This was the poverty that played cat and mouse with Ritwik. It ruled in his world of worn-out clothes, of ill-fitting school shoes that ate into his toes but lasted forever with the help of his father’s home repairs, of the tired vegetables sold at cut price when the greengrocers in the daily market were about to pack up and leave for the suburbs, of the hungry delight with which he waited for the treat of gristly and bony meat once in two months or so. It was everywhere, all the time, so much so that Ritwik either did not remember a time when it was not a daily struggle, or his memory did not match his father’s nostalgic stories of days of plenty.
When he was four, his parents and their two sons had moved from their rented ground floor flat in Park Circus to his uncles’ in Jadavpur. He had never been able to figure out the reason for this. In any case, he was too young to remember except for one somewhat unfocused memory of his mother, in one of her moods, shouting at him while dressing him: You’ll get nothing to eat but salt and rice at your uncles’ house, we’ll see then how fussy you can be about food.
Knowledge is a cumulative business, acquired with the slow, unnoticed accretion of information here and there, and when four-year-old Ritwik arrived at his uncles’ home, he had neither the tools nor the pile-up of evidence to comprehend their instant economically downward move in this act which, for him, was full of fun and excitement. The word for ‘uncles’ house’ in Bengali is, after all, synonymous with boundless liberty and fun. Instead, growing up in Jadavpur became a growing intimacy with the shame of his father’s moving in with his in-laws in their home.
A man with a wife and two children was not allowed to do that sort of thing. Whatever a marriage was for a woman, it certainly wasn’t an invitation on the part of her family to her husband to extend the household. It was decreasing the numbers by giving the daughter away. To leave and then return with a retinue was one of those things which was socially forbidden, almost taboo. And to break that tacit rule was to invite the neighbourhood’s tongues and eyes and ears inside the house and give them free play. Which may well have been the case all those years ago but with an important twist: Ritwik’s father was silently expected to provide for everyone already living in the flat in Grange Road – a disabled grandmother, four unemployed uncles, one marriageable aunt – besides his wife and two sons.
Ritwik’s grandfather had died nearly four years ago, having vehemently opposed the marriage of his daughter to a man thirtythree years older than her. He had apparently relented when Ritwik was born and had gone to see his first grandchild in hospital. With his death, the household in Grange Road had lost its breadwinner. He had left no savings, there was nothing in the way of investments, the flat was a rented one and they had fallen behind with the rents and bills for four years. The electricity had been cut off and one of the first things Ritwik’s father did when they moved in was to have it restored.
Since the death of Ritwik’s grandfather, his grandmother and uncles and aunt had lived from hand to mouth, sometimes on the charity of neighbours and distant relatives, at other times on meagre handouts and soft loans begged from people. Ritwik’s father could not have moved in at a more opportune moment. It was an extended family of ten now, living in a three-bedroom flat, with one tiny kitchen, an equally small bathroom, a balcony fronting the street, and a larger room which was really no room, in the true sense, only an open space on to which all the bedrooms opened.
In some ways, there seemed to have been a barter, as tacit as the social rules his father’s move to his in-laws’ home broke. It was an understanding that this shameful thing would be tolerated if he took on the mantle of the chief (it turned out, only) earner. So to atone for the shaming move here his father took upon himself the more respectable and empowering role of head of family: head of family who earned money on which nine other people lived. It was only much later that Ritwik unravelled the killing illogic of someone trying to undo his own weaker position by accepting to be hobbled with leaching burdens: it was the Third World Debt principle. It was submerged blackmail, pure and simple. His father was sixty-one when all this was set in motion.
The continued unemployment of his uncles was a central source of tension in the family. Pradip, the eldest of the four brothers, did have a short-lived job as a bus conductor in a minibus on the Garia to BBD Bagh route but gave it up when his girlfriend at the time complained that this was not a suitably dignified job. ‘It’s a prestige issue,’ she said, using that incontrovertible argument of the Bengalis.
Ritwik’s childhood was signposted mostly by the frictions between his father, resentful of having four young men in their twenties and thirties living off him, and his uncles, who evaded, dodged and hid from his father and from any sense of adult responsibility. Sometimes this erupted into open confrontations, with his father trying to reason with them, or taunt and humiliate them into some sort of contribution to the running of the household. His uncles swallowed everything in guilty silence, and then slunk away, avoiding another run-in with their brother-in-law by returning home well after midnight. Weeks went by in this careful dance of avoidance, with Dida acting as choreographer, warning her sons off if her son-in-law was at home, or carrying news of the dominant mood to them so they could stay away or time their return home. In their absence, Ritwik’s father took out his frustration on his wife with words carefully chosen for maximal damage.
‘A bunch of illiterate spongers, that’s what your brothers are. Don’t they feel any shame, living off an old man? I’m not paying for them anymore; we’ll have separate kitchens from now on – they can fend for their own food. You can tell them that. Parasites, parasites!’
Silence from his mother.
‘And your parents, both illiterate, they were good for nothing except breeding. Look at this bloody nest of vipers they’ve produced. All they did was litter. They didn’t provide for your education, they did nothing, as if just animal breeding were qualification enough for title of parent. It reminds me of dogs. That’s what your family is, a bloody bunch of strays.’
More silence from his mother. Sometimes quiet tears, or a storming out of the room. Then there were days of noncommunication, slamming of doors, badly cooked food, setting down of plates with a crash and clatter. She took her anger out on her two sons, mostly on Ritwik. As soon as his father left the house, she rounded on him on some pretext or the other.
‘Have you done your homework? Have you? Why are you wasting time then?’ He got a sharp slap across his face, or was dragged by his hair across the room and pushed to the corner where his schoolbooks were piled. ‘Now don’t dare move until you’ve done the lesson. If it’s not ready in an hour, I’ll finish you off, do you understand, finish you off,’ she screamed.
Ritwik, whimpering and scared, pulled out a book, any book, and let his eyes swim over random pages: irrigation in Punjab, how plants made their own food, why we should love and obey God. Nothing sank in; the words were just empty black marks on the page held down by trembling hands.
Whenever his father lashed out against his mother’s family, Ritwik blindly took her side. There was no doubt that all that he said was true but articulating it so cruelly and corrosively made it an unfair stealth-weapon. As a child, he felt anxious and unhappy when his parents quarrelled: at the merest whiff of it – something in the set of his mother’s jaw, or the menace in her heavy tread – his heart began thudding painfully against his ribs. From a very early age, he learnt to sniff out gathering tension in the air, much like old people who can tell changes in the weather by the feeling in their joints. But this was inseparable from the sympathy he felt for her; he must have sensed how difficult it was for her to be in the middle, riven by divided affections and allegiances. She seemed to Ritwik to be a pathetic pawn in this war. When elephants fight, it’s the grass that suffers, Dida used to say. Yes, his mother suffered.
Truth was, there was no effort on his uncles’ part to make things better. They just grew a thicker hide. They knew they had it good: sleeping in
till mid-day, having food waiting for them (when it was there), no rent to pay, no bills to think about. They knew if they left it long enough, a crisis would develop and their brother-in-law would have to do something about it, so they left it to him. The confrontations, unhappiness, the dividing lines that were slowly developing – all these seemed to them a small price to pay for the larger pleasures of laziness and living off someone else.
And if there were occasions when they did not have food waiting for them, they could always take it out on their mother. The whole family was a twisted version of some domino effect. They were all linked by their use of each other as channels of anger and resentment; a pressure on one point in this chain would invariably lead to effects all along the line. So Ritwik’s father shouted at his wife; Ritwik’s mother screamed and beat up her sons; his uncles either went underground or, when a showdown became inevitable, braved it out and then took out their humiliation on their paralysed mother.
Any excuse would do. Shirt was a recurring one. Pratik had one decent shirt that he hid zealously away from his brothers. Every time one of his brothers felt the need to wear something special, something other than the one frayed shirt and one pair of trousers each of them had, he stole Pratik’s fancy shirt. He either found out the hiding place by coercing his mother or, if she refused to tell, ransacked the whole house till he found it. By some malign law of probability, the shirt would go missing the very evening Pratik wanted to wear it himself. When he found out it had been stolen, his first target was his mother.
‘You must have told Pradip. Only you knew where it was kept,’ he shouted. (That was another thing: nobody spoke in that house, everyone shouted. Everything was done slightly awry to the civilized norm.)
‘No, I didn’t. I didn’t know where you hid it,’ Dida muttered.
‘You did. You saw me putting it away under the mattress,’ Pratik challenged.
Dida was scared now. ‘Nn . . . o . . .’ She started limping away.
Pratik saw that chink and pounced. Literally. He clutched her hair, pushed her against the wall and started banging her head against it. ‘You did, you did. What am I going to wear tonight then?’ he kept on shouting.
Ritwik’s mother rushed in and separated them. She shouted back at her brother, ‘How dare you do this to your own mother? You’re an animal, an animal.’ It petered out, aware of its own futility.
Pratik simmered till Pradip returned very late at night, hoping Pratik would be asleep so that he could slip the shirt back in under the mattress. No such luck: Pratik was waiting in the dark like a crouching feline.
Another fight broke out. The sound of two men fighting in a confined space in a tiny flat was like a little earthquake of thuds and crashes; it woke up everyone, even some of the neighbours. In the room where Ritwik and Aritra and his parents slept everyone started stirring. Ritwik’s father did not miss this chance of delivering another blow to his wife. ‘There, the dogs are at it again. There’s no bloody peace in this house.’ He made as if to get up and intervene but she stopped him.
‘Why do you want to get involved if you hate them so much? Let them tear themselves to pieces, what do you care?’ Her voice was like a spring coiled to the point of breakage.
‘It’s because of my sons. How can you bring up children in this hell? What do you think they’re going to pick up from this?’ he replied. The boys were wide awake now but they pretended to be asleep; at least they could spare their parents one added concern. Not only was Ritwik’s heart knocking painfully against his chest again, there was also something new – a rising and falling column of sharp fire from behind his chestbone up to his throat, then down and then up again. He knew Aritra was awake because his breathing had gone very quiet and measured.
‘Why did you come here then? How many times did I tell you, before we moved, don’t give up the flat in Park Circus, don’t give up the flat in Park Circus. Why didn’t you listen to me?’ Her words were a jet of acid hiss against glass: they were both trying not to wake up their children.
It was his father’s turn to remain silent now, a guilty silence in that pitch dark room, as if she had exposed his complicity in the whole business and he had no reasonable defence with which to counter her accusation.
There was a loud crash followed by a thud in the other room. As one by one the neighbours’ lights came on, Dida tried to intervene in the fight taking place right under her nose. She mumbled, ‘What will the neighbours think?’
This was all the excuse the brothers needed. It was Pradip’s turn to have a go at his mother. Like a feral dog, he turned his attention on her, crouching low beside the bed on which she lay. ‘What did you say about the neighbours? What did you say?’ he shouted.
She was too scared to answer. This just stoked the fire. He started slapping her face – one, two, three, four, the sound of skin on skin a neat sharp crack each time. ‘You told him I wore his shirt. You’re behind this.’ She couldn’t even move away from this assault: it took her a long time to shift her body from one side to another.
Pradip continued shouting, ‘You’re the bitch behind all this. That’s what you do all day – carry tales from one camp to another, play people off against each other. You’ve nothing else to do all day, you sit in your chair and gossip.’
She was crying now, her mouth a helpless rictus of pain, but no sound escaped from her, not even a sob; it was as if she was trying to erase any sign of life that marked her out as another human being, to reduce herself to an inanimate object, so that her sons could ignore her and vent their fury on something else. At that point, Ritwik’s mother entered the room.
‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves?’ she said. Her voice was between a shout and a threat. ‘What will everyone think?’ The brothers loped away like chided dogs with their tails between their legs. It had happened before, it would happen again. Sometimes she tried to scare her brothers by reminding them that violence towards their own mother was one of the greatest sins possible. It was as bad as killing a cow; it would call down certain vengeance from the gods. Surely the gods had already cursed them for such unnatural behaviour: the squalor, the unhappiness, the menace, weren’t all these really just effects of their displeasure with the family? This only had a loose hold on her brothers’ minds for it came undone, readily and with slick, perfect ease, at the next flashpoint.
And so it went on.
Ritwik never understood what his father did for a living but felt instead a growing anxiety at its irregularity and meagreness. A broker, maybe? An in-between man in deals? A facilitator? As a young boy, when he had asked his father his profession, possibly because he had been set the standard school homework of writing five sentences on ‘My Father’, the answer had been, ‘Engineer’. That had stuck for a very long time, along with other things whose residue he has started to scrape off slowly only now. It had acquired the status of truth. Even to this date, the ‘father-as-engineer’ picture stole in microseconds before the certainty of its untruth.
So what did he do? He really didn’t know and not having been very close to his father, especially in those abrasive late teenage years, he hadn’t made much of an effort to find out. It was partly to save both of them the embarrassment of having to address an issue which demanded fixed, stable answers in accordance with the fixed, stable structure given to parent-child relations. How would his father have faced up to an answer that was fuzzy, for he really did not have a profession category in which he could slot himself? How would Ritwik have taken such an answer, or shored up against his own uncertainties of childhood the flotsam of an old man’s shame and insecurities?
The only established fact he had about his father’s jobs was their requirement of his long presence. The regularity of his mother waiting for his arrival home from work, first in the balcony, and then walking out to the bus stop, was a stable cornerstone of his boyhood. There were late nights; eleven or midnight was worrying, especially for a man who had suffered three cardiac arrests. Ritwik rememb
ered a tired man with his head down walking so slowly along the edges of the road, beside the margins of the open drains, that he could have been looking resignedly for something he had lost along the same stretch of the street as he had walked on it in the opposite direction earlier on in the day. An old old old man, thrown in unregarded corners, already half in the shadow of death.
Ritwik had always been, as far back as he could remember, embarrassed by an old and sick father. Until the age of eleven, he had been taken to school – a forty-minute bus ride from Jadavpur to Park Circus – by one member of the family or another. Sometimes, his father took him there and insisted on seeing him inside, seeing him mingle with the other boys before the bell rang for morning assembly. He tried to dodge and parry the growing unease and sense of shame, which set upon him as soon as they neared the school building, by several clumsy strategies – walking faster to create a distance between them, insisting that his father went home once they had reached the main gate and not accompany him inside, see nobody’s father goes inside why should you why don’t you go back now I’ll be all right. The truth was that he didn’t want to be physically associated with this shabby old man. On a few occasions he had even gratuitously lied to his friends that the man with him was the driver dropping him off to school en route to taking his father to his swanky office.
Although Ritwik didn’t understand it then, part of the problem may have arisen from his unconscious reaction to the contrast between the class of boys – from well-heeled, middle-class to upper middle-class families – who attended that school and his own lot. Always a progressive man, his father had decided that the children’s education came first. ‘Without knowledge of the English language, you’re crippled,’ he used to say. If sacrifices had to be made for it, they would be made in some other household department. No compromise was ever to be made with the boys’ schooling: that was sacrosanct.
A Life Apart Page 10