Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

There was a long pause.

‘I feel sorry for her,’ he continued. ‘I thought I should try and make life a little bit happier for her, so I decided that whenever I buy you something, I’ll buy two of it and give her one: face-cream, lipstick, scent, sari, whatever. If these little things can make her happy, can make her feel less left out, then. . Besides, it’s not as if the cost is a consideration for us. Please think about it,’ he had pleaded. ‘It brings a smile to her face.’

It is a conversation from fifteen years ago, from a time when she had found it easy to accede to her husband’s requests without a thought. Things are so different now that it feels they were all different people then, like characters you read about in a book, not the younger version of your own self. A different thought occurs to her now: did she ever ask Priyo whether Chhaya had been given pieces of the jewellery identical to those that he had bought her over the years before the wealth trickled away? The thought of duplicates of her rings and bracelets and necklaces lying in another almirah in the same house, but on a different floor, makes her feel slightly queasy. And all the saris given by Priyo too? She has lost count of them. Did he give Chhaya the same seven-stranded chain, calling it a shaat-lahari haar? Did she fall for it? Especially, it turns out, when she had a genuine one?

There is no vantage point opposite the house where he can station himself and spy on 22/6. He could hardly perch in one of the windows of the neighbouring houses, or on the stoop of number 14/6/A, which is directly opposite 22/6. The Basaks live there. Vikramjit used to be his childhood playmate. They went to manimela together and sang ‘Touch my soul with the touchstone of fire’ in a chorus of about a dozen boys. Where is Vikramjit now? He does not know; he has fallen out of touch, drifted apart from these childhood affinities and friendships. He wraps a part of the gamchha over his head, making sure that at least half his face is covered. They would not recognise him, not unless they were specifically looking, but it would be foolish not to be vigilant. Some busybody is bound to notice him if he stays in one spot near 14/6/A for a long time, most likely someone from the Basak family or one of their servants, and then where would he be? Not that the chance of being discovered reduces to zero if he keeps walking up and down the street; there are so many people, with dead, empty time on their hands, who sit at a window or on a verandah all day, watching the traffic of people on the streets, with nothing to do with their hours and days, nothing. There is old Bhadra-babu on his balcony, biding his time until the final call comes. There will inevitably be a maid hanging out the washing who will notice him, then mark him again when she comes out to check if it is dry, then again when she gathers the dry clothes. . This is how this world runs, a small group of people who know each other, a closed world of intense curiosity in other people’s lives because your own is just empty, dead time.

There is Pintu-da, stepping out of his front door to go to the Writers’ Building, where he works as head clerk to the transport secretariat, cloth bag hanging from one shoulder; rickety arms and legs, but with a paunch straining at the lower buttons of his tucked-in shirt and the top hook of his brown trousers. It is eleven o’clock; by the time Pintu-da makes it to his desk it will be around twelve-thirty. He will chat to his colleagues for an hour, drinking tea and snacking on wedges of cucumber dipped in rust-red chilli-salt. Then they will have a lunch break for two hours. At three-thirty, it will be time for tea. He will move a pile of files from one side of the table to the other, feel exhausted with the pressure of work, gossip for a while longer with his co-workers. Then, at five, it will be time for him to leave his office and head back home, where he will complain about his gruelling day, and everyone else around him, his wife, his children, the servants, especially his wife, will run about doing his bidding, trying to make the last hours before he goes to sleep easy and comfortable.

The bile rises to his throat. He swallows it, because hawking would draw more attention.

He stands for a few minutes gazing at the house, slightly defamiliarised now that he is looking from the outside at a structure whose inside he has known since his birth; he has never had the opportunity or the inclination to scrutinise the exterior with such intensity of concentration. Four storeys, with the date of completion of construction, 1921, in bas-relief plumb in the horizontal centre of the façade, right at the top, just under the parapet.

It was a solid if unoriginal, and now ugly, edifice, with a deeply recessed balcony, on the left of the main door and the staircase, on each of the four storeys. With the exception of the balcony on the ground floor, which was completely enclosed in iron grilles, each of the three on the upper floors had a stomach-high wrought-iron railing, intricately carved and dense, prone to rust and flaking. ‘Don’t go to the balcony, you’ll fall over the edge’ was a standard refrain from adults when he and his cousins were growing up; no one seemed to have taken into account that a child would have to climb over the railings to achieve that mishap. In his lifetime the building had been painted twice, the first time white, with the balconies, windowsills and the edge of the parapet picked out in green; the second time, a shade of dull yellow and the contrasting colour, an equally dull brownish-red. It stands cream and green now, this house which is asymmetrical, he notes with surprise for the first time, along the vertical plane. If one were to draw a longitudinal line dividing the building into two halves, they would not correspond to each other; the balconies would be to the left, the two windows of one of the front-facing rooms, used as bedrooms on all four floors, would be to the right. There are four rooms on each floor, the one leading out to the front verandah the largest and meant to be used as the living room on that floor, but on the top two floors they are used as bedrooms: his grandfather and grandmother’s on the third floor, and his aunt’s on the second.

Long L-shaped corridors open to the back courtyard ran along the entire inner side of the house, facing away from the road, the ones they had always called the back verandas; each floor had one. These were the verandahs where the children had had their birthday parties: banana-leaf plates had been set down on the floor in a row and the invitees, all children from the area, sat with their backs to the walls of the rooms, eating off the plates in front of them. The large courtyard had a pump room, which housed the electrical pump, the reservoir on a raised bank, and a small enclosure with a simple hand-pump, where most of the washing-up and even some of the washing of the house was done. The courtyard was slightly sunken, two or three feet below the corridor of the ground floor. Madan-da had planted dahlias, chrysanthemums, marigolds, roses, chillies, impatiens of several strains, a blue aparajita and a white one, and god knows what else in terracotta pots and tubs, row upon row, in an effort to beautify the frankly squalid, wet, dark, slippery place; somehow there always seemed to be a big fat tongue of slime and water, edged thickly with green, in one corner. The ersatz garden had worked for a while and then, after decades of a forced and reluctant kind of flourishing, the plants had mostly died or become shrivelled and spindly because Madan-da had lost the energy that he had lavished on them for so long.

Through a corner of the courtyard, one entered the most surprising bit of the house, a back garden; surprising because it was a rare thing in this part of the city, but also because it was hidden and one could not tell from the layout of the courtyard that there was a garden tucked away behind it. It was not visible from the ground floor because the mess of the courtyard and the rooms that had been habitually used as the servants’ quarters towards the back of the house got in the way, but if you stood on the back verandahs of the first, second and third floors, or at the back windows of some of the rooms upstairs, you could see that scrap of land — it was not big — with its guava tree, the oddly bent jackfruit tree that never bore any fruit, the shiuli bush, the jumbly tagar tree, all in an erratic arrangement on the grassless earth.