The Lives of Others

by Neel Mukherjee

  There was the time they had sat Som down, less than a year ago, when he was getting over a bad cold; they had made him pick his abundant nose and eat the pellets of snot, all of different consistencies and textures.

  Such events were not regular; they were spun out on the spur of an inspired moment, and inspiration, or opportunity, did not cheapen itself by visiting too often. There was no intentional or premeditated cruelty in these games, not always; much of it had an anthropological interest for the perpetrators. Chhaya found her little brother between the ages of three and four so edibly sweet that she wanted to handle him much like a comestible, presented in portion-sized pieces to devour. She found her teeth clenching when she ran her hand through his curls; her hands itched with the desire to inflict pain; often she tightened her fist, his hair caught in it, one step beyond the acceptable boundary between petting and something murkier, more elemental. As soon as Som yelped, she retreated to cosier ground. How much could he take? How much could she get away with? Often, while squeezing his chubby cheeks, she would dig her fingers in so that she could feel his gums and the roots of his teeth through the intervening membrane of skin and flesh and fat, and Som would start crying. She would then spend a lot of time cooing and gurgling and kissing and consoling; a much paler time than the animalic excitement of the moments when her desire toppled into something else.

  She squeezed cut hemispheres of lime into his open mouth just to have the pleasure of seeing him pull faces; her insides turned all woolly watching him. Then she forced his mouth open and rubbed the spent fruit against his teeth, witnessing his gradual working out of the unpleasant sensation of soured, tender teeth with something approaching a flailing inside her chest and stomach. These things were motivated not by an unperceived sadistic streak, but by a sense of curiosity; how would this beautiful, fair, curly-locked angel look and behave and sound when taken outside the matrix of his ordinary experience and transplanted into a new, unknown one?

  Priyo, too, had this tendency towards experimentation. In winter, when oranges were in season, he convinced the boy that regular squeezing of the peel into his open eyes would guarantee perfect vision for life and offered to help him keep his eyes open and do it himself. The gullible child agreed. The citrus oil stung. Som blinked furiously, hardly able to keep his watering eyes open.

  ‘Ooh, ooh,’ he sang, ‘burning, burning.’ His eyes streamed.

  ‘That’s a good sign,’ Priyo soothed. ‘It means the goodness in the orange peel is working. Your eyes are going to shine like stars now.’

  The tipping point came when Chhaya and Priyo lured Som to the terrace, grabbed his favourite toy, Teddy Tail, off him and hanged it, with much ceremony, on the clothes line, then amputated the toy’s limbs. Som, unable to bear it, lunged at Priyo and sank his teeth into his wrist. Chhaya tried to detach the boy by catching hold of his abundant curls and pulling with all the force in her body. The ensuing commotion brought Charubala running up to the terrace.

  Chhaya, never one to forget a slight or forgive anyone for having exposed her as being wrong and then for having punished her for it, more than two years later took a kind of revenge on her mother for the sound thrashing she had received that afternoon. She was helped in this by the coincidence of two events: the lead-up to the Matriculation Exam and her period that month.

  On an oppressive summer late-afternoon, with the sky a livid violet-black, which warned of a thunderstorm, Charubala, finding the rooms prematurely dark, went around turning on the lights room by room. It was only after switching on the ceiling light in the sitting room on the first floor that she noticed her daughter lying on the low divan, almost at one with it.

  Chhaya let out a ‘tsk’ of irritation at the sudden exposure and turned her face to the wall.

  Charubala asked, ‘What are you doing, lying all alone in a dark room? Why haven’t you turned on the lights? To leave the house in the dark like this at dusk . . . it’s not good, the goddess of wealth will run away. There’s going to be the most almighty storm, just look at the sky.’

  Silence.

  ‘What’s happened to you?’

  No answer.

  Then it fell into place. Charubala went over to her daughter, sat down on the edge of the divan and said to Chhaya’s back in a more tender voice, ‘Are you feeling ill? Is your stomach cramping? Shall I bring a hot-water bottle?’

  Silence again.

  Charubala touched her daughter’s shoulder, only to have her arm batted away with a vicious swipe.

  ‘What’s happened?’ she repeated. ‘Why aren’t you telling me?’

  No answer.

  Charubala persisted. Something about the girl’s posture, all scrunched in on herself, the back of her head so eloquent with – with what? – indicated to Charubala that there was a different storm brooding, as if the weather outside were going to play out in Chhaya first. She pulled at her shoulders gently to make Chhaya face her and all she got was a tenacious physical resistance. When she managed at last to coax Chhaya to face her, she saw that she was not wrong: that dark face had in it a shadow of the livid blue of the clouds massed outside.

  It felt as if years and years of something thwarted had banked up in the girl and was now going to overflow. For a moment Charubala felt something closer to fear than sympathetic worry, then tried to dispel its pressure by falling back on the more reliable emotion of gently badgering affection.

  ‘Why can’t you tell me? You should be able to tell me everything. I’m your mother, after all.’

  At the word ‘mother’, Chhaya’s mouth and face crumpled. ‘No, you’re not my mother, you’re Somu’s mother.’ The words seemed to be excavated from some pit deep inside her soul. What agony and tamped-down anger burned in them.

  The click of sudden knowledge in Charubala’s head – how could she not have seen this coming? – was offset by the short falling feeling inside her. So this was what had been eating her daughter, causing her sulkiness, her mood swings, the cloud of pettiness and jealousy that seemed to trail her perpetually nowadays. It was only last week that she had come upon her and Priyo bullying Som, who was terrified of the dark, by shutting the boy in a totally dark room. Chhaya and Priyo had then shrouded themselves in long bedsheets and entered the room, impersonating ghosts, moaning ‘Hooo, hooo, hooo’, standing at the door to prevent the child from escaping. Children’s games, yes, but ever since Charubala had discovered the blisters on Som’s feet and joined the dots – some, if not all – together, she had been prone to sensing something unsmooth to these games and naughtiness, as if the nap of the fabric was not all uniform and comforting to the touch but had, instead, a tiny thorn here, a prickle there, to deliver an unpleasant surprise. Even this latest instance she, with her pragmatic mind and worldly-wise domestic strength, had been prepared to ignore as the inevitable process of siblings tussling with each other, something that would ease with time and the beginning of adulthood; but confronted now with those treacherous words, it was as if everything she had chosen to pass over in silence had found embodiment, a spectre transformed into a flesh-and-blood combatant that demanded reckoning with. Denial would no longer do.

  She drew in a deep breath and began the job. ‘Chhee, chhee, what inauspicious words! I’m as much your mother as Som’s or Priyo’s or Adi’s. You are all my children.’ Spoken out like that, the truth, obvious and axiomatic, acquired the falsehood of lines in a play.

  A brilliant flash of lightning pushed the purple of the clouds to their most extreme, malignant shade for a second, then the darkening resumed. In the silence following Charubala’s strained words, the drumroll of thunder sounded equally theatrical.

  Chhaya began a low sobbing that was not so distant from retching.

  Charubala tried again. ‘Can you favour one finger over another? All of them make up the thing that is the hand. Each one is as important as the other.’

  Chhaya’s eyes streamed with tears.

  ‘Don’t cry. Please. I feel terrible watching you
cry like this,’ Charubala said. Her heart clenched with pity.

  Still sobbing in that excruciated way, Chhaya brought out deadlier words. ‘You . . . love . . . Somu . . . more . . . because . . . he’s . . . fair . . . and . . . beautiful . . . and . . . I’m . . . dark . . . and . . . ugly . . . and . . . cross-eyed.’

  With a dozen words Charubala’s world lay cleaved. It was not that she had not known this; once again, it was the exposure of her unacknowledged fears, so indecently made incarnate to the open air, that caused this sensation of sudden terror. And yet she sat locked in her helplessness; how could she bring herself to leap over her embarrassment and say those words or act out those gestures that would wipe the slate clean for her daughter? Were love, compassion, pity expressible? How? Charubala certainly did not know. Love and affection were not particular instances of their manifestations, but rather the entire world one moved around in, an atmosphere. How could you isolate something so brutally flat and one-dimensional, such as words, from a kind of sky, which was intangible, both there and not there? The closest she had ever come to showing such feelings to her children had taken, typically in this world, the form of brusqueness or dismissal, a performance of irritation: ‘Get off, get off, I have to go to the kitchen otherwise so-and-so is sure to burn the rice’ to a child hanging on to her neck; ‘Ufff, not a moment’s peace in this home, you are burning me to death’ to another, demanding to snuggle up to her during afternoon nap; or, delivered in a voice pitched halfway between mock-tartness and faux-scolding, ‘Oh, melting over the sides with affection, I see. Off with you!’ to another of her children perhaps wanting nothing more than a cuddle. These brush-offs, accompanied more often than not by the unlikely partners of a smile and furrowed brows, not dissimilar to a smile flashed through tears, were never meant to be serious. They were the array of masks that love wore, the only way it could be displayed and seen. Both parties knew this in their blood and their bones. It was in the very air they breathed. So being faced now with an imperative to leave that familiar set of comforting exchanges behind and take a leap into the unknown filled Charubala with a tense inertia. She had the sense that she had reached a crossroads and, whichever turning she took, she would do wrong, either by her daughter or by her world.

  She made the boulder of her tongue move to bring out the words, ‘Who has put such rubbish in your head? How can you say this?’

  In desperation, she continued elaborating.

  ‘Is skin-colour everything? You have so many talents – you are a prize pupil in Diocesan, and how many girls can boast of going to an English-medium school? And you sing so beautifully. Just the other day Arati-di from the neighbouring house was saying to me, “When your Chhaya sits down to practise in the evenings, we drop all our work, shush everyone and stand at our windows, drinking in everything. Will you ask Chhaya’s music teacher, Shipra-di, to train my children too?” Beauty is skin-deep, you know that. What good is it to anyone? It won’t quench your thirst, or cure a sick person.’

  But already it was too late. Chhaya’s cry had called for something instant, something headlong and impulsive. Instead, all she was able to return by way of a response was a cold, congealed thing, deliberated upon until its quick, fragile life had departed.

  Around the same time Adinath made a strange choice, strange to his father, at least. Instead of joining Charu Paper immediately after he sat his Intermediate Science exams, he applied to read Engineering at Shibpur. At this juncture in Adi’s life, his childhood love of the built structure had flared to something grander, more ambitious – he wanted to learn how to build houses. The arrival of Somnath had interrupted several things, one of which, not given much thought by Adinath, or at least not consciously, had been the gradual development of a bond between Prafullanath and his oldest son based on what father had assumed was an early grooming of the business sense and what son had taken to be the ordinary commerce of affection and companionship. But that undone drawing of the interior of a house, something that Adi later came to know was called something as simple as a plan, never found realisation in the expected father–son duet; it had to be learned, understood and executed as a solo. And yet Prafullanath’s neglect – if that it can be called – of Adi after the birth of Som did not have the predictable effect of snuffing out the boy’s interest in the area that had been so much his domain with his father, held pure and insulated from the interference of the world.

  What happened was something else. The deepening interest in and fascination with houses, their depiction on paper, both stylised and representational, continued and expanded to take in harder questions that led to the study of the business of buildings and construction as a discipline. How did walls support a roof? Why did foundations not collapse? How could extra storeys be added to a house on the foundation estimated for a two-storey building? As Adi’s interest gravitated towards the scientific and structural-engineering end of things, there was a concomitant diminishment of that part of his imagination that perhaps cooperated, unwittingly, with his father’s desire to see this enthusiasm about houses and plots of land directed in one direction only: the growth and maturity of business sense, or ‘material intelligence’, as it was called, to the level needed for starting a construction business. Adi himself, as a boy, had never thought along those lines; it was an interest, a hobby; that was all there was to it. To what use it could be harnessed, to which destination it was headed – these questions may have played in his father’s mind, but never arose in the boy’s.

  Although the wish to study Engineering, inevitable if one gave it some thought, had been years in the making, Prafullanath had either been in denial about it or had not considered it worthwhile paying much attention to a trajectory that was in conflict with the design he had in his head.

  He summoned his oldest son in an attempt to dissuade him.

  ‘This was not the plan, this Engineering College business,’ he said to Adi.

  Adi, head bowed, replied with some trepidation, ‘No, but, yes, but . . .’

  ‘Stop but-but-ing – spit it out!’ his father demanded.

  ‘No, erm, you’ve known it, that I want to be an engineer . . .’

  How could he not have known? Adi thought; his father had been the one who had ignited the flame, then held his cupped palms to nest it against anything that could extinguish it. All those drawings, those pencils and plans, interior and exterior – had he forgotten it all now? Now that his attention had moved elsewhere? Adi did not think about it in those terms, choosing instead to tell himself that in the effort and energies needed by his father to make a business thrive, this murmuring little dream, a secret between the two of them, really, first became inaudible, then, over time, as it no longer made its presence felt, was forgotten. Now that he had impulsively framed the answer to his father’s demands in such a way that there was a possibility of Prafullanath being reminded of that forgotten secret and, worse, beginning to acknowledge a kind of abandonment, Adi felt panic creeping up on him. All he wanted was for the conversation to skirr off in another direction; he could not bear to have his father put form and substance in words to the one particular, vital loosening that had happened to their bond.

  ‘Who’s going to look after the business then?’ asked Prafullanath. ‘You are my eldest son, it’s part of the order of things that you should take over from me.’

  ‘I can do that as soon as I’ve qualified. It’s only four years.’ He felt a momentary reprieve, but also a shadowy disappointment, that the conversation had not gone down the feared path.

  ‘No, you are going to start coming to the office with me regularly, not the two-days-a-week we’ve done so far. You’ve got to start learning the ropes. In business experience is everything.’

  Adi bravely tried another argument. ‘I thought engineering would provide a solid foundation for the manufacturing side of things,’ he lied. But the relief had won out and he could not bring them both to the brink of a reckoning again by divulging that he was actually going
to read mechanical engineering. In order to spare his father, he elaborated on the lie, ‘It would be good to know how paper is made, how to improve its quality, the science and mechanics of it . . .’

  Again he was cut short.

  ‘We know how paper is made. There are machines to do it, people to run the machines. It’s made the way it has been made all these years. Not much use, all this science and engineering and mechanics. No education can be a substitute for experience. What good is book-learning going to do? It’s like teaching parrots to speak. Look at me: what harm has lack of education done to me? I left home at the age of nineteen, a year after my father’s death. I worked my way up, beginning as a shop assistant, bundling paper, filling and emptying carriages, as an errand-boy. We did not have the luxuries of education and universities like your lot. We worked so hard that the sweat from our heads dropped onto our feet. Engineering was no help then . . .’

  Adi’s attention cut out at this point. He had heard the narrative many, many times before, the story of Prafullanath Ghosh, self-made man: his escape from his parental home; his rise from rags to riches; his resilience against the cruelties and injustices the world threw at him; his ultimate ascendancy; the shaky beginnings to the current solidity of his construction business, which he had started from scratch . . . not for the first time it struck Adi that clichés were clichés because they were truths that had been lived out by generation after generation of people before him. By the time those lived truths were inherited by him, they had become foxed, crumpled, brown and brittle with age. Through the entire discourse, however, Adinath remained still, his head respectfully lowered; he did not know anything else. It also served as a way of hiding the imprint on his face of the knowledge that he had just acquired: his father has forgotten that anything special had ever existed between them. He need not have feared, after all.