Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

What happened was something else. The deepening interest in and fascination with houses, their depiction on paper, both stylised and representational, continued and expanded to take in harder questions that led to the study of the business of buildings and construction as a discipline. How did walls support a roof? Why did foundations not collapse? How could extra storeys be added to a house on the foundation estimated for a two-storey building? As Adi’s interest gravitated towards the scientific and structural-engineering end of things, there was a concomitant diminishment of that part of his imagination that perhaps cooperated, unwittingly, with his father’s desire to see this enthusiasm about houses and plots of land directed in one direction only: the growth and maturity of business sense, or ‘material intelligence’, as it was called, to the level needed for starting a construction business. Adi himself, as a boy, had never thought along those lines; it was an interest, a hobby; that was all there was to it. To what use it could be harnessed, to which destination it was headed — these questions may have played in his father’s mind, but never arose in the boy’s.

Although the wish to study Engineering, inevitable if one gave it some thought, had been years in the making, Prafullanath had either been in denial about it or had not considered it worthwhile paying much attention to a trajectory that was in conflict with the design he had in his head.

He summoned his oldest son in an attempt to dissuade him.

‘This was not the plan, this Engineering College business,’ he said to Adi.

Adi, head bowed, replied with some trepidation, ‘No, but, yes, but. .’

‘Stop but-but-ing — spit it out!’ his father demanded.

‘No, erm, you’ve known it, that I want to be an engineer. .’

How could he not have known? Adi thought; his father had been the one who had ignited the flame, then held his cupped palms to nest it against anything that could extinguish it. All those drawings, those pencils and plans, interior and exterior — had he forgotten it all now? Now that his attention had moved elsewhere? Adi did not think about it in those terms, choosing instead to tell himself that in the effort and energies needed by his father to make a business thrive, this murmuring little dream, a secret between the two of them, really, first became inaudible, then, over time, as it no longer made its presence felt, was forgotten. Now that he had impulsively framed the answer to his father’s demands in such a way that there was a possibility of Prafullanath being reminded of that forgotten secret and, worse, beginning to acknowledge a kind of abandonment, Adi felt panic creeping up on him. All he wanted was for the conversation to skirr off in another direction; he could not bear to have his father put form and substance in words to the one particular, vital loosening that had happened to their bond.

‘Who’s going to look after the business then?’ asked Prafullanath. ‘You are my eldest son, it’s part of the order of things that you should take over from me.’

‘I can do that as soon as I’ve qualified. It’s only four years.’ He felt a momentary reprieve, but also a shadowy disappointment, that the conversation had not gone down the feared path.

‘No, you are going to start coming to the office with me regularly, not the two-days-a-week we’ve done so far. You’ve got to start learning the ropes. In business experience is everything.’

Adi bravely tried another argument. ‘I thought engineering would provide a solid foundation for the manufacturing side of things,’ he lied. But the relief had won out and he could not bring them both to the brink of a reckoning again by divulging that he was actually going to read mechanical engineering. In order to spare his father, he elaborated on the lie, ‘It would be good to know how paper is made, how to improve its quality, the science and mechanics of it. .’

Again he was cut short.

‘We know how paper is made. There are machines to do it, people to run the machines. It’s made the way it has been made all these years. Not much use, all this science and engineering and mechanics. No education can be a substitute for experience. What good is book-learning going to do? It’s like teaching parrots to speak. Look at me: what harm has lack of education done to me? I left home at the age of nineteen, a year after my father’s death. I worked my way up, beginning as a shop assistant, bundling paper, filling and emptying carriages, as an errand-boy. We did not have the luxuries of education and universities like your lot. We worked so hard that the sweat from our heads dropped onto our feet. Engineering was no help then. .’

Adi’s attention cut out at this point. He had heard the narrative many, many times before, the story of Prafullanath Ghosh, self-made man: his escape from his parental home; his rise from rags to riches; his resilience against the cruelties and injustices the world threw at him; his ultimate ascendancy; the shaky beginnings to the current solidity of his construction business, which he had started from scratch. . not for the first time it struck Adi that clichés were clichés because they were truths that had been lived out by generation after generation of people before him. By the time those lived truths were inherited by him, they had become foxed, crumpled, brown and brittle with age. Through the entire discourse, however, Adinath remained still, his head respectfully lowered; he did not know anything else. It also served as a way of hiding the imprint on his face of the knowledge that he had just acquired: his father has forgotten that anything special had ever existed between them. He need not have feared, after all.

It may be said, not unfairly, that Prafullanath, having missed out on the experience of higher education himself and, therefore, to some extent, partly unsympathetic to it and partly unable to enter its potential imaginatively, had stumbled upon the business of educating his sons and daughter as an afterthought, extemporising on the basis of whim, or the chatter of other people, or the prevailing fashion in circles more elevated than the one to which he belonged, a familiar variant of the aspirational urge. So when the issue presented itself, the matter of convenience overruled all other considerations: Adi and Priyo were sent to Ballygunge Government High School on Beltala Road, a bare one and a half miles north-east from their home and, later, Bhola, to whom his parents gave the least attention, to the even nearer Mitra Institution. An unusual thing happened when it came to his daughter. It was only by a stroke of chance that the imminence of sending Chhaya to school coincided with one of Prafullanath’s acquaintances remarking on the vital necessity of English education. The idea caught. In an uncharacteristic and momentary fit of daring, he had Chhaya admitted to an English-medium school, St John’s Diocesan on Elgin Road. As if to atone for it, there was a throwback with Bhola, then again a reaching for the heights when it came to the jewel of his life, Somnath, who was sent to the highly reputed missionary school, St Xavier’s, on Park Street.

In the twelve years between Adi and Somu, Prafullanath had felt, in every pore of his body, the toil involved in making a business stand on its feet, so he had banished, with wry casualness, the grand ambitions for several varied businesses that he had harboured for himself and his sons; in that sense, Adi was correct that his father had forgotten what it was that lay between them. While unable to acknowledge that the vastness of his earlier designs was linked in a straightforward if intricate causality to the life he had had before the great rupture happened, Prafullanath was steadfast in his aim of handing over the captaincy of Charu Paper in the future.