All the Lives We Never Lived

by Anuradha Roy

  “No, there’s nothing. I feel so sad.”

  “Whose letter are you waiting for?”

  “A stranger’s.”

  “And who might that be?”

  “I don’t know. The waiting is sweet because I don’t know.”

  “Won’t you come inside, Amrita? I have bought you Knut Hamsun’s Hunger.”

  This is the first time he has gifted me anything. I take the book from his hand. He has written my name in it and one word in French, “Amitiés.”

  I keep standing there. I don’t have the courage to sit. Who knows why. He too is standing—he won’t sit unless I do. I have my back to him and have opened the lid of the piano. Am I waiting for something? Will the impossible take place? Do I want it to take place? He is standing very close to me. But he has not touched me. He could put his hand on my back but he hasn’t. Between us there is a bit of sky, and we are standing there—I can feel him right through my body. I can feel his touch in my mind. How is this possible? The sky is not a vacuum, it is filled with ether. I don’t know what ether is but it must be the substance that brings me his touch. I can smell the scent of his breath everywhere.

  Then from upstairs someone calls me: Ru. Ru. Ru.

  I thought of my mother. Was this how she and Brijen had devised ways to run into each other by accident? I read of Mircea caressing Amrita’s foot under the dining table and wondered if my mother and Brijen had done the same even as we sat around the table oblivious. Had my mother ever felt, as Amrita did about Mircea, that she would not be able to live if they were separated?

  As their feelings for each other intensified, the inevitable occurred: Amrita’s father discovered his student was in love with his daughter and threw him out of the house. I read of Amrita’s anguish at being separated from her lover and wondered if this was my mother’s state of mind when she was on that train to Madras. I wondered too what my mother was in truth more tormented by: her separation from me or her separation from her lover?

  My hair is tangled up. I have not let my mother touch it. I am constantly tetchy with her, she endures it. I gave the letter to the boy and went back to my room and lay down again. My hair all over me, my face covered with my arm, I shut my eyes and vowed, “I will not forget, I will not forget, I will not forget. After all, my father cannot control my mind . . .”

  Morning comes, night comes, the world is spinning on its wheel. This hateful cycle is churning all my happiness, sorrow, grief and peace together and turning it into something else. My mother says the flames of grief rage high for three days, then slowly they die down. Mothers forget the death of their children, widows stagger back to their feet. I am wearing away daily, but I am also being renewed. Everyone knows this, either they hear of it or they read it in a book—but that kind of knowing is not knowing at all. Burning in my grief is teaching me how to understand the truth. I had thought I would cut off my hair—I couldn’t—and I don’t even want to anymore. One side of me says, What’s the point of cutting off your hair? You’ll look terrible. This is what hunger for life is. I know.

  My mother sits beside me and talks of this and that. How badly my uncle has been behaving, that he is breaking away from the family home. That his wife is a bad egg. Goes to her parents and says nasty things about us. About me as well. I listen to nothing, I have my face buried in my pillow. What’s the point of listening to all this? Let them do whatever they want. This whole family is alien to me now.

  My mother runs her fingers through my hair, on and on, and untangles it strand by strand. She plaits my hair. She says to me softly, “Ru, sorrow is a gift too. Every sage has said so. Pray to God, it is only God who can heal your grief. God will give you peace. Man thinks of God only in times of grief, never otherwise. Those who are felled by an arrow, they fall at God’s feet.”

  My mother turns off the light and leaves. The words of a song circle around in me, but my distraught, scattered mind can make no sense of them . . . Am I disgraced? Of course I am. Next door’s Baidyanath Babu has declared, “These are the indulgences of the rich. They bring a Christian brat into the house and fall about embracing him.” Baba is furious, he says we will move, find another house. We won’t live in such an uncouth neighborhood. I am slandered left and right and my mind is in pieces, wrapped in a strange lassitude . . . disgrace and perfume . . . God, I fall at your feet . . . I fall at your feet . . . Something goes straight to my head and clang, clang, clang, clang . . . I toss and turn in my bed. All at once I fall off.

  When I regain consciousness, I see everyone in my room, even my father. This is the first time I have seen my father since he banished Mircea. He says to Ma, “Give her a little brandy in milk.”

  “I’ll call Shyamdas the doctor tomorrow . . .”

  My uncle says a few harsh things and leaves the room. This is the first time I have seen him being rude in my father’s presence. Such insolence, to speak to my father this way. Was it not Baba who brought him up? I look, there are two lights on in the room but somehow everyone is shadowed. My father too is a shadow. My father’s shadow is near my bookshelf. He is hunting for books and taking them out. The first is a book of Japanese fairy tales. It is bound in bright blue cloth and the picture of a magical animal is stamped on it in gilt. Baba slowly opens the pages and tears out the page in it which is inscribed. A book Mircea gave me. Then he tears out the inscription from the book named Hunger. He removes my books one by one and tears out every page on which Mircea has written an inscription for me. He takes out the Life of Goethe, but cannot find the page with Mircea’s words because it is glued by some lucky chance to the cover. This little scrap of his handwriting is now the only trace of him in my life, nothing else, not even a photograph.

  With measured deliberation, Baba tears the pages into tiny shreds and throws them out of the window. If it were a different home and family, the books would have been destroyed. That is not possible in our home. A Ghengis Khan reigns over this house, but he cannot bring himself to harm books—he can burn people, not books. Books are his gods.

  Amrita waited for Mircea after he was banished from her house, listening out for his footfall every day. He was still in Calcutta, he might turn up. She thinks she has seen him—there he is just at the end of the street! But no, that is not Mircea. She plots ways to find him but fails. She waits every minute for him to send her a sign that will tell her how to reach him. He does nothing. Four years pass. Her family decides: enough. She must marry. They will search out a groom for her, a respectable girl needs a suitable husband. She has wild thoughts of escape, she has promised she will wait for Mircea in sickness and in health, till death do us part, as she had once read, attracted by the sentiment although she did not know at the time these were Christian wedding vows. But now she agrees to marry a man of their choosing. Marriage will at least free her from her family, she will be able to leave the house, find a kind of freedom away from her father. Her mother goes about the job with great efficiency, she gets herself a notebook in which she lists possible grooms, their virtues, their parents’ names, their addresses, and so on. Amrita realizes her life has turned into a joke; she might as well laugh.

  A prospective groom appeared, a doctor, good government job, though his own wealth and property added up to a horse’s egg. It’s not that, the real problem is that his skin color is the deepest black. We Indians are certainly not color-blind. My mother says in a faltering tone, “Oh dear, isn’t he rather too dark?” I am enjoying the absurdity of it thoroughly, I am thinking of saying, “Too white did not suit you either, did it?” I restrain myself. The doctor’s old father does not want to let go of me, but the doctor does not pick me. He is on his own personal mission: he is worried about the Future of the Bengali. His own height is about five feet three or four inches, so he is searching for a bride at least five feet eight inches tall. I am a mere five foot two or three. His view is that if the groom is short, getting hold of a tall bride is a matter of necessity. If short mates with short, won’t Bengal’s fu
ture be in jeopardy? Since he has a good job, this groom is an attractive prospect. He can pick and choose. He goes about with a tape, measuring all the unmarried girls of his caste. I hear he never married in the end.

  Ultimately a groom is found for Amrita. She agrees to marry him but has no interest in meeting him before the wedding. “Why should I meet him?” she says to her mother. “If I do meet him and say, oh no, I don’t like him, I want to marry this other person—he’s from a different race yet I like him. Will you let me?”

  The preparations for the wedding begin, her mother’s ever-intensifying anxiety escalates. The wedding is to happen within five days, before anyone manages to tell the prospective groom about Amrita’s past. The groom appears perfectly calm, he agrees to go ahead without ever meeting her. He writes her a letter instead. It is in English.

  Mademoiselle,

  Understanding that you are going to choose a partner in life, I beg to offer myself as a candidate for the vacancy. As regards my qualifications, I am neither married nor am I a widower: I am in fact that genuine article, a bachelor. What is more I am a real, ripe bachelor, being one of long standing.

  I should in fairness refer also to my disqualifications. I frankly confess that I am quite new to the job and I cannot boast of any previous experience in this line—never having had occasion before to enter into such partnership with anyone. This my want of experience is likely, I am afraid, to be regarded as a handicap and disqualification. May I point out, however, that though want of experience is likely to be regarded as a handicap and disqualification in other avenues of life, this particular line is the only one where it is desirable in every way.

  For further particulars I beg you to approach your mother who studied me the other day with an amount of curiosity and interest that would have done credit even to an eminent Egyptologist examining a rare mummy.

  In fine, permit me to assure you that it will be my constant endeavor to give you every satisfaction.

  I have the honor to be

  Mademoiselle

  Your most obedient servant

  17th June 1934

  Although her husband-to-be sends the letter days before the wedding, Amrita’s parents do not give it to her until after the two are safely married. She reads it. She smiles. If only she had seen the letter before, she thinks, she would have known what to say to the stranger who had become her husband: “You can make me laugh!”

  My father made my mother smile—ironic smiles, rueful smiles, mocking smiles, bitter smiles, and smiles that came through tears—he almost never made her laugh. Brijen Chacha did. How had I never noticed this?

  My thoughts went back to the time I was in a hospital in the eastern hills twenty years ago, strung up to a saline drip, when the voice from the next bed said, “You have her eyes.” It was during my months at the tea garden when I got a virulent malaria and was brought into the hospital. I thought the bed next to mine had a man I vaguely recognized, but I put it down to my feverish delirium. Surely it was not Brijen Chacha, it could not be, he had battled his brother over a love affair and left the house in a storm when I was only about ten. He had never been seen since and everyone said his broken heart had made him end his life. Sliced to pieces on the railway’s tracks, a few people said, while others spoke authoritatively of a noose made from a lover’s sari.

  When the malarial haze left me and I woke up properly, I realized it was one of those coincidences that only happen in real life: without a doubt it was Brijen Chacha, who had not been seen since 1938. Gray hair, shaggy gray eyebrows, but despite his illness he had the old menacing glint in his eyes that said he was up for anything and the crooked smile that invited you to join in his escapades as in the past when he lived next door, his only appointments assignations and his only preoccupation the next soirée. At the hospital a different young woman would appear with home-cooked food for him every day. I noticed a pattern—there were three of them, taking turns, each one more solicitous than the other, stroking his forehead, settling his blankets and pillows, feeding him with a spoon as if he were too weak to eat on his own. One of them slipped him a hip flask for a quick swig. She was his favorite, I could tell.

  “Assistants on our film unit. We are here to shoot, I like to come along sometimes and see,” Brijen Chacha explained from his stack of pillows with a contented smile. “I still write—but screenplays now, not novels. And I compose music you know, for movies. Like jingles to sell soap, but you should see how people lap it up and go on and on about how I use classical music in silly songs. They haven’t a notion what real music is or what real writing is. No wonder I have a burst ulcer.”

  Over the next few days we lay in our adjacent beds, I fighting off the remnants of my malaria, still struck by bone-rattling shivering fits now and then, and he recovering from ulcer surgery. For long periods we slept, our waking hours tied to the schedules of doctors and nurses. I was never given to talking much but Brijen Chacha, always garrulous, would periodically shake off his stupor during those waking hours, say something, then sink back in his pillows again.

  “You have taken after your mother, I can see. A relief. You have her eyes, though behind those glasses most people wouldn’t know . . . I changed my name. I wanted to vanish. People thought I was dead. How happy my beloved brother was. Every now and then I send him a nameless postcard from beyond the grave just to rattle his cage.”

  In his next lucid moment he said, “Your father was a real innocent. Always going on and on about doing good. He made me sing at his Mukti Devi’s meeting once. I sang romantic thumris instead of patriotic songs, he didn’t like that, not at all.”

  Then one day in bitter tones: “Everyone in that bloody dump of a town thought I was a rake who had trampled on a hundred hearts. The shattered heart was mine. Nobody knew.”

  A few minutes later: “Your mother and I. Both misfits. If we had different families we would never have had to leave.”

  And with his old manner of baiting the unwary: “I told her once, Gayatri Rozario, you and I, we’re twin souls, let’s run off into the sunset together and never come back. We were great friends, Myshkin. I would have given anything to stop her going away. Do you understand?”

  I did not understand what he was driving at all those years ago in that hospital bed. He was so often incoherent or groaning and cackling and humming to himself that I could hardly decipher his ramblings. But half-remembered things are coming back to me, now bathed in an altered light. Incidents, even glances, have acquired a new meaning. His hand lingering over my mother’s for a fraction of a second as she passed him something. The time I saw my mother brush a grasshopper off his back. Her relentless fretful anxiety when he went off drinking and did not come back for three days. The hand that held her palm, dropped red flowers into it, and pressed it close that night of the concert. The day I came upon him storming out of our garden, the hollows of his face the color of ash, as if his blood had turned to acid and scorched his insides.

  I was overcome with anger one moment and then in the next an impersonal tenderness, even understanding, would come over me for the woman who was my mother. She was a mere twenty-six at that time, and was condemned for life to the loneliness of being out of step with everyone around her. Where something so trifling as reading detective novels rather than my father’s improving tracts was treated as rebellion, she fell in love with the writer of those thrillers. The audacity of it made me smile. I wished I had known her better. Instead, all that I had now, as in my childhood, were her letters.

  25

  December 1938

  My dearest Lis,

  It is wretched & tense. They arrested one Dutchman & found a whole bunch of letters (where will my letters end up?) that prove this man is some sort of kingpin supplying boys to men. The Resident of Batavia has been sacked too for no specific reason—they can’t find any evidence—and off he’s gone because he was mentioned in those letters. Is that enough, I wonder. Sentenced by hearsay.

  It is st
range & chilling when such things happen to people you know. You say people are being arrested all over the place at home for sedition—based on gossip—well, here too. And it is not a situation people like Jane are familiar with—to be powerless, to be questioned, to be watched. To feel as if the government might do anything to you—jail you, take away your possessions. We in India have always lived this way—expecting calamity—what is the colonial government but an agent of calamity in our country, NC used to say. Europeans have never faced that anywhere & here too they are used to being comfortable, rich, free. Now some of them feel a little uncertain. As for me, like all Indians I am used to expecting the worst—this situation tortures me, but it is not new.

  They haven’t been able to find anything wrong in Bali so far—except a handful of cases, they say—but all over Batavia, Medan, Surabaya, Semarang, places on other islands—there they have arrested many people, well over 150. They say people are being picked up for questioning, being tortured in jail and it has to do with “Matters of State.” It is too terrifying to contemplate. Once they find out how WS is working with the Balinese against the Dutch government, who knows what will happen to him?

  I have a very foggy understanding of politics, dear Lis, as you know—or as NC let everyone know—my wife has no understanding of the country’s political situation whatsoever. QED. One of the reasons I found Brijen a comfort was the absolute cynicism and disregard with which he treated every kind of politics, how he thought all of nationalism was nothing but a way of dividing people. NC tried so hard—sending me off to Mukti Devi to improve myself—I just couldn’t. Partly because it was his world & I did not want to be a part of it. Partly because I simply wasn’t interested in spinning cotton when I wanted to paint.