Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

Charubala instinctively began to flex an inward defensiveness; she could say what she felt like about Somu, but the slightest shadow of criticism from someone else, even from his father, made her feel uneasy. She was his mother; she had rights that no one else did.

‘You’re right,’ said Prafullanath. ‘Everything was ordained by fate. Or it is all in the blood. Bad blood will tell one day. All those things I thought I had left far behind. . I was so wrong. All that depravity and excess, they’ve all been passed on by me to my children. I feel I have just been a conducting pipe between the bad in the past and the bad in the future.’

Charubala had to staunch this immediately. Very soon, she knew, the self-excoriation would turn sickly and maudlin and, who knew, even into some real threat against Somu.

‘There’s no point punishing yourself like this. What has happened has happened. We should think about what to do now. I think we should find him a wife immediately, a nice girl who’ll set him right, reform his ways.’

‘Easier said than done. Besides, we’ve already had Bhola’s wedding this year. It’ll be a big financial hit to have another one so soon. He’s our youngest son, everybody expects that his wedding will be a big affair. It’s not as if it can be a registry-office thing, in and out, then a reception at home.’

Charubala mulled this over and said, ‘Why not? He has thrown quicklime-and-ink on our faces, let this be the price he pays for that.’ She found herself still caught up in the rapid pendular arc of hating Somu, wanting to punish him severely, and feeling protective towards him. All she wanted was a respite from that constant motion, some resting point.

‘No, no,’ Prafullanath said. ‘How can that be? Everyone will then say that it was a marriage for our convenience, to mend his ways. Will you be able to live with that?’

‘People can’t be saying anything worse than what they’re saying now.’

‘What is your point?’

There was steel in Charubala. She said, ‘Marriage at any cost, that is my point. No point going to a matchmaker this time around. We should look amongst people we know.’

‘People we know?’

‘Yes. Listen: you, Adi, Priya, all of you know a lot of people through your work in the big world outside. You will have to put your heads together and find a girl soon. Leave the social side of things, reception and ceremony and invitees, leave all that to me.’

In less than three months Adinath found a girl for his younger brother, which led to a regret-filled, jokey aside from his mother: ‘You should have been engaged to find a husband for your sister.’

Prasanta, one of the clerks at the office, had come to Adi to ask for an advance on the following month’s salary. Eyes fixed firmly on the floor somewhere a few inches away from Adi’s feet, he poured it all out. ‘It’s not for me, sir,’ he said. ‘One of my uncles has fallen on hard times. He worked as the postmaster in Ranaghat: comfortable government salary, family house with some land around it. There were fruits and vegetables in the garden, even fish in a pond. They weren’t well-off, but they got by well enough. But eight years ago they closed down the post office and he hasn’t been all right since. Soon after that my grandmother, his mother, that is, died after a long illness. Then the four brothers squabbled over the land and the house. What can I say? I’m ashamed to say that my father was one of them, fighting over inheritance and property and how to divide the garden, the house, the pond. To cut an ugly story short, my uncle was left with hardly anything except two dingy little rooms. He seemed to have lost all will and the brothers exploited this. His wife fought back, but she didn’t have a chance. Anyway, since losing his job he has lost all interest in everything. Caught in the middle of all this, suffering the most, is their young daughter, about to sit her secondary-school exams. I feel most for her’ — here his voice caught and he had to gulp a few times before he could continue — ‘she’s sixteen, only four years younger than me, and we grew up together, she’s closer to me than my own siblings. I also feel doubly bad because my father is involved in all this. He’s responsible, to some extent, for their awful situation. And I don’t want to have any part in it. I help them secretly whenever I can: a sack of rice, a few kilos of lentils, cooking oil, salt, whatever. If they can’t pay Purba’s school fees, which have been in arrears for a few months now, they’ll deregister her and she won’t be able to sit her exams. Her parents don’t have the wherewithal to get her married; at least if she has a matric to her name, maybe. .’

The words dribbled to an end. But no, not yet. ‘Forgive me, sir,’ he added, ‘I’ve taken up a lot of your valuable time with my personal troubles. It’s not your business to listen to all this petty rubbish. But, sir, I. . I didn’t know who. . who to turn to. .’ Here his voice cracked again.

Adi knew in his guts that the man was not spinning him a sentimental tale, one told by so many so often that it had calcified into a giant pillar of cliché, one of those load-bearing struts that held up the structure of Bengali life. But perhaps it had become a cliché because it was a truthful situation for so many people: stretched lives, limited income, indigence, debts, the scrabbling and fighting of dogs replicated by humans. Could he deny that these were not true?

‘Don’t worry, this is not a problem,’ he said. ‘Just tell me how much your cousin’s school fees are and I’ll pay them all — it needn’t come off your salary.’

It was only in the small hours, tossing and turning in bed, sleepless with anxiety over the correct structure of the loan for the new imported machines, that a hidden hook, which had caught in the shallows of his memory, revealed itself in a scrap of sentence he had heard earlier in the day. A scheme was murkily outlining itself in his mind; he would have to test the waters first.

The next day he summoned Prasanta and said to him, ‘So Ashim-babu should be retired, we think. I was also thinking that maybe you could take over from him. Your salary will go up, of course, and that may help you with the situation in your uncle’s family. Talking of which, weren’t you saying yesterday about the trouble you will have getting your cousin married? Well. . what does she look and sound like?’

In a month’s time Somnath was married to Purba. Neither of them had much choice in the matter. The Ghoshes withheld from Purba’s parents the reason for the haste, and the true nature of their youngest son. Here was a beautiful girl, who looked like the goddess Lakshmi, as Charubala remarked on seeing her picture; surely she would be able to reform Somnath? The Das family, for their part, could not quite believe their luck: the disparity in class (and caste) was so huge as to be unbridgeable, but bridged it was. It never occurred to them to dig deeper or to question why; one doesn’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

Prasanta, who was later going to be sorry to see Purba go, experienced the dazed detachment someone feels when events they ignited go far beyond any reasonable trajectory they had imagined. From a request for a loan against his salary from his boss, a trifling piece of the shabby everyday for his class of people, to the marriage of his cousin to the youngest brother of the boss, all within the speed of one month: he will later think that it left his imagination so far behind that he wondered if a faculty that could not imagine things should deserve that name. And there would be something else too, a cloudy suspension in all that clear amazement and disbelief that could only be called envy, as if a fellow prisoner had been released and he left behind to serve his indefinite sentence.