Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

The swish of sari, the rattle of keys tied to her aanchol, and the tinkle of bangles heralds the approach of Jayanti.

‘Is your homework done?’ she asks. ‘Arunima, I can only see tools of study, but not a single open book or exercise copy. You think I won’t notice?’

Arunima does not bother to look up.

Jayanti raises her voice: ‘Arunima, I’m talking to you, look up. Why don’t you have a book open in front of you? Don’t you have homework to do? Am I to believe it’s all done by half-past six? Where is your Bengali book? You got four out of twenty in your Bengali spelling test last week. Shameful, shameful! You can’t seem to get your head around the difference between the short and long ‘i’ sounds. And you’re now sitting here wasting your time sharpening pencils.’

Arunima has this all sorted out in her head, including the trump card she slaps down in front of her mother. ‘There’s no Bengali class tomorrow, Ma, only homework for Eng. Lit. and Drawing. I was sharpening the pencils for drawing class. You know how angry Sister Josephine gets if our pencils are blunt.’ Pause. ‘If you want, I can start on the Eng. Lit. homework instead.’

Arunima knows, with the confident cruelty of a child, that her mother increasingly fears all her subjects except Bengali, because everything else is in English and, therefore, outside her reach; the downside of sending her daughter to the English-medium Carmel Convent. Only after she has said that does she look up to note the hesitating deflation of her mother, then she lowers her eyes, seemingly absorbed again in preparing her pencils exactly as Sister Josephine likes them. The jewel inside her flickers and gleams.

Jayanti, the wind taken out of her sails, aims for a swift rebuttal that would save her face, but all she can come up with is, ‘Well, then, after you’re done with Drawing and English, I want you to go through “Shiladitya” from Raj Kahini . I’ll be back to test you on it.’

Feeling a sense of bathos at what she has just said, Jayanti adds, ‘I don’t want you sneaking out of the room before you’re finished with your lessons. No inattentiveness’ and huffily leaves the room.

Sitting on a battered rush mat on the floor of the dingy room, which she shares with her mother and her brother, Kalyani looks at the open book in front of her with a familiar mixture of bafflement, indifference and boredom. That dreary, unfathomable story again about those two impeccably good children, Hashi and Tata, and their strange relationship with a king with a toothsome name, Gobindamanikya. For all that she can make out, the lines in front of her could be the effect of a swarm of insects, their legs dipped in ink, let loose on straight, closed tracks on the pages; the letters and words, one after the other, make no more sense to her than that. She has difficulty reading on the very basic level of individual words. If she fails again this year, she will be thrown out of school. For two years running she has remained in Class Three of their local school, Katjunagar Swarnamayee Bidyapith. Without the help of her elder brother, Sona, she would have been expelled last year, for she had failed in every single subject. But Dada is busy preparing for an exam that will help him move, if he is successful, from the government school, where he is now, to the better, more prestigious Calcutta Boys, and it has been decided that his fees are going to be paid by Mejo-jyethu, so Sona is putting in extra hours after school at his friend Sougata’s home.

Which is just as well, because if he stays on late enough he is at least going to get a proper meal there, with most likely two kinds of vegetable dishes, fish, even mutton or chicken if he gets lucky, not the unchanging watery dal-rice-mashed-potatoes that they have every evening, unless someone from upstairs sends something down. By some unspoken agreement their dinnertime has been pushed further and further back, even within Kalyani’s short living memory, so that they eat after ten o’clock now; perhaps in the hope that salvation in the form of leftover cauliflower-and-potato fry or egg curry or even stale, old food that the people upstairs won’t eat any more will get sent down. Often, that does not happen.

She hears the call — ‘Buliiii, come inside, don’t stand on the verandah at this hour, everyone can see you’ — in her aunt’s ox-bellow of a voice, and the residue of guilt and fear that is left in her, pricking her to apply herself to the insurmountable nature of her school work, vanishes, replaced by colourful dreams of all the cosmetics that Buli-di has and which Kalyani so cravenly desires. Lipstick and nail polish are magic words to her: they can make the entirety of the known world disappear. As far as she can ascertain, Buli-di has one shade of lipstick — a pomegranate-flower red — and two bottles of nail polish: hot pink and scarlet. Buli-di isn’t allowed to wear lipstick — Kalyani saw her hastily and brutally removing it from her mouth one evening last year during Durga Puja, standing at the corner before entering Basanta Bose Road; she had been out with her friends, doing the evening tour of the different pandals of South Calcutta — but nail polish, while not exactly endorsed by her mother, does not carry such a flagrant charge. She is not even sure if Buli-di owned the lipstick or was wearing one of her friends’. If the former, she would certainly have to keep it stashed well away from the prying eyes of her mother. If only Kalyani can discover where that secret place is. . But she is not even allowed to go to any of the floors above without being looked at as if she were a mangy dog that has strayed indoors, so rooting around in Buli-di’s room on the first floor is a wild dream, no more. Besides, if Kalyani’s mother finds out that she has been upstairs without her permission, she will be ‘beaten to the shape of a plank’, as her mother never ceases to remind her.

They have to stay hidden away, all three of them, in one room on the ground floor of this big four-storey house, as if they were servants and not what they really are, true family, she and Sona first cousins to Bor’-da and Chhor’-da, Buli-di, and Arunima. Each of the brothers and their families got a whole floor to themselves, while she and her mother and brother had to remain cooped up in what was nothing more than a hastily emptied-out junk storage room, with one low bed and a cracked, smoky mirror, both rejects from upstairs, a rusting metal wardrobe with doors that did not stay shut and a rolled-up mattress and folded-up mosquito net that sat in one end of the room and were spread out for her and her mother before bedtime every night while Sona, being the son, had the pallet.

Not that Kalyani has ever thought this set-up to be unfair, in the sense of assigning it that particular term and being consequently moved along the path of enquiry on causes and reasons. The situation is as it is, she has known no better and she has unconsciously imbibed, from her mother and from the very air circulating in this nether region of the house, not to ask questions or even think of them in the first place, so the incongruence in the conditions of the families of the three brothers upstairs and her mother’s hardly ever strikes her as anything other than an ineluctable fact, as given as the fact of a tree rising upwards from the soil or of rain falling in the direction of the earth.

Or the fact of the fawn-coloured lizard edging closer and closer, with utmost furtiveness, towards the cockroach perched under the tube-light on the wall she faces. The sight freezes her; fear mingled with a repulsion that gives her the sensation of a whole forest of tiny hairs along her spine and back rising to attention. Her stomach heaves, yet she cannot take her eyes off the atavistic scene unfolding two yards in front of her: the cockroach seems unaware of the predator inching closer, or is perhaps hypnotised by the prospect of imminent death. Suddenly, so quickly she thinks she has imagined it, the lizard flicks out its gummy tongue and swallows the cockroach whole.