Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

Much like the iron grilles on the Ghoshes’ front balconies, poxy with rust under the recent new coating of paint, the steady conviction that Madan is innocent begins to corrode under the acid that the Inspector’s words have sprinkled on it during his visit. Purnima, loyal primarily to her material possessions, is the first to be swayed. ‘The Inspector is right,’ she says to Priyo. ‘Who else could have taken it? Madan-da knows the ins and outs of everything, the routines of everyone. Only he could have burgled us with such ease and with no one being any the wiser.’

Priyo too teeters: ‘I’m finding it difficult to get my head around it.’

‘He’s been nursing a grudge. It’s that business with his son. I think he has been biding his time.’

‘A long time to bide. But I cannot think of anyone better placed than Madan to burgle us, you’re right. Still, I find it difficult to believe. He has been with us since before I was born. .’ Priyo’s words tail off. The worlds of reasonable doubt and dogged faith have never seemed more incommensurable.

Bhola consoles his mother with equally empty words. ‘Ma, what good is all this crying going to do? The Inspector can’t be lying. If he says Madan-da has stolen, then he must have reason to say so. We couldn’t counter any of his arguments.’

Charubala is heartsick. Memories play like clips from old films inside her head and she relays them weepily. ‘How can it be?’ she cries. ‘Do you know, when he and Adi had very high fever at the same time — Adi must have been around six or seven then — I put them on the same bed and stayed up all night, putting cold water compresses on their foreheads.’ What she wants to ask the world is whether that act did not fasten him to her and hers for life, but she cannot find the words, or perhaps the courage, actually to say this, because to embody it in words would be an acknowledgement of a sort of fissure between them that had been eternally present. She dwells on details that sieve through her soul, leaving behind both purified object and unwanted residue: Madan bringing her children gifts every time he came back after his annual visit to his home in the village in Orissa; Madan lying to protect the children from her anger when she knew they had been up to mischief; she and Adi making fun of Madan, affectionately, by asking him to sing Oriya songs, then cracking up at the outlandish language; Madan tripping over his reading from Shahaj Path in the early stages of his education at her hands. . How could those instances, so funny or ridiculous or endearing at the time, have been sifted to become only repositories of pain now?

Sandhya is no better than her mother-in-law. Things are at sixes and sevens without Madan-da’s cohering presence. She finds herself lacking the energy to be the girder around the house; it has had to do without her for two and a half years, it will no doubt survive the two days of looseness brought about by Madan-da’s arrest. Yet this very pragmatism is the result of inertia. So many details were taken care of by Madan-da that in less than twenty-four hours of his absence cracks are proliferating everywhere. Did she then do nothing worthwhile? Or was Madan-da the real energy behind the scenes and she only a titular supervisory figurehead? Thoughts along these lines are interrupted by the appearance in her room of Chhaya and Jayanti. Without saying anything, they need, it is clear to Sandhya, some principle of reassurance from her in the middle of this unravelling.

Even Chhaya has no appetite for this particular spectacle of someone else’s unhappiness. She says, ‘Who would have thought. .’ and stops. Previously those very words would have been the prelude to a ripe thrill of a conversation saturated with cheerful malevolence; now the words are only doleful.

Jayanti echoes her sentiment — ‘Yes, truly. .’ — and brings the aanchol of her sari to cover her mouth.

Sandhya, attempting to emulate the rationality of her elder son, says, ‘Wait, wait. Nothing has been proven against him yet. They still haven’t found the missing jewellery.’

Jayanti says, ‘But they took him to jail. Would they have done it if he was innocent? Then there was all that business with his son. . We didn’t know a word of that, did we?’

Sandhya cannot answer this; neither can Chhaya. There is a long pause marked by the same looseness, the same unbinding that has begun to rear its head everywhere. It manifests itself as a lack of energy in everything; this twilight gathering, with the darkness falling outside, is no exception. It is a testament to that dispersion of focus that no one gets up to turn on the lights, despite everyone’s firmly held belief, particularly Sandhya’s, that dark interiors at dusk drive out the goddess of wealth. Now if Madan-da had been around. .

Madan has become, overnight, a ghost in the midst of the living.

ONLY THREE MONTHS since the news about Sona has broken and already a different order is beginning to set in. Like the camouflaging of an insect, one saw the before and, with great effort, the after, but never the process in between. So how and when exactly, and in what degrees, the new dispensation arrived no one could tell, only the fact of its dawning and its presence afterwards. Purba, in turmoil, notices, but does not give it much thought. As for Sona, it is impossible to tell if he perceives at all in the first place, or if he senses and understands but will never bring himself to comment on it, or if he is simply above it all in the world of numbers.

But nothing escapes the fine sensor of Kalyani’s attunement to the unstable connections, forever careening, sometimes this way, sometimes that, between people. It is she who notices the increasing frequency with which food is sent down to them from upstairs, and although Madan-da’s recent departure has led to a lot of things beginning to fall to rust, this is one area that has, shockingly, improved. Then she notices that it is not stale food, on the cusp of turning, that is being sent to them, but freshly cooked marvels — any number of vegetable dishes, cabbage or bottle gourd with small shrimps, egg curries, yellow split peas with raisins and fried coconut, rui fish in yoghurt sauce, mince with peas and potatoes, mutton curries. . This is what heaven is in her imagination — delights being sent down from up above. They even take care, she regards, to send her mother’s vegetarian food separately from Kalyani’s and Sona’s non-vegetarian dishes to avoid contamination, but she does not move one step further from observing to pondering on the reasons for this sudden newly-found consideration for her mother.

Purnima comes one evening, bearing a box of classy sandesh from Ganguram.

‘Baishakhi’s had a son,’ Purnima says, giving the paper box to Purba, ‘so I’m distributing sweets.’

Purba smiles and receives it with her usual, ‘Oh, really, there was no need. .’

‘I’m giving it to everyone in the family, so why should you be excluded? You are family too,’ Purnima says. ‘Besides, you have your own reasons for eating sweets now, Purba, don’t you? All this wonderful news about our Sona. . who would have thought that a boy from this house was a hidden genius? Really, unthinkable for stupid people like us! Anyway, some goddess is sure to be smiling on you now, things are beginning to look up, good news is beginning to come in. .’ The tone for noting good tidings modulates to faint regret by the time she reaches the end of the sentence.

Purba only smiles wanly; it is left to Purnima to fill the silence.

‘Kalyani, why don’t you serve your mother some sandesh and help yourself to some, too?’

Kalyani runs out to fetch a small plate, picks out three pieces of sandesh and offers it to her mejo-jyethi first.