Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

Bhola answered with peevishness. ‘How am I supposed to know? What will happen, what will happen? ’ he said, mimicking her cruelly. ‘Am I a clairvoyant?’

It was the rasp of irritation, so unusual in Baba, that made Arunima prick up her ears. Hoping that her father was going to win this round, she settled in for the fight, concentrating on looking totally uninterested and making her face take on a far-away gaze.

‘My hands and feet turn cold when I hear these things,’ Jayanti whined.

‘Your hands and feet have a tendency to turn cold whenever the breeze changes direction,’ Bhola said.

‘What can I do? I can’t suddenly become brave, like all your brothers,’ Jayanti said, trying sarcasm. ‘One of them seems not to have noticed that his nephew has been missing for nearly a year and a half now, such is his attitude. Even the father seems to be resigned, behaving like a saint who has renounced the world. This is not natural.’

Bhola, not to be cowed, not this time, said, ‘What good will it do any of us, your feeling afraid? I don’t think you should be poking your nose into this business at all. This has reached some pretty unpleasant and dangerous quarters.’

‘But what if something happens to us ?’ The sarcasm had been short-lived.

‘What do you think will happen, eh, what, what?’ Bhola was not going to let this one go.

Arunima silently cheered her father on. Let him crush her with his heel, she thought.

‘There’s lots happening already,’ her mother flared into anger again. ‘Do you think I don’t have eyes? How long can you hide fish with greens? There are bombs in the city, people being killed. . All this chatter about Supratik. . some of it must be true.’

At the mention of Bor’-da’s name some kind of alertness was restored to the adults. A look passed between them, one that took into its arc Arunima as well. She understood that the conversation was over, at least in her hearing. She also had more support for her suspicion that something terrible had happened to the missing Bor’-da.

This afternoon Jayanti has worried herself into pacing up and down, from second-floor verandah to bedroom to verandah again, because her daughter is late returning from school. Arunima’s arrival soothes her somewhat. Now there is only her husband to fret about.

‘Is Baba back?’ Arunima asks.

‘Is this the normal time for Baba to come back?’ Jayanti answers. ‘He’ll be late this evening, the roads are all flooded.’

Arunima does not bother giving her mother any information about the current state of the roads. A sudden visitation of fear, as if the horrible face of a ghost has peeked at her from behind a pillar then removed itself again, unsettles her: what if the school discovers that the summons has not been delivered and gets in touch with her parents without her help or knowledge? Best not to think about it, she decides, willing it away. The thought of feigning illness and not going to school for two or three days begins to take shape in her mind. Surely by that time Sister Josephine will have forgotten the whole thing? The nuns have so many things to think about. .

A Friday afternoon gathering at the offices of Basanta, a small publishing house, on West Range. Bhola has been in charge of this small subsidiary of Charu Paper ever since its inception in 1952 and has tried, of late, to extend its narrow remit of publishing only educational books to branching out into poetry and fiction, which is where his real interests lie. These Friday-afternoon addas brought together friends, friends of friends, aspiring writers and whoever someone who knew Bhola brought along, and amidst much talk of politics and how best to run the state and the world and how everything was going to hell and how the Bengali was never going to roar again, some scribbler read out a story or a section of a novel or a handful of poems to the assembled company in the hope that Basanta Publishing Co. was going to take to it enough to consider bringing it out. These addas had started acquiring the comfort and reliability of ritual amongst the small group of people who knew about them; and even if putative writers wanting to change the very course of Bengali literature — an ambition they shared with Bholanath Ghosh — found that Basanta did not always do the right thing by giving their dreams the fixity and immortality of print, they could get soft loans and handouts from Bhola.

Bhola saw himself as the centre of patronage in this fledgling court. Whenever he could, he helped out struggling writers and poets with money and, often, publication; how could he not support the pursuit of literature? That would be a betrayal of the very soul of Bengaliness. Besides, these Friday afternoons had another typically Bengali underpinning: it was not crassly purposive, or a means to an end that was commercial and material profit. It was, instead, an end in itself, a celebration of conviviality and the art of conversation and the sparklingly playful things one could do with time. He felt dismayed and besmirched even thinking about adherence to a business model or vulgar things like that; money was such a dirty, downright polluting thing.

Today there are six of them, including Bhola: his printer; the editor of a ‘little magazine’ and author of the fiery experimental novel Endnotes for a Beginning , recently published by Basanta Publishing Co.; Bhola’s colleague and employee at Basanta; an out-of-work theatre director; and today’s writer, an unemployed graduate of Bangabashi College earning a pittance from private tutoring, brought here by the editor, who has published a few of his revolutionary poems in his ‘little magazine’ named after a Sanskrit verse-form, Mandakranta .

There is a mild running joke in the circle along the lines of how Bhola lives up to the scatty forgetfulness that his name embodies. There is also great affection for the wild raconteur in this slightly distracted, slightly unanchored, slightly off-kilter man. Today, though, there is something more in the aura about his normally dispersed personality.

The printer asks, ‘Everything all right?’

Bhola answers, ‘Yes, yes, fine.’

‘Just thought you seemed a little more distracted than usual.’

‘Hmmm’ comes the frugal reply. That is eloquent enough to most of the company; in ordinary circumstances Bhola Ghosh would have seized on that calculated ‘more’ and spun a giant castle from it. ‘“More”? What do you mean “more”? Have you known me to be so distracted that I have walked into ditches or got on the wrong bus? Talking of which, did I ever tell you of the time when. .’ it would begin.

Now, however, Bhola dodges, ‘No, no, it’s nothing. The buses and trams are so crowded nowadays. .’

The theatre director and the editor are slightly puzzled by this reduction in Bhola Ghosh’s usual volubility; maybe it is nothing, maybe they are reading too much into it. But the greater matter of the adda awaits; the scribbler’s story, with its scalpel-like finger on the dying pulse of the terminally ill times, is sure to set a thaw in motion, of that the editor is sure.

He signals to his protégé to begin. The writer stubs out his Charminar, takes a sip of lemon tea and begins, ‘The story is titled “Prehistoric”. It’s set in the present time.’ He pauses to let the witticism register, then emphasises it, in case someone has not got it, by emitting a short, ironic snort.

PREHISTORIC

Eleven-thirty on a Tuesday morning. Writers’ Building is a crackling, buzzing hive of activity. Bechu Sarkar of the Housing Ministry has just arrived at work, a quarter of an hour later than usual. He puts his cloth side-bag on his chair, sits down, greets everyone in the office with his time-tested general bulletin — ‘Don’t even ask, it was murder on the number 74 this morning, I came here hanging from the door, I tell you, hanging from the door, like a bat’ — then hollers for tea, ‘What, is there a tea-strike on? Where has the tea-boy gone? Where’s my tea?’ As if on cue, a grubby boy with a huge blackened kettle enters and pours out milky tea into a smudged greenish glass.