Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

Ashish Roy sits through the tirade blinking and drooling like an idiot. He does not look particularly embarrassed or mortified. What is going on in the prickly thickets of his unknowable mind, Sona has no idea. Sona himself wants to become inanimate, like the Basak Stores calendar, something outside the horizons of human address.

She turns to him and spits out, barely bothering to change her tone, ‘And you. You go home now. Don’t come here again.’

This Sona understands — it is plain, unclothed rejection. Scampering off through the gap between the scolding woman and the door, he cannot turn back to answer Mad Ashu’s desperately slurred shout directed at his fleeing figure: ‘Ei, wait, stop, where do you live?’

Running back home in the dark, with a thudding heart and flaming ears, past Pandey’s cowshed and its attendant smell-cloud of cow-dung and hay, then the corner shop with its one weak taper and strings of peanut brittle hanging from an open shutter, Sona sees old Panchanan, with his cheeks sunk in on his toothless gums, sitting behind the grubby glass jars of sweets and savouries. In the daytime he would perhaps have called out to Sona, ‘Ei je, mathematics-moshai, where are you headed?’ but it is pitch-dark now. Sona is often sent to Panchanan’s tiny shop to buy four-annas’ worth of puffed rice or a candle or a box of matches or a plastic bottle of kerosene for the small stove that his mother had lately started using to cook on. He runs faster, knowing his mother is going to be worried.

At home, the usual rusty clockwork of festering days. Mejo-kaki is shouting at a maidservant because the stairwell and the inner verandahs, the courtyard, are all utterly dark and the servant has failed to dispel it quickly enough. From their room Sona can see the weakest illumination of candlelight. Madan-da can be heard muttering to himself as he emerges from his room near the back garden and goes upstairs; from his tone it seems that he is none too pleased with something or the other.

Purba asks, ‘Why are you so late?’

Her son lies, ‘I had to do some extra work with Sougata.’ In that moment of involuntary lying he understands that he is going to find ways to circumvent the stricture forbidding him to visit the professor.

Purba asks, ‘Did they give you anything to eat?’

Kalyani, sitting on the floor, doing nothing at all, turns to him, all attention.

‘Yes, rice pudding,’ he says.

‘Rice pudding?’ mother and daughter ask together. ‘What was the occasion?’

Sona, face averted from them, mumbles, ‘I think it was Sougata’s birthday a couple of days ago.’

Here too Sona has something to hide, but it belongs to a different order of privacy. This afternoon, while he was doing his usual three-times-a-week English tuition, Mala-mashi had brought in, halfway through the tutorial, three bowls of chilled rice pudding, one each for the two boys and one for Sanjay Banerjee, the new English tutor. (Dibyendu-da had left after six months, to become a Naxalite, it was rumoured.)

‘It was Bumba’s birthday on Wednesday,’ she announced coyly while handing out the bowls.

Sanjay-da had wished Sougata happy birthday while the boys concentrated furiously on the bowls in their hands, hoping to avoid any excruciating social small talk.

Ever since Sona had moved to St Lawrence School last year, his status in the Saha house had changed, but not entirely for the better. On the one hand Mala-mashi was clearly impressed, expressing a hooded admiration: ‘Now that your skill in mathematics has taken you to a better school,’ she said, ‘you must make sure that some of your cleverness rubs off on Bumba.’ Sometimes she operated through coiled locutions where occluded envy and a calculating expectation fought a tug-of-war: ‘A tiny bit of credit for moving up must be given to all the help Sona has had with English, his weakest subject, in the tutorials at our home,’ she said to the neighbours, ‘let’s hope he remembers that’; obligation can loop more complicated knots around the giver than the receiver. Occasionally something boiled over in her and she said to Sona, ‘You’ve reduced coming here to three days a week instead of the usual five, now that you’re in a better school. So be it. But you’re not the type to become arrogant. We, on our part, are happy to do the little that will help you along, regardless of five days or three.’

She stretched to identical cups and bowls for tutor and both students now — previously Sona had been given stainless steel while Sougata and the tutor got china — but took away with the other hand: she exited the room with a comment that left no one in any doubt that she grudged the little good she had done this neighbour’s boy. Couched, of course, as caring affection.

Today it was a different variation. Today the rice pudding was laced with: ‘Just because you’ve now moved to a big school, it doesn’t mean that you can’t have some of the rice pudding I made for your not-very-clever friend’s birthday.’

Sona, cocooned for the most part against this kind of poison, stayed silent and ran his spoon through the rice: it was a luxurious version with sultanas and cashews. He put a spoonful in his mouth. It was so delicious, coating every millimetre inside his mouth with its silky richness, that he closed his eyes. On his birthdays, his mother struggled to make him the obligatory rice pudding; she had to make do with broken rice, rather than the expensive gobinda-bhog, while raisins and nuts were beyond her imagining. He felt almost physically swayed by a wave of pity for his mother. His eyes prickled and the rice pudding, now bitter in his mouth, refused to move down his obstructed throat. In fierce defiance he thought that his mother’s rice pudding was the best in the world; this one in his wretched hand could not even begin to compare with it.

Now to be asked a direct question, albeit in all innocence, about something that had nearly unseated him from his studied indifference seems like the resurgence of a newly anaesthetised pain. So he treads with the utmost caution while answering, refusing to give out any signal of weakness. Besides, he is itching to have another go at trying to prove p = x 2+ y 2if (and only if) p = 1 (mod 4). That Brahmagupta identity, so teasingly dangled in front of him, could well be the key to unlock it, but it is unattainable, at least for the moment, from Pagla Ashu, so he will have to figure out a way of finding it.

Sona knows who he can ask. The mathematics teacher in the senior school of St Lawrence, Swapan Adhikari, is a legend. He has a reputation for being fierce and bad-tempered. It is said that he pulls up lazy boys from their seats by their sideburns and is the acknowledged master of the ‘double slap’, a strike to the face so forceful that it flings aside the first boy to be hit and lands resoundingly on the cheek of the boy sitting next to him, taking care, with great efficiency, of two boys sitting on the same bench and talking, or not paying attention, in class. He is impatient with, and frankly not interested in, those who have no aptitude, instead choosing to concentrate on the one or two who are gifted. Given that he neglects nearly all his students and can’t be bothered to follow the rules set by the syllabus, it is surprising that he has been kept on as senior (and only) mathematics teacher. And this despite a growing clamour from parents that Mr Adhikari is responsible for their sons’ underwhelming performance in mathematics, their being ‘unripe in maths’.

Mr Adhikari has a degree in pure mathematics; that alone sets him apart from most school teachers. He thinks differently and discourages all his students from the learning by rote that is the basic, dominant and only model of education. Ingest and vomit — that is the order of things; you learn by heart reams and reams, and then regurgitate it all during examinations. Everything — History, Geography, Bengali, English, Science — is dealt with in this one unchanging way. It develops only one faculty, memory, and atrophies everything, most of all thinking. You can see the results of this in the teachers themselves; there is a blankness, something of a ruminant’s absence of thought about them.