The Lives of Others

by Neel Mukherjee

  The children’s eyes widened with terror. Chhaya was too scared to cry out. They huddled closer and avoided the garden after dark. They sat at the windows at the back of the house and willed themselves to see the she-ghost’s dangling limbs. Charubala’s wish that the children stayed indoors after nightfall was effected in one neat stroke.

  At other times Madan got carried away by the momentum of his tales. One autumn afternoon, when the six-year-old Chhaya was picking shiuli flowers fallen on the grass to use the saffron stalks to dye the clothes of her dolls, Madan said, ‘Don’t pick those flowers. Don’t you know why the plant sheds them? L-o-n-g before you were born, a little girl used to live in this house. When she was six she died of the pox. Her family buried her in the garden and planted the shiuli on her grave. In autumn, which was when she died, the flowers are shed on her grave as an offering.’

  For a few minutes Chhaya remained transfixed. Then her lips quivered, her chin wobbled; a bout of weeping followed. Madan, who always brought a bag full of toys for the children when he returned from the annual visit to his village – tin whistles; little figurines made out of sal-leaves, fragile and ephemeral in the hands of the children; apple-seed necklaces; gaudy plastic objects such as toy maces, rattles, dolls – came back with extra toys for Chhaya later that month: a pair of clay dolls, Radha and Krishna, with their features and clothes and ornaments painted on them in garish colours; a bheesti with eyes drawn in black ink and lips in the deepest shade of red.

  Imitating their parents, Adi, Priyo, Bhola and Chhaya had all begun by calling Madan by his first name, but Charubala had firmly seen to it that they always addressed him as Madan-da. She never ceased telling her neighbours, ‘Our Madan is part of the family’ or ‘He is like our eldest son.’ But despite all this apparent oneness between servant and master’s children, an invisible membrane separating the two worlds never got breached. It was as if a supra-surveillant intelligence, invisible itself but ordering all and keeping everything within the design of things, which was meant to remain unchanging, ever so, was ceaselessly invigilating a flexible barrier that could be moved only so far and no further. Without ever being instructed on what he should call his master and mistress’s children, Madan fell to addressing the boys as ‘Bor’-da’, ‘Mej’-da’, ‘Shej’-da’ and Chhaya as ‘Didi-moni’ from their infancy, breaking a lesser law, of chronology and seniority, in order to honour a superior, overarching one of social hierarchy. While singing to them, when they were still babies, a traditional children’s rhyme, ‘Come, come, o long-tailed bird / Come and play with ——’, in that blank space where he should have inserted the name of the child he was singing to or distracting, Madan invariably inserted the relational status.

  And this man now, his son older than he, the father, was when he came to work for the Ghoshes and stayed on for a period longer than any of her offspring, except Adi, has been part of Charubala’s life, has brought himself to ask her for a favour, possibly for the first time.

  She smiled and said, ‘But there are no factories or mills in the city itself. It’ll have to be in a town elsewhere. Then we’ve lost two or three factories to East Pakistan recently . . . On top of that, there is this wave of refugees swamping us. All of them want jobs in the city. From what I hear from your baba and Adi and others, there are really no jobs to be had. But let me ask. Will a small town do? The Calcutta jobs are all in offices . . . he’ll have to be a peon somewhere.’

  ‘Yes, Ma, small town will do very well. It’s just that the villages in our place . . . there’s nothing there. If you don’t have land to farm, then the prospects are really nothing.’

  ‘All right, I’ll talk to your baba and let you know.’

  She was true to her word. Prafullanath put the matter to Adi and Priyo.

  ‘Well, there’s always the need for another pair of hands in a mill,’ Priyo said.

  ‘We can find him something in Bali,’ said Adi.

  ‘Yes, that’s what I was thinking,’ said their father. The mill at Bali was their biggest possession. In a depressed post-war market, the Ghoshes had not done too badly. From Prafullanath’s export-market contacts they had picked up rumours of an imminent shortage of grey board and had hoarded it. Then, through the war years, they had released it very cautiously – they did not want the King’s government to requisition their entire production and their private properties too – but with the condition that for every unit of grey board purchased, a stipulated number of units of paper would also have to be bought. This paper was supplied, of course, by the Ghoshes’ mill at Memari. So when the recession of ’46 began the Ghoshes were better placed than most. While the mills at Ilam Bazar and Nalhati continued to lie shut, the loss of Meherpur and Chalna in ’47 was at least offset.

  ‘Let Dulal work in Bali for a while. We’re stepping up production there, so we’ll need to hire more workers. Depending on how he does, he could keep an eye on the labour situation for us,’ Prafullanath said. ‘I trust you know what I’m trying to say.’

  ‘Yes, he could be our inside man, as long as no one else finds out how he came by the job,’ Priyo said. ‘We’ll have to ask him to keep his mouth shut.’

  ‘All right, it’s agreed then. Madan will be happy,’ Prafullanath said.

  So it was that Dulal, Madan’s sixteen-year-old son, joined the Ghoshes’ paper mill at Bali as one of the several labourers who worked ‘on the floor’, drawing water to feed the pulping pits, stirring the vats, laying out the pulp in frames. Later, because he had the advantage of literacy and numeracy over most of the other workmen at his level, he was put in charge of the electrical equipment. In two years he had moved up to the rank of unofficial head of the workforce of 250 that kept the mill operating, then, in another year, to de facto manager of the Bali outfit; still under a formal manager, appointed by Priyo on one of his visits to oversee the company’s production units. It was becoming a matter of tacit knowledge that Dulal was the man who, at twenty, understood every nut and every bolt of the actual work done at a paper-manufacturing factory.

  In the thirty years since Prafullanath had set up Charu Paper, a kind of moderate success had come his way, although he would have been the last person to see it like this. Caught in the daily battle of making his two factories cleave as closely as possible to their maximum yields, he had only just let the niggle of continuing to produce on average 180–200 TPD, instead of the perfect 250, become consciously negligible. Still, it was a 45–60 per cent increase on what he had started out with; not to be sniffed at, although it had taken the best part of seventeen years to get to this point. In moments of self-doubt and anxiety, however, the debit column seemed to be endless. Two factories, albeit fallow, lost to East Pakistan, the money written off. Two more factories yet to be repaired, refitted and reopened; the investment required was too huge to contemplate. The fluctuating nature of the output at Memari and Bali, never a steady average of 200 TPD every year: issues of quality control, a late delivery of some chemical, a roller malfunction, a mistake with the metered amount of lacquer entering the Fourdrinier machine, minor accidents with careless and unskilled labourers who didn’t understand the basic functioning of electrical equipment . . . the list was dizzyingly proliferating. After all these years Prafullanath was still occasionally thrown by an error he hadn’t encountered before. At least the appointment of Dulal could theoretically troubleshoot some of those minor problems that had such a disproportionate effect on production.

  And yet Prafullanath couldn’t cavil with the real benefits that he and his family had cumulatively begun to enjoy: three cars, more money to spend on household expenses, servants to take care of the running of such a big house and the needs of the people who lived in it, frequent purchases of gold jewellery, a growing portfolio of land, swelling savings accounts and fixed deposits and life insurances. They were comfortable. Prafullanath hadn’t let the spectre of daily economies and cutting corners, always such a threat, ever materialise. Now that the domestic front had bee
n secured, it was time to turn his attention to the consolidation that had long been his dream. He had laid a strong foundation and brought in his sons to the business. Now it was up to this family team to work together. What were they going to do with the profits?

  While Adi, conservative to the core, asked his father to hold on to his gains, Prafullanath was all for using them to modernise the factory at Memari. ‘Money begets money,’ he had always maintained. ‘If you can’t make it work to breed, then you’ll end up consuming it. We can double the TPD of Memari with new, imported machines. Triple it, even.’

  ‘I think it may be best to sit on our war chest a bit longer,’ Adi suggested. ‘What’s the harm? The interest will not be inconsiderable. What if trying to step up production turns out to be the wrong strategy?’

  Prafullanath said to his son, ‘Listen, I hear Nehru is going to announce the first five-year-plan next year. Where our sector is going to be in the scheme of things is anybody’s guess. I would imagine not very high up. Now is the time to modernise. There will be a whole new set of regulations to deal with then, a new regime of subsidies and taxation and duties. I have a feeling it’s not going to be rosy at all. Besides, we know all the middlemen in these deals, we know what they want, they know how reliable we are in keeping them happy, we know how reliable they are in expediting matters – why not take advantage of this comfortable set-up? Who knows when it’ll all be gone?’

  ‘All right then,’ Adi conceded. ‘But why not think of other interests? Not big ones, such as mines and minerals or the heavy industries – these would be state-owned, in any case – but what about something related to the line we’re already in, like publishing?’

  ‘Publishing?’ Prafullanath and Priyo asked in unison.

  ‘Yes, publishing. Why don’t we start a press? Under these five-year-plans education will emerge as an important sector, don’t you think? We already have a kind of “in”, being paper men.’

  Prafullanath and Priyo absorbed the new idea in silence. A thought was forming in Priyo’s mind.

  ‘Yaaaairs,’ said Prafullanath slowly, mulling it over. ‘Not a bad idea, not bad at all.’

  Priyo played his card tentatively. ‘Actually a good idea, I think. We solve two issues together – lateral expansion and . . . and Bhola. He can look after the publishing house. I think it would be more his kind of thing than straightforward business.’

  At the mention of Bhola’s name a fidgety embarrassment descended on the three. He remained the strand of hair that did not fall in to lie down with the rest, when oil and water and comb were rigorously applied. There was the periodic turning-on of the great fountain of words and fabulism, then there was that undimmable, slightly simple smile, the ever-present suggestion of imminent drool at the corners of his mouth, the spiky hair, the infinitesimally awry movements and physical awkwardness – they all added up to a person who gave the impression that he had not received enough nourishment in his mother’s womb and had come out semi-formed. And yet there was nothing medically or physically wrong with him, only a kind of off-centredness and a touch of the holy fool. All the Bengali terms used for him – ‘grinning idiot’, ‘not quite there’, ‘otherworldly’, ‘like Shiva’ (alluding, of course, to the god’s playfully child-like aspect) – were at once pejorative and not inaccurate. He was twenty-four and, now that Priyo was married, Prafullanath and Charubala would have to start thinking of finding a wife for him, but who was going to marry a simpleton? Prafullanath would never admit this, but Charubala knew that he looked upon his third son as a kind of personal failure, much in the way a poet knew, in the innermost cloister of his soul, that one poem in his collection did not quite deserve to be made public through the medium of print; it was a shame felt at his deficiency in the making, not at his son’s apparent defect.

  Bhola, on the other hand, seemed oblivious to how he was perceived. A certain percentage of the shares of Charu Paper was in his name, but he did not bother about it, nor was exercised about the fact that, unlike Adi and Priyo, he did not have a fancy designation to go with his decidedly unfancy job in the family firm, a mere bookkeeper, a director only in name, not in practice. It could be said of him that while others chased the mirage of happiness, he was happy with being content. And it appeared this was not something that he had arrived at after strenuous meditation or struggle, or application of scrupulous moral principles; it was an ease and carelessness he had been born with. At times Charubala thought that it was Bhola’s armour against the world; if it was, it had not been donned consciously. But there he was – a creature who moved a few inches above the ground on which everyone else walked.

  But this very unworldliness proved an impediment to the plans Prafullanath had for Charu Paper and the ancillary companies he hoped his sons were going to own and manage. Bhola was crippled by a blind trust in people. He smiled too much, too often, and told them things that should never have left the office. He worked well enough when he was set a task, but had no initiative and, worse, no capacity for thinking creatively about business. Initially Prafullanath had thought that Bhola could look after the company accounts and be guided by him and his older brothers in the more creative aspects of company accounting, but very quickly he realised that even that called for sharp thinking, the capacity for which Bhola lacked.

  Last year Adi had discovered a one-lakh-sized hole in the company accounts. When he had asked Bhola, his brother had pretended not to know anything about it. After a day or two of ferreting, the truth had been revealed: Bhola had simply forgotten, in the beginning, to chase up invoices and then this matter of overlooking had become active avoidance, settling ultimately into a gelid lack of interest. When his initial reminders to the agents about outstanding payments were met with the usual ‘Yes-yes, we’ll pay you tomorrow’ and ‘Of course, next week, definitely’ and ‘The cheques just need signing’, the deferrals fitted in like cogs to the grooves of Bhola’s laziness, his endless capacity to put off until tomorrow what could effortlessly be done today. The agents, sensing a weak spot, delayed payments to see how much they could get away with; as it turned out, a lot. The three agents in question worked out that they could probably get their consignments of paper for free, certainly in the short term. In several instances, when invoicing, Bhola actually forgot how much was owed by whom and when.

  Prafullanath had tried to console himself with the thought that a weak son did not seriously jeopardise his grand plans because he had three others; Bhola needed an eye kept on him, that was all. Now he was being presented with a graceful solution, a foolproof get-out clause.

  He was instantly imagining complex scenarios: a publishing house kept deliberately small – small outlay, small educational books, small profits – with Bhola as its head . . . But, wait, if it was an educational-books publisher, it would be taxed at a different rate, lower than the tax on paper, so a simple bit of transfer-pricing could shift most of the profits from Charu Paper onto the books of the publishing house, which would mean losing much less profit to tax. Or if the publishing house could be shown to be perpetually making a loss, which wouldn’t be difficult to do, since Bhola was going to make sure that was going to be the case . . . he had it. It was going to be easy to effect; not so his bigger dream of modernising the plant at Memari.

  ‘I want to begin a costing of a technological upgrade of Memari,’ he began. ‘Foreign machines. Latest things from Germany and England and Holland. It’s not going to be cheap, but in the long term it is going to be more costly carrying on with below-par production.’

  Two days after New Year, in mid-April, Priyo took his wife out for their first evening outing, the 6.35 p.m. showing of Jogan in Rupali, followed by dinner at Firpo’s in Esplanade. It was something that Priyo had read about in a recent novel and the idea had caught; it was modern, new, with just the right touch of adventurous daring about it, a slight defiance of middle-class conservatism that he felt all writers should take it upon themselves to push against. There were two more visi
ts to the cinema – Babul and Tathapi – before news of Purnima’s pregnancy was announced to the family on a blustery monsoon evening in July. Eleven days after this, in the bathroom on the first floor, Chhaya slit open the veins in her wrists with her father’s straight razor, appropriately called ‘Bengall’, manufactured by Luke Cadman, Sheffield, England, a simple and dangerous item of luxury that he had bought himself in 1930, following his father’s habit of spending occasionally on small, private pleasures to remind himself, in his father’s words, ‘that you have worked your way up to a world where you can afford these things; a treat from you to you’.

  The Ghoshes tried hard to control the information from becoming public knowledge, tried to hide it even from the younger members of their own joint family, but how could they ever have contended with the supreme acoustics of Bengali life?

  Their first recourse was to lie and spin the news: they gave it out to be understood that an ambulance had to be called that monsoon evening and Chhaya rushed to hospital because her blood pressure had dropped dangerously low and she had fainted in her bath. But the servants had had to clean up the blood from the bathroom floor, and hushing them up meant appeasement and bribes and playing a very long game whose dynamics and balances, bound to change with time, meant that the Ghoshes could not staunch that particular flow. Besides, the bandages around both her wrists, when Chhaya returned home, were not easily explained away. So people talked with jubilant ferocity and, as they talked, the Ghoshes changed the story to something involving broken glass from the bathroom window that Chhaya was trying to open when she slipped on the wet floor. That was concession enough. The whole neighbourhood pounced on it, feral beasts fighting over the meagre meat on a bone. This taint, it was later whispered, had ruined what little remaining chance she had had of finding a husband. Overnight, she became untouchable; it was as if the sharp razor she had used so imperfectly on her arteries had at least shredded, with hideous efficiency, both her marriageability, already attenuated, and her social standing.