Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

Purnima’s hands clutch the bedclothes ineffectually. She can only let out a ‘Jah!’ of profound disbelief. Chhaya? The queen lioness in the valley of lions where she, Purnima, is a calf? That. . that walking capsule of poison? Why would she give her daughter this amazing heirloom piece of jewellery?

‘You’re not lying?’ Purnima asks. ‘Is it true that your pishi’s given you this?’

‘Why would I lie?’

‘Was she smiling when she gave you this? Or muttering with anger?’

‘Why would she be muttering? She said it was best to have the gift-giving within the family out of the way and not done in public. So I bent down and touched her feet and she said that she was blessing me with this necklace. “Go, go adorn someone else’s home, I never had the chance,” she said and then her eyes filled with tears and she turned her head away.’

Purnima can find nothing to return to this. She feels odd, as if she has been caught doing something wrong and been chastised by someone much younger; a mixture of shame and indignation. In its peculiar way it seems to be a version of the loss of face she had been so keen to avoid by making up the shortfall in Baishakhi’s wedding gold. But it is not in her nature to sit with an ambiguous feeling for long, not in front of her daughter.

She takes out the necklace, its several strands spilling and now entangled in her nervous fingers, and says, ‘Yeeees, remarkably weighty.’ Then, after a pause, ‘Looks like real gold all right. Just checking, it’s good to make sure about these things. After all, you can never tell with this family. Or with your aunt.’

Purnima untwists the strands of the necklace, pats smooth the bedclothes and spreads it out. There is no denying it is a beauty: seven lines of thick chains, each with a decorative centre pendant in graduated sizes, the pendants getting smaller towards the neck as the chain-length reduces with each strand. It is not something that Baishakhi’s generation of women can easily pull off. Besides, where would she wear it? Purnima lifts it up gently, with the delicacy one would bring to a newborn’s fragile head, and slips it carefully over her own neck. It is a tricky thing to wear and needs disentangling again while resting against her chest, flowing down nearly to her navel. There, done now. She stands up and turns to the mirror on the steel wardrobe. Oh, my. The sheer weight of the thing is its signature; it is a presence that cannot be forgotten for a single second, as you can a ring or a bangle. You feel slightly bowed by it, as if in reverence. A tiny burr of envy catches at the admiration: really, shouldn’t her in-laws have given it to her when she came to this house, rather than giving it to her daughter now?

Much better, much more satisfying to think of what this beautiful thing has been doing in her sister-in-law’s clutches, immured in the depths of a bank locker or the darkness of a steel almirah. Had it been given to her by her mother? When? When they expected Chhaya to get married? How galling to learn that that ugly smudge of a woman was in possession of such amazing old-school masterpieces, while she has had to make do with attenuated chains and earrings. Her only truly heirloom piece is the ring that her aunt gave her as a wedding present, a gold ring with a pigeon’s-blood ruby at the centre, its deep, discreet fire set off by the showier sparkle of the twelve small diamonds surrounding it.

Many years ago, shortly after coming to live in Bhabanipur, Priyo had given her what he had called a shaat-lahari haar, but that was a crow compared to the peacock of this real thing on her chest. Had she really believed hers was the seven-stranded necklace of Bengali jewellery lore, or had she pretended to believe in order to please her husband? Its chains were like cotton threads, weak and tangly; these were curved strips of pure metal, each the width of two fingers.

But there is a dissonance somewhere that she cannot quite put her finger on. She cannot fully immerse herself in the predictable pleasures of acidulous speculations about Chhaya. She feels she has been trumped. Who would ever have thought that Chhaya was capable of such generosity? In fact, the idea is so unfeasible that she is certain there is some kind of a cunningly secreted catch involved and keeps hunting for it. She wants to trip up on a snag planted by her sister-in-law; that way comfort lies. She remembers a conversation with Priyo well before things curdled so irreversibly between her and her in-laws that she feels under siege in this house now.

Priyo had come home from work one evening and ushered her into their room. ‘Look what I’ve got for you,’ he said, extracting a bottle from his briefcase. Perfume! ‘Intimate’, it was called; she can still recall the ridged glass of the bottle, the sharply pointed cupola of its scarlet cap, the gold-coloured liquid.

‘O ma,’ she had said, ‘shall I try on a squirt now or leave it for a special occasion? It’s Tapati’s wedding next week, I’ll wear it then. Where did you get it?’

‘On the black market. You can’t get foreign scents in shops.’

‘O ma, foreign! I shall have to be careful with it.’

‘No, no, no need for that. It’s there to be used, not kept in storage and admired. When you finish it, I’ll get you another one.’

Later that night, when she opened the wardrobe, she saw her bottle of ‘Intimate’ on a shelf inside. But had she not put hers on the dressing table? She wheeled around; yes, there it was, where she had left it. There was a second bottle, then, which Priyo had hidden, without her knowledge, in the almirah. Some planning must have gone into it: how had he got hold of the keys? They were tied, in a bunch with other keys, to a knot in her sari and tucked in at her waist; he could not have had access to the shelf inside the almirah without her knowing. But these were children’s games beside the spectre of the second bottle of perfume and the meaning it radiated, the only meaning it could possible have.

After three days of fielding an armoury of sulking — curt replies to his questions, a face like thunder, sudden exits from the room when he appeared — a baffled Priyo asked, ‘What’s up, can you tell me?’

Several hours of tears and indirectional talking and heavy hints and mystification later, Purnima had, to her shame, to spell it out: that second bottle of ‘Intimate’ in the wardrobe.

Priyo’s face fell. Purnima knew that she had caught him out. But it was bathos that had flitted across Priyo’s expression and, if there was any guilt in it, it was not the kind that Purnima had been preparing herself for.

‘Yes, you’re right, I bought a second bottle,’ Priyo confessed. ‘But it’s not what you think. That second bottle is for Chhaya.’

‘Chhaya?’ Purnima echoed.

‘Yes, Chhaya. Sit down, I think it’s time I told you about this.’

Purnima, stunned, sat down. Priyo began, ‘Chhaya is over thirty years old now. It’s safe to say that she won’t get married. The shame and agony of it lashes her, can’t you see? She thinks that everyone is pointing at her and whispering, “Look, look at her, a spinster for the rest of her days.” She’s not totally wrong about that. And she is, how should I put it, not the easiest of persons, as you well know. She looks at you and Boüdi and Chhoto-boüdi and thinks all the time that these are things that she is never going to have: a husband, children, in-laws. She will have to remain in her father’s house for the rest of her life. When Dada and Boüdi go somewhere, or I buy you a sari or some cosmetic, or when we go to the cinema or a restaurant — I’ve seen her face become so small. I can see the thought inside her head: “There’s no one to bring these little treats for me, no one for me to go out with.” I feel sad when I see her. .’