Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

‘How this apathy became the order of things,’ he completes her sentence. ‘Is that it?’

‘No, not that, not exactly. Things were somehow. . difficult to change.’

‘Difficult to change the darkness of superstitious rubbish willed on all of you by an old, tyrannical woman?’ he hisses.

‘Chhee, chhee!’ is her involuntary response. ‘She is your grandmother, how can you say such things about her?’

‘Which is worse in your opinion: obeying without question the blind superstitions of a hardly literate old woman or condemning three members of your family to shame and penury for ever? Which one?’ his voice rises.

Her voice trembles as she says softly, ‘I understand what you’re saying. But do you understand my position? How could I, as daughter-in-law, have challenged her rules? When you marry, you’ll understand that, you’re still too young.’

‘But you took over from her,’ he argues back. ‘In the beginning, perhaps, yes, she was the head, and she couldn’t be challenged and all that, but five, seven, ten years down the line?’

‘You won’t understand it,’ she repeats helplessly. ‘It’s not how things work. I tried. At least with those two children, Sona and Kalyani, I’ve tried to show them the same affection in which I hold all my nephews and nieces.’ Pause. ‘And my own sons.’ Her voice catches.

Here we go again, the old waterworks . His fury is still coursing through him. He says, ‘Yes, but, at the end of the day you came down on the side of the one who was powerful, against the powerless side. Everyone can anoint an already anointed head, don’t you know?’

Sandhya cannot check her tears any longer, but these are tears of frustration. ‘Stop giving me lessons!’ she cries out, restored for a few moments to the time when this son of hers was a child and she could rule and discipline him as a mother should her son. ‘Enough of this book-learned wisdom. If you are so full of kindness and sympathy for the powerless, why don’t you look closer to home, instead of running away and playing at dangerous politics with farmers and beggars?’

Her tears are unimpeded now. It transports Supratik from anger to shame in the space of no time and lands him with a bump: his mother is crying yet again and he has been responsible for it. And all she had wanted was a few minutes of his company, perhaps a show of some fondness; not much, just a little bit.

‘Someone who can’t look after his own cannot look after others,’ she announces indignantly. ‘Did you know that your brother is going to the dogs? He returns very late at night, sleeps until noon, hardly eats anything. He’s losing weight. He looks like a beggar on the streets. Do you notice? Do you care? Did you know that your father discovered him, drunk out of his senses, passed out on the bathroom floor?’

No, he didn’t know; he is surprised, but not at the facts, only at his overlooking of them.

‘When did this happen?’ he asks.

‘What good is knowing that going to do?’ Sandhya cries, seizing the sliver of opportunity that has opened up in taking the high moral ground. ‘What do you care? Did you bother keeping us informed about your whereabouts, whether you were dead or alive? If you can do that to your mother, you’re clearly made of stone, and no amount of information about these little things, like a younger brother losing his way or falling into bad company, is going to make you care.’ She knows she is squandering the capital that has come into her possession for such a tantalisingly small duration, but the accumulated force of culture is too mighty to resist.

Supratik wonders at the coincidence of three people at home, Purba, Madan-da, and his mother now, voicing identical thoughts to him in the course of as many months. Why did they all think alike? Typical bourgeois brainwashed homogeneity? How else could this unvarying calculus about the worth of one’s own kind measured against the lives of others have come about? Could he allow himself a few moments of entertainment considering the possible truth-value of that insane thinking? And here is his mother, parroting the same lies in the same, worn-to-dust mode of lachrymose blackmail, trying to rouse him to shoulder some kind of adult responsibility. What prevents her from asking directly, ‘Could you talk some sense into your brother? We think he’s straying’ or some such, rather than resorting unfailingly to these circuitous dramas, all womanly wiles and manipulative strategies?

He gets up to wash his hands, lashed with self-loathing.

Supratik, sitting on his bed, notes that Suranjan does not arise before noon and as soon as he wakes up he goes to the toilet for what seems a long time, so he lies in wait and catches his brother as soon as he comes out of the bathroom. The signs are all there, so how has he failed to read them? It’s not as if they are the uncials of a foreign script he is unable to understand and, therefore, is excused from deciphering any meaning out of them; the acrid blast out of the bathroom after Suranjan emerged from it is transparently readable. Could it have been a willed ignorance on his part? Or — and perhaps their mother was right in this all along — his indifference to those to whom he is attached by ties of blood? Or even his deep distraction, for Supratik has his sights set on the shiny moon of a new, ideal order, not on the soiled coin, which can be scrubbed to a gleam, lying at his feet?

He makes a stab at some sort of a beginning: ‘Don’t you have classes to go to?’

Suranjan does not reply, as if he has not heard, so Supratik repeats it.

‘Oh. . yes. . classes,’ Suranjan says so vaguely that all this talk of attending classes may be as alien and distant to him as manned interstellar travel. ‘Classes,’ he says again. ‘Hmmm. Well, there aren’t any until exams, it’s revision time.’

This is such a ridiculous lie — college exams in early September? — that Supratik feels pity for his brother.

‘Oh, I see,’ he says. ‘So why aren’t you revising then?’

‘I shall, I’ve only just woken up.’

‘Why are you waking up so late nowadays? Is everything all right? Are you ill?’ Supratik looks elsewhere while asking the questions; he cannot bear to look at those signs facing him, cannot bear to be right about their meanings. The diminishing weight, the sallow complexion, those coal-dark rings under the eyes which are devoid of any spark, that waiting lassitude. . No, unthinkable.

‘No, no, why should I be ill? Do I look ill?’

‘Yes, as a matter of fact, you do. You look as if you’re doing some kind of drugs.’

Suranjan freezes, then tries to give a cool, contemptuous, dismissive laugh, but he can get only a quarter of the way there, after which it comes unstuck and sounds like a written-down onomatopoeia of laughter, dead letters on a page.

‘What nonsense!’ he says hoarsely.

‘You think I’m so naïve that I won’t be able to identify the smell of charas drifting out of the bathroom? The room stinks.’

‘I smoked a cigarette in there.’ He tries another laugh, this time to make light of things. ‘Actually, without a cigarette in the morning nowadays — you know. . motions and cigarettes, really, impossible without them.’

Something about the lie piques Supratik. ‘I see. The burnt foils from cigarette packets lying around are also to aid you with your bowel movements? And the clutter of burnt matchsticks around the burnt foil? The puncture marks on your left arm? You think all of us move about with our faces to the grass? You can fool Ma and Baba, they have no idea of the poisons of our generation, but you thought you could fool me too?’

The waxy-yellow pallor of Suranjan’s face glistens with sweat. Supratik does not miss the shiver; so his brother is afraid. Afraid of what? Of being discovered doing drugs? Or afraid that Supratik will tell on him and have him punished? He cannot distinguish the two questions in his mind. All his life he has been blessed, or maybe cursed, with the ability to separate himself out of his own self, move away from any scene in which he is involved and watch himself acting out the moves, speaking the lines; the doubleness has conferred a rare lucidity on things. But the duality fails to kick in, where his brother is concerned.