The Lives of Others

by Neel Mukherjee

  The incident was never repeated.

  Somnath was nearly four at the time. Born seven years after Bhola, he had, at first, seemed like an afterthought, added distractedly after the main story. But the coda became more important than what preceded it. The deeper, more recessed locks of the dams of affection were opened for the baby in the family; he was everyone’s golden moon, the iris of their eyes, the radiant prince. Where Madan and the other servants had entertained the children with cautionary tales and stories that sent a tiny current of fear through them – stories of snakes biting children, children falling off trees or drowning in ponds, children tumbling to their deaths while flying kites from terraces without raised boundary walls, children tailed by evil spirits or possessed by malicious devils – for Somnath only the loveliness was ever distilled. There were stories of beautiful princes on their beautiful white, winged steeds; the prince always bore the name ‘Somnath’.

  With his head of glorious loose curls, his fair skin, his chubby cheeks that dimpled when he smiled, his huge brown eyes, the term ‘prince’ seemed to be something he had a natural right to. Even Charubala, whose closeness and partiality to her firstborn, Adi, had by then ceased to be an open secret and become more of a much-narrated family story, even she felt the beginning of a new season in her. He could only be a blessing. Her husband’s business moved up several gears after the birth of Somnath; he was clearly an auspicious child. Prafullanath, who did not bother himself with the bringing up of children, considering it wholly women’s domain, Prafullanath, who did not go in for displays of fatherly affection or demonstrations of love or the occasional playing with his children, singing to them, telling them stories, whose onward narrative of life was not temporarily slowed by the parenthetical presence of the silly, playful, giddy expressions of love between parent and baby, even buttoned-up, costive Prafulla had his head turned by his new son. Like a bad comedian, who elicits laughter of derision and not the laughter resulting from successful comedy, the noviciate Prafullanath hit the wrong notes when he tried to do the traditional things with his baby. While throwing Som up in the air and catching him, an act that had the boy almost choking with delight, Prafullanath’s mouth became a rictus of tension, his face a pinched, nervous mask, as if he knew he was performing badly at an audition for the role of easy, happy father. His songs were strained, off-key and tuneless, his recitation of children’s rhymes strangulated, his dandling of the toddler on his knees stiff and regimented, the silly nothings and baby talk embarrassed. He appeared to be a marionette playing the role of father in a puppet play. The awkward matter of his heart would not animate his limbs and eyes, and yet that unaccustomed heart swelled with love and a kind of seduction, of bewitchment. This was a child, he knew, to whom he could not say no, one who would escape the strictures of discipline, of the tiniest of harsh words or irritated looks; an angel cannot offend.

  This behaviour stood in marked contrast to his attitude towards his other four children. Always a stern and distant yet dutiful father, Prafullanath, because of his private history, would have been opposed to a notion of fatherhood that could consist, as well, of intimacy with children, of becoming a child with them, yet he would have been surprised if he had been told that he was not a loving parent. Mollycoddling was the mother’s duty; the father’s lay elsewhere. As a consequence, his four older children feared and respected him, as they had been taught to do, and the love they professed to feel, had they been asked and had they answered truthfully or even had access to that truth, was of a duty-bound, obligatory kind too, a love issuing from commandment and tradition and the notion of family, not one from the tides of the heart or the unbridled, inexplicable pull of feelings. If painted, that love would take the form of a polite and manicured wash of pleasant colours, not the hurl-and-splatter of impastoed reds. But having been the victim of the unintended consequences of his own father’s love for him, Prafullanath had been unconsciously moulded by forces in a way that had resulted in him becoming a fair if unpassionate father, or at least one who was undemonstrative with his fatherly feelings. Probably some deep instinct for protecting one’s offspring from internecine relations, from being exposed to the depredations of rivalry, as he himself had been, dictated to him that cast of personality. Yet with Somnath, the workings of this instinct slid into his blind spot; just as he did not know that he was not an expressively affectionate father with his four older children, he also did not realise he had become exactly that with his youngest.

  When Adinath was born, Prafullanath had been cheered that his first child was a son because he could hand over, in time, the reins of the small paper business he had built from scratch and close his eyes in peace. That is what a son was for. Accordingly, the special place that Adi held in his father’s regard was almost exclusively connected to his future role as helmsman. But by the time Adi turned one, Prafullanath’s ambitions had swelled; he wanted his son to start a construction business, while he would consolidate the paper one, which could provide Adi with the start-up capital necessary for his scheme. He and his son, or sons, could run at least two, if not several, business empires together, not be confined by having to pass the baton of one trade down the line, as his grandfather, his father, his half-brother – and he too, had he not decided to disrupt the relay – had done to such baneful effect. Once again, an instinct, which had germinated in the turbulent soil of his past, led him to insure himself and his sons against any such possibility resulting from following a monadic trade; thus, the branching out. The idea of several different pieces joining up to form a pied world appealed to him. He had experienced the opposite paradigm, of one family business growing and becoming bloated and sick down the generations, leaking its toxins to those who inherited it, and he did not want that for his sons.

  So, from a very early age, Adi was groomed by his father, trained in the language and texture and details and workings of the construction business. As a boy, Adi had heard from his father how houses were built: how concrete was mixed; what the functions of the various components of concrete were; how a collection of tall iron rods provided the spines of a building; how foundations were laid. This complemented, often substituted, the stories children are usually told, stories of djinns and fairies, of a prince whose life was tied to a gold chain that lived in the stomach of a giant carp in the pool of the palace gardens, stories from the Mahabharata, of Abhimanyu who had learned, while he was in his mother’s womb, the secret of breaking into an impenetrable phalanx, but not the secret of emerging from it. Adi assimilated the fundamentals of construction in stories. When he started going to Ballygunge Government High School and, like all children at a certain age when they are unstoppable with their questions, he too spent the entirety of his talking time asking endless whys and hows, Prafullanath channelled this curiosity to focus on buildings, on the strength of materials, on bricks, mortar, lime, sand, cement. The foundations were imperceptibly laid.

  Prafullanath, on returning home in the evenings from the office he still retained where he had started up, in Old China Bazar Street, used to holler out ‘Adi-i-i-i’ as soon as he crossed the threshold. The boy, stationed on the ground-floor verandah, already on the lookout for his father’s return, would rush to him only after that deep, elongated call. Out would come something from the pocket of his father’s panjabi or his black Gladstone bag: a dozen A.W. Faber coloured pencils or a roll of discarded planners’ drawing paper.

  ‘Look what I’ve got you,’ Prafullanath said.

  Adi nodded, too happy to speak.

  ‘Come, let’s have our tea in the sitting room and you can draw your Baba something with this. What is it going to be today?’

  ‘The house that I’ll build and we’ll all live in,’ the boy answered, not one whit of delight diminished from the game father and son had played dozens of times before.

  ‘Well, well. Let us see how grand this house is going to be and whether we’ll all fit in. You have to build a big, big house. Right, tea now.’ Another h
oller – ‘Mada-a-a-a-n.’

  As Madan came from the kitchen at the back of the house with fried diced coconut and other savoury snacks on one tray and a maid, following, with the tea paraphernalia on another, Adi was already on the floor, pages strewn everywhere, busy erecting his house on paper. Over three or four years he had perfected his vision. From crooked lines and scribbles he had moved on to the basic shape of a house, a tall rectangle with a mouth-like door and the two eyes of windows, every single line at an angle or slightly wobbly, but the whole discernible as a diagram of a basic house-like structure. The lines had become straighter, stood at sharp right-angles to each other, the door had acquired a knocker, the front of the house a garden and steps leading to the door. Then, as Adi and his competence grew, the ideal house became proportionately detailed and mature. He kept a running commentary going as he carefully moved his hand about, his face radiant with effort and concentration, the tip of his tongue sticking out from one corner of his mouth, a habit his father found adorable.

  ‘One storey . . . two storeys . . . three storeys. Now, a front verandah on each floor. Round verandah or straight verandah, or a hanging one? Ummm, let’s try a round one this time . . . How many windows on the front? Eeesh, my hand shook a bit there, the line’s not quite straight . . . Now, the garden. Here, a bed of roses. Let’s keep the shiuli shrub, a lot of fireflies sit on it at night – I like them. What about a fountain? Or a pond, in which golden fish will play? Shall I put a dovecote on the roof?’

  He talked to himself while the pencil in his hand moved over the space of the sheet of paper in a slow, cautious dance, smearing on it the geometry of his dreams. Prafullanath and Charubala, who had come downstairs to tend to her husband, let him chatter on. Once or twice, the boy’s father would intervene.

  ‘Bah, first-class! Excellent. It looks grand. Now what about the interior?’

  ‘Interior?’ Adi repeated, baffled. What did his father mean?

  ‘You’ve drawn how our house is going to look from the outside. But what about the inside – the different rooms, the staircase, the courtyard?’

  How could these be shown in one drawing? Adi wondered. ‘You mean, draw each room, one by one?’ he asked hesitantly.

  ‘Aha,’ said his father, his eyes gleaming. ‘There is a way of showing the whole house from the inside in one drawing.’

  Adi, now even more confused, asked, ‘But how? There are walls . . . and floors and . . . well, floors and ceilings between storeys. How can . . . how can one drawing show all the rooms on different floors?’ The boy didn’t have any notion of or terms for isometric projection, perspective and three-dimensionality, and his mind was trying to stretch itself around that lack.

  ‘We’ll have to learn that,’ his father said. ‘But not now. When you’re a little older, you’ll learn how to do it. But it won’t look like your house from the outside; it’ll look different, not like a house at all. But enough. Why don’t you go and share your pencils and paper with your brothers and sister?’

  Priyo and Chhaya had been waiting upstairs on the balcony that ran the inner perimeter of the house on each floor, circling the courtyard in a squarish formation. As Adi ran up the stairs, Chhaya advanced towards him excitedly, ‘Show us, show us what your father’s brought you today.’

  Many years later, an unbidden memory of that casual, unpremeditated possessive adjective, ‘your’, before ‘father’, was to give Adi another lesson in perspective and the layout of the interior world. But now it did not strike him at all. The three of them oohed and aahed over the pencils, admired Adi’s drawing, then decided to give a few of the pencils and some paper to Bhola, who was only three at the time, to see how he would delight in them. Off they went.

  At school, Adi slowly started picking up how to represent three dimensions in two, the elementary rules of perspective, the difference between photographic representation and stylised diagrams. He was not formally taught all this, but found his way in slow degrees. Then Somnath was born and things got further deferred. The baby grew, gathering to himself all the skeins of love and attention in the house, and wrapped himself in a tight cocoon with them. The diagram of the interior of the house remained untaught by Prafullanath and undone by Adi, at least for now.

  Somnath’s birth was like the sudden appearance of a blazing comet or a new planet in a known alignment of heavenly bodies: a previously understood system was now dented by a new presence and had to be subjected to a recalibration, a new set of calculations. No one could predict how the alliances and balances of different forces that kept everything in a stable equilibrium would now respond.

  Initially, it was all jubilation at the birth of a baby brother. Adi, at twelve, was growing too old to find it such a thrill, although he appeared to participate in the general festal mood, at least until eighteen months or so down the line, when he began to discover the facts about human reproduction, and the proximal nature of the two, the recent baby brother and birds and bees, filled him with distaste, embarrassment and, at times, a physical sense of revulsion. He stayed up thinking uneasily about carnal intimacy between his parents, such recent sexual congress between them, and felt a mild nausea. He could not look at the curly-haired, cooing toddler without the shadow of shame falling over his own self. He became parsimonious and stilted with the expressions of affection – almost paternal, given the age difference – expected of him.

  He saw his father trying to catch fireflies for the four-year-old Som and the initial, momentary enchantment, during which he even toyed with the idea of running out to pick up the little boy and get him closer to those magical, flickering points of living light, suddenly become soiled by that familiar cloud of queasiness. He watched the whole family caught up in a huge song-and-dance to feed his little brother (a fussy eater) – Madan-da distracting Som by pointing out pigeons in the attic of the house next door and singing ‘Come, come, o long-tailed bird’, Chhaya shaking rattles and belled anklets and doing peek-a-boo with a shiny scarf, their mother making little patties of Som’s food and planting tiny florets of cauliflower on top, in an effort to convince him that they were little wooded hills and wasn’t he a brave giant to swallow them one by one – and Adi felt a cindery taste on his tongue that was nothing but pity and a hooded distaste for his mother. But not for a moment did these unaccommodated intrusions impinge on his relations with the child, for whom he was bound by the bonds of family to feel the protective love of a much older brother.

  When Bhola had his plum position as the family’s youngest child usurped by Somnath, he was only seven years old. In one of those wholesome surprises that a family can occasionally throw up, Bhola, instead of grudging Som the privilege that had been his for so long, took his baby brother to his heart. He stared and stared, in the beginning, at this tiny, warm, quick thing, no bigger than a large toy, then took to devouring him with his eyes when he was asleep; when he was blinking and awake, bringing up liquid ropes of curdled milk from the corner of his mouth; when he was wailing with all the might of his tiny lungs; when he was gurgling at nothing at all, engaged in some frolic of his own, unknowable mind. Bhola watched the baby being rubbed with Nardelli olive oil and washed in a shallow plastic basin of warm water. He took to propping him up and chattering to him while his mother poured small mugfuls of water over the boy’s hairless head. He loved watching the baby gasp for breath as the water streamed down his face. He watched his mother put kaajol, from a tiny tin, with her little finger under his eyes in a fat curve. ‘Makes the eyes brighter,’ she would say. Then she put a big, fat circle of kaajol on his forehead or, sometimes, awry, almost on his temple, to one side. ‘To ward off the evil eye,’ she said. Then she mimicked biting his nails, followed by a mimicking of spitting on him. ‘Thhoo, thhoo,’ she said. Bhola watched, transfixed.

  ‘Did you do that to me when I was his age?’ he asked his mother.

  ‘To all of you,’ she replied.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘So that no one gives him the evil ey
e.’

  ‘But why would they do that?’

  ‘Because he’s looking lovely.’

  ‘Did I look lovely too?’

  ‘Yes, you did. Now run off, I have a hundred and one things to do, I can’t spend all day chatting to you.’

  Then Bhola innocently asked the question that had the effect of a blow to her chest.

  ‘Did Didi look lovely too?’

  This was the first time Charubala was brought face-to-face with the nature of the way the outside world saw her daughter. If Bhola could ask such a question, did that mean that others had similar, or even more merciless, thoughts going through their heads? Or was it her own guilt, the unnatural cruelty and small-mindedness of a mother thinking that her own daughter was ugly, that this child had read and reflected back at her? Could he have asked the question in all innocence, without the injurious implication she saw lurking behind it? Before she could decide, the answer tumbled out and, along with it, her refusal to engage any longer.

  ‘Yes, she did. Lovelier than all of you. Now, don’t you have anything to do? You’re keeping him from falling asleep, jabbering away non-stop. Go, go!’ she said, practically shooing him away.

  Minutes after he left, she felt a cloudy sense of melancholy at having compared all of them unfavourably to Chhaya; the overcompensation was neither going to transform the truth nor make Bhola feel better. If only two lies could add up to one truth, she sighed to herself and concentrated on feeding the baby. Her milk flooded through the clamping gums of the infant at her breast. She decided to send Madan out for those reddish-black hot-and-sour boiled sweets Chhaya loved so much. And let her eat the dried raw mango with black salt that she wanted all the time.