Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

Priyo feels the diminishment as pity in his soul. What anger there was that his daughter has chosen a callow, flashy ne’er-do-well for a husband instead of dutifully allowing her parents to find her the right kind of man has now burned itself out; the residue in the crucible is resigned pity. Pity because her wedding is going to be so much more restrained than his own or his brothers’ had been. What had been a river in spate runs as a contemptible trickle now, like a baby’s piss-stream. His daughter’s in-laws had not noticed; the dowry they had demanded had been pegged to a public idea of the Ghoshes’ financial might and standing. It had been far-sighted of Priyo’s father to have bought so much jewellery during the days of plenty. Garlands of gold guineas; armbands of solid gold studded with emeralds and rubies and diamonds; lurid tiaras — what was he thinking? or, more pertinently, of whom was he thinking? — encrusted with gems; sometimes even plain solid-gold bricks. There was no way the family could have lived up to what had been expected of them, had it not been for his mother’s jewellery hoard: it had helped them save face. The outside world has so far been kept from noticing that family jewellery is being sold off or pawned to surmount liquidity problems. Or so he thinks. The fear that others may have an inkling sends a familiar feeling in to his guts, a feeling that he needs to evacuate immediately.

He tries to dispel the sensation by dwelling on how he is literally going to cover his daughter in gold, for everyone to see, at her wedding. No one outside need know that his mother has only loaned what is left of her jewellery to prop up the illusion of family wealth; since his wife and his mother had so recently fallen out with each other over the contentious issue of ornaments, his mother is in no mood to part with any of her belongings to help Purnima.

‘Take them to deck Baishakhi. But I want them back, each and every single one of them. I’m counting out the pieces, so I’ll know if anything goes missing. It was an evil hour when I gave my blessings on your marriage to that woman,’ Charubala said.

The situation is not ideal, far from it, but averting this public loss of face somehow compensates for the private shame he feels at being unable to give his daughter the kind of wedding that people in Bhabanipur would talk about in years to come. They will say, ‘He covered his daughter in gold’ and that will be consolation enough, for satisfaction is not going to come from the number of guests (limited to 150 only), shehnai-players sitting in a temporary Juliet balcony (they were going to play records of Bismillah Khan and have a loudspeaker to broadcast the music) or posh caterer (merely a hired cook). Yes, he feels sorry for Baishakhi. Then he begins playing the game, comforting and incendiary in equal measure, of casting about to blame someone, something. . Today, the long shadows thrown by his father’s stubborn insistence on a radical technological upgrade at the plant at Memari would do.

When Priyo began to discover how much Baba had exposed to risk for the sake of the modernisation of the plant at Memari, the offering up of the Bali mill as collateral seemed the most breathtaking. At the time the other detail, that the larger part of Ma’s jewellery in the locker, and all of the family’s investment in gold, had been bound as security too, had seemed trivial, a matter of the private domain, easily containable. Now that petty subclause raises its head to bite him every day as if in punishment for being written off as harmless. Over the last ten years choice bits and pieces, mostly the pure-gold biscuits, had been sold, sometimes to pay the pressing interest on a loan, sometimes to nibble away at the principal of such a loan from the bank. When those gold ingots were all gone, it was the turn of his mother’s jewellery. One evening, in the immediate aftermath of the disaster that was the upgrade of Memari, he and Dada, seeing no way out, had broached the topic of needing a lump sum of ready cash in front of their mother. The money was required for bribing customs officials to release the imported machinery from Kidderpore Docks. They had perhaps not initiated the conversation pointedly, with the implicit purpose of asking their mother to release some of her ornaments. They had not even known, if he remembers the evening correctly, that she was participating in this men’s chat, so that the words she had used to enter the discussion had felt like a slap to their faces.

‘Sell my garlands of guineas,’ she had said. ‘They’ve already been pledged to the bank as security, your father has told me. What difference does it make if what almost belongs to the banks becomes totally theirs? At least it’ll save us from shame.’

The brothers’ burning faces had felt too heavy to lift up to look at their mother, or at each other. Priyo can close his eyes now and summon up exactly the configuration of the residual grains of rice on the plate, the wipe-marks of his fingers on the central smear of drying yellow gravy, the vertebral column of the fish picked clean and its head chewed and the fibrous bits rejected in a compact grey bolus on one side.

Their mother had filled the silence with words meant to soothe and salvage. ‘What’s the big deal?’ she had said. ‘What’s mine is yours, you’re my sons. Money, gold — these things come and go. It’s not good to form attachments to these things. I’m selling off my gold today, it’ll come back to me tomorrow, I know it.’

But Priyo thinks of it as the beginning of the long plunder. He has no idea what she makes of the business of having to sell off most of her valuables to pay for the mistakes of her husband, and it is not something that can ever be talked about, but now, seeing her sudden parsimony at parting, even temporarily, with what little she has left, it is her generosity that lashes him, and the curdling of that largesse because of the conflict with his wife is a reduction of his spirit, not his mother’s.

And Baba? What had he made of his shame? Conveniently enough, he had still been on his protracted recovery arc after his first heart attack in 1957, the one nearly two years before the new machines arrived, so not much could be raised with him, most definitely not in any accusatory or angrily remonstrating ways. The potential confrontation would itself then have become the excuse for another bout of illness, possibly even another heart attack. Priyo and Adi had struggled on as best as they could, coping with nearly six years of zero output at Memari. When, at last, the new machines had started working, the TPD had increased by a risible twenty, not the 125 that Baba had hoped for and shown in the applications for the bank loans. It was going to be a long drought, with all the profits going to offset the crippling loans, but at least the mills, or — unthinkable — their house, wouldn’t have to be sold. The factory at Bali had continued to be their saviour. Some sadistic god must have laughed at this: within twenty months union trouble began at Bali. Two years later, the factory shut down. The full implication of putting Bali as collateral revealed itself.

When Prafullanath had been inflexible about pushing ahead with his deranged idea of a face-to-face with Dulal, Priyo and Adi had said, over and over, ‘Baba, this is madness. You are the arch-enemy for him and his CPI(M) paymasters, why would he even want a meeting with you?’

Rage, lidded down for months, had turned Prafullanath into a creature that was not quite he, but an approximate simulacrum. Ever since he had come to know of Dulal’s mischief-making, he had wanted to use the most aggressive strategies to deal with the man — having him beaten up, even eliminated, by goons; firing his father, Madan; bribing powerful people who could pull strings for him at the CPI(M) headquarters on Potuatola Lane to have either the union defanged or the police ordered to act. Not for the first time Priyo had wondered if he shouldn’t have immediately told his father and Dada about that meeting with Ashoke-babu instead of sitting on it for over a year. Would Dulal have reached this stature if he had addressed the issue then? Would they ever have reached this point?