Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

I couldn’t see his eyes in the dark, but I could certainly hear the big, teasing smile in his voice.

I said — But that particular song is such rubbish! It’s supposed to be about a full-moon night and he brings in blue skies and flying birds. . which just goes to show that the quintessential Bengali soul is both confused and inconsistent.

And I almost forgot to tell you one big reason why we were in this corner of West Bengal: this was the hamlet where Nitai Das killed his family — his wife, his son, his two daughters — and then swallowed poison last year in May.

NOT ALL FAMILY bonds are equal. The lie so assiduously propagated by mothers — ‘How can you ask who is my favourite? They are all my children, I love all of them equally. Are you partial to one finger of your hand over another?’ — is disbelieved by everyone, yet it is quite astonishing what pervasive currency it has in the outward show of lives. Everyone is hectically denying the existence of favourites, of special affections and allegiances and alliances within a large group of siblings, or between parents and children, while, just under the surface, the empty drama of equality is torqued to its very opposite by the forces of conflicting emotions and affinities.

The Ghosh family unwittingly followed this paradigm with slavishness. The existence of four brothers and one sister, with a gap of twelve years separating the oldest from the youngest, meant that the siblings, with the exception of Somnath, were close in age. Priyo and Chhaya were born almost back-to-back, within a year of each other. If a reason had to be found for their extreme closeness, this could do for the moment. It was said that the first word Chhaya uttered was ‘Dada’, even before ‘Ma’ or ‘Baba’; no one really cared that this was not a very robust proof, especially since, defying the laws of appellation in a Bengali family, Chhaya called Priyo by his first name and reserved ‘Dada’ for Adinath.

As children, they had formed one unit, slightly separate from the other two. In any game, Priyo and Chhaya could be relied upon to gang up with each other against Adi and Bhola. They helped each other cheat in hide-and-seek even if they were on opposite sides: Chhaya gave away the hiding places of Adi and Bhola if Priyo was doing the seeking, and Priyo kicked up a fuss if Chhaya was made the seeker, wanting to join her instead of hiding with his brothers. In a game of ‘Blind fly buzz-buzz’, Priyo left subtle clues for the blindfolded Chhaya to locate the others. The real game for them was the inset one, the one of how not to make their collusion transparent, rather than what they came to consider as the framing game; in that, they had little or no interest. It was the embedded core of duplicity and coalition that got them going. The effect of this was the inevitable withering away of the assumed game to a boring charade, and it took Adi and Bhola years to understand why all the games they played between the four of them turned out to be so wet, so unexciting, when those identical ones with their other friends retained their element of fun and spark. They shouted, ‘Cheating! Cheating!’ at their middle siblings, because they instinctively understood that some vital element was missing, but could not put their fingers on what exactly was undermining everything.

Before long, Priyo and Chhaya were left to their own devices, which was what they had desired all along. They designed games no one else could understand. Even their mother started to comment, ‘You are like twins, you think each other’s thoughts and say each other’s words.’ They sat next to each other in the back seat of the car, or on a train or bus. Other members of the family took to leaving a seat beside Chhaya vacant, for they knew it was marked for Priyo.

At an enthusiastically planned function on a summer evening on the terrace of 22/6, a sort of informal private variety show, with the children and other members of the family and friends from the neighbourhood acting in skits, singing, miming, and a clothes line with two or three huge bedcovers serving as the curtain separating the ‘stage’ from the audience, six-year-old Priyo sang, ‘There’s a game of hide-and-seek between the sun and the shade in the paddy fields today / Who has set afloat boats of white clouds in the blue sea of the sky?’, while Chhaya danced across the concrete, gracefully miming the words: here covering her little face with her tiny hands and uncovering it again, there joining her hands to form a boat and lifting them up above her head, fluttering her child’s fingers to indicate the expanse of the sky. . She knew the song well: a music teacher, Shipra-di, had just been engaged to come to the house and give the little girl singing lessons, and this was the first Tagore song that she had been taught. The applause was deafening. In the audience, Charubala and Prafullanath beamed and looked triumphant.

For months afterwards, whenever anyone saw the boy and the girl, they went into raptures about the pair’s magical performance until it became a kind of local legend, sticking, with increasingly piteous glamour, to the lives of Priyo and Chhaya like the residue of a lingering illness. Even when they started going to college, elderly men and women of Basanta Bose Road, whose lives consisted only of chewing the cud of memory, reminded them of that performance, drawing from them strained smiles that never quite managed to reach their eyes.

Seven years after that memorable evening on the terrace, the connection between Chhaya and Priyo edged, more by chance than natural progression, into a different territory. At that time, Charubala and Prafullanath occupied the first floor with their daughter and youngest son, while the three older boys lived on the second floor. At around noon one Sunday, Charubala was harrying all her children to have a bath and get ready to sit down for lunch. Priyo, discovering that the bar of soap in the bathroom upstairs had been worn down to a tiny nub, ran to fetch a fresh one from a bathroom downstairs. The door was closed, as always, but not locked, so he pushed it and rushed in.

The rest happened in increasingly suspended time, moving from fast to very, very slow as if the events had been rolled into a small ball and shot with force through a tube of viscous liquid. Chhaya was squatting on the latrine built into the floor, letting out a large, dark cheroot of turd. Before the shriek from Chhaya’s horrified open mouth could become sound, Priyo raised his index finger to his lips and, in one seamless movement, reached back his hand to slip the shutter into its catch and lock the door. There was a quiet, calm majesty in his gestures, as if he had rehearsed this episode numberless times in the recent past, that settled Chhaya. Priyo leaned back against the wall, silent, watching with a devouring intent. As the convergent point of that gaze, Chhaya became a pliant puppet, almost with no will of her own, carrying on her unspeakably private hygiene activities as if she were all alone. The silence in the bathroom, punctuated by the drip-drip-drip of the tap onto the water’s surface in the full bucket under it, conducted Priyo’s supplication, and Chhaya’s instant granting of it, in a way that would only have been ruined by language.

Priyo watched Chhaya sluice her arse, pour four big mugs of water down the latrine to flush the shit away, then wash her hands with soap. There was no trace of shame or inhibition in her, just the abiding fluidity of something routine done without thought. Very oddly, the threshing that had taken over Priyo’s insides served only to calm and slow him down. He watched his sister, oblivious to any potential discovery, oblivious to any sense of wrongdoing, of shame, a statue of solid desire.