Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

How much Chhaya had relied on Priyo’s rash oath — taken by everyone else as frivolous, as a kind of performance of solemn intentions — became apparent during the days over which the knowledge of Priyo’s assent percolated down to the core of her understanding. The occasional match presented to Priyo by their mother: this Chhaya had learned to bat away, for she knew Priyo would go through the motions and then come up with a final ‘no’. That the game would change she had no idea. Through all the early stages of the matchmaking, Chhaya had been genuinely unbothered, even, initially, by the news that Priyo had said ‘yes’. It could have been disbelief, it could have been denial, but the first contact with the truth was like a stone flung at delicate, innocent glassware. The reassembling took an effort that was hundredfold the energy of the shattering: it was her abnormally pitched voice as she pulled out the trembling words ‘What good news! It’s time for celebration’ from inside her, when she was informed that the final talks between the two families had begun; the way her face seemed so frangible, so effortfully held back from disintegration; the way she seemed scrunched up on herself, but bravely trying to go through the ordinary motions and reactions of life; a smile that never reached her eyes, a mechanical answer, a choked muffledness sometimes at the edge of her voice when she spoke — it was all these that pierced Charubala at the same time as chilling her soul.

Fear. That is what Charubala felt in the presence of her daughter. Ordinary conversations felt like booby-trapped enclosures.

‘Have you decided which saris you’re going to wear?’ she asked her daughter, instantly regretting missing out on articulating the occasion she meant.

Chhaya called her on it; the time for sensitivity was long over. ‘Wear when?’ she said.

Charubala made her second mistake. ‘You know very well when.’

‘If you know that I know, then clearly you do too. Why such difficulty in spelling it out?’

Terror had emptied Charubala’s mind; she had no response. In any case, Chhaya did not wait for one.

‘Yes, of course, I have been thinking a lot about Priyo’s wedding and what I should wear at Priyo’s wedding ,’ Chhaya said, that raggedy edge to her brittly-pitched voice. ‘Tell me what to wear at Priyo’s wedding , on the different days of Priyo’s wedding — one for each day and another for each night of Priyo’s wedding . What an auspicious occasion.’ Her voice rose higher and higher at each recurrence of what her mother had thought it tactful to leave out.

Charubala cried out, more in fear than anger, ‘What’s happened to you? Why are you behaving like a madwoman?’

Unnervingly, Chhaya did not snap. Instead she gave a high, unjoyous laugh and turned her back to her mother. Charubala thought that she had turned away to avoid being seen to cry, to appear weak. A long-buried memory shifted in her mind, of an afternoon when this daughter, then much younger, had looked into her soul and confronted her with an insuperable choice. It was too much for her. She would have to ask Sandhya to deal with this, but what precisely was she going to say to her daughter-in-law? She fled from the room, from the sight of that dangerous suppuration.

In the four-month lead-up to Priyo’s wedding, Chhaya’s behaviour became more and more erratic. She secluded herself in her room, pleading some kind of illness or the other. At times she appeared for dinner wearing stale clothes, her unwashed hair all over the place, looking the picture of wildness, not far from an incarnation of the goddess Kali. At other times she showed up wearing what seemed like a shopful of heavy ceremonial jewellery — bangles up to her elbows, chokers and necklaces, earrings that covered the entire ear — looking even more precarious, her face a mask of a sick excess of powder and snow and lipstick. She resembled a malignant, bloodthirsty goddess even more. On these occasions, with everyone else around her walking as if on eggshells, she asked her rhetorical questions, ‘How do I look? Good, don’t you think? At least I don’t look so dark with all the make-up. What do you think? Why aren’t you answering me? Tell me, tell me, why aren’t you answering me?’ And, poised teeteringly at that pitch, she took off her ornaments, piece by piece, and dashed them onto the floor, against the furthest wall.

Sandhya gently said, ‘Chhee, such expensive stuff, and sacred to Lakshmi too, it’s not good to hurl these things onto the floor.’ She almost crooned the words, as if lulling a child to sleep. ‘Give them to me and I’ll pick out the ones that will look best on you and match your sari and blouse, come now.’

Charubala thought of the imminent wedding and her hair stood on end; what unknown heights would Chhaya ascend on those climactic days? It did not bear thinking about.

Sandhya suggested, ‘Ma, I think Chhaya may be feeling left out. It’ll be all right if we involve her in more things. What if we asked her to sing on the evening of boü-bhaat? Such a wonderful singer. She just needs to feel that she too has a role in all this.’

Sandhya was a year younger than Chhaya but relationally her senior, since she was married to Chhaya’s elder brother; Charubala had always thought this was a felicitous combination — Sandhya could be a mixture of sister and friend for her daughter and still have a kind of gentle, subtle command over her. In the six years that Sandhya had been in the family, she had taken on more and more responsibilities and become a solid, reliable, gentle sanctuary, but she was also efficient and hard-working. Even with two little sons to look after, she worked in tandem with her mother-in-law as the core that held the Ghosh household together, its central nervous system, its head factory. Charubala foresaw a day in the near future when Sandhya would be running, with her blessing, the entire show, so that when she suggested something, such as this solution to the problem of Chhaya, Charubala was always willing to heed it.

Pointedly Chhaya did not go to the bride’s house in Behala for the main wedding rituals; she said she was too ill to move out of bed: nausea, head-spins, high temperature, a throbbing inside her head, palpitations, extreme weakness. A doctor was called. Charubala was torn between extreme irritation — what a fine time to fall sick! in the middle of a frenetic circus at home, with scores of people, decorators, caterers, guests milling around, everyone rushed off their feet — and the need to put on a mask of caring sympathy. Yet something inside her also registered relief. Chhaya was a loose cannon nowadays, and who knew what she would do at the bride’s house during the wedding? Best that she remained at home, even if that meant wasting precious time trying to organise people to stay back to look after her and, vitally, to act out, with tears and theatrical excess, a drama of trying to persuade her to come to Behala; she was safe in the conviction that Chhaya would not budge. It set back the wedding by three hours; there was hysteria in Behala that the auspicious hour was passing; Chhaya extracted a tiny morsel of satisfaction from the compounding wreckage of her life.

Purnima arrived that evening to take up residence in her new home. Chhaya did not come down to join the throng of women welcoming bride and groom at the threshold, showering them with paddy and new grass, blowing on conch-shells. Her face was not at her window upstairs, furtively feeding her curiosity about her new sister-in-law. Sandhya found time to visit her, sit on her bed, give a short account of the wedding. Chhaya lay on her bed, silent and somehow abbreviated. Then Sandhya asked, ‘Will you be well enough to sing tomorrow? We’re all counting on it.’