While Kanu was saying all this, I was reminded of the food riots in Calcutta last year: middle-class people behaving like wild dogs, looting from ration shops, fighting to grab what little was entering the public distribution system. If the middle classes were not getting enough to eat, what hope for these invisible people? They call themselves munish, or labourers; they have climbed down from manush, humans. They cannot imagine even thinking about food – even that is a luxury to them.
Do you know, I was reminded of something else too, a childhood memory surfacing, aided by Kanu’s words. I was seven or eight years old and all the adults in the room forgot that I was there, or thought I could be ignored, that I wouldn’t understand what they were talking about. The thing that has remained with me was Pishi and Boro-kaka recounting something they had seen: a woman lying dead on a narrow side-street and a crow pecking out her eyes, while her child, near-dead with hunger, watched the scene. This was during the famine of ’43. It struck me, listening to Kanu, that it was mostly the starving people from this very district, Medinipur, who had flocked to Calcutta in the hope of getting food in the city and had died like flies on the roads.
Nitai’s physical weakness: that was what I couldn’t get out of my head. Starving for days at a time, but having to work – back-breaking physical labour – double, three times his normal effort because whatever he earned, the rice that he harvested, say, belonged to the moneylender, who had secured it at a price below the market rate. I supposed his creditors gave him enough to keep him working: what use was a dead labourer to anyone? What was it like, having the last drop of your blood (and your land) squeezed out of you and there was nothing you could do about it? Was it like getting trapped in quicksand: the more you struggled, the more you sank in? How quickly did it break the frame of the man – the physical frame, I mean – as it would break a pack animal worked like that on a fraction of its food rations, and that too given intermittently? What had Bijli said? ‘He couldn’t bear the torments of his stomach any longer.’
The nights were getting colder. I longed for a sweater or a woollen shawl, I feel ashamed to admit it. But not to you. We had to live with the farmers as fish in the sea, Chairman Mao wrote. But who knew of these daily, minute changes in life as we adapted to swim in those seas? Some we were not prepared for before we jumped in. We had to adapt while in the water. This threadbare green chador will have to do.
I can see the Milky Way. It’s like the smudge of a cosmic giant’s fingerprints on the inky black sky. And stars – so many millions and millions of them that, if I let my eyes unfocus for a bit, they too become a smear in the sky. You never see this kind of a sky, living in the city. These stars, all revealed now, hide themselves from urban eyes. My heart hammers audibly every time I see a sky like this; yet another thing I didn’t know existed, this sheer density of pinpricks of light. And sometimes I see your face in the stars, just for a brief moment, as if they have arranged themselves in the shape of your face and nose and eyes and mouth and eyebrows. Then it disappears and I’m unable to find it again, however hard I try. At other times the stars seem to arrange themselves into spelling out your name in that infinite sky. Again, it’s an optical trick – the moment I become conscious of it, it’s gone, and the stars return to being themselves.
Samir raised it first – Ei, what’s that you scribble in your notebook so secretively?
– Hardly secretively, if you know all about it.
– But what is it that you write?
I felt panicky, so I tried to turn the tables against him – It could be the kind of revolution-tinged poetry that you scribble away yourself in small pieces of paper hidden inside The Little Red Book. Everyone thinks you’re reading Mao, but actually you’re practising to be a cross between Jibanananda and Sukanta.
A mixture of anger, embarrassment and sheepishness from Samir, some of it feigned – What?? You’ve read my notebook? You’ve been going through my things?
– No, no, don’t be stupid. Don’t you think the rest of the world has eyes? It’s obvious even to a child what you’re up to.
– Really?
He was most surprised at being caught out and, while I could understand a mild embarrassment at being discovered in this rather sweet and adolescent act of deception – no, too strong, that word, but you know what I mean – I couldn’t fathom the acuteness or depth of this discomfort. He had been caught writing poetry surreptitiously, not doing something unspeakable. At last he gave a sheepish laugh and it blew over.
In relief he began to play-attack me – And you? What do you scribble away? Poetry too, I bet.
– No.
– What then?
I told him a partial truth – Nothing very important. Just a record of our times here. A sort of diary.
Now Dhiren said – Careful! If it includes names and whereabouts of the people in the various regional cells and committees, it could be a godsend to the police. They’re dragging comrades away to jail if they so much as find poster paint and brushes in their homes.
Yes, I had thought of that. Which was why I decided that I wasn’t going to post you these pages. It wouldn’t do to have them discovered in your room, in the event of a police raid. Word reached us that the blacklisting of our comrades had begun. It was only a matter of time before our names reached that list. But, then, what was the point of noting all this down, having you in my head as its only reader, if it never reached you?
Then Samir, after some hesitation and hemming and hawing, came out with – All this writing business . . . you know . . . among people who are, almost without exception, illiterate . . . Isn’t it . . . isn’t it a bit . . . you know . . . Mao said we have to be like the fish with the fish in the sea . . . This writing business is . . . is . . .
I put him out of his misery – Conspicuous?
– Yes, yes, conspicuous! That’s what I was thinking.
Another long and hair-splitting discussion of Chairman Mao’s words until I silenced him with – Don’t you think Mao himself wrote, when he was being one with the Chinese peasantry?
Samir wasn’t quiet for very long – Yes, that may well be true, but the Chinese peasantry is not illiterate like their Bengali counterpart, so writing amidst them wouldn’t have stood out so much.
CHAPTER FIVE
1968
ON A MONSOON day loud with downpour, during the short break at ten-past-eleven before the beginning of the English period, Arunima is summoned to Sister Josephine’s office on the ground floor. Here, she is grilled about the short essay, ‘A Day in the Life of My Mother’, she wrote and submitted as her homework two days earlier.
‘Is this true? Are all these terrible things you’ve had the cheek to write about your mother true?’ Sister Josephine asks.
The exercise copy sits on the glass-topped table between them. Arunima, head bowed, remains silent.
‘LOOK UP. Why have you written these awful lies about your mother?’ Sister demands. ‘Do you not know that lying is a sin? And lying about your mother, who has given birth to you, who has fed, clothed, loved, protected you, does this not make you feel ashamed? Do you not see what a big sin this is?’
Arunima lowers her head further, hoping that the posture conveys her wish to become the vessel for any punishment Sister deems fit for her sins; the ready humility could then go some way towards mitigating her anger.
Perhaps the performance works; there is a sudden diminishment in Sister Josephine’s ferocity as she says, ‘Come up to my desk. I want you to take this letter back home and give it to your parents. I’m going to keep the exercise book for the time being.’
Arunima is overthrown by this wholly unexpected turn of events. A severe scolding, punishment, these she had expected, and had steeled herself for, but this? Never. What is she going to tell her parents? And how will they cope with a meeting with the Sisters, her mother with no English, not the barest minimum, and both Baba and Ma intimidated into subservient silence by those who speak the language; how will
they ever bring themselves even to consider a meeting with the Sisters of Carmel Convent? A worm of anxiety bores through her. Her face flushes with the imminent shame of this unveiling of her parents as rustic ‘natives’, as Sister Claire has it, unsophisticated, ‘uncultured’ – that accusation she has heard levelled by her aunt Chhaya at armies of people. The fear and tension looping through her are more to do with this than with being exposed in the eyes of her parents, or being punished at school and at home as a consequence.
By the time school ends at 3.35, the rain has abated but has left behind the usual damage: the road on which the school stands is a battlefield of umbrellas; rolled-up trousers and pyjamas; wet, bedraggled people looking like crows; an infernal soundtrack of vehicle horns punctuated occasionally by a timpani-roll of thunder; traffic jam; crowds, crowds and crowds. The press of parents, almost exclusively mothers, and drivers waiting outside the gates to collect their charges resembles the early stages of a gathering stampede. From here only chaos can take over as girls scan anxiously for drivers or parents delayed by the flooding and traffic disorder, and car-shares and lifts are organised with something bordering on neurosis. Some school buses have made it, others not.
Arunima has spent all afternoon trying to figure out when and where she can destroy Sister Josephine’s letter. It cannot be done on the school bus, obviously, or anywhere in school, for she is paranoid about the torn-up pieces of paper being discovered and then put together like pieces of a jigsaw. But the same kind of problem would obtain at home too: what if her mother, forever ferreting about, forever enquiring and suspicious, comes upon the fragments and subjects her to an interrogation?
In the mayhem she sees a chance to become inconspicuous: she runs up the stairs to the bathrooms on the second floor, shuts herself in a cubicle and takes out the sealed envelope. Then she sets to tearing the page in half, then quarters, eighths and sixteenths. Each sixteenth she tears into two or four, shoving the tiny bits of paper into her white socks as her hands become full. She is careful to distribute these more or less equally between her left and right legs. All the while she is aware of god’s eye watching her in the act of compounding her sin, seeing through walls and barriers straight into this cubicle, straight into her heart. As she leaves the bathroom she is intensely conscious of the area between the elastic top of her socks and the edge of the black shoes around her ankles. Her gait changes. The paper feels as if it is burning her lower legs, turning them into glowing columns of light.
On the school bus, which arrives ninety minutes late, Arunima swings between sitting immobile, like a statue, afraid that moving might give away her secret, and fidgeting, but in a slowed-down, staccato way, nervous that natural movement might lead to the hidden objects spilling out and leaving an accusatory trail behind her. When the Don Bosco School bus passes theirs, the girls lean out of the windows to shout in chorus, ‘Donkey Boys, Donkey Boys’, to the boys’ combined retort of ‘Camel Girls, Camel Girls’, but today Arunima, usually an enthusiastic participant, sits in silence.
When she is set down at the crossing of Basanta Bose and Bediapara Roads, the stretch towards Hazra Road is still flooded. She waits for the bus to go a few metres north, up its usual route, then bends down to retrieve the paper stuffed in her socks and strews the confetti onto the puddles in the road. There, she thinks, no one will ever know. A few remaining bits have gone into the space between her instep and socks. A different problem nags her now: what if the goddess Saraswati is offended by her deliberate and prolonged flouting of the rule that forbids the touching of study materials sacred to her – paper, pen, books, pencils – with the feet?
At home, things continue with the grey pallor they have worn ever since Bor’-da went missing. Dread and the tighten-relax routine of the grip of anxiety have now given way to the settled, monotonous drone of a dull ache. Boro-jyethi, who has been most affected by it, naturally so, has become a ghost in the house she used to hold together. She is hardly ever seen and the children are not allowed to go to her room, where she lies in bed day and night, wasting away. Then there is Arunima’s ill grandfather, also on the third floor: something terrible happened to him a few years ago, the details of which had not been discussed in front of the children, but from what she had pieced together it had been something involving his work and bad people who worked in his paper factory and somehow Madan-da had had some role to play in it and it had all resulted in her grandfather’s second heart-attack and he has been mostly bedridden since. Arunima has been told off so often for being loud while playing or talking, for showing any signs of joy or life or frivolity, a constant ‘Shhhh’ from the adults, accompanied by a furrowing of the brows and a finger to the lips, that her life seems conducted under the cover of a tarpaulin that will never lift to show the sky again.
Jayanti, like everyone else, has used Supratik’s disappearance to wring whatever advantage she can get, mostly in the domain of the superficial. When her daughter, while packing her school satchel for the next day, had lifted a book in a way so careless that the dried wad of marigold petals from Saraswati Puja in February, pressed between its pages, had fallen out, she had immediately pounced upon it.
‘Have a care, have a care,’ she had scolded her daughter. ‘Dropping sacred flowers like this, eeesh! No wonder all auspicious influences have departed from this house.’
The unspoken hint at the tragedy hit home. The guilt that Arunima may have had anything to contribute to Bor’-da’s disappearance worked its way through her, to silence and intimidate.
The feel of dark curtains hanging everywhere in the house, in thick, unbroken folds that one has to keep dodging, is inescapable today too. Previously, on returning home from school, she would be summoned to the third floor with, ‘Come, come. Quickly. Look what I’ve got for you.’
Arunima would rush to their Boro-jyethi.
‘I got Madan to make coconut shapes,’ she would say. Or ‘Your face looks dry and shrivelled. They must be working you very hard in your English-medium school. Come, let me get Madan-da to mix up spicy puffed rice for you.’
No such pampering now. Even the memory seems attenuated by the darkness in the house. At dinner Arunima feels the yawning hole around which everybody is walking, trying not to fall in, trying especially not to acknowledge it by talking about it. At times, adults fall silent as she enters the room, the air still rippled by whatever they have hastily stopped discussing; it could only be Bor’-da. She has become very good at sensing these ripples because she has been given, inadvertently, just the slightest glimpse of the unmentionable: adults being reliably ignorant of the depth of how much children understand or can imagine.
Take the conversation overheard when Arunima was in the room as Jayanti was folding clean laundry and putting it away, Bholanath sitting there, not doing anything particular.
‘What is going to happen, then?’ her mother asked, a frequent question for her, worried as she was about the worst possible outcome of anything. It was a question asked in fear, with hope that someone would contradict her and allay her jitters.
Bhola answered with peevishness. ‘How am I supposed to know? What will happen, what will happen?’ he said, mimicking her cruelly. ‘Am I a clairvoyant?’
It was the rasp of irritation, so unusual in Baba, that made Arunima prick up her ears. Hoping that her father was going to win this round, she settled in for the fight, concentrating on looking totally uninterested and making her face take on a far-away gaze.
‘My hands and feet turn cold when I hear these things,’ Jayanti whined.
‘Your hands and feet have a tendency to turn cold whenever the breeze changes direction,’ Bhola said.
‘What can I do? I can’t suddenly become brave, like all your brothers,’ Jayanti said, trying sarcasm. ‘One of them seems not to have noticed that his nephew has been missing for nearly a year and a half now, such is his attitude. Even the father seems to be resigned, behaving like a saint who has renounced the world. This is not natura
l.’
Bhola, not to be cowed, not this time, said, ‘What good will it do any of us, your feeling afraid? I don’t think you should be poking your nose into this business at all. This has reached some pretty unpleasant and dangerous quarters.’
‘But what if something happens to us?’ The sarcasm had been short-lived.
‘What do you think will happen, eh, what, what?’ Bhola was not going to let this one go.
Arunima silently cheered her father on. Let him crush her with his heel, she thought.
‘There’s lots happening already,’ her mother flared into anger again. ‘Do you think I don’t have eyes? How long can you hide fish with greens? There are bombs in the city, people being killed . . . All this chatter about Supratik . . . some of it must be true.’
At the mention of Bor’-da’s name some kind of alertness was restored to the adults. A look passed between them, one that took into its arc Arunima as well. She understood that the conversation was over, at least in her hearing. She also had more support for her suspicion that something terrible had happened to the missing Bor’-da.
This afternoon Jayanti has worried herself into pacing up and down, from second-floor verandah to bedroom to verandah again, because her daughter is late returning from school. Arunima’s arrival soothes her somewhat. Now there is only her husband to fret about.
‘Is Baba back?’ Arunima asks.
‘Is this the normal time for Baba to come back?’ Jayanti answers. ‘He’ll be late this evening, the roads are all flooded.’
The Lives of Others Page 16
