Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

A tiny spark at lunch. The family has long stopped sitting down together to eat, a result of the absence of Sandhya’s kind, superintending eye. Purnima and Charubala, not on talking terms for a good while now, go through the motions of sitting at the same table around half-past one or two every afternoon, even though they do not speak to each other directly. If this non-communication was a cause of active tension when the hostilities began, now it has calcified into something inorganic, like a darkening water mark down an external wall, that can be ignored; it seems the natural course of things. The age-old oppugnant relationship between mother and daughter-in-law in this instance is an apparently paradoxical variant: Purnima feels she has failed to elevate her husband to the top position in Charubala’s regard. After years of jockeying, the accreted failure, by now densely settled into a stratum of fury and resentment, could not be checked and has started bubbling up under the increasingly flimsy superstructure of family unity and its foot soldiers — respect, obedience, love.

How like that Geography chapter on volcanoes, thinks Arunima, as she picks out tiny bones from her piece of fish, a time-tested strategy for deferring the act of eating until so late that her plate is eventually cleared away, saving her yet again from eating the rubbish that gets served day after day, unchangingly, for lunch: rice, dal, a mushy medley of vegetables, a watery fish stew, the fish chosen deliberately, she felt, for maximum boniness; it is an invitation to starve yourself, that fish.

Her mejo-jyethi calls out, ‘Madan-da, bring me some of the rice left over from last night.’

Madan says, ‘But there’s fresh rice, just cooked, here, on the table.’

‘But I don’t want the leftovers to go to waste. Why don’t you reheat it and bring it?’

Madan does as he is told. Charubala looks at nothing in particular, her eyes stony. Something is coming, Arunima knows. Her pishi, Chhaya, has that look on her face, the one that presages warfare.

The tiny spark comes from Purnima. ‘We can’t afford any waste nowadays, what with the recent state of things here,’ she adds as a coda to her request. ‘Someone has to start paying for the years of kingly behaviour of others.’

She is in a fiendish mood.

Arunima notes that she is taking on the collective might of her grandmother and her pishi; no mean feat. She feels vicariously afraid.

Madan brings in the reheated leftover rice. Charubala says, ‘Madan, pass the fresh rice this way, will you? It wouldn’t do to mix the two’, and moves the bowl of fresh rice far away from the old one, as if the grains had the agency and ability to mingle on their own.

In one surprisingly agile movement, Purnima gets up from her chair, carries her container of warmed-up rice to the receptacle containing the new, spoons the old into the fresh, gives a few thorough stirs, picks up the full bowl and moves back to her place, where she serves herself some rice. All this before Charubala and Chhaya can open their mouths to cry out in protest.

The very air seems cloven. A shiver of terrified delight goes through Arunima.

Charubala responds first. ‘Madan,’ she calls, her voice almost a high, quavering trill with the effort to keep clutching onto dignified behaviour, ‘take the rice away and throw it out.’

Madan comes in from the kitchen. He has the cultivated detachment of someone who has long experience of being used as a device by warring parties. But he is pushing sixty now, no longer a green boy who could be shouted at, punished, for not doing anyone’s irrational or machinating bidding. Besides, he has been with the family for longer than anyone at the table except Charubala, so he knows where his loyalties lie. He begins to do as he has been told; he picks up the rice and asks Charubala, ‘Ma, what will you eat if I throw this out? I can put on some rice for you now, but it’ll take some time.’

Unwittingly Madan gives Charubala a bit of fuel. ‘No need to, Madan. Bin it. If it’s been willed that I won’t eat, fine, so be it, but I’ll make sure that those who have willed it don’t eat, either.’

Arunima, wise to the ways of quarrels among people who refer to each other in the third person, now begins to get interested in how sustainable the trope can be in this particular flare-up.

‘Yes, Madan, do take it away and throw it out,’ Purnima says. ‘How else to show one’s empty snobbery? Cutting off the nose to spite one’s face — if, at the age of seventy, one doesn’t understand how stupid it is, I wonder when one will.’

Madan leaves for the kitchen; it is best not to offer himself as a conducting rod.

Chhaya butts in and addresses her mother. ‘I warned you many, many times not to bring this. . this creature into our house.’ The claim is not true, but she has said it so often over the years that it has become the truth. ‘She’ll burn it down,’ Chhaya says. ‘It turns out you have nurtured a snake on milk.’

‘At least I was lucky enough to have the option of marriage and of going to another home to live, although it turned out to be a pit of vipers. Some amongst us are so ugly and so venomous that marriage has passed them by,’ Purnima says.

Chhaya sits there, shaking, then manages to bring out a strangulated, ‘Ma, my heart is hammering again, I think something’s going to happen to me.’

‘About time,’ Purnima says.

Charubala rises to the challenge. ‘It is imperative that one behaves in a civilised manner in a civilised house, regardless of one’s background,’ she begins, addressing, it would appear, the framed black-and-white photograph on the wall opposite her, of her husband receiving a prize at the Bengal Chamber of Commerce nearly twenty years ago.

‘Civilised!’ Purnima says. ‘Show me where civilisation is in this house!’ She breaks the unwritten third-person rule and attacks Charubala directly now. ‘I can see father and favourite son skimming off money from the business and pretending that it’s going down the tubes. I suppose someone like you, in cahoots with them, would call that civilisation.’

In the time that Charubala takes to draw breath, Purnima charges again. Today she is indefatigable; if at this point, when Adinath is at his lowest, losing control of the business, haemorrhaging money and reputation, if now she cannot strike to dislodge him and make her husband usurp his position, they will never get another opportunity again.

‘“Bad times, bad times”,’ she mimics the dominant line that has been the unremitting background noise in the house for several years. ‘I ask you, who is responsible for those bad times?’ Her voice rises to its extraordinary pitch, that split-toned duet caused as if by a cracked voice. Madan cringes in the kitchen, but cannot help soaking it up. He stops clattering about with pots and plates and glasses.

‘Now that you’ve feathered your nests, it’s up to us to make the economies. Thieves, that’s what you are, low, common thieves,’ she shrieks.

Charubala finds her tongue. ‘Careful, very careful now,’ she warns. ‘You are no longer in the house of riff-raffs and common scum that you came from. If you are to stay on as a daughter-in-law here, you have to abide by our rules, otherwise. .’

‘Otherwise what? Are you threatening me? Are you?’ Purnima, already standing, tucks the end of her sari at the waist, prepared even for physical conflict.

‘Yes, I’m threatening you. You will have to leave. I will not put up with this kind of behaviour. This is my house and you will learn to know your place in it and behave accordingly.’

‘ Your house?’

‘Yes, it’s in my name.’

‘Well, you won’t be around for ever. What’ll happen then? Oh, don’t tell me, it’s going to be equally divided among your children. Not for a moment in your shitty little life have you done anything governed by equality. I know you’re going to leave it all to your eldest son. But I’ll see how you do it. We’ll talk to lawyers and pursue litigation until you will beg, beg to be forgiven.’