Amol Halder didn’t have a family but his job as a handler of secret agents, sent out on long and arduous missions, demanded that he interact with their beleaguered families on a regular basis. He didn’t enjoy this particular chore because it involved fielding a lot of queries to which he had no answers. Or, to be honest, he might have had replies that he was not supposed to give to his clients in the interests of security.

Amol Halder didn’t have a family but his job as a handler of secret agents, sent out on long and arduous missions, demanded that he interact with their beleaguered families on a regular basis. He didn’t enjoy this particular chore because it involved fielding a lot of queries to which he had no answers. Or, to be honest, he might have had replies that he was not supposed to give to his clients in the interests of security.

On a muggy April afternoon, Amol found himself trudging along a narrow serpentine lane of Baguihati, a north Kolkata suburb, wiping sweat from his brows and trying to locate the safe house where Shabnam aka Urmila was likely to rattle him with a few incisive queries about Kamal, her absentee husband. Since this was his first visit to her house, he carried a small packet of sandesh for Urmila and a toy car for her son.

Urmila had already been informed about his visit, so she opened the door at the first ring of the bell, but kept the door chain hooked in its groove. “Mr Amol Halder?” she asked, peering suspiciously at the tall gaunt visitor in a grey safari suit.Amol merely nodded to confirm his presence.  “Please come in, sir.” Urmila released the door chain and Amol entered a small, but well-furnished sitting room with heavy velvet curtains on the windows and a number of framed prints on the walls, one of them being Jamini Roy’s famous Mother and Child.

Amol allowed his eyes to graze the walls briefly and then mumbled “Lovely”, even though he carried a postcard size photo of Urmila’s sitting room in his pocket. “Thank you, sir,” Urmila beamed. “May I bring you a glass of sherbet?” “Yes, thanks, this is for your son, Urmila.” He handed over the toy and then the sweets. “Oh, there was really no need for these things, sir,” Urmila said, “You have already done so much for us.” She accepted the gifts and then went to the kitchen to prepare sherbet for the visitor.  Amol noticed, may be for the second time that Urmila was a tall, slender woman in her mid-twenties with a finely chiselled oval face, fair complexion and long dark hair. She was educated (a graduate from Rajsahi University in Bangladesh) and quite intelligent.

He hoped that she would have no problem in adapting herself to the sanitised life of the wife of an agent sent away on a difficult mission. When he saw her the first time with Kamal, her runaway lover, in Alipore central jail, waiting to be deported back to Bangladesh, Amol was impressed by her graceful appearance and intense look. Fleeing their native city, the couple had crossed the Indian border at Murshidabad without any valid documents and the Border Security Force arrested them before they could board a Kolkata-bound train.

Kamal later told him that Shabnam was not happy with her arranged marriage to a politician’s spoilt son. Hannan, her husband, beat her whenever she protested about his philandering. When she escaped from her husband’s house one night with her three-year-old son and eloped with Kamal, whom she knew from her college days, her enraged husband set goons on their trail. Their return to Bangladesh being impossible under such circumstances, Kamal readily accepted Amol’s offer to become an agent for his organisation in exchange for a long term bail for the couple and a safe house for Shabnam who was rechristened Urmila. Urmila returned with a glass of lemon sherbet and a plate of rosogolla on a small plastic tray.

Amol drank the sweet and sour sherbet in two quick gulps.“Please take a rosogolla, sir,” Urmila pleaded.“No, thanks… The sherbet will do. So you have settled down, Urmila.”“Sir, I will consider myself settled when Bubai joins a playschool.”“And which playschool have you chosen for your son?” Amol asked, taking out from his pocket a sheet of paper that his assistant had handed him before he left his office.“Little Angels.”Amol took off his dark glasses to look friendly and accessible. “No, Urmila. Tender Steps will be the right choice.”Urmila looked surprised. “But, sir, Mrs Saha’s playschool is not properly equipped. Chipped toys, unclean toilet and no playground. She runs her school in a back room of her house with small windows that overlook a garbage dump.

I understand the children aren’t happy there.”“But he will be safe there from the security angle,” Amol pointed out. “Little Angels is run by Mrs Talukder whose husband is an active member of his office union.”“Do we need to be so cautious about a playschool?”Amol nodded. “The children are so vulnerable, Urmila. They have been used in the past to collect information on their parents. I hope you have trained your son to name his parents correctly.”“Yes, Sunil and Urmila, though he is still unable to pronounce my name properly. It comes out as Omila.”“Correct him whenever he falters in your presence,” Amol advised. “And your husband’s profession? Can he pronounce the word ‘Engineer’?”Urmila laughed, revealing her pearly white teeth that made her smile so fetching. “That’s too difficult a word for a three year old.”“Better tell Bubai, ‘Your father builds roads and houses.’ That will be easier for him to remember.” “I will try that one, sir,” Urmila said with a wry smile.

To provide the spy a new identity, the organisation hadn’t stopped by just giving Kamal a new name, they had also assigned him the job of a junior engineer in a government undertaking that built highways, dams and public buildings. Sunil Sen was now supposed to be working on a bypass that would connect Durgapur with Kolkata, cutting down the journey time between the two cities. In the organisation’s record Sunil was Agent 121, deployed to infiltrate a dreaded terrorist organisation, which was fomenting trouble in three border districts of West Bengal.   “Do you have any friends, Urmila?” Amol inquired.Urmila shook her head. “No, sir. Just acquaintances. Neighbourhood women I meet in the park down below when I go there with Bubai in the afternoon.”“And what do you talk about?”“Anything but politics.” For the first time Amol noticed a slight hardening of Urmila’s finely chiselled face.“Good. You may borrow books from a local library,” Amol suggested.“I don’t have any spare time, sir.

A naughty three year old doesn’t give his mother too much spare time.”“Of course, I understand, Urmila. You have a television, so you can enjoy the afternoon soaps, if you can snatch a couple of hours from your busy schedule.”“I’d rather prefer writing a poem if I have a free hour,” Urmila said, presumably to show off her class and upbringing. Amol smiled. “So you are a poet? Very good. You may publish your poetry in some literary magazines.” “Thanks for your advice, sir, but I have to show my poems to you first, before I send them to a magazine, don’t I?”Amol would have been happy to say no, but in his position he couldn’t really take chances. “Just one casual glance is all I need to clear your poems,” he said. “You can send a batch of your poems to our office — Post Box No 666 — and we will return them …’“…with a rubber stamp at the bottom of each sheet,” Urmila savagely cut in. “Thanks a lot, sir. I will think twice before I put pen to paper.”This, Amol knew, was the standard reaction of the unhappy wife of an agent sent out on a difficult mission. The contract he got signed by Kamal before his release on bail was an elaborate one, which not only indemnified the organisation against all mishaps, including his death, but also imposed a plethora of restrictions on his family.

Urmila knew this, but she couldn’t help showing her resentment. “I am sorry you feel so unhappy about our small restrictions, but these are only to ensure your as well as your husband’s safety,” he said. It was time to take leave of the unhappy housewife before she went ballistic and started shooting questions about her husband’s welfare.“Where is Kamal now?” asked Urmila, anticipating Amol’s next move.  “Somewhere in North Bengal,” Amol said. “He is safe and in good health.”“Thank you, sir.”      Urmila could have asked him a few more incisive questions on her husband’s safety and wellbeing but to Amol’s relief her child woke up and started crying and she dashed straight into her bedroom to pacify him. The welcome interruption, however, put Amol in an awkward situation as he just couldn’t get up and leave the flat. So he waited for her return, picking up a copy of a popular Bengali magazine that publishes a number of stories and poems.  Urmila returned with her son, who looked groggy from his sleep but was quite happy with the toy car. “Bubai likes it,” Urmila said, all smiles, her bitterness over her husband’s dangerous assignment quite obliterated by the instant happiness of her child.

For Amol, family had mostly been pain, suffering and deprivation. His father, a stern school teacher, often caned him for his rowdiness and he had no distinct memory of his mother, a self-effacing woman preoccupied with her numerous fasts and pujas, never stroking his head, let alone kissing him on the cheek. And yet, there were those rare moments when, nursing his whisky in a nondescript hotel room in a district town like Murshidabad or Malda after a hard day’s work, Amol fancied himself as a householder with a caring wife and a couple of naughty children. On the spur of the moment, he took a bold decision in favour of Urmila and her son, violating the standard practice. “Let Bubai go to Little Angels,” he declared.

Urmila, who had been trying to teach Bubai how to operate the toy car, turned around and beamed at him. “Thank you, sir. Thank you very much indeed.”“Welcome.” He rose from the sofa. “We will keep in touch, Urmila. Take care of your child and yourself. And thank you for the sherbet.”  He walked towards the door and then stopped. He turned around, took a couple of steps forward and bent down to kiss Bubai’s head. The child looked up and smiled at him. He smiled back. A routine exchange of gestures but Amol felt inordinately happy to have brought cheer to a mother and son with whom he had only a professional relationship.“Come again, sir,” Urmila said as he stepped out of the room.“See you.” Amol headed for the stairs, quickly putting on his dark glasses to hide the drop of tear that had appeared in the corner of his eye.