Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

Suranjan hardly ever thinks about his brother and, when he does, it is not really as another, separate presence. Like the air he breathes in, his brother is only noticeable to him when he is absent. And now that he has disappeared — well, not really, but as good as, because no one knows where he sent those two postcards from; the postmarks said Ballygunge — Suranjan starts the train of a correlational algebra in his head, bringing into proximity the fact of the disappearance and the suspicion of his brother’s involvement in the student political activism. Dada was so preternaturally quiet and secretive, so unyielding with any kind of response or reaction, that no one ever knew what he was up to.

But buzzing hornets of questions swarm into Suranjan’s mind now. Not a day had gone by in the winter of ’66–’67 without the circulation of fevered news: ‘The Students’ Federation are lobbing bombs at the police’, ‘The Superintendent of the Hindu Hostel has been gheraoed for thirty-six hours’, ‘There are buses burning on College Street’, ‘The police have opened tear gas on the student protesters’. If Dada had had anything to do with these conflagrations, wouldn’t the distant heat from them at least have been felt by his family? No sooner have some suspicions begun to join up together, like links in a chain, than other countervailing arguments break them apart and separate them until, racked by this dance of tmeses, Suranjan’s algebra stands in ruins.

Something starts pressing against him, as if some invisible walls are inching closer, trapping him, truncating his vision: surely this is the cannabis user’s typical paranoia? Suranjan tries to brush off the feeling that he is in a narrow well, and concentrate instead on where he really is: sitting with his friends and getting high in a secluded corner of Presidency College. Patchy grass, weeds, straggling, spindly plants, a big tree, earth, a small pile of orange-red bricks, a big drain, the new canteen to his left, one wall of the gym behind his back. He tries to hold onto something more than this solidity outside him and settles invariably on the liberating knowledge of this evening’s promise: smack, in Bappa-da’s house on Ironside Road. His very first time. He has heard so much about brown sugar, all in excited, slightly frightened whispers as if the talk was about the forbidden fruit. Bappa-da has done it half a dozen times and has told him it is a necessary graduation if Suranjan wants to have the doors of his perception cleansed and see the world in a grain of sand. The ritual was apparently called ‘chasing’; yes, the pursuit of the vision that reconfigured everything in its real contours, that showed not things but the design behind things, unmediated meanings. This had been what Blake chased, and Aldous Huxley, and what Allen Ginsberg, the new poet Bappa-da has introduced him to, was after. He will be their acolyte and disciple.

The Ghosh and Datta families talk formally and agree on Baishakhi and Shobhon’s marriage to go ahead next year. Both Priyo and Purnima are dead set against the marriage before Baishakhi finishes high school. They want it to be deferred until she is twenty-one, until she has finished university and acquired a BA degree, it doesn’t matter in which subject. Of the many things that exercise them the most pressing is the necessity of her being a graduate. But the Dattas think five years to be an immoderately long period of engagement, so the compromise of 1969 is reached. The Ghoshes try to extract a promise from their prospective in-laws that Baishakhi will be sent to college, but they know they are defeated right at the beginning of their entreaty, not so much by what appears to them, rightly, it will turn out, to be empty and perfunctory assurances from the Dattas, as by their own daughter’s placid indifference to any such concerns. The home side lets them down.

Her thinning and now greying hair spread out in a pitiful swathe across the bank of stale pillows on which her head rests, Sandhya runs the indelible film of her son’s two postcards in her head. She had taken to her bed ever since Supratik left a year ago, only very occasionally leaving it to perform the bare minimum of tasks that would keep her from puncturing a vital divisive membrane and slipping from the world of humans to that of something less-than-human. Overnight she had dropped out of her life and become a spectre, giving up on all her duties and privileges as the eldest daughter-in-law at the helm of the family ship and letting it drift, keelless and rudderless; she didn’t care any more about anything. The images of the two postcards burn through her: six inches by four inches (yes, she had measured them with a ruler) of light-beige ordinariness, the imprint of the head of the Royal Bengal Tiger, along with the denomination, fifteen paisa, on the top right-hand corner, just above the ruled space for the address. . She knows every atom of those two postcards now.

She has stared at them so hard, willing them to release the imprisoned meanings from behind the cursive cage of the words, the real meanings that would communicate something special to her beyond what its surface said. She has handled them, stroked them, slept with them under her pillow, all with the wish to touch what he had touched, a kind of communion of distance, of air. And she had done it so often that even she was prepared to admit, had she been faced with such a requirement, that she had erased all traces of his touch from the postcards by now. There were times when she had wanted to ingest them, chew them into a bolus, swallow them and assimilate their essence into her blood. That would have been a way of holding on to his presence.

Two postcards in a year: that was all a firstborn owed his mother.

The first one, dated 19th April 1968 — it was her mother-in-law who had pointed out, over the weeks spent dissecting and anatomising it to its very elementary particles, that the date was the New Year — that first postcard, addressed to her, contained only five sentences:

Respected Ma, I am well, don’t worry about me. I hope all of you are too. The postal services where I am are a bit erratic and infrequent, so I’m getting someone to post it to you from Calcutta. I will be in touch again. Give everyone my love. Supratik.

It was his hand, confident, elegant, neat, there was no doubt about that; Sandhya would have been able to identify it as her son’s with her eyes shut. The second one, sent five months after the first, was even more parsimonious and ungiving:

Respected Ma, Hope all your news is well. I am in good health and spirit. Truly. Don’t worry about me. Again, this postcard is being mailed to you from Calcutta. My love to everyone, Supratik.

The arrival of the first one had created such a huge jag in expectation that for the ensuing month or two Sandhya had left her bed and taken up an almost immovable position in an armchair on the verandah in the daylight hours, willing the postman to arrive with another letter from her son. That hope had turned to ashes slowly and Sandhya had taken to her bed again. Over the year that Supratik had been absent, the harsh calculus of hope and despair, juggling with the usual variables of ‘Where is he?’, ‘What is he doing?’, ‘Is he still alive?’, ‘Who else knows of his whereabouts?’, always regressed to that one irreducible question, ‘Why?’, and came to a halt. Was her love not enough to keep him at home? Did nothing, no one, matter? How iron-hearted did one have to be to walk out on everything so suddenly, so quickly? And as easily as stepping out of stale clothes? How could she have given birth to someone like that? Who was he?

At times a different light fell on the boulder weighing down on her and it blazed into a burden of outrage: she wished she had cracked open his skull to read his brains, riced with the maggots of his secret thoughts, and prevented everything that followed. But that light, too, dimmed, and she was left with the weight of the darkness again.