Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

No answer.

Charubala persisted. Something about the girl’s posture, all scrunched in on herself, the back of her head so eloquent with — with what? — indicated to Charubala that there was a different storm brooding, as if the weather outside were going to play out in Chhaya first. She pulled at her shoulders gently to make Chhaya face her and all she got was a tenacious physical resistance. When she managed at last to coax Chhaya to face her, she saw that she was not wrong: that dark face had in it a shadow of the livid blue of the clouds massed outside.

It felt as if years and years of something thwarted had banked up in the girl and was now going to overflow. For a moment Charubala felt something closer to fear than sympathetic worry, then tried to dispel its pressure by falling back on the more reliable emotion of gently badgering affection.

‘Why can’t you tell me? You should be able to tell me everything. I’m your mother, after all.’

At the word ‘mother’, Chhaya’s mouth and face crumpled. ‘No, you’re not my mother, you’re Somu’s mother.’ The words seemed to be excavated from some pit deep inside her soul. What agony and tamped-down anger burned in them.

The click of sudden knowledge in Charubala’s head — how could she not have seen this coming? — was offset by the short falling feeling inside her. So this was what had been eating her daughter, causing her sulkiness, her mood swings, the cloud of pettiness and jealousy that seemed to trail her perpetually nowadays. It was only last week that she had come upon her and Priyo bullying Som, who was terrified of the dark, by shutting the boy in a totally dark room. Chhaya and Priyo had then shrouded themselves in long bedsheets and entered the room, impersonating ghosts, moaning ‘Hooo, hooo, hooo’, standing at the door to prevent the child from escaping. Children’s games, yes, but ever since Charubala had discovered the blisters on Som’s feet and joined the dots — some, if not all — together, she had been prone to sensing something unsmooth to these games and naughtiness, as if the nap of the fabric was not all uniform and comforting to the touch but had, instead, a tiny thorn here, a prickle there, to deliver an unpleasant surprise. Even this latest instance she, with her pragmatic mind and worldly-wise domestic strength, had been prepared to ignore as the inevitable process of siblings tussling with each other, something that would ease with time and the beginning of adulthood; but confronted now with those treacherous words, it was as if everything she had chosen to pass over in silence had found embodiment, a spectre transformed into a flesh-and-blood combatant that demanded reckoning with. Denial would no longer do.

She drew in a deep breath and began the job. ‘Chhee, chhee, what inauspicious words! I’m as much your mother as Som’s or Priyo’s or Adi’s. You are all my children.’ Spoken out like that, the truth, obvious and axiomatic, acquired the falsehood of lines in a play.

A brilliant flash of lightning pushed the purple of the clouds to their most extreme, malignant shade for a second, then the darkening resumed. In the silence following Charubala’s strained words, the drumroll of thunder sounded equally theatrical.

Chhaya began a low sobbing that was not so distant from retching.

Charubala tried again. ‘Can you favour one finger over another? All of them make up the thing that is the hand. Each one is as important as the other.’

Chhaya’s eyes streamed with tears.

‘Don’t cry. Please. I feel terrible watching you cry like this,’ Charubala said. Her heart clenched with pity.

Still sobbing in that excruciated way, Chhaya brought out deadlier words. ‘You. . love. . Somu. . more. . because. . he’s. . fair. . and. . beautiful. . and. . I’m. . dark. . and. . ugly. . and. . cross-eyed.’

With a dozen words Charubala’s world lay cleaved. It was not that she had not known this; once again, it was the exposure of her unacknowledged fears, so indecently made incarnate to the open air, that caused this sensation of sudden terror. And yet she sat locked in her helplessness; how could she bring herself to leap over her embarrassment and say those words or act out those gestures that would wipe the slate clean for her daughter? Were love, compassion, pity expressible? How? Charubala certainly did not know. Love and affection were not particular instances of their manifestations, but rather the entire world one moved around in, an atmosphere. How could you isolate something so brutally flat and one-dimensional, such as words, from a kind of sky, which was intangible, both there and not there? The closest she had ever come to showing such feelings to her children had taken, typically in this world, the form of brusqueness or dismissal, a performance of irritation: ‘Get off, get off, I have to go to the kitchen otherwise so-and-so is sure to burn the rice’ to a child hanging on to her neck; ‘Ufff, not a moment’s peace in this home, you are burning me to death’ to another, demanding to snuggle up to her during afternoon nap; or, delivered in a voice pitched halfway between mock-tartness and faux-scolding, ‘Oh, melting over the sides with affection, I see. Off with you!’ to another of her children perhaps wanting nothing more than a cuddle. These brush-offs, accompanied more often than not by the unlikely partners of a smile and furrowed brows, not dissimilar to a smile flashed through tears, were never meant to be serious. They were the array of masks that love wore, the only way it could be displayed and seen. Both parties knew this in their blood and their bones. It was in the very air they breathed. So being faced now with an imperative to leave that familiar set of comforting exchanges behind and take a leap into the unknown filled Charubala with a tense inertia. She had the sense that she had reached a crossroads and, whichever turning she took, she would do wrong, either by her daughter or by her world.

She made the boulder of her tongue move to bring out the words, ‘Who has put such rubbish in your head? How can you say this?’

In desperation, she continued elaborating.

‘Is skin-colour everything? You have so many talents — you are a prize pupil in Diocesan, and how many girls can boast of going to an English-medium school? And you sing so beautifully. Just the other day Arati-di from the neighbouring house was saying to me, “When your Chhaya sits down to practise in the evenings, we drop all our work, shush everyone and stand at our windows, drinking in everything. Will you ask Chhaya’s music teacher, Shipra-di, to train my children too?” Beauty is skin-deep, you know that. What good is it to anyone? It won’t quench your thirst, or cure a sick person.’

But already it was too late. Chhaya’s cry had called for something instant, something headlong and impulsive. Instead, all she was able to return by way of a response was a cold, congealed thing, deliberated upon until its quick, fragile life had departed.

Around the same time Adinath made a strange choice, strange to his father, at least. Instead of joining Charu Paper immediately after he sat his Intermediate Science exams, he applied to read Engineering at Shibpur. At this juncture in Adi’s life, his childhood love of the built structure had flared to something grander, more ambitious — he wanted to learn how to build houses. The arrival of Somnath had interrupted several things, one of which, not given much thought by Adinath, or at least not consciously, had been the gradual development of a bond between Prafullanath and his oldest son based on what father had assumed was an early grooming of the business sense and what son had taken to be the ordinary commerce of affection and companionship. But that undone drawing of the interior of a house, something that Adi later came to know was called something as simple as a plan, never found realisation in the expected father — son duet; it had to be learned, understood and executed as a solo. And yet Prafullanath’s neglect — if that it can be called — of Adi after the birth of Som did not have the predictable effect of snuffing out the boy’s interest in the area that had been so much his domain with his father, held pure and insulated from the interference of the world.