The Lives of Others

by Neel Mukherjee

  The private English tuition had been the idea of Mala Saha, Sougata’s mother. News of Sona’s preternatural mathematical abilities – at the age of eleven he had already mastered differential calculus and was champing at the bit to get to integral calculus – had spread quickly in the closed world of Basanta Bose Road. It was she who had suggested to Sona’s Boro-jyethima that the boy should look in a couple of evenings a week to help Sougata with his mathematics homework; Sougata was not the brightest of students in his famous English-medium school, St Lawrence, especially in arithmetic, and the prospect of starting algebra and geometry next year was terrifying. The matter could have been idly mentioned, within the course of aimless chit-chat, and could have died an equally idle death, so how exactly it managed to translate into action remains a mystery to Sona, to a large measure because he has not grown up with good or favourable things happening to him, from new clothes and proper meals to fancy, fee-paying, English-medium schools and private tuition. They happen in the lives of the lucky ones, like all his cousins, but he and his sister, Kalyani, have not been born into it. The world is as it is, and Sona makes do with Suranjan’s hand-me-downs, and Chhoto-jyethu’s algebra books from his college years (nearly twenty-five years old, saved from a clearout sale to the bikriwalla), and scraps of leftovers sent down irregularly from upstairs, and Khastagir, the free government school down the road, on Mahim Halder Street, where the teachers have trouble solving elementary quadratic equations and the pupils have to sit cross-legged on the floor, being cooked in the heat in the summer because there are no fans. Such is the way his world is configured and he cannot yet put a shape to the lineaments of his desire to escape it, let alone articulate the desire. Not yet.

  Someone has done some bargaining behind the scenes so that Sona is expected to give maths tuition to Sougata, his thick neighbour, in exchange not only for dinners, but also for tuition in English, his weakest subject; the flimsiest subject in his school, in fact, for the English teacher in Khastagir hardly knows how to transpose a sentence from the simple present tense to, say, the past continuous, such is the state of government schools. But Sona has been asked to soak up the lessons passively, not actively participate; just an audience of one witnessing the English classes between Sougata and his tutor.

  The English tutor, Dibyendu Majumdar, a second-year undergraduate in the English Department of Presidency College, does not think that the deal is as good for him as it is for his employer. A stereotype of the Bengali aantel – the word, with ironic appositeness, is a bastardised form of the French intellectuel – Dibyendu has all the appurtenances to go with the role, straggly beard, glasses, khadi kurta, jute shoulder-bag, and resents being made to be on the giving end of the two-for-one offer. He takes out his resentment, in so far as he is intrepid enough to do so, in pathetic dribs and drabs, on Sona, the added extra. Dabbling in fiery left-wing politics in college has clearly made him more sympathetic to the lot of the have-nots further afield than the one right under his nose. Instead of resenting Mala Saha, which would have been the logical thing to do, since it is she who foisted Sona on him without increasing his pay, he diverts it to focus on the wrong person; money breeds a lot of attitudes in men and a particular stripe of obsequiousness is high on the list for people of his kind.

  So Dibyendu takes pains to explain a point over and over again to Sougata, but a rare question or request for clarification from Sona – rare because he has been told obliquely but repeatedly, so that there can be no ambiguity in his own mind about it, that he is only a watcher – will be met with silence, or with an expression of irritated reluctance, sometimes even a mocking ‘I see your head is full of cow-dung.’ Dibyendu puts petty obstructions in the way of Sona, such as not allowing him to share Sougata’s textbooks, or setting Sougata homework while making it obvious that Sona is not going to be given any.

  Sona, electrically alive from the earliest time that he can remember to being excluded to the margins, from where he watched everyone else get their share while he only looked on in silence, has sniffed this politics of mean-mindedness in the air from the moment he walked in on his first class.

  Already hobbled by the sense of obligation this exchange tuition entails, he is further humiliated by Dibyendu-da’s gratuitous cruelties and, as always, recoils deep inside himself to nurse the word so frequently used of him, ‘beggar’, as if it were a talisman, in a prolonged, introspective agony, his soul’s equivalent of pushing his tongue ceaselessly against a wobbling tooth that hurt. And then, suddenly, over the course of a few weeks, he crosses the line as he knew he would, an invisible fence beyond which it does not hurt him any longer, or even touch him: he is deaf and blind to it. All that remains within that insulated self are his mother’s words, the words that have been embossed on his impressionable soul – ‘If you study hard, very, very hard, and do nothing but study, and do well in school, be the “first boy” in class every year, there will be an escape from this, escape for all of us.’

  The words save him yet again from an intractable situation. He knows he has been invited to Sougata’s to give, not to receive. He bites down hard on the fact, steels himself and takes all the barriers in the way to his one chance of acquiring English as challenges, much as getting his head around trigonometry or logarithm had been. Once framed that way, he knows he will keep at it, with the doggedness of a switched-on machine, until he gets the better of it; in this, algebra is no different from the cheap exclusionary politics that the world plays against him. After Dibyendu-da leaves each evening, when it is Sona’s turn to teach maths to Sougata, he deliberately sets problems well above Sougata’s ability to solve. While the other boy is thus occupied, racking his brains and chewing the end of his pencil, Sona borrows his English books and concentrates on the lesson recently finished with Dibyendu-da with such ferocious will that he has his jaws locked tight and his temple throbbing by the end of it. He knows he is racing against the great winner, time.

  In four weeks, Sona has wrestled to the ground all forms of tenses, including the supremely eloquent and difficult future perfect continuous, has begun to get the hang of clauses, and has started grappling with the capricious and illogical absurdities of English prepositions.

  As eldest daughter-in-law of the Ghosh family, married to Adinath, Sandhya has a set of elusive duties no less binding for their status as tacit and unformulated. They lie in a nebulous notion of tradition, of the way things are done and have been done for generations, of the overweeningly important idea of what the world thinks, especially if that world consists of her elders. Of the several of these duties, one is being in charge of the prayer room (a miniature temple, really) up on the terrace, and all the rituals of daily worship – cleaning out the room in the morning, giving the deities fresh water, cut fruits, crystallised-sugar sweets and flowers, watering the tulsi plant, then repeating the same chores in the evening, except then it is a more ceremonial affair involving the ringing of a big brass bell, sprinkling of water from the Ganga (kept in a frog-green plastic water-bottle), more flowers, the lighting of incense sticks and copra and frankincense, which fill the whole room with dense, aromatic smoke, lighting small terracotta lamps, carrying the brazier of copra into each room in all four storeys of the house and sanctifying it with the holy smoke . . . The rituals have their own shape and place and rightness, and over her twenty-three years in the Ghosh family, Sandhya has devolved and delegated a lot of tasks to the other daughters-in-law, but this she keeps to herself, although she is beginning to find the business of climbing up and down the stairs to take the brazier into every room of the house laborious and harsh on her legs and tightening knees.

  This evening she has been uncharacteristically late with the evening worship, but her jaa Purnima’s call – ‘Buliiiii, come inside, don’t stand on the verandah at this hour, everyone can see you’ – has elbowed her out of her reverie. The prayer room has a white marble floor, a large bell suspended from the ceiling and a whole fleet of statuettes, framed picture
s and figurines of a dozen gods and goddesses and saints arranged along two raised stone daises set against the wall. Her older son, Supratik, at the age of fourteen, had once impudently said, ‘Ma, there are thirty-three crore Hindu gods and goddesses. You seem to have a fair few of them here. How do you know that sending up prayers to all these different deities won’t cancel each other out?’

  At the centre of the wall facing east a niche has been carved out, with symmetrical ascending curves on either side that join in a final point at the top. Inside, in a blaze of red silk and gold, is housed the reigning deity of the Ghosh house, the gentle goddess of wealth, Lakshmi, with her faint, inscrutable almost-smile, her sheaf of paddy and her docile barn-owl. Sandhya had heard long ago that in her father-in-law’s family home in North Calcutta – there is very little mention of that chapter in his life – the goddess was stripped of her clothes after the puja and left naked throughout the year so that she couldn’t run away.

  The conducting of the annual puja on a full-moon night in late October was the most honourable duty that had been bestowed on Sandhya when she married into the Ghosh family. In time-honoured fashion, this is really the eldest daughter-in-law’s investiture as the earthly, domestic symbol of the goddess. It is she who channels Lakshmi’s blessings on the family. In her is vested, by an understanding of priestly transference, the household’s economic prosperity, well-being and harmonious daily life. Beside it, her other daily chores as eldest daughter-in-law – supervising the cook and cleaners and servants and household accounts, caring for her elderly parents-in-law, looking after their meals and medication, deciding which tasks can be ceded to the wives of her three brothers-in-law, keeping a family of twenty (including the servants) ticking over without hiccups or mishaps – all these appear as milk-and-rice, as uncomplicated, bland and digestible as infant fare. Now that Lakshmi Puja is a little over a month away, she can feel the gathering thrill again.

  But something is clouding the excitement this year and she already knows its name: Supratik. Over the last year he has lost so much weight that the shadow he casts, in all light, is nothing more than a thin line. She can swear that his eyes have grown bigger as he has started to look more cadaverous; set deep within his bony face, all sharp angles and a luxuriant black beard, they make him look like a starving mystic, a Naga sanyasi on the banks of the Ganga in Gomukh. He has certainly grown as quiet and uncommunicative. Never the most garrulous of children, Supratik, now a young man of twenty-one, barely speaks and, when he can be bothered to, it is only in monosyllables as if he is conserving all the energy he needs to hold on to his cage-like frame. There is an incandescence about him: the large, blazing black eyes are devouring in their intensity, and the opacity of his inner world, its unknowable resilience, makes Sandhya fear far more for him than any mother should for her child. When had the change begun? She cannot put a time to it. Does that make her a bad mother? Where does he disappear to for days on end? Where is he, out until so late at night that she has long lost any handle on when, or if, he returns? Why has he become like a furtive ghost? How can one’s own son, her flesh and blood, nurtured in her womb for nine months, become such a stranger? Who is he?

  Sandhya’s hands shake as she refills the terracotta lamps with oil and she spills some of it onto the marble counter. She has the cast of mind that sees omens in the number of birds congregated on telegraph wires and portents in a child’s killing of a scurrying spider or touching food with the left hand – nothing falls outside a predestined design – and the small spill grips her heart. Is Ma Lakshmi trying to tell her something? Is she offended? Has she, Sandhya, not done something right in the daily ceremony or in last year’s big puja? The very contiguity of her worries about Supratik and the oil spill makes her think of the minor accident as heaped with meaning about some imminent evil related to her son, maybe some danger that is about to befall him. As she mulls on this, a cold fear rises in her and she forgets to ring the bell that announces the evening in auspiciously.

  I

  I want to set down an account of all that has happened and is happening. When you hear different voices chattering away afterwards, all with their shadows and half-truths and lies and fiction, you can come back to this and think that you and only you have the truth. That is all I can give you. But after you’ve read it, burn everything. On no account must a shred of these letters and journals be found on you or in the house. You will soon find out why I’m asking you to do this.

  Did you know that Calcutta was the capital of British India until 1912? The English built this city by bringing together mosquito-infested swamps and marshes and mud. Today, walking down Chowringhee, with its rows of palatial buildings and arcades and shops on one side, the huge Maidan on the other, the towering Monument off Mayo Road in Esplanade, can you tell that this was just a vast expanse of silt? The British left our country twenty years ago, but their handiwork will remain for ever.

  You may never get a chance to walk up and down Chowringhee, so let me try and put it into words for you. The grandeur of the Great Eastern Hotel alone would make you slack-jawed with awe. On the street level of this part of Chowringhee, it’s one long colonnade, sometimes interrupted by cross-streets: the paved footpath gives way to Chowringhee Road and Bentinck Street on one side; on the other you have shop after shop selling jewellery, fancy goods, liquor, clothes, luxury items, imported food, watches, shawls, carpets and rugs, chandeliers, lights and candelabra, carved wooden boxes, antiques . . . whatever money can buy you can get in these shops. An endless fountain of things. They can dazzle and blind you. Left off north Chowringhee, on the colonial splendour of Old Court House Street, sits the Great Eastern. The first floor of this blindingly white building is above the colonnade, as if to lift its elite guests and residents a few feet above the torrent of ordinary life outside.

  I have never been inside its rooms or to the restaurant, the ballroom, the bar, the shops that still display the sign of the British crown and the words ‘By appointment to HM the King Emperor and HM the Queen Empress’, the tearoom where waiters in full regalia – cinched waistband; high, pleated headgear; sash; brass buttons; cuffs; starched uniform – bow low and bring in tea that you and I will never drink. But you can walk around – if you’re properly dressed and do not attract the suspicion of the uniformed guards and staff – and see the gravelled drive, the blue swimming pool, the stone and marble and glass of the building, the gardens, the well-tended lawns, the flowers . . . even Nature seems to oblige the moneyed.

  But my concern is not with the inside. I have tried to give you the tiniest glimpse of it, so that you can better imagine the world that is my concern – the world beyond the walls of the Great Eastern Hotel, the world immediately outside, at its doorstep. If you walk down the colonnaded arcade below the hotel at dawn, just as the dawn chorus has started, long before the luxury shops have opened or the mad bustle of life in Chowringhee and BBD Bag has begun, you will see a very different view. Here, lying on their gamchha, a jute sack, a piece of tarpaulin or plastic or whatever scrap of cloth they can spare after wrapping their bodies, is a row of sleeping men curled up like foetuses. Those who have sandals use them as pillows, otherwise they will be stolen. Those who don’t, do without, resting their heads on the concrete. Their vests are full of holes, they wear dirty, threadbare lungis that ride up while they are asleep, exposing their shame to the world, the soles of their feet are so cracked that they look like parched land during a particularly bad drought, they have nothing to protect them from the morning drop in temperature. Extreme exhaustion clings to their faces and the shadows under their eyes, even when they’re sleeping the sleep of the near-dead. Only ten feet separate them from the world of extreme wealth. Inside-outside: the world forever and always divides into those two categories. Inside, the amount of water used daily to keep the lawns and gardens so lush could provide drinking water to each of these men for a month. Outside, these men have to walk miles sometimes to get to a public hand-pump. On the way, if
they collapse of thirst, even dogs won’t piss into their mouths to slake their dried tongues and throats. These men piss on the road, shit behind a bush or by a railway track, eat one meal of muri or chhatu a day, if they are lucky, rummage in the footpaths and drains surrounding New Market to see if someone has left a stub of banana in its peel or a corner of a shingara in a sal-leaf plate. They fight off the swarm of beggars who are also looking for food thrown away by the sated rich, they wash in the muddy brown water gushing out of broken standpipes. Do you remember that poem I read out to you? ‘Poetry, I bid you goodbye today. / The world is prosey with hunger / The full moon is like a piece of singed bread.’ You might see the pale bronze-coloured full moon, but they see, in its round shape, something to eat.

  Who do you think they are? They are not beggars, and they are certainly not the worst-off in our country – they have the clothes on their backs and the physical ability to work, at least for now. They haven’t yet found a foothold in a slum, but the lucky ones among them will. A slum will offer them a roof made of sheet plastic, maybe of bundles of hay held together by wooden stakes to form a tent. They won’t always have to sleep in the open like this. But, in a few years, most of them will contract a disease – TB, cholera, dysentery, malaria – and die like animals. Do you know what happens to their dead? To take them to a crematorium would mean paying the cremation fee, registering the death. That means a death certificate and money; in fact, more money than they earn in a week. It means a name, an address, a next of kin, a date of birth. They have nothing. So they are slipped into the Hooghly in the dead of the night. There the corpses rot and bleach and bloat, wash up ashore, get half-eaten by dogs and foxes, rot on land for a while, then get pulled back into the water during high tide . . . even in death their blighted lives won’t let go of them.