Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

Chhaya finds her voice again. ‘Ma, you mustn’t shout, you’ll fall ill. Let’s leave her to stew in her own poison.’

‘Did you hear what she said?’ Charubala asks. ‘Lawyers, litigation. . Is this what has been lurking in that cesspit of your venomous mind?’

‘Cesspit? Poison? Looks to me like a case of the sieve saying to the colander, “Why do you have so many holes in your arse?”’ Purnima modulates her tone to fit the glory of her colloquial style. ‘Your daughter could give a snake a few lessons in “poison” and “venomous mind”.’

Another frisson of shock goes through Arunima.

Chhaya says, ‘You are shameless, shameless . An animal, a greedy animal out to devour us. I warned everyone about you, the moment I heard your vulgar voice during the matchmaking. This is all so predictable.’ She pauses for breath, already aware that her hits lack the force of her sister-in-law’s earthier words, her more skilfully targeted darts. The knowledge makes her even angrier, but a secret anxiety, just beginning to whisper inside her head, leaches it away somewhat: does she. . could she know ?

Purnima fires her final shots. ‘I’m telling you this now, this is your last chance to come to a settlement, otherwise I’ll have walls erected to divide the house.’

A common enough story in joint families, the threat has not been defanged by the frequency of its occurrence; it curdles and slows the hot flow of anger in both Charubala and Chhaya.

In the kitchen Madan thinks: How did it come to this? Will the family really break up into smaller units? Where will I go if that comes to pass? What’s going to happen to me in my old age?

Charubala can only return a few feeble words to this incendiary thrown at her: ‘It will not happen while I am alive.’ But, she thinks, to announce in public such an enormous intention to rive must mean that Purnima has discussed it with Priyo; the thought is like thunder. How could her son have colluded with this woman against his mother, against his father and his siblings? No, no, that is unthinkable, unnatural. So what gave Purnima the power to utter such a thing? Does she really hold so much sway over her son? Division of the house. . Her head is reeling with the reverberations of those unspeakable words. It is true that the situation with Priyo and Purnima has not been ideal for a long while; tension in the air, an undercurrent of animosity rippling through all the time, congealing silences, avoidance or minimising of contact, a coldness and formality in the ineludible conversations and interactions that one was forced to have because of living in the same house. But whose fault was it all?

Priyo is not the most intimate among her children, or the most expressive with his affections and emotions, he never has been, but ever since he married this woman, who did not think anything of using the language of the gutter in front of her elders, something befitting slum-dwellers, ever since then there seems to have been a gradual swerving away from all familial bonds. Yet Charubala has never noticed Priyo to be uxorious, or even minutely different from his usual phlegmatic and detached self in his deportment with his wife; he has behaved towards everyone with a total democracy of what she could only call indifference. And she is convinced that it is not the split between his public and private faces; living in one house together means that all the things one imagines are private are not really so — the walls and floors have eyes, ears and interpreting minds. Charubala knows that Priyo does not possess a secret self for his wife’s consumption only.

As she sits feeling humiliated in front of her granddaughter and in the hearing of a servant, an idea takes shape in Charubala’s head. Before it has fully formed she blurts out, ‘All right, if dividing up the house is what you’ve been plotting, I hope you will remember that I too have some say over the division of other things. It’s Baishakhi’s wedding later in the year. She won’t even get the dust from the jewellery I’ve been saving up for her.’

This has the effect of a forest fire reaching the line where all the trees have been felled to contain it.

During the matchmaking leading to Priyo and Purnima’s marriage, the bride’s family had quickly discovered that the groom’s father was the younger son of the Ghosh family, which had made its money and name in the gold business. Jewellers were thick on the ground in Calcutta, but the Ghoshes had long attained the electricity of legend, helped generously by rumours of family dissension, dissolute living, all manner of excess, even rumours of a suicide and gunfire in their family seat in North Calcutta long ago. Didn’t someone kill herself? Poison or self-immolation? Didn’t they regularly have to bring back one of the sons or brothers, unconscious with drink, from the brothels? The risk of becoming a daughter-in-law in a family tainted with scandal was heavily outweighed by the possible riches, in the form of gold and jewellery, that would accrue; this was Purnima’s parents’ sharp reasoning. Besides, wasn’t the groom’s father a breakaway who had reinvented himself in a new business and had nothing to do with the decadent main line any more? Purnima herself had been dazzled by the idea of gold; the lure of metal made her forget that she was actually marrying into paper; forgotten too was the fact that the connection of her husband’s family with gold was historical, not real.

Yet Purnima had not been deceived in her acquisitive ambitions, not totally. Although he never talked about jewellery, certainly never within Purnima’s earshot, Prafullanath had a secret obsession with it; or so she speculated. It gradually emerged, a few years after she had taken up residence in Basanta Bose Road, that her father-in-law bought gold ornaments, almost ritualistically, about three times a year and kept them in a State Bank of India vault in his wife’s name. The jewellery he bought was not trinkets like rings and thin gold chains and bangles, but of the heavier, showier and more intricate kind, the kind that would be worn by the women of an extremely wealthy family on the big social occasions, a wedding or a family puja. Some of them could not be worn, in public or private, any longer; the era of gold hair pieces, tiaras studded with gems, drooping and baroquely decorative chains linking nose to ear had probably passed.

Rumour within the family — a word slipped into conversation by her jaa, Sandhya, an unguarded comment by Priyo, evasive answers given to her dogged and strategic questions about the existence, nature and exact content of this jewellery vault — had convinced Purnima that a far bigger hoard lay beyond the usual loose change of necklaces, rings, bangles, earrings and chokers that the women of the house, herself included, kept in the steel lockers in their bedrooms. There were stories about the Ghoshes of Garpar, with whom her father-in-law had had no connection for nearly fifty years, of how they wrapped their daughters in so much gold at the giving-away ceremony of their weddings that only their eyes could be seen, two quick, black holes in the dull yellow glitter. But she had never known her mother-in-law to wear such stuff, not even when she went to attend upper-crust weddings. Where was it all then? How much jewellery did Sandhya have? Did she have her own private locker in a bank? And what about Chhaya? Traditionally, most of the jewellery would have been saved up for her, a gift from her parents when she got married. Now that that possibility had been ruled out, where was her share? In a bank? In her almirah? What good was it going to do Chhaya? It was like a feast of pork for a starving Muslim.

The only time Purnima got to see what the other women in the house possessed was when they dressed formally to go out. She strewed seemingly innocuous questions in their way, hoping to elicit information about how much more they had beyond the fraction they chose to display.