Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

After fielding this emotional boycott from his mother and his sister, a harsher reminder of the gravity of his misdeed arrived when his father returned home. Before he sat down in the living room downstairs to go through the daily routine of tea and snacks and the solicitous attention of Charubala, Prafullanath summoned Somnath to the boy’s room, shut the door, bolted it, took off his belt in a baleful mimicry of an action from another life and brought it down like a whip, over and over and over again, on his son’s shocked body. And yet this was no punishment that he was giving out, but an act of revenge; that trembling, crouched figure on the floor was his elder brother Braja; the tables had turned after all this time.

An overindulged, unruly son who had fallen into bad company and had started coming back home drunk, at the age of sixteen: is this what fate had kept in store for him? Prafullanath had turned the thought in his head all day long as he had smoked one cigarette after another in his offices in Old China Bazaar Street. The distance of more than thirty years between that chapter of his past and the present suddenly seemed foreshortened to nothing; the bad blood was flowing in the new one too, no escape was possible. Inheritance was everything, and he and his had got nothing except the negatives: cheated out of wealth and property, stalked by decadence and bad character.

As he lashed his youngest son with the leather belt, that zero distance became real and material to him. Take that — the belt came down on the back, curling around to the ribs and upper arms — and that — back and bottom — that, that — shoulders, arms. . the cracks were like the air sundering. At last. I have dreamed about nothing but this moment when I could pay you back for all that you’ve done to me. This is a beginning. Remember this? Remember thrashing me under the stairs in front of all the servants, thrashing me until I had no breath left inside me to ask you to stop, to ask for water? Remember? Remember?

Somnath felt more confused than terrified: why was his trembling, spitting, crying father, transformed into a frenzied animal now, repeatedly shouting ‘Remember? Remember?’ at him? Had he forgotten something his father had enjoined him to keep in mind? Was it some moral lesson about transgression and its consequences? Was it specifically about alcohol? For the life of him, Somu could not remember.

Outside, Charubala hammered on the door, wailing, ‘Stop it! Stop it now! Let him go!’

‘I’ve written another short story. Do you want me to read it out to you?’ Priyo asked his sister.

Chhaya said, ‘Yes, yes! Read it out right now.’

Priyo paced his reading slowly. It was a story about a woman who leaves her husband of forty years because every night he washes his feet and goes to bed while they are still wet, despite her entreating him, every single night of those forty years, to dry his feet before he gets into bed. One day she has had enough. She walks out of their home, saying to her baffled husband, ‘I cannot bear you clambering into bed with your sopping-wet feet any more. I’m leaving.’ Those words were the last line of the story.

‘Bah!’ exclaimed Chhaya admiringly. ‘Very modern. Like Buddhadeb Basu, or Premen Mittir. I feel like applauding. You know, you will be famous one day, like Rabi Thakur.’

Priyo, basking in her enthusiasm, made a show of deflecting her appreciation. ‘Ufff, you and your Rabi Thakur! His days are over. How behind the times you are. It’s the age of the ultramoderns, don’t you know?’

‘That’s why I mentioned their names. You will be a star along with them.’

He lapped it up a bit more. In the entire world, only she seemed to understand him and regard his talent truly, to ‘get’ his work. Everyone else was unresponsive, rejecting. He had been trying for so many years to get a story or a poem published in the cutting-edge literary journals, but they seemed to be staffed by donkeys. Each generation seemed to get stuck on its gods, refusing to move on: first there was Tagore, now there were these modernists, Bishnu De, Buddhadeb Basu and others, territorial dogs guarding their patch from interlopers. Did people really read Sudhin Datta’s poetry? Did they understand all those teeth-hurting words?

Ultimately, in a backward-moving procession of causes, he blamed his father — he was finding it so difficult to get a foothold in the world of Bengali letters because he had not been immersed in arts and letters from birth, as his father had no truck with the business of culture and literature. He had been born into a family of philistines, and this was his undoing. Take, as a counter-example, his friend from his school years, Susobhan Ganguly. Susobhan had not been demure about recounting his famous grandfather Dwarik Ganguly’s exploits at every opportunity he got, and then some. There was one story that had caught Priyo’s imagination. Dwarik Ganguly had been, along with luminaries such as Debendranath Tagore, John Elliot Bethune and Vidyasagar, at the forefront of the female-education revolution. On reading a nasty, innuendo-filled editorial against the education of women in a conservative Bengali daily, he had torn out the relevant piece, marched into the editor’s office and asked him to confirm that he had written it. Then Dwarik Ganguly had said, ‘Right, I have come to make you eat your words’, crumpled up the cutting and handed it to the editor with a glass of water, standing by him, his walking stick in hand, until the offending editor had swallowed the ball of paper. Then Dwarik Ganguly had said, ‘If I do not see a retraction tomorrow, I will come again.’ There had been an editorial the next day, taking back everything written in the earlier one.

This was the family he should have been born into, Priyo thought with a lurch of envy: fierce reformers; progressive, educated people; men whose fathers and elder brothers had been published in Bichitra and Parichay and Saturday Letter before those magazines became defunct. Instead, he had been forced by his father to do a degree in Commerce, then join Charu Paper. While he was competent enough, he assumed, looking after the production side of things, Priyo also held that if you did not love what you did, love it so much that it took up permanent residence in a protected corner of your mind so that you were never without its company, if that kind of love was not there, then you would never be any good at it. You would forever tread the path set down by others, by books, and never advance the subject and extend its horizons. Priyo only felt that kind of love for his literary efforts, not for the business of subjecting the output of the plant in, say, Memari to quality control. Every day he felt let down by what he had inherited and wished for another history, an alternative life.

Only Chhaya understood his soul’s very fulcrum, the thing around which all his thoughts and energies turned.

‘Tell me, have you written any more poetry?’ she asked him now.

Oh, for a poem, a luminous vitrine for his talents, a new, transparent shape in the air through which a different kind of light shone. ‘Not for a while. I’m thinking of concentrating on the short story for a bit,’ he said instead.

‘Wonderful! You too will have a Galpaguchho to your name.’

‘Ufff, Rabi Thakur again! Can’t you think beyond him? People are writing short stories now too — Manik, Buddhadeb. .’

‘All right, all right,’ Chhaya said hastily, trying to deflect Priyo from thinking she was backward-looking. ‘Where are you thinking of publishing them? Why don’t you ask some press to bring out a volume? That’ll be fantastic!’

Priyo shrank at Chhaya’s move from literary-critical appreciation to the depressing business of, well, business. How much, or what precisely, should he tell her? That he had been trying for the last ten years without getting anywhere? That his writing was for an audience of one: her? That he had never thought of publication — now there was an idea she had given him?