Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

Leaving them to carry on, Madan discreetly picked up the cat in his arms and took it to his room. He got some warm milk from the kitchen, dipped a clean piece of cloth in it and squeezed slow drops into the sleeping creature’s mouth when he noticed it beginning to stir. Would it live? At least it was still breathing. He put the cat’s head on his lap and covered the lower half of the animal with a sheet so that it did not get cold. Was it only last year that he had stayed up two nights in a row, putting cold-water compresses on Somnath’s forehead when he was burning up with fever? Ma’s face had been thin and desiccated with worry. The doctor had said that the boy should be given cold sponges every hour and monitored throughout the night to ensure that his temperature did not shoot up. It was nothing for him to obey those orders, to see Somu-babu returned to health again. His Dulal, whom he got to see only once a year during the month-long visit to his village, was just under a year younger than Somu-babu. For the eleven months of the year that he was in Calcutta, Somu-babu was a substitute Dulal; Madan held little distinction in his head between the two boys.

Chhaya carried tales, not all of which were innocent. She got a thrill out of poisoning people’s minds and playing them off against each other. ‘Bhola’s digging dirt in the garden, you asked him not to,’ she said to her mother to try and get him into trouble; she snitched about Adinath: ‘I saw Dada going to the terrace in the afternoon sun and he told me not to tell you.’ She expected to be rewarded for all this. When the kulfiwalla went down the road in the late afternoon, with his terracotta pots, covered in woven jute, full of ices and kulfis, Chhaya kept an eye on who among the four siblings got ordinary kulfi (two annas), malai kulfi (three annas) or double cream (four annas); god help Charubala if her daughter thought she had been fobbed off with the cheapest.

It served Charubala’s purpose on occasion that her daughter acted as an extra pair of eyes and ears, and she knew that children love to tell on each other and squabble among themselves, but all hope she had that Chhaya would outgrow this unpleasant trait proved to be in vain when it continued, unabated, as the girl turned twelve, then thirteen, then fourteen. . By the time Chhaya sat her Matriculation Exams, Charubala had stopped noticing that her daughter’s childhood habits were still present, still strong. Now, without a child’s innocence to lighten it, the full unsavouriness of the personality revealed itself.

Servants regularly found themselves to be the focus of Chhaya’s malignant attention. From overt accusation (‘I saw the dish-washing maid eating off our brass plates in the kitchen’ or ‘Madan-da was in Baba’s room this afternoon when he should have been having his nap’), meant mostly for her mother’s ears but often mentioned in the presence of the servant concerned to cause maximum discomfort, she became a mistress of the art of insinuation. Those childish tags, ‘You told him not to’, ‘He swore me to silence’, were now dropped. She had an unerring knack of sniffing out the balance of power between people and she played it for all she could. Her veins and arteries ran with a bitter fluid, not blood, Adinath exclaimed in fury one day.

Just one glance a fraction longer than the ordinary duration of a casual look would be construed by Chhaya as being a look of derision or revulsion because she was dark or cross-eyed. Slights were imagined and built upon with creative architecture. Anything could become mined in her imagination. It had the effect of a kind of psychological terrorism — people around her became hyper-conscious of what they were saying or doing, or not saying and not doing, because Chhaya’s susceptible, paranoid mind could alight on anything she chose and make it into a cause for war.

The exception, of course, was Priyo. It sometimes appeared that Chhaya distinguished insufficiently between her person and Priyo’s to the extent that she often did not communicate with him verbally or through signs, assuming that the unity of their minds did not necessitate such things; unity in the strictest sense it was, a oneness, an indivisibility. When Chhaya enrolled in Bethune College to do her Intermediate and then a BA, it was Priyo who frequently accompanied her there and brought her back home. (One of the family cars — there were two — could always have been at her disposal, and sometimes she availed herself of this service, although never unaccompanied; someone from the family had to be with her in the car.) Although buses were now seen frequently on the city streets, the idea of Chhaya boarding one on her own, or a tram, to go back and forth between home and college, was unimaginable. Bethune proved to be convenient for such arrangements involving decorum and social rules: Priyo, who was studying Commerce in City College, could chaperone Chhaya a bit further north of College Street to Cornwallis Street and then retrace his route south to go to his own college.

Sometimes they took the tram, changing at Esplanade. At other times they took a bus, which reduced the journey time by half. What no one knew was how often Priyo and Chhaya played truant from their respective colleges to take in a matinee at a cinema together.

This was a fun time for Priyo and Chhaya. War had broken out in Europe, but at first the flames were so far away that no one felt much heat. A small item in the papers, about a warship making its way towards Bangkok from the Far East, seemed like someone else’s story. Bhola said it was a Japanese ship, and Japan was on the side of the enemy — Britain’s enemy, that is; it was customary to see enemies of Britain as enemies of India and the ruling power’s allies as the colony’s friends. Then the rumour began that because Calcutta was on the eastern flank of the country, it was in real danger of being bombed by the Japanese. Prafullanath came home one day with blackout shades for the lights at home.

‘One and a half rupees I paid for each of these, one and a half rupees,’ he grumbled. ‘Now there’s a ban on car headlights. Neon lights, signboards — all off. The whole place has turned into a ghost city.’

Every single light in the house was shrouded in black paper. The effect was eerie, much like an eclipse; only the area directly under the shaded bulb remained in a small circle of light. Black curtains on doors and windows, black paper gummed onto skylights — all added to a depressing subfusc air. The objective was not to let a single crack or hairline of light be detected from outside. The Air Raid Patrol checked on this with the vigilante’s zeal.

‘O moshai, I can see a line of light under your door,’ came the holler from an ARP going about his rounds.

The Japanese will strike on a full-moon night, the rumour went. The first bombs fell just before Christmas. The city emptied like a bottle with a large leak. Adi and his father, who had to go near Sealdah on work, complained about the seething throng of people at the railway station trying to flee the city.

Prafullanath said, ‘The station is thick with people. We bumped into Chatterjee-babu and his family. He was sitting on his holdall, surrounded by luggage and people streaming everywhere, holding two cauliflowers, one in each hand. So we asked him what on earth he was doing carrying cauliflowers around in an emergency. Do you know what he said? “Arrey, moshai, don’t ask. On our way here I see this woman selling cauliflowers by the roadside. They were so fresh, so tight, I couldn’t resist, so I bought a couple. We have to eat wherever we go, no?” We didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.’

Huddled in the big sitting room now, with the six other members of her family, all wrapped in shawls and sweaters against the cold January night, Charubala began her predictable harangue.