Her ordinary tone of voice to the children was like whiplash. Get your books. Wake up. Go and have a bath all had the sharp report of a dead, dry twig breaking in silent forest floors. They were always orders, delivered with imperiousness and something approaching distaste, as if the boys had just been bought from a slave market; the spectators approved. And then there were threats articulated through clenched teeth and with rolling eyes: she managed to make ordinary situations a condition of cold, rib-stabbing menace. It’s nearly mid-day, I’ve been asking you to go and have a bath for the last hour, if you don’t go now, I’ll tear you to pieces. Her threats of violence got more and more baroque but they were the common currency of the Bengali household: I’ll batter your face with a shoe, I’ll lash you with the broomstick, or I’ll break every tooth in your face.
She was always on this edge of fury, like a restrained storm, about to burst any moment. Every aspect of her, every word, every intake of breath, every movement of her eyebrows seemed to have been dipped in an acid bath of anger; in an instant her relatively benign demeanour could change, as if some inner demon had flipped a trip switch with a sudden surge of current. She shouted and raged, the neighbours came out on to their balconies or heard every single word through their open windows and commented, ‘Bidisha-di is so scary. The boys fear her as if she were Yama.’ It was a commendation of the highest order: it meant the boys would grow up straight.
That was the thrust of Moral Science classes in school as well. The central metaphor was of an upright tree, growing up towards light, growing up tall and straight, because the careful gardener had tended it in its youth, guided its pliable green twigs and branches, supported it with twine, wire, stakes, trained its wayward shoots and tendrils around strong rods. Such was the importance of discipline and correction during the early years, when children could easily go astray, like the crooked plant which no one looked after so it became a jumbly, untidy mess and was uprooted with the noxious weeds and thrown into the flames. No teacher tired of this parable and, at home, Bidisha discovered that it sounded a sympathetic chord in her when she supervised the boys’ homework. Practically every week the parable was wheeled out in that storm-cloud tone of voice. Neighbours whispered respectfully, ‘Bidisha-di is a perfect mother. Look how well she disciplines her boys. Look how wonderfully she keeps them on the straight and narrow.’ Her fame spread, her name was on every tongue.
The incessant shouting became an issue between Bidisha and her husband. He was a kind, gentle, elderly man who believed children should be brought up with love and tenderness, should never be shouted at, and should never, never be hit. Whenever she went on the rampage, he quietly asked her to keep her voice down. ‘Why do you have to shout, Bidisha,’ he said, ‘why can’t you just make your point softly but firmly? There’s no need to bring the house down.’
This fanned the fire to a mighty crackling roar. ‘You keep quiet. You’re spoiling the boys; all this business of affection, affection, affection, it’s had them dancing on our heads,’ she shouted, her voice rising by a few more decibels as her sentence neared the end.
He made another gentle attempt. ‘Can’t you just speak to them? And how exactly do you see them behaving badly? They seem all right to me.’
She played her trump card. ‘You’re not helping things by criticizing me in front of everyone. This will later give the boys licence to do the same,’ she said. And then she lobbed the little grenade: ‘Fine, if you think you know best, you deal with them. You bring them up. You feed them, make them do their homework, take them to school and bring them back, you do everything.’ With every clause, her voice rose, till she almost spat out the last word and rushed out of the room. In the kitchen she could be heard handling utensils so noisily that they were afraid she was breaking half of them.
This silenced their father. He gave up in despair; he wasn’t combative enough. She could only be tackled by her means: shouting, aggression, that precarious positioning on the precipice of violence. He didn’t have those in him.
Meanwhile, the boys instinctively understood that this bit of friction between their parents was going to take its toll: as soon as their father left the house, she was going to take it out on her sons. They waited in terror and not knowing what she was going to peg her fury on made it worse. It could be a spelling mistake in one of the sets of homework from school; not knowing ‘by heart’ the last Geography chapter, including every single punctuation mark; or a slip-up in the perfect arrangement of books in the school satchel, the biggest one at the bottom, the smallest one on top and everything in between in descending order of size; an unsharpened pencil in the pencil-box – it could be anything. She could even manufacture something to suit her purpose. They could only wait with churning stomachs and small, dimmed faces, but even during their mother’s worst excesses, they prayed and hoped their father wouldn’t intervene.
Ritwik was the convergent point of all these coiled energies in her. Her excuse was simple: he was the older of the two; he had to be flawless so that Aritra could follow in the track made by him. That was what Ritwik became, a bit of substantiating evidence around which the flux of daily life was organized. He was the furrow which her cultivating zeal carved out. He was to become her creation, her prize garden, her impeccable son. He was going to be her bulwark against everything that life had ranged in battle against her. Bend him, buckle him, mould him like wax, like clay, like putty, he’s mine, my love will build him anew, I’ll show them I’ve won, the ooze of oil comes only from pressing and bruising, the life in him is going to be the shine of oil, not the dullness of uncrushed seed and I’m going to be responsible for the radiance, she thought.
The first zone in which this experiment was put to practice was Ritwik’s education. Every evening, from six to nine, was homework time: she supervised this, in between cooking dinner for the family, with the sharpness of a predatory bird.
‘What subjects do you have for school tomorrow? Take out your diary, let me look at the timetable,’ she began, her voice already poised between command and threat.
Ritwik passed the diary to her.
‘Why can’t you open it to the right page and read it out? Can’t you read?’ she shouted.
‘But . . . but you asked . . .’ he muttered.
She cut it short, ‘Don’t dare answer back, do you understand?’ Her voice was beginning to hurt the inside of his eyes and the juddering place behind his ribs.
She took a quick look at the timetable. ‘Moral Science, Spelling & Dictation, English Language, Bengali, Science, History & Civics, Math . . .’ she read out. ‘All right, take out your Moral Science textbook. I want you to learn the questions and answers at the end of the chapter you did in school today. After that, I’m going to give you a spelling and dictation test from the new lesson in Radiant Way Reader, “The Cook and the Crane”. I’m going to the kitchen now, I’ll be back in an hour. I want both subjects thoroughly prepared by that time. Otherwise you have trouble on your plate.’ Every word, every sentence, was a fusillade of command.
She thud-thudded off, leaving the scared boy fumbling with books, having trouble focusing on the words on the page. She returned almost immediately and shouted, ‘I want you to read the lessons out aloud, so I can hear you from the kitchen. I want to be sure you’re not wasting time.’
Ritwik mounted a feeble opposition to this. ‘Why can’t I do it silently?’
She deigned to reason with this one. ‘It’s because reading out aloud fixes the work in your head better because you read it and hear it.’
‘But I think I learn better if I read things in a murmur rather than aloud.’
‘You know better than I do?’ That fireform again. He gave in.
For the next half an hour or so, the cheap waxy pages of the Moral Science textbook, with their faint whiff of rancid glue, and the catechism-type exercise at the end of each chapter, became a compact prelude to terror. Its opening chords were so loud and consuming in his ears and his blood th
at the words on the page were either not fixable or they were meaningless. Why must we love, honour and obey God? We must love, honour and obey God because He made us in His image and likeness, put us in this beautiful world to enjoy His goodness and generosity, blessed us with life and gave us the chance to glorify Him. He also gave us parents to love and take care of us. They were in an opaque code, he could have been reading hieroglyphics; he was so scared that willing his voice to give sound to them, one by one, could not give them any meaning. How could he ever learn all this ‘by heart’ if they never moved from mark to meaning?
He could hear miscellaneous sounds of sizzling and frying and clanking of metal pots and pans coming from the kitchen. And the occasional tremor of her tread as she moved around. Once or twice, there would be a sudden shout from her, ‘Why can’t I hear you? Why has your voice gone low?’ He’d nearly jump out of his skin and increase the volume ‘. . . He endowed us with free will so that we can choose between good and bad. . .’
Some of the answers were quite long, nearly five or six lines; he hated them. Others were short and easy and these he learnt first, leaving the involved ones till later. His attention kept wandering off – he was tempted to look at the final few chapters of his Geography and Biology books, such virgin pages, so far away in the school year. They would do those much later on, in winter, the chapters on tea-growing in Darjeeling and Assam; the north-eastern hill states and union territories; the digestive system; a chapter called ‘Coal’. And what was that one about the man being swallowed whole by a huge whale and staying alive in its belly? He couldn’t wait to read it all in one quick go. They were new lands waiting to be discovered in the vast sea of this boredom of lessons done to death. He kept sneaking looks at those untouched pages; they were almost forbidden and delicious.
Dida, limping around the flat, came by, stopped at the door and said, ‘You’ll be put through the wringer if you don’t do your work; will serve you right,’ and hobbled off. It came out of thin air; no encouragement, no motive, nothing. Did this add some sense of drama to the dead sameness of her days?
Suddenly Bidisha was in the room where Ritwik sat on the floor, amidst the untidy strew of his schoolbooks, pencils, and dirty satchel.
‘Are you ready then?’ she demanded.
Ritwik froze. ‘Nnno . . . I mean yes . . . but . . .’ he stammered weakly.
Ritwik desperately wanted his father to come back: in his presence, she shouted and went as far as giving him a slap or two but never let herself go fully. That transformation into a column of fire had to be repressed till he was out of the house.
‘Give me the book.’ She settled down on the floor opposite him and picked out the wooden ruler. So this was going to be her weapon this evening. It had happened so many times before that Ritwik didn’t even flinch but he was scared. Fear was forever new, like spring; nothing ever robbed it of its edge and thisness. She fired quick volleys – ‘Which chapter? Which page?’ – and then began asking him the questions at the end of each chapter. He was going to have to give her the answer printed after each question verbatim.
‘Why did God make us in His image and likeness?’
‘God make . . . God make . . .’ he whispered, his eyes focused on the slow, irregular brandishing of the ruler gripped in her hand, and almost immediately knew he had made a mistake because she looked up at him with a dull gleam in her eyes and interrupted him.
‘God?’ she asked in that interrogative tone of hers, which meant that he had got the next word wrong and she wanted to confirm that, or maybe give him a chance to correct it before she brought down the ruler on his exposed arms or legs, he was never sure which.
‘God . . . God . . . make,’ he murmured, his voice a trembling leaf to the approach of storm. He knew he was getting it wrong but the right word had dried up inside him, gone into hiding.
‘God?’ That menacing brush of a chance given again, aware that it wasn’t going to be availed of.
‘God make . . .’
Crack: the ruler on his thigh.
‘God?’ She was going to carry on the questioning halt at that word till he cleared up the blockage and let the words flow clean and correct.
‘God make . . .’
This time there was not one but a whole choir of cracks, neat sharp sounds, syncopated and random, played out on his bare skin everywhere – arms, legs, thighs, a couple on his face and on the knuckles. He tried to dodge and duck but this infuriated her even more. As he half-crawled half-dragged himself to a corner, any corner, she stepped over his books and satchel and wielded the ruler with such abandon that anyone watching this would have thought that it had released something dammed up in her. Whenever she punished him physically, she came into a new being. It could only be called blossoming, as though all the forces in her, concentrated so far in a tight bud, had suddenly unfurled in a terrible beauty.
Ritwik could only feel the rectangles of burn the ruler imprinted on his skin. He noticed that where the thin edge of the ruler had caught one of his knuckles the skin had split in a tiny red gash. Only a tiny one. And there was the torrent of her words, some shouted, some hissed with the spitting anger of an attacking snake, which kept up the continuous bass line to the slap of wood against skin: ‘No God MADE God MADE how many times do you need to be told that if you’re asked a question containing the word “did” the answer is in the simple past tense so MADE MADE MADE not “make” will you ever make that mistake will you will you say MADE say God MADE.’
‘God made, God made,’ Ritwik obediently sobbed.
‘Stop crying. Stop crying now,’ she shrieked. ‘I don’t want a single sound to escape your lips. I’ll throttle you if I hear another sob. Is that clear?’
Ritwik choked and nodded. He was aware of the open wooden shutters of the adjacent house and the squares of fluorescent light visible through their own open windows. He sensed there were people standing near those windows, listening to everything that was going on here. He knew that his mother was aware of the neighbours soaking up the details of this little exemplary drama as well. The theatre inside her head broke into a tumultous applause.
There was an indeterminate gap between the Moral Science and the spelling test. Bidisha strode off to the kitchen after this corrective act, warning her silently crying son, ‘I’m going to the kitchen to cook some rice. I want all the difficult words in “The Cook and the Crane” mastered by the time I’m done. Otherwise, what you’ve just had is going to seem like a picnic compared with what’s coming.’
Ritwik had reached the plateau stage of terror. It was only its first installment that rattled and jarred him; after that, it was the physical pain that took front seat while the fear diminished. If there was to be more after a while, he was more or less prepared for it. He took a pencil and started underlining the difficult words in “The Cook and the Crane”: witty, receive, humorous, kitchen, shoo . . . The words drew him in and his voice slowly faded until he was reading the whole story silently.
Her appearance at the door took him by surprise; she had come to conclude unfinished business.
‘Why can’t I hear your voice? Why? Didn’t I tell you I wanted to hear every word? Didn’t I?’
She advanced on him with huge strides, shouting, ‘I can’t hear you. Who’s taken your tongue?’ In the space of an eyelash-flicker she was upon him.
Then she did something she’d never done to him before: she picked him up by his shirt collar, lifted him clean off the floor and flung him, as one would a rag doll or a bag of rubbish, to one corner of the room. She had just extended her repertoire; the audience was on its feet, throwing coins and flowers. The applause was deafening.
Ritwik hit the low bed and the big metal trunk and landed on the little square of space made by the two walls, one edge of the trunk and one side of the bed. She rushed to him, dragged him out of the space and then threw him, again, in the opposite direction. This time he skidded on his school books lying on the floor and fell with his face d
own, his nose, teeth and tongue somehow hitting the concrete floor, with its patchwork of mismatching loud tiles, all at the same time. It put an end to his scared whimpering, the pain was too much for that. He let out a wail and some torn words, unintelligible, ineffectual, which were like bellows to her fire. While he lay curled on the floor trying instictively to reduce the surface area of contact, she kicked and punched him in between straightening him out so that she could have greater access to his body.
No one in the house intervened to save him. It was necessary disciplining, the rod that taught and educated. Without this just measure of pain, how would a child ever learn to be diligent about his studies? It was an unspoken law of the Bengali household that whatever a mother meted out to her children, it was right and motivated by unconditional love. It couldn’t be questioned: everything worked for the greater good of the child.
It was the sight of blood on Ritwik’s face that made her stop, or the sense that he was nearly choking, able only to inhale or to exhale but not both, one following the other. Perhaps it was because she had welled herself out empty for the moment. She left the room to go to the kitchen, only returning when the sobbing had given way to an exhausted panting of snot, tears and some blood. There was a very faint air of the truce behind her commands, ever so slightly gentle now – ‘Stop crying. Get up, go to the bathroom and wash your face with cold water. I will give you your dinner after that, all right? Go, get up now.’
All of a sudden Dida appeared at the door and whispered, ‘So, enjoyed the fun, did you? How did it feel?’ From where did the leaking excitement in her voice come? Which bit of it appeared as ‘fun’ to her? She seemed to be keeping herself on a leash, a little girl trying very hard not to be giddy. Ritwik was convinced that had she, or could she have, let herself go, she would have broken into handstands and cartwheels there and then on the floor.
He whimpered away to the bathroom, washed his face, blew his nose and returned to his books. His eyes scanned the underlined words in “The Cook and the Crane”. He did not feel any fear. He noted the cunning twists in the spelling of some English words – ‘humour’ had two U’s but ‘humorous’ omitted the second ‘u’ of ‘humour’ and added an ‘—ous’; ‘receive’, he must remember, had an ‘e’ before ‘i’ and not the other way around. When his mother came back from the kitchen and gave him the spelling test, he got all the words correct. He had the uncomfortable feeling that she was somewhat disappointed.
A Life Apart Page 14