Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

Madan walks in, teapot, cup, saucer, milk, sugar, plate of Marie biscuits all on a tray, sets it down and proceeds to pour while beginning his daily bulletin. ‘Chicken ishtu for you today. Light like water. Ma’s orders. With toast. No butter. The rest are having deep-fried aubergines, dal, spinach balls stuffed with cottage cheese, fish fry. Soaking the pieces of bhetki in marinade now, have to take them out in the next hour. Said to Ma, one or two pieces of fish fry won’t do Baba any harm, she wouldn’t listen to me. Well, we are poor, illiterate people, what do we know, but since when have people died of eating, I ask you? They die of hunger. But if Ma says it’s bad for you, then it must be. But what harm can a couple of pieces do? Want some with your tea now? Could quickly sneak in a couple for you, no one would be any the wiser.’

Prafullanath blows on his tea, thereby avoiding answering the question.

Madan continues, ‘So it’s Durga Puja next month. I will be going to the country after Kali Puja for twenty days, as usual. That Gagan will be bringing you your tea. Will probably forget it half the time, not bring it on time, you’ll have to keep nagging. Said to Ma, whatever gets done, or doesn’t get done more likely, see that they don’t slip up with Baba’s afternoon tea and bishkoot. Gagan’s mind is like a sieve, nothing except bad habits stays in it, that and finding money for cigarettes and god knows what else, wouldn’t be a tiny bit surprised if it wasn’t just cigarettes. Even saw him whispering to Suranjan-da by the stairs that day, very close they were too.’

Prafullanath coughs, shifts around on the sofa as far as his creaking body will allow, shuffles his feet and starts pouring out the tea onto his saucer to cool it faster. The tea dribbles out and drips into a small brown puddle on the low table; a few warm drops fall on his pyjama and, in trying to avoid more of them falling and staining the white cotton, he moves his shaky hand quickly, only to have the drops now fall on the floor, on the edge of the sofa, on a different spot on the table, on the tray that holds the tea things.

Madan pounces at once and starts mopping up the spilt tea with a dishcloth that he always carries, slung on his shoulder. ‘Eeesh, eeesh, let me, let me, I’ve got it.’ With that only concession towards what he knows to be a deliberately engineered distraction, he reverts to his monologue. ‘Don’t get me wrong, but Suranjan-da is at an impressionable age, and Gagan such a ne’er-do-well, such close whispering under the stairs; and then that other time on the terrace, I swear I saw something pass hands, could have been I saw wrong, but as they say, a poor man has four eyes and four ears.’

Prafullanath sips his cooling tea, coughs and tries to say ‘Achha, achha’ dismissively, but it comes out as a pathetic croak.

‘Saying this to you and no one else, he doesn’t earn that little, thanks to your generosity and Ma’s and Bor’-da’s, but where does all that money go? Don’t think he sends any to the country, doesn’t have a wife and children to support, but every month, without fail, Ei, Madan-da, can you lend me ten rupees, can you lend me twenty rupees, will return it the very minute I get paid, swear on Ma Kali . I say, where does all his money go?’

This time Prafullanath manages a gruff, ‘All right, all right’ before beginning to dip his fingers for the dregs of the biscuit, which has become too soggy after being dunked into the tea to make it to his mouth and has dropped instead into the cup. Madan notices the mishap, feels a small surge of joy inside him and continues without a pause, ‘But anyway, who am I to say anything? To each his own. My interest is to look out for Suranjan-da. Nowadays people of many hues seem to be all over the place. Take the Datta family next door, their maid, Parul, Parul this, Parul that, there was no end of talk about her endless virtues’ — he notices Prafullanath getting fidgety, being overly fussy about dunking his next biscuit in his tea, clearing his throat to prepare himself to say something to him, but paralysed in the attempt — ‘and then one day, right in the middle of the street, at two in the afternoon, in full view of the world, there she was, screaming her throat cracked, tearing out her hair in clumps and shoving them into her mouth, handful by handful, swallowing it all. They had to send her back to the country.’

He pauses to inhale the odour of small triumph that has suddenly suffused the room. The old man will not try to send out hints asking him to stop again this evening; maybe tomorrow, but that will be a new battle. Today, he has broken the old man’s back, he has won. Again.

He resumes his recounting of the scandal with the insane maidservant next door. ‘Much whispering, much talk about how a young woman could go mad suddenly like that. So many people said so many things, I kept my mouth shut, as always, the wise never talk, only listen, all this gossip about something that may have happened to her in the Datta house, after all with that young man there, I didn’t say anything, of course. .’

Prafullanath fixes his eyes on the tattered, yellowed calendar opposite and attempts to shut out the low babble in the only way he knows: by concentrating on the fact that the year it is from, 1957, was the year his life began to turn to rubble.

‘C-o-n-j-u-g-a-t-i-o-n,’ Dibyendu-da writes on Sougata’s exercise book. Sona copies it diligently, awaiting an explanation. ‘From the Latin conjugare , meaning “to join together”,’ Dibyendu-da adds and Sona writes that down too, as if he were taking dictation. He hopes that this will ease his path towards mastering it; at the moment, it is an impenetrable forest from a particularly malevolent fairytale. Standing at the edge of that darkness, where ‘be’ becomes ‘am’, ‘is’ or ‘are’, depending on who one is talking about, and thorny thickets of ‘has been’, ‘have been’ and ‘had been’ — where does this ‘been’ come from? what does it mean? — Sona is stabbed momentarily with despair that he is never going to reach the illuminated freedom on the other side: English is going to defeat him. But a pluckiness, born from that very despair, reasserts itself: if there are rules, as there are in mathematics, then he will master those rules, and their exceptions, and the truth will reveal itself. He just has to concentrate and a world different from numbers will unfurl slowly and invite him in.

The private English tuition had been the idea of Mala Saha, Sougata’s mother. News of Sona’s preternatural mathematical abilities — at the age of eleven he had already mastered differential calculus and was champing at the bit to get to integral calculus — had spread quickly in the closed world of Basanta Bose Road. It was she who had suggested to Sona’s Boro-jyethima that the boy should look in a couple of evenings a week to help Sougata with his mathematics homework; Sougata was not the brightest of students in his famous English-medium school, St Lawrence, especially in arithmetic, and the prospect of starting algebra and geometry next year was terrifying. The matter could have been idly mentioned, within the course of aimless chit-chat, and could have died an equally idle death, so how exactly it managed to translate into action remains a mystery to Sona, to a large measure because he has not grown up with good or favourable things happening to him, from new clothes and proper meals to fancy, fee-paying, English-medium schools and private tuition. They happen in the lives of the lucky ones, like all his cousins, but he and his sister, Kalyani, have not been born into it. The world is as it is, and Sona makes do with Suranjan’s hand-me-downs, and Chhoto-jyethu’s algebra books from his college years (nearly twenty-five years old, saved from a clearout sale to the bikriwalla), and scraps of leftovers sent down irregularly from upstairs, and Khastagir, the free government school down the road, on Mahim Halder Street, where the teachers have trouble solving elementary quadratic equations and the pupils have to sit cross-legged on the floor, being cooked in the heat in the summer because there are no fans. Such is the way his world is configured and he cannot yet put a shape to the lineaments of his desire to escape it, let alone articulate the desire. Not yet.