Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

She breathed the words ‘Someone will see us’ and held onto his hand even more tenaciously.

The kind of trembling that this memory ignites in him is much like the one he had felt in a tiny, injured sparrow he had once cupped in his hand. The pages and pages that he has written for her, the pages that have kept him going because through the faithful scribbling he has imagined her as their sole recipient and dedicatee, imagined her as the source of light, as if in a painting, illuminating his writing as she reads it — he has not found the courage to give them to her. What stays his hand, he now wonders? Fear? Fear that he has shown her too much of the flow in his heart that cannot have a destination, that can only eddy around endlessly inside him in an arid circle? Fear that she may be baffled by it or, worse, repelled?

It is true that he has not had the opportunity to bring the account up to date. The fraught experience of his own and Dipankar’s deliverance — that final disastrous action, which had culminated in abandoning Dhiren and Debashish and becoming fugitives for days, hiding out in patches of forests, in little villages and towns, until he and Dipankar reached Giridih, feverish with fear, exhaustion and starvation — remains unwritten. The two months in Giridih were spent lying low in Dipankar’s uncle’s home, writing the larger part of the account of the time in Majgeria and Gidighati, picking up from where he had left off, at the beginning of the first sowing season. The other substantial occupation was learning, with furious concentration and intent, the engineering of railway tracks and fishplate joins from Dipankar. They had walked for miles at night, for hands-on lessons — Dipankar called them ‘practicals’ — on far-flung railway tracks running through land that was so devoid of human habitation for miles around that they had sometimes felt they were on the moon. All that is yet uncommitted to paper. But it is truer that the incompletion serves as a convenient excuse not to give her what is already written; the writer’s timeless self-acquittal — ‘Oh, I need to write just the last couple of pages. .’

Or is it another kind of fear that has been the cause of the procrastination, fear that he may be exposing her to knowledge that will make her vulnerable, put her in harm’s way? Several times a day he swings between cursing himself for leaving behind the pages in Giridih because of this particular variant of fear, the fear that they may compromise her if the house is searched by the police — he is, after all, in their cross-hairs — and thinking that he has done the prudent thing by not bringing his incriminating account back home.

Would she have called him ‘anyone’ if she had known what he had been up to in the last two and a half years? Or would it have pushed her further away?

There is no answer from Purba. Everyone in the room is pointedly looking at nothing in particular; a calculated indirection. Even Sona, who is impervious to ordinary reality most of the time, feels something in the air has thickened and acquired a quality he can only think of as waiting, expectant. Like the atmosphere in the vicinity of a bomb, seconds before it explodes.

‘Your maths teacher has sent for me. Do you know why?’ Supratik asks Sona.

‘No,’ is Sona’s brief reply. He seems to be taken aback by the contents of the letter that sir has given him to deliver.

The letter had surprised Supratik so much that he only has occasion to think much later about the implications of Sona handing it to him. An ordinary handwritten letter on a piece of paper torn neatly out of an unruled exercise book; the envelope has been addressed, in an upward-sloping hand: ‘The parents/guardians of Swarnendu Ghosh’; its contents brief: could the parents/guardians of Swarnendu Ghosh come to the school to see me, the senior school mathematics teacher, any weekday between the hours of eleven to one, signed Swapan Adhikari.

So Supratik is not prepared for what’s waiting for him. Why could Swarnendu’s parents not come? is the first question. Because his father had died when he was little, and his mother, well, she would be uncomfortable, out of place in this world, Supratik answers, leaving Mr Adhikari to fill in the gaps; he says that he is Swarnendu’s cousin and can be trusted with anything that requires looking into.

Nothing that needs looking into, Mr Adhikari assures him, but something quite different, something bigger. The boy is preternaturally talented in mathematics, a prodigy really; he is working on things better suited to the postgraduate level and is thinking about some crucial open problems in the subject of number theory, things he has never been taught, it all seems to come naturally to him; and the teacher has spoken to a close friend who is an associate professor at a university in the USA and has sent some of the boy’s work to him, his notebook and papers, and he too thinks this is no ordinarily gifted boy who is good in maths, but someone rarer, someone very special, and this friend is of the opinion that a place can be found for him in the mathematics programme of the university, right now. Swarnendu need not go through the business of completing school and sitting school-leaving exams and American university-entrance exams, the professor has spoken to his Faculty members already, the other professors in the department, the Dean and the Chair, showed them Swarnendu’s work, and he seems to be of the opinion that a place can be found for the boy, a fully funded place, on full scholarship; the university would like to welcome such prodigies and mature their talent, so will the family, the boy’s family, be willing to consider this? It is a chance in a million, so he would strongly, very strongly, advise them to think. . to think, erm, positively and purposively about the whole business. It could all be arranged in six months, or maybe nine. A year, maximum. He, Swapan Adhikari, is, of course, going to do everything in his power to push things along.

That torrent of information — each point so unthinkable and, therefore, unimagined by Supratik — has exactly the opposite effect of drowning with confusion and surprise; yes, his hands shake a bit and turn cold and clammy, but the revelation also gives him such a sudden, brief burst of sharp-edged clarity that he thinks for a moment it is the opening chord of something like a seizure or a stroke. And in that extreme lucidity he thinks first of Purba, then, almost simultaneously, how odd it is that he does not any longer think of her as his aunt, Chhoto-kakima, that he thinks of her as her unadorned, naked name, not what she is relationally to him. Will she be happy, share his sense of levitation? Will she even understand? Here, at last, so close to home, at home in fact, is the first proof of that wishy-washy, folksy, superstitious hypothesis, that good things happen to everyone in equal measure, that the great distribution system in the universe sends down sweeties to everyone with a blind and stringent even-handedness. Cock, total and utter cock; it has been his long-held conviction that only shit happens to the world’s have-nots and no good ever comes their way without radical intervention; good things only happen to those to whom good things happened. Here, suddenly, mockingly, is a hole in his conviction. Here is something beyond good happening to someone in whose way nothing good has ever come in his small life. Will Purba understand at least that ?

On the way back home he asks Sona, ‘Are you happy about this?’

Sona, who seems very far away inside his head, does not answer. Then, much later, entering Basanta Bose Road, he says, in a small voice, ‘Bor’-da, will you tell Ma?’

And Supratik does; first, to Purba’s complete incomprehension, then to one question only, asked quaveringly, ‘You mean Sona will leave us and go abroad?’