Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

Again, he is thrown by an observation that had never occurred to him while he was an inhabitant of the house that he watches now from the outside: why had Madan-da never tried to elevate the garden to his aesthetic standards, channelling instead all the relevant energies into improving the blighted concrete courtyard? Is it the lot of the insider to be marked, always and predominantly, by a kind of absence of thought, a bluntness of perception?

Apparently, his grandfather had bought this huge house for cash in 1926 or ’27 or thereabouts. The story went that the three brothers who had had the house built towards the end of the First World War went out of business overnight sometime in the mid-Twenties; his grandfather had saved them from destitution by buying their house; the original owners had moved, with their wives and children, to quarters somewhere else in the city. In keeping with his scrutiny of the building with new eyes, he now turns that childhood tale around, lifting it up to see if he can discern what lies underneath. Too much time has passed; the dead grass buried under it would be that unnatural shade of mutton-fat white. Besides, he had never really paid much attention to that story; which child is interested in the history of his parents and grandparents? The adults too, sensing this, perhaps concoct an easy formula that barely touches the true, and therefore complicated, history, choosing a short, convenient fiction over the dense adventitiousness of fact.

But now, as he stands watching the house that has become a separate, independent entity for the first time, detached from him, something in the outer world, he speculates: is the story true, that emphasis on his grandfather’s philanthropy? Isn’t a more credible story one in which his grandfather had seen an opportunity to acquire a large house cheaply from people who had backed themselves into a corner; that he had exploited them at their weakest moment, agreeing to save them from bankruptcy and ruin by giving them money with the house as collateral? That collateral had never been released, so maybe he had formally bought the house; the money given to the three brothers had been used by them to save their skins from their creditors.

The house seems to shift shape minutely for him and become subtly different, a bit more hostile and forbidding, its shameful history giving it an aggressive aura as if it has become defiantly shameless. From all the things he has bothered to find out about the way the Ghoshes ran their business — planting lumpens within unions to spark off violence so that all the union workers could be sacked; an old story of buying off a business from a friend’s widow, who did not know any better, for a fraction of its real value; using the Hindu — Muslim riots the year before Independence, the year he was born, to shut down mills, regardless of how many workers were deprived of their livelihoods, and buying up factories in areas emptied by the migration — all this immorality and opportunism, this was what characterised them, not altruism, as the stories they had spun would have you believe. But then, this is a world whose running fuel is anecdotes and stories, he reminds himself. The anecdotes need not be first-hand; in fact, better if they are not, better if they are repeated across several degrees of separation, because that proves how potent and pervasive they are, bringing everyone together in one huge, collusive matrix. A legendary lecture given by so-and-so in Presidency College in 1926, its iconic status relayed by a nineteen-year-old in 1965 with the words ‘You needed to be there to feel the goosebumps’. The memory of a martinet kept alive by stories recounting his disciplinary measures from fifty years ago, handed down a dendritic chain of people across the generations. This is the way this world runs: self-mythologising through anecdotes proliferating like a particularly virulent strain of virus. Chatter chatter chatter, always the chatter of what others did and others said in a golden age of an unrecoverable past.

He feels his blood flowing more quickly. The gamchha around his head and part of his face is making him steam. All the while, the building opposite him remains resilient, unyielding with the information he seeks from it. The slatted wooden shutters in the windows have been opened, an unchanging morning ritual, before he arrived on the street; but no one on the front verandahs as of yet. No sooner does he think this than a maid — a new one, it seems; he does not recognise her — appears on the second-floor balcony with a broom, gathers up all the dust and fluff and rubbish that she has swept and tips it out onto the street. That floor is Pishi’s and Mejo-kaka’s. How uninhabited the house seems — no one coming out onto the balconies, no one peeking out over the parapet, no face at any of the windows, no one coming out of the front gate. The new lick of paint it has had earlier this year, on the occasion of his cousin’s wedding, is already beginning to get stained and tarnished. How odd that the painters had not uprooted a couple of bat or ashwattha plants that have taken root in the cracks, one along the top left, near the roof, and the other on the low wall of the parapet itself. Everything needs a toehold here. The tenacious plants will grow and their roots will crack open the building like a butcher cleaving a joint of meat. He visualises a huge yawn running through the middle of the house, as if someone has taken hold of the two sides along a fissure and prised it open like a mouth, its deep insides exposed — the rooms, the furniture, the people, their lives. His heart thumps with the angry euphoria of retribution.

The house still appears devoid of people. What are they doing ? It is quarter-past eleven, the men must have left for work and the children for school, but what about the servants? Why is no one coming out to go to the market or the shops? Where is Madan-da? It is impossible to glimpse the person he really wants to see because she lives on the ground floor; she does not use the barred and grilled dark cage of the front balcony, which, in any case, is blocked from view because the iron front gates are shut. Suddenly he feels deflated; the waiting outside is hopeless. What is he really expecting to see? And if he does catch sight of that, what is he going to do?

On the top floor of 22/6 Sandhya gets out of bed, ignores her head-spin, comes out of her dark bedroom and goes in search of her mother-in-law. There is a great turmoil in her, as if of dead leaves skittering around in a stiff breeze, about to be lifted clean off the ground in a mighty, sustained blast of gale. She feels a premonition of that particular kind of levitation that can only be effected by a force of Nature.

She announces to her stunned mother-in-law, ‘Ma, Boro will return today. I feel it in my bones.’

Looking at this woman with dishevelled hair, the inky shadows under her eyes, about to disappear into their sockets, the dull skin, Charubala wonders briefly if her eldest daughter-in-law has finally toppled over into madness, but the magnetism of sixth sense is stronger, especially if it is, as in this case, felt by a mother. She dismisses her suspicions of insanity and says, ‘What are you saying!’

‘Yes, I feel it. The goddess has at last smiled on me. Ma, I think this may be the day.’

‘Don’t say that, you’ll tempt fate. Let’s just wait and see what happens. Why don’t you have a bath and go to the prayer room?’ Charubala advises.

He can feel an intense impatience and longing breaking up his hard, silent core. He is beginning to fragment at last. No, this will not do. If he has put up with the unspoken rules for so long, reined in his feelings, been as careful as a predator stalking its prey, it will not do to ruin everything now by giving in to impulse, however strong that may be. To have the boat capsize so near the shore — no, no, it cannot be. He can feel his jaw muscles and the vein at his temples throb with the force of determination, so hard has he gritted his teeth to will himself to stand steady.