The Trail to Spring

Chapter 32

We had just reached the outskirts of Kolkata when the detective finished reciting his story. He had retold the story with many pauses and breaks in between as he remembered his days on the road with his friends.

"I am sorry, Rakesh," I said.

"Don't be, Ms Ganguly," he said, avoiding eye contact with me, "I am not. Real empathy arrives from shared experiences."

His voice cracked a bit as he said this and I knew he was lying.

"I hope my brother is alright," I whispered, wondering how he could have survived in the street.

"He will be," the detective assures.

"I owe a lot to Pops," he continued, looking at the pen drive in his hand, "He was there for me when there wasn't anybody else. I am going to give this pen drive to him and confront him myself. Face to face."

As we entered the proper city, Sukhiji asked us the address of Grandpa's hospital. I was about to tell him but Rakesh stopped me.

"We will first go to 26 B. B. Ganguly Street," he answered.

He looked at me as I was about to start protesting.

"I'll go with you, Ms Ganguly. Just wait in my apartment for a moment. There is still something important to me that I want to show you," he said.

I did not have any idea what he was talking about but relented this time. A few minutes I could spare. Sukhiji stopped in front of the building that housed Rakesh's apartment. We climbed up to the second floor and the detective pushed his door open.

"I'll be back. You make yourself at home," he said and rushed down the stairs before I could say anything.

I walked inside and closed the door behind me. I chuckled slightly as the door slowly swung in its hinges and opened again. The detective never repaired his front door.

I passed the bedroom and sat down on one of the chairs in his living room. This time I didn't feel as suffocated in this small apartment as I had felt the first time. The detective didn't really stay in just these two rooms. To him the whole world was his apartment.

I remembered Grandpa, who spent his last days looking after his flowers and dreaming about his grandson. I remembered Dad, who always felt so lonely without his son and yet carried on bravely day after day. I remembered Mom, who had lost all hope and how she pulled herself together for a greater cause.

I remembered Chintu of the Happy Days Orphanage. He had portrayed a completely different picture to us about what had happened to the orphanage children. I realised that it was because he blamed himself for the five children who had left him and that's why he had lied to us and had said that he had turned them out.

I remembered Shruti and Mrs. Banerjee. Mrs. Banerjee must have adopted her and that's why they knew the detective so well.

I remembered Mrs Majumdar and how she much she missed her daughter. She must feel so lonely in her big house, spending away her days in the solitude of the hills.

There was Mrs. Pyne who had been manipulated to murder someone because she just wanted to save her husband.

And Rakesh. He had given away his wallet to that pickpocket because he had been one too. He roamed around with his harmonica because it reminded him of the friend he had lost. I could now distinguish the dim line of reason that dictated his eccentricities.
I remembered what the detective had said about everybody fighting their own battles against the injustices the life. So this is what he had meant.

I had previously thought the world to be a shallow place, ruled only by greed and money. But I never gave a thought to the reasons behind those vices. Nobody is born to be evil, it is just the circumstances that shape them to be so. Everybody in this world just wants to live on their own terms and everybody just wants to be free. The only difference is that different people have different methods of doing so, like my brother.

I stood up from my chair. It had already been ten minutes and I couldn't stay here any longer. I had to go to the hospital as fast as I could.

I was about to walk out through the front door when something suddenly caught my eye as I passed Rakesh's bedroom. There was something peeping out from behind a collection of Physics books in the detective's bookcase. I removed the books and saw a teddy bear kept in the deepest reaches of the case.

I took it out and held it my hand. It was heavily discoloured but I could ascertain that the teddy was originally black in colour. One of its legs had cotton coming out of it. I noticed its price tag from where its tail should have been. Something was written on it with blue ink and I stretched the tag to read it better.

Maya.

I saw my name written with a blue sketch pen on the price tag of the black teddy bear.

There was only one memory that I remembered of my brother. It was the day he had run away. He had taken my favourite black teddy bear and had promised that he would return one day and hand the teddy back to me himself.

"Blackie?," I asked the teddy bear in my head half expecting it to nod its head. The teddy stared back at me with its unblinking black beady eyes.

It didn't make any sense. Rakesh was my brother?

Now that I came to think about it, it all started to make sense. His natural tendency to flout any and every rule, the fear in his voice whenever he spoke to me, his tears while we were coming back to Kolkata, it all made sense now. But then if he was indeed my brother, then why did he need to hide that fact for so long?

I hurried downstairs in search of the detective with Blackie in my hand. There was no sign of him in front of the apartment building. Sukhiji was sitting inside his car and dozing.

"Sukhiji, where's Rakesh?," I asked, shaking him awake a little too roughly than I intended.

"He rounded the corner in that direction. He didn't tell me where he was going," he said, stretching his hands and yawning.

I immediately ran towards the pointed direction even as I heard Sukhiji mutter from behind, "People don't really say thanks these days."

I rounded the corner hoping to find Rakesh but there was not a single soul here either except a man who was standing quietly in a corner and smoking. I decided to just leave it and go back to Sukhiji when I noticed the man approaching me. At first I thought it was the detective but as he came nearer and nearer, I realised who he was. It was the man with the scar on his forehead, the man who was supposedly following me.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you," he said as I started to walk away from him.

There was something silvery glistening in his hand as the light from the street lamp fell on it.

It was a knife.