Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

She has started shivering now: the hind legs and the wing-ends of the insect still stick out of the reptile’s mouth and then disappear as the peristaltic movements within the lizard, something she can clearly see as a slow ripple of convulsions, convey the prey inside. A dry heave goes through her, as if in answer to the motion she is witnessing. Another heave. The lizard stays still, bloated at its centre, its skin so thin, almost to the point of translucence, that she thinks she can see the struggling cockroach — or is it dead by now? — inside. Then, in an unimaginable moment, the reptile ejects the brown wings of the ingested insect through its mouth. As the wings float down to the floor, Kalyani, paralysed as a creature in a malign myth a few seconds before, throws up all over her Bengali textbook. At that exact moment her mother, barely able to suppress her sobbing, storms into the room.

Three floors up, in the bedroom of her parents-in-law, Kalyani’s mother, Purba, is making their bed as her mother-in-law, Charubala, stands by, watching her as a falcon watches a quivering rabbit. Purba has done this, every single evening, for the last eleven years, but she knows that the possibility of slipping up is infinite. A pleat not smoothed down, the sheets on the bed not pulled tightly enough before being tucked under the mattress, the bolster and pillows not fluffed up perfectly. . it surprises her that these ambushes can still trip her up. Today, the slowly ticking silence in the room since she has entered it makes her prepare herself for something worse than the usual corrosive nagging. God alone knows from which direction it is going to come. She hears her Mejo-jaa call out to her daughter, ‘Buliiii, come inside, don’t stand on the verandah at this hour, everyone can see you’, weakened and muffled in its passage two floors up, and as if on cue the barrage begins. And, as always, it begins with finding fault with the task at hand.

‘Cataracts!’ Charubala barks, ‘have you suddenly developed cataracts in your eyes? Can’t you see the dustball in that corner, or do I need to point everything out to you? Who is doing the cleaning: you or I, hyan?’

Purba dutifully takes up the broom, resweeps the corner of its imaginary dustball and resumes making the bed. But before she can touch the sheets, Charubala shrieks, ‘Touching my bedsheets directly after touching the broom? You sewer-witch! Go wash your hands immediately. Use soap.’

Purba, silent, head bowed as always, enters the bathroom, runs the tap at the sink and stands watching it, without washing her hands, for what she considers a seemly duration, then turns off the tap, counts up to five, comes back into Ma’s room and carries on with making the bed. She knows that Charubala’s outburst has been only a prelude, a kind of clearing of the throat before the real singing begins. She continues lifting and tucking, waiting for the inevitable; what makes her jittery is not knowing the particular form it is going to take.

‘Have you gathered the dry washing today? It’s getting dark, I have no idea why you leave it till so late. The evening dew will make it damp. You can’t be trusted to do anything properly nowadays. What’s got into you?’

Purba cannot work out where this is leading, so she hesitates before replying.

‘What, someone’s put a lock on your tongue?’

‘I was going to do it after I’d made your bed,’ Purba bleats, her head still lowered. If she so much as dares to look up, she will be accused of being disrespectful and intransigent.

‘To time it with Shobhon Datta’s cigarette break on his terrace next door. Do you think we’re blind?’

Purba reddens instantly. The accuracy or incorrectness of what her mother-in-law is accusing her of is irrelevant; the fact that it has been articulated means that a certain set of assumptions has been made about her character and given public existence in the form of an utterance. It is in the nature of flung mud that some of it sticks.

Charubala takes her youngest daughter-in-law’s blushing as evidentiary proof of a guilty soul. There is no stopping her now. ‘Chhee, chhee! Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? You are a widow, a mother of two. You’ll bring shame and scandal on our family, more than you’ve already done. .’

‘But, Ma, this is not true,’ Purba manages to speak out, before Charubala cuts her short.

‘So you’re accusing me of lying? Oh god, I had to live to see this, accused of being a liar by a girl from another family. Was this what was written on my forehead?’

Purba hastens to negate this, but knows it is pointless. If she does not choose her words carefully, she will dig herself in deeper, but if she remains quiet, locked in the incredulity at what is being thrown at her, she will condemn herself equally.

Charubala, on the other hand, is on a roll. ‘Shame! Shame! I see that I shall have to keep a sharper eye on you. God knows what’s going to happen if anyone finds out’ — Purba knows that she is going to make sure that everyone does — ‘the good name of the Ghosh family will lie in the dust. Haven’t you done enough to make us suffer? I knew from the very beginning that you were trouble, I told your father-in-law, when the match was being made, Listen, she comes from a lower-caste family, her father is a mere postal worker, it’s not right that such a girl should come into our family , but he didn’t listen. Now we are all reaping the cost.’ Charubala, of course, was mindful that the Ghoshes were not perched on a high rung of the caste-ladder, so she was grateful to have a few upon whom she could look down. The gratitude expressed itself as venom for those below.

Years of this kind of unceasing torrent have somewhat blunted but not eliminated, not by any measure, the keenness of the hurt and humiliation Purba feels when faced with it. She wants the ground to open up and swallow her. She shuts her eyes, hoping that when she opens them, she will discover all this is a bad dream, but the trick fails her yet again.

‘If I see you on the roof in the evening, I will have to take other measures. I shall see then how much appetite for secret love you have when you’re starving.’

If she had any residue of dignity left, she would have long run out of the room, Purba thinks, but she has fallen far, far below that. Even anger at being treated like this has been burned out of her. What remains is a dead weight of darkness. Her eyes rest on the powder-blue sheets and pillowcases and the stripy blue and yellow tasselled bedcover. If she looks up, she knows she will see the rolled-up mosquito net, a large, crumpled, brooding bird, above the bedposts, but she cannot move her head or her eyes to glance upwards. There is no salvation to be had from the objects in the world.

Supported by his silver-tipped cane, Prafullanath hobbles to the room adjacent to his bedroom, towards his daily ritual of early evening tea, unchanged for the last twenty years. It is the second and last time he leaves his bed during the day, for an hour, to sit, imprisoned in the hardened angularities of his pain, staring at the Charu Paper & Sons (Pvt. Ltd) calendar on the opposite wall, a cup of unsweetened, milky tea in his hands tilting slowly to spill out half its tepid contents onto the saucer and sometimes onto his pyjama.

Prafullanath waits for Madan to bring his tea and a couple of Marie biscuits and with them, invariably, he notes with mounting dread, the compulsive jabbering. Ever since the upheavals involving Madan’s son, Dulal, last year, it has been deeply uncomfortable for Prafullanath to be alone in a room with him; and these teatimes, where Madan, in blithe denial, has not eased off his habitual pointless chatter, as if nothing in the recent past has happened to make him as uncomfortable as Prafullanath in each other’s presence, have been especially excruciating. The old man has toyed with the idea of asking Madan to stop jabbering, has spent months appearing to be conspicuously restless and impatient and distracted, often cutting him short and changing the topic, but the cook has persisted with such terrier-like tenacity, apparently oblivious to the signals being given out, that Prafullanath has accepted this small defeat and has locked himself away deeper inside his own head, while Madan has wittered on about chicken stew and how fish in mustard sauce gives you hyperacidity and about Patit, the driver, drinking, and Gagan, the general dogsbody, being caught gambling at shatta in the slums across the railway lines. . Does Madan seriously think that Prafullanath, at the age of almost seventy, arthritic, diabetic, with an ischaemic heart and two heart attacks already behind him, is interested in these paltry nothings? Besides, domestic servants are the women’s domain; he does not remember if he has ever had a word with Charu, his wife, about this excess in Madan, now grown so trying. He must remember to talk to her tonight and see if she can arrange for it to stop; Madan has always been her creature, while his role has only been to pay his salary.