Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

Bhola’s mind is elsewhere today, on his own far more pressing situation, but he must force himself to listen to the reading, if only to save himself:

A crowd of people sit outside, waiting, hoping to get some work done by the officials inside — have a file traced or moved to another department, have papers signed and attested, enquiries answered, bureaucratic mazes unlocked, puzzles elucidated. One such petitioner, a shuffling, creased, dusty, creaky, bent man of about sixty-five enters and takes in the scene of smoke-wreathed business of the government before hobbling his way to Nakshatra-babu.

But Bhola’s attention soon drifts away from the dull, predictable hell of others to his own consuming one. It had been his own unpreparedness, his lack of all the necessary information, that Bhola had found so difficult to cope with while the Sisters had talked to him in their office; lightning in clear skies. Obviously he was going through some serious bad times, he mused, and when times were bad, even buggery resulted in pregnancy, as the salty theatre director never ceased to remind everyone who came within his orbit. The thought of the director forces him again to concentrate on the proceedings under way right in front of him:

Mr Das returned to the Employment Ministry, where the relevant PA, sighted only once, declared hurriedly, ‘The Minister is in Burdwan, he’ll be back tomorrow,’ and disappeared, not to be seen since. The following day the underlings and hangers-on in the PA’s office said that the Minister had gone to Siliguri; the day after, to Delhi. A polyphony of gossip, informal advice, chatter, loose talk, suggestions, the tabla keeping the

taal

to his eighty-two visits, kept sounding its infernal accompaniment throughout.

Bhola interrupts, ‘Achchha, this is all very well, but. . but isn’t this, how should I say, isn’t this all a bit familiar ?’

The young man’s face falls before he can rearrange it into a mask of defensive contempt. He is still trying when Bhola’s colleague seconds his boss, ‘Yes, yes, right, right, we know all this stuff. So much time to state the obvious. . I’m sure there’s a twist coming?’

The magazine editor begins to defend the writer, ‘It may be familiar to us, but maybe it’s not familiar to a lot of people who have no first-hand or even second-hand experience of all this stuff . It’s new stuff to them.’

The theatre director says, ‘It opens up a more philosophical point: should stories be about the familiar world or should they show us something new each time?’

The young man, who has had some time to swallow his disappointment, now argues, ‘If you look at the work of the German writer Franz Kafka, you’ll find that what I’m trying to do is not dissimilar: the hellish nature of bureaucracy, the labyrinth from which man cannot escape, the going-around in circles. .’

The director adds excitedly, ‘Yes, yes, Kafka, Kafka, we’re going to put on a play by him, it’s called Insect . Do you know that play, where a man becomes an insect? Masterpiece, masterpiece! We are all insects.’

Insect, thinks Bhola; that’s about right, that’s what he had felt during the incident at Carmel Convent yesterday, when he found himself facing two Christian nuns. Dressed in impeccably starched white blouses, grey skirts, grey wimples, with chunky crucifixes cradling on their shelf-like chests, Sister Josephine and the headmistress, Sister Patience, had throughout addressed him as ‘Mr Gauche’. Their English had seemed opaque, probably because authentic; accordingly, Bhola’s deep fear of the English language and those who spoke it well had taken the form of abject deference.

‘Mr Gauche, we are a bit worried about an essay Arunima has written,’ Sister Josephine said in clipped tones.

Bhola grinned in incomprehension, then, realising it was an inappropriate reaction, shut his mouth and tried to look serious.

Sister Patience took the baton now. ‘Would you say you were having problems at home?’ she asked. Not wishing for it to be construed as an unhealthy curiosity about domestic matters, she hastily added, ‘Problems with Arunima, I mean, of course.’ The severity in her voice was notched up to compensate for what she saw as an unfortunate slip.

Bhola quailed at the stentorian tone of the headmistress, even while straining to follow this alarming flow of echt -English, but he identified the repeated word, ‘problems’, and clamped onto it.

‘Problems. . heh-heh. . yes. . I’m meaning no. . heh-heh. .’ he began. Perhaps they meant that his daughter was having problems with her English lessons, and he had been called in to be made aware of the glitch so that he could ask her to pull her socks up and get her to improve her performance? Yes, that must be it.

‘I asking my brother and. . and brother’s son for helping in English all the time,’ he said, ‘but they. . they busy.’ This last word he pronounced ‘bi-ji’ — his old problem of distinguishing between a palatal and a sibilant fricative — and set the Sisters’ stern mouths twitching.

Years of dealing with parents who had no English, but aspired to better for their daughters — thank the Lord for that — had made Sister Patience adept at recovering the real meaning from behind the fog of Benglish, so she replied, ‘No, Mr Gauche, I’m not referring to the quality of Arunima’s work. With that, we’re all satisfied. I mean this.’ With that she passed him an exercise book covered in brown paper, with a Sulekha ink label on it indicating name of owner of the copy, class, section, subject, school. He remembered bringing back from work sheets of brown paper, the regulation cover for his children’s textbooks and exercise copies, at the beginning of their school year. He had a slight tightness in his chest, seeing them in their correct use now, at imagining this aspect of his daughter’s life to which he had no access, to which he could never be a daily, present witness: her small hands opening the pages of the book in a classroom, writing in it, putting it away in her bag. It was as if this object was the bridge to a corner of her life that would increasingly become separate from his. He felt an invisible hand squeezing the inside of his chest again. Then the words of Sister Patience dissipated that momentary sensation.

‘If you could please read the piece that is on the last page that is written on. We are dismayed, too, that Arunima did not give you the letter in the first instance.’

Bhola, who was settling into his terrified state and therefore beginning to comprehend the Sisters’ words better, took the slim book and opened it on the requisite page. Two pages of his daughter’s rounded, cursive English hand under the title ‘My Mother’. His eyes began to smart at the evidence of her flourishing competence in the language; was it true that it was his daughter who had written so fluently in that treacherous language, which had eluded him with such obstinacy?

‘We’ll wait until you finish reading. It’s not going to take you long,’ Sister Josephine urged.

Bhola obliged; he was much better at reading than at aural comprehension. But before long, a lag seemed to be opening up between the signs on the page and the meanings behind them and a corresponding one between meaning and sense. Acutely conscious of two pairs of judgemental eyes riveted on him, and also of his own deep anxiety brought about by a sense of lack, he nevertheless found himself forgetting them, ensnared by the peculiar nature of Arunima’s essay on Jayanti. What on earth had she written? This was not the Jayanti he recognised. What were all these wild fictions?

My mother’s name is Jayanti Ghosh. She is short and black and has hair till her waist. She gets up in the morning and shouts at me and my father to get ready to go to school and office. In my tiffin-box she gives a banana and a boiled egg, sometimes insects and worms.