Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

As they reached the periphery of the crowd, where the dense clot had thinned out to a few stragglers and the road out was in clear view, Priyo looked out of the rolled-up window glass and caught a flash of Dulal, a dark, thin man but now with a moustache and a paunch, flanked by several men, all of whom were caught by surprise by the steadily accelerating car, staring at it, momentarily frozen in their behind-the-scenes commanding of the action.

Lately his father has taken to trotting out the old mantra: ‘One generation builds, the next generation sits on it and consumes it to nothing.’ How Priyo would like to turn that against him. The generation that builds is also the generation that destroys; the next generation is only the audience outside the invisible fourth wall, watching the antics of its elders puffing themselves up with hubris then getting deflated, like balloons four days after a child’s birthday party. For a change, Priyo can draw a clear, linear map of causal links: his father lies half-dead in his bed upstairs because he disregarded everyone’s advice and visited the factory at Bali in 1966 because it was so important that Bali became functional as quickly as possible because the survival of their business depended on it because he had pledged it as collateral to the banks because he had had the brilliant idea of wanting a complete technological overhaul of their other plant at Memari. That flare lights him up inside again. Baba built the business; he started to extinguish it too.

The thought of upstairs drags Priyo back: if he does not rejoin the company of his wife and restart the supervision of caterers and electricians and decorators, she is going to give him hell. As he climbs up to the terrace, taking two steps at a time, he sees Bhola, in a hurry too, coming downstairs.

‘Mej’-da, listen,’ Bhola says, ‘the electricians seem to be having some problems with the decorators, something about how crossing the bamboos one way and covering them with cloth will prevent extra lights from being placed on the façade of the house. I didn’t quite understand. You need to tell them what you want, otherwise they’ll make a royal mess of it.’

‘Come, let’s see what’s up,’ Priyo says, then adds, despite himself, ‘So, which of your literati luminaries are coming to grace us with their presence?’

Bhola, as always, does not get it. He laughs his signature silly laugh and, glowing with pride, says, ‘A young man called Sunil Ganguly’s coming, you may not have heard of him.’

Priyo ignores the jab and asks, ‘You mean the Sunil Ganguly, the poet?’

‘Yes, the very same. He’s written four fine novels too. Do you know them? Exposure, Young Men and Women, Days and Nights in the Forest and The Exiled Heart ,’ he reels off their names.

Priyo swallows this presumption of ignorance, too. A childhood feeling visits him briefly: his right hand itching to give Bhola a resounding slap. He asks through clenched teeth, ‘And any of the authors you so generously supported?’ He was going to add ‘with family money’, to leave Bhola in no doubt that others could respond to his barbs with sharper quills, but restrains himself; he has more information to winkle out.

Bhola looks crestfallen for a second or two, then recovers his foolishly grinning self.

‘Just one or two, one or two. Not very well known, not yet, but one day they will be, mark my words.’

‘But of course!’ Priyo says. ‘If you have foreseen their fame, not even fate can stop them.’

Shocking Priyo, who has always taken his younger brother’s impermeability for granted, Bhola looks stung. He goes quiet for a bit. Then, the habitual ebullience gone out of him, he says, ‘Yes, I’m not very good, am I?’ Pause. ‘This business-thisness, not my thing, you know. I know everyone’s disappointed in me.’

Priyo feels as small as the nail on his little toe. He interrupts his brother with a faux-gruffness designed to hide his own shame at causing distress: ‘Enough, enough. No such talk on an auspicious day like this. Only good things today.’

Bhola immediately reverts to his cartoonish smileyness. ‘Right, right, you’re absolutely right. No such talk. You go upstairs, let me go and make myself useful with the catering staff.’

Really, that man is a yo-yo; Priyo nods, turns away and continues climbing upstairs, now one step at a time.

Bhola calls out to him: ‘Mej’-da, do you know if Didi will be singing this evening?’

Priyo freezes. Nearly twenty years have not bleached his wedding evening of its full horror. His heart does a fierce dance of shame. He turns around slowly, composing his face first, he hopes, into a perfectly affable mask of normality, and says, ‘I haven’t been told anything. Why don’t you find out and let me know?’

Bhola bounds down the stairs, giddy with joy: he has managed to throw some ink on Priyo’s unblemished day. And today of all days. That foolish fucker.

It could easily have been Purnima’s week — it is her daughter who is getting married — but instead she feels an ambivalence casting shadows in corners. She feels she has not won the jewellery war, although Priyo has told her a dozen times what her mother-in-law had apparently said when he had broached the prickly subject: ‘All this is for my eldest granddaughter, I’ve been saving them up for this day.’ Purnima does not quite believe this; it is simply not in her mother-in-law to give away her life’s treasures like so much puffed rice. Even if that had been the case, in some counterfactual supposition, it certainly would have been negated by the argument they had had recently. Lest she come too close to conceding her own role in that clash, she quickly chases away any rerun of that memory — it is ever so slightly different every time she lets it play inside her head — and wills herself to concentrate on the real thing: the spoils. But that too is not an entirely happy rumination. How typical of Priyo to think that he could ‘cover Baishakhi in gold’ with the pieces he has been fobbed off with. A few bangles and armlets (a pair of kankan, yes, but no chur or mantasha), four necklaces (only a thinnish five-stranded one among them, not the seven-stranded one she was hoping for), two chiks (both grudgingly admitted) and a miscellaneous category in which she lumps what she considers the loose change of jewellery — earrings (no kaan), rings (no ratanchur), chains and other sundries. Taken together and adorning her daughter, you could say — and it cost her to admit this — that she is not being sent off too badly, at least loss of face has been avoided, but ‘covered in gold’? No, no, no, no. Purnima has made Baishakhi do several dress-rehearsals wearing every single piece of jewellery given by her mother-in-law and she could still see large windows of her daughter’s clothes and flesh behind the sparse covering of gold and jewels. What to do? She has had to part with some of her own stuff to hide those shameful gaps. Her mother’s heart burns with shame.

Baishakhi enters the room with a jewellery box in her hand. ‘Ma, I have something to show you, I’m shutting the door.’

Before she can sit on the bed Purnima says, ‘What’s that? What’s that? Show me’ and reaches out her hand.

She opens the long red box. Nestling in the red velvet inside is a gold shaat-lahari haar, the seven-stranded necklace of her dreams.

Her eyes widen to cartoon Os. She whispers, ‘Where did you find this? Who’s given this to you?’

Baishakhi says, as if it is the most expected and ordinary thing in the world, ‘Pishi gave it to me just now. She asked me to wear it for boü-bhaat, not the wedding.’