Neel Mukherjee - A Life Apart

During one of their dinners — informal, just the two of them, but neither of them forgets to dress up — Mrs Cameron asks, ‘So do you have any idea what this woman Bimala is like?’

Miss Gilby says, ‘No, what I know of her is what I have gleaned from her husband’s letters. He is very well educated: a recent MA from Calcutta University.’

‘But Maud, she’s not one of those girl brides, is she?’

‘No, no, I don’t think so. She can’t be any older than twenty or so but she is no girl. Or at least that’s not the impression I get from his letters.’

There is a pause for a few minutes as the servants remove the empty plates of consommé and bring in the curried prawns.

‘Are you not somewhat anxious about living with an Indian family?’ Mrs Cameron asks.

‘To tell you the truth,’ Miss Gilby replies, ‘yes, I am, a little.’

‘Will they have an untouchable European put in a separate wing of the house, give you servants who will not be allowed to touch or do any work for the other members of the household, that sort of thing?’

‘Oh, Violet, I’ve thought and thought about these practical arrangements and even mentioned one or two of them to Mr Roy Chowdhury. It appears they are a very progressive family. He has two widowed sisters-in-law who live with them and I’m assuming they observe strict religious rules or whatever the norms and mores are in these cases, but I’ve been asking around about rules and etiquette in Hindu families. One thing I’m sure of is that he doesn’t have much truck with the caste system.’

There is another clearing of plates before the leg of mutton is brought to the table. Miss Gilby asks, ‘Are you going to carry on with the school?’

‘Yes, of course, Maud, of course. It will be difficult without you. God knows, you’ve been such a great help and I don’t know what I’m going to do without you. Miss Hailey — you know her, don’t you, Grant Hailey’s sister — is showing an interest but she is the timid sort and one harsh word from her brother, or, indeed, anyone, would be enough to make her cower into subservience.’

‘You know, Violet, don’t you, I really wish I could stay on but. .’ she says, an askance glance picking up the burden of the unsaid.

‘No, Maud, you must go where your heart takes you. And if you don’t manage to get into all these families and familiarize yourself with their running, get to know their women, your book is going to be a little thin. Have you started it yet?’

‘No, I haven’t, not yet, but I’m hoping to begin once I’ve settled in in Nawabgunj. I’m so glad you understand, Violet. Mr Roy Chowdhury says he’s very interested in your school. If you need any help from him — talking to people, funds, anything — you just have to ask. He seems to be a very enlightened young man.’

‘You are lucky. You could have got yourself into a family that locked the women away in dark rooms and allowed them to do nothing but play with dolls and gossip and bear children.’

‘In that case, I don’t think I would have been asked for in the first place.’

Mrs Cameron gives orders for the table to be cleared. They have both had somewhat more than their usual amount of claret. Lightheaded, they move to the drawing room. It has started raining again and there are all sorts of flying insects making a beeline for the candles in the room; something drifts down, too slow to be an insect. Miss Gilby realizes it’s a feather from somewhere, maybe a wet bird outside, or a pillow. She blows on it and instead of falling down it changes its course and gets wafted in the direction of Mrs Cameron.

Mrs Cameron exclaims, ‘Oh, look, a feather.’ There’s a childish delight in her voice. She moves her head forward and lets out a puff of breath from lips protruding in an O; the breath catches the swaying, falling feather and it swerves towards Miss Gilby. But before it can reach Miss Gilby’s blowing range, it loses momentum and starts gravitating downwards again. Miss Gilby gets up, goes down on her knees and before the feather can reach the chairs, she blows on it very hard.

‘Quick, Violet, quick, blow it up to the level of the table. Go on, lie down and blow it up, up,’ she squeals with urgency.

Mrs Cameron does exactly that — she crouches very low on the floor and, with her neck pointed upward, blows up, moving her head like a cat that has seen a flying insect or bird above it. She tries several bursts to get the feather right in the current.

‘You’ve got it, you’ve got it,’ Miss Gilby shouts and raises herself up to meet the ascending feather.

‘Maud, Maud, try and raise it higher so we can do it standing up. No, higher, higher,’ Mrs Cameron shouts.

The two women shuffle and parry in an odd, staccato dance while the feather, which gets tossed between them, never seems to lose its light grace.

Paper covers stone. Stone breaks scissors. Scissors cut paper. Paper cuts him, has always done. Not just those occasional cuts when he is impatiently opening the rare envelope in his pigeon-hole, no, not those. It cuts him into new shapes, new forms, until there is no he anymore, but a cipher, a shadow, dependent on other things for his very existence. Sometimes while papers and their resident words slip and slide into him, drowning him under so that he can’t take so much life in its burning bright rush inside him, he casually looks up to catch the face of someone in the window opposite his desk. For the space of something not calibrated in human time, only registered by the sudden sway of his heart towards his throat, he does not recognize that the unmoored face looking back at him is his own. He is goosepimpled by his own presence, or a deferred version of himself, as if he is not really there. He chances upon Edmund Spenser’s dedicatory epistle to Lady Carey: ‘Therefore I have determined to give my selfe wholy to you, as quite abandoned from my selfe. .’ His eyes stop at quite abandoned from my selfe . Yes, this is it; he has found confirmation in another page, in other words, of what happens to him. But there is no he left when he reads. So who is it that looks at him from the impressionable glass? Words for him are like the sporing rust on metal — they eat away at him until there is only an unidentifiable husk. He has become nothing.

These presences and shadows scare him sometimes. He has taken to sitting with his back firmly pressed to the corner where two walls meet at right angles. He has become like a cat: at least two sides are covered and nothing can startle him from behind. Whatever encounter there is in store for him will be face to face; he’s prepared for it, ready to look it in the eye.

Look her in the eye if she comes back again.

So far, she hasn’t come back while he has been in his room, but occasionally, when he returns at night, turns the key in the lock, pushes the door open and, leaning forward, quickly switches on the light with an outstretched arm while still standing outside, he knows she has been in the room. No, nothing has been moved or hidden, nothing has been disturbed. There is no trace, no evidence, only a gathering together of the air into its normal Brownian motion after it has been sliced through and agitated by a recent presence. It is like water restored to calm after the ripples generated by a lost stone have died out but the water still remembers. The air in his room sometimes has that quality of remembrance. That’s all. And he’s afraid of that memory of air.

He doesn’t dare tell anyone about it; he knows they’re going to be polite, commiserating, maybe just embarrassed, averting his eye. He certainly doesn’t want to confide in Gavin. Lately, he has been getting on Ritwik’s nerves. When he’s alone with Gavin, the deprecatory humour directed at him, the ribbing, they’re quite all right; he takes them in his stride as part of Gavin’s affection for him. He even enjoys, up to a point, Gavin’s feigned exasperation with him, his attitude of what are we going to do with a __________ like you? The blank term changes: sometimes it’s rustic peasant, at other times phony, charlatan, unsophisticated yokel, embarrassment ; it all depends on his mood, but it’s all done in the spirit of fun and friendship.