"His name was Ulioperistybier and he had metallic wires coming out of his skull, black and thin like well-oiled hair. Sometimes when he thought hard, his wires would sway a little giving the impression of ripples in a paddy field."
And that story would go through a needle and come out of a haystack and yet all of it would sound real as Soumojit Mistry would tell it to the young wards with so much eyebrow-dancing, chest-thumping and ocassional jumping over tables with various guttural sounds that it created a dreamy verisimilitude.
He was an accountant in a glass factory and retired sometime back. Now he just comes to our school and tells his stories. Allow me some imagination and I would say he looked like an amused turtle sticking his head out of a shell or more like a bald baby in a cradle fascinated by the jhumka hanging overhead.
'Dada, what silly stories you tell these children? Why don't you tell them something useful like freedom fighters, or Ashoka or something?'
The science teacher clearly didn't appreciate what Soumojit Mistry was doing. In fact she was worried at times over some of the things Soumojit Mistry had said in the class: 'You see, you throw an electron at the wall like a cricket ball and wait for it to rebound so that you can catch it'. Even some parents had started flocking me to express concerns about this old man telling stories.
Once we were watching the children play. Soumojit mistry pointed at a boy and said: 'You see that thin boy, if he runs any more, he would vanish into thin air'. The boy's parents moved and he went to another school in another city. Soumojit Mistry later said to me: 'See I told you he would vanish'.
I once said to him: 'Dada, you are so young!'. I wouldn't imagine an old man getting excited about a new day, every time the same sun rose in the same east! It seemed there was no worries or end to anything. Soumojit Mistry died some days later. Natural aging. I had really hoped for a more dramatic climax to the story of the man behind these many stories.
I couldn't help remembering the story I once read when I was a boy. A man in China didn't want people to weep at his funeral. So he hid lots of crackers under his garment before dying. And when the villagers set his body afire, rockets vroom-ed out to the sky and exploded and the children started laughing in joy!
