Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

From his room Prafulla could hear voices raised, sometimes in altercation, sometimes in calculating cheer, as if it were not around a death that they had congregated, but a jubilation. Often this was accompanied by the sharp methyl smell of the spirits that lubricated the raucous proceedings. Forbidden from participating, Prafulla paced his room like a caged beast.

Braja’s next step was to have everything transferred to his own name — the business, the house, the bank accounts, the assets and properties — effectively disinheriting Prafulla of his share of the patrimony and making him a dependant.

‘I have done it for your own good, you’ll come to understand one day,’ Braja said to him. ‘You will work your way up to the top. That training will be invaluable.’

Those who saw it as the barefaced robbery it was, most notably Chitta-babu, Chittadas Roy, the manager of Ghosh Gold Palace, and Manmathnath’s friend and accomplice for decades, kept their mouths sealed.

Prafulla could not choke down his outrage. ‘Why are you cutting me out like this? It’s wrong. I am as much my father’s son as you are,’ he said.

This was exactly the opening Braja needed; if he played it carefully, Prafulla was going to do Braja’s dirty work for him.

‘Alas, I can’t believe I’ve lived to see the day when I hear my very own younger brother talk of my father and your father,’ Braja said.

‘I have rights to all the things that you’re denying me.’

Braja ratcheted up his display of hurt. ‘Rights? I saw you being born, and you talk to me of rights? Has it now come to this?’ His voice did an impression of a wobble. ‘I feel I’m being called a thief by those very people for whom I do the stealing. This is all to protect you, and now you talk to me of division of. . of. .’ He let this trail off for maximum impact.

Wrong-footed, Prafulla dropped the matter for the time being. It was raked up again, this time by a meeting with Chitta-babu, at which the elderly gentleman, clearly struggling to present a calm surface over the roil of things he could not bring himself to articulate in front of this young man, hinted darkly, ‘If your father were alive, this. . this sin would have been undreamt-of. One day you will understand all this. I can’t say any more than that. But if you soon find yourself in need of help, I mean any kind of help, look at me, child, look at me; any kind of help, come to me and I’ll see what I can do. More than this I cannot say. I hope you understand my constraints. But remember, He is seeing everything from above, He’ll not let this pass.’

Prafulla, who had a reasonable idea of what the great unmentionable could be, confronted Braja again. This time Braja’s wife, Surama, took a lead role. Speculation, not entirely baseless, had it that it was Surama who had poisoned her husband’s mind against his much younger brother: it was she who had made a big thing out of the fact that the two brothers had different mothers, gainfully exploiting, if not initiating, a wild suggestion that Braja’s mother, Manmathnath’s first wife, had killed herself in mysterious circumstances, no one knew how. The propinquity of Braja’s mother’s death and Manmathnath’s second marriage was a ready gift for this compulsive hyper-fictionalising tendency in Bengali culture; Surama was an exemplar. Yet Prafulla knew, even if he never gave it recognition in words, that Surama had had malleable material to mould.

‘He is the son from the “second phase”,’ she was reputed to have said to Braja, ‘he will usurp your place in your father’s affections and you’ll find yourself left with nothing. Act quickly.’

She had harped on the theme, with creative variations, for years until surmise and suspicion had solidified into truth; to Braja and Surama, Prafulla, a mere fledgling of ten when they got married in 1908, matured in their imagination into a raptor.

In the nine months since her father-in-law’s death and, crucially, a year since the longed-for birth of a boy, Surama had amplified the behind-the-scenes attacks: ‘You have to think about your son now,’ she said, ‘and secure his future. What if your brother takes everything away from us and lands us in the street? What will happen to your heir?’

The mask of filial duty had at last slipped at the final confrontation. Braja’s calculated air of grievance got so much on Prafulla’s nerves that he called his bluff.

‘Stop your acting!’ he said. ‘I’ve had enough. The pain you say you’re feeling, I know exactly how much that is. I want to go through all the property and shop papers. I want my name on half of everything.’

‘I told you,’ Surama said, addressing her husband, ‘I told you that we were raising a snake with milk and rice. “Acting,” he says. How can you swallow such an insult? We have practically brought him up, and this is our reward.’

Braja’s practised lugubrious conduct now allowed a very slight tug of amused contempt at the corners of his mouth, but the words that emerged continued with pretend hurt.

‘My heart feels ready to burst—’ he began, but Prafulla cut him short.

‘Why have you cut me off from everything?’ he demanded. ‘Going to the shop is forbidden, learning the business hands-on is forbidden. . What else is out of bounds for me? This house as well? When I last went to the shop everyone was avoiding looking directly at me, all the salesmen, the craftsmen, Chitta-babu, Samar-babu, Ramaprasad-babu. What have you said to them? Why do I feel like a pariah? Even the servants in this house, my home. . There seems to be something I’m not getting, I’m being left out of. What have you and Boüdi done to them?’

This was the opening Braja needed. ‘You are overstepping some boundaries here,’ he warned. There was flint somewhere in his voice now, so different from the faux-plush earlier.

‘You are stealing everything from me and you sit here talking of boundaries? Yes, I have overstepped the boundaries of my patience,’ Prafulla shouted.

The opera of Bengali life, already pitched so high, had begun.

‘How dare you say that!’ Braja said. ‘Stealing? Stealing?’

‘Yes, stealing. Baba said to me that half of everything is mine. You’re trying to cheat me out of the business. Now I want to know what else you’re cheating me out of.’

‘ Baba said, Baba said ,’ Braja mimicked the voice of a whining child. Then the flint returned. ‘Can you prove what Baba said? Where is it written down that half of everything is yours? Go on, show me. And you’re still a minor and a dependant.’

‘No, I’m not, I’m nineteen. And you beat me like a dog because you are burning with envy, you have always known that Baba loved me more.’

From this point the escalation was linear, short and simple. Prafulla declared that he was leaving home for ever; it was not his home any longer, his brother was a snake, poison ran in his veins; he had betrayed their father and the trust that had been vested in him and the duty of care and responsibility; he had engineered to bring it to a state where Prafulla would be left with no choice but to leave. . In this world of overheated reactions and hysteria, words spoken carried with them the unearthable charge of honour and insult; they remained crackling and alive for generation after generation. Another boundary was crossed, this time without the possibility of return.

Prafulla walked away from half of what was rightfully his, leaving behind a world of chandeliers, fleets of servants, the Beeston Humberette and a De Dion-Bouton, a world of diamond buttons on his panjabi, of womenfolk wearing fifty-bhari gold waistlets at ceremonies, of a 300-square-foot showroom on 130 Baubazar Street, which remained thronged with customers every single hour that it was open. He was never to return.