A Short Story by Baby Shaw

Whirlpool

 

 1.

 

The Subarnarekha.

Here, the river is cursed. Here, it is terrifying.Its dark, ink-black waters twist and coil like a black krait gliding through the earth. The way the current bends, curls, and spills forward carries the hypnotic grace of a serpent. Yet this fearsome character belongs only to a narrow stretch—barely half a kilometre long. Beyond it, the landscape opens into an endless expanse of golden sand, shimmering with mica flakes like sheets of scattered silver.

Across the river lies an emerald wilderness—the Six-Thousand Mouza. Fields upon fields of groundnuts, flax blossoms, and okra stretch into the distance beneath a canopy of dense green forests.

On this bank, however, the world tells a different story.

Brick kilns rise against the sky, their chimneys breathing smoke. Every morning, hundreds of sand-laden trucks rumble past in an endless procession from the river quarries. Their growling engines mingle strangely with the morning prayers drifting from the Ramakrishna Mission—a modest, almost incongruous institution that has stood here only for a few years.

Nearby stands the abandoned indigo planter's mansion.

Its shattered windows and broken doors are swallowed by thickets of wild putus flowers. Kraits, rat snakes, checkered keelbacks, and scorpions glide silently through the overgrown grounds. At night, the wind whispers to the restless spirits of imprisoned, defiant peasants who once suffered within these walls. Their voices can be heard even before the evening lamps are lit.

Sometimes, the sharp crack of the indigo planters' canes echoes through the darkness. At other times, the desperate cry of a young Naxalite, left behind during those violent years, seems to drift along the river's current. Even the heavy footsteps of Communist Party leaders appear to linger in the deserted mansion.

Here, the Subarnarekha is cursed.

Can a river truly be cursed?

...Yes... Yes...

 

Here, it sheds its ancient image as a nurturing mother and becomes a murderous witch. It has swallowed countless young lives, earning its dreadful reputation. Beside the river's deadly whirlpool stands an ancient temple dedicated to Goddess Kali. The place is cloaked in towering trees and perpetual shadows. Kali herself seems mysterious here—silent, watchful, unknowable.

Ironically, the river accused of so much violence moves with remarkable gentleness. Except for this haunted bend, its current is slow and dignified, almost regal. Elsewhere it becomes a slender ribbon of water, flowing quietly through forests that rise along its banks, past forgotten ghats, abandoned stories, and the scattered remains of history.

It simply flows on.Things die beside it.And then, somehow, they are born again.

Kuthighat— Like the river, the crumbling indigo mansion has long been abandoned—desolate and unsettling. Yet it gave the village its name.Everyone knows this place as Kuthighat, and that is how it is officially recorded as well.

Hidden within the forests of Jangalmahal, the village shares an intimate bond with the Subarnarekha. It is a relationship woven from mystery, adventure, memory, and life itself. Here, neighbours remain deeply connected, sharing one another's joys and sorrows.

Once, this was a prosperous yet dust-covered land. Mud houses stood beside ponds as clear as polished glass. Cool winds carried secret messages from the deep forests and the enigmatic river. That was the heartbeat of Kuthighat.

Time, however, has changed almost everything.

Much has changed with the passage of time. Yet from Bibhabati's mother-in-law, Kunjarani Raut, one can still hear stories of the old Kuthighat—tales of bandits, and of the love between Indu and Abir. People say that their love, too, drowned in the cursed waters of the Subarnarekha. It vanished without a trace, and was never found again.

Does Kunjarani still live in that ancient Kuthighat?

Or has she herself become its living memory?

To Bibhabati, Kunjarani seems like the embodiment of thousands of years of forgotten history, folk songs, oral legends, and timeless proverbs.

 Bibhabati wonders...

About the Kuthighat that once knew no roaring trucks, no brick-kiln owners—only mystery, whispered legends, and every now and then, the crack of gunfire from the abandoned indigo mansion. That was the old Kuthighat.

After the evening ārati at the Kali temple, the entire place would sink into an uncanny stillness, heavy with silence. Yet life, people say, was never so uncertain then. The villagers rarely suffered the kind of tragedies they do now.

Bibhabati, of course, has never seen the indigo planters. To her, Kuthighat has always been gentle, beautiful—a place where love still lingers.

Across the river, dusk settles softly over Shi's house. It is the kind of twilight that fills the heart with an inexplicable sadness. A sob begins to coil deep inside Bibhabati's chest, tightening with every passing moment.

She knows what will happen next.

She will cry.

And tears never come to her without reason. Her thoughts drift back to her childhood home. It seems like another lifetime ago that she was married and brought here. Her parents' village, Dharampur, near Gopiballavpur, is not really very far away. Yet she seldom returns. There is nothing left there to pull her back.

Orphaned at a young age, she had been married off as quickly as possible by her elder brother. His wife was forever poisoning his ears with complaints about Bibhabati.

As a girl, Bibhabati loved to run. She was the fastest student in her school. Her physical education teacher would often say, "One day this girl will become another P. T. Usha."

But time outran them all. And Bibhabati was the one left behind.

She still remembers the song that rose from the deepest part of her heart after her wedding. It was a song woven entirely of grief—old grief, ancient grief. Its melody dissolved into her tears.

Every girl in their village learned these lament songs 'kandageet' as children, knowing they would one day sing them at their own weddings. They sang them while playing, while racing through the fields, even during pretend weddings for their dolls. Back then, they never understood what the songs truly meant.

Now they did.

These days, Kunjarani—Bibhabati's mother-in-law—often sings those same sorrowful melodies, almost absent-mindedly. One evening, while gently braiding Bibhabati's hair, Kunjarani had said,

"In our time, child, this was our greatest sorrow. We were not allowed to cry. We were given songs instead.

Whenever tears came, they had to become music. They could never remain tears. People believed that a woman's crying brought misfortune upon the household."

Even listening to those words had made Bibhabati weep. The two women sang together for a long time that evening.

All the hurt, humiliation, resentment, and silent longing they had carried inside slowly melted into water and fell to the earth.

They cried.

They sang.

They cried until they had nothing left.

People say that tears make the heart lighter.

"Tell me," Bibhabati had once asked Saroj, "why is there so much sorrow in this world? Look at the moonlight filtering through every tree in the forest. It's so beautiful... so unreal. Doesn't it make you want to cry?"

Holding her closer against his chest, Saroj had replied,

"I think nature cries too, Bibha. The moon cries. The river cries. Somewhere inside that forest, someone is always crying."

Bibhabati had drawn him even closer.

"Sometimes I feel happiness doesn't really exist," she whispered. "Only sorrow does. But I have no tears left anymore. I have only songs."

Saroj had embraced her with all the tenderness he possessed.

That night, the quiet sounds of their love dissolved into the darkness, into the moonlight, and into the ancient murmurs of the abandoned indigo mansion.

Not long afterwards, Ruma was born.

Ruma— Bibhabati's daughter.

Only a few months after her birth, Saroj disappeared beneath the cursed waters of the Subarnarekha.

 

The river never gave him back.

2.

 

The entire universe is in motion.

The Earth, the Sun, every star in the sky—even emptiness itself. A vast whirlpool surrounds us. It swirls through our lives, through our minds, turning everything we possess upside down before drawing us into its unfathomable depths.

Scientists say that, one day, everything in the universe may become a black hole. And a black hole, they tell us, devours everything that comes within its reach. Nothing is left behind.

But where does it take everything?

How much space can that infinite darkness possibly hold?

Or is it, in the end, nothing at all?

They say the entire universe is rushing towards that nothingness. And once the black hole claims something, it never returns it.

Never.

Ruma reads the passage aloud to her mother. As Bibhabati listens, she no longer sees the words on the page. Instead, she sees the Subarnarekha. Its dark waters stretch forward like a long black tongue. She sees Saroj sinking beneath the current.

Going down.

Disappearing.

Kunjarani quietly begins to sing—

"How deep these waters are, my dear...

Dark waters, carrying wounds without end...

The river has taken away my golden child...

Will he ever find his way home again?"

When Saroj stepped into the Subarnarekha that day for his morning bath, he had no idea that such a fate was waiting for him. He knew only one thing.

That this stretch of the Subarnarekha was cursed. Nearby stands a beautiful Ramakrishna Mission. There is a school inside its grounds, where little children run and play. The morning prayers drift gently over the boundary wall.

Ruma is there too.

The school bell rings.

Its clear, metallic sound carries all the way to the river. Saroj hurriedly steps into the water. He must fetch his daughter from school before returning home. Here, the current of the Subarnarekha is swift and restless.

A little to the right of the Mission stands a brick kiln. From its towering chimney, thick smoke rises steadily into the sky, sometimes stinging the eyes. The kiln has transformed this once-quiet place into a noisy, bustling settlement. Kuthighat hums with activity from dawn until dusk.

Yet most of the people who work here are outsiders. Their faces are unfamiliar—hard, unreadable, unsettling. The villagers avoid meeting their eyes. They are nothing like the local farmers, whose lives have long been rooted in this soil. The people of Kuthighat fear them. They do not know exactly why.

Only that, ever since the strangers arrived, the village no longer feels quite like its own.

Saroj would often say,

“They'll take everything from us.”

Bibhabati would ask, “But they aren't people of our forest.”

“That's exactly why they'll claim it, Bibha. They want to build towns everywhere. Cities. They want to clear our forests, drive us out, and build their own kingdom on our land.”

“But they don't even live here. They don't belong to this place.”

“For generations,” Saroj would reply, “people like them have treated the forest people as outsiders, while they themselves have acted as if the forest belongs to them. Just think about it, Bibha. So many people here go hungry. There are no jobs, no proper hospitals, hardly any schools, barely any roads. Do you think they see us as human beings? Or do they see us as animals?”

“But they're giving work to local people. Three hundred, maybe four hundred rupees a day, I've heard. Rebati's husband works at the brick kiln.”

“They asked me too. Tell me, should I abandon my fields and work there instead?”

“You don't farm all year. It's only a single-crop harvest. We have a daughter now. When she grows up, won't we need to save money for her? Couldn't you work there after the farming season?”

“You want that too?”

“What if I go instead?”

“No. Never.”

Saroj pulled Bibhabati into his arms. In moments like these, he seemed unbearably vulnerable. Fear had become a permanent shadow around him.

He never allowed Bibhabati to work at the brick kiln. Every evening they would hear Kunjarani humming quietly to herself. No one knew where she found so many songs steeped in sorrow. Sometimes the mournful melodies became almost unbearable for Bibhabati. They sounded like omens—as though they were foretelling something dark that had not yet happened. Yet she could never ask her mother-in-law to stop. Kunjarani was an elder, and elders were not questioned.

It was shortly after the festival of Dol. The Harinam Sankirtan had ended, and the village had surrendered itself to celebration. Men lay scattered in intoxicated sleep after drinking bhang and siddhi. Under the luminous full moon of Dol Purnima, Bibhabati heard Kunjarani humming once again.

And crying.

Nodi opare bhanga kuriya, ma go,

Nodi kanduchi, loho bohuchi, ma go...

[Across the river stands a broken hut, Mother...

The river is weeping, its waters flowing red...]

 

Ma... Bibhabati asked softly, “why do you find tears even on a day filled with so much joy?”

“You shouldn't listen to these things, child. You shouldn't. There were so many people here tonight. No one else heard me. Why did you?”

“But I did hear you.”

“No... you mustn't hear such things.”

Kunjarani repeated the words under her breath, almost as if she were warning herself.

“Does everything make you cry?”

“What can I say? I always feel that somewhere, something is grieving. As if a calamity is on its way. All my life I've watched people leave. On a Dol Purnima night just like this, my husband abandoned me for another woman. Then I remember the day the police and the military came to our village. We hid in terror. Afterwards there was gunfire... so much gunfire... and such fighting. No one survived. The next morning the police dragged the bodies away one by one. The whole village was singing that day. Everyone was crying. Everyone was singing.

The police couldn't understand it. They stood there in a dreadful silence, almost celebrating like demons, while the entire village mourned in song. I still remember it all...

But don't listen to these things, child. Come. Let me tell you the story of the old indigo house instead.”

 Bibhabati felt an inexplicable heaviness settle over her heart. Without even realizing it, she began composing a song of her own.

She can no longer remember its words. She remembers only that she found herself humming softly into the night. And, like everyone before her, she too shrank inward with fear, imagining the future that seemed to be drawing ever closer.

 

3.

 

As Ruma grew older, Bibhabati began to pour every dream she had into her daughter. The girl looked remarkably like Saroj—as though she had been sculpted from the same earth. The same long, expressive eyes. The same graceful frame. Bibhabati had never imagined that her little girl would grow up so quickly.

After finishing the day's work in the fields, she would hurry across the Subarnarekha to the brick kiln. The place was always crowded with strangers.

Saroj had been right. None of them truly belonged here. Beyond the kiln, the forests of Jangalmahal stretched towards the horizon. The outsiders feared those forests, yet they spoke of them with the confidence of conquerors.

"One day we'll take those too."

The words filled Bibhabati with silent disgust. Whenever she could, she would look towards the Subarnarekha, believing that one day—somehow—Saroj would rise from its depths and return to her.

One day, the owner of the brick kiln, Udayan Barik, summoned Bibhabati to his room. She could not refuse.

That day, she could not resist anything.

It felt as though a monstrous bulldozer had passed over her body.

The smell of the kiln's smoke mingled with alcohol and cannabis until the air itself became suffocating. All Bibhabati could feel was something like a drilling machine forcing its way into her body, as though she were no longer flesh but earth to be broken open.

That, however, was only the beginning.

After that day, Bibhabati's body ceased to belong to her. She became someone whom anyone could use. She could stop nothing. Inside her, a silent cry twisted and echoed without end, spreading through her like a mournful melody—a lament that sounded uncannily like Kunjarani's songs.

Each night, after everything was over, she would return home and sit beside her sleeping daughter.

Looking at Ruma's peaceful face, she would sing. The words no longer came clearly.

They drifted like fragments through darkness, blurred and broken. And woven into every note were her tears.

Her pillow would be soaked by morning.

Yet she still wanted to live.

She kept living for one reason alone—the face of her sleeping child.

From somewhere in the distance came Kunjarani's voice, singing another old lament.

 The laughter from the brick kiln.The prayers from the Mission. And somewhere between those two worlds, Bibhabati would slowly surrender to sleep.

 

4.

 

Only Bibhabati knew that morning that Saroj had gone to bathe in the Subarnarekha. As noon approached and he still had not returned, anxiety spread through the village. People had always warned him. They would say that this stretch of the Subarnarekha was cursed.

The schoolmaster, however, explained it differently.

"There is a whirlpool here," he would say. "A whirlpool that draws everything into itself. No one knows where it carries what it takes."

Kunjarani had another way of putting it.

"Time itself is a whirlpool," she would murmur. "It devours everything... everything. The river is time... and time is a river... it swallows all."

Had it been time, then, that had taken Saroj? Had he vanished into the unfathomable depths of time itself?

The entire village gathered along the riverbank that day.

They searched. They waited. But they never found him.

That day, Bibhabati sang kandnageet.

Sitting beside Kunjarani, she sang one lament after another. Hearing their voices, others slowly came forward and joined them. Before long, grief had become a chorus.

Saroj had disappeared from Bibhabati's life.

Little Ruma, too young to understand what death meant, simply listened. Then, in her tiny, half-formed voice, she began making sounds of her own.

It was not really a song. There were no words. Only a raw, instinctive cry that somehow blended with the women's lament.

Everyone said, "She's only a child. That isn't singing. She's crying."

Holding Ruma tightly against her chest, Kunjarani whispered,

"May no one ever have to sing a song like this again... never again."

Jangalmahal began to change. The river changed. Within a few short years, Kuthighat became almost unrecognizable. Boys and girls disappeared.

Some returned. Many never did.

The dusty earthen roads gave way to highways. Electricity reached the villages. The landscape grew brighter, more orderly, more prosperous. People said jobs had come at last. The government, they claimed, was finally providing employment.

Had everything Saroj feared turned out to be wrong?

Had injustice truly come to an end?

Would no one ever again try to seize their forests?

Would the forest remain a forest?

Bibhabati knew otherwise. Nothing had truly changed. If anything, people's eyes had become even more brutal. More predatory.

But why?

Where did all this violence come from? People insisted that Jangalmahal had never been better. Yet the trees kept disappearing. Outsiders continued to pour in. And the people of Jangalmahal kept leaving. Leaving for somewhere else.

But where?

No one seemed able to answer that question. From time to time Kunjarani would sigh,

"My heart aches, daughter... it aches so deeply. Something inside me keeps warning that misfortune is near."

The evening breeze carried her songs across the village, one after another. Songs of sorrow. Songs that seemed older than memory itself.

Once, Bibhabati had found Kunjarani almost impossible to understand.

How could one person hold so much grief? How could so many tears keep finding their way into her songs?

 

5.

Kunjarani would often say, “Once grief takes hold of someone, it never lets go. And once a song takes hold of someone, it never lets go either.”

Gradually, Bibhabati accepted everything around her. She accepted that nothing more was going to happen in her life. She accepted that this was enough. She accepted that Saroj would never emerge from the water again. That there would be no revolution. The field in front of her house was hers alone. Ruma was hers alone. As Ruma slowly grew up, that became the greatest blessing in Bibhabati's life. Whenever someone in the neighbourhood was in pain, whenever there was a wedding, or whenever someone lost a loved one, Bibhabati would go and join the women singing with them. And in the lonely evenings she would sit by the Subarnarekha and sing. Later, no matter how hard she tried, she could never remember which songs she had sung. The songs came on their own, and they disappeared on their own. Kandana Geet—songs of lament. Inauspicious songs. She would never allow those melodies to reach even the courtyard of her house. Let them drift away in the current of the Subarnarekha. Let the river take them. Let the river take them. Just as the current flows away and never returns, let these melodies drift away in the same manner. Let them sink. Just like the songs of their Jangalmahal. People called them songs of weeping. People came from the cities, from faraway places, asking about these songs of sorrow. Bibhabati could never explain them, just as Kunjarani could never explain them. Bibhabati herself never understood why grief was so necessary to them. Why did they need it so much? She would only say, “We cry. Our tears become songs.”

This was how the lives of Bibhabati and the others went on. Then, on the day of the Durga idol immersion, Ruma disappeared.

The immersion procession was moving towards the river. Ruma had gone with it. Bibhabati followed behind her. Ruma was only a little distance ahead. Bibhabati called out to her. “I'm coming,” Ruma replied.

And then she was gone.

Bibhabati sat on the bank of the river for the whole evening and the whole night, just as she had spent her life waiting for Saroj. Waiting for the revolution.

Ruma never returned.

The Subarnarekha was searched frantically. So was its whirlpool. Its dark waters. But Ruma did not return.

This time Bibhabati stood facing the Subarnarekha and sang in a fierce voice. Why? Why did the river draw everyone into itself like this? Why?

Kunjarani Devi remained completely speechless. But it was not the Subarnarekha that returned Ruma.

The next day, her body was found on top of a drain beside the brick kiln.

She was naked.

A noose was around her neck. The police said that several men had raped Ruma throughout the night.

Only the water in the drain kept splashing and flowing towards the Subarnarekha. Bibhabati stood staring at those splashing waters in disbelief.

Ruma was only fifteen years old.

After the post-mortem, when her body was brought back to the courtyard of their home, the place was filled with people. Strangely, there was no song from Kunjarani. No words. The old woman's eyes had turned cloudy. She sat in complete silence.The women of the entire village were silent.

Ruma's body lay on the bamboo bier, wrapped in a white sheet.

The neighbours held Bibhabati tightly from both sides. They feared that if she did not cry now, something terrible might happen.

But Bibhabati could not cry. Nor could she sing.

They took Ruma's body away. They cremated her, and her ashes were scattered into the waters of the Subarnarekha. The police arrested three men from the brick kiln.

 

6.

 

People say that the Subarnarekha is cursed.

 Saroj used to say that it is not the river that is cursed, but human beings. Human beings are cursed. Human beings are violent. Human beings are killers.

That evening, it felt as though someone was calling her. Silent, Bibhabati slowly walked down to the bank of the Subarnarekha. The river flowed on, alone. Behind her, the tall chimney of the brick kiln still stood defiantly, thrust high against the sky.

So much arrogance. So much.

She turned to her left. In the distance, flames were rising from deep within the forest. They said a road would be built there. Or perhaps a factory. So much arrogance. Yours. All of yours.

Something twisted again and again inside her, through her chest and deep into her belly. A low hum of grief began to rise within her. But she no longer knew for whom she was grieving. Ruma's face came back to her. Then Saroj's.

"Come back... come back... all of you... come back..."

Something broke free from the darkness buried deep inside her. Bibhabati cried out.

No song came.

Only a raw, piercing scream. Then came the tears. And with the tears came vengeance. She raised her hand and pointed towards the brick kiln, screaming with all the strength she had left. Suddenly she remembered the day Saroj had disappeared, when little Ruma, still a child, had cried in just the same way. That evening, every inhabitant of Kuthighat heard Bibhabati's cry. They heard her rage. But no one saw Saroj rising from the water.

The fish had eaten away his eyes. His entire body was covered with moss. Slowly he climbed out of the river and stepped onto the ghat. He came towards Bibhabati and quietly stretched out his hand to her.

No one saw him.

Only the towering chimney of the brick kiln remained standing in its pride beneath the open sky.

And the forest kept burning.

Some people say that the Subarnarekha is cursed. Others say that there is a whirlpool here—a whirlpool that pulls everything into itself.

Everything sinks.

Everything disappears.