Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

Then, over time, more evidence began to pile up. Another complaint, this time from a man to Prafullanath; he said that he spoke not only for his two sons, who had been beaten ruthlessly by Somnath, but also for other boys in the neighbourhood. If Somnath was not disciplined, he threatened, then he was not going to be allowed to play in Diana Club any more.

‘A bunch of Brahmo ninnies,’ Prafullanath said. ‘If his sissy boys can’t put up with some natural, healthy rough-and-tumble, they should stick with their singing assemblies and other effeminate stuff.’

It was true that Diana Club was a predominantly Brahmo organisation and the boys and young men there, while very good at sport, especially cricket and football, did have the refined genteelness of the community to which they belonged, but this was only an excuse for Prafullanath.

Charubala agreed with her husband’s reasoning, but she was reminded of that first complaint; now she was left in no doubt that that fiercely intelligent-looking and eloquent woman was a Brahmo too.

Somnath, never a good student, failed his Class Six exams lamentably; not in one weak subject, as the mitigating case could be, but in all the major ones — English, Bengali, Arithmetic, Science. Despite the indulgent affection lavished on this boy, his worsening performance in school seemed not to have come to his parents’ attention at all. When the red-mark-filled report card arrived at the end of the year, there was a little bit of tut-tutting and his father’s usual ‘It doesn’t matter, it’s only book-learning, real knowledge is in hands-on experience of the real world.’ If Charubala thought this was the last thing he should have been saying, especially within Somu’s hearing, she did not bring up the matter with her husband.

While Somnath repeated Class Six, she began to notice other things about him: a certain insolence in his manner, an open defiance of his elders, spending a lot of time in front of the mirror doing his hair, growing it long and combing it over his ears. . the answering back to his elders and the disobedience seemed so much a continuum of the kind of child he had always been that Charubala would have failed to notice them particularly, had it not been for these other telltale external manifestations of a boy becoming what was known in the culture as ‘spoilt’, much as one would use the term of milk that had gone off. As if she had invoked their presence by thinking about these attributes, they began to show up. Somu was rusticated from school after being caught smoking in the toilets. Prafullanath raged and ranted, but fell well short of any of the fearsome disciplinary measures that were the common currency — taking a belt to the boy, imposing a curfew; he had never been one for corporal punishment, not because of any high liberal principles, but because his private experience of what went on in the name of disciplining made him unable to mete it out to his own children.

Somnath scraped through the repeated year, just about, then failed his Class Seven annual exams. He was now the oldest boy in his class by more than two years. Over and above the stigma attached to that, there was the burgeoning physical evidence of him belonging to a world beyond a boundary — nascent moustache, broken voice, disparate colonies of acne breaking out on his chin, forehead, cheeks. He hung out in bad company, with similarly overgrown boys who had something of a sullen uselessness about them. Some saw in them a foreboding of a blasted future of mediocrity and misdeeds. When Somnath failed the Class Seven exams a second time, he was asked, as the school rules dictated, to leave St Xavier’s. Prafullanath, who did not nurture any great hopes of his youngest son becoming a doctor or an engineer, thought twice about forcing Somu to run the entire gamut of secondary education — better to have him start learning the ropes in the business now — and then reluctantly decided to have him admitted to another school, this time to the downmarket Ghosh Institution, where Bhola had been sent as a child.

Somnath fell into worse company here. Reports of the boy spending most of his time with the futile, unemployed young men who sat on the stoops of houses, killing time chatting and smoking and ogling women, reached his parents’ ears. He seemed to be some sort of hero to this group of wastrels because of his prowess in football and cricket. He was indispensable when local teams were formed — Bhabanipur XI or South Calcutta Football Federation, teams of amateur enthusiasts who dreamed of joining at state- or even national-level. ‘Somu’s leg-spin is a killer,’ they said. ‘No goalie I know has been able to obstruct his penalty kicks,’ they said. But in this world talent did not lead, through intensely hard labour, to the slow scaling of the ladder of achievement; instead, it took the easy lateral route of chatter and talk, and found itself shrivelling more or less exactly at the point at which it had begun to bud. His local fame, confined to about fifty or, at most, a hundred people, pleased Charubala enough. ‘At least he’s good at something,’ she thought.

Somnath stayed out in the evenings well past his six o’clock curfew hour and once or twice returned home long after everyone had gone to bed, sneaking in and going straight up to his room, hoping he would not bump into anyone. He was nervous about the alcohol on his breath, and other signs that he had been drinking. His absence at dinner cast a shadow over the assembled family: not only was he breaking a cardinal rule, but he was also too young to be doing so.

‘He’s going to the dogs,’ Charubala said.

‘Not a surprise, considering how you have raised him to your heads,’ Chhaya commented tartly.

‘Yes, really, he’s turning into quite a handful,’ Priyo added.

Prafullanath, in thundery mood, took it personally, as a slight to his parenting. ‘I’ll show that boy today what’s what. Let him come back.’

The clouds passed. It was Chhaya who ferreted out the reason for Somu’s occasional late, furtive returns. She stayed up, ears pricked, and when she heard the slow creak-and-clang of the iron gate, then the muffled, over-careful opening of the front door, she came downstairs, as if by accident, pretending that she had some business in a room along the path that Somu would have to take to reach his room. She saw him taking one step at a time, very, very gingerly. He looked at her, his eyes bloodshot. He tried to hold onto the banister, but could not manage it in one attempt. Even Chhaya, whose experience of drunken men, swaying in front of her on the balls of their feet, was not frequent, could tell what was going on. The spirituous reek was unmistakable. She pressed herself to the wall as she passed him, as if he were a pool of vomit that she was avoiding stepping on.

The next day, when he surfaced around noon, Somnath found himself facing walls of brooding silence wherever he turned. Charubala, usually persistent with queries about his whereabouts the night before if he had been late returning home, was noticeably absent from his room and then silent as stone when he saw her in the dining room.

‘Can one get a cup of tea in this house?’ he said, attempting to cover his guilt with a forced light-heartedness.

Charubala, grim-faced, lips squeezed to a thin line, stormed out of the room, her swishing sari and jangling keys tied to the end of her aanchol, sounds that Somnath, throughout his life, had found to be the very definition of a cocooning security, now somewhat like the music of war. Chhaya walked into the room and pointedly walked out again, she too silent. In a trice Somnath understood what had transpired. No tea from Madan-da, or from anyone, was going to be forthcoming. He noticed that his dinner from last night, usually cleared from the table in the morning if he came in too late to eat, had been left standing, the plate and the small bowls ranged along one-third of its circumference all sitting in a bigger container filled with hot water, a bath to keep his dinner warm, the whole thing covered with a big mesh dome to keep out flies and insects. The warm bath had obviously cooled in the last fourteen hours. It was a still life of the great wrong he had committed.