Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

She burns the food for my father and throws down the plate in front of him. Then she takes all the money from him and says, ‘I want to see your dead face today.’ Then I come to school and she spends all day beating the servants. One day she hit the maidservant so much that she went to hospital with broken arms and legs.

Then she eats lunch, all nice and delicious things that she does not give to me and my father — mutton, fish, chop, cutlet, sweets. After lunch she waits until all my aunts are asleep. Then she goes into their rooms and steals their saris and jewellery.

In the afternoon, I return back from school. She shouts at me and beats me with a wooden stick and sometimes with the handle of a hand-fan. Then my father returns back and she shouts at him. She gives him rice and water and salt to eat. Sometimes there are eggs of cockroaches and spiders in our food.

Then she sends my father and me to sleep on the floor at the bottom of the stairs. One day Jesus Christ will burn her like the thornbush.

He looked up at the four eyes watching his every nerve-twitch and eye-flicker then lowered his baffled face to continue reading. He switched back to the cover to read Arunima’s name on the label on the front, hoping that the Sisters had made a mistake, then wondered if there were two girls with the same name in the class despite the evidence of his daughter’s handwriting.

Then, shocking himself and the Sisters, he started giggling uncontrollably at the absurd nature of Arunima’s imagination.

For a startled few seconds Sisters Patience and Josephine dropped their masks and stared with incredulity at Bhola, until an even pricklier disapproval took over.

‘Why do you laugh?’ Sister Patience demanded. ‘Is it true what she has written? We are of the opinion that these are all terrible slanders. What do you have to say?’

The clear note of haranguing in her voice tethered Bhola somewhat. ‘Erm. . yes, ma’am. . no. . meaning Sister. . this is very laughing matter. No, I mean, writing funny,’ he said and halted. The Sisters heard the substitution of the fricative with a plosive in ‘funny’, but they were too far gone in their perplexity and outrage to find it even mildly amusing. Now barely concealed disdain took its place.

‘We, on the other hand, do not find it a laughing matter, Mr Gauche,’ said Sister Patience in her coldest, hardest voice.

Bhola made a swift calculation in his head: he did not have enough English, or nerves steely enough, to explain to the Sisters that the stuff Arunima had written was all fabricated, because he would then have to field further questions — whys, whats, wherefores — which would lead to larger stretches of communicative quicksands, so it might be a wise strategy simply to look apologetic, even outraged, and let the tide of the Sisters’ displeasure and disciplinary prescriptions for his daughter wash over him. Tussling with this decision was a more amorphous shame: what if the Sisters thought that Arunima’s essay was true? What kind of an idea would it give them of his domestic life, his family, his marriage, his general ineffectuality? This counter-feeling made him want to speak out, but he did not have the right words. Not for the first time in his life he felt himself fall into the gap between feelings and their articulation in language.

So relieved was he to step out onto Gariahat Road after his ordeal that he nearly forgot how he would be quizzed by Jayanti as soon as he returned home. She was fretting herself to dyspepsia. The English sentences Arunima had written would make little to no sense to her, so how was he to summarise the events of the morning? What could he say? Walking down to the bus stop on the other side of the road, he felt suddenly weak-kneed with pity: pity at Jayanti’s ignorance of English; pity for the incomprehension and then the puzzled sadness that would be her reaction, were she to be told the entire truth; compassion for the unknowable emotions that would be going through her in her private moments when she worried at the episode, trying to parse some kind of sense out of it.

He lit a cigarette from the burning tip of the braided coir rope hanging beside the narrow paan-bidi shack adjacent to the Ucobank building and inhaled deeply. He decided to weave a different tale altogether for his wife when he got back home, something along the lines of a new order they were trying out in Carmel Convent, which had to do with calling parents in at regular intervals throughout the year to keep them apprised of their daughters’ academic progress. Then he would make up something for verisimilitude and density: how they were satisfied with Arunima’s work, although there was room for improvement in some subject or the other. The prospect of lying calmed him instantly, more than the nicotine.

But far more treacherous were proving to be the currents running under the complicity that united him and Arunima now. He could barely bring himself to look her in the eye; he knew that she knew of his deception, knew also that some uneasy coalition into opposing camps across a dividing line had occurred. While this made him feel disloyal to his wife, and the screw of an odd discomfort now and then turned and turned inside him, Arunima seemed to have developed a silent, intentful intensity, refusing to let go of her pinning gaze on him, searching his eyes out, wanting something ungiveable. Her child’s heart knew that he had protected her, but its susceptibility to magnified fears and anxieties seemed, perhaps, to want also a kind of reckoning about the content of what she had written, an acknowledgement from him of the spirit and life under the surface of those words. This she would not get because he did not know it was demanded of him and, had he known, would have found it impossible to endow it with a form in which things of the soul or heart are given. What shape does collusive understanding take? What her innocent mind could not comprehend was that it was not her that he had shielded; that knowledge would have been reckoning enough. But that was not to be, not yet.

Although the events are recent, to Bhola it appears that the clouds, which have begun to settle across the sky of his heart, have acquired a tenacious staying power. Bhola is unsettled by this new, growing grain of — of what exactly? This is what he cannot put his finger on, and the inability distracts him significantly enough to bleed into other areas of his life; he cannot safely shut it away in a room to be revisited in the silence of introspective solitude.

Sitting at work now, it continues to gnaw at him; nothing major or disruptive, nothing painful or upsetting, just a kink that will not go away. The debate around him is in wild spate; he has not heard a word for a long time. Where are they? Someone is saying agitatedly, ‘Let me tell you, the Shakti-Sunil-Niren crowd will become a shrine, a shrine!’

Samir said — Do you know how Debdulal-da referred to you?

— No. How?

— Pratik-da. The ‘Su’ prefix to your name has been — here he made a cutting movement, but with his hand held sideways, so probably indicating a sickle — chopped off.

Much laughter from Samir and Dhiren.

I asked — Did you not correct him?

Samir answered — Arrey, at least six times, but it was like a dog’s tail: the moment you let it go, it curled back again.

— Not a bad change, what do you say, from Supratik to Pratik?

Dhiren said — Not bad at all. From ‘auspicious symbol’ to ‘symbol’ only. Who wants to be auspicious? Bloody cant of the bourgeois ****ers!

I, too, thought: Not bad, this loss of weight in the name. I could happily live as Pratik, as pure symbol only. .

I had been handed a sickle and shown how to cut the paddy stalks at the base, about three inches from the soil. Each of us went to the plot that his host was working. Kanu, mine, was a wage-labourer, on the lowest rung. This, I realised later, had its uses: a number of class enemies could be pointed out to me — owners of small plots who overworked and underpaid day-workers; the subset of yes-men of big landlords among these; the absentee jotedaars’ managers who cracked the whip. .