The Lives of Others

by Neel Mukherjee

  But he must not derail himself with the old animus today. Today he must answer the question Purba had asked him when he was arguing for Sona, a question that will leak its destructive half-lives into their own, and one day they may discover that they have been made irrecoverably ill. When he had asked, carried away by his rhetoric, if Purba did not imagine for Sona a future better than her blighted past and equally rotting present, she had looked up at him and said, ‘But what about my future? What about our future?’ That commute from singular to plural pronoun had felled him. How can he answer the question that is like a vortex inside him? That it is easier enjoining others, in distant villages, to break the walls of their historical conditions than to do the same violence to the fabric of his own social conditioning? Or can he bring himself to do both with equal ease? Can he?

  Purnima is first heard screaming, then rushing around from floor to floor. ‘My jewellery’s gone! All my jewellery’s been stolen – all. Clean missing from my safe. All gone, disappeared!’

  It is difficult initially to get to the facts behind the nearly solid wall of hysteria, but the small crowd of family and servants that swiftly coalesces around her manages to put together some basic things: Purnima had come out of the bathroom after her midday bath, gone to her almirah to take out some clothes, discovered it was not locked, which made her suspicious, so she had unlocked the drawer in which her jewellery was kept, only to discover that it was staring at her emptily like the eye-sockets in a human skull. The story changes elastically according to who is narrating it to whom; sometimes the almirah is locked, and not the jewellery-drawer inside it, while sometimes it is the other way around. There are divergent accounts involving keys, and others about the value of the jewellery – some put it at one lakh rupees, some at ten. Purnima herself cannot give any fixity to these stories; she is too much in shock to make much sense of the events and, for a start, she cannot make up her mind if this storm of attention centred around her goes a little way, a very little way, towards compensating for the great loss.

  Priyo is incensed with her. ‘Why did you leave the stuff lying around in the house when it should have been in the bank locker?’

  Purnima bleats, ‘I brought my precious things home for the wedding, then . . . then I didn’t find the time to return them to the bank. Or the chance.’

  ‘You didn’t find the time? Who do you think you are? Empress Victoria? The president of this country? Couldn’t you have even found the time,’ he mimics savagely, ‘to ask me to do it?’

  ‘So much gold and jewels! Worth such a lot of money. All gone, all gone’ is all Purnima can bring herself to say in between bouts of crying.

  A repeated chord resonates in 22/6: ‘Who could have burgled us?’ The suspicion alights automatically on the servants. But which one of them can it be? Everyone in the house is an old and trusted hand and the newest of the lot, Kamala, the helper cook, has been around for nearly six years. The temporary staff – Usha, the maid who comes to clean every day; Reba, the washerwoman, who has been doing their laundry for the last twenty-five years – have been irreproachable so far. What about the revolving staff, usually three or four early-adolescent boys, none of whom stays for more than a year or two before moving on to another job, the ones who help out with the dusting and cleaning and miscellaneous duties? Surely it must be one of them. They are new, they have access to the rooms, they are not as melded in with the rest of the household as the other servants.

  The police are called. The three boys are questioned, threatened, slapped around a bit. They are in tears, they deny everything. Their bodies and clothes are searched, then the room in the servants’ quarters where they sleep. Nothing. Someone comments, ‘They’re hardly likely to stash it in their rooms. The loot’s been taken away, they came to the house just to do this, their job’s over now.’ The boys plead for mercy, they protest their innocence, they wail like little children, but to no avail – they are beaten, then hauled away to jail. Their very profession has incriminated them. If they haven’t done it, who has? There is much tearing of hair over the question of how they got hold of the keys to Purnima’s almirah. Could she have left it open by mistake? Could she have mislaid the keys? She cannot remember.

  Chhaya says, ‘Just because someone has been in the family for ten years doesn’t mean that they are honest or above temptation. Maybe it was part of the plan to stay so long, to lull us into a false sense of security and trust.’ Everyone understands to whom she is referring. Malati is questioned; she and her room, which she shares with Kamala, are searched. Neither of them is very happy about it. Kamala, a placid, slow woman, goes about her business with furrowed brow, a sour frown on her face. Malati, more volatile, can be heard complaining loudly to an invisible adjudicator while going about her duties: ‘Ten years I’ve worked here, ten years. In all that time I haven’t helped myself to a single glass of water without asking. And now this. Because we are poor people, we are all thieves? We have no honour? No dignity? Being searched like this, as if we have stolen . . . chhee! Chhee!’ Then, louder, as she wields that old, reliable filleting knife, the second-person singular, which is actually an unnamed third person: ‘It’s clear who is pulling all the strings. This is what happens when you do not have any happiness in your life; you try and stick your nose in other people’s business to bring them down to your level of unhappiness. Book-learning is no substitute for honour. We may not be lettered but we’re not in the habit of putting a stick in others’ arses.’ Every one of the Ghoshes pretends not to hear her, but the wrung, dyspeptic look on their faces betrays the strain of this performance. Sandhya, for instance, feels that familiar boiling of anxiety, for it is she who will have to do the smoothing and mending afterwards. Besides, over the last week, Supratik has been staying out a lot, leaving home in the morning and returning after everyone has gone to bed. She has a vertiginous sense of déjà vu, a premonition manufactured out of the memories of the recent past; she would not be able to survive his vanishing again.

  An inventory is made of all the missing items. It is doubtful how stable Purnima’s accounts are, but it turns out that not all her jewellery is gone; the safety-deposit locker at the bank had not been totally cleaned out; not all the ornaments had been brought home. Once again Purnima is torn between relief that at least some of her treasure still survives and a sense of bathos that this puncturing of the story of being robbed of everything brings about. The inventory keeps changing until the officer in charge of drawing up the FIR, the First Information Report, his patience frayed, barks, ‘Listen, Mrs, you have either lost one choker or you haven’t, there’s no “maybe” or “I think” about it. If you can’t be accurate about this, it becomes that much more difficult to find them.’

  Purnima has to collect her thoughts, concentrate and collate her holdings with their different storage spaces, and then work out which ones she gave away to Baishakhi. Then she has to describe the missing jewellery, its weight and monetary value; the monumental project defeats her. As if this were not enough, word has reached her of some of the comments being made in unsympathetic quarters. ‘If you look hard enough, you’ll find that she has had the stuff removed herself so that replacements can be bought. A time-tested way of getting more, when the usual methods have run dry,’ her mother-in-law had apparently said. And Chhaya, ‘It’s just a ploy to get her hands on some money. She’s passed it on to the folks in her father’s house and she’s now crying “Thief! Thief!” to save face. And, of course, she needs to be the focus of attention again somehow, now that Boro-boüdi is back at the helm.’ Purnima can hear the perfect punctuation of the petulant sigh as a full stop after the words.

  The police eventually undertake a search of the house. No one asks what good this is going to do, a week after the burglary; the question does not seem to occur to anyone. Seven constables turn the house upside down. Some rooms are spared, Prafullanath and Charubala’s, notably, out of deference to the elderly and invalid. Not every member of the family is accord
ed this special treatment: Supratik and Suranjan’s room, for example, is ransacked, every article of clothing from the cupboard and on the clothes horse unfolded, the two beds turned upside down, the books and papers in the room painstakingly scrutinised. Both brothers are out during this act of sanctioned and official vandalism. As storey after storey is turned over, some more than others, following an opaque and arcane logic that the Ghoshes are unable to read, everyone at home seems resigned to this undignified upheaval, but not without murmur. That old saw, ‘If a tiger touches you, you get off with eighteen sores, but if it’s the police, you’re lucky to escape with fifty-eight’, is repeated more than once. Even Sandhya is heard to grumble, ‘It’s not they who are going to put everything back in its place after they’re done. We’ll have to do it ourselves.’

  Bhola dares to ask a constable, ‘What use is it to search the rooms of the family members? It’s not we who have stolen our things. It’s really inconvenient . . .’

  The constable replies, ‘We are doing our duty. If you do not like it, speak to Inspector Saha. We’ll lose our jobs if we don’t follow orders.’

  Simultaneously with the searching, people are interrogated. The tone and style of the questioning are tailored to fit the subjects: threats and accusations for the servants, unctuous deference for the Ghoshes. In the middle of this bedlam, a ring is found and brought over to Purnima to establish if it is hers; a gold ring with a large ruby at its centre, the red gem surrounded by a circle of twelve tiny diamonds.

  ‘Yes! Yes!’ she cries, ‘It’s mine, mine. Oh god, I didn’t know that this had been taken too. My aunt gave it to me when I got married. Where did you find it?’

  ‘In Madan’s room,’ comes the answer.

  Purnima looks as if someone has suddenly shifted the medium of conversation from Bengali to Finnish. First she stares with incomprehension and then, after a good few minutes, she shakes her head in disbelief. ‘No, no, this is a mistake’ – she can barely speak.

  As if by an instant osmosis of thought, the news percolates down to every corner of the house almost as soon as the words are out of her mouth. The chorus of ‘No, this must be a mistake’ is shell-shocked, unanimous.

  Charubala, supported by Sandhya, descends the staircase slowly, her voice raised in anger. ‘Who has alleged this?’ she asks. ‘Who, I want to know? Madan is one of ours. He has been at my children’s births, he has been with us longer than some of my children. I will not have these things said about him. Who has said this? Bring him to me.’

  Charubala squares up to the constable who has discovered the ring and repeats her words in stronger terms.

  ‘The ring was found in his room,’ he says. ‘There must be an explanation for it. We will have to take him in for questioning, those are our orders.’

  ‘What questioning?’ Charubala retorts. ‘Question him in front of me. I don’t believe you found the ring in his room.’

  Adinath says, ‘And you can’t take him away without a warrant. Bring one first.’

  For the Ghoshes some fundamental law of Nature has been bent out of shape; they go about as if they are underwater, their thoughts and movements and reactions viscous and slow. Before they have collected their wits about them sufficiently to talk to Madan first, Madan comes into the room where most of the family is sitting, congregated in incredulity. He too looks puzzled, like someone lifted up and set in a new world; the wordless staring between the two parties ticks on and on until Charubala’s words, ‘Madan, what is all this going on? Where have you been? Have you heard?’, all in an elided stream of nearly one continuous word, break both the spell and something in Madan. He begins to answer; his mouth moves, but no words come out of it. Then the ordinary speech-movements of the mouth become somehow more elastic, the mouth contorts and, to everyone’s spellbound horror, this man of sixty, this old man who has brought up Charubala’s sons and daughter and her grandchildren on his lap and his back, presses his fists against his cheeks in an effort to stop his mouth twisting and begins to weep with the silent shamefulness of one not used to crying.

  Instead of congealing the horror to embarrassment, Madan’s tears move all the women in the room – Charubala, Sandhya and Chhaya – to a similar point of release. Dabbing at her eyes with the end of her sari, Charubala finds it difficult to speak without giving in to the tide of emotion within her. It is Chhaya who breaks the silence.

  ‘Madan-da, what is going on, can you tell us?’ she asks.

  Madan’s account, in a brittle delivery, is stitched through with sobs: ‘Ma, what can I say, what’s written on the forehead will come to pass . . . Was this what was in store for me in my old age? I can’t show my face anywhere any more . . . the shame, the shame! . . . The police say I’ve stolen Mejo-boüdi’s jewellery . . . You tell me, is this possible? Do you remember the time, Ma, when I found your diamond earrings in the bathroom, I brought them over to you straight away . . . and that other time, when you couldn’t find your gold ring, who was it that found it hiding behind the gas-cylinder in the kitchen? And now they say I’m a thief, a thief . . .’ He is like a plaintive child in the middle of a long protest, having just bruised himself against the essential, indurate unfairness of the world.

  ‘No, Madan-da, it is unbelievable that you are a thief,’ Sandhya is moved to intervene and console, ‘but we are at a loss to understand how it happened, we cannot believe our ears.’

  Madan pauses, maybe to draw some succour from this, then continues, ‘They came to search my room, so I said search away, I have nothing to hide. They begin to look, sweeping things aside, turning everything inside out, upside down, but what possessions do I have, nothing much, they knock everything down and . . . and suddenly one of them . . . the small, dark one with the pot-belly, he says he has found something, it was under the brass statuette of Krishna in my room . . . Boro-boüdi, I had forgotten that it was hollow inside, the thought never crossed my mind in all these years that something could be hidden there . . . god is punishing me, I know, he’s punishing me for I don’t know what, but for some sin, otherwise why would that ring be hidden under his statue? The policeman shows it to me and asks . . . asks what else am I hiding and where have I hidden everything, then . . . then he slaps me . . . he hits me and shows me the ring and asks do I recognise it . . .? And I say that I don’t, it’s not mine, how can I afford such a thing and he says, Oh, I see that every joint in your body is aware of the price and value of such things; he taunts me . . . Ma, what can I say?’

  He stops to draw breath and the reactions to his words all rush to crowd into the vacuum of that lull.

  ‘Purnima’s ring in your room? This . . . this cannot be believed,’ Chhaya says, only now beginning to let the fact permeate her understanding.

  ‘But how did it get there?’ Priyo says rhetorically.

  ‘Who put it there?’ Adi asks.

  ‘Did they find anything else? Not in your room,’ Chhaya hastily adds, ‘but elsewhere? Have all the rooms been searched?’

  ‘My head is reeling,’ Charubala says feebly. ‘Purnima’s ring in our Madan’s room,’ she keeps repeating, as if articulating the words will give the scarcely credible occurrence the solidity of fact.

  ‘Where are the police?’ Adi demands.

  ‘Yes, why have they not notified us of anything?’ Priyo says. He feels oddly polarised; on the one hand, it is his wife’s jewellery that has been stolen; on the other, the sympathies in the room are all directed at the man accused of the theft. Should he be angry with Madan-da and break the solidarity that has developed in the room? But how can he will himself to side with the accusers of this man who is part of his earliest memories, a man who has never been anything but upright and honest, who has treated him only with affection and indulgence? But then why is he pricked by this sense of betrayal towards his wife when he acknowledges his natural feelings for this man? It is just as well that Purnima does not form part of the parliament to which Madan-da has brought his supplication.

  W
hen the constables enter the sitting room, all four of them, they are adamant about taking Madan away. ‘For questioning,’ they say.

  ‘What are these questions that have to be asked in the police station?’ Charubala asks. ‘Why can’t you question him in front of us now?’

  ‘We have orders,’ one of them answers.

  ‘Who has given the orders?’ Adi is on a roll now that he knows he is dealing with minions. ‘Ask your inspector to come and talk to me.’

  But the roar behind the words is half-hearted and the constables on duty, bred to detect, because their livelihoods depend upon that talent, the tiniest movements in the hairsprings that drive power, know instinctively that Adi is not the one calling the shots, not in this particular game; his roar is of the child wearing a lion mask on stage.

  Madan prostrates himself at Charubala’s feet and howls, ‘Ma, I’ve eaten your salt, I would never do something like this, I’d much rather take poison than steal from you, Ma, Ma, please tell them they’re making a mistake.’ Then, in his fear and anguish, he turns erratic with his targets – he clings first to Adi’s feet, then to Priyo’s, crying, ‘Bor’-da, Mej’-da, I’m telling the truth, I’m touching you and saying this, if it’s a lie, god’s going to bring down endless punishment on me, I didn’t take Mejo-boüdi’s ornaments, I swear I didn’t. Please save me, save me!’

  Sandhya turns to her husband and says with something approaching anger, ‘Why can’t you do anything? Why are you sitting there silently?’