The Lives of Others

by Neel Mukherjee

  ‘Mej’-da, listen,’ Bhola says, ‘the electricians seem to be having some problems with the decorators, something about how crossing the bamboos one way and covering them with cloth will prevent extra lights from being placed on the façade of the house. I didn’t quite understand. You need to tell them what you want, otherwise they’ll make a royal mess of it.’

  ‘Come, let’s see what’s up,’ Priyo says, then adds, despite himself, ‘So, which of your literati luminaries are coming to grace us with their presence?’

  Bhola, as always, does not get it. He laughs his signature silly laugh and, glowing with pride, says, ‘A young man called Sunil Ganguly’s coming, you may not have heard of him.’

  Priyo ignores the jab and asks, ‘You mean the Sunil Ganguly, the poet?’

  ‘Yes, the very same. He’s written four fine novels too. Do you know them? Exposure, Young Men and Women, Days and Nights in the Forest and The Exiled Heart,’ he reels off their names.

  Priyo swallows this presumption of ignorance, too. A childhood feeling visits him briefly: his right hand itching to give Bhola a resounding slap. He asks through clenched teeth, ‘And any of the authors you so generously supported?’ He was going to add ‘with family money’, to leave Bhola in no doubt that others could respond to his barbs with sharper quills, but restrains himself; he has more information to winkle out.

  Bhola looks crestfallen for a second or two, then recovers his foolishly grinning self.

  ‘Just one or two, one or two. Not very well known, not yet, but one day they will be, mark my words.’

  ‘But of course!’ Priyo says. ‘If you have foreseen their fame, not even fate can stop them.’

  Shocking Priyo, who has always taken his younger brother’s impermeability for granted, Bhola looks stung. He goes quiet for a bit. Then, the habitual ebullience gone out of him, he says, ‘Yes, I’m not very good, am I?’ Pause. ‘This business-thisness, not my thing, you know. I know everyone’s disappointed in me.’

  Priyo feels as small as the nail on his little toe. He interrupts his brother with a faux-gruffness designed to hide his own shame at causing distress: ‘Enough, enough. No such talk on an auspicious day like this. Only good things today.’

  Bhola immediately reverts to his cartoonish smileyness. ‘Right, right, you’re absolutely right. No such talk. You go upstairs, let me go and make myself useful with the catering staff.’

  Really, that man is a yo-yo; Priyo nods, turns away and continues climbing upstairs, now one step at a time.

  Bhola calls out to him: ‘Mej’-da, do you know if Didi will be singing this evening?’

  Priyo freezes. Nearly twenty years have not bleached his wedding evening of its full horror. His heart does a fierce dance of shame. He turns around slowly, composing his face first, he hopes, into a perfectly affable mask of normality, and says, ‘I haven’t been told anything. Why don’t you find out and let me know?’

  Bhola bounds down the stairs, giddy with joy: he has managed to throw some ink on Priyo’s unblemished day. And today of all days. That foolish fucker.

  It could easily have been Purnima’s week – it is her daughter who is getting married – but instead she feels an ambivalence casting shadows in corners. She feels she has not won the jewellery war, although Priyo has told her a dozen times what her mother-in-law had apparently said when he had broached the prickly subject: ‘All this is for my eldest granddaughter, I’ve been saving them up for this day.’ Purnima does not quite believe this; it is simply not in her mother-in-law to give away her life’s treasures like so much puffed rice. Even if that had been the case, in some counterfactual supposition, it certainly would have been negated by the argument they had had recently. Lest she come too close to conceding her own role in that clash, she quickly chases away any rerun of that memory – it is ever so slightly different every time she lets it play inside her head – and wills herself to concentrate on the real thing: the spoils. But that too is not an entirely happy rumination. How typical of Priyo to think that he could ‘cover Baishakhi in gold’ with the pieces he has been fobbed off with. A few bangles and armlets (a pair of kankan, yes, but no chur or mantasha), four necklaces (only a thinnish five-stranded one among them, not the seven-stranded one she was hoping for), two chiks (both grudgingly admitted) and a miscellaneous category in which she lumps what she considers the loose change of jewellery – earrings (no kaan), rings (no ratanchur), chains and other sundries. Taken together and adorning her daughter, you could say – and it cost her to admit this – that she is not being sent off too badly, at least loss of face has been avoided, but ‘covered in gold’? No, no, no, no. Purnima has made Baishakhi do several dress-rehearsals wearing every single piece of jewellery given by her mother-in-law and she could still see large windows of her daughter’s clothes and flesh behind the sparse covering of gold and jewels. What to do? She has had to part with some of her own stuff to hide those shameful gaps. Her mother’s heart burns with shame.

  Baishakhi enters the room with a jewellery box in her hand. ‘Ma, I have something to show you, I’m shutting the door.’

  Before she can sit on the bed Purnima says, ‘What’s that? What’s that? Show me’ and reaches out her hand.

  She opens the long red box. Nestling in the red velvet inside is a gold shaat-lahari haar, the seven-stranded necklace of her dreams.

  Her eyes widen to cartoon Os. She whispers, ‘Where did you find this? Who’s given this to you?’

  Baishakhi says, as if it is the most expected and ordinary thing in the world, ‘Pishi gave it to me just now. She asked me to wear it for boü-bhaat, not the wedding.’

  Purnima’s hands clutch the bedclothes ineffectually. She can only let out a ‘Jah!’ of profound disbelief. Chhaya? The queen lioness in the valley of lions where she, Purnima, is a calf? That . . . that walking capsule of poison? Why would she give her daughter this amazing heirloom piece of jewellery?

  ‘You’re not lying?’ Purnima asks. ‘Is it true that your pishi’s given you this?’

  ‘Why would I lie?’

  ‘Was she smiling when she gave you this? Or muttering with anger?’

  ‘Why would she be muttering? She said it was best to have the gift-giving within the family out of the way and not done in public. So I bent down and touched her feet and she said that she was blessing me with this necklace. “Go, go adorn someone else’s home, I never had the chance,” she said and then her eyes filled with tears and she turned her head away.’

  Purnima can find nothing to return to this. She feels odd, as if she has been caught doing something wrong and been chastised by someone much younger; a mixture of shame and indignation. In its peculiar way it seems to be a version of the loss of face she had been so keen to avoid by making up the shortfall in Baishakhi’s wedding gold. But it is not in her nature to sit with an ambiguous feeling for long, not in front of her daughter.

  She takes out the necklace, its several strands spilling and now entangled in her nervous fingers, and says, ‘Yeeees, remarkably weighty.’ Then, after a pause, ‘Looks like real gold all right. Just checking, it’s good to make sure about these things. After all, you can never tell with this family. Or with your aunt.’

  Purnima untwists the strands of the necklace, pats smooth the bedclothes and spreads it out. There is no denying it is a beauty: seven lines of thick chains, each with a decorative centre pendant in graduated sizes, the pendants getting smaller towards the neck as the chain-length reduces with each strand. It is not something that Baishakhi’s generation of women can easily pull off. Besides, where would she wear it? Purnima lifts it up gently, with the delicacy one would bring to a newborn’s fragile head, and slips it carefully over her own neck. It is a tricky thing to wear and needs disentangling again while resting against her chest, flowing down nearly to her navel. There, done now. She stands up and turns to the mirror on the steel wardrobe. Oh, my. The sheer weight of the thing is its signature; it is a presence that cannot be forgotten for a single
second, as you can a ring or a bangle. You feel slightly bowed by it, as if in reverence. A tiny burr of envy catches at the admiration: really, shouldn’t her in-laws have given it to her when she came to this house, rather than giving it to her daughter now?

  Much better, much more satisfying to think of what this beautiful thing has been doing in her sister-in-law’s clutches, immured in the depths of a bank locker or the darkness of a steel almirah. Had it been given to her by her mother? When? When they expected Chhaya to get married? How galling to learn that that ugly smudge of a woman was in possession of such amazing old-school masterpieces, while she has had to make do with attenuated chains and earrings. Her only truly heirloom piece is the ring that her aunt gave her as a wedding present, a gold ring with a pigeon’s-blood ruby at the centre, its deep, discreet fire set off by the showier sparkle of the twelve small diamonds surrounding it.

  Many years ago, shortly after coming to live in Bhabanipur, Priyo had given her what he had called a shaat-lahari haar, but that was a crow compared to the peacock of this real thing on her chest. Had she really believed hers was the seven-stranded necklace of Bengali jewellery lore, or had she pretended to believe in order to please her husband? Its chains were like cotton threads, weak and tangly; these were curved strips of pure metal, each the width of two fingers.

  But there is a dissonance somewhere that she cannot quite put her finger on. She cannot fully immerse herself in the predictable pleasures of acidulous speculations about Chhaya. She feels she has been trumped. Who would ever have thought that Chhaya was capable of such generosity? In fact, the idea is so unfeasible that she is certain there is some kind of a cunningly secreted catch involved and keeps hunting for it. She wants to trip up on a snag planted by her sister-in-law; that way comfort lies. She remembers a conversation with Priyo well before things curdled so irreversibly between her and her in-laws that she feels under siege in this house now.

  Priyo had come home from work one evening and ushered her into their room. ‘Look what I’ve got for you,’ he said, extracting a bottle from his briefcase. Perfume! ‘Intimate’, it was called; she can still recall the ridged glass of the bottle, the sharply pointed cupola of its scarlet cap, the gold-coloured liquid.

  ‘O ma,’ she had said, ‘shall I try on a squirt now or leave it for a special occasion? It’s Tapati’s wedding next week, I’ll wear it then. Where did you get it?’

  ‘On the black market. You can’t get foreign scents in shops.’

  ‘O ma, foreign! I shall have to be careful with it.’

  ‘No, no, no need for that. It’s there to be used, not kept in storage and admired. When you finish it, I’ll get you another one.’

  Later that night, when she opened the wardrobe, she saw her bottle of ‘Intimate’ on a shelf inside. But had she not put hers on the dressing table? She wheeled around; yes, there it was, where she had left it. There was a second bottle, then, which Priyo had hidden, without her knowledge, in the almirah. Some planning must have gone into it: how had he got hold of the keys? They were tied, in a bunch with other keys, to a knot in her sari and tucked in at her waist; he could not have had access to the shelf inside the almirah without her knowing. But these were children’s games beside the spectre of the second bottle of perfume and the meaning it radiated, the only meaning it could possible have.

  After three days of fielding an armoury of sulking – curt replies to his questions, a face like thunder, sudden exits from the room when he appeared – a baffled Priyo asked, ‘What’s up, can you tell me?’

  Several hours of tears and indirectional talking and heavy hints and mystification later, Purnima had, to her shame, to spell it out: that second bottle of ‘Intimate’ in the wardrobe.

  Priyo’s face fell. Purnima knew that she had caught him out. But it was bathos that had flitted across Priyo’s expression and, if there was any guilt in it, it was not the kind that Purnima had been preparing herself for.

  ‘Yes, you’re right, I bought a second bottle,’ Priyo confessed. ‘But it’s not what you think. That second bottle is for Chhaya.’

  ‘Chhaya?’ Purnima echoed.

  ‘Yes, Chhaya. Sit down, I think it’s time I told you about this.’

  Purnima, stunned, sat down. Priyo began, ‘Chhaya is over thirty years old now. It’s safe to say that she won’t get married. The shame and agony of it lashes her, can’t you see? She thinks that everyone is pointing at her and whispering, “Look, look at her, a spinster for the rest of her days.” She’s not totally wrong about that. And she is, how should I put it, not the easiest of persons, as you well know. She looks at you and Boüdi and Chhoto-boüdi and thinks all the time that these are things that she is never going to have: a husband, children, in-laws. She will have to remain in her father’s house for the rest of her life. When Dada and Boüdi go somewhere, or I buy you a sari or some cosmetic, or when we go to the cinema or a restaurant – I’ve seen her face become so small. I can see the thought inside her head: “There’s no one to bring these little treats for me, no one for me to go out with.” I feel sad when I see her . . .’

  There was a long pause.

  ‘I feel sorry for her,’ he continued. ‘I thought I should try and make life a little bit happier for her, so I decided that whenever I buy you something, I’ll buy two of it and give her one: face-cream, lipstick, scent, sari, whatever. If these little things can make her happy, can make her feel less left out, then . . . Besides, it’s not as if the cost is a consideration for us. Please think about it,’ he had pleaded. ‘It brings a smile to her face.’

  It is a conversation from fifteen years ago, from a time when she had found it easy to accede to her husband’s requests without a thought. Things are so different now that it feels they were all different people then, like characters you read about in a book, not the younger version of your own self. A different thought occurs to her now: did she ever ask Priyo whether Chhaya had been given pieces of the jewellery identical to those that he had bought her over the years before the wealth trickled away? The thought of duplicates of her rings and bracelets and necklaces lying in another almirah in the same house, but on a different floor, makes her feel slightly queasy. And all the saris given by Priyo too? She has lost count of them. Did he give Chhaya the same seven-stranded chain, calling it a shaat-lahari haar? Did she fall for it? Especially, it turns out, when she had a genuine one?

  There is no vantage point opposite the house where he can station himself and spy on 22/6. He could hardly perch in one of the windows of the neighbouring houses, or on the stoop of number 14/6/A, which is directly opposite 22/6. The Basaks live there. Vikramjit used to be his childhood playmate. They went to manimela together and sang ‘Touch my soul with the touchstone of fire’ in a chorus of about a dozen boys. Where is Vikramjit now? He does not know; he has fallen out of touch, drifted apart from these childhood affinities and friendships. He wraps a part of the gamchha over his head, making sure that at least half his face is covered. They would not recognise him, not unless they were specifically looking, but it would be foolish not to be vigilant. Some busybody is bound to notice him if he stays in one spot near 14/6/A for a long time, most likely someone from the Basak family or one of their servants, and then where would he be? Not that the chance of being discovered reduces to zero if he keeps walking up and down the street; there are so many people, with dead, empty time on their hands, who sit at a window or on a verandah all day, watching the traffic of people on the streets, with nothing to do with their hours and days, nothing. There is old Bhadra-babu on his balcony, biding his time until the final call comes. There will inevitably be a maid hanging out the washing who will notice him, then mark him again when she comes out to check if it is dry, then again when she gathers the dry clothes . . . This is how this world runs, a small group of people who know each other, a closed world of intense curiosity in other people’s lives because your own is just empty, dead time.

  There is Pintu-da, stepping out of his front door to
go to the Writers’ Building, where he works as head clerk to the transport secretariat, cloth bag hanging from one shoulder; rickety arms and legs, but with a paunch straining at the lower buttons of his tucked-in shirt and the top hook of his brown trousers. It is eleven o’clock; by the time Pintu-da makes it to his desk it will be around twelve-thirty. He will chat to his colleagues for an hour, drinking tea and snacking on wedges of cucumber dipped in rust-red chilli-salt. Then they will have a lunch break for two hours. At three-thirty, it will be time for tea. He will move a pile of files from one side of the table to the other, feel exhausted with the pressure of work, gossip for a while longer with his co-workers. Then, at five, it will be time for him to leave his office and head back home, where he will complain about his gruelling day, and everyone else around him, his wife, his children, the servants, especially his wife, will run about doing his bidding, trying to make the last hours before he goes to sleep easy and comfortable.

  The bile rises to his throat. He swallows it, because hawking would draw more attention.

  He stands for a few minutes gazing at the house, slightly defamiliarised now that he is looking from the outside at a structure whose inside he has known since his birth; he has never had the opportunity or the inclination to scrutinise the exterior with such intensity of concentration. Four storeys, with the date of completion of construction, 1921, in bas-relief plumb in the horizontal centre of the façade, right at the top, just under the parapet.

  It was a solid if unoriginal, and now ugly, edifice, with a deeply recessed balcony, on the left of the main door and the staircase, on each of the four storeys. With the exception of the balcony on the ground floor, which was completely enclosed in iron grilles, each of the three on the upper floors had a stomach-high wrought-iron railing, intricately carved and dense, prone to rust and flaking. ‘Don’t go to the balcony, you’ll fall over the edge’ was a standard refrain from adults when he and his cousins were growing up; no one seemed to have taken into account that a child would have to climb over the railings to achieve that mishap. In his lifetime the building had been painted twice, the first time white, with the balconies, windowsills and the edge of the parapet picked out in green; the second time, a shade of dull yellow and the contrasting colour, an equally dull brownish-red. It stands cream and green now, this house which is asymmetrical, he notes with surprise for the first time, along the vertical plane. If one were to draw a longitudinal line dividing the building into two halves, they would not correspond to each other; the balconies would be to the left, the two windows of one of the front-facing rooms, used as bedrooms on all four floors, would be to the right. There are four rooms on each floor, the one leading out to the front verandah the largest and meant to be used as the living room on that floor, but on the top two floors they are used as bedrooms: his grandfather and grandmother’s on the third floor, and his aunt’s on the second.