As you walk along Rashbehari Avenue in south Kolkata past a grand kurta store on your left, you approach a small, much quieter store called New Roy Bedding Stores, stirred only by the whirr of sewing machines. Its entrance is stacked up with mattresses, pillows and cushions on both sides, making it look like a narrow passage from the outside. Inside sits Naresh Roy Mondal, who runs the store. He exudes quiet, too.
He is also a master of economy. He will advise you to buy 80 centimetres of cloth for a small cushion cover, instead of 1 metre, and is likely to return you a small strip if that was extra. This, he says, is because there is no space in his store for anything in excess, but one suspects there is more to it.
Something like a philosophy of life.
Roy Mondal, 63, a very soft-spoken, gentle man, observes every scruple, and does everything with care and attention to detail. When the small mattress and its cover reach you from his store, they fit each other perfectly, the piping pert on the edges and no unseemly bulge or loose cloth hanging anywhere.
Once, when he was young, Roy Mondal says, he did not exactly look forward to a life out of perfecting pillows and mattresses and quilts and cushions. Or sofa covers and curtains. “I had not thought of doing anything in particular. I had no motto, no goal. It never occurred to me that I needed one.” He was a free bird.
His family had come over from Bangladesh. After shuttling between West Bengal and Orissa for a while, they settled down in Gangulibagan, in the southern end of the city. Now Roy Mondal lives with his family in Patuli, not very far from Gangulibagan. Due to financial constraints, he could only build a small two-storey house for himself very recently.
Roy Mondal’s father set up the shop with his younger brother in 1964. Roy Mondal went to school in Gangulibagan and graduated from Prafulla Chandra College (South City College, evening). He began to work from the time he was 19. He was employed at a number of private companies. When a company he was working at closed down, he joined the bedding store on his father’s advice.
“When I first joined the shop I didn’t like it a bit,” says Roy Mondal. “It felt like a prison.” Even as he speaks, he is wary of being portrayed as more than he is. “I am a very ordinary person, who has to work very hard for a living,” he stresses.
He had been restless even as a child, always going away. “I would wander about and attend every jolsa or ‘function’ (musical event) in the locality,” he says. He loved theatrical performances the most — “natok, jatra, theatre”, he says. Jatra is the popular Bengali folk-theatre performed in urban and rural places, and natok and theatre are the same as each other, except that theatre, perhaps, would mean a performance on a more formal, bigger stage, in the city proper. “Then I could neither go to Academy (of Fine Arts) or Tapan Theatre,” he says. He had to be content with local performances. They were dazzling enough. “I had a nesha (addiction). My parents would scold me.”
Staring at rolls of upholstery cloth felt very different. He would have to spend a lot of time at the store, learning the prices, how to take measurements for curtains, to cut cloth.
He would do that, dutifully. One day things began to change for him, he noticed. It was a slow, long, invisible process, yet it was happening.
When you sit with something, without resisting it, giving it attention and patience, then that changes as well. You do not resent it any more. You may even begin to enjoy it.
You have to allow yourself to open up to something. Then you understand it.
“You feel good when you begin to understand something, learn something,” says Roy Mondal. “You begin to like it. And it is essential to hold on to that love.”
“Every kind of work reaches its ultimate level if you apply yourself, your heart and mind,” he says, self-deprecatingly again. He gives an example from writing. “Rituparno Ghosh, for example, wrote a perfect phrase: ‘Bongojiboner ongo Boroline’.” Literally, this catchline, an advertisement for the skin cream that is no less than a Bengali institution, means Boroline is a part of Bengali life, but the Bengali phrase resonates with an untranslatable music.
Roy Mondal comes to the shop every day early afternoon and shuts it around 9pm. A handful of men work for him, some sitting at the shop and others whom he contacts for specific work, such as stitching sofa covers. He helps with the work when required, though he does not do any stitching.
He lives with his wife, his 23-year-old daughter, who has recently joined an IT company, his mother, who is around 85 and bedridden, and three dogs, who were strays. “We have four young ones in our family,” he says, proud and beaming. They keep the elders busy.
He looks after his mother himself, cleaning her and dressing her every day before coming to work and after going back home. He is very grateful to his wife for being supportive and taking care of all the other work. He speaks of how his mother recently suffered a severe lung infection, but he chose not to hospitalise her. She has recovered with care given at home.
To every customer, Roy Mondal recommends the material that he thinks will be good. He gets the cotton from outside Bengal, “shimul” cotton from south of India and “kapaas” cotton from Maharashtra. The cotton fabrics arrive mostly from the southern states.
He is particular about styles. In his gentle way, he tries to push a customer towards using a sturdy fabric when required, or a zipper instead of buttons. He can look slightly disappointed if the customer does not relent.
“I try to be good,” he says. “But is it possible? I am human. God is there in me, but also the devil.” He claims he cannot control his anger at times. “And I cannot stand it if I feel undermined,” he says.
Portraits of Hindu deities hang on the shop wall. His WhatsApp DP is of Lord Jagannath. Where is the divine presence located in his scheme of things? “I don’t understand that. I have tried and failed. I know the limits of my understanding. Now I have stopped trying to understand,” he says.
“I can’t get anything about thinking about things beyond me. That’s why I don’t think about God,” he adds.
“What matters is what within us. We should be clean inside. The dirt inside cannot be washed away.”
But life teaches you everything. “Parents are your first teachers, then life. Life is everything,” he says.
He loves the idea of some lives, including that of gods.“I am fascinated by the life of lord Shiva. He is a wandering soul, a renouncer, without any need, who only helps people,” says Roy Mondal.