Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

‘Why don’t you try?’

‘Boro-babu, the world does not change, you destroy yourself trying to change it, but it remains as it is. The world is very big, and we are very small. Why cause people who love you to go through such misery because of it?’

Once again, what response can he give to this?

‘Your mother took to her bed after you were gone. At first she wouldn’t even touch water until you returned. I’ve made a bargain with god, she said. She was shrivelling up like leather in the sun. I’ve known her ever since she came to this house as a daughter-in-law, it burned my chest to see her like that’ — his voice breaks.

Supratik looks up sharply. Madan-da’s eyes are red with unshed tears. Supratik turns his face quickly away.

But Madan reins himself in. ‘What good will come of all this that you are doing?’ he asks.

‘What is it that you think I’m doing?’

Madan answers tangentially, ‘Being kinder to your near and dear ones — isn’t that a bigger thing than doing good for the unknown mass of people?’

A switch is flicked somewhere. It sends through Supratik a surge of cold fury that he is being given a lesson in political morality by the family’s cook. His answer is like the crack of a whip: ‘Was that what you were doing when you prostrated yourself in front of my grandmother after Grandfather’s heart attack, and wept and begged her to forgive you for your son’s part in gheraoing him? You asked her to mete out whatever punishment she thought fit for your betrayer of a son. Let loose the police on him, let him go to jail , you said. Was that kindness to your near and dear ones?’

Madan looks as if he has been slapped. The lower half of his mouth goes slack for a moment or two before he can begin to assert some kind of control over it.

Supratik is not done. ‘Remember? You told her that you wouldn’t see your son’s face again, he had destroyed your honour and dignity with the family who employed you, who had given you a home for decades? Do you remember?’

Madan looks at Supratik with the unblinking gaze of an idiot; Supratik expects the corners of his mouth to start dripping with drool any minute. His own initial reluctance to engage is gone. In its place is that familiar saw-toothed hardness.

‘What? Have you forgotten? A CPI(M) stooge, that’s what you said your son was. You were right, as it turned out. But what did you think was more important — that he served your petty interests in not rocking the boat for you or that he fought for the rights of scores who have nothing?’

Madan begins, ‘Boro-babu. . where did you—’

Supratik cuts through his feeble words: ‘It’s irrelevant where or how I came by all this. You were looking after yourself when you were grasping my grandmother’s feet and wailing, your self-interest. But it was all couched in the language of feelings for your near and dear ones, as you are doing now. Punish him, he’s done great wrong, but don’t abandon me , you said then. Did you ever think of Dulal? The factory’s been shut down, possibly for ever; your son’s out of a job, struggling to set up an electrical-goods shop. All the men who worked at that mill are jobless now, thanks to the people you work for, the people you are now pleading on behalf of. In these times of shortage, of hundreds and thousands of unemployed and no jobs to be had, how are these men going to eat? How are they going to feed and clothe their families and keep the roof over their heads?’

Madan now visibly flinches as the hissing, which is what Supratik’s words have become, hits him. Supratik knows that somebody who is not a servant in their home can easily retaliate with the argument that Madan’s advice to him, that one must pay heed to the private over the public, otherwise one is inviting disaster in, is coherent for both situations, Dulal’s and Supratik’s, but he also knows that Madan-da will not answer back because his station in life has not taught him how to. Besides, as Madan himself pointed out, Supratik has had the benefit of higher education while the cook is, at best, someone who learned how to read at home — how could he ever have the competence to mount an argument exposing holes in Supratik’s logic?

And, predictably enough, Madan looks routed, as if he is staring at some devastation wrought by a natural calamity or war. He opens his mouth to try to speak, but thinks better of it. If Supratik feels a quantum of regret, it is because of the party Madan-da has been speaking up for — his mother — but that too vanishes almost as soon as it appears.

Only Sona seems to be unaware that Supratik has been gone for two and a half years, that he is now, like a circus lion, enclosed by a ring of fire.

Supratik catches hold of the boy downstairs in his quarters one day and asks, ‘What’s going on in the new school? Your mother seems unable to report anything to me.’

Purba, flustered at this direct reference, absents herself for a while. Supratik has forgotten the difficult trick of getting Sona to talk or, when he does, of extracting the real meaning from the little that he says.

Sona mumbles something; Supratik does not quite catch it, only half his attention is on the boy. He knows he must ask the boy again, so he dutifully poses another question.

‘Are you facing any trouble with English? What are they teaching you now?’

‘Agreement of prepositions with verbs,’ comes the succinct reply.

‘Difficult?’

‘Yes, very. You learn by heart things like “prefer to” and “abide by”, so if you don’t know the meanings of “prefer” and “abide” then things get quite tricky.’

‘Don’t you ask your English teacher for the meanings?’

Silence.

‘And how is the mathematics going?’ Supratik asks.

‘It’s going well. The maths teacher says he wants to see someone. .’

‘See someone?’

‘Someone from here, from home. .’

But before Sona can finish his sentence Purba enters the room and Supratik is all a-scatter again.

‘Get moving, get moving,’ she tells her son peevishly, ‘you can’t be sitting here all day, chatting away with anyone who gets it into their head to drop by to waste time.’

Sona does not bother to respond.

Supratik, his heart thumping, asks Purba, ‘How come I’ve become “anyone” suddenly?’

Purba turns her back to both of them. Her heart pummelling against her ribs, she scrapes up enough daring to reply, ‘If someone disappears for so long, sends no news, no nothing, no sign to let anyone know whether he’s dead or alive, yes, then he becomes just “anyone”.’ The last few words are bright with the smoulder of real anger.

‘To you too?’ Supratik brings himself to ask. Something has happened to his gullet. He feels the need to swallow repeatedly. It’s a feeling familiar from those sneaked moments on the terrace when he used to time his visits there to coincide with her routine of hanging up the washing in the afternoons. They had had to be so careful, even to the excruciating extent of him deliberately missing some days so that no one suspected anything. On those days, Supratik imagined the twenty minutes of Purba upstairs with such force of concentration, hearing every footfall, every wet slap of the washing, that he felt drained and weightless when he heard her footsteps going down the stairs back to the ground floor. And on the days they met in the sun-baked terrace, they went through an unvarying miniature drama.

‘You hang the clothes, I’ll peg them to the line,’ he would say, hardly able to bring out the words, or hear them himself over the roaring in his blood.

She would nod, her face flushed.

And then their hands would touch on the clothes line, the length of rope and a wet sari or shirt between them. He hadn’t trusted himself to speak then, for he had needed every particle of energy to prevent his teeth from chattering. He had clasped her hand with such ferocity, to steady as much himself as her.