The Lives of Others

by Neel Mukherjee

  Chance to do what? Hard as I try, I can’t answer their side of the issue, can’t imagine myself into it. Instead of all this idealism of unity, did they not think – They’ve come from Calcutta, they have more money than we do, they live in brick and cement buildings, they get three meals a day (not true of Dhiren), they ride in buses and trams, they wear different kinds of clothes, so why are they going to bed with their stomachs half-empty nearly every night by choice? Which fool chooses to go hungry? Or could it be that they are eating secretly, meals they’re buying elsewhere with their money? And if they’re doing that, then why are they not doing that for us, buying us some food? They can see that we’re getting barely enough to keep body and soul together, why aren’t they doing anything about the burning in our bellies?

  The logical progression of the thoughts I imagined for them, if indeed they progressed along that line, brings me to a disturbing conclusion: could it be that that particular endpoint of their thoughts, why are they not ending our misery with their city money?, could it be that it would become the cause of another resentment?

  Now that I’ve thought that, I can’t get it out of my head. Were we too going to be seen to be on the side of their class enemies, unable to cross a crucial dividing line? Would we too become yet another justified target of their hatred?

  I don’t want to think like this, but I find myself helpless to put a stop to it. Every little thing lifts the lid. Take, for example, Bijli sowing the seeds of various gourds and pumpkin in the tiny patch of dirt next to her hut. Who brought the seeds? Did she save them herself, taking them out and putting them carefully away when she cut the vegetables before cooking? Did she buy them somewhere? I asked Kanu. He said that his wife saved the seeds, everyone did it, so that they could grow a little something for their own use; the wealthier farmers grew cash crops, such as paan or sugar cane, because they had the land to do it, while people like Kanu grew edible stuff for their own use in a scrap of vegetable garden. In itself this fact was yet another of those little things that added to my growing knowledge of a new world. But it disturbed me because I hadn’t noticed the process of retaining the seeds and drying them out and saving them. Did it happen while I was away in Chhurimara or Munirgram? Or did I simply overlook it? Whatever the answer, what stares me in the face is this: I’m failing to become one of them. A distance still separates us.

  On some nights, I lie awake, trying to imagine being someone else, someone who has crossed my path that day, say, the man who was selling fritters at the mela in Munirgram, or the one selling hot gram, or the labourer whom I had noticed once, squishing all the fiery, tiny purple chillies into his rice first before beginning to eat, a thing that caught my eye for no reason at all . . . I imagine anyone, really, anyone who happens to fall into my mind as I wait for sleep to arrive. First, I concentrate to bring into sharp focus every detail of his face and clothes and bearing. When I get that, I move one step further and try to imagine his life in as much detail and minuteness as I can. Sometimes I arrange it on a time-axis: When did he wake up? What did he do then? What after that? I try to string out his day in hours and minutes.

  Sometimes I use a different approach. I concentrate on one probable experience in his life and try to become him and live that experience in every single sensation and feeling. That wage-labourer mashing those blackish-purple scud chilles into his rice, for example – why was he doing that? It was obvious that he loved his food very hot, but when did he acquire the taste? Was he given chillies to eat from early childhood? Did his mother make very hot dishes? Could it be that in situations where there isn’t much to eat, or not much variety in what there is, people eat more chillies as a way of adding some kind of zing to their dull food? Do they burn his mouth and make his . . . my eyes and nose water? Does the burn spread to my ears? Does it upset my stomach? What did I do when I couldn’t get hold of chillies? The questions come thick and fast, each spawning five more, and those five, five each . . . until I find that I have squeezed my eyes so tightly closed that I see floating coloured shapes, like rotting fragments of dead leaves underwater.

  I open my eyes. The centre of my head feels heated. And yet I’m no closer to that man. Most importantly, I haven’t been able to answer that big question: what idea did he have of the story of his life, not only of the past and the present, but also of what was to come?

  There seem to be fewer stars; it must be getting close to dawn. No sign of your face or your name in the sky tonight. What is going to happen to the two of us? Doesn’t that question haunt you, too, and keep you awake? It’s eating me slowly from the inside. It’s all impossible, everything between us, every possibility, imaginable or unimaginable, is impossible.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  MANY YEARS LATER, as he faced his own dissolution, Prafullanath was to remember a distant afternoon when his father took him to see the Elphinstone Bioscope in an enormous tent on the Maidan. That same book of memories seemed to contain an infinite number of self-renewing pages; a well-visited one was the time when he had gone with his father to watch the IFA Shield match, which Mohanbagan had won. It was a book that Prafullanath forced himself to think he had erased successfully, but it was as if scraps of imperfectly rubbed-out writing, half a line here, a quarter-page there, still bearing the tiny worms of rubber-shavings and the impress of the letters wiped out, had cunningly revivified themselves and presented their taunting, undead selves to him, mocking, mocking his failure to annihilate them for ever.

  Five years after Mohanbagan’s IFA Shield victory, his father was dead. It was 1916 and the war in Europe had temporarily disrupted the passage of the ships that brought the medicines for his father’s diabetes into India from the country of their manufacture. No amount of money, in which the Ghoshes were not lacking, could open this particular door.

  When he was four, Prafulla had seen his brother, Braja, older than him by twelve years, celebrating British victory in the Boer War, and had joined him in running up and down the stairs, parroting his dada’s ‘The English have won! The English have won!’ They were all supporters of the English then; victory for the English meant their victory. Who would have thought that a dozen years down the line the distant thunder of another war in which the English were again involved would descend so crashingly on their little lives? He had not, then or later, linked up the British with his father’s death, stringing out the beads of cause and effect, in part because the rise in anti-British nationalism hardly touched the Ghosh family in North Calcutta. Four or five years after the child’s jubilation at British victory in the Boer War, when the nationalist movement in Bengal was in full swing, the Ghoshes in their enormous family mansion in Garpar Road had not boycotted English goods, or given up their jewellery, like most patriotic families, to fund the nationalist cause, nor had they consigned their foreign silks and fabrics to the regular bonfires that the swadeshi revolutionaries organised.

  Prafulla, Manmathnath’s son from his second marriage, had lost his mother at birth. Manmathnath, cradling the motherless infant, had said to Braja, his elder son, ‘This baby has never seen his mother’s face. The two of us are his only world. We have to be mother and father to him, in the way I have tried to be both to you, after you lost your own mother. I married again so that you could have another mother in your chhoto-ma. That dream is now ashes. You are twelve years older than he, you must be not only a brother to him, but also another father.’

  But it was the death of Manmathnath that was the true turning point in Prafulla’s life; to speak of his world and his father as two separate things was meaningless. Manmathnath had established and run Calcutta’s biggest and best jewellery house, Ghosh Gold Palace, and had lovingly explained to his younger son, without a trace of condescension in his voice, his innovations in the Bengali jewellery trade; Prafulla, despite himself, could still remember everything from those lessons, which he had absorbed eagerly as stories. He could remember the long, noisy, rattling trip in the Beeston Humberette to the huge showroom o
f the Great Eastern Motor Company in Park Street, where he was taken to feast his eyes on the steam- and motor-cars on display. The open-mouthed stares of people who stopped in their tracks to see that rarity, a car, phut-phutting down Circular Road. (The child Prafulla was not immune to this sense of wonder; he and his brother sat for long hours on the front balcony to watch motorcycles going down the street; when a horse-drawn brougham or a victoria or, better still, an Oldsmobile, made an appearance, the boys’ day was made.) Much earlier, when he was a little boy carried in the tight embrace of his father’s arms, the spectacular experience of watching the ascent of a gas-balloon carrying a man up-up-up from the Oriental Gas Company fields to the sky. The kadam tree in the garden that looked adorned with perfect spheres of creamy-golden light in the monsoon. The man who came around every evening, a ladder on his shoulder, lighting the street lamps. The unearthly rhythmic song of the Oriya palanquin bearers – Dhakkunabor hei-yan nabor, dhakkunabor hei-yan nabor – going about their business on the streets of Chitpur. Much later, the pale-brown-and-yellow trams with their many doors and their wondrous ting-ting-ting sound as they approached. The ‘khut’ sound as the conductor gave his father his ticket, which he handed to his son immediately. The priceless treasure of the Calcutta Tramways Company ticket, with writing in English and Bengali equally divided on front and back, which he saved in his little box of precious collectables along with pigeon and crow and sparrow feathers, coloured beads, pieces of shiny coloured glass, string, ribbons, buttons, a piece from a broken anklet, tamarind seeds, even a seashell. The drudgery of having to sit through Vidyasagar’s Barna Parichay and Parry Charan Sirkar’s First Book of English in the occasionally sooty light of hurricanes. Running his thrilled fingers over the tight and precise accordion of creases made by the servants, using gila seeds, on the sleeves of his father’s panjabi. The pile of sitabhog, like heaped petals of jasmine, brought all the way from Bardhaman on the train, and he seated on his father’s lap, being fed with a silver spoon from a silver bowl spoonfuls of that divine sweet. ‘The Great Bengal Circus’ one evening, once again sitting next to his father, his left hand clasped to his father’s right throughout, the boy, enchanted, watching the Bengali strongman, Shyamakanta-babu, breaking enormous boulders on his chest.

  This father, who had loved his motherless younger son more than the irises of his own eyes, more than the weight and value of gold and diamonds that passed through his shop every month, this man had suddenly died and Prafulla, completely orphaned, had found himself falling falling falling as if he had chanced upon the trapdoor that connected his life to the black infinity of space.

  Braja took to heart their father’s injunction, warming to the task, most enthusiastically in the disciplining duties of brotherly care. Prafulla would never forget the day when Braja had summoned every single servant in the house and had belted him mercilessly in front of them for the misdemeanour of calling one of the servants a ‘son of a pig’, a filthy term in the mouth of someone so green. That hectic performance of tough love under the stairs might have established the credentials of Braja as an ideal elder brother in the eyes of the world, but in the boy’s mind it planted the first seeds of the suspicion that Braja resented him for being the second wife’s son.

  In the months after their father’s death Braja found a liberation, manifested in the frequent explosive flowerings of his cruelty. What shame and pain Prafulla had felt when he had been thrashed repeatedly without any reason, again in the view of everyone in the house who cared to see – and everyone did – and again without anything, or anyone, to restrain Braja. He knew then that nothing in his future could ever hold the terror of the prelude to these beatings: Braja taking off, one by slow one, the dozen or so rings that he wore to channel the propitious influences of the stars and planets, that warm-up exercise lovingly undertaken so that the metals or any protruding stone did not do any serious damage to his brother’s face or mouth or eyes – such consideration – and Prafulla standing there, trying to control his pelvic floor so that he did not add the humiliation of pissing himself to the deluge that was about to break over him. A chasm had long opened up between Prafulla’s public manner of respect and esteem for his dada, a mask that he put on every day and tried to keep firmly in place, and the private knowledge that the feelings which bound the brothers together were envy, rivalry, rancour.

  First, there was Braja’s great reluctance in having Prafulla continue to come to the shop in the mornings, as he had started doing in the company of their father to learn the ropes. ‘In the jewellery trade,’ Manmathnath used to repeat like a favourite chant, ‘experience is everything, the first-hand, touched-by-your-skin, seen-with-your-eyes experience of handling gold and jewels – that is the greatest education.’ Braja had benefited from it; now it was Prafulla’s turn. While Manmathnath had been alive, Braja had had to keep a secure lid on his antipathy; now it became an open sanction against Prafulla coming in to Ghosh Gold Palace. Prafulla bit down on his indignation and acquiesced, but could no longer contain himself when his uncles and their grown-up sons started circling in the hope of rich pickings. His three uncles all had their own jewellery shops, all variants using the Ghosh name, but none a quarter as successful as his father’s business; this added to the animosity that had already led to the brothers setting up separate businesses.

  Days and nights of people, his relatives, going in and out of their enormous house in Garpar, relatives who had hardly shown their faces during his father’s lifetime because jealousy and enmity ran so deep, now brimming over with solicitous tenderness for Manmathnath’s orphaned sons. Soon, the eloquent sympathies were directed only at Braja, and Prafulla was ignored; the uncles had only had to sniff the air to work out who held the keys. All these uncles, at once frayed and battened by their perfumed lives of khemta dances, alcohol, the obligatory visit to the brother before returning home – when they did return home – to the ministrations of their cosseting, dutiful wives, these uncles who had lived off their family wealth and dissipated it in such sybaritic style, they had all come rushing to see if they could invoke family and heritability and loot more fuel for their finite fires and infinite appetites.

  From his room Prafulla could hear voices raised, sometimes in altercation, sometimes in calculating cheer, as if it were not around a death that they had congregated, but a jubilation. Often this was accompanied by the sharp methyl smell of the spirits that lubricated the raucous proceedings. Forbidden from participating, Prafulla paced his room like a caged beast.

  Braja’s next step was to have everything transferred to his own name – the business, the house, the bank accounts, the assets and properties – effectively disinheriting Prafulla of his share of the patrimony and making him a dependant.

  ‘I have done it for your own good, you’ll come to understand one day,’ Braja said to him. ‘You will work your way up to the top. That training will be invaluable.’

  Those who saw it as the barefaced robbery it was, most notably Chitta-babu, Chittadas Roy, the manager of Ghosh Gold Palace, and Manmathnath’s friend and accomplice for decades, kept their mouths sealed.

  Prafulla could not choke down his outrage. ‘Why are you cutting me out like this? It’s wrong. I am as much my father’s son as you are,’ he said.

  This was exactly the opening Braja needed; if he played it carefully, Prafulla was going to do Braja’s dirty work for him.

  ‘Alas, I can’t believe I’ve lived to see the day when I hear my very own younger brother talk of my father and your father,’ Braja said.

  ‘I have rights to all the things that you’re denying me.’

  Braja ratcheted up his display of hurt. ‘Rights? I saw you being born, and you talk to me of rights? Has it now come to this?’ His voice did an impression of a wobble. ‘I feel I’m being called a thief by those very people for whom I do the stealing. This is all to protect you, and now you talk to me of division of . . . of . . .’ He let this trail off for maximum impact.

 
Wrong-footed, Prafulla dropped the matter for the time being. It was raked up again, this time by a meeting with Chitta-babu, at which the elderly gentleman, clearly struggling to present a calm surface over the roil of things he could not bring himself to articulate in front of this young man, hinted darkly, ‘If your father were alive, this . . . this sin would have been undreamt-of. One day you will understand all this. I can’t say any more than that. But if you soon find yourself in need of help, I mean any kind of help, look at me, child, look at me; any kind of help, come to me and I’ll see what I can do. More than this I cannot say. I hope you understand my constraints. But remember, He is seeing everything from above, He’ll not let this pass.’

  Prafulla, who had a reasonable idea of what the great unmentionable could be, confronted Braja again. This time Braja’s wife, Surama, took a lead role. Speculation, not entirely baseless, had it that it was Surama who had poisoned her husband’s mind against his much younger brother: it was she who had made a big thing out of the fact that the two brothers had different mothers, gainfully exploiting, if not initiating, a wild suggestion that Braja’s mother, Manmathnath’s first wife, had killed herself in mysterious circumstances, no one knew how. The propinquity of Braja’s mother’s death and Manmathnath’s second marriage was a ready gift for this compulsive hyper-fictionalising tendency in Bengali culture; Surama was an exemplar. Yet Prafulla knew, even if he never gave it recognition in words, that Surama had had malleable material to mould.