beji noun [Bengali]: mongoose; a small tropical animal with fur, that kills snakes, rats, etc.
Now that I am at home. Permanently. I have picked up some of the easiest of the daily household chores in the name of helping the family. Getting the dried clothes from the rooftop shed in the afternoon is one of them.
It had been raining since morning; not a violent, thunderous rain, but that gloomy, persistent kind that makes everything smell old and clean at once. The sky had cleared for a while in the afternoon, and the sun was out. When I stepped onto the rooftop, the scent of wet concrete mixed with the deeper, richer smell of soaked earth wafting up from below flipped my mode mood to nostalgia.
I walked over to the clothesline, shook off the beads of water still clinging to the poles, and then looked down at the plot of land beside our house.
Soon, I spotted Mr and Mrs Mongoose, sleek and twitchy, weaving between the bamboo clumps. One moved swiftly into the bushes, the other went ahead to find him, only to get booed from behind by a third one.
Watching their wild little game, full of surprise attacks and sudden vanishing acts stirred something old in me. Something that had been still for a while.
Some years before I went to NISER, that plot used to be a jungle. Wild banana trees, dense bamboo, some wild berries, and god knows what else tangled into it. We called it “the jungle”, even though it was just a large, wild patch of land in the middle of Kolkata.
And in there lived a large family of mongoose.
They lived underground. Dug deep into the soft soil, making crisscrossing tunnels that connected one end of the land to the other. I remember standing with Maa on the rooftop. Both of us were watching them go in from one side and pop out from another, quiet and quick. Always in motion, always just out of reach.
During the monsoon, when their tunnels flooded, they’d often sneak into the house. Harmless creatures, really. Just wet, nervous, and fast.
I was in class 5 or 6 at that time. Ours was a morning school, and I came back by noon. After lunch, I was supposed to sleep so that I wouldn’t feel tired in the evening while studying. But in reality, I would steal my sleeping time and read storybooks. As I would hear someone coming, I would swiftly shut the book and pretend like I went to sleep reading.
So that day, as usual, I was definitely not in the world of the wishing chairs 😉, when I heard some noise. It was coming from the dining room. Reflex took over. I snapped the book shut, eyes closed, and started taking deep breaths (as if fast asleep).
Moments passed by… nothing happened…
The sound came again. This time, I decided to check, but noobs break characters. So a long yawn, a slow stretch, eyes half closed and the look of someone half awake on the way to the toilet, it is!
As soon as I entered the dining room, I saw the mongoose. Sniffing the apples and the oranges in the fruit basket on the dining table! It noticed me, froze for a second, then PoooFFF! It disappeared down the stairs.
I stood there for a moment, half amused, half amazed. Then I went back to bed. This time for real.
The next story is about my little brother. He was in his second year of life then. Learning to walk and talk. Starting to explore the world around. Accidentally kicking the balloons while falling down, amazing himself of his superpowers.
One day, a mongoose sneaked into the house. He was eating his lunch with help from grandma and listening to her stories. Suddenly, the tiny detective spots the bandit.
It was peeking from behind the wall.
He froze for a second, then his face lit up. He stood up at once with his trembling legs and ran for it. Screaming “beji! beji!” with his two incisors smile. The mongoose clearly wasn’t ready for this sort of fan club and vanished in a blink.
When Maa came home, he told her the entire adventure in detail. When Baba came back, he told it again. And for the next whole week, he performed it to every person he met; each time with the same excitement. It seemed the mongoose might appear any time mid-story to take a bow.
I remember that time, my grandma had an incident. She is an early riser. Both of them wake up before the sun. Grandpa would immediately go to the market to get the best fish, while she would wake up early and put water on the doorstep. Then she would get some flowers from the garden for offering and some tulsi leaves to put in grandpas tea. All these chores used to get completed by the time we woke up and the cook or our househelp arrived.
That day, we woke up to a loud scream from Grandma. We run downstairs to see what happened, and find grandma sitting on the sofa crying, and annoyed grandpa consoling her.
When we went outside, we saw a headless dead snake lying right at the doorstep, to be discovered by anyone trying to step out. Apparently, this was one of the biggest bad omens that could happen, and that is why she was upset.
Now, only a thin strip of that “jungle” clings on, surrounded by walls and windows. Most of the mongoose are gone, their quick shadows replaced by parked cars and balcony grills. Watching that pair weave through the bamboo today felt like stepping through a doorway in the rain — one moment I was back in those monsoon afternoons, hiding books under my pillow, or hearing my brother’s squeal of “beji! beji!” — the next, I was here again, on a quieter rooftop, where memories run faster than any mongoose still left to chase them.