Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

Priyo, Chhaya’s shadow, was not long behind. On the concrete roof, baking in the wood-splitting heat since seven in the morning, it was impossible to step beyond the threshold barefoot. Sitting on the landing in front of the prayer room, Priyo and Chhaya lured their five-year-old brother with sure steps.

Chhaya said to Priyo, pretending to whisper, ‘Shall we play that game? The one that ends with the winner getting half a dozen New Market biscuits?’

The New Market biscuits were Huntley & Palmers’, which were brought home by Baba from Hogg Saheb’s Market regularly because they were Som’s favourites. The boy did not much care for ‘bakarkhani’, the Bengali ones they were constantly being told they should eat because that would support the nationalist movement against the British, but the Ghoshes’ weak sympathy for such sentiments never translated into action; not enough energy was present to bring that about. Someone, probably Madan-da, had started calling them New Market biscuits to distinguish the two classes, and the name had stuck.

Priyo answered, ‘Shhh, don’t mention it now, Som will hear us.’

‘Oh, sorry, I forgot myself, what about. .’ Chhaya said, then proceeded to whisper in Priyo’s ear.

Priyo’s eyes lit up; he said excitedly, ‘Yes, yes’, then it was his turn to do the whispering, only letting the words ‘game’ and ‘biscuits’ become audible.

By now, all his attention focused on his elder siblings, Som cried out, ‘Me too, me too.’

Priyo and Chhaya, now in unison, ‘No, you’re too small. It’s a game for grown-ups.’

That reeled Som in. ‘No, no, I play too. And I want New Market biscuits.’ He seemed on the verge of kicking up a noisy tantrum.

‘All right, all right,’ Chhaya said, ‘but on two conditions. One, you cannot tell anyone, not Ma, not Baba, not Madan-da, no one. If you do, we’ll never never never let you play our nice games with us again. Okay?’

Som nodded his head innocently and eagerly. Secrets! This was getting better and better.

Priyo said, ‘The other condition is this — you cannot give up on the game halfway through. You must finish it, otherwise terrible things will happen to you.’

‘What terrible things?’ the little boy asked, easily diverted by the more exciting part of the conditions.

Priyo extemporised, ‘The ghost that visits you in your dreams will cut out your tongue and wear it around his neck. When you wake up in the morning you’ll find that you cannot speak. Ever again. No sound will come out of your mouth.’

Som’s mouth trembled.

‘You’ll cry out, “Ma, Ma”, but there’ll be no sound, nothing.’

Som whimpered, ‘No!’, about to start squalling. Chhaya, sensing its imminence, pulled him onto her lap, patted him on his head and said, ‘Now, now. Nothing of that sort is going to happen. Just do as we tell you.’ A few kisses were planted on his fat, dimpled cheeks and curls. ‘You still want your New Market biscuits, don’t you?’

The tears remained unshed. Som nodded again.

Chhaya explained, ‘So this is the game. You run to that corner of the roof’ — here she pointed to the area furthest from the attic — ‘and start walking back towards us while we wait here and count up to one hundred. You cannot return to this point, where we are sitting now, before we reach a hundred. If you do that, you’ve lost. No biscuits for you. But if you get here on the dot of one hundred or after, a whole plateful. Do you understand the game?’

‘Yes,’ the child said, hesitantly.

Priyo now took him through the rules, more slowly this time, spelling out each clause for a child’s understanding. It was difficult for him to tell if Som was absorbing and comprehending every little detail, including the sanctions that had been imposed earlier; his face had an unreadable expression, a kind of calm incomprehension mixed with wariness.

‘All clear?’ Priyo asked again.

‘Yes.’

‘All right then, we are going to start counting as soon as you have reached the far corner. You run to it but, remember, you have to walk back slowly, very slowly.’

The unshod boy ran swiftly to the north-east corner, which looked out towards Russa Road; he was in the full, blazing field of the early afternoon sun. He reached the corner, turned around to face Chhaya and Priyo, and then the effect of the three or four seconds of his feet remaining on the ground without being raised for shifting to a new spot hit him.

‘Oooh, hot, hot,’ he said, almost absent-mindedly, still registering the new sensation. He stood first on one foot, then on the other, continuing the rapid exchange between the right and the left for a good few seconds, then tried to stand on the outer edges of his feet. He looked like a wobbly clown, performing antics, or an unsteady toy, its clockwork mechanism gone haywire. Priyo and Chhaya giggled, but their mirth was slightly adulterated by a squishy feeling in their hearts — how unutterably sweet he looked, puzzled and in pain and imprisoned by the rules of the game.

‘My feet hurt,’ Som cried out.

‘No pain, no gain,’ Chhaya called out. ‘Just think of your plate of crunchy, sweet, sugar-crusted biscuits and start moving forward. We’re going to start counting.’

Som’s face was scrunched up with pain, or perhaps with confusion and bewilderment at the experience of a game that had nothing of fun in it, or pleasure; instead, it was a kind of agony. He kept hobbling from one foot to another.

Priyo started counting out loud, ‘One. . two. . three. . four. .’

Som advanced, trying to keep as much of the under-surface of his feet off the concrete as possible; he tried walking on tiptoe, then with his instep curved in and only his curled-in toes and heel touching the ground. All the positions were proving to be precarious and unstable. He shouted to his brother and sister, ‘I feel hot on my soles.’ The light was lacerating.

Priyo said, ‘Twelve. . thirteen. . don’t move too fast! Remember, you have to last out until one hundred. Eight. . nine. . ten. . eleven. .’

Som tried a few more steps. It was like trying to balance on a pinhead. The only way to end the misery was to run back quickly, but that was not a possibility.

Chhaya took over the counting, ‘Thirteen. . thirteen. . thirteen. . fourteen. . no, no, you moved too quickly. . ten. . eleven. .’

Som said, ‘You said thirteen many times. It’s fourteen after thirteen.’

‘But you were taking very fast steps, so we had to adjust the counting accordingly,’ Chhaya said.

‘On top of that you’re cheating,’ Priyo added. ‘You’re meant to walk normally, not like a flittering sparrow.’

‘But it’s hot when I put my foot down,’ Som protested.

‘You’ll get used to it if you let them stay on the ground for a bit. Try it,’ Chhaya said.

‘Go on, try it. We’re older than you, we know better, don’t you know?’ Priyo said.

Som, suspicious now, paused to consider if this was to be trusted. The white heat of the sun had blinded him and he could not see his Bor’-da and Didi sitting in the darkness of the shade. The burning surface seemed determined to peel off the skin from the underside of his feet.

‘Seven. . eight. . nine. . ten. .’ Chhaya intoned.

Som shouted, ‘But seven is finished, it is over, why are you saying seven again?’ and exploded into the tears that he had been holding back.

Chhaya and Priyo heard Mamoni’s-ma, the domestic who did the laundry, coming upstairs, with malign timing, to hang out the washing.

Unfazed, Chhaya changed tack seamlessly. ‘Oh, you poor little cushy-cushy-pookie angel! Come running to me, come,’ she said in her cutesiest voice, but stayed put where she was.