The Lives of Others

by Neel Mukherjee

  By the time Baishakhi was born in late February of the following year, Chhaya could still be considered as recovering. Madan took it upon himself to serve only convalescent food to his Didi-moni for this period. All the dishes that he cooked when they were children, suffering from measles or fever or chickenpox or tonsillitis, he revived for her. Pish-pash, bone-marrow soup, gentle mutton stew with carrots and green beans and potatoes, soft kedgeree with an omelette on the side and that staple – magur or shing fish (both were supposed to aid the production of red blood cells) cooked with ginger. It was as if Didi-moni had regressed to childhood and needed all over again the things that a child required: nourishment, pampering, care. She had lost so much blood. The very thought turned him to cold stone. What was in his capacity to give her so that she could be whole again, except what he had given them for the span of their lives until now – his food? Would that bring her back from death’s door? That is where Chhaya had been, everyone whispered: death’s door. He heard other things, such as a figure (she had needed six bottles of blood in hospital) or a medical prescription (she had to have her wrists bandaged for two months), and pity reduced him to nothing. Random memories played through his head as Charubala spooned food, which he had brought in, into her daughter’s mouth and he stood in a corner of the room, watching, ready to obey Ma’s orders before she had even finished saying them. A six-year-old girl crying because she had chipped the paint off the clay figurine of a flute player that he had bought her from the Chadak Mela in his village. He trying to coax an obstinate girl, ill with chickenpox, to eat the incredibly bony pholi fish that was thought to help against the illness. A girl of twelve stealing into the kitchen and saying, ‘Madan-da, quick, give me a little bit of that spicy dried-fish fry-up, quick, quick, before Ma comes and catches me.’ A broken seed-necklace, the tiny seeds scattered all around it under a flowering bush and a little girl saying, ‘Madan-da, pick them up for me, won’t you, I’m afraid to go near that bush, you said there’s a girl buried under it.’ Was that girl and this bandaged, semi-conscious, broken woman on her bed the same person?

  When Charubala was sure that Chhaya had mended, she moved her up from the first floor, which she had so far shared with Priyo and Somu and now Purnima, to the second floor. Whatever anyone felt for Chhaya, and this was different for each person, although it was a difference of degree rather than of kind, pity was a dominant emotion. This pity curdled partially to what could only be called fear.

  When even Bhola, who was also thought to be unmarriageable, got married three years later, to a ‘nice, simple girl from a nice home’, as Charubala described Jayanti to everyone, they gave up trying to find someone for Chhaya. A worm of regret wriggled through Charubala, especially when she found herself sleepless during the small hours, but nursing and feeding this almost-grief seemed to consume less of her energies than the continual waging of what had become a battle, a battle she knew she had lost. Occasionally a small hope flashed in her, she scurried around for a day or two chatting to matchmakers, making enquiries, a kitten amusing itself with falling leaves; then the true nature of the deceiving glimmer made itself obvious to her and she subsided into a tearful inertia.

  Chhaya took a job at a new school, Ballygunje Shiksha Sadan on Gariahat Road, in an attempt to start afresh; rumours had insinuated themselves into her previous workplace at Beltala Girls’ School, much closer to home than Gariahat Road. Every summer when Chhaya went on a school trip with her new students to Puri or Digha or Ghatshila, Charubala imagined her daughter was going to her husband’s home and her in-laws’. A week’s holiday elastically stretched itself in Charubala’s mind as a lifetime, then snapped back with the slap of limitation when her daughter returned; the whole episode had just been a cheap toy of her mind.

  As Chhaya stepped outside the front gate on her way to work one morning two women came up to her. One of them asked, ‘That Ghosh house, aren’t you the sister?’

  Belatedly Chhaya understood that they were talking to her; she had never set eyes on them before. Maidservants, she could tell immediately, but she was certain that neither of them had ever worked in their house. Unless it was during the time when she was in hospital and then, later, too sunk in slow recovery at home to take notice of temporary staff.

  ‘Yes. Why do you ask?’ Chhaya replied hesitantly.

  ‘Somnath your brother?’ The tone was harsh, aggressive.

  ‘Y-y-yes. What do you want?’

  ‘Your brother has a friend called Paltu, in that neighbourhood?’ she asked, pointing somewhere vaguely west with her left hand.

  Chhaya was beginning to get irritated by this rude inquisition, so she said tetchily, ‘I don’t keep a list of Somnath’s friends. And, anyway, what is it to you? Now move out of my way, I’m getting late for work.’

  ‘No, we won’t. Take us to your mother, we have things to tell her,’ the woman insisted.

  Chhaya, taken aback by such impudence on the part of a servant, tried a new tack. She said, ‘You think my mother has nothing to do except meet riff-raff all day? Think again. Now move.’ That note of command in her voice would ensure that these two women backed down.

  The woman who had remained silent so far now spoke. ‘Your brother and Paltu have been frolicking with my sister. She works as a maid in that Paltu’s house. She’s with child now. People at your home know about this?’

  The words had the effect of a furious slap across Chhaya’s face. She edged backwards and ran into the house. She wanted to shout, ‘Lies, lies, all filthy lies’, but this would have been too feeble. She ran up two flights of stairs, found her mother on the first floor and panted, ‘Ma, there are some people outside . . . servants, servants from another neighbourhood . . . Filthy stuff, filthy . . . Somnath and his friend, Paltu, all lies . . . They’re outside and want to see you. Don’t go, don’t listen to what they have to say. Send Madan-da to deal with them – throw them out.’

  ‘What is wrong with you?’ said Charubala. ‘Sit down. What are you babbling on about? Which servants, what filthy stuff?’

  ‘There, outside,’ Chhaya could only point weakly.

  Charubala got up to go to the front balcony. Chhaya said, ‘Don’t listen to them!’

  From the balcony Charubala looked down onto Basanta Bose Road, noticed nothing special and half-turned to Chhaya, still inside, to say, ‘Where? What am I looking for? What women?’

  ‘Two maidservants. They’re standing outside.’

  ‘Oh, maids. I see. Where . . . I can’t . . . oh, those two? Come here and point them out to me.’

  Chhaya quailed at the prospect of facing them. She let out a brief ‘No’, then began to think whether it was not better that her mother heard from her, Chhaya, what she had been told than from those strangers. But how was she going to bring herself to say it? Even thinking about it made her feel polluted. How could people have such cesspools inside their heads? How typical of that class of women.

  She heard her mother call out, ‘You, what do you want?’ The reply was inaudible. Then her mother again, ‘You want work? We have all the people we need. You should go elsewhere to look for work, there’s nothing here.’

  A pause again, this time followed by an impatient outburst from Charubala, ‘Yes, yes, I am Somnath’s mother. Say what you have to say from there, and be quick about it, I don’t have all day.’

  At the mention of Somnath’s name some familiar dread in Charubala was beginning to sound a warning that an ill-humoured attitude was probably not the wisest one to take, especially standing on the balcony, in view of the whole wide world. She gripped the balustrade tightly. She was glad of the support, because what the women then proceeded to say made the ground beneath her feet move as if to dislodge her. She squeezed her eyes tight shut and opened them again; the women were still there, this was not a dream; the snaky trails of poison were still streaming out of their mouths. The brief vertigo over, Charubala now felt seized by anger.

  She found her voice and shouted down at
the women, ‘Don’t you feel any shame, coming here and spouting these unspeakable lies? Who has put you up to this? I know my son, and I’m not going to stand here listening to all this sewage. Get out of here, get out now!’

  She turned around, expecting to find succour from someone in the house, but realised that all the menfolk had left. There was no one she could ask to take charge of things except Madan.

  ‘Madan,’ she called, going back inside. ‘Madan. See to the women outside. Two maidservants. Get rid of them immediately.’

  Charubala sat down on the edge of her bed, panting. Chhaya was in the room too; neither could bring herself to look at the other. United in humiliation, each felt as if she had done something wrong and was being silently judged by the other person. Aeons passed as Madan went down, spoke to the two women, clanged the front gate shut and came upstairs. They strained to hear what was going on. Sounds of vehicle horns; people passing, talking, calling out; more people; a utensil-seller calling out her wares; a man selling toy flutes made out of bamboo and palm-leaves.

  Then the screaming began. Not every single word could be heard from indoors, partly because of the way sound travelled through a competing wall of other sounds, partly because of a willed underhearing to protect themselves, but what filtered through was enough.

  ‘. . . didn’t care much about filth when fucking maidservants . . . may be poor, but we don’t have to put up with . . . go around from street to street, telling everyone . . .’

  The woman shouting was on the further side of Basanta Bose Road; she had clearly been asked by Madan not to hang around outside the house. She raised her voice as she progressed through her litany, the escalation in volume and the accusations feeding off each other. Within minutes a small crowd had gathered: what could be more interesting than other people’s lives?

  Charubala sensed rather than saw the people – strangers, neighbours, acquaintances, passers-by – assembling in a wide, loose circle around that vile, shrieking woman and felt that whirling dizziness again, this time accompanied by a spreading heat in her ears, her face, neck and arms. Chhaya seemed to have turned into stone.

  Purnima came to the front room and asked, ‘Ma, there are some women standing outside, shouting. Is there some problem?’

  Charubala shrank. A fantasy of disappearance pressed urgently against her.

  On the third floor the two little boys, Supratik and Suranjan, attracted by the noise outside, ran to the verandah to see what was happening.

  ‘Look!’ Supratik said to his younger brother, ‘people are gathering around in a circle. A monkey-dance. Or maybe travelling players. There’ll be a circus.’

  ‘Where are monkeys?’ Suranjan asked.

  ‘Ufff, wait, they’ll come. That woman is announcing their arrival,’ Supratik replied, impatient at his five-year-old brother’s obtuseness.

  But, wait, something about the pitch, the tone . . . He felt something was not quite joyous and entertaining here. There weren’t going to be any monkeys, or madaris setting up a tightrope and swinging their toddlers in a sack in huge, heart-dropping arcs. There was also something of the forbidden going on down there. Some of those words . . .

  ‘. . . think we don’t know why she tried to kill herself’ – then some incomprehensible word – ‘that’s what the lot of you . . .’

  Sandhya rushed out to the verandah, swooped down on her two sons and shooed them inside, barking, ‘Go inside, you two monkeys, go on, go inside, nothing doing standing out here, listening to that rubbish.’

  ‘. . . see to it that the son of a whore is sodomised on the streets and left bleeding . . .’

  Before the two boys ran inside reluctantly, Supratik took one last look at the street below: the number of people seemed to have swelled and everyone was looking at their house.

  Suranjan was about to start bawling. ‘No, no, I want to see monkey-dance, I want to go downstairs and see monkey-dance.’

  Sandhya turned and smacked him. ‘Not one word from you,’ she said.

  The wailing burst like a ripe cloud. Supratik felt intimidated; it was unusual for his mother to be so short-tempered. He had better slink away and sit with his books to mollify her by pretending to study.

  Drifts from the theatre downstairs were still audible: ‘. . . don’t think we don’t know . . . know it all . . . son of a pig . . . the whole lot of you will . . .’

  Supratik felt a guilty thrill at the term of abuse he could recognise, ‘son of a pig’, but also, simultaneously, a tense deflation – were they the target of all these bad words?

  In the front room on the first floor Charubala had started shaking.

  At last Chhaya spoke, her voice emerging in a croak, ‘We should go to the back of the house.’ She leaped up and called out, ‘Madan-da, Madan-da. Shut all the doors and windows on all the floors right now.’

  But the damage had been done. The great, roaring world outside – against that, what match were these transient bits of straw?

  XII

  – The Baruis haven’t seen your faces, Kanu said, trying to allay our fears. Or his own.

  Then Shankar threw the bombshell. He said – Those farmers there tonight, they’re all friends, they won’t blab.

  – How do you know? I asked, beginning to suspect something.

  – We told them to be ready with weapons. And hide nearby. What if we needed help?

  I was stunned into silence.

  – You . . . you . . . told others? Dhiren managed to get out.

  All those meetings in the still heart of the night in which the need for absolute secrecy was every other sentence spoken – all that had come to naught.

  Kanu read our dismay and said – They’re our people, they’re one of us, they won’t tell anyone.

  This was not the time to get into an argument, so I accepted their reassurances on the surface. I said – You shouldn’t have done it. Maybe we got lucky this time. We’ll see. What are we going to do when the police arrive? Or the men of the landlords?

  Kanu – Don’t go out of the house. Hide inside. We’ll protect you.

  At any other time I would have laughed at his naïvety, but instead I said – These are the police, Kanu, they can come inside any time.

  Kanu pondered this for a while, then said – You guys leave the village now.

  – What will happen to you?

  – Two or four thwacks from the police’s lathi are nothing to us. But you need to leave now, light will soon begin to show in the sky.

  They gave us beaten rice and cane molasses wrapped in a cloth bundle.

  – Go, go, go now, they urged.

  We tried to run – impossible to do this through stretches of bamboo groves – but once we reached the fields, we took long strides towards the jungle, hurrying in the direction from where we knew the police from Jhargram were going to enter Majgeria. But we were miles away from the road, on a parallel outlier, protected by trees. I didn’t know if I imagined this, but just as we made the edge where the trees began to get denser I heard the distant sound of motor-cars. The sky was pink and orange and pale yellow.

  As we moved deeper into the forest, Dhiren said – I think I’m going to collapse, and he did exactly that, bending down to the forest floor and stretching himself out fully. Before Samir and I could say anything he was asleep. Looking at him, we realised that this was what we wanted to do too, immediately.

  I didn’t know what woke me up. I had no idea what time it was and I could not see the sun in the sky. Sunlight only made it down through the tree cover in patches. I was cold and itching all over, I had the beginnings of a headache and I was completely parched. We had no water to drink, it dawned on me. I turned to Samir and Dhiren – they were curled in on themselves, snoring away. Mosquitoes had formed a flying colony above each of them. There were insects in Samir’s hair – not ants; I had no idea what they were – and Dhiren, still asleep, brushed off something annoying him in his beard, then around his nose, then again his beard, followed now
by his ear . . . until he awoke, red-eyed and thrashing, swearing at the disturbance – Shala, killing me, these bloody insects . . .

  I waited for him to ask the inevitable question before giving him the bad news.

  Dhiren – Ufff, my chest is cracking with thirst.

  – No water. They forgot to give us some and we forgot to ask.

  – What are we going to do?

  – Unlikely we’ll find water in a forest.

  – But . . . but we’ll die!

  – Don’t be silly. No one dies of thirst in twenty-four hours. We’ll be at Debdulal-da’s at night. If we set out as soon as it gets dark, we’ll be there in six to eight hours, maximum.

  – But . . . but . . . we can’t walk for that length of time without any water!

  – Here, have some of this, it’ll make you feel better.

  I gave him the cloth bundle in which Kanu had given us molasses and beaten rice.

  – Don’t devour it all. It’ll have to last the three of us until we reach Belpahari. Which is twenty hours from now, or thereabouts.

  He began to swear, but gave up. There was nothing to be done.

  When Samir woke up we made a half-hearted plan to go looking for water. He said – I’m sure there’s some stream or fountain in the forest.

  There wasn’t a trace of hope in his voice. He said it because he felt he had to say something. Nobody got up to go on the water-finding mission.

  Samir tried again – Listen, trees need water to survive. How can there be a forest without water? Elementary biology.

  Dhiren said – Trees have deep root systems to draw water from the ground. Elementary biology, level two.

  My headache was like somebody poking around in the soft tissue behind my right eye with a hot knitting needle. Samir said that he too was getting a headache.