Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

They tried to keep her from seeing Somnath’s corpse, but only half-heartedly. An accident in the forests of the Chhotanagpur plateau , someone had said. A road accident , said another. A whisper, quickly suppressed, that Santhals may have been involved in some way, but no one was talking about it, definitely not to her or in front of her; she could not ask anyone, she did not dare ask. How could she? This was not her family, but her lifelong exile among strangers. She saw the room on the ground floor, in which the body had been laid out, thronged with people at all hours, saw the brass vases full of cut stalks of green-tinged white tuberose, its smell mingling with the smoke from the continually burning incense sticks, and felt only the cold clutch of fear.

She took in the clotted black jam that had been his head and tried to turn her face away, but was transfixed by a small line of ants leaving the mess and beginning a march in the opposite direction on the white sheets on which he had been placed. She wondered, sacrilegiously for a time like this, if the ants had been picked up in the forest as he was lying dead in the thick of trees and bushes or if they had come in search now, attracted as they were by rotting organic matter. Then she had thrown up right there and was rushed out of the room; her second great error, a defilement of the sacred room of the dead.

The doctor who had come to write out the death certificate, and give Prafullanath and Charubala a sedative, looked in on her on his way out; she was pregnant with her second child, he said. She had cried then; the doctor had taken it to be for her great misfortune. And yet the tears had not been for her, or for the new child beginning inside her — that was not incarnate yet, only an idea — but for her son who would never know his father. Watching his curly head and his dark, innocent eyes, she felt something like a smashing of everything that was held behind her chest. In a household where she was the youngest adult, who had to defer to the wishes and commands and whims of her seniors, she deferred too on the matter of sorrow and grieving — Somnath’s death was a greater loss to these others.

The little boy, Supratik, whom she had seen prancing up and down, wearing a child’s silk panjabi and a child’s dhoti, when she had got married two years ago, the child who had seemed like the principle of irrepressible energy and was only about seven years younger than she, now slipped into her room and announced sombrely, ‘This is the first death in this house.’ He was only eleven.

Purba lifted up her head. She did not know what to say.

Supratik said, ‘Do you know that story about the Buddha?’

‘No.’

‘A woman’s child died. She was very sad and crying, all the time. She went to the Buddha and said, “Buddha, Buddha, please bring my son back to life.” And she was crying, crying. So the Buddha said to her, “Go bring me some mustard seeds from a house in which there has been no death ever and I’ll bring your son alive.” So the woman went around from house to house, begging for mustard seeds, crying. But she couldn’t find a single house in which there hadn’t been a death. For days she went looking and crying but no one could give her those seeds. So she returned to the Buddha, fell at his feet and said, ‘I couldn’t find the mustard seeds. Every house I went to has had a death in it. What will happen now?’ The Buddha said, ‘I asked you to do the impossible. Every mortal is marked by death. No one can escape it. That is why you couldn’t find a death-free home. This was my lesson to you — death is universal, all of us have to die.’ So the mother, crying, crying, still crying for her dead son, went away. And that is the end of the story.’

She could not bring herself to speak.

The boy let the silence tick for a little while longer, then said to the floor, ‘Don’t be sad’, and left the room.

Several years later she would keep turning the little incident this way and that in the hope of discovering an answer to the question: could this have been the beginning?

The day after Somnath’s cremation at Nimtala Ghat, Prafullanath, who had spent most of his time under sedation since the corpse of his youngest son had been brought back to Calcutta, woke up from the obliteration of his drugged sleep with a strange pain up his right arm. It was not very bad, but neither could it be ignored. He called out to his wife — where was she? — but his throat was too phlegmy for the call to carry. What time was it? There was so much light in the room, he had never known the room to be flooded with so much sunlight. Why had they opened the windows and the door if he had been sleeping? Where was all this light coming from? He got out of bed, felt for his slippers with his feet and managed to kick one under the bed trying to get his feet into them. He bent down to retrieve it. The room canted around him. The light exploded.

After three weeks in PG Hospital, twelve days of which were in the cardiac intensive-care unit, Prafullanath returned home not as himself, but as his beaten shadow. Only one thought, sometimes murmured aloud to himself but overheard gradually by others, kept wheeling and turning in his head: ‘It’s against the order of Nature for a father to mourn the death of his son. What wrong did I commit that I am being punished in this way?’

The efficacy of the sedation was variable. Charubala had sat beside her dead son’s mangled corpse and, dry-eyed, begun to bang her head against a wall, the force of impact increasing with each ramming as she settled into the consolation of a distracting pain. She had to be forcibly removed and restrained in her bed as the doctor gave her an injection. On regaining consciousness she showed no grief; she did not wail, cry, speak — she became instead a stone. If everyone had been horrified by the brutal expression of her sorrow before, now they were even more alarmed. They set about to draw some kind of emotion from those frozen depths. Over days they tried. They cajoled and suggested and tried to make her afraid. News of Purba’s pregnancy could not lance the boil, nor could showing her photographs of Somnath and asking her to choose which one should be blown up, framed and hung on a wall. In one extreme instance Priya tried to describe his brother’s body in gory details and speculate about his final hours, hoping that cruelty would bring about the thaw; his mother remained petrified.

Sandhya suggested that if Purba sat beside her mother-in-law, the sight of her son’s widow might break her heart and release her. Purba, now in her widow’s white, the vermilion line in the parting of her hair permanently removed using the big toe of her husband’s corpse before it was taken away for cremation, complied with her habitual meekness. For unknown reasons, a murky sense of guilt made her want to be overobedient, overbiddable; it was as if she had brought her in-laws to this pass and there was nothing she would not do to atone.

But her mother-in-law, still suspended in the limbo of her shock, read these murky, unplumbed deeps of Purba’s soul with ease. On the third day of Purba sitting at her vigil, Charubala surfaced from wherever she had been drowned and uttered her first words. She looked at Purba and said, ‘You have brought this great misery upon our heads. You are ill-starred, evil.’

The effect of her resurgence momentarily shrouded the meaning of her words. Chhaya shrieked, ‘Ma’s speaking! Ma’s speaking!’ and ran up and down the stairs summoning everyone. In that room, now full of people, Charubala arraigned her youngest daughter-in-law. ‘You have brought this misfortune to our house,’ she repeated. ‘You’re a burnt-faced woman, it is because of you that my son died.’

Sandhya tried to interrupt, ‘Ma, please, this is not. .’ but the words shrivelled and died in her mouth. A great pall had fallen over the house. The silence in the room was that of unspeakability. A magic circle had been drawn around Purba; locked inside it, she instilled fear in everyone outside that malignant aura of the cursed one. Superstition did the rest. Purba found herself to be the weak animal that the rest of its own kind attacked and drove outside the fold.