Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

Over the next few days he tries to explain to Purba, with what partial and imperfect knowledge he has of the matter, the process of going to study in a country far away, only to be returned, time and time again, to that insurmountable issue — her son leaving home at the age of fifteen. It is only after he is forced to resort to a low kind of sentimental blackmail — ‘You do not want your son to do well? Do you want him to stay here and fester? Become a servant like you, sitting and standing to the demands and whims of everyone in the house? Don’t you want him to escape this? Don’t you want to escape all this? Do you not have in mind a future for him that is better than your past and present?’ — it is only after this barrage has reduced her to tears that he has the first stirring of hope that Sona may leave with her blessings.

But this chapter has just begun. Supratik has to tell his mother the news about Sona and wait for her to inform the rest of the family. It is best done that way: the messenger’s good standing amongst everyone would cast the message as inherently positive and somewhat mitigate the poisonous reactions of envy that Supratik is fully expecting to be unleashed tricklingly over time. Purba may have slipped from being the target of active hostility, through a long state of being passively considered a pariah, to becoming, along with her two children, mostly a kind of forgotten outpost now, related to the main house in a vague, historical and dusty way, but Supratik knows the milieu, knows that nothing swells and replenishes their poison sacs more than the success of others, especially those whom they have consigned to a different kind of destiny. Happiness for Purba and her children meant rebellion, it meant trying to break the walls of the prison they had been immured in, it meant unconscionable acts of defiance, and how could that be tolerated?

But he must not derail himself with the old animus today. Today he must answer the question Purba had asked him when he was arguing for Sona, a question that will leak its destructive half-lives into their own, and one day they may discover that they have been made irrecoverably ill. When he had asked, carried away by his rhetoric, if Purba did not imagine for Sona a future better than her blighted past and equally rotting present, she had looked up at him and said, ‘But what about my future? What about our future?’ That commute from singular to plural pronoun had felled him. How can he answer the question that is like a vortex inside him? That it is easier enjoining others, in distant villages, to break the walls of their historical conditions than to do the same violence to the fabric of his own social conditioning? Or can he bring himself to do both with equal ease? Can he?

Purnima is first heard screaming, then rushing around from floor to floor. ‘My jewellery’s gone! All my jewellery’s been stolen — all. Clean missing from my safe. All gone, disappeared!’

It is difficult initially to get to the facts behind the nearly solid wall of hysteria, but the small crowd of family and servants that swiftly coalesces around her manages to put together some basic things: Purnima had come out of the bathroom after her midday bath, gone to her almirah to take out some clothes, discovered it was not locked, which made her suspicious, so she had unlocked the drawer in which her jewellery was kept, only to discover that it was staring at her emptily like the eye-sockets in a human skull. The story changes elastically according to who is narrating it to whom; sometimes the almirah is locked, and not the jewellery-drawer inside it, while sometimes it is the other way around. There are divergent accounts involving keys, and others about the value of the jewellery — some put it at one lakh rupees, some at ten. Purnima herself cannot give any fixity to these stories; she is too much in shock to make much sense of the events and, for a start, she cannot make up her mind if this storm of attention centred around her goes a little way, a very little way, towards compensating for the great loss.

Priyo is incensed with her. ‘Why did you leave the stuff lying around in the house when it should have been in the bank locker?’

Purnima bleats, ‘I brought my precious things home for the wedding, then. . then I didn’t find the time to return them to the bank. Or the chance.’

‘You didn’t find the time ? Who do you think you are? Empress Victoria? The president of this country? Couldn’t you have even found the time ,’ he mimics savagely, ‘to ask me to do it?’

‘So much gold and jewels! Worth such a lot of money. All gone, all gone’ is all Purnima can bring herself to say in between bouts of crying.

A repeated chord resonates in 22/6: ‘Who could have burgled us?’ The suspicion alights automatically on the servants. But which one of them can it be? Everyone in the house is an old and trusted hand and the newest of the lot, Kamala, the helper cook, has been around for nearly six years. The temporary staff — Usha, the maid who comes to clean every day; Reba, the washerwoman, who has been doing their laundry for the last twenty-five years — have been irreproachable so far. What about the revolving staff, usually three or four early-adolescent boys, none of whom stays for more than a year or two before moving on to another job, the ones who help out with the dusting and cleaning and miscellaneous duties? Surely it must be one of them. They are new, they have access to the rooms, they are not as melded in with the rest of the household as the other servants.

The police are called. The three boys are questioned, threatened, slapped around a bit. They are in tears, they deny everything. Their bodies and clothes are searched, then the room in the servants’ quarters where they sleep. Nothing. Someone comments, ‘They’re hardly likely to stash it in their rooms. The loot’s been taken away, they came to the house just to do this, their job’s over now.’ The boys plead for mercy, they protest their innocence, they wail like little children, but to no avail — they are beaten, then hauled away to jail. Their very profession has incriminated them. If they haven’t done it, who has? There is much tearing of hair over the question of how they got hold of the keys to Purnima’s almirah. Could she have left it open by mistake? Could she have mislaid the keys? She cannot remember.

Chhaya says, ‘Just because someone has been in the family for ten years doesn’t mean that they are honest or above temptation. Maybe it was part of the plan to stay so long, to lull us into a false sense of security and trust.’ Everyone understands to whom she is referring. Malati is questioned; she and her room, which she shares with Kamala, are searched. Neither of them is very happy about it. Kamala, a placid, slow woman, goes about her business with furrowed brow, a sour frown on her face. Malati, more volatile, can be heard complaining loudly to an invisible adjudicator while going about her duties: ‘Ten years I’ve worked here, ten years. In all that time I haven’t helped myself to a single glass of water without asking. And now this. Because we are poor people, we are all thieves? We have no honour? No dignity? Being searched like this, as if we have stolen. . chhee! Chhee!’ Then, louder, as she wields that old, reliable filleting knife, the second-person singular, which is actually an unnamed third person: ‘It’s clear who is pulling all the strings. This is what happens when you do not have any happiness in your life; you try and stick your nose in other people’s business to bring them down to your level of unhappiness. Book-learning is no substitute for honour. We may not be lettered but we’re not in the habit of putting a stick in others’ arses.’ Every one of the Ghoshes pretends not to hear her, but the wrung, dyspeptic look on their faces betrays the strain of this performance. Sandhya, for instance, feels that familiar boiling of anxiety, for it is she who will have to do the smoothing and mending afterwards. Besides, over the last week, Supratik has been staying out a lot, leaving home in the morning and returning after everyone has gone to bed. She has a vertiginous sense of déjà vu, a premonition manufactured out of the memories of the recent past; she would not be able to survive his vanishing again.