Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

‘I want to begin a costing of a technological upgrade of Memari,’ he began. ‘Foreign machines. Latest things from Germany and England and Holland. It’s not going to be cheap, but in the long term it is going to be more costly carrying on with below-par production.’

Two days after New Year, in mid-April, Priyo took his wife out for their first evening outing, the 6.35 p.m. showing of Jogan in Rupali, followed by dinner at Firpo’s in Esplanade. It was something that Priyo had read about in a recent novel and the idea had caught; it was modern, new, with just the right touch of adventurous daring about it, a slight defiance of middle-class conservatism that he felt all writers should take it upon themselves to push against. There were two more visits to the cinema — Babul and Tathapi — before news of Purnima’s pregnancy was announced to the family on a blustery monsoon evening in July. Eleven days after this, in the bathroom on the first floor, Chhaya slit open the veins in her wrists with her father’s straight razor, appropriately called ‘Bengall’, manufactured by Luke Cadman, Sheffield, England, a simple and dangerous item of luxury that he had bought himself in 1930, following his father’s habit of spending occasionally on small, private pleasures to remind himself, in his father’s words, ‘that you have worked your way up to a world where you can afford these things; a treat from you to you’.

The Ghoshes tried hard to control the information from becoming public knowledge, tried to hide it even from the younger members of their own joint family, but how could they ever have contended with the supreme acoustics of Bengali life?

Their first recourse was to lie and spin the news: they gave it out to be understood that an ambulance had to be called that monsoon evening and Chhaya rushed to hospital because her blood pressure had dropped dangerously low and she had fainted in her bath. But the servants had had to clean up the blood from the bathroom floor, and hushing them up meant appeasement and bribes and playing a very long game whose dynamics and balances, bound to change with time, meant that the Ghoshes could not staunch that particular flow. Besides, the bandages around both her wrists, when Chhaya returned home, were not easily explained away. So people talked with jubilant ferocity and, as they talked, the Ghoshes changed the story to something involving broken glass from the bathroom window that Chhaya was trying to open when she slipped on the wet floor. That was concession enough. The whole neighbourhood pounced on it, feral beasts fighting over the meagre meat on a bone. This taint, it was later whispered, had ruined what little remaining chance she had had of finding a husband. Overnight, she became untouchable; it was as if the sharp razor she had used so imperfectly on her arteries had at least shredded, with hideous efficiency, both her marriageability, already attenuated, and her social standing.

By the time Baishakhi was born in late February of the following year, Chhaya could still be considered as recovering. Madan took it upon himself to serve only convalescent food to his Didi-moni for this period. All the dishes that he cooked when they were children, suffering from measles or fever or chickenpox or tonsillitis, he revived for her. Pish-pash, bone-marrow soup, gentle mutton stew with carrots and green beans and potatoes, soft kedgeree with an omelette on the side and that staple — magur or shing fish (both were supposed to aid the production of red blood cells) cooked with ginger. It was as if Didi-moni had regressed to childhood and needed all over again the things that a child required: nourishment, pampering, care. She had lost so much blood. The very thought turned him to cold stone. What was in his capacity to give her so that she could be whole again, except what he had given them for the span of their lives until now — his food? Would that bring her back from death’s door? That is where Chhaya had been, everyone whispered: death’s door. He heard other things, such as a figure (she had needed six bottles of blood in hospital) or a medical prescription (she had to have her wrists bandaged for two months), and pity reduced him to nothing. Random memories played through his head as Charubala spooned food, which he had brought in, into her daughter’s mouth and he stood in a corner of the room, watching, ready to obey Ma’s orders before she had even finished saying them. A six-year-old girl crying because she had chipped the paint off the clay figurine of a flute player that he had bought her from the Chadak Mela in his village. He trying to coax an obstinate girl, ill with chickenpox, to eat the incredibly bony pholi fish that was thought to help against the illness. A girl of twelve stealing into the kitchen and saying, ‘Madan-da, quick, give me a little bit of that spicy dried-fish fry-up, quick, quick, before Ma comes and catches me.’ A broken seed-necklace, the tiny seeds scattered all around it under a flowering bush and a little girl saying, ‘Madan-da, pick them up for me, won’t you, I’m afraid to go near that bush, you said there’s a girl buried under it.’ Was that girl and this bandaged, semi-conscious, broken woman on her bed the same person?

When Charubala was sure that Chhaya had mended, she moved her up from the first floor, which she had so far shared with Priyo and Somu and now Purnima, to the second floor. Whatever anyone felt for Chhaya, and this was different for each person, although it was a difference of degree rather than of kind, pity was a dominant emotion. This pity curdled partially to what could only be called fear.

When even Bhola, who was also thought to be unmarriageable, got married three years later, to a ‘nice, simple girl from a nice home’, as Charubala described Jayanti to everyone, they gave up trying to find someone for Chhaya. A worm of regret wriggled through Charubala, especially when she found herself sleepless during the small hours, but nursing and feeding this almost-grief seemed to consume less of her energies than the continual waging of what had become a battle, a battle she knew she had lost. Occasionally a small hope flashed in her, she scurried around for a day or two chatting to matchmakers, making enquiries, a kitten amusing itself with falling leaves; then the true nature of the deceiving glimmer made itself obvious to her and she subsided into a tearful inertia.

Chhaya took a job at a new school, Ballygunje Shiksha Sadan on Gariahat Road, in an attempt to start afresh; rumours had insinuated themselves into her previous workplace at Beltala Girls’ School, much closer to home than Gariahat Road. Every summer when Chhaya went on a school trip with her new students to Puri or Digha or Ghatshila, Charubala imagined her daughter was going to her husband’s home and her in-laws’. A week’s holiday elastically stretched itself in Charubala’s mind as a lifetime, then snapped back with the slap of limitation when her daughter returned; the whole episode had just been a cheap toy of her mind.

As Chhaya stepped outside the front gate on her way to work one morning two women came up to her. One of them asked, ‘That Ghosh house, aren’t you the sister?’

Belatedly Chhaya understood that they were talking to her; she had never set eyes on them before. Maidservants, she could tell immediately, but she was certain that neither of them had ever worked in their house. Unless it was during the time when she was in hospital and then, later, too sunk in slow recovery at home to take notice of temporary staff.

‘Yes. Why do you ask?’ Chhaya replied hesitantly.

‘Somnath your brother?’ The tone was harsh, aggressive.

‘Y-y-yes. What do you want?’

‘Your brother has a friend called Paltu, in that neighbourhood?’ she asked, pointing somewhere vaguely west with her left hand.