The Lives of Others

by Neel Mukherjee

  The effect of his answer is equally unprecedented. Mad Ashu gives out a high, hiccuping giggle, poised somewhere between the gurgling of a baby, giddy with laughter, and a series of barks emitted by an imaginary animal. The lenses of industrial thickness flash, or are they his eyes?

  ‘Bah, bah, grand! Grand. Now, can you prove it?’ the madman asks.

  Sona shakes his head. ‘No, I’ve been trying, but I keep running into walls.’

  ‘The proof is not easy. Do you know the Brahmagupta identity?’

  Sona shakes his head again, but this time there is excitement and curiosity mixed with the admission of failure. He has got over the slurring way of talking that Mad Ashu has, as if his sleepy tongue is having trouble waking up to alertness.

  ‘Proof is everything in mathematics. You know that, right?’ Mad Ashu asks and peers at him as he would at an insect in his food.

  Sona nods his assent.

  ‘Listen, you come with me, I’ll show you, show you the proof. I live right here, look, there’s my house,’ he says, pointing, and at that exact moment there is a power outage. A collective sigh from the whole neighbourhood goes up.

  ‘Jaaaah, load-shedding. Load-shedding, do you see? Again,’ the man says. ‘But no problem, we’ll work in the light of a hurricane lamp, we’ll ask them to send one to the room. Come, come.’

  Any other time this business of following a stranger, and not quite a normal stranger, home would have given Sona pause, not least by the promptings of his own shyness and solitary, reserved nature. But the lure of numbers has overruled everything; Sona is not even conscious of any such caution or deliberation. Maybe the bits of half-truths about Ashish Roy, those not to do with his apparent unordinariness, submerged under the more colourful gossip of insanity, played a part in this. Sona seems to remember, in shreds and patches, that Ashish Roy had been a much-respected professor in Presidency College; people used to call him interchangeably ‘genius’ and ‘mad’; the terms, after all, could very well be transferable. Then something had happened – an illness, a stroke, an accident, a grieving? – something that Sona does not know, never knew; Ashish Roy had stopped being a regular commuter across the divide between ‘genius’ and ‘madman’ and had remained stuck on one side, unable to cross over to the other again. He had taken early retirement and was often seen walking along the streets of Patuapara or just north of Hazra Road with rheumy eyes, muttering to himself, sometimes laughing out loud, sometimes sighing, dressed in outsized, filthy hand-me-downs, a handy bugbear for mothers of the area to scare their children with. And yet, through all this open ridiculing, something of the awe at his former glory, something remembered, perhaps only through anecdotes at several removes, bubbles to the surface and mitigates what could easily have turned into naked cruelty.

  Sona follows Ashish Roy to his dingy quarters on the ground floor of a decrepit house on Rupchand Mukherjee Lane. The falling dark and the power outage have not been dented in the slightest by the few hurricane lamps that are being lit; most of their glass chimneys are black with soot. A transistor radio is playing, in a room somewhere, a popular Hemanta Mukherjee song. An elderly woman’s voice calls out, ‘Who goes there?’ No one replies. Ashish Roy mutters, ‘So dark, can’t see a thing, wait, don’t move, you may trip over something’, then gives a shout, ‘Orre, bring some light here’, which tapers to a thin cry towards the end of the call. No answer.

  ‘Follow me, we’ll get there,’ he advises the boy, then begins his ill man’s shuffle. Sona cannot see him very well, but does as he is told. A servant is complaining in shrill tones, ‘The water’s gone. If the pump had been turned on this afternoon, there would be water. How will I do the washing-up now?’ There follows the clatter of stainless-steel plates and metal pots and pans.

  When they reach what Sona assumes to be Ashish Roy’s room, he notices that a hurricane lamp has been placed already on a wooden stool. It casts more shadows than it illuminates. The extreme shabbiness of the room is familiar to Sona – a wooden four-poster bed with greasy sheets and pillows, a large glass-fronted showcase containing scores of books, a wooden almirah, a cane stool, a diptych of framed photographs of perhaps his dead parents above the doorframe, a wall calendar from ‘Basak Stores’ with a picture of Kali.

  The man plunges in straight away. ‘Proof, proof, no proof, nothing. Have you heard of Euclid? The Greeks laid the foundations of mathematics. Can you tell me how many prime numbers there are? Can you tell me?’

  Sona knows this. ‘Infinite,’ he answers.

  Ashish Roy cackles again, ‘Correct, correct. Now, can you prove it? See here, see here.’

  He limps to the bookcase, opens one of its doors, picks out a thick, battered volume, all the while muttering to himself, ‘Nine twenty, nine twenty, nine twenty, infinity of primes’. He bends down towards the smoky light and locates what he is searching for. ‘Here it is, here it is, look, look here: nine twenty, book nine, proposition twenty, Elements, Euclid’s Elements, have you heard of it, the foundation stone of mathematics; here, look, the proof of the infinity of primes. Shall I explain it to you? It’s very simple, you can see it in front of you as I speak, they’ll appear in front of your eyes, the logical steps, shall I? Shall I?’

  Before Sona has had a chance to leaf through the pages of this legendary book – his hands are a-quiver at the touch of Euclid – Ashish Roy has begun, falling over himself in his enthusiasm and child-like excitement.

  ‘Let us assume that there is not an infinity of primes. So the series A, let’s say, of primes goes 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17 and ends with X. Are you following me?’ he asks, then, without waiting for an answer, not because he does not care, but because something in the boy’s wide-open eyes and half-open mouth, something approaching a trance-like state, tells him, this man who once upon a time made a living teaching and could work out by taking one brief look at a student’s face whether he was with him or not, that the boy intuitively knows from this point on, from the finite set of A = {2, 3, 5, 7, . . . X} he has posited, that he will be able to construct the proof himself, so without waiting for a response to his rhetorical question, he continues, ‘Now let us suppose, on the basis of our hypothesis, that there is a number Y, which is defined by the formula Y = {2, 3, 5, 7, . . . X} + 1.’

  Sona lets out an exultant cry, part one-note laugh, part shout – his magic number, his old friend, his saviour on the winged horse: one. Here too, in the proof, as in the geography of his mind, it is the key that will unlock, the hand that will guide him safely through the path in the dense, jumbly woods. His joy is at recognising his unfailing friend again. Yes, he knows how the proof will advance.

  Ashish Roy has not been interrupted by Sona’s ejaculation; if anything, it has spurred him on, because he has now received a sign that the boy’s mind is flying along the beautiful arc of the proof, the mind at one with the path, indivisible. ‘It is obvious that Y is not divisible by any of the numbers in the set A because it leaves the remainder’ – in his excitement, not only at the elegant parsimony of the proof, but also at his certainty of the boy’s innate understanding of the steps to come, he trips over his words – ‘onewhendividedbyanynumberbelongingtothesetAbutifitisnotaprimeitmustbedivisiblebysomeprimeandthereforethereisaprimenumbergreater-thananyofthenumbers . . .’

  Sona cannot sit still. He leaps up and shouts, ‘That contradicts our hypothesis.’

  Ashish Roy gives out his signature cackle, then the boy and man sing out in inseparable unison, ‘So the hypothesis is false and so there are an infinity of primes.’

  Then both of them simultaneously fall to a delighted laughing. It is the laughter, one imagines, of child-angels; the purest distillate of joy while contemplating some kind of immanent perfection. The shadows in the room, nearly totally in the dark, are tremulous. The hurricane-light flame, one side markedly higher than the other, is turning the glass blacker by the minute.

  Ashish Roy says, ‘Do you know what kind of a proof this is? It’s a reductio ad absurdu
m, Latin, meaning, literally, to reduce to the point of absurdity, to the point of absurdity. Euclid loved this method. It is one of the finest weapons in the mathematician’s drawer, one of the finest, the finest.’

  Sona sees the glint of a thread of drool at the corner of the man’s mouth catching the yellow light of the lamp and turning briefly golden.

  ‘Beautiful, isn’t it? What do you say, eh?’ Mad Ashu asks.

  Sona, still enmeshed in magic, can only nod.

  ‘“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever”,’ the man says, losing Sona for a moment by this sudden switch to non-mathematical English. ‘Have you heard this? “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.” Keats, John Keats. English poet, great English poet. Now do you understand how right he was?’

  Because these are not numbers but words instead, with a fractious and slippery attachment to the meanings behind them, unlike numbers, Sona takes a while to work out the relation between the words of the great English poet and the reality they describe. He nods hesitantly, late with his reaction.

  It is far too early to get hopeful, but Ashish Roy, after what seems like an entire geological era in which he has been crushed and atomised and obliterated, after that oblivion and erasure, feels an unforgettable tug, an imprisoned tiger glimpsing, for the briefest dart of thought, a chink showing the wide open, before it closes again. Or rather, he sees himself as the tiger that has a flash of its freedom; it comes to him with shocking visualness, the black-streaked yellow, the white between the nose and mouth, even the suffocating odour of the big cat. Then it is gone. The dust settles, a heavier patina than before. He does not know how to feel after this – what was it? unexpected vision? intimation? of what could be potential renewal? Pain that it could be a teasing, lying illusion? Hope that it may be real and true? Dread that it could be, as so many times before, true for a while, then turn out to be a cul-de-sac? That pendulum-swing between the two extremities had ruined him. So why is he being tortured with it again? He is finished, he has nothing to give, nothing can be extracted from him any more. But this lanky, underfed, big-eyed boy . . .

  ‘You come here when you can, and talk mathematics with me. How does that sound?’ he offers with utmost tentativeness, his voice disappearing as it progresses.

  Sona nods avidly again.

  Encouraged, Ashish Roy continues, ‘Nowadays I have no one to talk to. There were many in the past, many. My world was full of talk of mathematics, was full of it, loud with it. Now . . . all gone. All finished. There was a time when I was even forbidden to talk or think about numbers.’

  A long pause. Sona is mystified, but does not ask any questions. He has been trained not to ask anything unless it is in a mathematics lesson, only to listen and watch. Listen, watch and keep oneself invisible, absent. Pagla Ashu, mad Ashu, is rambling.

  ‘I couldn’t do it myself. I thought I came close, several times came close, but the next morning, or the next week, I’d discover a mistake, a mistake, a mistake. Everything would come crashing down. Jah, all over, all over!’

  Another long silence. A cockroach flies from the space between the almirah and the bookcase and lands whirringly next to the calendar. Sona flinches. The pervasive slippage in the professor’s speech, mannerisms, physical demeanour, as if all were sliding away between intention and its correct manifestation, may be the effects of some illness, but it is not madness, Sona decides. Maybe the higher reaches of mathematics have curdled his mind. The dividing line between genius and madman is hair-thin, he has always been told. Turned mad while walking around in the world of numbers – Sona cannot imagine a greater pleasure. With the fingers of his mind he caresses the reductio ad absurdum proof again and again.

  A middle-aged woman enters the room. Dishrag of a block-printed sari, burdened looks as if she were a pack animal not a long way off from the knackers’ yard. She adds to the shadows in the room.

  In a tight voice that people adopt when they do not want their words to be overheard she says, ‘Again? Again? You’ve brought someone back again? How many times have you been asked not to do it? How many times?’ The fury in her words belies the partially hushed delivery. Sona fears that she is going to explode any minute, but the low hiss continues. ‘You clearly haven’t learned your lesson. How much lower do you want to pull us? You may not have any shame, any repentance, but you could think of us. Or is that too much to ask? To replace some numbers with humans? Mathematics has eaten not just you, but is devouring us alive too.’

  Ashish Roy sits through the tirade blinking and drooling like an idiot. He does not look particularly embarrassed or mortified. What is going on in the prickly thickets of his unknowable mind, Sona has no idea. Sona himself wants to become inanimate, like the Basak Stores calendar, something outside the horizons of human address.

  She turns to him and spits out, barely bothering to change her tone, ‘And you. You go home now. Don’t come here again.’

  This Sona understands – it is plain, unclothed rejection. Scampering off through the gap between the scolding woman and the door, he cannot turn back to answer Mad Ashu’s desperately slurred shout directed at his fleeing figure: ‘Ei, wait, stop, where do you live?’

  Running back home in the dark, with a thudding heart and flaming ears, past Pandey’s cowshed and its attendant smell-cloud of cow-dung and hay, then the corner shop with its one weak taper and strings of peanut brittle hanging from an open shutter, Sona sees old Panchanan, with his cheeks sunk in on his toothless gums, sitting behind the grubby glass jars of sweets and savouries. In the daytime he would perhaps have called out to Sona, ‘Ei je, mathematics-moshai, where are you headed?’ but it is pitch-dark now. Sona is often sent to Panchanan’s tiny shop to buy four-annas’ worth of puffed rice or a candle or a box of matches or a plastic bottle of kerosene for the small stove that his mother had lately started using to cook on. He runs faster, knowing his mother is going to be worried.

  At home, the usual rusty clockwork of festering days. Mejo-kaki is shouting at a maidservant because the stairwell and the inner verandahs, the courtyard, are all utterly dark and the servant has failed to dispel it quickly enough. From their room Sona can see the weakest illumination of candlelight. Madan-da can be heard muttering to himself as he emerges from his room near the back garden and goes upstairs; from his tone it seems that he is none too pleased with something or the other.

  Purba asks, ‘Why are you so late?’

  Her son lies, ‘I had to do some extra work with Sougata.’ In that moment of involuntary lying he understands that he is going to find ways to circumvent the stricture forbidding him to visit the professor.

  Purba asks, ‘Did they give you anything to eat?’

  Kalyani, sitting on the floor, doing nothing at all, turns to him, all attention.

  ‘Yes, rice pudding,’ he says.

  ‘Rice pudding?’ mother and daughter ask together. ‘What was the occasion?’

  Sona, face averted from them, mumbles, ‘I think it was Sougata’s birthday a couple of days ago.’

  Here too Sona has something to hide, but it belongs to a different order of privacy. This afternoon, while he was doing his usual three-times-a-week English tuition, Mala-mashi had brought in, halfway through the tutorial, three bowls of chilled rice pudding, one each for the two boys and one for Sanjay Banerjee, the new English tutor. (Dibyendu-da had left after six months, to become a Naxalite, it was rumoured.)

  ‘It was Bumba’s birthday on Wednesday,’ she announced coyly while handing out the bowls.

  Sanjay-da had wished Sougata happy birthday while the boys concentrated furiously on the bowls in their hands, hoping to avoid any excruciating social small talk.

  Ever since Sona had moved to St Lawrence School last year, his status in the Saha house had changed, but not entirely for the better. On the one hand Mala-mashi was clearly impressed, expressing a hooded admiration: ‘Now that your skill in mathematics has taken you to a better school,’ she said, ‘you must make sure that some of your cleve
rness rubs off on Bumba.’ Sometimes she operated through coiled locutions where occluded envy and a calculating expectation fought a tug-of-war: ‘A tiny bit of credit for moving up must be given to all the help Sona has had with English, his weakest subject, in the tutorials at our home,’ she said to the neighbours, ‘let’s hope he remembers that’; obligation can loop more complicated knots around the giver than the receiver. Occasionally something boiled over in her and she said to Sona, ‘You’ve reduced coming here to three days a week instead of the usual five, now that you’re in a better school. So be it. But you’re not the type to become arrogant. We, on our part, are happy to do the little that will help you along, regardless of five days or three.’