The Lives of Others

by Neel Mukherjee

  Arunima does not bother giving her mother any information about the current state of the roads. A sudden visitation of fear, as if the horrible face of a ghost has peeked at her from behind a pillar then removed itself again, unsettles her: what if the school discovers that the summons has not been delivered and gets in touch with her parents without her help or knowledge? Best not to think about it, she decides, willing it away. The thought of feigning illness and not going to school for two or three days begins to take shape in her mind. Surely by that time Sister Josephine will have forgotten the whole thing? The nuns have so many things to think about . . .

  A Friday afternoon gathering at the offices of Basanta, a small publishing house, on West Range. Bhola has been in charge of this small subsidiary of Charu Paper ever since its inception in 1952 and has tried, of late, to extend its narrow remit of publishing only educational books to branching out into poetry and fiction, which is where his real interests lie. These Friday-afternoon addas brought together friends, friends of friends, aspiring writers and whoever someone who knew Bhola brought along, and amidst much talk of politics and how best to run the state and the world and how everything was going to hell and how the Bengali was never going to roar again, some scribbler read out a story or a section of a novel or a handful of poems to the assembled company in the hope that Basanta Publishing Co. was going to take to it enough to consider bringing it out. These addas had started acquiring the comfort and reliability of ritual amongst the small group of people who knew about them; and even if putative writers wanting to change the very course of Bengali literature – an ambition they shared with Bholanath Ghosh – found that Basanta did not always do the right thing by giving their dreams the fixity and immortality of print, they could get soft loans and handouts from Bhola.

  Bhola saw himself as the centre of patronage in this fledgling court. Whenever he could, he helped out struggling writers and poets with money and, often, publication; how could he not support the pursuit of literature? That would be a betrayal of the very soul of Bengaliness. Besides, these Friday afternoons had another typically Bengali underpinning: it was not crassly purposive, or a means to an end that was commercial and material profit. It was, instead, an end in itself, a celebration of conviviality and the art of conversation and the sparklingly playful things one could do with time. He felt dismayed and besmirched even thinking about adherence to a business model or vulgar things like that; money was such a dirty, downright polluting thing.

  Today there are six of them, including Bhola: his printer; the editor of a ‘little magazine’ and author of the fiery experimental novel Endnotes for a Beginning, recently published by Basanta Publishing Co.; Bhola’s colleague and employee at Basanta; an out-of-work theatre director; and today’s writer, an unemployed graduate of Bangabashi College earning a pittance from private tutoring, brought here by the editor, who has published a few of his revolutionary poems in his ‘little magazine’ named after a Sanskrit verse-form, Mandakranta.

  There is a mild running joke in the circle along the lines of how Bhola lives up to the scatty forgetfulness that his name embodies. There is also great affection for the wild raconteur in this slightly distracted, slightly unanchored, slightly off-kilter man. Today, though, there is something more in the aura about his normally dispersed personality.

  The printer asks, ‘Everything all right?’

  Bhola answers, ‘Yes, yes, fine.’

  ‘Just thought you seemed a little more distracted than usual.’

  ‘Hmmm’ comes the frugal reply. That is eloquent enough to most of the company; in ordinary circumstances Bhola Ghosh would have seized on that calculated ‘more’ and spun a giant castle from it. ‘“More”? What do you mean “more”? Have you known me to be so distracted that I have walked into ditches or got on the wrong bus? Talking of which, did I ever tell you of the time when . . .’ it would begin.

  Now, however, Bhola dodges, ‘No, no, it’s nothing. The buses and trams are so crowded nowadays . . .’

  The theatre director and the editor are slightly puzzled by this reduction in Bhola Ghosh’s usual volubility; maybe it is nothing, maybe they are reading too much into it. But the greater matter of the adda awaits; the scribbler’s story, with its scalpel-like finger on the dying pulse of the terminally ill times, is sure to set a thaw in motion, of that the editor is sure.

  He signals to his protégé to begin. The writer stubs out his Charminar, takes a sip of lemon tea and begins, ‘The story is titled “Prehistoric”. It’s set in the present time.’ He pauses to let the witticism register, then emphasises it, in case someone has not got it, by emitting a short, ironic snort.

  PREHISTORIC

  Eleven-thirty on a Tuesday morning. Writers’ Building is a crackling, buzzing hive of activity. Bechu Sarkar of the Housing Ministry has just arrived at work, a quarter of an hour later than usual. He puts his cloth side-bag on his chair, sits down, greets everyone in the office with his time-tested general bulletin – ‘Don’t even ask, it was murder on the number 74 this morning, I came here hanging from the door, I tell you, hanging from the door, like a bat’ – then hollers for tea, ‘What, is there a tea-strike on? Where has the tea-boy gone? Where’s my tea?’ As if on cue, a grubby boy with a huge blackened kettle enters and pours out milky tea into a smudged greenish glass.

  Bhola’s mind is elsewhere today, on his own far more pressing situation, but he must force himself to listen to the reading, if only to save himself:

  A crowd of people sit outside, waiting, hoping to get some work done by the officials inside – have a file traced or moved to another department, have papers signed and attested, enquiries answered, bureaucratic mazes unlocked, puzzles elucidated. One such petitioner, a shuffling, creased, dusty, creaky, bent man of about sixty-five enters and takes in the scene of smoke-wreathed business of the government before hobbling his way to Nakshatra-babu.

  But Bhola’s attention soon drifts away from the dull, predictable hell of others to his own consuming one. It had been his own unpreparedness, his lack of all the necessary information, that Bhola had found so difficult to cope with while the Sisters had talked to him in their office; lightning in clear skies. Obviously he was going through some serious bad times, he mused, and when times were bad, even buggery resulted in pregnancy, as the salty theatre director never ceased to remind everyone who came within his orbit. The thought of the director forces him again to concentrate on the proceedings under way right in front of him:

  Mr Das returned to the Employment Ministry, where the relevant PA, sighted only once, declared hurriedly, ‘The Minister is in Burdwan, he’ll be back tomorrow,’ and disappeared, not to be seen since. The following day the underlings and hangers-on in the PA’s office said that the Minister had gone to Siliguri; the day after, to Delhi. A polyphony of gossip, informal advice, chatter, loose talk, suggestions, the tabla keeping the taal to his eighty-two visits, kept sounding its infernal accompaniment throughout.

  Bhola interrupts, ‘Achchha, this is all very well, but . . . but isn’t this, how should I say, isn’t this all a bit familiar?’

  The young man’s face falls before he can rearrange it into a mask of defensive contempt. He is still trying when Bhola’s colleague seconds his boss, ‘Yes, yes, right, right, we know all this stuff. So much time to state the obvious . . . I’m sure there’s a twist coming?’

  The magazine editor begins to defend the writer, ‘It may be familiar to us, but maybe it’s not familiar to a lot of people who have no first-hand or even second-hand experience of all this stuff. It’s new stuff to them.’

  The theatre director says, ‘It opens up a more philosophical point: should stories be about the familiar world or should they show us something new each time?’

  The young man, who has had some time to swallow his disappointment, now argues, ‘If you look at the work of the German writer Franz Kafka, you’ll find that what I’m trying to do is not dissimilar: the hellish nature of bureaucracy, the labyr
inth from which man cannot escape, the going-around in circles . . .’

  The director adds excitedly, ‘Yes, yes, Kafka, Kafka, we’re going to put on a play by him, it’s called Insect. Do you know that play, where a man becomes an insect? Masterpiece, masterpiece! We are all insects.’

  Insect, thinks Bhola; that’s about right, that’s what he had felt during the incident at Carmel Convent yesterday, when he found himself facing two Christian nuns. Dressed in impeccably starched white blouses, grey skirts, grey wimples, with chunky crucifixes cradling on their shelf-like chests, Sister Josephine and the headmistress, Sister Patience, had throughout addressed him as ‘Mr Gauche’. Their English had seemed opaque, probably because authentic; accordingly, Bhola’s deep fear of the English language and those who spoke it well had taken the form of abject deference.

  ‘Mr Gauche, we are a bit worried about an essay Arunima has written,’ Sister Josephine said in clipped tones.

  Bhola grinned in incomprehension, then, realising it was an inappropriate reaction, shut his mouth and tried to look serious.

  Sister Patience took the baton now. ‘Would you say you were having problems at home?’ she asked. Not wishing for it to be construed as an unhealthy curiosity about domestic matters, she hastily added, ‘Problems with Arunima, I mean, of course.’ The severity in her voice was notched up to compensate for what she saw as an unfortunate slip.

  Bhola quailed at the stentorian tone of the headmistress, even while straining to follow this alarming flow of echt-English, but he identified the repeated word, ‘problems’, and clamped onto it.

  ‘Problems . . . heh-heh . . . yes . . . I’m meaning no . . . heh-heh . . .’ he began. Perhaps they meant that his daughter was having problems with her English lessons, and he had been called in to be made aware of the glitch so that he could ask her to pull her socks up and get her to improve her performance? Yes, that must be it.

  ‘I asking my brother and . . . and brother’s son for helping in English all the time,’ he said, ‘but they . . . they busy.’ This last word he pronounced ‘bi-ji’ – his old problem of distinguishing between a palatal and a sibilant fricative – and set the Sisters’ stern mouths twitching.

  Years of dealing with parents who had no English, but aspired to better for their daughters – thank the Lord for that – had made Sister Patience adept at recovering the real meaning from behind the fog of Benglish, so she replied, ‘No, Mr Gauche, I’m not referring to the quality of Arunima’s work. With that, we’re all satisfied. I mean this.’ With that she passed him an exercise book covered in brown paper, with a Sulekha ink label on it indicating name of owner of the copy, class, section, subject, school. He remembered bringing back from work sheets of brown paper, the regulation cover for his children’s textbooks and exercise copies, at the beginning of their school year. He had a slight tightness in his chest, seeing them in their correct use now, at imagining this aspect of his daughter’s life to which he had no access, to which he could never be a daily, present witness: her small hands opening the pages of the book in a classroom, writing in it, putting it away in her bag. It was as if this object was the bridge to a corner of her life that would increasingly become separate from his. He felt an invisible hand squeezing the inside of his chest again. Then the words of Sister Patience dissipated that momentary sensation.

  ‘If you could please read the piece that is on the last page that is written on. We are dismayed, too, that Arunima did not give you the letter in the first instance.’

  Bhola, who was settling into his terrified state and therefore beginning to comprehend the Sisters’ words better, took the slim book and opened it on the requisite page. Two pages of his daughter’s rounded, cursive English hand under the title ‘My Mother’. His eyes began to smart at the evidence of her flourishing competence in the language; was it true that it was his daughter who had written so fluently in that treacherous language, which had eluded him with such obstinacy?

  ‘We’ll wait until you finish reading. It’s not going to take you long,’ Sister Josephine urged.

  Bhola obliged; he was much better at reading than at aural comprehension. But before long, a lag seemed to be opening up between the signs on the page and the meanings behind them and a corresponding one between meaning and sense. Acutely conscious of two pairs of judgemental eyes riveted on him, and also of his own deep anxiety brought about by a sense of lack, he nevertheless found himself forgetting them, ensnared by the peculiar nature of Arunima’s essay on Jayanti. What on earth had she written? This was not the Jayanti he recognised. What were all these wild fictions?

  My mother’s name is Jayanti Ghosh. She is short and black and has hair till her waist. She gets up in the morning and shouts at me and my father to get ready to go to school and office. In my tiffin-box she gives a banana and a boiled egg, sometimes insects and worms.

  She burns the food for my father and throws down the plate in front of him. Then she takes all the money from him and says, ‘I want to see your dead face today.’ Then I come to school and she spends all day beating the servants. One day she hit the maidservant so much that she went to hospital with broken arms and legs.

  Then she eats lunch, all nice and delicious things that she does not give to me and my father – mutton, fish, chop, cutlet, sweets. After lunch she waits until all my aunts are asleep. Then she goes into their rooms and steals their saris and jewellery.

  In the afternoon, I return back from school. She shouts at me and beats me with a wooden stick and sometimes with the handle of a hand-fan. Then my father returns back and she shouts at him. She gives him rice and water and salt to eat. Sometimes there are eggs of cockroaches and spiders in our food.

  Then she sends my father and me to sleep on the floor at the bottom of the stairs. One day Jesus Christ will burn her like the thornbush.

  He looked up at the four eyes watching his every nerve-twitch and eye-flicker then lowered his baffled face to continue reading. He switched back to the cover to read Arunima’s name on the label on the front, hoping that the Sisters had made a mistake, then wondered if there were two girls with the same name in the class despite the evidence of his daughter’s handwriting.

  Then, shocking himself and the Sisters, he started giggling uncontrollably at the absurd nature of Arunima’s imagination.

  For a startled few seconds Sisters Patience and Josephine dropped their masks and stared with incredulity at Bhola, until an even pricklier disapproval took over.

  ‘Why do you laugh?’ Sister Patience demanded. ‘Is it true what she has written? We are of the opinion that these are all terrible slanders. What do you have to say?’

  The clear note of haranguing in her voice tethered Bhola somewhat. ‘Erm . . . yes, ma’am . . . no . . . meaning Sister . . . this is very laughing matter. No, I mean, writing funny,’ he said and halted. The Sisters heard the substitution of the fricative with a plosive in ‘funny’, but they were too far gone in their perplexity and outrage to find it even mildly amusing. Now barely concealed disdain took its place.

  ‘We, on the other hand, do not find it a laughing matter, Mr Gauche,’ said Sister Patience in her coldest, hardest voice.

  Bhola made a swift calculation in his head: he did not have enough English, or nerves steely enough, to explain to the Sisters that the stuff Arunima had written was all fabricated, because he would then have to field further questions – whys, whats, wherefores – which would lead to larger stretches of communicative quicksands, so it might be a wise strategy simply to look apologetic, even outraged, and let the tide of the Sisters’ displeasure and disciplinary prescriptions for his daughter wash over him. Tussling with this decision was a more amorphous shame: what if the Sisters thought that Arunima’s essay was true? What kind of an idea would it give them of his domestic life, his family, his marriage, his general ineffectuality? This counter-feeling made him want to speak out, but he did not have the right words. Not for the first time in his life he felt himself fall into the gap b
etween feelings and their articulation in language.

  So relieved was he to step out onto Gariahat Road after his ordeal that he nearly forgot how he would be quizzed by Jayanti as soon as he returned home. She was fretting herself to dyspepsia. The English sentences Arunima had written would make little to no sense to her, so how was he to summarise the events of the morning? What could he say? Walking down to the bus stop on the other side of the road, he felt suddenly weak-kneed with pity: pity at Jayanti’s ignorance of English; pity for the incomprehension and then the puzzled sadness that would be her reaction, were she to be told the entire truth; compassion for the unknowable emotions that would be going through her in her private moments when she worried at the episode, trying to parse some kind of sense out of it.

  He lit a cigarette from the burning tip of the braided coir rope hanging beside the narrow paan-bidi shack adjacent to the Ucobank building and inhaled deeply. He decided to weave a different tale altogether for his wife when he got back home, something along the lines of a new order they were trying out in Carmel Convent, which had to do with calling parents in at regular intervals throughout the year to keep them apprised of their daughters’ academic progress. Then he would make up something for verisimilitude and density: how they were satisfied with Arunima’s work, although there was room for improvement in some subject or the other. The prospect of lying calmed him instantly, more than the nicotine.

  But far more treacherous were proving to be the currents running under the complicity that united him and Arunima now. He could barely bring himself to look her in the eye; he knew that she knew of his deception, knew also that some uneasy coalition into opposing camps across a dividing line had occurred. While this made him feel disloyal to his wife, and the screw of an odd discomfort now and then turned and turned inside him, Arunima seemed to have developed a silent, intentful intensity, refusing to let go of her pinning gaze on him, searching his eyes out, wanting something ungiveable. Her child’s heart knew that he had protected her, but its susceptibility to magnified fears and anxieties seemed, perhaps, to want also a kind of reckoning about the content of what she had written, an acknowledgement from him of the spirit and life under the surface of those words. This she would not get because he did not know it was demanded of him and, had he known, would have found it impossible to endow it with a form in which things of the soul or heart are given. What shape does collusive understanding take? What her innocent mind could not comprehend was that it was not her that he had shielded; that knowledge would have been reckoning enough. But that was not to be, not yet.