The Lives of Others

by Neel Mukherjee

  Somnath stayed out in the evenings well past his six o’clock curfew hour and once or twice returned home long after everyone had gone to bed, sneaking in and going straight up to his room, hoping he would not bump into anyone. He was nervous about the alcohol on his breath, and other signs that he had been drinking. His absence at dinner cast a shadow over the assembled family: not only was he breaking a cardinal rule, but he was also too young to be doing so.

  ‘He’s going to the dogs,’ Charubala said.

  ‘Not a surprise, considering how you have raised him to your heads,’ Chhaya commented tartly.

  ‘Yes, really, he’s turning into quite a handful,’ Priyo added.

  Prafullanath, in thundery mood, took it personally, as a slight to his parenting. ‘I’ll show that boy today what’s what. Let him come back.’

  The clouds passed. It was Chhaya who ferreted out the reason for Somu’s occasional late, furtive returns. She stayed up, ears pricked, and when she heard the slow creak-and-clang of the iron gate, then the muffled, over-careful opening of the front door, she came downstairs, as if by accident, pretending that she had some business in a room along the path that Somu would have to take to reach his room. She saw him taking one step at a time, very, very gingerly. He looked at her, his eyes bloodshot. He tried to hold onto the banister, but could not manage it in one attempt. Even Chhaya, whose experience of drunken men, swaying in front of her on the balls of their feet, was not frequent, could tell what was going on. The spirituous reek was unmistakable. She pressed herself to the wall as she passed him, as if he were a pool of vomit that she was avoiding stepping on.

  The next day, when he surfaced around noon, Somnath found himself facing walls of brooding silence wherever he turned. Charubala, usually persistent with queries about his whereabouts the night before if he had been late returning home, was noticeably absent from his room and then silent as stone when he saw her in the dining room.

  ‘Can one get a cup of tea in this house?’ he said, attempting to cover his guilt with a forced light-heartedness.

  Charubala, grim-faced, lips squeezed to a thin line, stormed out of the room, her swishing sari and jangling keys tied to the end of her aanchol, sounds that Somnath, throughout his life, had found to be the very definition of a cocooning security, now somewhat like the music of war. Chhaya walked into the room and pointedly walked out again, she too silent. In a trice Somnath understood what had transpired. No tea from Madan-da, or from anyone, was going to be forthcoming. He noticed that his dinner from last night, usually cleared from the table in the morning if he came in too late to eat, had been left standing, the plate and the small bowls ranged along one-third of its circumference all sitting in a bigger container filled with hot water, a bath to keep his dinner warm, the whole thing covered with a big mesh dome to keep out flies and insects. The warm bath had obviously cooled in the last fourteen hours. It was a still life of the great wrong he had committed.

  After fielding this emotional boycott from his mother and his sister, a harsher reminder of the gravity of his misdeed arrived when his father returned home. Before he sat down in the living room downstairs to go through the daily routine of tea and snacks and the solicitous attention of Charubala, Prafullanath summoned Somnath to the boy’s room, shut the door, bolted it, took off his belt in a baleful mimicry of an action from another life and brought it down like a whip, over and over and over again, on his son’s shocked body. And yet this was no punishment that he was giving out, but an act of revenge; that trembling, crouched figure on the floor was his elder brother Braja; the tables had turned after all this time.

  An overindulged, unruly son who had fallen into bad company and had started coming back home drunk, at the age of sixteen: is this what fate had kept in store for him? Prafullanath had turned the thought in his head all day long as he had smoked one cigarette after another in his offices in Old China Bazaar Street. The distance of more than thirty years between that chapter of his past and the present suddenly seemed foreshortened to nothing; the bad blood was flowing in the new one too, no escape was possible. Inheritance was everything, and he and his had got nothing except the negatives: cheated out of wealth and property, stalked by decadence and bad character.

  As he lashed his youngest son with the leather belt, that zero distance became real and material to him. Take that – the belt came down on the back, curling around to the ribs and upper arms – and that – back and bottom – that, that – shoulders, arms . . . the cracks were like the air sundering. At last. I have dreamed about nothing but this moment when I could pay you back for all that you’ve done to me. This is a beginning. Remember this? Remember thrashing me under the stairs in front of all the servants, thrashing me until I had no breath left inside me to ask you to stop, to ask for water? Remember? Remember?

  Somnath felt more confused than terrified: why was his trembling, spitting, crying father, transformed into a frenzied animal now, repeatedly shouting ‘Remember? Remember?’ at him? Had he forgotten something his father had enjoined him to keep in mind? Was it some moral lesson about transgression and its consequences? Was it specifically about alcohol? For the life of him, Somu could not remember.

  Outside, Charubala hammered on the door, wailing, ‘Stop it! Stop it now! Let him go!’

  ‘I’ve written another short story. Do you want me to read it out to you?’ Priyo asked his sister.

  Chhaya said, ‘Yes, yes! Read it out right now.’

  Priyo paced his reading slowly. It was a story about a woman who leaves her husband of forty years because every night he washes his feet and goes to bed while they are still wet, despite her entreating him, every single night of those forty years, to dry his feet before he gets into bed. One day she has had enough. She walks out of their home, saying to her baffled husband, ‘I cannot bear you clambering into bed with your sopping-wet feet any more. I’m leaving.’ Those words were the last line of the story.

  ‘Bah!’ exclaimed Chhaya admiringly. ‘Very modern. Like Buddhadeb Basu, or Premen Mittir. I feel like applauding. You know, you will be famous one day, like Rabi Thakur.’

  Priyo, basking in her enthusiasm, made a show of deflecting her appreciation. ‘Ufff, you and your Rabi Thakur! His days are over. How behind the times you are. It’s the age of the ultramoderns, don’t you know?’

  ‘That’s why I mentioned their names. You will be a star along with them.’

  He lapped it up a bit more. In the entire world, only she seemed to understand him and regard his talent truly, to ‘get’ his work. Everyone else was unresponsive, rejecting. He had been trying for so many years to get a story or a poem published in the cutting-edge literary journals, but they seemed to be staffed by donkeys. Each generation seemed to get stuck on its gods, refusing to move on: first there was Tagore, now there were these modernists, Bishnu De, Buddhadeb Basu and others, territorial dogs guarding their patch from interlopers. Did people really read Sudhin Datta’s poetry? Did they understand all those teeth-hurting words?

  Ultimately, in a backward-moving procession of causes, he blamed his father – he was finding it so difficult to get a foothold in the world of Bengali letters because he had not been immersed in arts and letters from birth, as his father had no truck with the business of culture and literature. He had been born into a family of philistines, and this was his undoing. Take, as a counter-example, his friend from his school years, Susobhan Ganguly. Susobhan had not been demure about recounting his famous grandfather Dwarik Ganguly’s exploits at every opportunity he got, and then some. There was one story that had caught Priyo’s imagination. Dwarik Ganguly had been, along with luminaries such as Debendranath Tagore, John Elliot Bethune and Vidyasagar, at the forefront of the female-education revolution. On reading a nasty, innuendo-filled editorial against the education of women in a conservative Bengali daily, he had torn out the relevant piece, marched into the editor’s office and asked him to confirm that he had written it. Then Dwarik Ganguly had said, ‘Right, I have
come to make you eat your words’, crumpled up the cutting and handed it to the editor with a glass of water, standing by him, his walking stick in hand, until the offending editor had swallowed the ball of paper. Then Dwarik Ganguly had said, ‘If I do not see a retraction tomorrow, I will come again.’ There had been an editorial the next day, taking back everything written in the earlier one.

  This was the family he should have been born into, Priyo thought with a lurch of envy: fierce reformers; progressive, educated people; men whose fathers and elder brothers had been published in Bichitra and Parichay and Saturday Letter before those magazines became defunct. Instead, he had been forced by his father to do a degree in Commerce, then join Charu Paper. While he was competent enough, he assumed, looking after the production side of things, Priyo also held that if you did not love what you did, love it so much that it took up permanent residence in a protected corner of your mind so that you were never without its company, if that kind of love was not there, then you would never be any good at it. You would forever tread the path set down by others, by books, and never advance the subject and extend its horizons. Priyo only felt that kind of love for his literary efforts, not for the business of subjecting the output of the plant in, say, Memari to quality control. Every day he felt let down by what he had inherited and wished for another history, an alternative life.

  Only Chhaya understood his soul’s very fulcrum, the thing around which all his thoughts and energies turned.

  ‘Tell me, have you written any more poetry?’ she asked him now.

  Oh, for a poem, a luminous vitrine for his talents, a new, transparent shape in the air through which a different kind of light shone. ‘Not for a while. I’m thinking of concentrating on the short story for a bit,’ he said instead.

  ‘Wonderful! You too will have a Galpaguchho to your name.’

  ‘Ufff, Rabi Thakur again! Can’t you think beyond him? People are writing short stories now too – Manik, Buddhadeb . . .’

  ‘All right, all right,’ Chhaya said hastily, trying to deflect Priyo from thinking she was backward-looking. ‘Where are you thinking of publishing them? Why don’t you ask some press to bring out a volume? That’ll be fantastic!’

  Priyo shrank at Chhaya’s move from literary-critical appreciation to the depressing business of, well, business. How much, or what precisely, should he tell her? That he had been trying for the last ten years without getting anywhere? That his writing was for an audience of one: her? That he had never thought of publication – now there was an idea she had given him?

  ‘We all thought Bhola was going to turn out to be the writer,’ she said, ‘given the way he used to chatter away all the time, creating all these ridiculous tall tales, but it turned out to be the quiet one, you.’

  Priyo flinched inwardly at the comparison with Bhola. How distasteful that even Chhaya should bring them together in her head, using the common bond of storytelling. But Bhola was only someone who was afflicted with logorrhoea, and his chatter was just that, chatter; whereas he was the true writer, literally so – he wrote his stories down on paper, they had shape, a design, a selection of things from life, a gathering that imposed a paradigm on the formless wash of time and reality. But Bhola? Priyo immediately felt disloyal, thinking this line of thought; Bhola was his brother, after all; a simpleton maybe, but still, connected to him by blood.

  And yet, sitting here, talking about Priyo’s literary efforts, both brother and sister unspokenly conspired to ignore the loud, pervasive ticking of the clock in the background.

  The same ticking was, like the slow rise of an inundation, filling Charubala and Prafullanath’s lives. Lying in bed, under the white canopy of the mosquito net, the ceiling fan turned on at full volume to battle the almost-solid presence of June heat, their conversation came back to that unchanging centre.

  ‘The lecturer’s family has said no,’ Charubala said to the roof of the net.

  ‘Oh,’ Prafullanath replied, looking up at the ceiling too. There was enough in that one syllable.

  Silence.

  ‘Did they say why?’ Prafullanath asked at last.

  ‘The usual excuses: horoscopes not matching, girl too educated . . .’ she said.

  She imagined the futile beating of the fan’s blades, a fast, blurry whirr in the dark. It was going to be another of those long nights.

  ‘Did you tell her?’ he asked. They had long reached the stage when they had stopped referring to her, or could no longer refer to her, by name.

  ‘No. What’s the use? I can’t bear to see the disappointment on her face,’ she answered. She paused to steady her voice, then continued, ‘At least they didn’t, like last time, that engineer, write back to say she was too dark. Or like that family where we had to keep chasing them and they came back with, “She doesn’t seem like a home-maker.”’

  There was real anger beginning to taint her tone. Prafullanath remained silent.

  ‘This business is putting an end to all my nights’ sleep,’ Charubala declared.

  ‘What if we step up the amount of dowry?’ he suggested.

  ‘You have done that on two occasions now, but nothing has come of it.’

  ‘Yes, but what if we increased it further?’

  ‘All is fate. How can we ever go against what’s written on our foreheads? I fear . . . that . . . that . . .’

  Prafullanath reached out sideways and tried to clamp his hand on her mouth. ‘Chhee, don’t say inauspicious things like that.’

  The sanction made the unsaid even more palpable, as if the thoughts had been waiting outside the room and had at last been given permission to enter; now there was no denying their presence.

  Prafullanath and Charubala circled around them in a quaint dance.

  ‘Achchha, what if we got a new set of photos? Got a really good photographer and asked him to do some top-notch studio portraits?’

  ‘How is that going to help? They will eventually have to come here to . . . to see her.’

  They had come face-to-face with the unacknowledged party in the dance. They started again.

  ‘What about those families who don’t bother to get back after they’ve visited? Are there any of those still left that we’re waiting to hear from?’

  ‘There can be only one meaning to their silence, don’t you think? What’s the use of contacting them? They’ll only come up with the usual excuses.’ Pause. ‘Or tell us the truth that we all know.’

  There, the presence again, unignorable.

  Charubala broke part of the taboo.

  ‘Achchha, don’t dark girls get married? They are becoming brides by the hundreds, thousands, every day. Our Chhaya is hardly the blackest imaginable,’ she said.

  In through the opening Prafullanath went, somewhat reluctantly. ‘Y-y-yes, that’s true. But . . .’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘But . . . I mean . . . her . . . her blackness is a . . . is slightly different, no?’

  Silence again, which was answer enough.

  Now that the breach had been made, it seemed to hurt them less to widen it.

  ‘Then there is the other matter.’

  ‘I did look into it . . .’

  ‘We should have had it done when she was small.’

  ‘But who could have predicted at the time that a slightly lazy eye would have become so prominent? I suppose others see it more than we do. We live with her, we see her every day, we don’t even notice it any more.’

  ‘Yes. Do you remember, one family wrote back to accuse us of lying by omitting to mention it? They were really nasty about it, all respectability thrown to the winds. Thank god our Chhaya didn’t end up at theirs.’

  ‘Yes, small mercies. Do you think we should seriously start looking again into the eye-operation business?’

  ‘We must. She’s not getting any younger, you know. As it is, she’s marred her chances by doing an MA. I told her then, what’s the need? Isn’t a BA enough? I reminded her that it would be difficult to find a match
for her, if she kept doing one degree after another. Do you know what she said? “You seem to be in one hell of a rush to get rid of me. Am I such a burden to you? I am happy to go out and look for a job so I can earn my keep.” Can you imagine? I could hardly speak, I was so upset.’

  ‘She has a dangerous tongue, like a knife.’

  ‘She’s twenty-six this year. Soon she’ll be over the hill. We’ll also have to start thinking of Priyo and Bhola’s marriages.’

  ‘We haven’t been able to get Priyo to renege on his foolish oath of not marrying until Chhaya is married off. Do you think he’ll budge?’

  Charubala was again on the brink of thoughts she had managed to keep unthought, just about, for many years. She looked into the whirlpool briefly and felt dizzy with . . . with what? Fear? Or shame? She looked away quickly and decided it was a matter of the greatest imperative that either Priyo or Chhaya, and preferably both, got married as soon as possible. This winter, she decided. It had to be.

  Why Priyo agreed – on a whim, it appeared to his mother – no one knew. Charubala did not dare ask him in case he went back to his previous position of intransigence. Maybe he had forgotten his foolish pledge, she thought; and let it rest at that. The wedding was rushed through, even though Charubala had her doubts about the girl. Priyo’s ‘yes’ had such immediate weightiness that she did not think about speculative and lighter counterweights on the other half of the scales. It did not occur to her to ask her son why his choice had alighted on Purnima – the caste, the family, the woman herself, everything was a fraction of a degree off – when she, Charubala, had preferred at least three or four of the matches that had come in. There was that shy, modest Datta girl who had so decorously kept her head down throughout the first meeting. The family was not well-off, but that had seemed a small blot. Then there was the pretty, smiley, child-like Das girl; lower-caste, yes, but such a sweet disposition; she would have been such a radiant presence in the house. And she had been as fair as the dawn too. But no; Priyo had to go for a dark, coarse girl, with a voice that could curdle milk instantly. But hers was not to reason why or question; it would not do to look a gift-horse in the mouth. So on a cool February evening Charubala and Prafullanath ticked yet another box in their long list of responsibilities towards their children; two down, three to go. Only Charubala knew that she had ticked her box feebly, with fading ink, for could it be that Priyo unmarried but Chhaya stable was a more desirable option than a married Priyo with a sister who was becoming more intractable by the day?