Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

Arunima is overthrown by this wholly unexpected turn of events. A severe scolding, punishment, these she had expected, and had steeled herself for, but this? Never. What is she going to tell her parents? And how will they cope with a meeting with the Sisters, her mother with no English, not the barest minimum, and both Baba and Ma intimidated into subservient silence by those who speak the language; how will they ever bring themselves even to consider a meeting with the Sisters of Carmel Convent? A worm of anxiety bores through her. Her face flushes with the imminent shame of this unveiling of her parents as rustic ‘natives’, as Sister Claire has it, unsophisticated, ‘uncultured’ — that accusation she has heard levelled by her aunt Chhaya at armies of people. The fear and tension looping through her are more to do with this than with being exposed in the eyes of her parents, or being punished at school and at home as a consequence.

By the time school ends at 3.35, the rain has abated but has left behind the usual damage: the road on which the school stands is a battlefield of umbrellas; rolled-up trousers and pyjamas; wet, bedraggled people looking like crows; an infernal soundtrack of vehicle horns punctuated occasionally by a timpani-roll of thunder; traffic jam; crowds, crowds and crowds. The press of parents, almost exclusively mothers, and drivers waiting outside the gates to collect their charges resembles the early stages of a gathering stampede. From here only chaos can take over as girls scan anxiously for drivers or parents delayed by the flooding and traffic disorder, and car-shares and lifts are organised with something bordering on neurosis. Some school buses have made it, others not.

Arunima has spent all afternoon trying to figure out when and where she can destroy Sister Josephine’s letter. It cannot be done on the school bus, obviously, or anywhere in school, for she is paranoid about the torn-up pieces of paper being discovered and then put together like pieces of a jigsaw. But the same kind of problem would obtain at home too: what if her mother, forever ferreting about, forever enquiring and suspicious, comes upon the fragments and subjects her to an interrogation?

In the mayhem she sees a chance to become inconspicuous: she runs up the stairs to the bathrooms on the second floor, shuts herself in a cubicle and takes out the sealed envelope. Then she sets to tearing the page in half, then quarters, eighths and sixteenths. Each sixteenth she tears into two or four, shoving the tiny bits of paper into her white socks as her hands become full. She is careful to distribute these more or less equally between her left and right legs. All the while she is aware of god’s eye watching her in the act of compounding her sin, seeing through walls and barriers straight into this cubicle, straight into her heart. As she leaves the bathroom she is intensely conscious of the area between the elastic top of her socks and the edge of the black shoes around her ankles. Her gait changes. The paper feels as if it is burning her lower legs, turning them into glowing columns of light.

On the school bus, which arrives ninety minutes late, Arunima swings between sitting immobile, like a statue, afraid that moving might give away her secret, and fidgeting, but in a slowed-down, staccato way, nervous that natural movement might lead to the hidden objects spilling out and leaving an accusatory trail behind her. When the Don Bosco School bus passes theirs, the girls lean out of the windows to shout in chorus, ‘Donkey Boys, Donkey Boys’, to the boys’ combined retort of ‘Camel Girls, Camel Girls’, but today Arunima, usually an enthusiastic participant, sits in silence.

When she is set down at the crossing of Basanta Bose and Bediapara Roads, the stretch towards Hazra Road is still flooded. She waits for the bus to go a few metres north, up its usual route, then bends down to retrieve the paper stuffed in her socks and strews the confetti onto the puddles in the road. There, she thinks, no one will ever know. A few remaining bits have gone into the space between her instep and socks. A different problem nags her now: what if the goddess Saraswati is offended by her deliberate and prolonged flouting of the rule that forbids the touching of study materials sacred to her — paper, pen, books, pencils — with the feet?

At home, things continue with the grey pallor they have worn ever since Bor’-da went missing. Dread and the tighten-relax routine of the grip of anxiety have now given way to the settled, monotonous drone of a dull ache. Boro-jyethi, who has been most affected by it, naturally so, has become a ghost in the house she used to hold together. She is hardly ever seen and the children are not allowed to go to her room, where she lies in bed day and night, wasting away. Then there is Arunima’s ill grandfather, also on the third floor: something terrible happened to him a few years ago, the details of which had not been discussed in front of the children, but from what she had pieced together it had been something involving his work and bad people who worked in his paper factory and somehow Madan-da had had some role to play in it and it had all resulted in her grandfather’s second heart-attack and he has been mostly bedridden since. Arunima has been told off so often for being loud while playing or talking, for showing any signs of joy or life or frivolity, a constant ‘Shhhh’ from the adults, accompanied by a furrowing of the brows and a finger to the lips, that her life seems conducted under the cover of a tarpaulin that will never lift to show the sky again.

Jayanti, like everyone else, has used Supratik’s disappearance to wring whatever advantage she can get, mostly in the domain of the superficial. When her daughter, while packing her school satchel for the next day, had lifted a book in a way so careless that the dried wad of marigold petals from Saraswati Puja in February, pressed between its pages, had fallen out, she had immediately pounced upon it.

‘Have a care, have a care,’ she had scolded her daughter. ‘Dropping sacred flowers like this, eeesh! No wonder all auspicious influences have departed from this house.’

The unspoken hint at the tragedy hit home. The guilt that Arunima may have had anything to contribute to Bor’-da’s disappearance worked its way through her, to silence and intimidate.

The feel of dark curtains hanging everywhere in the house, in thick, unbroken folds that one has to keep dodging, is inescapable today too. Previously, on returning home from school, she would be summoned to the third floor with, ‘Come, come. Quickly. Look what I’ve got for you.’

Arunima would rush to their Boro-jyethi.

‘I got Madan to make coconut shapes,’ she would say. Or ‘Your face looks dry and shrivelled. They must be working you very hard in your English-medium school. Come, let me get Madan-da to mix up spicy puffed rice for you.’

No such pampering now. Even the memory seems attenuated by the darkness in the house. At dinner Arunima feels the yawning hole around which everybody is walking, trying not to fall in, trying especially not to acknowledge it by talking about it. At times, adults fall silent as she enters the room, the air still rippled by whatever they have hastily stopped discussing; it could only be Bor’-da. She has become very good at sensing these ripples because she has been given, inadvertently, just the slightest glimpse of the unmentionable: adults being reliably ignorant of the depth of how much children understand or can imagine.

Take the conversation overheard when Arunima was in the room as Jayanti was folding clean laundry and putting it away, Bholanath sitting there, not doing anything particular.

‘What is going to happen, then?’ her mother asked, a frequent question for her, worried as she was about the worst possible outcome of anything. It was a question asked in fear, with hope that someone would contradict her and allay her jitters.