Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

An inventory is made of all the missing items. It is doubtful how stable Purnima’s accounts are, but it turns out that not all her jewellery is gone; the safety-deposit locker at the bank had not been totally cleaned out; not all the ornaments had been brought home. Once again Purnima is torn between relief that at least some of her treasure still survives and a sense of bathos that this puncturing of the story of being robbed of everything brings about. The inventory keeps changing until the officer in charge of drawing up the FIR, the First Information Report, his patience frayed, barks, ‘Listen, Mrs, you have either lost one choker or you haven’t, there’s no “maybe” or “I think” about it. If you can’t be accurate about this, it becomes that much more difficult to find them.’

Purnima has to collect her thoughts, concentrate and collate her holdings with their different storage spaces, and then work out which ones she gave away to Baishakhi. Then she has to describe the missing jewellery, its weight and monetary value; the monumental project defeats her. As if this were not enough, word has reached her of some of the comments being made in unsympathetic quarters. ‘If you look hard enough, you’ll find that she has had the stuff removed herself so that replacements can be bought. A time-tested way of getting more, when the usual methods have run dry,’ her mother-in-law had apparently said. And Chhaya, ‘It’s just a ploy to get her hands on some money. She’s passed it on to the folks in her father’s house and she’s now crying “Thief! Thief!” to save face. And, of course, she needs to be the focus of attention again somehow, now that Boro-boüdi is back at the helm.’ Purnima can hear the perfect punctuation of the petulant sigh as a full stop after the words.

The police eventually undertake a search of the house. No one asks what good this is going to do, a week after the burglary; the question does not seem to occur to anyone. Seven constables turn the house upside down. Some rooms are spared, Prafullanath and Charubala’s, notably, out of deference to the elderly and invalid. Not every member of the family is accorded this special treatment: Supratik and Suranjan’s room, for example, is ransacked, every article of clothing from the cupboard and on the clothes horse unfolded, the two beds turned upside down, the books and papers in the room painstakingly scrutinised. Both brothers are out during this act of sanctioned and official vandalism. As storey after storey is turned over, some more than others, following an opaque and arcane logic that the Ghoshes are unable to read, everyone at home seems resigned to this undignified upheaval, but not without murmur. That old saw, ‘If a tiger touches you, you get off with eighteen sores, but if it’s the police, you’re lucky to escape with fifty-eight’, is repeated more than once. Even Sandhya is heard to grumble, ‘It’s not they who are going to put everything back in its place after they’re done. We’ll have to do it ourselves.’

Bhola dares to ask a constable, ‘What use is it to search the rooms of the family members? It’s not we who have stolen our things. It’s really inconvenient. .’

The constable replies, ‘We are doing our duty. If you do not like it, speak to Inspector Saha. We’ll lose our jobs if we don’t follow orders.’

Simultaneously with the searching, people are interrogated. The tone and style of the questioning are tailored to fit the subjects: threats and accusations for the servants, unctuous deference for the Ghoshes. In the middle of this bedlam, a ring is found and brought over to Purnima to establish if it is hers; a gold ring with a large ruby at its centre, the red gem surrounded by a circle of twelve tiny diamonds.

‘Yes! Yes!’ she cries, ‘It’s mine, mine. Oh god, I didn’t know that this had been taken too. My aunt gave it to me when I got married. Where did you find it?’

‘In Madan’s room,’ comes the answer.

Purnima looks as if someone has suddenly shifted the medium of conversation from Bengali to Finnish. First she stares with incomprehension and then, after a good few minutes, she shakes her head in disbelief. ‘No, no, this is a mistake’ — she can barely speak.

As if by an instant osmosis of thought, the news percolates down to every corner of the house almost as soon as the words are out of her mouth. The chorus of ‘No, this must be a mistake’ is shell-shocked, unanimous.

Charubala, supported by Sandhya, descends the staircase slowly, her voice raised in anger. ‘Who has alleged this?’ she asks. ‘Who, I want to know? Madan is one of ours. He has been at my children’s births, he has been with us longer than some of my children. I will not have these things said about him. Who has said this? Bring him to me.’

Charubala squares up to the constable who has discovered the ring and repeats her words in stronger terms.

‘The ring was found in his room,’ he says. ‘There must be an explanation for it. We will have to take him in for questioning, those are our orders.’

‘What questioning?’ Charubala retorts. ‘Question him in front of me. I don’t believe you found the ring in his room.’

Adinath says, ‘And you can’t take him away without a warrant. Bring one first.’

For the Ghoshes some fundamental law of Nature has been bent out of shape; they go about as if they are underwater, their thoughts and movements and reactions viscous and slow. Before they have collected their wits about them sufficiently to talk to Madan first, Madan comes into the room where most of the family is sitting, congregated in incredulity. He too looks puzzled, like someone lifted up and set in a new world; the wordless staring between the two parties ticks on and on until Charubala’s words, ‘Madan, what is all this going on? Where have you been? Have you heard?’, all in an elided stream of nearly one continuous word, break both the spell and something in Madan. He begins to answer; his mouth moves, but no words come out of it. Then the ordinary speech-movements of the mouth become somehow more elastic, the mouth contorts and, to everyone’s spellbound horror, this man of sixty, this old man who has brought up Charubala’s sons and daughter and her grandchildren on his lap and his back, presses his fists against his cheeks in an effort to stop his mouth twisting and begins to weep with the silent shamefulness of one not used to crying.

Instead of congealing the horror to embarrassment, Madan’s tears move all the women in the room — Charubala, Sandhya and Chhaya — to a similar point of release. Dabbing at her eyes with the end of her sari, Charubala finds it difficult to speak without giving in to the tide of emotion within her. It is Chhaya who breaks the silence.

‘Madan-da, what is going on, can you tell us?’ she asks.

Madan’s account, in a brittle delivery, is stitched through with sobs: ‘Ma, what can I say, what’s written on the forehead will come to pass. . Was this what was in store for me in my old age? I can’t show my face anywhere any more. . the shame, the shame!. . The police say I’ve stolen Mejo-boüdi’s jewellery. . You tell me, is this possible? Do you remember the time, Ma, when I found your diamond earrings in the bathroom, I brought them over to you straight away. . and that other time, when you couldn’t find your gold ring, who was it that found it hiding behind the gas-cylinder in the kitchen? And now they say I’m a thief, a thief. .’ He is like a plaintive child in the middle of a long protest, having just bruised himself against the essential, indurate unfairness of the world.

‘No, Madan-da, it is unbelievable that you are a thief,’ Sandhya is moved to intervene and console, ‘but we are at a loss to understand how it happened, we cannot believe our ears.’