The Lives of Others

by Neel Mukherjee

  How much Chhaya had relied on Priyo’s rash oath – taken by everyone else as frivolous, as a kind of performance of solemn intentions – became apparent during the days over which the knowledge of Priyo’s assent percolated down to the core of her understanding. The occasional match presented to Priyo by their mother: this Chhaya had learned to bat away, for she knew Priyo would go through the motions and then come up with a final ‘no’. That the game would change she had no idea. Through all the early stages of the matchmaking, Chhaya had been genuinely unbothered, even, initially, by the news that Priyo had said ‘yes’. It could have been disbelief, it could have been denial, but the first contact with the truth was like a stone flung at delicate, innocent glassware. The reassembling took an effort that was hundredfold the energy of the shattering: it was her abnormally pitched voice as she pulled out the trembling words ‘What good news! It’s time for celebration’ from inside her, when she was informed that the final talks between the two families had begun; the way her face seemed so frangible, so effortfully held back from disintegration; the way she seemed scrunched up on herself, but bravely trying to go through the ordinary motions and reactions of life; a smile that never reached her eyes, a mechanical answer, a choked muffledness sometimes at the edge of her voice when she spoke – it was all these that pierced Charubala at the same time as chilling her soul.

  Fear. That is what Charubala felt in the presence of her daughter. Ordinary conversations felt like booby-trapped enclosures.

  ‘Have you decided which saris you’re going to wear?’ she asked her daughter, instantly regretting missing out on articulating the occasion she meant.

  Chhaya called her on it; the time for sensitivity was long over. ‘Wear when?’ she said.

  Charubala made her second mistake. ‘You know very well when.’

  ‘If you know that I know, then clearly you do too. Why such difficulty in spelling it out?’

  Terror had emptied Charubala’s mind; she had no response. In any case, Chhaya did not wait for one.

  ‘Yes, of course, I have been thinking a lot about Priyo’s wedding and what I should wear at Priyo’s wedding,’ Chhaya said, that raggedy edge to her brittly-pitched voice. ‘Tell me what to wear at Priyo’s wedding, on the different days of Priyo’s wedding – one for each day and another for each night of Priyo’s wedding. What an auspicious occasion.’ Her voice rose higher and higher at each recurrence of what her mother had thought it tactful to leave out.

  Charubala cried out, more in fear than anger, ‘What’s happened to you? Why are you behaving like a madwoman?’

  Unnervingly, Chhaya did not snap. Instead she gave a high, unjoyous laugh and turned her back to her mother. Charubala thought that she had turned away to avoid being seen to cry, to appear weak. A long-buried memory shifted in her mind, of an afternoon when this daughter, then much younger, had looked into her soul and confronted her with an insuperable choice. It was too much for her. She would have to ask Sandhya to deal with this, but what precisely was she going to say to her daughter-in-law? She fled from the room, from the sight of that dangerous suppuration.

  In the four-month lead-up to Priyo’s wedding, Chhaya’s behaviour became more and more erratic. She secluded herself in her room, pleading some kind of illness or the other. At times she appeared for dinner wearing stale clothes, her unwashed hair all over the place, looking the picture of wildness, not far from an incarnation of the goddess Kali. At other times she showed up wearing what seemed like a shopful of heavy ceremonial jewellery – bangles up to her elbows, chokers and necklaces, earrings that covered the entire ear – looking even more precarious, her face a mask of a sick excess of powder and snow and lipstick. She resembled a malignant, bloodthirsty goddess even more. On these occasions, with everyone else around her walking as if on eggshells, she asked her rhetorical questions, ‘How do I look? Good, don’t you think? At least I don’t look so dark with all the make-up. What do you think? Why aren’t you answering me? Tell me, tell me, why aren’t you answering me?’ And, poised teeteringly at that pitch, she took off her ornaments, piece by piece, and dashed them onto the floor, against the furthest wall.

  Sandhya gently said, ‘Chhee, such expensive stuff, and sacred to Lakshmi too, it’s not good to hurl these things onto the floor.’ She almost crooned the words, as if lulling a child to sleep. ‘Give them to me and I’ll pick out the ones that will look best on you and match your sari and blouse, come now.’

  Charubala thought of the imminent wedding and her hair stood on end; what unknown heights would Chhaya ascend on those climactic days? It did not bear thinking about.

  Sandhya suggested, ‘Ma, I think Chhaya may be feeling left out. It’ll be all right if we involve her in more things. What if we asked her to sing on the evening of boü-bhaat? Such a wonderful singer. She just needs to feel that she too has a role in all this.’

  Sandhya was a year younger than Chhaya but relationally her senior, since she was married to Chhaya’s elder brother; Charubala had always thought this was a felicitous combination – Sandhya could be a mixture of sister and friend for her daughter and still have a kind of gentle, subtle command over her. In the six years that Sandhya had been in the family, she had taken on more and more responsibilities and become a solid, reliable, gentle sanctuary, but she was also efficient and hard-working. Even with two little sons to look after, she worked in tandem with her mother-in-law as the core that held the Ghosh household together, its central nervous system, its head factory. Charubala foresaw a day in the near future when Sandhya would be running, with her blessing, the entire show, so that when she suggested something, such as this solution to the problem of Chhaya, Charubala was always willing to heed it.

  Pointedly Chhaya did not go to the bride’s house in Behala for the main wedding rituals; she said she was too ill to move out of bed: nausea, head-spins, high temperature, a throbbing inside her head, palpitations, extreme weakness. A doctor was called. Charubala was torn between extreme irritation – what a fine time to fall sick! in the middle of a frenetic circus at home, with scores of people, decorators, caterers, guests milling around, everyone rushed off their feet – and the need to put on a mask of caring sympathy. Yet something inside her also registered relief. Chhaya was a loose cannon nowadays, and who knew what she would do at the bride’s house during the wedding? Best that she remained at home, even if that meant wasting precious time trying to organise people to stay back to look after her and, vitally, to act out, with tears and theatrical excess, a drama of trying to persuade her to come to Behala; she was safe in the conviction that Chhaya would not budge. It set back the wedding by three hours; there was hysteria in Behala that the auspicious hour was passing; Chhaya extracted a tiny morsel of satisfaction from the compounding wreckage of her life.

  Purnima arrived that evening to take up residence in her new home. Chhaya did not come down to join the throng of women welcoming bride and groom at the threshold, showering them with paddy and new grass, blowing on conch-shells. Her face was not at her window upstairs, furtively feeding her curiosity about her new sister-in-law. Sandhya found time to visit her, sit on her bed, give a short account of the wedding. Chhaya lay on her bed, silent and somehow abbreviated. Then Sandhya asked, ‘Will you be well enough to sing tomorrow? We’re all counting on it.’

  Chhaya nodded. ‘Of course. I’ll be fine,’ she said. The words, the tone, her expression, all pulled in different directions.

  Number 22/6 Basanta Bose Road had turned into a fairground. The 400 invitees were going to be fed in batches on the roof, which had been covered in coloured fabric and lights for the purpose. Long trestle tables had been set up. Flowers, fairy lights, a specially constructed eyrie of bamboo and cloth and planks twelve feet above the front door, to house the shehnai-player and his accompanists as they played one raag after another through the evening, the aroma of pulao and mutton curry and fish-fry and women’s perfumes and tuberose – in the midst of all this Chhaya seemed the unappeased wra
ith who had come back to haunt and curse.

  In the big room on the first floor, where the newly-weds sat, receiving guests and the presents they had brought with them, Sandhya ushered in Chhaya. She had suggested this odd thing, that the groom’s sister was going to entertain the guests coming in and going out of the room with her singing, but now she was doubtful about the appropriateness of the idea. Charubala had called her aside and confessed her misgivings about it too. But it was too late to go back on the plan. That Chhaya, who was ordinarily so reluctant to perform in public, seizing up with shyness and inhibition when asked to do so, had readily agreed in the first place without any cavilling should have alerted both her mother and Sandhya, but there was a wedding celebration to organise, they had a hundred other things to attend to.

  As Purnima was introduced to Chhaya, she got up and then bent down to touch her sister-in-law’s feet. Chhaya graciously played the game of coy reluctance, followed by the inevitable giving in. Guests milled around. There were so many people that it did not seem unusual that Chhaya did not once look at Priyo. On Prafullanath’s insistence, the house had been turned into a blazing core of light. There were no shadows in that cruel room. The chatter and laughter of people rose and fell like spume on grand waves, swelling and partially disappearing, then appearing again. Word quickly went around that Chhaya was going to sing. Someone was sent off to fetch the tanpura from her room.

  Chhaya began with the love-songs of Tagore. Glances of approval were exchanged; her choices were fitting for the occasion. ‘I haven’t seen him yet but I’ve heard his flute’, ‘I yearn to speak what’s in my heart but no one wants to know’, ‘Clouds covered the stars at dusk’, the difficult ‘What radiance is this that fills my soul?’ As so often with Tagore, it was difficult to separate cleanly the spiritual from the romantic, and Chhaya leaned with the full force of her considerable talent on this chord of blurring and made the songs speak with unexpected luminosity. The chatter had ebbed away.

  Purnima, looking appropriately bashful, was doing the usual bridal thing of keeping her eyes downcast in a show of modesty. God, she sang well, Purnima thought, but was it one of those families that was all Tagore songs and effete poetry quotations and literature-grazing? Her heart sank.

  In Priyo’s roiling mind a clear photographic memory bobbed to the surface. A little boy singing, ‘I am a lost traveller. O flowers, you, night-blooming jasmine, mallika of the morning, do you recognise me?’ And a little girl singing out in joyous affirmation, ‘Yes, yes, I know you, new traveller, I have seen the edge of your colourful clothes in the forests . . .’ His chest was a tight band. Did betrayal feel like this then?

  Now that she knew she had her audience captive, Chhaya began the crossing-over. With two mournful, almost unredemptive songs, ‘Both banks of my heart flood over, alas, my companion’ and ‘There is a thirst in my eyes, a thirst across my entire chest’, both more straightforwardly from the ‘Love’ section of Tagore’s songbook, she flicked the mood. No one seemed to notice it, no one registered that something about those two songs sounded some off-notes in a celebratory gathering. But her audience was of one. She knew for whom she was singing and she knew, with the knowledge of someone who has thought another’s thoughts, that a meaning occluded from the perception of everyone else was hitting its target with lethal accuracy. But it was not an audience of one, as she assumed; in a corner of the room Charubala wanted to be swallowed up by darkness, to disappear entirely. The meanings that were forming and disintegrating inside her could not be tolerated; she had to turn her mind away from them.

  Chhaya moved on to the kirtan-inflected, ‘You appear only occasionally, why do I not get to see you for eternity?’ At the words ‘It’s as if clouds move over the sky of my heart, preventing me from seeing you’, Priyo felt the bitter taste of treason in his mouth again: it was like cinders, ashy one moment, burning the other. Out of the corner of his eye he saw his mother bring her aanchol to her mouth and hold it there. Nothing could have prepared them for this. Was it revenge, or was it the cry of a fatally wounded animal as it ran around in pain?

  And then Chhaya twisted the knife in the final movement. She began by singing the compassion-drenched, minor-mode song that her mother had sung to her as a child to console her when she felt small in the eyes of the world because she was dark: ‘Clouds are black, the darkness is black / And scandal too is black / Black is the sin that caused Binodini to be cast out / But blacker than all these, my daughter, is the hair on your head.’ In one neat bundling, Chhaya threw back onto the face of the world, like spit, all that it had arrayed against her. She had been born into a melodramatic world; melodrama was the tool she used to banish it from her.

  Meanwhile, to Bhola’s room on the second floor – Bhola, like everyone else, was mingling with the crowd of guests, friends and relatives – Somnath had succeeded in bringing the housemaid, Meera, on some pretext or the other. He had not only been eyeing up her healthy, curvy, nineteen-year-old’s body for some time, but also making sure that she knew he held it in admiration. The lightest of touches on her shoulder, a feathery and seemingly accidental brush of his arm against her breasts, a casually engineered, and equally debonairly executed, full-frontal bump into her while turning a corner – Somnath had played this with the subtle surety of an old rake, as if what he lacked in experience he made up for with the natural expression of something that was coded in him, something that ran in his blood. He did not know what Meera thought about his creeping advance, but she had appeared to be receptive enough, not pushing his hands away or making excuses not to be in his vicinity.

  He had clocked all her movements and knew that she had her bath in the afternoon, then went up to the roof to hang her washed clothes out to dry. A fortnight ago he had timed his entry to the roof to coincide with this and had been rewarded with the sense-filling sight of her ripe-fruit breasts brimming out of her blouse as she had tried to put it on. Masturbating himself dry while fondling the memory of that image, Somnath had come to the conclusion that it had not just been a matter of serendipity, that there had been something deliberate, almost provocative, about the way those breasts had spilled out before she, taking all the time in the world, had tucked them in. The whole incident occupied barely five seconds, but it stretched itself in Somnath’s mind, adding to his perception of it as pointed, calculated. Over the next ten days or so Somnath planned furiously. He tried to catch her on her own, but was foiled by something or the other. The wedding preparations had made everyone so breathlessly busy that a snatched moment or two of privacy had become even more difficult to come by than it normally was in this populous, ever-public home. He could hardly lock himself in a bathroom with her; even that would be discovered – somebody was bound to come along and hammer on the door, wanting to use it, halfway through.

  And then, amusing Somnath, the opportunity to hide presented itself at the moment of greatest publicness: there was so much going on elsewhere that no one was going to discover them in his brother’s room. But he had to hide his embarrassingly obvious erection from her first, so he asked her to fetch a glass of water.

  ‘Come straight back here, don’t get roped into doing other stuff on the way,’ he said.

  Meera shook her head and ran off to do the errand. Somnath reclined on his brother’s bed and arranged himself and his clothes to hide his arousal. An odd thing occurred to him: he addressed Meera customarily using the lowest of the three forms of ‘you’, as everyone in the house did, but he could not think of a single instance in which Meera had spoken directly to him, either using the highest version of ‘you’, which would have been normal, or the middle one, which would have been disrespectful and impudent for a servant to use with someone of her employer’s family, even though he and Meera were more or less the same age. Had she always found ways of speaking to him in such a way that the ‘you’ had been avoided? How was that possible? The conjugations of the verbs would have given the game away instantly. He had to make her say somethin
g now and find out the answer.

  Meera walked in with a glass of water. She advanced towards Somnath, he reached out his hand for it, she extended hers to give it to him, then he did not know how it happened, perhaps because of his awkward angle of repose on the bed, perhaps because the timing of the transfer of the glass was a whisker off, but it slipped in the moment of being passed, spilling its entire contents on Somnath’s lap.

  ‘Eeesh, jah, it slipped,’ Meera exclaimed. ‘Let me do it, let me do it,’ she said and before Somnath could move or react Meera had whisked off some piece of cloth from somewhere and begun to rub his crotch and lap vigorously, the area drenched by the water, in an effort to soak up part of it. In a dream Somnath watched and felt her rub his rock-hard penis as if it were the most natural action in the world. Was she doing it purposefully? Or was she just dabbing at the wet patch? Did she know, feel, that he had an erection? Why was she continuing to touch his cock as if by accident, if she knew what it was exactly? Or was she so innocent that she had no idea? The swarm of questions came like a trick of light or air, here one moment, absent the other, so that he had no idea, in the giddiness of his sensations, whether he had thought them at all or had retrospectively appended a kind of cerebration to what at the time was only an undifferentiated wash of sense-data. Swelling the excitement was the fear of discovery. He seemed incapable of asking her to shut the door.