Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

Someone has done some bargaining behind the scenes so that Sona is expected to give maths tuition to Sougata, his thick neighbour, in exchange not only for dinners, but also for tuition in English, his weakest subject; the flimsiest subject in his school, in fact, for the English teacher in Khastagir hardly knows how to transpose a sentence from the simple present tense to, say, the past continuous, such is the state of government schools. But Sona has been asked to soak up the lessons passively, not actively participate; just an audience of one witnessing the English classes between Sougata and his tutor.

The English tutor, Dibyendu Majumdar, a second-year undergraduate in the English Department of Presidency College, does not think that the deal is as good for him as it is for his employer. A stereotype of the Bengali aantel — the word, with ironic appositeness, is a bastardised form of the French intellectuel — Dibyendu has all the appurtenances to go with the role, straggly beard, glasses, khadi kurta, jute shoulder-bag, and resents being made to be on the giving end of the two-for-one offer. He takes out his resentment, in so far as he is intrepid enough to do so, in pathetic dribs and drabs, on Sona, the added extra. Dabbling in fiery left-wing politics in college has clearly made him more sympathetic to the lot of the have-nots further afield than the one right under his nose. Instead of resenting Mala Saha, which would have been the logical thing to do, since it is she who foisted Sona on him without increasing his pay, he diverts it to focus on the wrong person; money breeds a lot of attitudes in men and a particular stripe of obsequiousness is high on the list for people of his kind.

So Dibyendu takes pains to explain a point over and over again to Sougata, but a rare question or request for clarification from Sona — rare because he has been told obliquely but repeatedly, so that there can be no ambiguity in his own mind about it, that he is only a watcher — will be met with silence, or with an expression of irritated reluctance, sometimes even a mocking ‘I see your head is full of cow-dung.’ Dibyendu puts petty obstructions in the way of Sona, such as not allowing him to share Sougata’s textbooks, or setting Sougata homework while making it obvious that Sona is not going to be given any.

Sona, electrically alive from the earliest time that he can remember to being excluded to the margins, from where he watched everyone else get their share while he only looked on in silence, has sniffed this politics of mean-mindedness in the air from the moment he walked in on his first class.

Already hobbled by the sense of obligation this exchange tuition entails, he is further humiliated by Dibyendu-da’s gratuitous cruelties and, as always, recoils deep inside himself to nurse the word so frequently used of him, ‘beggar’, as if it were a talisman, in a prolonged, introspective agony, his soul’s equivalent of pushing his tongue ceaselessly against a wobbling tooth that hurt. And then, suddenly, over the course of a few weeks, he crosses the line as he knew he would, an invisible fence beyond which it does not hurt him any longer, or even touch him: he is deaf and blind to it. All that remains within that insulated self are his mother’s words, the words that have been embossed on his impressionable soul — ‘If you study hard, very, very hard, and do nothing but study, and do well in school, be the “first boy” in class every year, there will be an escape from this, escape for all of us.’

The words save him yet again from an intractable situation. He knows he has been invited to Sougata’s to give, not to receive. He bites down hard on the fact, steels himself and takes all the barriers in the way to his one chance of acquiring English as challenges, much as getting his head around trigonometry or logarithm had been. Once framed that way, he knows he will keep at it, with the doggedness of a switched-on machine, until he gets the better of it; in this, algebra is no different from the cheap exclusionary politics that the world plays against him. After Dibyendu-da leaves each evening, when it is Sona’s turn to teach maths to Sougata, he deliberately sets problems well above Sougata’s ability to solve. While the other boy is thus occupied, racking his brains and chewing the end of his pencil, Sona borrows his English books and concentrates on the lesson recently finished with Dibyendu-da with such ferocious will that he has his jaws locked tight and his temple throbbing by the end of it. He knows he is racing against the great winner, time.

In four weeks, Sona has wrestled to the ground all forms of tenses, including the supremely eloquent and difficult future perfect continuous, has begun to get the hang of clauses, and has started grappling with the capricious and illogical absurdities of English prepositions.

As eldest daughter-in-law of the Ghosh family, married to Adinath, Sandhya has a set of elusive duties no less binding for their status as tacit and unformulated. They lie in a nebulous notion of tradition, of the way things are done and have been done for generations, of the overweeningly important idea of what the world thinks, especially if that world consists of her elders. Of the several of these duties, one is being in charge of the prayer room (a miniature temple, really) up on the terrace, and all the rituals of daily worship — cleaning out the room in the morning, giving the deities fresh water, cut fruits, crystallised-sugar sweets and flowers, watering the tulsi plant, then repeating the same chores in the evening, except then it is a more ceremonial affair involving the ringing of a big brass bell, sprinkling of water from the Ganga (kept in a frog-green plastic water-bottle), more flowers, the lighting of incense sticks and copra and frankincense, which fill the whole room with dense, aromatic smoke, lighting small terracotta lamps, carrying the brazier of copra into each room in all four storeys of the house and sanctifying it with the holy smoke. . The rituals have their own shape and place and rightness, and over her twenty-three years in the Ghosh family, Sandhya has devolved and delegated a lot of tasks to the other daughters-in-law, but this she keeps to herself, although she is beginning to find the business of climbing up and down the stairs to take the brazier into every room of the house laborious and harsh on her legs and tightening knees.

This evening she has been uncharacteristically late with the evening worship, but her jaa Purnima’s call — ‘Buliiiii, come inside, don’t stand on the verandah at this hour, everyone can see you’ — has elbowed her out of her reverie. The prayer room has a white marble floor, a large bell suspended from the ceiling and a whole fleet of statuettes, framed pictures and figurines of a dozen gods and goddesses and saints arranged along two raised stone daises set against the wall. Her older son, Supratik, at the age of fourteen, had once impudently said, ‘Ma, there are thirty-three crore Hindu gods and goddesses. You seem to have a fair few of them here. How do you know that sending up prayers to all these different deities won’t cancel each other out?’

At the centre of the wall facing east a niche has been carved out, with symmetrical ascending curves on either side that join in a final point at the top. Inside, in a blaze of red silk and gold, is housed the reigning deity of the Ghosh house, the gentle goddess of wealth, Lakshmi, with her faint, inscrutable almost-smile, her sheaf of paddy and her docile barn-owl. Sandhya had heard long ago that in her father-in-law’s family home in North Calcutta — there is very little mention of that chapter in his life — the goddess was stripped of her clothes after the puja and left naked throughout the year so that she couldn’t run away.