The Lives of Others

by Neel Mukherjee

  Shobhon, twenty, reluctant BCom student at City College, only son of the Datta family, which has made money recently in the catering business; Shobhon, who wears his hair long, wears a gold chain around his neck, has a reputation of being a Romeo, and leaves his shirt unbuttoned nearly down to his stomach so that the chain can be seen nestling in his chest hair like an iridescent snake in dark grass, duly emerges on the terrace of the Datta house. Baishakhi, who has been staring unblinkingly at the green-painted wooden door through which Shobhon will make his entrance, instantly looks down and pretends to be so deeply absorbed in her novel that she is oblivious to the sound of the door, to his appearance a mere fifteen or twenty feet away. Shobhon, a seasoned player, pretends too that he has come to the terrace merely to have a smoke away from the eyes of the elders in his house. The acts of lighting his Capstan Gold, of cupping the match in his hand to shield it from the breeze, of flinging the spent match away all seem to be done with a slight excess of movement, more than the actions themselves demand. He starts walking up and down the terrace, Baishakhi still apparently unnoticed. Baishakhi, breath held, blood pounding in her ears, eyes fixed unmovingly on the meaningless black scrawl of letters on the page, can hear his footsteps pacing back and forth. And then, without any prelude or warning, he comes over to the side of his terrace that she is facing, places his elbows on the parapet, leans forward and whispers, ‘Ashtami evening, eight o’clock, behind the puja pandal.’

  Baishakhi jumps out of her skin at this sudden violation of the tacit rules of the game. On no account are they supposed to look at each other in public, let alone speak. She stares at him, then gathers her wits about her and hisses, ‘What are you doing? Someone will see us. Don’t stand on this side of the roof.’

  He answers back, still whispering, ‘Who will see us? If anyone appears on your roof, I’ll see them before you do, I’ll move away immediately. They’ll never know.’

  ‘We can be seen from Mala-mashi’s roof, from Namita-di’s, Sunil-mama’s . . . If they look up, they'll see you. Please, please don’t stand here.’

  ‘How will you love, if you fear so much?’ Shobhon asks, neatly inverting the opening line of a popular Hindi film song. He is given to such smart wit at moments of great risk. As a result, Baishakhi finds him almost unbearably attractive. She colours furiously at the word ‘love’, floating so openly, so publicly, between them – a secret thought suddenly embodied and exposed by being spoken aloud – and cannot find a way to answer him.

  ‘Don’t forget, eight on ashtami evening, behind the puja pandal,’ he repeats, debonairly blows out some smoke rings, blue and fragile, and leaves the terrace through the green wooden door.

  Throughout lunch Chhaya has watched the movements and actions of everyone, like an undercover surveillance agent. Purnima has, as usual, eaten as much as a Bihari guard or a rickshaw-puller, almost up to her wrist in the mound of rice and dal and vegetables and fish curry; Baishakhi has, uncharacteristically, toyed with her food, her mind altogether far away; it seems that Arunima, monosyllabic but jumpy and lit up somewhat dangerously from within as if plotting grand arson or regicide, is following her older cousin into a private no-man’s territory too. It never crosses Chhaya’s mind that others could be thinking similar thoughts about her unnatural silence: where is her relentless carping, her flurry of barbs let loose at everyone, the measured drip of acid from her tongue?

  Chhaya had started off being unusually animated, asking everyone, nicely for a change, what plans they had for the rest of the afternoon, whether anyone would be interested in joining her for a few rounds of Ludo afterwards. When she had established what everyone was going to be doing – no one was remotely interested in Ludo or snakes-and-ladders – she lapsed into silence and let the viscous plan move up and down in her mind like the meniscus of an exotic poison.

  Malati, the maidservant, comes rushing upstairs from the kitchen just as lunch is ending and says excitedly to Purnima, ‘The knife-and-scissors sharpening man is going down the street now.’ Purnima gets up, energised and active, goes to the kitchen downstairs and orders, ‘Quick, quick, gather all the stuff, don’t forget the bonti. And all the scissors – all of them, they’re all blunt. Call Gagan, ask him to carry the stone mortar. Quick-quick, I don’t want to miss the sharpening man this time, he’s been quite elusive, we keep missing him. The sheel has lost its friction. Call Gagan, what are you waiting for? Here, I’ll take the rest downstairs, let me first wash my hands. Call out to the man to stop.’ And in a whirling vortex of activity, Purnima thud-thuds out, carrying a clattering, clinking armoury of assorted knives and scissors.

  Now that the sudden frenzy has blown over, Chhaya can hear the raucous cry of the dharwala cycling down the street, his call so stylised over time that you have to know what it is in the first place in order to identify it as the knife-sharpening-man’s call. An opportunity sent by Ma Kali, she thinks, as she too rises from the table and announces calmly, ‘I’m going to wash my hands now, I’m done. Arunima, if you’re going to watch all this sharpening, don’t stare at the sparks for too long, you’ll go blind. I know you like watching it, but be careful.’

  She leaves the table and goes to the sink in one corner of the room to wash her hands. Then she goes to her room one floor up, picks up a bottle of red nail polish and walks out again. Moving calmly and confidently, she takes the stairs down, back to the first floor, then goes to Purnima and Priyo’s room. New clothes are strewn on the bed lavishly. A quick look tells her that they are both Purnima’s and Baishakhi’s. She empties the bottle of nail polish on as many of the garments on the top layer as the small volume of cosmetic will allow. Then she returns upstairs to her room, the empty bottle held in her hand. The burn in her is still unassuaged.

  A small fear begins to form: she has to dispose of the empty bottle; what if they find it in her room? She lets the fear grow to the point where the accusing bottle glows with reproach. She picks it up and, calmly again, makes her way up to the roof. She is going to fling it far onto someone else’s roof and run away from the terrace as soon as the deed is accomplished. When she reaches the top landing, before she can push open the door to the terrace, she hears Baishakhi’s unmistakable voice, ‘If they look up, they’ll see you. Please, please don’t stand here’, followed by something unintelligible in a man’s voice. She begins to turn back to escape downstairs, but some knowledge gives her pause. She stands still for a while and the embers of the burn inside her suddenly flare up into flames of unexpected joy.

  Earlier that day, while Purba had been filling up a bucket from the tap in the corner of the courtyard, the maid, Malati, had surreptitiously given her some Vim, which she had smuggled from upstairs in a small newspaper pouch.

  ‘You do your washing-up here with ashes and charcoal, seeing that makes me feel small, I do their washing with Beem, so I bring some down. Hide it, hide it, if anyone finds out, I’ll be kicked out,’ she whispered to Purba, slipping her the packet of powder. Noticing Purba’s hesitancy and fear, Malati added, ‘Take, take, quickly.’ Both women looked upstairs with guilt and fear.

  Touched by this gratuitous act of kindness from a servant, Purba’s eyes pricked with tears. But sentimentality was a luxury, she knew, and fear had the upper hand. She whispered, ‘Come into my room. If anyone sees you standing here talking to me, you’ll have a lot of questions to answer.’

  The two women scuttled into Purba’s little room. ‘You’ll get into trouble one of these days,’ she said to Malati.

  ‘Only if I get caught. But I’m careful.’

  ‘Why take the risk? I manage fine with charcoal,’ Purba said, trying to keep her voice steady; she felt soft, malleable.

  ‘What can I say? We are servants, illiterate, poor people, it is not our place to open our mouths. But we too have eyes and ears, we can see and hear what goes on.’

  Purba could only remain silent in the face of such empathy.

  ‘Do you think we don’t know that Boro-boüdi secretl
y sends down used clothes and other stuff for your son and daughter? They’re growing up on leftovers and bones, those two; they’ll come good one day, you mark my words. Those who suffer, win.’

  At the mention of her children, Purba couldn’t restrain herself. She covered her mouth with her sari to hide her trembling chin, her twisting mouth.

  The timing for doing the washing-up has been calculated by Purba with the utmost deliberation: late afternoon, when everyone upstairs will be deep into their siesta, so there is no chance of getting caught using Vim. She will have to be very quiet too; no clanging and clattering pots and pans that could wake up her mother-in-law.

  While doing the washing-up, Purba hears a commotion break out upstairs. A few minutes of straining to listen – and it does not require much effort, for Purnima’s voice carries for miles – establishes the main facts: Baishakhi has spilled a bottle of nail polish and ruined three saris and two salwar-kameez sets. Alight with rage, Purnima has mercilessly thrashed her daughter. Everyone in the family is now assembled on the first floor to witness the show and contribute their two-anna worth of opinion.

  Kalyani comes out of Purba’s room and listens, wide-eyed, thirstily soaking up the sounds of the circus upstairs until Purba shoos her away: ‘Go inside, someone will see you gaping and grinning.’

  Perhaps Purba is only trying to protect her daughter from the knowledge of how many new items of clothing the people upstairs have received and given, a knowledge that will extinguish the joy her daughter is clearly deriving from the drama. For the three of them, a separate household really, have received only one set each, the obligatory one bought at the last minute, from cheap shops and hawkers in Gariahat: Sona, a short-sleeved shirt and a pair of trousers two sizes too big for him; Kalyani, a salwar-kameez set; and Purba, a block-printed cotton sari. They will shrink, their colours will run, they will look like floor-swabbing cloths after the first wash, then they will start falling apart at the seams; you can predict all this by taking one look at the garments.

  Washing-up completed, Purba crosses over to her side of the courtyard and enters her room. She feels like a nap, but there are a hundred and one things to be done – darning the holey mosquito net alone will take up the rest of the afternoon. She decides instead to fold the dry washing and put it away.

  ‘Kalyani, why don’t you give me a hand with folding the big things?’ she asks her daughter.

  When all the folding is done, Purba starts putting the clothes away in the small wooden cupboard that houses practically all her earthly belongings. In it, tucked carefully under a bedsheet so that it does not stick out egregiously, is a flat parcel wrapped in paper and string. What is it? she thinks; how did it get here? She takes it out and, in her impatience to open it, knots up the string, so she lifts it up and holds it to her mouth to cut the string with her teeth. A piece of paper flutters to the floor. She picks it up and reads the austere note that does not give much away: Didn’t have enough money to buy you a puja sari, forgive me, but here’s something for Sona and Kalyani. She opens the package with trembling hands, barely able to swallow the growing lump in her throat. Inside it are a shirt and a pair of short trousers for Sona and a frock for Kalyani. She turns to face the cupboard, pushing her head inside, pretending to be busy sorting clothes, to hide her wet face from her daughter.

  From seven o’clock on ashtami morning, the priest has been conducting half-hourly public prayer sessions at the pandal. The PA system, which has been rigged up for the loud dispersal of music day and night from the two ends of the road and from the pandal through the five days of puja (a mandatory practice, this), is used for the purpose of worship only on this day. Flocks of residents, all got up in the finest of their new clothes, go in family groups or with friends and neighbours to congregate in orderly rows inside the pandal, face the stage where the statues of the goddess and her children stand looking at them and, led by the priest’s chanting, repeat the Sanskrit slokas and throw tufts of flowers to the deities in worship. Those who cannot go, such as the infirm Prafullanath, sit on their balconies and hear the priest’s voice, intoning the verses, issue from the PA system and feel comforted and consoled.

  Baishakhi goes with her parents to the pandal for anjali around noon. She sees Shobhon, an ardent worker in the Puja Committee, as busy as clockwork with some other young men, and looks through him. She has known that she will see him and, though she does not give the slightest indication of having done so, he knows that she has clocked him and she knows that he knows. As she stands at the bottom of the stage, between her parents, trying to gather her mind to the gravitas of communal worship, she notices that Shobhon has taken it upon himself to distribute the flowers for anjali to the people gathered for worship. The sudden thudding of her heart is raucous to her own ears: what is he doing? She imagines every eye there in the pandal on them. She is certain Baba and Ma, flanking her closely, almost touching her sides, can feel the heat radiating off her. When Shobhon reaches them, she can barely bring herself to put her hand into the big basket of flowers to pick out a small handful of marigold petals. She imagines a spectral brush of his arm against her fingers as he moves on to her mother, and then to the next person and then the next along the row, perfectly composed, cool and unruffled, as if she were only just another familiar neighbourly face. Baishakhi keeps her head resolutely down. Her face is burning. Coursing through her heart and mind is a seam of a delicious mixture of outrage, fear and awe at Shobhon’s foolhardiness.

  What is said about the darkest spot being directly under the light is nowhere more true than of the area behind the puja pandal: all that crammed symphony of festival lighting barely a few yards away does not have much effect on the dark here. Here the jutting ribs and carcass of the pandal have not received the care of being covered up with yards of coloured cloth; here you have the feeling of being in the wings of the makeshift stage of a travelling theatre company in the provinces, all bamboo, old tarpaulin, discarded nails, coiled snakes of rough ropes, damp earth, patchy clumps of tough, unruly grass. Here Baishakhi stands, on ashtami evening, quivering with fear that someone has spied her slipping into the shadows at the back of the pandal. If someone has noticed a young girl negotiating her way through the narrow gap on the side of the big tent, they would indeed have been alerted enough to ask themselves why she was heading for the back, the discarded side as it were: a tryst with someone perhaps?

  Chhaya has lured Priyo into sitting with her on the balcony on the first floor – Let’s go and look at people from the verandah before we go out later in the evening, the crush of people will be terrible now, it’ll certainly ease – and from their vantage position they have an unimpeded view of the milling crowd, the pandal, the sea of faces and heads where the known mingle with the unknown. The PA system airs songs from the hit film An Evening in Paris. Chhaya chatters on, ‘Look, look, Rupa-boüdi is wearing a parrot-green silk-tangail. Gorgeous! Pity her face is so scarred by that terrible teenage acne. O ma, Pushpa-babu has come out too, he’s using his cane, someone’s helping him. Priyo, isn’t that Pushpa-babu? Not very considerate of them to have let the old, ill man out at this peak sightseeing hour.’

  Priyo gets up and peers. ‘Yes, it is. His first time in years, no?’

  ‘First time since we heard he was not well. We should persuade Baba to go out too.’

  Then the meandering aimlessness of all this ends as the grail swims into view. Chhaya tugs at Priyo’s sleeve and says in a voice pitched perfectly between surprise and uncertainty, ‘Priyo, look, isn’t that Buli? Why is she trying to go to the back of the pandal? Quick, quick, she’s about to disappear.’

  Priyo asks, ‘Where? Where?’ before he manages to pick out the flash of an orange kurta, which, like a rare visitation from a species of butterfly assumed to be lost, disappears almost as soon as it has been spotted. ‘Couldn’t make out anything, it’s so dark. Are you sure?’

  Chhaya, with measured casualness, then says, ‘Now look, isn’t that our next-d
oor neighbour’s son, Shobhon, going there now?’

  Priyo, suddenly alert, sharp, looks again, this time with more focused intent.

  Yes, it is.

  Baishakhi, after much coaxing, has laid her head on Shobhon’s chest. He has clinched the embrace with an apposite line from a new film, Aamne Samne, starring Shashi Kapoor and Sharmila Tagore. He holds her close to him, trying to move, as subtly, as imperceptibly as he can, from stroking her back to stroking her sides. All he wants to do is fondle her breasts, but he will have to be very, very slow and cunning. Baishakhi, beginning to feel as if she is free-falling towards a floor that isn’t there, has at last relinquished her nervous attention to all kinds of sounds that could announce an intruder.

  A sudden crashing, like a miniature stampede, and rapidly advancing voices make them spring up, but, frozen by utter panic, they remain entangled when Baishakhi’s father and mother appear like vengeful, unappeasable gods.

  To the background music of An Evening in Paris, distorted ever so slightly by the volume of its amplification, thrilled neighbours see a weeping Baishakhi being frogmarched home by her parents, both of whose faces are black and brimful with imminent thunder.

  Severe weather rips through the Ghosh home and, when not inflicting damage, it sits brooding, umbrous, threatening, a pall over day-to-day activity. The frenzy first. Several rounds of immediate disciplining follow the discovery of Baishakhi: intense interrogation by her mother, physical punishment in the form of generous slapping during the questioning sessions, locking the girl in her room. All of these are accompanied by hysterically raised voices. Crueller measures follow. A lock is added to the door to the terrace. It remains shut day and night, and Purnima holds the only key to it. Baishakhi is forbidden to leave the house. When school reopens after the puja holidays, she is to be accompanied there and received at the gates after school is over and chaperoned back home. She cannot meet any of her friends unless they come to see her at home. These visiting friends are questioned fiercely by Purnima and asked if they are carrying letters or acting as go-betweens in any capacity. If she could, she would have frisked them. There is a clotted silence in the house, pulsating with reproach and judgement; Baishakhi feels she is being treated like a pariah, which indeed she is. All eyes are upon her, the elders’ dark with accusation that she has brought shame upon herself and the name of the Ghoshes; the children’s awed, embarrassed and a bit frightened, because they know she has done something terrible, but what exactly they have not been told. They are shielded from the whole truth in case it corrupts their morals. There is nothing new or unusual in all this; it runs along the well-ploughed furrows of middle-class Bengali life.