Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

Som, blind now with tears, ran to the attic. Chhaya tried to pull him towards her to comfort him, but the boy stood there stubbornly, howling. He was on the threshold of a bitter knowledge, yet he did not know it, having only a cloudy intimation of some part of his life gone awry. Mamoni’s-ma now reached the landing, two huge buckets spilling with washed clothes in each of her hands.

‘What happened? What happened?’ she asked, setting down the washing. ‘Somu, why are you crying, my little one?’

Then she turned to Priyo and Chhaya and asked, ‘What’s happened to him? Did he take a fall? Hurt himself?’

Priyo rushed to answer. ‘No, nothing of the sort. He was adamant about going out into the sun to play, Chhaya and I couldn’t stop him. God knows, we tried! And as soon as he stepped out, he burned his feet, so he’s crying now.’

Chhaya joined in the duet. ‘This is what happens when you don’t listen to your elders. We warned you,’ she said.

The wailing doubled in volume.

Charubala called up irritably from the floor below, ‘What’s going on, eh? What’s all that shouting and crying?’ and started climbing upstairs. ‘I knew this business of going up to the roof in pate-cracking heat would come to no good.’

Som rushed down to her.

Mamoni’s-ma, with her grubby rag of a sari hitched above her ankles so that her cracked heels were all too visible, lifted up the buckets and, advancing towards the clothes line, said, ‘He is only a little boy, he has delicate, soft feet, not hardened, calloused ones like ours. No wonder he’s crying. This sun is a killing one. . The clothes will be dry in no time at all.’

Charubala, intercepted by Som halfway up the stairs, paused in her berating to comfort the child — ‘There, there, my golden one, hush, hush, it’ll be fine’ — then reached the attic to vent her anger.

It struck her immediately, looking at Priyo and Chhaya, that the time to give them a slap or two or wring their ears to punish them over minor things had long passed; they were nearly adults now. This took the wind out of her sails somewhat.

‘Did I not tell you that it was all going to end in tears? Did I not?’ she yelled at her stony-faced son and daughter. ‘I want the two of you to go downstairs this very second, do you hear? Never a moment’s peace in this zoo. Everyone’s asleep in this heat, but only in my asylum do I have children who choose to play in the sun. How dare you disturb everyone’s siesta? Downstairs, right now!’

Their ears burned with the shame of being scolded in the presence of a servant. Neither of them uttered a word. They stood up and made their way downstairs, letting out the breath they had been holding in for a long time. They did not look at each other, knowing that the imprint of relief that they had not been interrogated about the reasons for Som’s crying fit would be all too readable on their faces; it would have bound the two together in too obvious a collusion, not least by bunching together related events from the past.

There was the time they had sat Som down, less than a year ago, when he was getting over a bad cold; they had made him pick his abundant nose and eat the pellets of snot, all of different consistencies and textures.

Such events were not regular; they were spun out on the spur of an inspired moment, and inspiration, or opportunity, did not cheapen itself by visiting too often. There was no intentional or premeditated cruelty in these games, not always; much of it had an anthropological interest for the perpetrators. Chhaya found her little brother between the ages of three and four so edibly sweet that she wanted to handle him much like a comestible, presented in portion-sized pieces to devour. She found her teeth clenching when she ran her hand through his curls; her hands itched with the desire to inflict pain; often she tightened her fist, his hair caught in it, one step beyond the acceptable boundary between petting and something murkier, more elemental. As soon as Som yelped, she retreated to cosier ground. How much could he take? How much could she get away with? Often, while squeezing his chubby cheeks, she would dig her fingers in so that she could feel his gums and the roots of his teeth through the intervening membrane of skin and flesh and fat, and Som would start crying. She would then spend a lot of time cooing and gurgling and kissing and consoling; a much paler time than the animalic excitement of the moments when her desire toppled into something else.

She squeezed cut hemispheres of lime into his open mouth just to have the pleasure of seeing him pull faces; her insides turned all woolly watching him. Then she forced his mouth open and rubbed the spent fruit against his teeth, witnessing his gradual working out of the unpleasant sensation of soured, tender teeth with something approaching a flailing inside her chest and stomach. These things were motivated not by an unperceived sadistic streak, but by a sense of curiosity; how would this beautiful, fair, curly-locked angel look and behave and sound when taken outside the matrix of his ordinary experience and transplanted into a new, unknown one?

Priyo, too, had this tendency towards experimentation. In winter, when oranges were in season, he convinced the boy that regular squeezing of the peel into his open eyes would guarantee perfect vision for life and offered to help him keep his eyes open and do it himself. The gullible child agreed. The citrus oil stung. Som blinked furiously, hardly able to keep his watering eyes open.

‘Ooh, ooh,’ he sang, ‘burning, burning.’ His eyes streamed.

‘That’s a good sign,’ Priyo soothed. ‘It means the goodness in the orange peel is working. Your eyes are going to shine like stars now.’

The tipping point came when Chhaya and Priyo lured Som to the terrace, grabbed his favourite toy, Teddy Tail, off him and hanged it, with much ceremony, on the clothes line, then amputated the toy’s limbs. Som, unable to bear it, lunged at Priyo and sank his teeth into his wrist. Chhaya tried to detach the boy by catching hold of his abundant curls and pulling with all the force in her body. The ensuing commotion brought Charubala running up to the terrace.

Chhaya, never one to forget a slight or forgive anyone for having exposed her as being wrong and then for having punished her for it, more than two years later took a kind of revenge on her mother for the sound thrashing she had received that afternoon. She was helped in this by the coincidence of two events: the lead-up to the Matriculation Exam and her period that month.

On an oppressive summer late-afternoon, with the sky a livid violet-black, which warned of a thunderstorm, Charubala, finding the rooms prematurely dark, went around turning on the lights room by room. It was only after switching on the ceiling light in the sitting room on the first floor that she noticed her daughter lying on the low divan, almost at one with it.

Chhaya let out a ‘tsk’ of irritation at the sudden exposure and turned her face to the wall.

Charubala asked, ‘What are you doing, lying all alone in a dark room? Why haven’t you turned on the lights? To leave the house in the dark like this at dusk. . it’s not good, the goddess of wealth will run away. There’s going to be the most almighty storm, just look at the sky.’

Silence.

‘What’s happened to you?’

No answer.

Then it fell into place. Charubala went over to her daughter, sat down on the edge of the divan and said to Chhaya’s back in a more tender voice, ‘Are you feeling ill? Is your stomach cramping? Shall I bring a hot-water bottle?’

Silence again.

Charubala touched her daughter’s shoulder, only to have her arm batted away with a vicious swipe.

‘What’s happened?’ she repeated. ‘Why aren’t you telling me?’