A Life Apart

by Neel Mukherjee

Mr Roy Chowdhury raises his voice and calls out to her. Instantly, there is a sound of hasty retreat, footsteps, rustling, tinkling, all fading down to the interior of the house. Mr Roy Chowdhury and Miss Gilby fall about laughing as if they’ve been the ones caught playing children’s games.

  The house, called ‘Dighi Bari’, or ‘Lake House’ – although there is no lake near it, just a big pond with dark, unfathomable water and wet, green woods ringing most of its circumference – is big, not half as big as the palace of the Nawab of Motibagh, but capacious enough for it to be recognized as a local zamindar’s house: three storeys, painted a buttery yellow, in a regular quadrilateral shape, enclosing a large, brick-paved central courtyard. All the rooms in the house open out on to this courtyard. The rooms facing east look out on to a garden, big and rambling, which leads ultimately to a track to the village, about half a mile away: this is the designated ‘front’ of the house. Miss Gilby has her quarters in this section of the house (East Wing, she calls it) on the top storey. Mr Roy Chowdhury must have told the malee about the English love of gardens, so he has dutifully brought up dozens of pots of plants and flowers and arranged them on the verandah outside her rooms. There are canna, zinnia, dahlia, rose, even petunia and snapdragon, a couple of ficus plants, a flowering jasmine, which he has lovingly trailed around the iron railings. He comes to water the plants every morning, bows low when he sees the memsahib, so incongruous in this house, so conspicuous in this village, which has hardly ever seen a white face.

  While this back verandah with the plants, which is also a running corridor linking all the rooms on that floor, looks out on to the courtyard below, she notices that half of the first floor – the two sides on the floor directly below hers – situated to the westfacing back of the house, which should open east to the courtyard, have wooden shutters and stained glass running their entire length, from the floor to the ceiling. The other side of the rooms in that ‘West Wing’ presumably has a view of the woods that nestle the dark pond that gives the house its name. This is the andarmahal, the secluded area of the house where the women live and, until recently, Bimala did too. She hasn’t been invited to see that area; it’s not that she has been told to stay off, but just that that section of the house hasn’t featured in any conversation so far. The open area of that floor is Mr Roy Chowdhury and Bimala’s quarters, while the ground floor is given over to a study, the living room, three offices, a ‘meeting room’ for conducting business, and a smaller library.

  It is in the living room that Miss Gilby gives piano lessons to Bimala and conducts most of the English lessons as well. A few lessons have occasionally taken place in Miss Gilby’s study upstairs – she knows Bimala is quite curious to see how a memsahib might appoint her living space – and it is very likely that they are going to take place in that more intimate room with increasing frequency. One thing Miss Gilby knows for certain is that the passage from stilted, shy formality to an apparently easy companionship in Indian societies is swift, but whether she will be let in to that intimacy is another question. She will have to wait and see.

  The first lesson is in the living room. Miss Gilby has requested Mr Roy Chowdhury not to accompany his wife to the lessons: the urge towards dependence on her husband would be too much and, consequently, learning would become a protracted business. He has thought the idea very commendable.

  Very shortly after one of these lessons, as soon as Bimala departs and Miss Gilby starts to clear up a little, she notices that Bimala has left behind her exercise book, her textbooks, her pencils, everything she needs for her homework, on the table at which they have been working. She gathers them up quickly, in a swift swoop of her hands, and runs out after Bimala. She sees her bright yellow sari disappearing through a door leading to the andarmahal. In her haste, she forgets social rules, what’s out of bounds and what’s not; she rushes down the stairs, books and pencils in hand, and reaches the floor below. Across from the landing, there is a big wooden door, with coloured glass filling up the space between the top of the doorframe and the ceiling. She knocks on the door then pushes it open and enters. There are three or four low wooden chowkees on the white mosaic floor. It is much darker here than in Miss Gilby’s open verandah, but the grass-green and red panes in the glass section above the dark brown painted wooden shutters throw fuzzy gules of coloured light on the white mosaic here and there. A servant is sitting in a corner, cutting vegetables and potatoes on a bonti. Seeing Miss Gilby she gasps, shrilly, immediately draws her aanchol over her face, runs around one of the corners and disappears. Miss Gilby suddenly stops in her tracks, realizing what she has done. Before she can turn around to go, a woman appears around the corner of the verandah. She wears white, unrelieved, impeccable white cotton, draped around her in a shapeless roll; her head is shaved, her face drawn and pale, there are dark circles under her eyes. She takes one glance at Miss Gilby, shrieks and runs away. A gramophone is playing in one of the rooms, its hissy, scratchy, high-pitched sound almost totally distorting the song it plays. Or perhaps the song itself is tremulous and wobbly. It stops abruptly and, as if to time it together, Bimala makes an appearance, clearly with the maidservant and the shaven-headed woman hiding behind her, but around the corner, against the wall and invisible. Bimala too stops, as if confronted with a mirage whose truth she cannot immediately gauge.

  ‘I’m ssorry, Bimala,’ Miss Gilby stammers, ‘I-I just wanted to return these’ – she holds out Bimala’s books and writing materials lamely – ‘I thought how is she going to do her homework if they are left behind . . .’

  Bimala comes closer, looks at her with a puzzled expression; Miss Gilby is speaking too fast for her to follow anything. Her eyes alight on Miss Gilby’s outstretched hands and suddenly the quizzical expression clears. A smile floods her face.

  ‘Oh, my books. Thank you, Miss Gilby,’ she murmurs, taking them from her tutor’s hands.

  Another woman, also dressed in stark white, but with her black hair tied severely back in plaits, appears behind Bimala. She stands staring, openmouthed, at this exchange between Bimala and an English lady right in the middle of the andarmahal. A Christian lady in the middle of the andarmahal. Bimala notices the momentary distraction in Miss Gilby’s eyes, focusing on something behind her, and wheels around.

  She turns back to Miss Gilby and says, ‘My . . . my . . .’, searches for a word, ‘husband sister, husband sister,’ she says, at last, with triumphant relief.

  ‘Yes, your sister-in-law,’ Miss Gilby instinctively corrects, ‘your husband’s sister,’ stressing the possessive case. She turns and leaves with rude abruptness.

  Once back in her room, she flops down on the nearest armchair and pants, as much with the knowledge of her great blunder as with the physical exertion of running up the stairs. After half an hour, she dares to go out to her verandah, eaten up with curiosity about what her presence in the andarmahal might have precipitated, although knowing well that she will not be able to see their verandah. Ten minutes of pacing up and down and straining to hear what’s going on rewards her with the sound of excited female voices and the brisk, energetic sound of broomstick against mosaic floor, the splash and swill of water, the sound of meticulous washing of the verandah into which she had mistakenly strayed.

  FOUR

  Everyone seems to be having money problems. Rachel rigorously limits herself to three pints of lager a week and that too in the college bar because it is heavily subsidized. She tells everyone with disarming frankness, ‘I can’t afford to go out to the pub, you know.’ Ritwik finds the ease with which she talks about financial constraints astonishing: he’d never be able to do it himself. He notices that most of them talk freely about not having very much money, or the need to take up part-time jobs such as waitressing at formal hall dinners, but Peter doesn’t ever join this sort of discussion. Declan tells him, sotto voce, ‘He gets money from his parents’, as soon as Peter goes to the bar to buy a round for everyone. It’s impolite to ask others about the details of thei
r finances, so they don’t ask him about his, nevertheless he feels guilty that they assume about him what they know of Peter.

  Ritwik has worked out that Declan’s Catholic – his only visit to the Continent was a bus trip to Lourdes with a bunch of pilgrims – so he tries to avoid mentioning his school past. Declan’s a practising believer in a pervasive way, not only in his world of Sunday morning services and prayers sent up to the BVM, but also in tutorials where he talks of Paradise Lost as Milton’s attempt to make his readers believe in God and the salvation in Christ who pays for the sins of the fallen with His blood. Milton as tub-thumping, silver-tongued evangelist. When he talks about all this, he casts his eyes downwards, a look of utmost reverence settles on his face and his voice goes down an octave or two. He ends by saying that they should all pray after they finish reading the epic. Dr Carter defuses this call to religious communality by agreeing with him but in more sophisticated terms revolving around the seventeenth-century connotations of the word ‘justify’. Sarah says, yes, indeed, they should all pray after closing the book but out of sheer bloody relief.

  There is this refreshing down-to-earth quality about Sarah; she seems focused too, but not in a manically driven way. She wants ‘to do good’, as she puts it; to Ritwik, her lack of cynicism, her easy laughter, her feminism are all like a slant of light on the gloom of dusky church marble. She plans to go into education administration because she says Britain’s schools are in a parlous state. It is she who explains to him the difference between grammar, state and comprehensive schools, and the cruel misnomer ‘public’ school. They get on really well and, together with Declan, they form an unusual trio. In another life, he wants to have Sarah’s positive force, be her even, with her glorious head of ringlets, her candour and freckles and unshakeable faith in radical economic redistribution.

  Declan talks of girls all the time, not in the way Gavin does, but with more soul and less hormone. He says things such as, ‘Her smile went straight through my heart, you know? I’d like to have her for keeps’ or ‘She lights up my inner world, like’. There is something so touching in his innocence that the kitsch factor can be easily ignored. But Declan believes in the soul, so within that universe all is perfectly acceptable. But all this talk of girls makes Ritwik anxious: he grips his Guinness a touch more strongly, expecting a casual question about his love life any moment. Of course, he’ll lie, but he’ll feel guilty about it, especially because he’ll be lying to these two guileless people. Beside them, his life is a dark labyrinth of shame and secrets.

  Sarah always steers the conversation away from love and relationships when Declan gets into his romantic excesses. It is as though she somehow senses this might be a mined area for Ritwik. This evening she gets up and says, ‘Well, I have to be off for work now.’

  ‘What essay are you doing?’ Ritwik asks.

  ‘No, it’s not essay work, it’s work work.’

  ‘You mean work for money?’ Ritwik’s a bit thrown; he didn’t know Sarah had to supplement her grant as well. He feels a surprising, unexpected prick of envy, the envy of the excluded.

  ‘No, no, not that sort of work. I do voluntary work three nights a week for the south-eastern chapter of the NSPCC. Answering telephones, sending out information, stuffing envelopes, you know, all that kind of stuff. A glorified secretary, really. But for an organization with a heart, not for a cheroot-smoking fat cat.’

  ‘NSPCC?’ He’s thrown again.

  ‘The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. It’s a charity.’

  ‘Cruelty to children? What sort of cruelty to children?’ What he really means to ask is ‘Do you have cruelty to children here?’, the emphasis sharply on ‘here’. His dominant idea of cruelty to children revolves around child labour from where he comes – domestic servants, tea-shack boys, sometimes as little as six or seven, working sixteen-hour days for just two frugal meals and a hole to sleep in, beaten up mercilessly if they break a glass or spill tea.

  ‘Well . . .’ she sighs, ‘where do I begin? Mostly domestic abuse, you know, people being violent to children, abusing them, physically or sexually, parental violence to children, battered children . . .’

  Her words get submerged under the loud pealing of the bells of Magdalen church tower. He has never heard it in this underground cellar bar before, or not consciously, but suddenly it is so loud it seems each ring is coursing through him. Funnily enough, there is no other sound, no bar hubbub, no hum of the other students, no music, just this extreme tolling, as though they are in the suspended moments of a film shot where background noise is eliminated to concentrate on the dialogue between the characters in focus.

  ‘. . . telephone helpline for people to call in to report or seek information and advice, even a childline manned by specially trained counsellors . . .’

  Her words toll him back again. Sasha’s darts have formed a neat isosceles triangle around the bull’s eye but quite a distance from it and Martin has seized up with laughter at the sight. At the other end of the bar, Dave has just finished pulling a dark pint of Guinness and is now moving the glass in slow careful circles to make a shamrock on the foam with the last few drops from the tap.

  Sarah continues, ‘We’re now campaigning for the total ban of smacking in schools. Corporal punishment has long gone, we hope, but even the residue, such as smacking pupils, or children at home, is unacceptable.’

  Ritwik moves his left hand from the top of the table and the cold right one from around his pint glass and sits firmly on them: that will stop them from their sudden shaking. His voice is very steady when he asks, ‘Do parents not smack their children here occasionally?’

  ‘Well, there’s a big debate raging about it at the moment. Most parents seem to be of the view that a firm slap once in a while is no big deal. But we think that constitutes the fundamentals of abuse.’ Her words slip into slightly formal institutionalese; not quite jargon yet, but getting there.

  ‘You mean disciplining children counts as child abuse? Isn’t that a bit excessive?’

  ‘No, not at all. A child is a person with rights. Hitting her or him is an act of physical violence. It’s unacceptable. Besides, there are extreme cases of child abuse that is not sexual. You’ll be horrified to hear what some parents do to their children.’

  No I won’t what do they do tell me tell me in graphic details tell me what they do.

  ‘These crimes never get reported because children are either inarticulate, accept this as the norm, are too scared to do anything, or just don’t know if or how anything can be done about it in the first place. It can be any or all of these factors working together.’

  She notices something, just a small shift, something tinily riven, in the air between them, something so small as to be absent.

  Almost.

  She asks, ‘Are you OK?’

  Yes, he is. Because he isn’t. Because he’s survived not being OK.

  Bidisha Ghosh was the proudest mother in Jadavpur. Not only were her two boys fair, which drew appreciative comments from neighbours – Look at your boys, like two little sahibs – but they also went to an English-medium school, cementing further the comparison with sahib. But above all, they were known to be the two most perfectly disciplined boys around. Or, to shift the focus, Bidisha-di was the byword in Grange Road for good parenting. She ruled with an iron hand, like some furious goddess from the Hindu pantheon, quick to take offence and send down punishment. There was no woolliness about her, no indulgence; it was tough love, love like the grip of a vice. If it didn’t constrain and keep the boys within its jaws, they would grow up as spoilt, ill-educated trash like the loafers and chengras who hung out in street corners, whistled at the girls, smoked, drank and did no work. Vigilance, constant, unremitting vigilance: if she let her guard down for a split second, the boys would be ruined.

  To this end, she had cultivated the persona of the ideal mother who was defined by her readiness to discipline and punish at the slightest hint of w
ayward behaviour. For what was love if it did not mould and reform? Love spoiled, punishment corrected. The heart could be of gold, but its appearance and expression had to be of tempered steel.

  Everyone in the neighbourhood knew that the boys were being brought up in a household with four bums. Their uncles were the worst examples to any child: they hadn’t had the benefit of education; they were boneidle, sleeping in until lunchtime; they were unemployed freeloaders; they smoked and drank; Pratik had a gambling habit; it was suspected that Pratim was on brown sugar; they stole, lied, cheated, beat up their mother, sang Hindi film songs loudly and got into fights. Bidisha had had no choice in moving in here after they had to give up their flat in genteel Park Circus. She certainly didn’t have any power to contain her brothers’ behaviour and lifestyle, so she decided to concentrate on the children instead – if she couldn’t change their environment and make it wholesome for them, she could throw all her energy into making the boys impervious to such malign influences. She built a chinkless wall around Ritwik and Aritra to protect them from the fire all around. In the process, she shut out all the light and air as well.

  Being a strict parent brought high marks from everyone who knew them. It was as though this whole act of bringing up the boys were being played out to a crowd of exacting judges and watchers whose every nod of approval, every pursed lip of criticism counted as plus or minus points. She was being watched and marked by this gallery, inside and outside; she had to perform well, win and walk off with the grand prize. So the more she ordered her boys in sharp, staccato bursts, the more this theatre audience approved, the more she barked and shouted, the more they were pleased. She was a hard mother, there was no pussyfooting and molly-coddling, no slipping up or cracks in the performance. She was lean, mean and streamlined; every inch of visible tenderness had been trimmed away like fat off meat. The only person left was the role itself.