Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

Purnima cries out, half in jest, ‘Oh god, not three! If you give three, you make an enemy of the person you’re serving. Hasn’t your mother taught you this? Here, why don’t you take one? Go on.’

Kalyani catches her mother’s expression of peeved strickenness and demurs. Purnima blithely continues, ‘You have to learn these things now, now that you’re growing older. What will your in-laws say about us, if you make these mistakes? What kind of a home has this girl come from, they’ll say.’ She laughs at her own witticisms as she polishes off all three pieces of sandesh on her plate.

Bholanath comes downstairs one evening, all booming camaraderie and jollity. ‘Here now, where is the boy? Where is the genius who is going to brighten the name of the Ghoshes? Here you are, sitting in a dark corner, head buried in a thick book. No doubt thinking grand mathematical thoughts. But your stupid uncle will say this to you: you’ve got to look after your eyes. If you can’t see the numbers, what proofs can you do? Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! That was funny. What book is it? Oh, let’s see — An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers . Ufff, too much for my little brain, too much. And such strange symbols in it, can’t understand a thing. And such tiny print, Sona-baba, you’ll really ruin your eyes. Just the other day I was telling someone, “This nephew of mine, all of fourteen years old, he’s some kind of prodigy, an American university is trying to snatch him away from us, like one would something precious, such as a gold chain; this nephew, we’ve always known that he was going to do something very big one day, something that would make us all so proud, and this boy is being offered a full scholarship to go to university before he has finished school. A double-double promotion.” Can you beat that? A double-double promotion, ha-ha-ha-ha. See if your silly uncle has been right with his arithmetic, you are the maths brains, see if he has calculated correctly. One double promotion — Class Ten; second double promotion to Class Twelve; so you skip two years, Nine and Eleven. What? Am I right? See, your mathematical gift must owe something to the blood that flows through your veins. It’s the Ghoshes’ blood, after all.’

Arunima fails her final exams in arithmetic and has to repeat Class Six. Jayanti is aghast.

‘I had no inkling that you were struggling in these subjects,’ she chides, ‘otherwise I would have asked your father to find a private tutor for you. Why didn’t you tell us earlier? Why? Oh, the shame, the shame!’

Word gets out that Arunima has to repeat a year. It is Chhaya, as always, with her infallible talent for neatly isolating the afflicted nerve and aiming for it, who gives voice to the greater shame: ‘How strange that our recently discovered mathematics genius should be helping out other boys in the neighbourhood and not his own cousin. If he can go to Mala-di’s house and give mathematics tuition to her son, can he not do it out of charity for our Arunima? They are cousins, after all.’ Then she twists the knife — ‘Perhaps Mala-di gives him a little something? Jayanti, maybe you could ask Bhola to give Sona some money?’

Chhaya announces this, like all her calculatedly murderous comments, loudly and in public, as if addressing the air, for maximum dispersal. Even Supratik, who has long cultivated a stony indifference to dirty domestic politics, is jolted out of its armour enough to say directly to her, ‘Pishi, you’ll find that it was I who arranged, through Ma, to have Sona give maths lessons to Mala-mashi’s son in exchange for Sona receiving English lessons from their private tutor. Chhoto-kaki cannot afford private lessons for Sona, as you well know, and it would have been a great shame if that bright boy fell behind because of the one handicap of knowing no English.’ Behind his back he twists his right thumb as far as it will go without snapping, so that he can channel his anger into that small act of violence, leaving his voice and tone and delivery imperturbably steady.

‘Oh, you were behind it,’ Chhaya says, sounding disappointed, but she is not to be outdone. There is a final flick of the scorpion’s tail: ‘How charitable of you to have done that! All these inexplicable generosities — these are what make men noble. I’m slow on the uptake, so I’m still left behind, trying to figure out the reasons behind these selfless acts.’

Supratik’s insides turn to ice with fear.

A conversation between mother and son late at night; she has waited up for him and is fussing about while he eats his dinner, kept warm, around midnight. He has given up asking her not to do it; it’s futile; not a single note of the endless variations he has constructed of that wish of his has ever entered through her ears, let alone reached her brain. He knows that it is the only time she can seize to talk to him, to find out what he is thinking, what is going on in his life, and he grudges her that, although it is beginning to settle into a kind of edgy toleration. The sense of déjà vu in this repeated business of being confronted by her late at night over food has become, like a familiar and predictable scratch on a record over which the stylus keeps slipping, one of the more dependable things in his life at home.

‘Your father was saying. .’ she begins with trepidation.

When he does not respond, she continues hesitantly, ‘. . he was saying that. . that you have turned your face away from the. . the family business, and you are. . you are. . you are the eldest son of the family.’

Silence flowed between the chewing sounds, the occasional clink of a small bowl being set down, the sound of fingers on china plate.

‘Your aunt was saying,’ she says with the quick volubility of the nervous, ‘that you told her. . that you arranged for Sona’s tuition at Mala-di’s. I didn’t tell anyone anything, mind you. You made me promise at the time that I wouldn’t breathe a word about it to anyone and I didn’t.’

At last Supratik breaks his silence: ‘Yes, I had to divulge the whole business. You know Pishi, there’s toxin in the very breath that comes out of her. She was up to her usual stirring. If Chhoto-kaki had heard what she was insinuating, she would take out her humiliation on poor Sona.’ Pause. ‘Also. . also. . I didn’t want Chhoto-kaki to find out I was behind it, but it’s too late to undo that now.’

‘Yes, you know what your pishi’s like. .’ Sandhya says resignedly.

Supratik is suddenly touched by the bigness of his mother’s soul; it would have had been so easy, so convenient, for her to fall in with the general viciousness of the Bengali middle-class family, its compulsive drive towards contraction of the spirit, yet she had never strayed into it.

In an effort to be kind to her he says gently, ‘Besides. .’ He halts, not sure whether he should be saying this at all.

‘Besides what?’ she asks.

Oh, what the hell. . ‘Besides,’ he says, ‘I feel bad when I see them, Chhoto-kaki and her two children. They’re as much part of our family as Boro-kaka and Baishakhi and Mejo-kaki and Arunima, yet they live in a kind of exile, confined to one small room, existing on the charity of Baba and my uncles, the handouts you secretly engineered with Madan-da’ — he flinches inwardly when uttering the cook’s name and watches its refraction manifested in his mother’s face — ‘and the other servants to send down occasionally. What kind of a life must it be for them, have you ever thought?’ His voice hardens halfway through. Reciting the catalogue of their miseries has swiftly scorched with a June sun the sympathy for his mother that had been beginning to germinate.

Sandhya says, ‘I used to think about their tragedy a lot. I talked to your father in the beginning about it. But. . but I don’t know how how. .’