24 frames per second

Nearly every major language in the world now has names for the days of the week. This, however, is no reason for the speakers of that language to care. So it was that an ordinary Monday morning dawned on Shyampara with barely a ripple. The fishermen and the goat-herders and the honey-collectors went about their business as usual – fish and goats and bees don’t keep regular office hours, after all. Even the children who had to go back to their two-room school after the week-long Durga Puja vacation didn’t feel particularly put-upon.

The only blip on an otherwise empty radar was Moni. Her hair was tied in two neat pigtails with their customary green ribbons, as usual. Her little cloth bag with her notebook looked exactly the same. The only thing out of the ordinary was the paper face mask worn on the back of her head. It could be argued that even this was normal – people do, after all, wear face masks on the back of their heads in the Sunderbans, so as to fool the tigers into thinking that they’re facing them. But what they – especially when they’re ten year olds in school – don’t do, is go to the back of the classroom, sit down facing the other way, and let the mask face the blackboard. 

Seeing as it had been nigh on two weeks since her father had died, they let her be. Tiger attacks weren’t exactly uncommon in their part of the world, but kids couldn’t be counted on to maintain the community standards for stoic acceptance. So, for a while, they simply ignored what was going on, even when they could hear her sobbing. A week or two later, her teacher tried to gently turn her around to face the class. The result was that she came to school the next day with a mask on both sides, and still faced the back wall while sitting down. She still knew her multiplication tables, answered questions when called upon, but that was that. They did express their frustration, sometimes loudly, but it seemed, almost a century since the more famous demonstration of the principle in this country, that peaceful but firm non-cooperation was still pretty damn effective. A few weeks after they started, they finally realised that it was what it was, made allowances for this otherwise well-mannered child, and carried on. It got to the point where most people, when asked to describe Moni, would immediately think of a pair of face masks, with a couple of pigtails poking out. 

Ironically, it started something of a trend. Her best friend Dipa was the first to express solidarity by turning up in a mask. Not in the classroom – that would’ve been a bridge too far – but in the playground, and on the way to school and back. A few weeks later, it was no longer uncommon to see a gaggle of girls in masks, some with a bit of rouge and lipstick applied on top with red colour pencil. When Moni eventually took off her mask during the Bonbibi mela, Dipa and the others quietly followed suit, and that was that.

Nobody really knows why, but for years afterwards, ten year old girls in Shyampara wore a face mask in the playground between Durga Puja and the Bonbibi mela. It even spawned a cottage industry of accessories like adhesive rep lips and paper earrings to stick on them.

And children went back to mourning the loss of a parent the way they usually did. Which is to say, nobody knows.

Hat tip: This piece was born out of a discussion with a friend Praba who was writing a young adult book about a little girl in Sunderbans at the time. [That book, titled Down by the Mangroves, is out now and available on Amazon — it’s a lovely read about growing up and moving on from the death of a loved one, set in a world where the flora and fauna form a support system in every sense of the term.] We discussed the central image in the story, and ended up using it, each in our own way, in our respective stories. I would be remiss not to acknowledge that conversation as the starting point for this story.