Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

In her head, she conflated several conversations she had had with Supratik, few and far between though they were, since he had joined college. With a mother’s intuition, she had noticed that he was changing, changing swiftly and radically, yet she could not tell in which direction or for what reasons.

‘You’ve become very quiet. Is everything all right?’ she had asked once. It was late at night; she had waited dinner for him, as always. Everyone else had eaten and gone to bed a long time ago. She broached the topic while serving him reheated rice.

‘Why should everything not be all right?’ he had countered.

‘Such silence nowadays. .’

‘Would you like it if I jabbered away non-stop like Boro-kaki?’

‘No, I’m not saying that. When you were young, you wouldn’t shut up. Tearing up and down the stairs: Ma, Ma, it’s Independence Day next week, I’m going to play the bugle and lead the Balak Sangha boys in a procession down the street, will you watch me from the verandah? Ma, Ma, you will sit in the front row on Sports Day in school, won’t you? Ma, Ma, look at all those lights on that house, is that a wedding? You must cover our house with fairy lights on my wedding . What a lot of talking!’

‘I’m not a child any more.’

‘To me, you’ll always be a child.’

‘Achchha, if I have nothing to say, should I still keep chattering? People will think I’ve gone mad.’

‘Is it true that you have nothing to say? Why? There’s so much you can tell me: what you do in college, who your friends are, where you spend your time with friends, where you stay out until so late. . My mother’s heart, it’ll always worry.’

‘Ah, so you don’t really want me to talk to you, you just want information of my whereabouts at any given time.’

‘Ufff, we can’t really cope with the twists and turns of your argumentative ways.’

A long pause.

‘Are you angry with me?’ he asked.

‘No, what’s there to be angry about? You’ll understand when you are a father yourself.’

Another pause.

‘Why do you wait up for me? I’ve asked you several times not to. And it’s not good for your health to have dinner with me so late.’

‘You don’t have to think about my health. If you’re so concerned, why don’t you return home at a more civilised hour?’

‘Ufff, I can’t really cope with the twists and turns of your argumentative ways,’ he rejoined, breaking into an unabashed grin.

Her heart swelled. She tried to accommodate it by changing the topic. ‘You’re eating like a sparrow nowadays. You’ve hardly touched your food.’

‘You give me so much. There are so many dishes.’

‘Where so many? One dal, one fry, one vegetable dish, a bit of fish, that’s it.’

‘And you don’t think that’s a lot?’

‘You’ve eaten like this all your life,’ she said, baffled.

‘Don’t you agree we eat too much?’

‘Who, you and I?’ she asked, still puzzled.

‘No, no, by “we” I mean all of us, everyone in our social and economic class. Don’t you think we have lots, that we could afford to lose a bit?’ The grin had disappeared and all its traces too. Those big eyes flamed with a different kind of light now.

‘I don’t understand what you say nowadays. We have always been like this, what’s wrong with our way of eating? Everyone eats like this.’

‘No, not everyone eats like this, Ma.’ The words were cold and heavy, like stones. ‘Gagan, Madan-da, Malati-di, the other people who work for us, do they eat like this?’

‘Tsk, but they are servants, they eat differently.’

‘Can you explain to me why the servants eat differently while they live in the same house?’ There was something else in his voice now, something cold and coiled.

‘This is the way it is. It has always been like this,’ she repeated, conscious now that she was failing to give him the right answer, the answer he was looking for. It was as if she had been forced to participate in an opaque game, the rules of which she didn’t know. The knowledge of her failure made her even more hesitant.

‘And what has always been must remain that way, must always be for evermore, right?’ Again, that edge of something like menace.

‘I. . I. . don’t understand what you’re saying.’ Pause. ‘I don’t understand you any more.’

‘No, you don’t.’ Delivered like three stabs. Then he had got up and left.

He had not spoken to her for weeks after that.

In the frenzied first two or three months after his disappearance, before she surrendered wholly to this lassitude, she and Supratik’s father, aided by Priyo and Bhola, had done everything within their power to trace him. They had talked to the police, who could not or would not help because he was technically not a missing person; he had pointedly left a goodbye note. Her father-in-law’s and Priyo’s contacts in the Congress Party and in the Calcutta Police had not yielded much. They had paid the police under the table to turn up information on Supratik’s whereabouts, even to locate, talk to and, if necessary, threaten his college friends who might have some knowledge. If anything had come of those lines of enquiry, Sandhya did not know or had not been told. She had got Gagan to drive her to Presidency College so that she could plead with the professors in the Economics Department to part with any news they might have, or anything he might have told them. She went there to find students who knew him, who were his friends — surely he must have had friends in the years above or below him — or even casual acquaintances who could throw her some scrap to sustain her diminishing life. Each time she returned home empty-handed.

Or not exactly empty-handed; the first impression she carried back with her was of dread. In the recent aftermath of the student unrest and the violence on the streets, there was a reluctance to give up information, however innocent, even to benign parties. No one knew the loyalties, affiliations or politics of anyone else: in such times it would have been foolish to open one’s mouth. Accordingly, the faculty in the Economics Department professed ignorance. Amidst the usual ‘There are so many who come and go every year, it is impossible to remember each and every student’ and ‘We teach them at this college. We do not become friends with them or gather their personal data’, there was one that astonished Sandhya: ‘He hardly ever attended classes. He failed his Part I exams and did not resit them.’

She stood outside classes, waiting for them to finish, and when the students streamed out, she randomly grabbed hold of some of them and asked about her son. Most of them did not seem to know Supratik and those who knew someone who might have known him redirected her. She went from pillar to post — someone could not be found, or had not come to college that particular day, or had already left — until, dizzy and weak, she returned home, swinging between hope and that familiar plummeting feeling. Day after day she went to his college, chased up elusive students, begged for names and addresses, until Supratik’s father found out and put a stop to it.

‘Have you gone out of your mind? What do you think you are doing? There are people already looking into this. Your weeping, pleading presence is only going to muddy matters,’ Adinath raged and reasoned. ‘Why don’t you believe me when I say that we’re doing everything, every little thing, to trace him? Isn’t he my son too?’

‘I am a mother,’ Sandhya argued. ‘How will you ever understand a mother’s heart?’

Before Adinath forbade her to do her own private digging in Presidency College, Sandhya had managed to piece together a nebulous story, but one potentially so sinister that she felt she had to pass on some of the burden to her husband.