The Lives of Others

by Neel Mukherjee

  It was around this time that Bhola developed a habit that was, in a more modified form, to mark him for life. It began with him baby-talking to Som – idle, nonsensical chatter, strings of pure sounds that were only a simulacrum of words, opaque, meaningless, not just a distortion of adult speech through the glass of the perceived aural understanding of a baby with one or two nonce-words thrown in. It seemed to be an entire vocabulary, giving the impression at once of being spun out on the hoof and of being a fully limned and realised world, which Bhola had had inside him all the time and had been waiting for another creature from that undiscovered planet to appear and spark him off into communication. A sea of private language, with intoned waves riding up and down, the surface a mesh of movements and agitation of inflection, song-like points of expressiveness, of ascendants and descendants, walls of thick-stacked sound-cascades in motion. It was like hearing any language, of which you did not understand a single word, being spoken. It gave the hearer the feeling of listening to pure abstraction, like music, except that this language had no meaning under the surface of its words; it was pure abstraction of a kind.

  Bhola returned from school, the local Mitra Institution, in the afternoons and rushed to his little brother the instant he was through the door. Som gave a smile of room-filling radiance when he saw Bhola and they launched into their world of nebulous music, now lit up here and there by an occasional word or phrase of Bengali. It was a wonder to watch: the toddler wide-eyed, rapt – you could even imagine his ears, delicate as sea-shell, pricked to catch every note – while his elder brother set him in the middle of the torrent, cut off the rope tethering him to his life of meals and sleep and children’s rhymes and mollycoddling, and set him wildly adrift.

  ‘What you say, ashes and cinders, I cannot understand a word,’ Charubala complained; half-heartedly, because she was secretly pleased to have such a ready tool for calming the toddler. Instead of Madan, Bhola was now summoned to deal with the more refractory moods of the new child. And Bhola was so effective that Charubala’s initial wonderment at his powers gave way to an uneasy sense of being spooked.

  ‘What if he grows up speaking that nonsense-language?’ she asked one day.

  ‘I’m not teaching him anything. Anyway, I speak to him in Bengali too.’

  But at the age of two years and seven months Somnath, to the anxiety of his parents, had not spoken a single word, not even basic things such as ‘Baba’, ‘Ma’, ‘Dada’. He stared and heard everything and the way his huge eyes took on the look of attentive stillness meant that he understood some things, if not all, but speak he could not or would not.

  Charubala badgered Bhola. ‘Does he speak when you’re alone with him?’ she asked.

  ‘No, he only listens. And laughs.’

  ‘Do you expect me to believe this? That you spend so much time with the boy, eating the worms in his ears,’ she exclaimed in pique, ‘and he doesn’t even open his mouth?’

  ‘No, he doesn’t. I’m telling the truth.’

  ‘Lying again?’ she threatened.

  Bhola, intimidated, said, ‘You can come and listen if you don’t believe me.’

  ‘Fine, that’s what I shall do. But what if he sees me and decides not to speak?’

  ‘But he doesn’t speak anyway!’

  Charubala was on a roll now. ‘I know what I’ll do. I’ll hide outside and you carry on as you do. If you tell him that I’m outside, I shall punish you severely.’

  Charubala alerted Madan; no one was to go into the room and no one was to pass outside it for the duration of her spying. She heard Bhola constructing walls of sound with the ease and fluency of a wizard. They seemed to flow out of him and, once in the common world, they remained there, of their own magical accord. On their surface Bhola occasionally stuck a window or two of comprehensible Bengali words – ‘bird’ featured more than once, and she noted ‘monkey’ and ‘glow-worm’ – but those came as mild shocks to her, embedded as they were in such a huge, furled fabric of strangeness that the familiar became the exceptional, the odd. She could not bring herself to peep in case Som caught her watching, and all she had was this strange music to go on, but for the quarter of an hour that she listened with intense concentration she only heard Som let out a carillon of laughter twice. That was all.

  The experiment failed.

  Som was now taken by his father to a renowned paediatrician in Shyambazar. The doctor tested the child’s hearing, asked him to open his mouth, stick out his tongue, say ‘Aaaaa’ – Bhola was taken too, to make Som comply – and finally said to Prafullanath, ‘Nothing wrong with him. He’ll speak in time.’

  ‘But he is nearly three years old and he hasn’t said one word,’ Prafullanath said.

  ‘Have you ever come across an adult who doesn’t speak unless he is dumb? And the child isn’t a deaf-mute, I assure you. Take him away, he’ll start speaking soon.’

  And he did. Shortly after the visit to the doctor, Som exploded into speech – ordinary, Bengali speech, halting, part-incomprehensible as a child’s speech usually is, but with not a single element of Bhola’s private language adulterating it. Charubala was relieved of a worry that was beginning to become burdensome.

  She called Bhola aside and said, ‘You must not talk any more nonsense to Som. He’s learning how to speak, I don’t want you to hamper that.’

  Bhola felt crushed. Did this mean his special claim on Som was over? Would he not be his little brother’s favourite person any longer? Something settled on him; he began to feel heavy.

  ‘But . . . but he . . . he seems to like it,’ Bhola said.

  ‘Never mind like. You listen to me. I don’t want to catch you speaking all that rubbish to him. Is that clear?’ she warned sternly.

  He nodded his bowed head once. His eyes began to prick, but he was determined not to cry, at least not in front of his mother. He felt more baffled than sorrowful; why did Som abandon him so capriciously?

  Madan-da slipped into the room. He came up to Bhola and whispered, ‘Ma’s scolded you?’

  Bhola nodded. He was not going to be able to hold back the tears, definitely not if he had to speak.

  ‘Come with me to the kitchen, I have something for you,’ Madan-da said. ‘But you mustn’t tell anyone.’

  Bhola couldn’t look up. What if Madan-da saw his tears?

  ‘Come on, quick. We don’t want to be seen, do we?’

  The boy followed him to the kitchen. The betrayal was still smarting, but it felt somewhat less keen now that a promise of something – what could it be? – had been held out to him.

  In the kitchen Madan-da stood him in a corner and said, ‘Close your eyes. Hold out your palms in a scoop. And no cheating, no opening your eyes while my back is turned.’

  Bhola, eyes squeezed shut into tight crinkles, shook his head vigorously. Suddenly, in the bowl of his hands, the touch of cool, solid things. He opened his eyes. It took him a couple of seconds to work out what they were: aniseed lozenges and sour-hot-sweet boiled sweets. His face shone with joy.

  And then, unknown even to himself, something in the substance of his chatter with Somnath, so irksome to his mother, changed. His opaque communication with Som started filling up with light, becoming translucent with meaning: he started spinning new worlds in Bengali.

  It happened like this. On a bright, rain-washed afternoon in October, Bhola stood on the three steps to the garden and watched Som, who had somehow managed to escape Madan-da or Uma-di’s supervision, bewitched by dragonflies hovering in the air, flitting about from bush to shrub to unkempt grass. Bhola saw Som freeze for a few seconds, then start to move on the tips of his toes, one step after one careful step, stalking a dragonfly that had landed on a leaf. From a window on the first floor, their father too had his attention caught by the sight of his youngest son creeping up on something in the untidy clump of sparse vegetation under the guava tree. Bhola and Prafullanath watched, immobilised, as if the tiptoed, alert unbreathingness of Som had transmitted itself
like an electric current to his watchers, binding them hushed as one. Som edged forward, inch by inch, magically in touch with the atavistic hunter gene in humans, closed in on the unsuspecting insect, his right hand reaching out, his forefinger and thumb brought forward in a pinch, his breath held . . . then he had it. A dragonfly, curled up in an inverted C, was now captive in the tweezers of Som’s little fingers.

  Prafullanath could not see from upstairs what Som had caught, only his look of amazement. He felt a slight tightness in his chest, but the residue of the hypnotic scene still kept him immobile. Bhola, downstairs, shared the remainder of the same transfixion. A delayed thought was about to take shape in Prafullanath’s mind – what if the boy had caught something that could give him a nasty sting or even a poisonous bite? – but it was still held in abeyance.

  The insect, caught by its folded-up wings, had instantly curved and grasped Som’s finger with all the thread-thin limbs in its head and thorax. This caused an unpleasant, rough sensation, and the little boy, somewhat afraid now, loosened his fingers. The dragonfly flew out, free but dazed, and in that instant a brown mynah, which had, in all probability, had its beady yellow-rimmed eye on the captive insect all this while, swooped down from the roof of the house in one graceful arc, caught hold of the dragonfly in mid-air and, without a break in its flight curve, a miraculous hyperbola, ascended back to where it had taken off from, insect clamped in its beak, the crumpled bits of wings and the thin line of the abdomen poking out of that bright-yellow vice. Everything happened in a minute flash of time, but it played out to all three of them, slowed down and stretched.

  Som turned his astonished head to follow the bird’s flight-path, wheeling around to see it perch on the terrace. The look on his face was such a roil of reactions that Prafullanath’s heart turned; all he wanted to do was to rush down to the garden, swoop his little boy up in his arms and make him forget whatever upset he had been caused. Bhola, on the other hand, was in the grip of a twofold marvelling: at the smooth, predatory art of the mynah, so swift, so unerring, and at Som’s shock at witnessing this god-knows-how-many-in-one chance of the freak yet perfectly poised hunting and his role in it as a facilitator. It was as if Som were the servant who had been duped into capturing the prize that his master would consume regally; it was the deception that hurt.

  Spell broken, Bhola ran towards Som, who could only point to the air, in the direction of the opportunistic bird. Then the little boy burst into tears.

  Bhola gathered him in his arms, kissed his cheeks and consoled him. ‘No, no, my kushu pushu, it’s all right, it’s all right.’

  Som howled and said something that was more garbled by the sobbing than his usual clotted child’s speech, then howled some more.

  Bhola tried to divert his attention by extemporising on a story, an old trick, but so far an effective one. But, for the first time, the words that emerged were not in the shared private language; the world began to be spun in children’s Bengali, ordinary, comprehensible, reassuring.

  By the time Bhola was about five minutes into his telling, Somnath was a figure carved in stone.

  A shout came from inside the house: ‘Bholaaaa, Sooom, what are you doing outside? Come in right now. I’m making bananas-milk-puffed-rice for you. Come in quickly.’ Their mother.

  Som clung tighter to his brother’s neck and shook his head forcefully. Bhola put a finger to his lips and said, ‘I’ll come with you too.’ The hold on his neck relaxed somewhat.

  And so Bhola’s logorrhoea began to mutate into story-telling, the transparent, sense-filled words now a clear pane of glass between sound and meaning, offering a view of a fantastically confabulated world of wood-fairies, incarnations and metempsychosis, of imaginary beasts and birds and their magical powers, of mangoes so sour that a whole forest of monkeys was struck dumb after eating them off the trees . . . and so it went on, over the years.

  One day Adinath overheard, in passing, a particularly colourful story about speaking fish that could transform themselves into malignant spirits residing in tamarind trees and remarked, ‘Arrey, you are not half-bad at spinning tales. When you grow up, you will be a writer.’

  Bhola, who saw his eldest brother as an adult really, and accorded him appropriate respect, felt himself puff up with pride. The stories got wilder.

  His mother reacted differently. ‘All day you talk rubbish. Where do you pick up these monsoony tales? Really, I sometimes wonder if there is madness in store for you. Your father used to say that there was madness in his family, some uncle or aunt. Why can’t you concentrate on your studies instead? I can see that your relationship with your books is nearly over.’

  Bhola’s school reports had seen a proliferation of marks in red ink. He had scraped through Classes Five and Six, just, struggling chiefly with his English. The English teacher at school, a brown saheb, pointed out repeatedly that his ‘native tongue’ got in the way of English acquisition: Bhola’s spelling was appalling; he read aloud in a ridiculously Bengali-accented English, confusing the ‘z’ sound with ‘j’ and short accents with long; his grammar was parlous; his sentence-construction still at the level of a seven-year-old’s. English was a key subject in school. If he did not pass his English exams, he would have to repeat the year.

  Meanwhile, he was more than happy to recline on the easy chair on the front balcony, watching the shapes of the white clouds against the blue sky: a crocodile with its mouth slightly open, trying to swallow a fluffy dog, which was heading straight into the fall of the veil on a woman’s face . . . Now, how did that configuration happen? Was there someone behind the blue of the sky, drawing out the shapes with a giant pencil that had white clouds in it instead of lead? There, there was an idea . . .

  IV

  Nitai used to live on the periphery of the neighbourhood of his caste, one circle inwards from where we were. There seemed to be some taboo about speaking of him, or at least referring to him directly. But his ghostly presence and the story of his fate were just under the surface of all our conversations with the villagers. How could it not have been so?

  I fought my urge to bring up his name in my usual daily chit-chat with Kanu and Bijli until one night I gave in. I asked Bijli, while she was serving me food, if she knew Nitai or his wife.

  – Nitai’s wife used to come sometimes. In the beginning she couldn’t bring herself to ask for food, but I could tell. She used to bring the baby and the girl with her. Dry and thin, all of them, like jute sticks. I felt very bad for them. Sometimes I gave them what I could, not much, a handful of rice, another of dal, maybe some waxed gourds or ridged gourds. Shame held her back from asking for food, but I knew. And then that shame went when the hunger became too much. It filled my soul with pity. Poor thing! The almighty gave her a burnt forehead at birth. Towards the end she stopped coming. Maybe out of shame – she had been reduced to a beggar. Maybe she didn’t have the strength to come here. But it’s not as if we had a lot to give away. I gave her as much as I could. The drought over the last two, three years had been so severe . . . Many people died here, around this area. Eeesh, I see her shrunken face in front of me now . . . One afternoon I came out and found that she had fallen asleep just outside the door. I didn’t understand then that it was because of weakness, I thought she had been working hard, sowing or collecting kindling in the forest, something. My heart bursts, thinking of those silent, downcast eyes now . . . god gave us stomachs to punish us – the punishment of hunger is a great punishment. Nitai’s wife too used to say that all the time. Then she stopped coming . . . Eeesh, if only I had tried to find out, maybe all this wouldn’t have happened.

  And here is the ‘all this’ that happened. In this aman-rice-producing area, a small farmer like Nitai, who didn’t have any land of his own but worked as a sharecropper or, when times got really bad, as a wage-labourer, had work for only three to five months of the year. Majgeria was not close to the river, so it wasn’t a double-cropping area, which would have meant nine months of work. The m
eagre money that he got as wages from labour, and the tiny percentage of the yield that he got as a sharecropper, rarely stretched to enough sustenance for a family of three, and then, killingly, four. And there were very few opportunities of employment outside agriculture – what else could he do? Break bricks and stones by a road under construction? Dig? Physical labour at a factory somewhere? Who would look after his wife and children if he left the village and went wherever such work was available?

  He had a tiny vegetable patch next to his hut, the size of a bitten nail, no more, and on that he grew some gourds and onions. He had to pawn even this apology of a plot to a moneylender when he desperately needed money to feed himself and his family.

  Kanu said – You’re desperate then, and the moneylender knows he can get anything out of you at that point. If he says, I’ll give you two kilos of rice, but you’ll have to return three kilos to me in a month’s time, you don’t think then: Where am I going to get three kilos of rice in a month? You think: I don’t care what you want, give me the rice now, my family is starving now, I’ll think of what comes later later. And they’ve got you then.

  That was the time-honoured way they got Nitai. He couldn’t pay the interest on the loans he took out in desperate times, loans of money and rice, and had to sell that scrap of land of his, the land that could have kept his family just about surviving until times improved. The interest accumulated. Nitai had to service it with labour on the land the moneylenders owned, but this time it was labour for which there were no wages, not even, sometimes, the subsistence meal given to the daily labourer working someone else’s land.

  Kanu again – The last two years have been so bad with droughts and starvation and crop-failure, but it’s like an opportunity for the landlords and moneylenders; they use these things as an excuse to lower our wages and not give us the daily meal when we work on their land. Bad times, they say, we can’t afford to pay you so much or feed you. They think that we poor people don’t see what’s really going on, that they are using this shortage of food grain to hoard it in their barns and warehouses, then sneak it out in lorries and trucks in the dead of the night to the cities, where it’s sold at a huge profit on the black market. And they tell us that they can’t afford to give us our daily meal when we work for them.