Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

Chhaya nodded. ‘Of course. I’ll be fine,’ she said. The words, the tone, her expression, all pulled in different directions.

Number 22/6 Basanta Bose Road had turned into a fairground. The 400 invitees were going to be fed in batches on the roof, which had been covered in coloured fabric and lights for the purpose. Long trestle tables had been set up. Flowers, fairy lights, a specially constructed eyrie of bamboo and cloth and planks twelve feet above the front door, to house the shehnai-player and his accompanists as they played one raag after another through the evening, the aroma of pulao and mutton curry and fish-fry and women’s perfumes and tuberose — in the midst of all this Chhaya seemed the unappeased wraith who had come back to haunt and curse.

In the big room on the first floor, where the newly-weds sat, receiving guests and the presents they had brought with them, Sandhya ushered in Chhaya. She had suggested this odd thing, that the groom’s sister was going to entertain the guests coming in and going out of the room with her singing, but now she was doubtful about the appropriateness of the idea. Charubala had called her aside and confessed her misgivings about it too. But it was too late to go back on the plan. That Chhaya, who was ordinarily so reluctant to perform in public, seizing up with shyness and inhibition when asked to do so, had readily agreed in the first place without any cavilling should have alerted both her mother and Sandhya, but there was a wedding celebration to organise, they had a hundred other things to attend to.

As Purnima was introduced to Chhaya, she got up and then bent down to touch her sister-in-law’s feet. Chhaya graciously played the game of coy reluctance, followed by the inevitable giving in. Guests milled around. There were so many people that it did not seem unusual that Chhaya did not once look at Priyo. On Prafullanath’s insistence, the house had been turned into a blazing core of light. There were no shadows in that cruel room. The chatter and laughter of people rose and fell like spume on grand waves, swelling and partially disappearing, then appearing again. Word quickly went around that Chhaya was going to sing. Someone was sent off to fetch the tanpura from her room.

Chhaya began with the love-songs of Tagore. Glances of approval were exchanged; her choices were fitting for the occasion. ‘I haven’t seen him yet but I’ve heard his flute’, ‘I yearn to speak what’s in my heart but no one wants to know’, ‘Clouds covered the stars at dusk’, the difficult ‘What radiance is this that fills my soul?’ As so often with Tagore, it was difficult to separate cleanly the spiritual from the romantic, and Chhaya leaned with the full force of her considerable talent on this chord of blurring and made the songs speak with unexpected luminosity. The chatter had ebbed away.

Purnima, looking appropriately bashful, was doing the usual bridal thing of keeping her eyes downcast in a show of modesty. God, she sang well, Purnima thought, but was it one of those families that was all Tagore songs and effete poetry quotations and literature-grazing? Her heart sank.

In Priyo’s roiling mind a clear photographic memory bobbed to the surface. A little boy singing, ‘I am a lost traveller. O flowers, you, night-blooming jasmine, mallika of the morning, do you recognise me?’ And a little girl singing out in joyous affirmation, ‘Yes, yes, I know you, new traveller, I have seen the edge of your colourful clothes in the forests. .’ His chest was a tight band. Did betrayal feel like this then?

Now that she knew she had her audience captive, Chhaya began the crossing-over. With two mournful, almost unredemptive songs, ‘Both banks of my heart flood over, alas, my companion’ and ‘There is a thirst in my eyes, a thirst across my entire chest’, both more straightforwardly from the ‘Love’ section of Tagore’s songbook, she flicked the mood. No one seemed to notice it, no one registered that something about those two songs sounded some off-notes in a celebratory gathering. But her audience was of one. She knew for whom she was singing and she knew, with the knowledge of someone who has thought another’s thoughts, that a meaning occluded from the perception of everyone else was hitting its target with lethal accuracy. But it was not an audience of one, as she assumed; in a corner of the room Charubala wanted to be swallowed up by darkness, to disappear entirely. The meanings that were forming and disintegrating inside her could not be tolerated; she had to turn her mind away from them.

Chhaya moved on to the kirtan-inflected, ‘You appear only occasionally, why do I not get to see you for eternity?’ At the words ‘It’s as if clouds move over the sky of my heart, preventing me from seeing you’, Priyo felt the bitter taste of treason in his mouth again: it was like cinders, ashy one moment, burning the other. Out of the corner of his eye he saw his mother bring her aanchol to her mouth and hold it there. Nothing could have prepared them for this. Was it revenge, or was it the cry of a fatally wounded animal as it ran around in pain?

And then Chhaya twisted the knife in the final movement. She began by singing the compassion-drenched, minor-mode song that her mother had sung to her as a child to console her when she felt small in the eyes of the world because she was dark: ‘Clouds are black, the darkness is black / And scandal too is black / Black is the sin that caused Binodini to be cast out / But blacker than all these, my daughter, is the hair on your head.’ In one neat bundling, Chhaya threw back onto the face of the world, like spit, all that it had arrayed against her. She had been born into a melodramatic world; melodrama was the tool she used to banish it from her.

Meanwhile, to Bhola’s room on the second floor — Bhola, like everyone else, was mingling with the crowd of guests, friends and relatives — Somnath had succeeded in bringing the housemaid, Meera, on some pretext or the other. He had not only been eyeing up her healthy, curvy, nineteen-year-old’s body for some time, but also making sure that she knew he held it in admiration. The lightest of touches on her shoulder, a feathery and seemingly accidental brush of his arm against her breasts, a casually engineered, and equally debonairly executed, full-frontal bump into her while turning a corner — Somnath had played this with the subtle surety of an old rake, as if what he lacked in experience he made up for with the natural expression of something that was coded in him, something that ran in his blood. He did not know what Meera thought about his creeping advance, but she had appeared to be receptive enough, not pushing his hands away or making excuses not to be in his vicinity.

He had clocked all her movements and knew that she had her bath in the afternoon, then went up to the roof to hang her washed clothes out to dry. A fortnight ago he had timed his entry to the roof to coincide with this and had been rewarded with the sense-filling sight of her ripe-fruit breasts brimming out of her blouse as she had tried to put it on. Masturbating himself dry while fondling the memory of that image, Somnath had come to the conclusion that it had not just been a matter of serendipity, that there had been something deliberate, almost provocative, about the way those breasts had spilled out before she, taking all the time in the world, had tucked them in. The whole incident occupied barely five seconds, but it stretched itself in Somnath’s mind, adding to his perception of it as pointed, calculated. Over the next ten days or so Somnath planned furiously. He tried to catch her on her own, but was foiled by something or the other. The wedding preparations had made everyone so breathlessly busy that a snatched moment or two of privacy had become even more difficult to come by than it normally was in this populous, ever-public home. He could hardly lock himself in a bathroom with her; even that would be discovered — somebody was bound to come along and hammer on the door, wanting to use it, halfway through.