Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

He saw his father trying to catch fireflies for the four-year-old Som and the initial, momentary enchantment, during which he even toyed with the idea of running out to pick up the little boy and get him closer to those magical, flickering points of living light, suddenly become soiled by that familiar cloud of queasiness. He watched the whole family caught up in a huge song-and-dance to feed his little brother (a fussy eater) — Madan-da distracting Som by pointing out pigeons in the attic of the house next door and singing ‘Come, come, o long-tailed bird’, Chhaya shaking rattles and belled anklets and doing peek-a-boo with a shiny scarf, their mother making little patties of Som’s food and planting tiny florets of cauliflower on top, in an effort to convince him that they were little wooded hills and wasn’t he a brave giant to swallow them one by one — and Adi felt a cindery taste on his tongue that was nothing but pity and a hooded distaste for his mother. But not for a moment did these unaccommodated intrusions impinge on his relations with the child, for whom he was bound by the bonds of family to feel the protective love of a much older brother.

When Bhola had his plum position as the family’s youngest child usurped by Somnath, he was only seven years old. In one of those wholesome surprises that a family can occasionally throw up, Bhola, instead of grudging Som the privilege that had been his for so long, took his baby brother to his heart. He stared and stared, in the beginning, at this tiny, warm, quick thing, no bigger than a large toy, then took to devouring him with his eyes when he was asleep; when he was blinking and awake, bringing up liquid ropes of curdled milk from the corner of his mouth; when he was wailing with all the might of his tiny lungs; when he was gurgling at nothing at all, engaged in some frolic of his own, unknowable mind. Bhola watched the baby being rubbed with Nardelli olive oil and washed in a shallow plastic basin of warm water. He took to propping him up and chattering to him while his mother poured small mugfuls of water over the boy’s hairless head. He loved watching the baby gasp for breath as the water streamed down his face. He watched his mother put kaajol, from a tiny tin, with her little finger under his eyes in a fat curve. ‘Makes the eyes brighter,’ she would say. Then she put a big, fat circle of kaajol on his forehead or, sometimes, awry, almost on his temple, to one side. ‘To ward off the evil eye,’ she said. Then she mimicked biting his nails, followed by a mimicking of spitting on him. ‘Thhoo, thhoo,’ she said. Bhola watched, transfixed.

‘Did you do that to me when I was his age?’ he asked his mother.

‘To all of you,’ she replied.

‘Why?’

‘So that no one gives him the evil eye.’

‘But why would they do that?’

‘Because he’s looking lovely.’

‘Did I look lovely too?’

‘Yes, you did. Now run off, I have a hundred and one things to do, I can’t spend all day chatting to you.’

Then Bhola innocently asked the question that had the effect of a blow to her chest.

‘Did Didi look lovely too?’

This was the first time Charubala was brought face-to-face with the nature of the way the outside world saw her daughter. If Bhola could ask such a question, did that mean that others had similar, or even more merciless, thoughts going through their heads? Or was it her own guilt, the unnatural cruelty and small-mindedness of a mother thinking that her own daughter was ugly, that this child had read and reflected back at her? Could he have asked the question in all innocence, without the injurious implication she saw lurking behind it? Before she could decide, the answer tumbled out and, along with it, her refusal to engage any longer.

‘Yes, she did. Lovelier than all of you. Now, don’t you have anything to do? You’re keeping him from falling asleep, jabbering away non-stop. Go, go!’ she said, practically shooing him away.

Minutes after he left, she felt a cloudy sense of melancholy at having compared all of them unfavourably to Chhaya; the overcompensation was neither going to transform the truth nor make Bhola feel better. If only two lies could add up to one truth, she sighed to herself and concentrated on feeding the baby. Her milk flooded through the clamping gums of the infant at her breast. She decided to send Madan out for those reddish-black hot-and-sour boiled sweets Chhaya loved so much. And let her eat the dried raw mango with black salt that she wanted all the time.

It was around this time that Bhola developed a habit that was, in a more modified form, to mark him for life. It began with him baby-talking to Som — idle, nonsensical chatter, strings of pure sounds that were only a simulacrum of words, opaque, meaningless, not just a distortion of adult speech through the glass of the perceived aural understanding of a baby with one or two nonce-words thrown in. It seemed to be an entire vocabulary, giving the impression at once of being spun out on the hoof and of being a fully limned and realised world, which Bhola had had inside him all the time and had been waiting for another creature from that undiscovered planet to appear and spark him off into communication. A sea of private language, with intoned waves riding up and down, the surface a mesh of movements and agitation of inflection, song-like points of expressiveness, of ascendants and descendants, walls of thick-stacked sound-cascades in motion. It was like hearing any language, of which you did not understand a single word, being spoken. It gave the hearer the feeling of listening to pure abstraction, like music, except that this language had no meaning under the surface of its words; it was pure abstraction of a kind.

Bhola returned from school, the local Mitra Institution, in the afternoons and rushed to his little brother the instant he was through the door. Som gave a smile of room-filling radiance when he saw Bhola and they launched into their world of nebulous music, now lit up here and there by an occasional word or phrase of Bengali. It was a wonder to watch: the toddler wide-eyed, rapt — you could even imagine his ears, delicate as sea-shell, pricked to catch every note — while his elder brother set him in the middle of the torrent, cut off the rope tethering him to his life of meals and sleep and children’s rhymes and mollycoddling, and set him wildly adrift.

‘What you say, ashes and cinders, I cannot understand a word,’ Charubala complained; half-heartedly, because she was secretly pleased to have such a ready tool for calming the toddler. Instead of Madan, Bhola was now summoned to deal with the more refractory moods of the new child. And Bhola was so effective that Charubala’s initial wonderment at his powers gave way to an uneasy sense of being spooked.

‘What if he grows up speaking that nonsense-language?’ she asked one day.

‘I’m not teaching him anything. Anyway, I speak to him in Bengali too.’

But at the age of two years and seven months Somnath, to the anxiety of his parents, had not spoken a single word, not even basic things such as ‘Baba’, ‘Ma’, ‘Dada’. He stared and heard everything and the way his huge eyes took on the look of attentive stillness meant that he understood some things, if not all, but speak he could not or would not.

Charubala badgered Bhola. ‘Does he speak when you’re alone with him?’ she asked.

‘No, he only listens. And laughs.’

‘Do you expect me to believe this? That you spend so much time with the boy, eating the worms in his ears,’ she exclaimed in pique, ‘and he doesn’t even open his mouth?’

‘No, he doesn’t. I’m telling the truth.’

‘Lying again?’ she threatened.

Bhola, intimidated, said, ‘You can come and listen if you don’t believe me.’