Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

‘Oh my, what a beautiful emerald set, Jayanti,’ she flattered her younger sister-in-law once. ‘It goes so well with your green benarasi sari. Where did you get it?’

Jayanti shyly parried the question. ‘I’ve always had it,’ she said.

‘Oh, I see. You got it at the blessing before the wedding, didn’t you? It’s just that I don’t think I’ve seen it before. What about the pearl set you have’ — this was a shot in the dark — ‘that would go really well with the green too.’

No reply from Jayanti, only a coyly perfunctory smile before she stepped into the car to be driven off to wherever she was going that evening. Purnima remained ignorant of her treasures.

Purnima’s own cache was not inconsiderable, a lot more than that of other women she knew. Not everything had been given to her when she got married; she insisted Priyo bought her some jewellery a couple of times a year. In this way she had built up quite a collection, but all these imagined old-world splendours of baju, tagaa, hanshuli, mantasha, shaat-lahari-haar, chik, chur, ratanchur, gold combs and hairpins with floral ornamentation to make the bun above the neck look like a miniature garden of jewelled flowers, all this she imagined was in Charubala’s trove and she wanted some to be bequeathed to her or to her daughter, Baishakhi, when the time came.

Now that the time has arrived for Baishakhi, this skinflint mother-in-law of hers has just announced her decision not to part with anything. In Purnima’s mind it is indubitable that this is what Charubala has been waiting for all along: to grab any excuse to hang onto her hoard and gloat over it in private.

Purnima pounds out of the room, leaving a shaking, tearful Charubala trying to swallow her humiliation and channel it to appear as the onset of feeling ill.

Very belatedly attention falls on Arunima. Chhaya is the first to realise that the girl has witnessed everything. Her frustration finds an easy target; she starts scolding her niece — ‘What? You still here? How many times have you been told not to remain sitting in a room when the elders are discussing something? How many times?’

Kalyani mashes up some hibiscus leaves — they exude something sticky that forms thin threads — and then apportions equal amounts onto three tiny dented aluminium plates.

‘Here you go,’ she says. ‘Mutton pulao with cashews and raisins. I want you girls to finish every last bit, no leaving something on the plate.’

She places the plates in front of three dolls propped against the trunk of the guava tree. One is plastic, the painted dress and eyes and lips and hair on its nearly neon flesh-coloured body erased in patches after years of handling so that it looks like it has a radical case of vitiligo. The terracotta one, also with flaking paint and one arm and a foot missing, was a present from Madan-da, brought back from one of his yearly visits to his home up country. The red paint on its inscrutably smiling lips has flaked off in one corner; Kalyani thinks it looks as if a morsel of rice is permanently stuck there, an instance of slack hygiene on the part of the doll, something for which she never fails to tell her off.

Sitting in the shade of the guava tree, she proceeds to cook the second course for the reception of her dolls’ wedding, a rich mutton kaliya made from dust, torn-up bits of grass, some shredded guava leaves and a couple of broken twigs, all stirred with water to a textured, heterogeneous paste.

‘Right, I’m about to serve the kaliya,’ she declares. ‘Sromona, careful, the edge of your benarasi is touching the gravy, you’ll ruin the expensive sari and then where will we be?’

At the age of eleven Kalyani is too old to play ‘cook-and-serve’ with her dolls, but there does not seem to be anything better to do. She has failed her annual examination in school and been made to repeat the year. Not that anyone is greatly perturbed by it. Her brother is so obsessed with his fat books of numbers and his continual scribbling — head down, uncaring about whether he has had any food or even about a decent place to sit and write — that getting a word out of him has become impossible, while their mother seems only physically present, her mind and spirit, like her son’s, somewhere else; they are both hollowed-out.

Malati-di had once told her a story about nishi, the ghost who moves by night and calls out your name, assuming the voice of someone you know, and if you answer that call, the nishi traps the sound in a box and with that she has got your soul too, for her to call in as and when she wants; you are her creature from the moment you have replied. It seems that the nishi has sent for the souls of her mother and her brother; her dolls have more animation, more life. She even misses her mother’s scolding. Now that seems so much more preferable to the distraction and melancholy and secret bouts of silent weeping, checked, as soon as Purba is caught out, with a pathetic, ‘I always cry when I’m chopping onions’ when there is no onion anywhere in sight. It is as if she just is not there. Flanked by these two people, who are all that her life contains, Kalyani’s days have fallen into a kind of dispersal, a diffuse structureless nothing that slips through her fingers like smoke.

She reprimands another doll: ‘There’ll be no mango chutney and papad for you if you don’t clean your plate. I can’t stand waste, you know that.’

From the second-floor window, Baishakhi has been watching her cousin muttering to herself. She calls and asks her to come up. A leap of excitement in Kalyani — something at last, something different from the viscous drudge of her days — almost instantly moderated by the training of years of cautiousness and inhibition about the ‘upstairs people’; it is noticeable in her walk from the garden up to the second floor: three skips, then however many measured paces with head held down, eyes downcast; not sullen, but just quiet.

Her eyes become as large as cottage-cheese balls when she enters her cousin’s room. Fanned out on the bed are what she takes to be the entire wealth of Baishakhi’s wedding saris, dozens of them, silk and benarasi and tangail and jamdani and others she does not know the names of, but all gorgeous and dazzling, filling every sense.

‘Wedding saris,’ Baishakhi says redundantly. ‘Do you like them?’

Kalyani can only nod.

‘I’m trying to decide what to wear on which day.’

Kalyani nods again.

‘Do you know how many days the whole ceremony is going to take?’

This she knows. Three days: the smearing-with-turmeric ceremony followed by the actual wedding in this house; then the bride leaves her father’s home for ever; then boü-bhaat at the groom’s. She also knows that although the formal talks have happened, the ashirbad ceremony will be next month, and the wedding at the very end of December.

Baishakhi picks up a comb and runs it through her long hair, but gives up after a few strokes. She goes to the window, looks out at nothing in particular, returns her attention to the saris and Kalyani. She seems on the verge of saying something, but thinks better of it and starts desultorily going through the saris again, gets bored with this too and walks up to the window again.

‘Are you excited that there’s going to be a wedding in this house?’ she asks Kalyani.

This time Kalyani nods with more vigour.

‘Do you want to know what each sari is called?’

‘Yes.’

But Baishakhi loses interest as soon as the question leaves her mouth. Instead she says, ‘Do you know, Baba has chosen a cook recommended by Debu-kaka to do all the catering? Debu-kaka owns Bijoli Grill, he and Baba are friends.’

Kalyani, who does not know about professional caterers, has been awed into silence; awe at the spectacle that this, her first ever wedding, is going to be. All this opulence of saris and caterers serves to intimidate her.