Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

‘Fine, that’s what I shall do. But what if he sees me and decides not to speak?’

‘But he doesn’t speak anyway!’

Charubala was on a roll now. ‘I know what I’ll do. I’ll hide outside and you carry on as you do. If you tell him that I’m outside, I shall punish you severely.’

Charubala alerted Madan; no one was to go into the room and no one was to pass outside it for the duration of her spying. She heard Bhola constructing walls of sound with the ease and fluency of a wizard. They seemed to flow out of him and, once in the common world, they remained there, of their own magical accord. On their surface Bhola occasionally stuck a window or two of comprehensible Bengali words — ‘bird’ featured more than once, and she noted ‘monkey’ and ‘glow-worm’ — but those came as mild shocks to her, embedded as they were in such a huge, furled fabric of strangeness that the familiar became the exceptional, the odd. She could not bring herself to peep in case Som caught her watching, and all she had was this strange music to go on, but for the quarter of an hour that she listened with intense concentration she only heard Som let out a carillon of laughter twice. That was all.

The experiment failed.

Som was now taken by his father to a renowned paediatrician in Shyambazar. The doctor tested the child’s hearing, asked him to open his mouth, stick out his tongue, say ‘Aaaaa’ — Bhola was taken too, to make Som comply — and finally said to Prafullanath, ‘Nothing wrong with him. He’ll speak in time.’

‘But he is nearly three years old and he hasn’t said one word,’ Prafullanath said.

‘Have you ever come across an adult who doesn’t speak unless he is dumb? And the child isn’t a deaf-mute, I assure you. Take him away, he’ll start speaking soon.’

And he did. Shortly after the visit to the doctor, Som exploded into speech — ordinary, Bengali speech, halting, part-incomprehensible as a child’s speech usually is, but with not a single element of Bhola’s private language adulterating it. Charubala was relieved of a worry that was beginning to become burdensome.

She called Bhola aside and said, ‘You must not talk any more nonsense to Som. He’s learning how to speak, I don’t want you to hamper that.’

Bhola felt crushed. Did this mean his special claim on Som was over? Would he not be his little brother’s favourite person any longer? Something settled on him; he began to feel heavy.

‘But. . but he. . he seems to like it,’ Bhola said.

‘Never mind like. You listen to me. I don’t want to catch you speaking all that rubbish to him. Is that clear?’ she warned sternly.

He nodded his bowed head once. His eyes began to prick, but he was determined not to cry, at least not in front of his mother. He felt more baffled than sorrowful; why did Som abandon him so capriciously?

Madan-da slipped into the room. He came up to Bhola and whispered, ‘Ma’s scolded you?’

Bhola nodded. He was not going to be able to hold back the tears, definitely not if he had to speak.

‘Come with me to the kitchen, I have something for you,’ Madan-da said. ‘But you mustn’t tell anyone.’

Bhola couldn’t look up. What if Madan-da saw his tears?

‘Come on, quick. We don’t want to be seen, do we?’

The boy followed him to the kitchen. The betrayal was still smarting, but it felt somewhat less keen now that a promise of something — what could it be? — had been held out to him.

In the kitchen Madan-da stood him in a corner and said, ‘Close your eyes. Hold out your palms in a scoop. And no cheating, no opening your eyes while my back is turned.’

Bhola, eyes squeezed shut into tight crinkles, shook his head vigorously. Suddenly, in the bowl of his hands, the touch of cool, solid things. He opened his eyes. It took him a couple of seconds to work out what they were: aniseed lozenges and sour-hot-sweet boiled sweets. His face shone with joy.

And then, unknown even to himself, something in the substance of his chatter with Somnath, so irksome to his mother, changed. His opaque communication with Som started filling up with light, becoming translucent with meaning: he started spinning new worlds in Bengali.

It happened like this. On a bright, rain-washed afternoon in October, Bhola stood on the three steps to the garden and watched Som, who had somehow managed to escape Madan-da or Uma-di’s supervision, bewitched by dragonflies hovering in the air, flitting about from bush to shrub to unkempt grass. Bhola saw Som freeze for a few seconds, then start to move on the tips of his toes, one step after one careful step, stalking a dragonfly that had landed on a leaf. From a window on the first floor, their father too had his attention caught by the sight of his youngest son creeping up on something in the untidy clump of sparse vegetation under the guava tree. Bhola and Prafullanath watched, immobilised, as if the tiptoed, alert unbreathingness of Som had transmitted itself like an electric current to his watchers, binding them hushed as one. Som edged forward, inch by inch, magically in touch with the atavistic hunter gene in humans, closed in on the unsuspecting insect, his right hand reaching out, his forefinger and thumb brought forward in a pinch, his breath held. . then he had it. A dragonfly, curled up in an inverted C, was now captive in the tweezers of Som’s little fingers.

Prafullanath could not see from upstairs what Som had caught, only his look of amazement. He felt a slight tightness in his chest, but the residue of the hypnotic scene still kept him immobile. Bhola, downstairs, shared the remainder of the same transfixion. A delayed thought was about to take shape in Prafullanath’s mind — what if the boy had caught something that could give him a nasty sting or even a poisonous bite? — but it was still held in abeyance.

The insect, caught by its folded-up wings, had instantly curved and grasped Som’s finger with all the thread-thin limbs in its head and thorax. This caused an unpleasant, rough sensation, and the little boy, somewhat afraid now, loosened his fingers. The dragonfly flew out, free but dazed, and in that instant a brown mynah, which had, in all probability, had its beady yellow-rimmed eye on the captive insect all this while, swooped down from the roof of the house in one graceful arc, caught hold of the dragonfly in mid-air and, without a break in its flight curve, a miraculous hyperbola, ascended back to where it had taken off from, insect clamped in its beak, the crumpled bits of wings and the thin line of the abdomen poking out of that bright-yellow vice. Everything happened in a minute flash of time, but it played out to all three of them, slowed down and stretched.

Som turned his astonished head to follow the bird’s flight-path, wheeling around to see it perch on the terrace. The look on his face was such a roil of reactions that Prafullanath’s heart turned; all he wanted to do was to rush down to the garden, swoop his little boy up in his arms and make him forget whatever upset he had been caused. Bhola, on the other hand, was in the grip of a twofold marvelling: at the smooth, predatory art of the mynah, so swift, so unerring, and at Som’s shock at witnessing this god-knows-how-many-in-one chance of the freak yet perfectly poised hunting and his role in it as a facilitator. It was as if Som were the servant who had been duped into capturing the prize that his master would consume regally; it was the deception that hurt.

Spell broken, Bhola ran towards Som, who could only point to the air, in the direction of the opportunistic bird. Then the little boy burst into tears.

Bhola gathered him in his arms, kissed his cheeks and consoled him. ‘No, no, my kushu pushu, it’s all right, it’s all right.’