Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

But that is not Chhaya’s business. She has evidence of something rather more urgent right under her nose, in the form of that mocking tangail sari. If Priyo can buy his wife four saris — at least four saris — and his daughter ten outfits, then giving her one sari is like a slap to her face. She feels the familiar pressure in her chest, the pressure of dammed-up water pushing against the sides that contain it. Her throat closes up, she lets herself go and prepares for a great deluge. But after several minutes of coaxing and trying, her eyes remain uncompliantly dry, which maddens her even further. She sits on her hands to prevent herself from tearing into strips of ribbons the poisoned tangail sari given by her brother.

Even Madan-da and Gagan and the other servants have got one article of clothing from her brother for puja. Has she now been demoted to their level? Is this the lot of the unmarried sister who has overstayed her welcome at her parents’ house? Has she become unwanted because they have not been able to marry her off? This time the tears oblige, although only for a short while: it is a momentary light drizzle rather than a downpour and, instead of feeling relieved, something coils and loops and knots and reknots inside her.

In the time she would come to remember as her two years of blazing brightly, Chhaya had received, on average, one marriage proposal a month. Much later, after the steady parade of suitors had fallen from ten a year to eight, then to four, and finally to one every two or three years, as the clock had ticked on and time had raced and rushed, it was openly said that being a graduate, having a BA degree, had harmed Chhaya’s chances of finding a husband. She did not know if it was in defiant retaliation or for consolation that she embarked on an MA after the flow of suitors had thinned to a trickle with all the volume of a newborn’s piss. Priyo had announced that he would not marry until someone was found for his sister first. That resolve, it transpired, had clearly not been set in stone, although, to be fair to him, he got married only when Chhaya had reached the age beyond which the issue became irreversible. Next, it was the turn of her younger brother, Bhola, to make a similarly rash promise. He had reneged the year his sister hit the point of no return: thirty.

It had all started off with not insufficient promise. Chhaya was the only daughter of the wealthy Ghosh family, so the dowry and attendant gifts such as jewellery, consumer durables, kitchenware and clothes would have been very attractive; she was reading for a degree (at the initial stages this had been a positive thing, something to be proud, even boastful, of); she had ‘Spoken English’. More importantly, she had the right sun-sign with the right planets in alignment — Pisces with Venus ascendant in the fifth house of Jupiter — to make an auspicious bride.

But the dizzying, whirling, magical roulette of matches, so rich and teasing with possibilities, had proved to be a slippery wheel. The laws of probability, while seeming so amenable to providing not one but a whole suite of matches, seemed disobliging when it came to achieving that one crucial hit of success and had somehow always tricked and wrong-footed her so that she remained outside the circle of the favoured. Some element in the whole set of required or desirable qualities had either not been satisfied or had been lacking. If the family of one prospective groom approved of everything and the marriage deal seemed almost closed, suddenly the question ‘And do you cook?’, or the demand that she would be forbidden to work once she was married, would have the effect of a ghost entering the room, chilling everyone to silence, ushering in the instant end of that particular match.

On a couple of occasions some incongruence during the matching of Chhaya’s horoscope with the suitor’s, discovered at quite an advanced stage of the matchmaking process, had finished off things. Charubala had raged, ‘Why did they not bother to find out earlier? Why did they get our hopes up, leading us on this merry dance? Low people, I say, low, common people! Good thing that our daughter didn’t go to the home of such lowlives.’

In moments of tremulous, private introspection a shadow of an admission flitted through her mind that it was not such a good thing after all, that on the balance of things it was better to have a daughter married than to carp about such hair-splitting on the part of the suitors’ families. It also struck her that circumstances had so tumbled over to their opposite that they were now the party with the suit, they were the real and true suitors, not the steadily diminishing stream of men who came to see Chhaya.

The family was forced to set their sights lower once they realised that the high noon of matchmaking had inexorably passed. First, they relaxed the category of the groom’s profession. In the beginning, nothing but doctors and engineers would do, particularly with the parenthetical word ‘London’ or ‘Edinburgh’ after FRCS or MSc, but a while later that ‘London’ or ‘Edinburgh’ clause was silently dropped. Then they relinquished their hold on FRCS and MSc; an ordinary MBBS or BSc would suffice. Soon, those requirements too fell away as the search was broadened (diluted, some said) to other professions — lawyers, lecturers, businessmen. From here, it climbed down further to white-collar worker, bank-teller, government employee, school teacher, even, at the final, desperate stages, clerk.

When even this didn’t produce a husband for Chhaya, other variables were tinkered with and revised. The dowry money climbed up by a factor of 1.5 with every rejection; to a refrigerator and cooking range were added a gramophone, a flat in Purna Das Road. Then the age of the candidates was relaxed — it had to be, Chhaya was not getting any younger — followed by an attendant loosening of criteria in the looks department. The words ‘fair’, ‘young’, ‘handsome’ were all deleted from the matrimonial ads in the newspapers. Ads put exclusively in the matrimonial columns of the English dailies — The Statesman, Amrita Bazar Patrika — started migrating furtively to the Bengali broadsheets, Ananda Bazar Patrika , even Jugantar . Charubala had a new set of portrait photographs taken of her daughter by Robin-da, the neighbourhood’s professional photographer. It emerged during these sessions that her face had looked too polygonal in the previous pictures, her chin and jaws too prominent, her forehead too broad. Quantities of make-up and snow and powder were applied so that the fact of her dark complexion would not be revealed to the groom’s family, at least not right at the beginning. The lighting was ramped up, cruel suns were shone on Chhaya’s face and she was made to look very slightly away from the lens, as if something was just beginning to catch her attention outside the frame, so that the camera would not be able to capture the fact that she was cross-eyed.

Herein lay the rub. Chhaya had been born preternaturally dark and with a squint that was not immediately noticeable — it depended on the light and the angle of her head and how obliquely she turned her gaze on something — but once it was detected it was impossible to unknow it. All those crucial final questions, such as ‘And do you cook?’ or ‘Will you stop working once you get married?’, were really an occluded reaction to that detection; an irreversible decision had already been made.

Her very name, which meant ‘shadow’, was a backhanded acknowledgement by her parents of the undeniable and omnipresent fact of her complexion. Through her girlhood and adolescence the less well-behaved girls in her school and the less decorous people of Basanta Bose Road had called her by several derogatory names, Kali, Kelti , all to do with her skin colour. Never to her face, of course, but they also did not make a great secret of it; a stage-whisper, a catcall, an overheard remark as she passed the loafers gathered outside Bhawanipur Tutorial Home: all these brought home to her, relentlessly, the inescapability of her skin colour. Stringent regimes of applying to her face ground red lentils, the cream top of whole milk, and dried orange peel made into a paste with cream had not wrought any change. The patented and unpatented whitening creams and lotions available in the shops had proved equally deceitful. Throughout all this, Charubala consoled and encouraged and empathised, holding out dark-skinned women who had made it in public life as role models, trying to overturn familiar habits of thought by making her daughter aware of some of the positive associations with negrescence — ‘Have you seen a cloud that is not dark? It is because of dark rain clouds that life thrives on earth’, or ‘The kaajol that women wear around their eyes is always black, never white’, or rhyming kaalo , black, with aalo , light.