Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

Prafulla, Manmathnath’s son from his second marriage, had lost his mother at birth. Manmathnath, cradling the motherless infant, had said to Braja, his elder son, ‘This baby has never seen his mother’s face. The two of us are his only world. We have to be mother and father to him, in the way I have tried to be both to you, after you lost your own mother. I married again so that you could have another mother in your chhoto-ma. That dream is now ashes. You are twelve years older than he, you must be not only a brother to him, but also another father.’

But it was the death of Manmathnath that was the true turning point in Prafulla’s life; to speak of his world and his father as two separate things was meaningless. Manmathnath had established and run Calcutta’s biggest and best jewellery house, Ghosh Gold Palace, and had lovingly explained to his younger son, without a trace of condescension in his voice, his innovations in the Bengali jewellery trade; Prafulla, despite himself, could still remember everything from those lessons, which he had absorbed eagerly as stories. He could remember the long, noisy, rattling trip in the Beeston Humberette to the huge showroom of the Great Eastern Motor Company in Park Street, where he was taken to feast his eyes on the steam- and motor-cars on display. The open-mouthed stares of people who stopped in their tracks to see that rarity, a car, phut-phutting down Circular Road. (The child Prafulla was not immune to this sense of wonder; he and his brother sat for long hours on the front balcony to watch motorcycles going down the street; when a horse-drawn brougham or a victoria or, better still, an Oldsmobile, made an appearance, the boys’ day was made.) Much earlier, when he was a little boy carried in the tight embrace of his father’s arms, the spectacular experience of watching the ascent of a gas-balloon carrying a man up-up-up from the Oriental Gas Company fields to the sky. The kadam tree in the garden that looked adorned with perfect spheres of creamy-golden light in the monsoon. The man who came around every evening, a ladder on his shoulder, lighting the street lamps. The unearthly rhythmic song of the Oriya palanquin bearers — Dhakkunabor hei-yan nabor, dhakkunabor hei-yan nabor — going about their business on the streets of Chitpur. Much later, the pale-brown-and-yellow trams with their many doors and their wondrous ting-ting-ting sound as they approached. The ‘khut’ sound as the conductor gave his father his ticket, which he handed to his son immediately. The priceless treasure of the Calcutta Tramways Company ticket, with writing in English and Bengali equally divided on front and back, which he saved in his little box of precious collectables along with pigeon and crow and sparrow feathers, coloured beads, pieces of shiny coloured glass, string, ribbons, buttons, a piece from a broken anklet, tamarind seeds, even a seashell. The drudgery of having to sit through Vidyasagar’s Barna Parichay and Parry Charan Sirkar’s First Book of English in the occasionally sooty light of hurricanes. Running his thrilled fingers over the tight and precise accordion of creases made by the servants, using gila seeds, on the sleeves of his father’s panjabi. The pile of sitabhog, like heaped petals of jasmine, brought all the way from Bardhaman on the train, and he seated on his father’s lap, being fed with a silver spoon from a silver bowl spoonfuls of that divine sweet. ‘The Great Bengal Circus’ one evening, once again sitting next to his father, his left hand clasped to his father’s right throughout, the boy, enchanted, watching the Bengali strongman, Shyamakanta-babu, breaking enormous boulders on his chest.

This father, who had loved his motherless younger son more than the irises of his own eyes, more than the weight and value of gold and diamonds that passed through his shop every month, this man had suddenly died and Prafulla, completely orphaned, had found himself falling falling falling as if he had chanced upon the trapdoor that connected his life to the black infinity of space.

Braja took to heart their father’s injunction, warming to the task, most enthusiastically in the disciplining duties of brotherly care. Prafulla would never forget the day when Braja had summoned every single servant in the house and had belted him mercilessly in front of them for the misdemeanour of calling one of the servants a ‘son of a pig’, a filthy term in the mouth of someone so green. That hectic performance of tough love under the stairs might have established the credentials of Braja as an ideal elder brother in the eyes of the world, but in the boy’s mind it planted the first seeds of the suspicion that Braja resented him for being the second wife’s son.

In the months after their father’s death Braja found a liberation, manifested in the frequent explosive flowerings of his cruelty. What shame and pain Prafulla had felt when he had been thrashed repeatedly without any reason, again in the view of everyone in the house who cared to see — and everyone did — and again without anything, or anyone, to restrain Braja. He knew then that nothing in his future could ever hold the terror of the prelude to these beatings: Braja taking off, one by slow one, the dozen or so rings that he wore to channel the propitious influences of the stars and planets, that warm-up exercise lovingly undertaken so that the metals or any protruding stone did not do any serious damage to his brother’s face or mouth or eyes — such consideration — and Prafulla standing there, trying to control his pelvic floor so that he did not add the humiliation of pissing himself to the deluge that was about to break over him. A chasm had long opened up between Prafulla’s public manner of respect and esteem for his dada, a mask that he put on every day and tried to keep firmly in place, and the private knowledge that the feelings which bound the brothers together were envy, rivalry, rancour.

First, there was Braja’s great reluctance in having Prafulla continue to come to the shop in the mornings, as he had started doing in the company of their father to learn the ropes. ‘In the jewellery trade,’ Manmathnath used to repeat like a favourite chant, ‘experience is everything , the first-hand, touched-by-your-skin, seen-with-your-eyes experience of handling gold and jewels — that is the greatest education.’ Braja had benefited from it; now it was Prafulla’s turn. While Manmathnath had been alive, Braja had had to keep a secure lid on his antipathy; now it became an open sanction against Prafulla coming in to Ghosh Gold Palace. Prafulla bit down on his indignation and acquiesced, but could no longer contain himself when his uncles and their grown-up sons started circling in the hope of rich pickings. His three uncles all had their own jewellery shops, all variants using the Ghosh name, but none a quarter as successful as his father’s business; this added to the animosity that had already led to the brothers setting up separate businesses.

Days and nights of people, his relatives, going in and out of their enormous house in Garpar, relatives who had hardly shown their faces during his father’s lifetime because jealousy and enmity ran so deep, now brimming over with solicitous tenderness for Manmathnath’s orphaned sons. Soon, the eloquent sympathies were directed only at Braja, and Prafulla was ignored; the uncles had only had to sniff the air to work out who held the keys. All these uncles, at once frayed and battened by their perfumed lives of khemta dances, alcohol, the obligatory visit to the brother before returning home — when they did return home — to the ministrations of their cosseting, dutiful wives, these uncles who had lived off their family wealth and dissipated it in such sybaritic style, they had all come rushing to see if they could invoke family and heritability and loot more fuel for their finite fires and infinite appetites.