The Lives of Others

by Neel Mukherjee

  In the brimming light of the early morning a gauzy mist lies on the ground in shreds and patches, a mist so thin that you have to look away and then quickly back to perceive it; gazed at for too long, it disappears. The garden at the back of the Ghosh house is full of fragrant shiuli, some flowers having fallen on the grass in the night, making that small section of the garden look like a green shawl flecked with white in one corner. If you look minutely, you can pick out the orange stalks of the flowers; a subtler, more delicately patterned shawl.

  There is the smell of puja in the air: a crisp, cool, weightless sensation. In the collective Bengali imagination, fields of kaash phul, with their enormous plumes of satiny cream flowers, bowing gracefully to the clement autumn breeze, are easily visualised, although there are no patches of pampas grass to be seen anywhere, not in this part of the city anyway. And to the collective ear the sound of the dhaak, beaten to a whole complex repertoire of rhythms and syncopations by the dhaaki, is already veering on the air, phrasing a sudden sentence in the mind of someone here, a group of words spoken by someone there, to follow the beat and curve of its percussive line. With one voice, the choir made up of the grass, the drum, the sky, the dew sings out, ‘Holiday, holiday, holiday’.

  Knowing well that there will be a possessive rush to grab the puja special autumn issue of Ultorath between Ma, Pishi, Boro-kaki and herself, Baishakhi picks up the family copy, which has arrived that very morning along with bumper issues of Nabokallol, Anandamela (for the children, she thinks derisively) and Ananda Bazar Patrika, and smuggles it to her room. She has a quick flick through it – novels by Ashapurna Devi, Bimal Kar, Bimal Mitra, Shankar. Two years earlier the serialised novels in Ultorath and Nabokallol would have been forbidden reading for her, on the grounds that they were for adults, and she would have been asked to stick to Anandamela, but those rules have now been relaxed somewhat, although she is not wholly confident that her mother or Pishi will not tell her off if she is caught with her head buried in either of these magazines. She hides the copy under her pillows and decides to avoid any possible impediment to her reading by taking it up to the roof terrace after lunch and reading it there, away from the traffic of people in the house, while sitting with her back to the sun, drying her long hair. Possibly with a bowl of mango pickle by her side. Thrilled at the prospect of the treat she has just planned to give herself, she skips to her parents’ room to consolidate her joy by going through the new clothes she has received for Puja, which is only ten days away.

  A similar thought may have occurred to Chhaya, for she decides to take out her new Puja clothes from her almirah and arrange them in order of the five days of the festival. But what should have been gloating joy quickly topples over into a restless bitterness as she contemplates the saris laid out on her bed: two pure silks, one tangail, one tashar, one kota, one for each of the five days of Puja. Last year she had had seven, the year before that, eight. She does not take into account the two she has bought herself: those do not count; only the things given one as presents truly matter.

  This year her brother Priyo has given her one sari. One only. The tangail. Admittedly it is from Adi Dhakeshwari Bastralaya on Rashbehari Avenue, but Purnima, his wife, has been given four saris. That is four times what Chhaya has received from him. And it is only by guesswork, with a bit of judicious snooping, that she has arrived at that figure. There are only four that she has been able to ascertain; in reality it could well be more, say, seven or eight. The truth will be discovered only over the five days of Puja. She will be watching her sister-in-law’s outfits like a hungry vulture.

  As if this were not enough, Buli, her niece, has boasted of ten – ten! – sets of new clothes, including two ghaghras, which are all the rage, and four saris, which Chhaya thinks the girl is too young to wear. No doubt most of them are from her father. They, or to be more accurate, she, she, the mother, has spoilt the girl rotten. Chhaya can already discern the incipient signs – a defiance somewhere in Buli’s eyes, an immodesty in the way she holds herself, a growing tendency to answer back and a complete indifference to her studies, a fact corroborated by her school reports: she barely scrapes through each year. Her secondary-school results are due shortly after the Pujas. It is Chhaya’s belief that the girl will perform so miserably in her first public examination that she will be asked to leave Gokhale Memorial and join an inferior school to continue for the school-leaving certificate. This is exactly what happens when one has an uneducated mother, Chhaya thinks. She has been honing and sharpening the words she will let slip at a family dinner one evening, after the proof of the girl’s failure arrives. She rehearses the tone and inflection every day, perfects the pauses, moves one word here, two words there. She is waiting to pounce. Lately – and Chhaya cannot put her finger on it – there seems to be a . . . a . . . an air of furtiveness about Buli. She needs watching, that one.

  But that is not Chhaya’s business. She has evidence of something rather more urgent right under her nose, in the form of that mocking tangail sari. If Priyo can buy his wife four saris – at least four saris – and his daughter ten outfits, then giving her one sari is like a slap to her face. She feels the familiar pressure in her chest, the pressure of dammed-up water pushing against the sides that contain it. Her throat closes up, she lets herself go and prepares for a great deluge. But after several minutes of coaxing and trying, her eyes remain uncompliantly dry, which maddens her even further. She sits on her hands to prevent herself from tearing into strips of ribbons the poisoned tangail sari given by her brother.

  Even Madan-da and Gagan and the other servants have got one article of clothing from her brother for puja. Has she now been demoted to their level? Is this the lot of the unmarried sister who has overstayed her welcome at her parents’ house? Has she become unwanted because they have not been able to marry her off? This time the tears oblige, although only for a short while: it is a momentary light drizzle rather than a downpour and, instead of feeling relieved, something coils and loops and knots and reknots inside her.

  In the time she would come to remember as her two years of blazing brightly, Chhaya had received, on average, one marriage proposal a month. Much later, after the steady parade of suitors had fallen from ten a year to eight, then to four, and finally to one every two or three years, as the clock had ticked on and time had raced and rushed, it was openly said that being a graduate, having a BA degree, had harmed Chhaya’s chances of finding a husband. She did not know if it was in defiant retaliation or for consolation that she embarked on an MA after the flow of suitors had thinned to a trickle with all the volume of a newborn’s piss. Priyo had announced that he would not marry until someone was found for his sister first. That resolve, it transpired, had clearly not been set in stone, although, to be fair to him, he got married only when Chhaya had reached the age beyond which the issue became irreversible. Next, it was the turn of her younger brother, Bhola, to make a similarly rash promise. He had reneged the year his sister hit the point of no return: thirty.

  It had all started off with not insufficient promise. Chhaya was the only daughter of the wealthy Ghosh family, so the dowry and attendant gifts such as jewellery, consumer durables, kitchenware and clothes would have been very attractive; she was reading for a degree (at the initial stages this had been a positive thing, something to be proud, even boastful, of); she had ‘Spoken English’. More importantly, she had the right sun-sign with the right planets in alignment – Pisces with Venus ascendant in the fifth house of Jupiter – to make an auspicious bride.

  But the dizzying, whirling, magical roulette of matches, so rich and teasing with possibilities, had proved to be a slippery wheel. The laws of probability, while seeming so amenable to providing not one but a whole suite of matches, seemed disobliging when it came to achieving that one crucial hit of success and had somehow always tricked and wrong-footed her so that she remained outside the circle of the favoured. Some element in the whole set of required or desirable qualities had either not
been satisfied or had been lacking. If the family of one prospective groom approved of everything and the marriage deal seemed almost closed, suddenly the question ‘And do you cook?’, or the demand that she would be forbidden to work once she was married, would have the effect of a ghost entering the room, chilling everyone to silence, ushering in the instant end of that particular match.

  On a couple of occasions some incongruence during the matching of Chhaya’s horoscope with the suitor’s, discovered at quite an advanced stage of the matchmaking process, had finished off things. Charubala had raged, ‘Why did they not bother to find out earlier? Why did they get our hopes up, leading us on this merry dance? Low people, I say, low, common people! Good thing that our daughter didn’t go to the home of such lowlives.’

  In moments of tremulous, private introspection a shadow of an admission flitted through her mind that it was not such a good thing after all, that on the balance of things it was better to have a daughter married than to carp about such hair-splitting on the part of the suitors’ families. It also struck her that circumstances had so tumbled over to their opposite that they were now the party with the suit, they were the real and true suitors, not the steadily diminishing stream of men who came to see Chhaya.

  The family was forced to set their sights lower once they realised that the high noon of matchmaking had inexorably passed. First, they relaxed the category of the groom’s profession. In the beginning, nothing but doctors and engineers would do, particularly with the parenthetical word ‘London’ or ‘Edinburgh’ after FRCS or MSc, but a while later that ‘London’ or ‘Edinburgh’ clause was silently dropped. Then they relinquished their hold on FRCS and MSc; an ordinary MBBS or BSc would suffice. Soon, those requirements too fell away as the search was broadened (diluted, some said) to other professions – lawyers, lecturers, businessmen. From here, it climbed down further to white-collar worker, bank-teller, government employee, school teacher, even, at the final, desperate stages, clerk.

  When even this didn’t produce a husband for Chhaya, other variables were tinkered with and revised. The dowry money climbed up by a factor of 1.5 with every rejection; to a refrigerator and cooking range were added a gramophone, a flat in Purna Das Road. Then the age of the candidates was relaxed – it had to be, Chhaya was not getting any younger – followed by an attendant loosening of criteria in the looks department. The words ‘fair’, ‘young’, ‘handsome’ were all deleted from the matrimonial ads in the newspapers. Ads put exclusively in the matrimonial columns of the English dailies – The Statesman, Amrita Bazar Patrika – started migrating furtively to the Bengali broadsheets, Ananda Bazar Patrika, even Jugantar. Charubala had a new set of portrait photographs taken of her daughter by Robin-da, the neighbourhood’s professional photographer. It emerged during these sessions that her face had looked too polygonal in the previous pictures, her chin and jaws too prominent, her forehead too broad. Quantities of make-up and snow and powder were applied so that the fact of her dark complexion would not be revealed to the groom’s family, at least not right at the beginning. The lighting was ramped up, cruel suns were shone on Chhaya’s face and she was made to look very slightly away from the lens, as if something was just beginning to catch her attention outside the frame, so that the camera would not be able to capture the fact that she was cross-eyed.

  Herein lay the rub. Chhaya had been born preternaturally dark and with a squint that was not immediately noticeable – it depended on the light and the angle of her head and how obliquely she turned her gaze on something – but once it was detected it was impossible to unknow it. All those crucial final questions, such as ‘And do you cook?’ or ‘Will you stop working once you get married?’, were really an occluded reaction to that detection; an irreversible decision had already been made.

  Her very name, which meant ‘shadow’, was a backhanded acknowledgement by her parents of the undeniable and omnipresent fact of her complexion. Through her girlhood and adolescence the less well-behaved girls in her school and the less decorous people of Basanta Bose Road had called her by several derogatory names, Kali, Kelti, all to do with her skin colour. Never to her face, of course, but they also did not make a great secret of it; a stage-whisper, a catcall, an overheard remark as she passed the loafers gathered outside Bhawanipur Tutorial Home: all these brought home to her, relentlessly, the inescapability of her skin colour. Stringent regimes of applying to her face ground red lentils, the cream top of whole milk, and dried orange peel made into a paste with cream had not wrought any change. The patented and unpatented whitening creams and lotions available in the shops had proved equally deceitful. Throughout all this, Charubala consoled and encouraged and empathised, holding out dark-skinned women who had made it in public life as role models, trying to overturn familiar habits of thought by making her daughter aware of some of the positive associations with negrescence – ‘Have you seen a cloud that is not dark? It is because of dark rain clouds that life thrives on earth’, or ‘The kaajol that women wear around their eyes is always black, never white’, or rhyming kaalo, black, with aalo, light.

  Ever since Chhaya had learned to identify the face looking back at her from the mirror as her own, she had been intimate with the fact – hard, unchangeable as fate and as merciless – of her own ugliness and, harder still, with the awareness that the world outside shared the knowledge too. To know that you are ugly is one thing, but to grow up with the imprint that it leaves on others’ thoughts, facial expressions, murmurs, talk, gossip is quite another; the former is a reckoning with one’s self, the latter an instilling of that most adamantine knowledge of all: that the world is as it is, and knocking your head against its hard shell is only going to break you, not dent the world.

  So the storm-fronts of girlhood – tears, capricious cruelty, tantrums, envy, brittle self-consciousness – had seemed to pass eventually after an unseasonably prolonged stay, but more intractable, more sustained damage was left behind in their wake.

  After five years of the drama of diminishment that was her matchmaking were played out, the neighbours started talking. Like all such examples of this genre, there was a great deal of histrionics about protecting the subject of gossip from unkindness, but drama, that is, fiction, was what it was, for it was seen to that Chhaya came to hear of what was being said about her via some circuitous route or the other. The usual, predictable things: she would die a spinster; the Ghoshes would never be able to get her off their hands; she would bring bad luck; that kind of dark skin (‘black, really, coal-black, ink-black, soot-black’) surely pointed to a dark fate; if the first face you saw after waking up was hers, your day was certain to be ruined; maybe there was something else wrong with her, something other than her dark complexion . . . and so it went on. Several kind-hearted people made ameliorative gestures: there were regular remarks along the lines of ‘What if she is so dark, she is remarkably well educated’ and the gradual currency of euphemisms for her skin colour – warmly glowing, a radiant darkness – that they thought shielded Chhaya from the misfortune she was born with. But all this was as leftovers from a small dinner party offered to a region ruined by famine: the gesture was noted, but the effect was nil. In the eyes of her suitors and their families, Chhaya had seen the instant knowledge, shocked, flickering, imperfectly repressed, as soon as she had walked into the drawing room. Beside that knowledge, everything was like her name – just a shadow.

  Armed with comb, Ultorath and a small stainless-steel bowl of mango pickle, Baishakhi stealthily runs up the stairs to the roof terrace. Lunch is just over, so most of the household is getting ready to go to bed for a light snooze. She is fairly certain that no one has seen her coming up here. Still on tiptoe, she makes her way to the west side of the prayer room; here she is sheltered from the eyes of any casual visitor to the terrace – someone coming up to hang out the washing, or clean out the prayer room. They would have to know she is up here to find her. She positions herself so that her back catches the October afternoon sun, l
oosens her still-damp hair and settles down with Ultorath in front of her. It is nearly three o’clock and her mind is very far from reading. It is almost time for Shobhon Datta, who lives next door, to come out onto his roof for his sneaky post-lunch cigarette. This is what Baishakhi has been really waiting for: the book, the bowl of pickle, even her comb and damp hair are just props in a pre-emptive drama of deception. If anyone finds her sitting here, with Shobhon on his terrace, the suspicion that she is romantically entangled with him will alight instantly on her. The props will then give her performance of wide-eyed innocence some credence.

  Without this deception, perpetrated by daughters and inevitably discovered by parents, aunts, servants and neighbours, played out, it would seem, since the very beginnings of family and society, the entire fabric of Bengali family life would be marred by a huge hole. There are ‘arranged marriages’ – the real, respectable, acceptable form of union between a man and a woman – decided by parents and families, not by the people getting married, and sanctioned by centuries of tradition and practice that say the daughter is her father’s property, to dispose of as he sees fit. A marriage is a social transaction; individuals come into it later, if at all. And then there are ‘love marriages’, where two people conduct their romance with the furtiveness of a shameful, sinful act, then take their hearts in their hands and decide to break the news to their families. They are transgressive, discordant, with all the desirability of the ruptures and havoc that a cyclone creates. They are also forbidden, and such a huge force of morality is brought to bear against them that they are practically irresistible. Baishakhi has taken the first steps in sowing the storm.