Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

From outside came the frantic symphony of everyone going about their busy Sunday routines: the clatter-and-hiss from the kitchen downstairs; the chaotic bass of footsteps of people running up and down the stairs; music from the gramophone in his parents’ room; and, as the top line above all this, Charubala’s barrage of instructions and commands — ‘Madan, if you leave grinding it till late, no one will be able to eat poppy-seed fritters with their dal’; ‘Adi-i-i-i, have you had your bath?’; ‘Chhaya-a-a-a-a, are you still hogging the bathroom? Do you think no one else needs to use it?’ — while she thud-thudded around the first floor.

At the sound of her name Chhaya panicked, but only briefly because Priyo stepped forward and turned on the tap. The water ran; added to this sound was the one of water overflowing the rim of the bucket, splashing onto the floor, running and gurgling down the drain. More time passed, although neither could have guessed how much. This dent in the normal perception of things was nowhere more apparent than in the continuation of the trance-like state brother and sister found themselves in, even when their mother came to the bathroom door and hollered, ‘Chhaya, I can hear running water, there are five others in the house needing a bath, if you finish all the water the pump will have to be turned on again.’ Once again, the arc of private, silent language welded Priyo and Chhaya together as she replied from inside, raising her voice, ‘Ma-a-a-a, forgotten to get my chemise, will you fetch one for me? The yellow, floral one. It’s on the clothes-horse.’ From outside, an irritated response from Charubala, ‘Ufff, unbearable all this running around, serving. .’, receding further. Stillness for the measure of one-two-three beats. Then, in a movement that could be missed in a blink, Priyo opened the bathroom door and slipped out and Chhaya locked it again. Madan-da and the servants were in the kitchen downstairs. From Baba and Ma’s room came the raspy wailing of the Atulprasadi song Baba was listening to on the gramophone: ‘Fill me right up to the brim, fill up my life’.

The incident was never repeated.

Somnath was nearly four at the time. Born seven years after Bhola, he had, at first, seemed like an afterthought, added distractedly after the main story. But the coda became more important than what preceded it. The deeper, more recessed locks of the dams of affection were opened for the baby in the family; he was everyone’s golden moon , the iris of their eyes , the radiant prince . Where Madan and the other servants had entertained the children with cautionary tales and stories that sent a tiny current of fear through them — stories of snakes biting children, children falling off trees or drowning in ponds, children tumbling to their deaths while flying kites from terraces without raised boundary walls, children tailed by evil spirits or possessed by malicious devils — for Somnath only the loveliness was ever distilled. There were stories of beautiful princes on their beautiful white, winged steeds; the prince always bore the name ‘Somnath’.

With his head of glorious loose curls, his fair skin, his chubby cheeks that dimpled when he smiled, his huge brown eyes, the term ‘prince’ seemed to be something he had a natural right to. Even Charubala, whose closeness and partiality to her firstborn, Adi, had by then ceased to be an open secret and become more of a much-narrated family story, even she felt the beginning of a new season in her. He could only be a blessing. Her husband’s business moved up several gears after the birth of Somnath; he was clearly an auspicious child. Prafullanath, who did not bother himself with the bringing up of children, considering it wholly women’s domain, Prafullanath, who did not go in for displays of fatherly affection or demonstrations of love or the occasional playing with his children, singing to them, telling them stories, whose onward narrative of life was not temporarily slowed by the parenthetical presence of the silly, playful, giddy expressions of love between parent and baby, even buttoned-up, costive Prafulla had his head turned by his new son. Like a bad comedian, who elicits laughter of derision and not the laughter resulting from successful comedy, the noviciate Prafullanath hit the wrong notes when he tried to do the traditional things with his baby. While throwing Som up in the air and catching him, an act that had the boy almost choking with delight, Prafullanath’s mouth became a rictus of tension, his face a pinched, nervous mask, as if he knew he was performing badly at an audition for the role of easy, happy father. His songs were strained, off-key and tuneless, his recitation of children’s rhymes strangulated, his dandling of the toddler on his knees stiff and regimented, the silly nothings and baby talk embarrassed. He appeared to be a marionette playing the role of father in a puppet play. The awkward matter of his heart would not animate his limbs and eyes, and yet that unaccustomed heart swelled with love and a kind of seduction, of bewitchment. This was a child, he knew, to whom he could not say no, one who would escape the strictures of discipline, of the tiniest of harsh words or irritated looks; an angel cannot offend.

This behaviour stood in marked contrast to his attitude towards his other four children. Always a stern and distant yet dutiful father, Prafullanath, because of his private history, would have been opposed to a notion of fatherhood that could consist, as well, of intimacy with children, of becoming a child with them, yet he would have been surprised if he had been told that he was not a loving parent. Mollycoddling was the mother’s duty; the father’s lay elsewhere. As a consequence, his four older children feared and respected him, as they had been taught to do, and the love they professed to feel, had they been asked and had they answered truthfully or even had access to that truth, was of a duty-bound, obligatory kind too, a love issuing from commandment and tradition and the notion of family, not one from the tides of the heart or the unbridled, inexplicable pull of feelings. If painted, that love would take the form of a polite and manicured wash of pleasant colours, not the hurl-and-splatter of impastoed reds. But having been the victim of the unintended consequences of his own father’s love for him, Prafullanath had been unconsciously moulded by forces in a way that had resulted in him becoming a fair if unpassionate father, or at least one who was undemonstrative with his fatherly feelings. Probably some deep instinct for protecting one’s offspring from internecine relations, from being exposed to the depredations of rivalry, as he himself had been, dictated to him that cast of personality. Yet with Somnath, the workings of this instinct slid into his blind spot; just as he did not know that he was not an expressively affectionate father with his four older children, he also did not realise he had become exactly that with his youngest.

When Adinath was born, Prafullanath had been cheered that his first child was a son because he could hand over, in time, the reins of the small paper business he had built from scratch and close his eyes in peace. That is what a son was for. Accordingly, the special place that Adi held in his father’s regard was almost exclusively connected to his future role as helmsman. But by the time Adi turned one, Prafullanath’s ambitions had swelled; he wanted his son to start a construction business, while he would consolidate the paper one, which could provide Adi with the start-up capital necessary for his scheme. He and his son, or sons, could run at least two, if not several, business empires together, not be confined by having to pass the baton of one trade down the line, as his grandfather, his father, his half-brother — and he too, had he not decided to disrupt the relay — had done to such baneful effect. Once again, an instinct, which had germinated in the turbulent soil of his past, led him to insure himself and his sons against any such possibility resulting from following a monadic trade; thus, the branching out. The idea of several different pieces joining up to form a pied world appealed to him. He had experienced the opposite paradigm, of one family business growing and becoming bloated and sick down the generations, leaking its toxins to those who inherited it, and he did not want that for his sons.