The Lives of Others

by Neel Mukherjee

  Chhaya finds her voice again. ‘Ma, you mustn’t shout, you’ll fall ill. Let’s leave her to stew in her own poison.’

  ‘Did you hear what she said?’ Charubala asks. ‘Lawyers, litigation . . . Is this what has been lurking in that cesspit of your venomous mind?’

  ‘Cesspit? Poison? Looks to me like a case of the sieve saying to the colander, “Why do you have so many holes in your arse?”’ Purnima modulates her tone to fit the glory of her colloquial style. ‘Your daughter could give a snake a few lessons in “poison” and “venomous mind”.’

  Another frisson of shock goes through Arunima.

  Chhaya says, ‘You are shameless, shameless. An animal, a greedy animal out to devour us. I warned everyone about you, the moment I heard your vulgar voice during the matchmaking. This is all so predictable.’ She pauses for breath, already aware that her hits lack the force of her sister-in-law’s earthier words, her more skilfully targeted darts. The knowledge makes her even angrier, but a secret anxiety, just beginning to whisper inside her head, leaches it away somewhat: does she . . . could she know?

  Purnima fires her final shots. ‘I’m telling you this now, this is your last chance to come to a settlement, otherwise I’ll have walls erected to divide the house.’

  A common enough story in joint families, the threat has not been defanged by the frequency of its occurrence; it curdles and slows the hot flow of anger in both Charubala and Chhaya.

  In the kitchen Madan thinks: How did it come to this? Will the family really break up into smaller units? Where will I go if that comes to pass? What’s going to happen to me in my old age?

  Charubala can only return a few feeble words to this incendiary thrown at her: ‘It will not happen while I am alive.’ But, she thinks, to announce in public such an enormous intention to rive must mean that Purnima has discussed it with Priyo; the thought is like thunder. How could her son have colluded with this woman against his mother, against his father and his siblings? No, no, that is unthinkable, unnatural. So what gave Purnima the power to utter such a thing? Does she really hold so much sway over her son? Division of the house . . . Her head is reeling with the reverberations of those unspeakable words. It is true that the situation with Priyo and Purnima has not been ideal for a long while; tension in the air, an undercurrent of animosity rippling through all the time, congealing silences, avoidance or minimising of contact, a coldness and formality in the ineludible conversations and interactions that one was forced to have because of living in the same house. But whose fault was it all?

  Priyo is not the most intimate among her children, or the most expressive with his affections and emotions, he never has been, but ever since he married this woman, who did not think anything of using the language of the gutter in front of her elders, something befitting slum-dwellers, ever since then there seems to have been a gradual swerving away from all familial bonds. Yet Charubala has never noticed Priyo to be uxorious, or even minutely different from his usual phlegmatic and detached self in his deportment with his wife; he has behaved towards everyone with a total democracy of what she could only call indifference. And she is convinced that it is not the split between his public and private faces; living in one house together means that all the things one imagines are private are not really so – the walls and floors have eyes, ears and interpreting minds. Charubala knows that Priyo does not possess a secret self for his wife’s consumption only.

  As she sits feeling humiliated in front of her granddaughter and in the hearing of a servant, an idea takes shape in Charubala’s head. Before it has fully formed she blurts out, ‘All right, if dividing up the house is what you’ve been plotting, I hope you will remember that I too have some say over the division of other things. It’s Baishakhi’s wedding later in the year. She won’t even get the dust from the jewellery I’ve been saving up for her.’

  This has the effect of a forest fire reaching the line where all the trees have been felled to contain it.

  During the matchmaking leading to Priyo and Purnima’s marriage, the bride’s family had quickly discovered that the groom’s father was the younger son of the Ghosh family, which had made its money and name in the gold business. Jewellers were thick on the ground in Calcutta, but the Ghoshes had long attained the electricity of legend, helped generously by rumours of family dissension, dissolute living, all manner of excess, even rumours of a suicide and gunfire in their family seat in North Calcutta long ago. Didn’t someone kill herself? Poison or self-immolation? Didn’t they regularly have to bring back one of the sons or brothers, unconscious with drink, from the brothels? The risk of becoming a daughter-in-law in a family tainted with scandal was heavily outweighed by the possible riches, in the form of gold and jewellery, that would accrue; this was Purnima’s parents’ sharp reasoning. Besides, wasn’t the groom’s father a breakaway who had reinvented himself in a new business and had nothing to do with the decadent main line any more? Purnima herself had been dazzled by the idea of gold; the lure of metal made her forget that she was actually marrying into paper; forgotten too was the fact that the connection of her husband’s family with gold was historical, not real.

  Yet Purnima had not been deceived in her acquisitive ambitions, not totally. Although he never talked about jewellery, certainly never within Purnima’s earshot, Prafullanath had a secret obsession with it; or so she speculated. It gradually emerged, a few years after she had taken up residence in Basanta Bose Road, that her father-in-law bought gold ornaments, almost ritualistically, about three times a year and kept them in a State Bank of India vault in his wife’s name. The jewellery he bought was not trinkets like rings and thin gold chains and bangles, but of the heavier, showier and more intricate kind, the kind that would be worn by the women of an extremely wealthy family on the big social occasions, a wedding or a family puja. Some of them could not be worn, in public or private, any longer; the era of gold hair pieces, tiaras studded with gems, drooping and baroquely decorative chains linking nose to ear had probably passed.

  Rumour within the family – a word slipped into conversation by her jaa, Sandhya, an unguarded comment by Priyo, evasive answers given to her dogged and strategic questions about the existence, nature and exact content of this jewellery vault – had convinced Purnima that a far bigger hoard lay beyond the usual loose change of necklaces, rings, bangles, earrings and chokers that the women of the house, herself included, kept in the steel lockers in their bedrooms. There were stories about the Ghoshes of Garpar, with whom her father-in-law had had no connection for nearly fifty years, of how they wrapped their daughters in so much gold at the giving-away ceremony of their weddings that only their eyes could be seen, two quick, black holes in the dull yellow glitter. But she had never known her mother-in-law to wear such stuff, not even when she went to attend upper-crust weddings. Where was it all then? How much jewellery did Sandhya have? Did she have her own private locker in a bank? And what about Chhaya? Traditionally, most of the jewellery would have been saved up for her, a gift from her parents when she got married. Now that that possibility had been ruled out, where was her share? In a bank? In her almirah? What good was it going to do Chhaya? It was like a feast of pork for a starving Muslim.

  The only time Purnima got to see what the other women in the house possessed was when they dressed formally to go out. She strewed seemingly innocuous questions in their way, hoping to elicit information about how much more they had beyond the fraction they chose to display.

  ‘Oh my, what a beautiful emerald set, Jayanti,’ she flattered her younger sister-in-law once. ‘It goes so well with your green benarasi sari. Where did you get it?’

  Jayanti shyly parried the question. ‘I’ve always had it,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, I see. You got it at the blessing before the wedding, didn’t you? It’s just that I don’t think I’ve seen it before. What about the pearl set you have’ – this was a shot in the dark – ‘that would go really well with the green too.’

  No reply
from Jayanti, only a coyly perfunctory smile before she stepped into the car to be driven off to wherever she was going that evening. Purnima remained ignorant of her treasures.

  Purnima’s own cache was not inconsiderable, a lot more than that of other women she knew. Not everything had been given to her when she got married; she insisted Priyo bought her some jewellery a couple of times a year. In this way she had built up quite a collection, but all these imagined old-world splendours of baju, tagaa, hanshuli, mantasha, shaat-lahari-haar, chik, chur, ratanchur, gold combs and hairpins with floral ornamentation to make the bun above the neck look like a miniature garden of jewelled flowers, all this she imagined was in Charubala’s trove and she wanted some to be bequeathed to her or to her daughter, Baishakhi, when the time came.

  Now that the time has arrived for Baishakhi, this skinflint mother-in-law of hers has just announced her decision not to part with anything. In Purnima’s mind it is indubitable that this is what Charubala has been waiting for all along: to grab any excuse to hang onto her hoard and gloat over it in private.

  Purnima pounds out of the room, leaving a shaking, tearful Charubala trying to swallow her humiliation and channel it to appear as the onset of feeling ill.

  Very belatedly attention falls on Arunima. Chhaya is the first to realise that the girl has witnessed everything. Her frustration finds an easy target; she starts scolding her niece – ‘What? You still here? How many times have you been told not to remain sitting in a room when the elders are discussing something? How many times?’

  Kalyani mashes up some hibiscus leaves – they exude something sticky that forms thin threads – and then apportions equal amounts onto three tiny dented aluminium plates.

  ‘Here you go,’ she says. ‘Mutton pulao with cashews and raisins. I want you girls to finish every last bit, no leaving something on the plate.’

  She places the plates in front of three dolls propped against the trunk of the guava tree. One is plastic, the painted dress and eyes and lips and hair on its nearly neon flesh-coloured body erased in patches after years of handling so that it looks like it has a radical case of vitiligo. The terracotta one, also with flaking paint and one arm and a foot missing, was a present from Madan-da, brought back from one of his yearly visits to his home up country. The red paint on its inscrutably smiling lips has flaked off in one corner; Kalyani thinks it looks as if a morsel of rice is permanently stuck there, an instance of slack hygiene on the part of the doll, something for which she never fails to tell her off.

  Sitting in the shade of the guava tree, she proceeds to cook the second course for the reception of her dolls’ wedding, a rich mutton kaliya made from dust, torn-up bits of grass, some shredded guava leaves and a couple of broken twigs, all stirred with water to a textured, heterogeneous paste.

  ‘Right, I’m about to serve the kaliya,’ she declares. ‘Sromona, careful, the edge of your benarasi is touching the gravy, you’ll ruin the expensive sari and then where will we be?’

  At the age of eleven Kalyani is too old to play ‘cook-and-serve’ with her dolls, but there does not seem to be anything better to do. She has failed her annual examination in school and been made to repeat the year. Not that anyone is greatly perturbed by it. Her brother is so obsessed with his fat books of numbers and his continual scribbling – head down, uncaring about whether he has had any food or even about a decent place to sit and write – that getting a word out of him has become impossible, while their mother seems only physically present, her mind and spirit, like her son’s, somewhere else; they are both hollowed-out.

  Malati-di had once told her a story about nishi, the ghost who moves by night and calls out your name, assuming the voice of someone you know, and if you answer that call, the nishi traps the sound in a box and with that she has got your soul too, for her to call in as and when she wants; you are her creature from the moment you have replied. It seems that the nishi has sent for the souls of her mother and her brother; her dolls have more animation, more life. She even misses her mother’s scolding. Now that seems so much more preferable to the distraction and melancholy and secret bouts of silent weeping, checked, as soon as Purba is caught out, with a pathetic, ‘I always cry when I’m chopping onions’ when there is no onion anywhere in sight. It is as if she just is not there. Flanked by these two people, who are all that her life contains, Kalyani’s days have fallen into a kind of dispersal, a diffuse structureless nothing that slips through her fingers like smoke.

  She reprimands another doll: ‘There’ll be no mango chutney and papad for you if you don’t clean your plate. I can’t stand waste, you know that.’

  From the second-floor window, Baishakhi has been watching her cousin muttering to herself. She calls and asks her to come up. A leap of excitement in Kalyani – something at last, something different from the viscous drudge of her days – almost instantly moderated by the training of years of cautiousness and inhibition about the ‘upstairs people’; it is noticeable in her walk from the garden up to the second floor: three skips, then however many measured paces with head held down, eyes downcast; not sullen, but just quiet.

  Her eyes become as large as cottage-cheese balls when she enters her cousin’s room. Fanned out on the bed are what she takes to be the entire wealth of Baishakhi’s wedding saris, dozens of them, silk and benarasi and tangail and jamdani and others she does not know the names of, but all gorgeous and dazzling, filling every sense.

  ‘Wedding saris,’ Baishakhi says redundantly. ‘Do you like them?’

  Kalyani can only nod.

  ‘I’m trying to decide what to wear on which day.’

  Kalyani nods again.

  ‘Do you know how many days the whole ceremony is going to take?’

  This she knows. Three days: the smearing-with-turmeric ceremony followed by the actual wedding in this house; then the bride leaves her father’s home for ever; then boü-bhaat at the groom’s. She also knows that although the formal talks have happened, the ashirbad ceremony will be next month, and the wedding at the very end of December.

  Baishakhi picks up a comb and runs it through her long hair, but gives up after a few strokes. She goes to the window, looks out at nothing in particular, returns her attention to the saris and Kalyani. She seems on the verge of saying something, but thinks better of it and starts desultorily going through the saris again, gets bored with this too and walks up to the window again.

  ‘Are you excited that there’s going to be a wedding in this house?’ she asks Kalyani.

  This time Kalyani nods with more vigour.

  ‘Do you want to know what each sari is called?’

  ‘Yes.’

  But Baishakhi loses interest as soon as the question leaves her mouth. Instead she says, ‘Do you know, Baba has chosen a cook recommended by Debu-kaka to do all the catering? Debu-kaka owns Bijoli Grill, he and Baba are friends.’

  Kalyani, who does not know about professional caterers, has been awed into silence; awe at the spectacle that this, her first ever wedding, is going to be. All this opulence of saris and caterers serves to intimidate her.

  ‘What? Why so silent?’

  ‘No, nothing.’

  ‘Do you want to see some of the ornaments I’m going to wear?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Kalyani says, her habitual wariness at being upstairs cast aside at last.

  But Baishakhi makes no move to show her anything. She asks, ‘Listen, do you know who I’m getting married to?’

  Again, a brief nod.

  There is a brief flare of irritation from Baishakhi – ‘The cats’ got your tongue or what?’ – then subsidence into alternating between distracted fidgeting and aimless inertia. ‘What have you heard about him?’ Baishakhi asks her cousin.

  Kalyani, so unexpectedly put on the spot, becomes even more tongue-tied than usual. She cannot read the question at all, but feels under pressure to answer it, otherwise she may be told off again. But what can she say?

  ‘What? Why aren’t you saying an
ything?’

  ‘I . . . I haven’t heard anything about . . . about him,’ Kalyani manages to bring out.

  ‘Why such hesitation? Tell me the truth, what have you heard? You clearly must have heard something, otherwise why did you stammer and halt?’

  This has the effect of terrifying the girl, so her stilted reply – ‘No, no, I’m telling you the truth, I’ve heard nothing, I was thinking, that’s why I paused’ – comes out all wrong: hesitant, deliberated, protesting too much.

  Baishakhi uses some false logic to trick Kalyani. ‘You live on the ground floor, so surely you hear a lot of stuff that people say, coming and going. Downstairs is full of people all the time. Tell me, tell me what you’ve picked up.’

  ‘Nothing, really, I’m touching you’ – here she moves closer and places her hand on Baishakhi’s arm – ‘and saying, “I’ve heard nothing”.’

  ‘If you’ve lied while touching me, you know I’ll die, don’t you?’

  ‘But I’m telling you the truth,’ Kalyani insists again.

  ‘All right, just tell me one thing: do they say good things about him or bad things?’

  ‘Good things, good things only.’

  ‘Aha, caught you, then they do talk about him and you know what they say. You lied. Which means I’m going to die. On the second night of my wedding I’m going to die.’

  Kalyani nearly shrieks, ‘No-o-o-o-o’, then remembers just in time where she is, so it comes out low.

  Baishakhi changes the subject suddenly. ‘Listen, will you be my nit-bou at the wedding?’ she asks.

  ‘What’s nit-bou?’

  ‘A kind of bridesmaid. You’ll have to accompany me to my in-laws’ and return after three days.’

  Kalyani, now wide-eyed, takes some time to process this utterly unexpected gift. Then she nods energetically.

  ‘Then you could wear one of these saris,’ Baishakhi says, adding to the giddiness.

  A cold thought strikes Kalyani. ‘What if my mother says no?’

  ‘Tell Kakima that I suggested it.’