Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

‘Orre, where’s Chhaya gone? See if you can find her,’ a cry would reach him. Or ‘Where’s Bhola? I don’t see him. Quick, quick, he’s learning how to climb the stairs, see that he doesn’t go up to the roof.’ Any call or order without a name was for him to answer. It was this fragmented miscellany of tasks that ate into his studies. The enthusiasm and desire to learn, always there, saw him through. Despite the fitful application, Madan could read passably well and even write by the time Adi and Priyo were initiated into the ‘chalk-in-hand’ ceremony, although his spelling was parlous and his letters uneven, crooked, amateurish. When Bhola reached school-going age — they were ensconced in Bhabanipur by that time — Madan was not just functionally literate but fluent; he read the books the boys read: the illustrated children’s Ramayana and Mahabharata by Upendrakishore, Tagore’s Katha o Kahini . He even started on English, but never progressed much beyond the alphabet and ‘cat’, ‘bat’, ‘sat’; lack of guidance and time, increasing responsibilities, a whole household on his shoulders, all put paid to that ambition.

By now, Madan’s Oriya accent had been almost totally leached out of his Bengali. But when he was younger, and for quite a few years after the family moved to Bhabanipur, Charubala and Adi and Priyo loved to poke fun gently at his accent; it was one of their occasional and reliable entertainments at home. It had taken him a while to work out why they so frequently asked him to sing songs that he had picked up in his village.

‘Go on, Madan, sing that one you sang last week, the wedding one,’ they implored.

The innocent seventeen-year-old, in the clutch of shyness, demurred but ultimately had to oblige. ‘Girl’s wedding, girl’s wedding / Everyone is crying silently on the wedding day / Their eyes are streaming with tears,’ he sang, his voice nasal, the melody plangent, wailing at regular intervals, and oddly pitched, the lyrics impenetrable, ‘The wedding sari was chosen after looking at fourteen markets / It was one hand long, wide from thumb to little finger/The bride wore it in pleats.’

At the Oriya expression for pleating, kunchi-kanchi , so primitive to their refined Bengali ears, Charubala and Adi collapsed, shuddering uncontrollably with laughter.

Priyo, all of seven years old, was too young to know what was going on, but he could read that it was ridicule, albeit affectionate, that was making his mother and Dada double up.

‘Did you then “doonce” at the wedding?’ Adi asked, trying, and failing, to keep a straight face as he picked out Madan-da’s Oriya inflection of the word ‘dance’. ‘Come on, do a doonce for us.’

Priyo pranced about, addressing him as ‘Udey’, the pejorative term for people from Madan-da’s province, and mocking, ‘Udey babu, udey babu, doonce-u for us-u.’

Madan knew that he was being laughed at and felt an inchoate sense of humiliation, which did not, could not, grow, because they were his masters who were making fun of him. What could he do, except join in with them, laughing along aimlessly, a bit foolishly, with their more pointed laughter directed at him? But he really did not mind; he knew he had come from a backward village; these were city people, born and bred, they knew better; he too laughed at his backward ways of speaking.

Charubala put Madan’s preternatural affinity for cooking down to his Oriya origins. She taught him the basics — which spices went with which dal; that hilsa was never cooked with onions, ginger and garlic; shukto was flavoured only with mustard seeds and ginger — and he consolidated that with an ease and talent that showed he had the real ‘cook’s hand’. He never burned the rice, oversalted or undersalted the food, made the staple fish stew too watery. Charubala did not have to guide him through every single step of a dish; a brief set of instructions before he began was sufficient. He did not make any mistakes or forget the recipe when he prepared the dish the next time. He introduced them to new tastes, new dishes that he picked up from his more experienced uncle or brought back, when he was older, from his annual trip back to his village; they were things unfamiliar to the Bengali palate.

Charubala tasted the dal at lunch one day and said, ‘What’s this? I don’t think I ever taught you to make this.’

Madan, nervous, almost hiding behind the door, answered, ‘No, Ma, this is biri dali.’

‘Oh, you mean biuli-r dal. It’s delicious,’ she exclaimed. ‘What did you do?’

‘I toasted it first,’ he said shyly, ‘then I fried panchphoron and chopped garlic and whole dried red chillies in mustard oil and added it to the boiled lentils.’

‘I’ve never had it before. Is this from your “country”? You must cook this more often for us.’

It became known as ‘Madan’s dal’. Over time, things came to be called ‘Madan’s stem-vegetable fry’ or ‘Madan’s fish’ (fish cooked with curry leaves and mustard and garlic paste with lime juice added right at the end, an unconservative way of cooking something, over which Bengalis thought they had a monopoly of inventiveness).

He even made thrift inventive. After squeezing out the milk from grated coconut, instead of throwing away the grounds, he mixed them with sugar and cardamom powder and set them in lightly oiled stone moulds in the shape of fish or abstract patterns. He fried up the gills and fins and bones of fish with garlic and chilli powder; this became so popular with the servants that Charubala heard of it, tasted it herself and became an instant convert. In later years Chhaya, as a young girl of twelve, developed a mild addiction to it. Madan firmly set his signature to dishes that one could get only in 22/6: fritters of mutton fat served during teatime at 6 p.m.; banana-flower croquettes; stems and buds of pui cooked with tiny whitebait. Charubala sent up thanks for his Oriya blood and never forgot how lucky she had been in finding Madan. Neighbours told her, only half-joking, ‘We’ll steal him from you one of these days. .’

Because Madan came to run this vital segment of the household — grocery shopping, cooking, suggesting what should be served to guests or at events such as birthdays and pujas and celebrations — he became not only indispensable but also, over time, someone whose say on certain domestic matters carried some weight, whose opinion was frequently consulted. For example, the maids who did all the menial jobs in the kitchen — cutting vegetables, cleaning and gutting fish, doing the washing-up — were engaged only after they had been approved by Madan. Even the maids-of-all-work, responsible for the laundry and sweeping and swabbing the floors, were hired with Madan’s consent. In time, as the household grew and more servants had to be engaged, Madan came to be a sort of housekeeper in charge of all of them.

As if this level of correspondence with culinary matters — and, later, the business of domestic staff arrangements — were not enough to make Madan a great catch, there was his wonderful way with the children. As with the kitchen matters, Charubala found him such a safe pair of hands that she left a substantial part of the childcare to him. Madan would be asked to keep an eye on the crawling babies or the unsteadily walking children — for several years Priyo, Chayya and Bhola formed one continuum of that — so that they did not fall, bang their heads, injure themselves or put dangerous things in their mouths. He would be asked to distract them when they refused to eat. Before long, he was asked to spoon food into their mouths as well. He helped Charubala when she bathed, dried and put talcum powder on them before easing them into their clothes. In winter, he massaged them with mustard oil, left out to warm in the sun, before they had their baths. When the four-year-old Bhola tried to pick up a caterpillar from the trunk of the guava tree in the garden, it was Madan who comforted the bawling child and extracted the barbs, one by one, from his forefinger and thumb. When the children were naughty or recalcitrant, and distracting or bribing with toys and games and goodies did not work, Madan tamed them with the thrill of fear.