Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

‘Kalyani, why don’t you give me a hand with folding the big things?’ she asks her daughter.

When all the folding is done, Purba starts putting the clothes away in the small wooden cupboard that houses practically all her earthly belongings. In it, tucked carefully under a bedsheet so that it does not stick out egregiously, is a flat parcel wrapped in paper and string. What is it? she thinks; how did it get here? She takes it out and, in her impatience to open it, knots up the string, so she lifts it up and holds it to her mouth to cut the string with her teeth. A piece of paper flutters to the floor. She picks it up and reads the austere note that does not give much away: Didn’t have enough money to buy you a puja sari, forgive me, but here’s something for Sona and Kalyani . She opens the package with trembling hands, barely able to swallow the growing lump in her throat. Inside it are a shirt and a pair of short trousers for Sona and a frock for Kalyani. She turns to face the cupboard, pushing her head inside, pretending to be busy sorting clothes, to hide her wet face from her daughter.

From seven o’clock on ashtami morning, the priest has been conducting half-hourly public prayer sessions at the pandal. The PA system, which has been rigged up for the loud dispersal of music day and night from the two ends of the road and from the pandal through the five days of puja (a mandatory practice, this), is used for the purpose of worship only on this day. Flocks of residents, all got up in the finest of their new clothes, go in family groups or with friends and neighbours to congregate in orderly rows inside the pandal, face the stage where the statues of the goddess and her children stand looking at them and, led by the priest’s chanting, repeat the Sanskrit slokas and throw tufts of flowers to the deities in worship. Those who cannot go, such as the infirm Prafullanath, sit on their balconies and hear the priest’s voice, intoning the verses, issue from the PA system and feel comforted and consoled.

Baishakhi goes with her parents to the pandal for anjali around noon. She sees Shobhon, an ardent worker in the Puja Committee, as busy as clockwork with some other young men, and looks through him. She has known that she will see him and, though she does not give the slightest indication of having done so, he knows that she has clocked him and she knows that he knows. As she stands at the bottom of the stage, between her parents, trying to gather her mind to the gravitas of communal worship, she notices that Shobhon has taken it upon himself to distribute the flowers for anjali to the people gathered for worship. The sudden thudding of her heart is raucous to her own ears: what is he doing ? She imagines every eye there in the pandal on them. She is certain Baba and Ma, flanking her closely, almost touching her sides, can feel the heat radiating off her. When Shobhon reaches them, she can barely bring herself to put her hand into the big basket of flowers to pick out a small handful of marigold petals. She imagines a spectral brush of his arm against her fingers as he moves on to her mother, and then to the next person and then the next along the row, perfectly composed, cool and unruffled, as if she were only just another familiar neighbourly face. Baishakhi keeps her head resolutely down. Her face is burning. Coursing through her heart and mind is a seam of a delicious mixture of outrage, fear and awe at Shobhon’s foolhardiness.

What is said about the darkest spot being directly under the light is nowhere more true than of the area behind the puja pandal: all that crammed symphony of festival lighting barely a few yards away does not have much effect on the dark here. Here the jutting ribs and carcass of the pandal have not received the care of being covered up with yards of coloured cloth; here you have the feeling of being in the wings of the makeshift stage of a travelling theatre company in the provinces, all bamboo, old tarpaulin, discarded nails, coiled snakes of rough ropes, damp earth, patchy clumps of tough, unruly grass. Here Baishakhi stands, on ashtami evening, quivering with fear that someone has spied her slipping into the shadows at the back of the pandal. If someone has noticed a young girl negotiating her way through the narrow gap on the side of the big tent, they would indeed have been alerted enough to ask themselves why she was heading for the back, the discarded side as it were: a tryst with someone perhaps?

Chhaya has lured Priyo into sitting with her on the balcony on the first floor — Let’s go and look at people from the verandah before we go out later in the evening, the crush of people will be terrible now, it’ll certainly ease — and from their vantage position they have an unimpeded view of the milling crowd, the pandal, the sea of faces and heads where the known mingle with the unknown. The PA system airs songs from the hit film An Evening in Paris . Chhaya chatters on, ‘Look, look, Rupa-boüdi is wearing a parrot-green silk-tangail. Gorgeous! Pity her face is so scarred by that terrible teenage acne. O ma, Pushpa-babu has come out too, he’s using his cane, someone’s helping him. Priyo, isn’t that Pushpa-babu? Not very considerate of them to have let the old, ill man out at this peak sightseeing hour.’

Priyo gets up and peers. ‘Yes, it is. His first time in years, no?’

‘First time since we heard he was not well. We should persuade Baba to go out too.’

Then the meandering aimlessness of all this ends as the grail swims into view. Chhaya tugs at Priyo’s sleeve and says in a voice pitched perfectly between surprise and uncertainty, ‘Priyo, look, isn’t that Buli? Why is she trying to go to the back of the pandal? Quick, quick, she’s about to disappear.’

Priyo asks, ‘Where? Where?’ before he manages to pick out the flash of an orange kurta, which, like a rare visitation from a species of butterfly assumed to be lost, disappears almost as soon as it has been spotted. ‘Couldn’t make out anything, it’s so dark. Are you sure?’

Chhaya, with measured casualness, then says, ‘Now look, isn’t that our next-door neighbour’s son, Shobhon, going there now?’

Priyo, suddenly alert, sharp, looks again, this time with more focused intent.

Yes, it is.

Baishakhi, after much coaxing, has laid her head on Shobhon’s chest. He has clinched the embrace with an apposite line from a new film, Aamne Samne , starring Shashi Kapoor and Sharmila Tagore. He holds her close to him, trying to move, as subtly, as imperceptibly as he can, from stroking her back to stroking her sides. All he wants to do is fondle her breasts, but he will have to be very, very slow and cunning. Baishakhi, beginning to feel as if she is free-falling towards a floor that isn’t there, has at last relinquished her nervous attention to all kinds of sounds that could announce an intruder.

A sudden crashing, like a miniature stampede, and rapidly advancing voices make them spring up, but, frozen by utter panic, they remain entangled when Baishakhi’s father and mother appear like vengeful, unappeasable gods.

To the background music of An Evening in Paris , distorted ever so slightly by the volume of its amplification, thrilled neighbours see a weeping Baishakhi being frogmarched home by her parents, both of whose faces are black and brimful with imminent thunder.

Severe weather rips through the Ghosh home and, when not inflicting damage, it sits brooding, umbrous, threatening, a pall over day-to-day activity. The frenzy first. Several rounds of immediate disciplining follow the discovery of Baishakhi: intense interrogation by her mother, physical punishment in the form of generous slapping during the questioning sessions, locking the girl in her room. All of these are accompanied by hysterically raised voices. Crueller measures follow. A lock is added to the door to the terrace. It remains shut day and night, and Purnima holds the only key to it. Baishakhi is forbidden to leave the house. When school reopens after the puja holidays, she is to be accompanied there and received at the gates after school is over and chaperoned back home. She cannot meet any of her friends unless they come to see her at home. These visiting friends are questioned fiercely by Purnima and asked if they are carrying letters or acting as go-betweens in any capacity. If she could, she would have frisked them. There is a clotted silence in the house, pulsating with reproach and judgement; Baishakhi feels she is being treated like a pariah, which indeed she is. All eyes are upon her, the elders’ dark with accusation that she has brought shame upon herself and the name of the Ghoshes; the children’s awed, embarrassed and a bit frightened, because they know she has done something terrible, but what exactly they have not been told. They are shielded from the whole truth in case it corrupts their morals. There is nothing new or unusual in all this; it runs along the well-ploughed furrows of middle-class Bengali life.