Samadhan (The Solution) -Banaphul (1)
In spite of the sky being blue, the
breeze gentle and my good name being Niharranjan, I got married to one PaNkra2-dwelling-village-belle
called Kshantamani and by the year end, on delivering a girl child, she named
it - BuNchi3. I mildly opposed this naming, to which everyone in
the neighborhood correctly pointed out - “This ugly-dark skinned girl, what
else do you wish to name it? Pushpamanjari?”
The girl was indeed ugly. Not only was its
skin dark, but also one eye was small and the other big, and it kind of looked
like an imbecile, the mouth always drooling. Undeniably, she cannot be called
Pushpamanjari.
Two years later.
Kshantamani has gone to her father’s taking
BuNchi along. A Sunday, nobody has a work at hand – the discussion was taking
its course to various subjects till it suddenly reached ‘me’.
Nripen said –“See Nihar’s fate. On top of
having a girl child, it is so ugly-”
Shyam Bose said –“That needs no saying!
Marrying her off will be one hell of a trouble! He will need a lot of money.”
Old man Haru snuffed in his tobacco twice
before remarking –“Moreover, these days dowry does not suffice, one expects
both money and beauty. The unequal size of eyes is a real worry... Ah! What is
to become of the girl?”
Everyone was gravely concerned.
Meanwhile a peon came and handed over a
letter to me.
Nripen asked –“Whom is it from?”
I read the letter and answered –“The
woman has written – BuNchi has died yesterday.”
- Balāi Chānd Mukhopādhyāy was a Bengali novelist, short story writer, playwright, poet, and physician who wrote under the pen name of Banaphul.
- A little known village. The ‘n’ in upper case refers to a nasal tone i.e. it is to be pronounced ‘pakra’ with a nasal tone after the first ‘a’.
- The name is either meaningless, which is seldom the case for names in a Bengali family those days (except for nick names of course), or it refers to the flat nose of the girl.
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