Purba only smiles wanly; it is left to Purnima to fill the silence.
‘Kalyani, why don’t you serve your mother some sandesh and help yourself to some, too?’
Kalyani runs out to fetch a small plate, picks out three pieces of sandesh and offers it to her mejo-jyethi first.
Purnima cries out, half in jest, ‘Oh god, not three! If you give three, you make an enemy of the person you’re serving. Hasn’t your mother taught you this? Here, why don’t you take one? Go on.’
Kalyani catches her mother’s expression of peeved strickenness and demurs. Purnima blithely continues, ‘You have to learn these things now, now that you’re growing older. What will your in-laws say about us, if you make these mistakes? What kind of a home has this girl come from, they’ll say.’ She laughs at her own witticisms as she polishes off all three pieces of sandesh on her plate.
Bholanath comes downstairs one evening, all booming camaraderie and jollity. ‘Here now, where is the boy? Where is the genius who is going to brighten the name of the Ghoshes? Here you are, sitting in a dark corner, head buried in a thick book. No doubt thinking grand mathematical thoughts. But your stupid uncle will say this to you: you’ve got to look after your eyes. If you can’t see the numbers, what proofs can you do? Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! That was funny. What book is it? Oh, let’s see – An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers. Ufff, too much for my little brain, too much. And such strange symbols in it, can’t understand a thing. And such tiny print, Sona-baba, you’ll really ruin your eyes. Just the other day I was telling someone, “This nephew of mine, all of fourteen years old, he’s some kind of prodigy, an American university is trying to snatch him away from us, like one would something precious, such as a gold chain; this nephew, we’ve always known that he was going to do something very big one day, something that would make us all so proud, and this boy is being offered a full scholarship to go to university before he has finished school. A double-double promotion.” Can you beat that? A double-double promotion, ha-ha-ha-ha. See if your silly uncle has been right with his arithmetic, you are the maths brains, see if he has calculated correctly. One double promotion – Class Ten; second double promotion to Class Twelve; so you skip two years, Nine and Eleven. What? Am I right? See, your mathematical gift must owe something to the blood that flows through your veins. It’s the Ghoshes’ blood, after all.’
Arunima fails her final exams in arithmetic and has to repeat Class Six. Jayanti is aghast.
‘I had no inkling that you were struggling in these subjects,’ she chides, ‘otherwise I would have asked your father to find a private tutor for you. Why didn’t you tell us earlier? Why? Oh, the shame, the shame!’
Word gets out that Arunima has to repeat a year. It is Chhaya, as always, with her infallible talent for neatly isolating the afflicted nerve and aiming for it, who gives voice to the greater shame: ‘How strange that our recently discovered mathematics genius should be helping out other boys in the neighbourhood and not his own cousin. If he can go to Mala-di’s house and give mathematics tuition to her son, can he not do it out of charity for our Arunima? They are cousins, after all.’ Then she twists the knife – ‘Perhaps Mala-di gives him a little something? Jayanti, maybe you could ask Bhola to give Sona some money?’
Chhaya announces this, like all her calculatedly murderous comments, loudly and in public, as if addressing the air, for maximum dispersal. Even Supratik, who has long cultivated a stony indifference to dirty domestic politics, is jolted out of its armour enough to say directly to her, ‘Pishi, you’ll find that it was I who arranged, through Ma, to have Sona give maths lessons to Mala-mashi’s son in exchange for Sona receiving English lessons from their private tutor. Chhoto-kaki cannot afford private lessons for Sona, as you well know, and it would have been a great shame if that bright boy fell behind because of the one handicap of knowing no English.’ Behind his back he twists his right thumb as far as it will go without snapping, so that he can channel his anger into that small act of violence, leaving his voice and tone and delivery imperturbably steady.
‘Oh, you were behind it,’ Chhaya says, sounding disappointed, but she is not to be outdone. There is a final flick of the scorpion’s tail: ‘How charitable of you to have done that! All these inexplicable generosities – these are what make men noble. I’m slow on the uptake, so I’m still left behind, trying to figure out the reasons behind these selfless acts.’
Supratik’s insides turn to ice with fear.
A conversation between mother and son late at night; she has waited up for him and is fussing about while he eats his dinner, kept warm, around midnight. He has given up asking her not to do it; it’s futile; not a single note of the endless variations he has constructed of that wish of his has ever entered through her ears, let alone reached her brain. He knows that it is the only time she can seize to talk to him, to find out what he is thinking, what is going on in his life, and he grudges her that, although it is beginning to settle into a kind of edgy toleration. The sense of déjà vu in this repeated business of being confronted by her late at night over food has become, like a familiar and predictable scratch on a record over which the stylus keeps slipping, one of the more dependable things in his life at home.
‘Your father was saying . . .’ she begins with trepidation.
When he does not respond, she continues hesitantly, ‘. . . he was saying that . . . that you have turned your face away from the . . . the family business, and you are . . . you are . . . you are the eldest son of the family.’
Silence flowed between the chewing sounds, the occasional clink of a small bowl being set down, the sound of fingers on china plate.
‘Your aunt was saying,’ she says with the quick volubility of the nervous, ‘that you told her . . . that you arranged for Sona’s tuition at Mala-di’s. I didn’t tell anyone anything, mind you. You made me promise at the time that I wouldn’t breathe a word about it to anyone and I didn’t.’
At last Supratik breaks his silence: ‘Yes, I had to divulge the whole business. You know Pishi, there’s toxin in the very breath that comes out of her. She was up to her usual stirring. If Chhoto-kaki had heard what she was insinuating, she would take out her humiliation on poor Sona.’ Pause. ‘Also . . . also . . . I didn’t want Chhoto-kaki to find out I was behind it, but it’s too late to undo that now.’
‘Yes, you know what your pishi’s like . . .’ Sandhya says resignedly.
Supratik is suddenly touched by the bigness of his mother’s soul; it would have had been so easy, so convenient, for her to fall in with the general viciousness of the Bengali middle-class family, its compulsive drive towards contraction of the spirit, yet she had never strayed into it.
In an effort to be kind to her he says gently, ‘Besides . . .’ He halts, not sure whether he should be saying this at all.
‘Besides what?’ she asks.
Oh, what the hell . . . ‘Besides,’ he says, ‘I feel bad when I see them, Chhoto-kaki and her two children. They’re as much part of our family as Boro-kaka and Baishakhi and Mejo-kaki and Arunima, yet they live in a kind of exile, confined to one small room, existing on the charity of Baba and my uncles, the handouts you secretly engineered with Madan-da’ – he flinches inwardly when uttering the cook’s name and watches its refraction manifested in his mother’s face – ‘and the other servants to send down occasionally. What kind of a life must it be for them, have you ever thought?’ His voice hardens halfway through. Reciting the catalogue of their miseries has swiftly scorched with a June sun the sympathy for his mother that had been beginning to germinate.
Sandhya says, ‘I used to think about their tragedy a lot. I talked to your father in the beginning about it. But . . . but I don’t know how how . . .’
‘How this apathy became the order of things,’ he completes her sentence. ‘Is that it?’
‘No, not that, not exactly. Things were somehow . . . difficult to change.’
‘Difficult to change the darkness of superstitious r
ubbish willed on all of you by an old, tyrannical woman?’ he hisses.
‘Chhee, chhee!’ is her involuntary response. ‘She is your grandmother, how can you say such things about her?’
‘Which is worse in your opinion: obeying without question the blind superstitions of a hardly literate old woman or condemning three members of your family to shame and penury for ever? Which one?’ his voice rises.
Her voice trembles as she says softly, ‘I understand what you’re saying. But do you understand my position? How could I, as daughter-in-law, have challenged her rules? When you marry, you’ll understand that, you’re still too young.’
‘But you took over from her,’ he argues back. ‘In the beginning, perhaps, yes, she was the head, and she couldn’t be challenged and all that, but five, seven, ten years down the line?’
‘You won’t understand it,’ she repeats helplessly. ‘It’s not how things work. I tried. At least with those two children, Sona and Kalyani, I’ve tried to show them the same affection in which I hold all my nephews and nieces.’ Pause. ‘And my own sons.’ Her voice catches.
Here we go again, the old waterworks. His fury is still coursing through him. He says, ‘Yes, but, at the end of the day you came down on the side of the one who was powerful, against the powerless side. Everyone can anoint an already anointed head, don’t you know?’
Sandhya cannot check her tears any longer, but these are tears of frustration. ‘Stop giving me lessons!’ she cries out, restored for a few moments to the time when this son of hers was a child and she could rule and discipline him as a mother should her son. ‘Enough of this book-learned wisdom. If you are so full of kindness and sympathy for the powerless, why don’t you look closer to home, instead of running away and playing at dangerous politics with farmers and beggars?’
Her tears are unimpeded now. It transports Supratik from anger to shame in the space of no time and lands him with a bump: his mother is crying yet again and he has been responsible for it. And all she had wanted was a few minutes of his company, perhaps a show of some fondness; not much, just a little bit.
‘Someone who can’t look after his own cannot look after others,’ she announces indignantly. ‘Did you know that your brother is going to the dogs? He returns very late at night, sleeps until noon, hardly eats anything. He’s losing weight. He looks like a beggar on the streets. Do you notice? Do you care? Did you know that your father discovered him, drunk out of his senses, passed out on the bathroom floor?’
No, he didn’t know; he is surprised, but not at the facts, only at his overlooking of them.
‘When did this happen?’ he asks.
‘What good is knowing that going to do?’ Sandhya cries, seizing the sliver of opportunity that has opened up in taking the high moral ground. ‘What do you care? Did you bother keeping us informed about your whereabouts, whether you were dead or alive? If you can do that to your mother, you’re clearly made of stone, and no amount of information about these little things, like a younger brother losing his way or falling into bad company, is going to make you care.’ She knows she is squandering the capital that has come into her possession for such a tantalisingly small duration, but the accumulated force of culture is too mighty to resist.
Supratik wonders at the coincidence of three people at home, Purba, Madan-da, and his mother now, voicing identical thoughts to him in the course of as many months. Why did they all think alike? Typical bourgeois brainwashed homogeneity? How else could this unvarying calculus about the worth of one’s own kind measured against the lives of others have come about? Could he allow himself a few moments of entertainment considering the possible truth-value of that insane thinking? And here is his mother, parroting the same lies in the same, worn-to-dust mode of lachrymose blackmail, trying to rouse him to shoulder some kind of adult responsibility. What prevents her from asking directly, ‘Could you talk some sense into your brother? We think he’s straying’ or some such, rather than resorting unfailingly to these circuitous dramas, all womanly wiles and manipulative strategies?
He gets up to wash his hands, lashed with self-loathing.
Supratik, sitting on his bed, notes that Suranjan does not arise before noon and as soon as he wakes up he goes to the toilet for what seems a long time, so he lies in wait and catches his brother as soon as he comes out of the bathroom. The signs are all there, so how has he failed to read them? It’s not as if they are the uncials of a foreign script he is unable to understand and, therefore, is excused from deciphering any meaning out of them; the acrid blast out of the bathroom after Suranjan emerged from it is transparently readable. Could it have been a willed ignorance on his part? Or – and perhaps their mother was right in this all along – his indifference to those to whom he is attached by ties of blood? Or even his deep distraction, for Supratik has his sights set on the shiny moon of a new, ideal order, not on the soiled coin, which can be scrubbed to a gleam, lying at his feet?
He makes a stab at some sort of a beginning: ‘Don’t you have classes to go to?’
Suranjan does not reply, as if he has not heard, so Supratik repeats it.
‘Oh . . . yes . . . classes,’ Suranjan says so vaguely that all this talk of attending classes may be as alien and distant to him as manned interstellar travel. ‘Classes,’ he says again. ‘Hmmm. Well, there aren’t any until exams, it’s revision time.’
This is such a ridiculous lie – college exams in early September? – that Supratik feels pity for his brother.
‘Oh, I see,’ he says. ‘So why aren’t you revising then?’
‘I shall, I’ve only just woken up.’
‘Why are you waking up so late nowadays? Is everything all right? Are you ill?’ Supratik looks elsewhere while asking the questions; he cannot bear to look at those signs facing him, cannot bear to be right about their meanings. The diminishing weight, the sallow complexion, those coal-dark rings under the eyes which are devoid of any spark, that waiting lassitude . . . No, unthinkable.
‘No, no, why should I be ill? Do I look ill?’
‘Yes, as a matter of fact, you do. You look as if you’re doing some kind of drugs.’
Suranjan freezes, then tries to give a cool, contemptuous, dismissive laugh, but he can get only a quarter of the way there, after which it comes unstuck and sounds like a written-down onomatopoeia of laughter, dead letters on a page.
‘What nonsense!’ he says hoarsely.
‘You think I’m so naïve that I won’t be able to identify the smell of charas drifting out of the bathroom? The room stinks.’
‘I smoked a cigarette in there.’ He tries another laugh, this time to make light of things. ‘Actually, without a cigarette in the morning nowadays – you know . . . motions and cigarettes, really, impossible without them.’
Something about the lie piques Supratik. ‘I see. The burnt foils from cigarette packets lying around are also to aid you with your bowel movements? And the clutter of burnt matchsticks around the burnt foil? The puncture marks on your left arm? You think all of us move about with our faces to the grass? You can fool Ma and Baba, they have no idea of the poisons of our generation, but you thought you could fool me too?’
The waxy-yellow pallor of Suranjan’s face glistens with sweat. Supratik does not miss the shiver; so his brother is afraid. Afraid of what? Of being discovered doing drugs? Or afraid that Supratik will tell on him and have him punished? He cannot distinguish the two questions in his mind. All his life he has been blessed, or maybe cursed, with the ability to separate himself out of his own self, move away from any scene in which he is involved and watch himself acting out the moves, speaking the lines; the doubleness has conferred a rare lucidity on things. But the duality fails to kick in, where his brother is concerned.
An old discomfort resurfaces: he is bothered again by how few memories he has of Suranjan, or of he and Suranjan together, growing up, sharing the same room for nearly all of their lives. Did they read the same books and talk about them? Did they have dif
ferent approaches to eating their food, one of them saving the best bits for the end, and the other gobbling them up right at the beginning? Had they ever fought over trivial things – who would go first with a detective novel, who had received more on a plate, whom Ma was perceived to be favouring, who bore the brunt of the blame when Ma disciplined them for some mischief? He cannot remember anything. How could his brother be just a hole in his life? How could he account for this absence? Purba has recently told him that her first sighting of him was on her wedding day: a little boy, dressed in silk dhoti and panjabi, with sandalwood buttons, prancing up and down the stairs, beside himself with joy. He had felt a mild sense of embarrassment, shame even, at this memory of hers. Now, if he asks himself whether Suranjan was dressed identically, whether he too was jumping around the place, he cannot come up with an answer; there is only a dark lacuna there. Would Purba have noticed and remembered? He would have to ask her.
Suranjan has transferred his fear to aggression. He snaps, ‘You are hardly the one to give lectures on how to behave.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Big words about the poisons of our generation don’t suit you. Your terrorism, your poison, is not without its side-effects.’
‘Don’t you dare talk about things you don’t understand!’
‘How dare you talk about pulling the wool over others’ eyes? What have you been doing all these years? Playing at revolutionaries, terrorism, killings, bombings – you didn’t do it exactly openly, did you, with the full knowledge of Baba and Ma?’
Supratik is amazed, not so much at the extent of his brother’s half-knowledge as at the intransigence of his speaking out with such vehemence. When did this kitten grow up into a snarling, clawing cat?
Suranjan takes advantage of the resultant pause to press ahead. ‘Keep your big talk to yourself, I don’t need any lessons from you,’ he says, his voice rising. ‘You’ve forgotten that I’ve grown up. Or not quite “forgotten” – when did you ever know? You haven’t been around much to know.’
The Lives of Others Page 55