The Midnight Palace (Niebla 2)

Again, I’ve left Ben to the end. Even today, although I haven’t seen him for over fifty years, I still find it hard to talk about the person who was and always will be my best friend. Thanks to Roshan I heard that he went to live in what had once been his father’s house – the house of Chandra Chatterghee, the engineer. He moved there with Aryami Bose, who never quite recovered from Sheere’s death and was plunged into a long deep melancholy that would eventually close her eyes for ever in October 1941. From that day on Ben lived and worked alone in the house his father had built. It was there that he wrote his books until the year he disappeared without a trace.

One December morning, years after we all, including Roshan, had given him up for dead, I was standing on the little dock opposite my house, gazing out at the marshland, when I received a small parcel. It had been postmarked by the Calcutta Post Office and my name was written in handwriting I could never forget, even if I lived to be a hundred. Inside, wrapped in layers of paper, I found half of the pendant shaped like a sun that Aryami Bose had divided in two when she separated Ben and Sheere that tragic night in 1916.

This morning, as I sit writing the last words of this memoir in the early light of dawn, the first snow of the year has spread its white mantle before my window and the memory of Ben has come back to me, after all these years, like the echo of a whisper. I imagine him walking in the crowds, through the fevered streets of Calcutta, among a thousand untold stories such as his own, and for the first time I realise that my friend, like me, is now an old man and that his journey is about to complete its circle. It is so strange to think how life has slipped through our fingers …

I don’t know whether I’ll ever hear of my friend Ben again. But I do know that in some part of the mysterious Black Town the boy I said goodbye to that morning when it snowed in Calcutta lives on, keeping the flame of Sheere’s memory alive, dreaming of the moment when at last he’ll be reunited with her in a world where nothing and no one can ever separate them.

I hope you will find her, my friend.