Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

From this point the culture of strictures governing widowhood will settle on Purba’s life like the clanging shut of the immensely heavy metal lid over a manhole. She will eat only strictly vegetarian food, all manner of protein forbidden in case it inflames her blood, leading her to any kind of impropriety in her thoughts and actions. She will observe strict fasts every eleventh day after the full moon. In a previous generation they would have had her head shaved and made her wear a piece of coarse, white, handspun cotton cloth that reached only down to the top of her ankles, but some grudging acknowledgement had to be made to social progress. On the excuse of some long-overdue rearrangements in domestic space, Purba and her two children will be asked in a year’s time to move from the first floor, which she had shared, when her husband had been alive, with Priya, Purnima and Baishakhi, to the ground floor of the house.

The apportioning of space and the layout of rooms on this floor followed a pattern different from the architectural interior regularity of the other floors. It was a mess: a sitting room that was never used; a kitchen with an adjoining enclosure for washing-up and cutting fish and meat; a room at the back that could have been a bedroom, but had been used as a pantry and storeroom from the early days of the building’s history; a couple of dingy rooms, their space eaten into by the need to accommodate, a few steps down, the garages and the entrance. In one of these rooms Purba will be asked to make her quarters with her son and daughter. Her exile will begin to take on its physical lineaments.

HE SCINTILLATES WITH the glamour of terror. Or so it seems to him. Only now, a month after his return, do the children of the house, his cousins, bring themselves to talk to him; initially, during the first weeks, it would be a lightning peep from the corner or behind doors, then a quick scampering off if he caught them at it. Sometimes he called out — ‘Ei, Arunima, come in, come inside’ — but she was gone, too frightened to think of him as her eldest cousin. What have the children been told? Supratik wonders. There is so much unsaid that he feels the air shimmer. Everyone avoids his eye; when they think he is looking elsewhere, he catches them stealing quick glances at him; the Ghoshes’ very own resident cicatrice. He is beyond indifferent.

But his mother dents this carapace. Watching, when he can bear to, the three-way pull between relief, fear and curiosity on her readable face, her fear barely winning out over her indestructible love, something goes through the rickety cage of his chest, but he stops it there. Emotion is a luxury, he knows; like all revolutionaries he cannot draw the correct line between emotion and sentimentality. He reminds himself of a story that had made a deep mark on him as a child — the man who had been following the Buddha around for years and years, in the hope that he would be accepted as a disciple, one day breaks down, falls at the Buddha’s feet and declares, ‘Master, I have nothing!’, to which the Buddha says, ‘Give that up too.’ That temporary tightening he feels behind his eyes when he sees his mother looking at him with the devotion of a dog — that is his ‘nothing’; he will have to learn to give it up too.

She has Madan-da cook him all the dishes she thinks he loves, five different things at every meal — bottle-gourd with poppyseed paste, green papaya with little shrimps, parshey fish filled with roe, lentil cakes cooked in sauce, white egg curry — and hovers around while he toys with it with the tips of his fingers.

His father dares to confront him one day, soon after he returns. Supratik knows the calculation that has gone behind this: if he does not do it quickly enough, he will never be able to speak to his son with any authority. Pity battles with antagonism, as Supratik watches his father hem and haw and stammer pathetically before he can even begin. In fact, he has to help him out with the opening: ‘Do you want to say something to me?’ he asks.

‘Yes, no, yes. . yes, I do, actually. You’ve blackened our face,’ Adinath launches in. ‘You’ve brought down so much shame upon us that we cannot show our face to the outside world any more.’

What does his father know of the ‘outside world’ that he cannot bring himself to name any longer? It is Supratik who knows about it: he has loped in and out of that demesne with the cautiousness of a preyed-upon animal. And fear? Yes, that too; he knows he is going to be hunted down. There is an inevitability about it that he finds oddly liberating, even euphoric at times. Yes, he knows that outside world.

The world, say, of his Badal, who had lived with a tuberculotic, unemployed father, a mother and two younger sisters in one room the size of a cardboard shoebox in a bamboo and tin shack in a slum in Santragachhi; Badal who had dreamed of a better life for his parents and sisters and no doubt for himself too, a better life that consisted of living somewhere with brick walls, not the insubstantial, bendy partitions made out of gunny-cloth and thinly beaten woven canes, a life in which he could get some kind of job that would provide two meals a day for his family of five and perhaps, if he got lucky, a couple of eggs for his father because the doctor had prescribed proteins for him, but protein had seemed as unreachable as the moon when every other day his mother had been unable to light their little mud-and-brick oven because there had been nothing to cook on it. The loose change Badal had earned, walking the streets twelve hours a day, peddling jam, jellies, pickles made by a cooperative, had not stretched to proteins. It had been commission work and there had been days when he had failed to push even one measly bottle on any household. That had been the life of his comrade Badal, who had tasted, daily, hourly, the bitter grit of humiliation as door after door had been shut in his face, and the children and servants who had answered his knocks, he had been able to tell instantly, had been instructed to lie and say that there was no one at home. Badal, whose anger had bubbled and spilled over like the foamy starch of boiling rice, watching everyone he loved desiccate as if their life-spirit was being sucked out, little by little, until one day they would all turn into husk. He had rebelled against that imminent state of huskness and had thrown in his lot, his anger and his dammed-up frustration and energies and his human capabilities of thinking and working, with the party he had thought could bring about some change in making the world a less hostile place for him and his own. For which he had been smoked out of his slum by the police, who had thrown a Molotov cocktail on the street outside — it was President’s Rule in the state now, the second time in as many years; the police could do anything now, not that they couldn’t when there was a government in place, mind you, but they could do it with the overt blessing of the state machinery now — had thrown a Molotov cocktail, then entered each shack on the excuse that some slum-resident was doing his usual terrorism stuff, and had rounded up about fourteen young men. Badal had tried to escape by running out of the back, through the mazy warren of the narrow space between the rows of shacks, a two-foot-wide zigzagging line, really, of compacted earth and mud and the estuarine trickles of washing-up and used bath water and liquid sewage, all trying to merge into one or two open drains, but he had been surprised by the policemen waiting on the other side of the woven-cane boundary wall he had so easily climbed over, thinking, while surmounting it, that he could run away and lie low somewhere else for a few days and then return after things had calmed down and Calcutta Police had transferred their attention to some other hapless place where they thought they could trawl successfully for Naxalites, but, no, that was not to be. The slum had become, in a matter of a few seconds after the raid began, an eerily silent, abandoned hive; those who had doors to their shacks had slammed them shut and the rest hid inside, pretending not to exist, praying that their hovel would not be visited and turned upside down by the police. Badal’s bullet-riddled body had been discovered, minutes after the black vans had left, lying on the outer edge of the boundary wall, where the police had shot him. Later, Supratik had been told by Subrata, another comrade, who had gone to visit Badal’s parents, that Badal’s mother had spat on his face and tried to scratch his eyes out. ‘You boys are responsible for my son’s death,’ she had howled at him, ‘you boys taught him to play with fire with your politics. I wish my fate on all your mothers.’ On his mother, too, Supratik had not failed to note. For it was he who had taught Badal first how to grind finely potassium nitrate, sulphur and charcoal, then mix them in a ratio of 2:1:1 very carefully into clayey balls with water, sometimes with nails or screws or ball-bearings as shrapnel, then tie them up even more carefully with jute threads, dry them overnight, ready to be carried in jute side-bags and lobbed where they saw fit; it was he who had directed Badal where to get hold of pipe-guns and ammunition on the black market or, better still, the cheap and easy Sten guns that had started making an appearance from 1963, not long after that ridiculous border skirmish with China; he had educated Badal in all this and more — target practice; dismantling and putting back together a Sten in order to work out if they could manufacture it locally; how to absorb the recoil of a gun and steady oneself during and after firing. . True, all too true, literally, that he had taught Badal to play with fire.