runu Kun?”, “Ei Runu kun?” flashing across the screen were accompanied by enunciations in a typical newsroom voice that sounded both ominous and titillating.
To this Niren came his faithful Runu, carrying moral platitudes and reams of notes. The overture of “Runu tumi etia xagoror tolit” played in the background as the two friends’ eyes rapidly filled with tears and a pall of gloom hung in Niren’s bedroom, the effect achieved by long shadows and dust motes around them.
In an old Assam-style bungalow with gables and brilliant green hedgerows, in a quiet Lamb Road, Guwahati, Runu Chaliha—aged 74—watched the TV with mounting bewilderment and fluttering of her heart. She was a retired school teacher who lived alone in a large house with a cat who had an eye missing. Her daughter lived in the States. When the news reached the latter, she made a call to her mother and charged her for withholding such a crucial part of her life. Runu Chaliha blinked rapidly. Whenever she was stunned, worried, confused or put in a tight spot, she blinked. This had happened a lot in her years of service at the all-girls’ TC School which had earned her the moniker tip tiponi baideu from a group of girls that went on to be handed down generations of students like a priceless heirloom. Her daughter did not press her mother further; for she knew that even if her mother had disclosed the information at their breakfast table, she would have had a hard time believing that the woman had known a famous personality, chiefly because not only was her mother wallflowerish—and therefore, friendless—but also an inveterate liar. Her nerves already frazzled from coddling her bawling eight-month-old on her knee, she jumped—cutting off her mother’s hemming and hawing—on to the topic of her mother’s shabby clothes, and asked her to be presentable. Before hanging up, she gave her mother a stern warning “Manage that bra strap of yours, okay, maa?” Runu Chaliha put on her finest, nuni-paat mekhela sador and dusted the sofa where she decided the interview would be conducted. When she contemplated seeing herself on screen for the first time, she felt giddy with an elation she had never felt before. She ran the teeth of the comb a little too roughly through her matted, grey hair as she thought of the lowly scum in her neighbourhood, family and school—too bad most of them were dead—who had never given her the attention she deserved. Look at them, now: They were down below and she was up here. As she waited for the press, in the silence of her house, something gnawed inside her and a muscle twitched in the corner of her lips. But Runu Chaliha put it down to anxiety and brushed it away with the rapid blinking of her eyelids.
The interview was aired on a Sunday so that your middle-class audience of fifty-somethings could lie, belly-up, after a Sunday lunch on the couch and watch an eye-blinking, hand-wringing old woman gush profusely about Niren Rajkhowa—aged 10 and aged 21—with whom she shared long hours in Sivasagar as a classmate and friend, and later a neighbour in a dingy lodging on a busy street of early 80s Calcutta. The woman would hastily add that everything was platonic between them. They bonded on an intellectual level, of the time they meandered for long hours under the sun, eating oranges. These details raised eyebrows and set off a spate of speculative videos on Rajkhowa’s love life. The channel that had drawn a fair bit of flak for its cloying depiction of Rajkhowa biography. They head learned their lesson, and now, there was chance to prove their mettle. They jumped to it, hand in hand with a team of city archivists and artists and media consultants who called themselves Heritage Guwahati (the latter procured a fat cheque in exchange of a good story and a better screenplay.)
The film opened on a sunny cliff, shot somewhere in Haflong, where a tall, lanky schoolgoing Niren (called Niru-da by his friends), leaned back on his elbows in an overlarge brown coat, with a plain, monobrowed Runu, away from the madding crowd of the school picnic, and contemplated the sun-dappled gorge, talking about their dreams and their post-exam plans. Soon, the scene shifted with a melancholic violin score in the background to show a sniffling and bed-ridden Niren, depressed because he couldn’t write his mid-year exam. To this Niren came his faithful Runu, carrying moral platitudes and reams of notes. The overture of “Runu tumi etia xagoror tolit” played in the background as the two friends’ eyes rapidly filled with tears and a pall of gloom hung in Niren’s bedroom, the effect achieved by long shadows and dust motes around them. The film then leapt to Calcutta in the 70s and the camera offered a wide panoramic shot of a busy Gariahat street where tangas jolted along, trams moved at a slow pace, people moved purposefully ahead and beggars squashed themselves beneath arched window-frames with slatted blinds set into a peeling wall. A young man arrived with long, shoulder-length hair, donning a coat in the sweltering heat, leaning on a sturdy umbrella with a shiny silver tip and humming Elvis’ “We Can’t Go on Together with Suspicious Minds.” In another part of the city, Runu, too, landed in Calcutta with her husband. Although circumstances seemed unpropitious—Niren trying his luck with music producers, smoking cigarettes and composing songs in the wee hours of the morning, Runu bustling pleasantly about the household—they often met at a chai stall and talked about their lives. On one such meeting, Niren confessed that he had fallen hopelessly in love with his next-door lodger’s wife. Although Runu Chaliha had constantly harped in her interview that she and Niren were never romantically involved, the devious filmmaker showed a flicker of something pass through the actress’ face in this scene. Later, there was no mistaking the air of martyrdom as Runu invited the newlyweds Niren and Moni into her household (the film briefly showed Moni’s already ailing husband falling from the staircase and dying) and later took them to watch the Digha seaside, in her late husband’s powder blue Fiat. Again, with the waves lapping at their feet and Niren’s silver tipped umbrella planted firmly in the wet sands, the film showed Runu and Niren clapping eyes at each other one too often. The film ended with the friends going their separate ways and a close-up shot of Niren scribbling these lines on a notepad under an anglepoise lamp: “Runu etia tumi xagoror tolit / jaare bindha raatit / tumi ubhoti oha / tumar siyor, mur usuponit.”
Niren Rajkhowa’s son, Balen Rajkhowa, all of fifty years and feckless, received the prestigious Assam Saurav award, that included among a host of other benefits, a cheque prize of four lakh rupees, during the distribution of which he, heavily inebriated, staggered up to the stage and almost grabbed it out of the Chief Minister’s hands, who—otherwise wearing a paternal smile which belied a steely resolve and a Machiavellian malevolence—recoiled fractionally
The film was a hit. It garnered well over 85k views on YouTube. Heritage Guwahati’s biennial journal commissioned a special issue on “Artists and their Muses”, where Niren Rajkhowa and Runu Chaliha found august company with motley pairs: Shakespeare and the Fair Youth, Bhupen Hazarika and Kalpana Lajmi, Neel Pawan Barua and Dipali Borthakur, WB Yeats and Maud Gonne. Intellectuals had recurring emotional orgasms as they parsed his song in light of the valuable information provided by the film, and poets spouted long lines on artistic sublimation on Facebook which were shared over and over again until they agreed that it should be included in their steadily germinating poetry collection, to be released to a smattering of weak applause at the upcoming Assam Book Fair.
By all accounts, every party that fished in the waters of Niren Rajkhowa’s death went home with plump and gleaming fish: Runu Chaliha became the centre of attention at a scale she had not dreamt of before (she went on to open her own vlogging channel on YouTube where she was greeted with the occasional unsavoury comment of an old cow with puckered udders which her daughter, now her social media manager, asked her to ignore); the triangular-lipped news editor who had made the Runu connection received a whopping hike that led him to lose weight at an exclusive gym and open his Instagram channel where he flexed his biceps and talked about his banal days as a bachelor; Heritage Guwahati’s founder, an Assam-returned History graduate from University of Cardiff, secured his foothold in Assam’s gated academia and rapidly built his contacts; Niren Rajkhowa’s son, Balen Rajkhowa, all of fifty years and feckless, received the prestigious Assam Saurav award, that included among a host of other benefits, a cheque prize of four lakh rupees, during the distribution of which he, heavily inebriated, staggered up to the stage and almost grabbed it out of the Chief Minister’s hands, who—otherwise wearing a paternal smile which belied a steely resolve and a Machiavellian malevolence—recoiled fractionally; and of course, more than anyone else, Niren Rajkhowa himself, once a singer of modest fame whom people treated with no more than a temporary wonder they reserved for an exotic macaque in a cage and whom the great stalwarts regarded derivative, now raised to the status of a legend.
But as M— saw his mother glance back again and again at the stove and gasp at all the wrong places, he grew irritated and walked out of the kitchen. He shouldn’t have come to her; of course, she wouldn’t understand—she was not as familiar with the seamier truths of life as he was.
So, when members of the trust that had been entrusted the responsibility of curating a museum for Rajkhowa in an unremarkable flat-roofed, Assam-style house in the Jurpukhuri area of Guwahati, went through Rajkhowa’s belongings—with a slurry noise of assent from his son—and could not locate the brown coat and the silver-tipped umbrella, no one was unduly perturbed, save for the group of freshly graduated students of Museology who were handling the project. Runu Chaliha was contacted but she blinked her eyelids to a blur and with an odd laugh, almost stuttered “H-how d-do I know? I was not his w-wife!”. Moni had long been dead, and Balen was downing his eleventh glass of whisky at a Chivas pub. Coat less and umbrella-less, the museum, however, had to stand up, exhibiting his wheelchair, that ludicrous boiler suit, his diaries and the cats-eye glasses in pexelglass casings. Seventeen-year-old M—, reared on a steady diet of Agatha Christie, Robert Galbraith and Dorothy Sayers had his doubts. He got up from the floor and went to the kitchen, stubbing his toe on a curled leg of the sofa in a state of total abstraction. The museum curator’s harried face on the TV screen was almost burnt into his retina. His mother, sweating at the stove as she, with great care, turned the pieces of brinjal over in the sputtering oil, looked over her shoulder and said loudly even before her son had set foot into the kitchen, “What is it, now, T—?”. With knitted brows, she had watched her son taking an unhealthy interest in that Niren Rajkhowa’s death and fritter away his time in front of the TV when he should have been studying for his exam (and not to mention the bowls and bowls of peanuts he gobbled). “I think I know where the umbrella and the coat are!” he said. She could almost hear a glimmer of triumph in his squeaky voice, and it bothered her even more because she suspected what was to follow. “What umbrella and coat?” she asked, warily, but not turning around. He grew impatient and shifted on his feet. His mother could sometimes be very obtuse, and now she had managed to dampen his spirits. He said as less tetchily as possible, “The umbrella and coat of that singer they couldn’t find…” She groaned. Just what she had thought. She was sure it was going to be one of those crazy ideas he found in those damned books he was reading. Only the previous day, he had been convinced that the neighbouring old woman who had died had been murdered by her daughter. He had given some convoluted logic but she had shushed him. The rest of his classmates were turning out to be fine young men but her son was expanding horizontally and plunging deeper and deeper into an unreal world. Passing a weary hand across her forehead, she turned around. “So, where are they?” His eyes shone with delight. His entire aspect changed. He became animated. “That coat—I mean, that brown coat—I can bet you, he threw away after throwing a girl off a cliff and the umbrella is in Bangladesh now.” His mother arched an eyebrow. “Ah, Bangladesh, is it?” “Yes,” he said, “because there were blood stains on it and he had to dispose of it at Digha beach after the murder, between rocks, mind, and it was later nicked by a ragpicker who took it to Bangladesh.” When the son ran out of breath laying out his theory, she felt something thaw in her heart; the way he spoke, hiccoughing, spit gathering at the corners of his lips, arms flying wide, she was reminded of his father, her dead husband, who on the night of their wedding, in his white kurta and pyjamas, had spoken passionately about the centre of his universe in front of his new wife: induction cookers, which he packed by hundreds at his employer’s warehouse. And so, she let her son prattle on. But as M— saw his mother glance back again and again at the stove and gasp at all the wrong places, he grew irritated and walked out of the kitchen. He shouldn’t have come to her; of course, she wouldn’t understand—she was not as familiar with the seamier truths of life as he was. In the silence of the drawing room—the TV now switched off—he watched the truth unspool before his all-seeing eyes. He steepled his fingers, like Lord Peter Wimsey and Poirot, and leaned against his armchair—only, he was sitting on a creaky murha and leaning against the hard wall. He sighed contentedly. Of course, they couldn’t find the brown coat. No one ever knew that the coat had been owned by a cowhered in Haflong for a length of thirty years from that winter morning he had seen it being flung down a cliff by a young boy after the latter had pushed a screaming girl. He couldn’t see who the boy was because the sun that day had been blindingly bright and the full glare of it had hit him like a slap.
However, on many a firelit evening, fortified by apong, he would brag about his windfall. “I saw a murder once on a cliff that got me this coat,” he would begin. But then, one always knew better than to not take a drunken raconteur with a pinch of salt. No one bothered to look for the silver-tipped umbrella wedged between the sea-worn rocks on a Digha beach where it lay with congealed, rust-coloured blood of an ailing man who had suspected what had been going on between the eccentric singer from Assam and his wife. The filmmaker was mistaken: The man couldn’t have stumbled down the stairs. Of course, they couldn’t have found the umbrella. It travelled through tortuous paths with a family of ragpickers to Bangladesh where it offered its cool bower to a family of four in the bristling heat of Mymensingh district. The curators couldn’t approach the real Runu, the mistreated orphan who lay, frozen in a tight smile, in an obituary between the pages of a yearbook. At the moment the curators were working on the whereabouts of Rajkhowa’s belongings, the only remaining photograph of the fifteen-year-old Rashmi Runu Gogoi was being devoured by legions of silverfish in an abandoned outhouse of Sibsagar Govt School. The fools went to Runu Chaliha, who blinking and at her wits’ end—as a Museology graduate stamped his feet impatiently on the other end of the line—sent them on a wild goose chase, towards a non-existent bosom buddy of Niren’s in Kolkata. There, the curators were met with deep scowls and unfriendly looks. Meanwhile, Runu Chaliha, scrolling down the comments on her latest vlog, blinked away the memory of watching, with a disquieting thrill and a chilling horror, Niren push down her namesake after a brief verbal spat. But she willed it away because if she thought about it, an uglier memory would rear its head. After all, it was on that picnic trip, all the girls had refused to include her in their groups on account of her bad breath, and so, nursing that hurt, she had wandered up the hillside and seeing Rashmi Runu shake her forefinger at Niren and scream at him, she had hidden herself behind the thick foliage of trees. When she had literally bumped into Niren at the Digha beach and seen him with a pugnacious-looking woman, she had gone white as a sheet.
The students wrote a sombre piece that detailed the ways in which the afterlife of a legend was always a descent into indifference and apathy— but it was fated to be shoved to the margins of an esteemed English language daily of Assam, where it was accorded nothing more than a passing glance.
M— felt his heart race by the end of his long-winded, mental disquisition, as if an invisible force was raising him up and up the clouds from where he could gloat at the Museology graduates slouching back to their workstations, sourness writ large on their faces. It was as if he could see them sagging their shoulders in disappointment and doffing their bags on their desks, fume, “For all we know, that friend could have been dead.” All of this could have made for a fine detective novel, provided the young man had the tools of writing at his disposal. Binning balls of crumpled paper in frustration, he finally took to Reddit— an apt choice because there he wrote all of it in his far from perfect sentences, and managed to secure three upvotes from complete strangers on the internet. Thus, in one of the numberless warrens of the internet, Niren Rajkhowa became a psychopathic killer, spilling blood and stilling lives wherever he went. As the legend-lover-killer rose up on the horizon in his hydra-headed glory, the museum finally opened to the public. The Chief Minister inaugurated it and in asserting that his government had done more than any other in honouring the arts, his gynecomastic chest swelled to an all-time high. When the city erupted into protests after the construction of a flyover over the tree-lined Guwahati Club-Digholipukhuri stretch, Mr. Bridges—as the Chief Minister was called by his detractors—coolly dismissed them saying that that it was foolish to protest against development since Niren Rajkhowa was himself a pioneer of change. Had the people of Assam forgotten that he infused Western elements into Assamese music? The ASS [Asomiya Sabalikaran Sangathan] was simply working in the spirit of Rajkhowa dev’s principles. In his classic paternalistic fashion, he expressed his deep worry over the direction in which the Assamese society was heading. Before turning his back on the array of microphones huddled around him, he promised that the government would erect a Niren Rajkhowa memorial right beneath the flyover. So, elegant lampposts were erected. Under the magnetic sway of spectacle, the protest dissipated. Painted in a monochromatic dull copper, Niren Rajkhowa stood in his singing pose. The SEBA social studies textbook for Class IX went on to include a tiny section on the singer, covering his life, influences and his work. Students parroted the information and regurgitated on their exam papers. Gradually, before anyone could squint up at the flyover, the Chief Minister made another extension to it and the statue was moved to his constituency.
Seasons turned. As cars sped through the new flyovers, voyeurs inside them had a field day. Rolling the windows down, choking on the hot air, eyes streaming, they feasted their eyes on intimate, household scenes through the holes of knickers festooned along cramped balconies. The trajectory of Niren Rajkhowa’s afterlife was matched by this appalling fall in civic values. The pedestal under his statue began to sink into the ground with a sideways tilt. Dust had settled everywhere and no one could blink. But when the crows came, a group of concerned students knocked the beeswaxed doors of a top municipal official. They couldn’t possibly know that the city’s municipal corporation with hikes in salary under the eighth New Pay Commission was becoming notorious for their negligence. Just a few days prior to this, they had to be called thrice before they deigned to pull down a poster of the CM graffitied with a veiny, upright penis on his forehead. It was little surprise, then, that the authorities turned a blind eye to a flock of mischievous crows who had suddenly taken to shitting on the statue and stabbing at the eyes of a massive, ugly interloper in their territory. The official of the lahe-lahe state leaned back in his swivel chair, yawned richly, picked his teeth, scratched his navel— all in record time of over five minutes— and said, “The cleaners are on holiday. It’ll happen, don’t you worry... And in any case, it was not their fault. The crows here defecated copiously.” The students wrote a sombre piece that detailed the ways in which the afterlife of a legend was always a descent into indifference and apathy— but it was fated to be shoved to the margins of an esteemed English language daily of Assam, where it was accorded nothing more than a passing glance.
Seeing their pleas go ignored, one day a group of teenagers, prodding and nudging each other towards their homes after a long evening of tuitions, pointed at the statue—fist raised, mouth open in mid-performance, a thick layer of white crow droppings giving the impression of an alabaster coating—and giggled, “Let’s pay our respects to whitewashed Niruda.” The only sensible among the lot objected but the others taunted him for being a wimp. When he wondered aloud if they’d be in trouble, the tallest of them slung his arm around him and leaned his head into his, whispering, “Arrrre son, Modiji’s mission— you’ve forgotten or what? Swachh Bharat Abhiyan. The cleaners won’t do it na, so we have to.” The shoulders of the rest quivered with silent, irrepressible laughter. So, with great misgivings, the mousy boy agreed. It happened too quickly. Under a veil of stars, an oblation of sparkling golden urine fell on the plinth from six sides. In the silence, punctuated by the staccato croaks of frogs, the fizz of the streams of urine was almost the stuff of an offbeat music record. Deed done, the boys zipped up, and as they cavorted off across the wasteland, their shrill ululations echoed in the gathering darkness.
***
Madhurjya Goswami is a PhD student living in Guwahati, Assam. His thesis is on Cartography of Queerness in R Raj Rao’s Fiction. He has published his literary work in The Assam Tribune. You can find him on Instagram: @goswamimadhurjya and X: @MadhurjyaG44258.
