Neel Mukherjee - A Life Apart

At other times it was a different joy of finding out totally unknown things. There was curiosity, bafflement and, once again, that intense chasing dance, the moves of some of which he could not master for a long time. Someone had mentioned Bach in school so he came home and looked it up. There seemed to be a lot of them, and he didn’t know the first names, but he assumed it must be Bach, Johann Sebastian , because he had the maximum number of lines to his name. It led him on separate enquiries: a slowly enclosing one from counterpoint, to canon, to fugue, to suite; the other, a widening dance: Bach, Johann Sebastian; Rameau, Jean-Philippe; Albinoni, Tomasso; Vivaldi, Antonio; Couperin, Louis … It reminded him of those funny chapters in the Old Testament which went on and on and on about how Shem begat Arphaxad begat Salah begat Eber begat Peleg, theoretically stretching to the here and now, but this one was different: each name, each term was a new world, not a dead proper noun on the page.

There was a lot he didn’t understand. When this happened, he committed the thing to memory or read it over and over again, ten times, fourteen times, repeating counterpoint The term comes from the idea of note-againstnote, or point-against-point, the Latin for which is punctus contra punctum. It consists of melodic lines that are heard against one another, and are woven together so that their individual notes harmonize. In this sense Counterpoint is the same as Polyphony, repeating it in his head as a rapid chant, as though manipulating this stubborn thing and chasing its strewn spores across other pages with such white-hot doggedness would suddenly make it give up its resilient secret. When he shut the book at last and looked around him, at the bare whitewashed walls, the cobwebby mosquito nets in the windows, the gathering dust everywhere, he saw them differently, as though the whole world had been newly named. Was this what Brother Matthew meant when he talked about new heaven, new earth?

Outside, another conflict had erupted. Pratim had been hiding for three days because Mr Malvya from across the street had told Ritwik’s mother that he had lent Pratim some money which he said he would return in a week. ‘He wanted about three hundred rupees; he said you haven’t been able to pay the boys’ school fees for over two months now. I didn’t have three hundred with me, I gave him a hundred and seventy-five,’ he said. He had been clearly embarrassed confronting her with their inability to pay for their children’s education. Ritwik’s mother had been furious at this unashamed lie; she didn’t know which was worse — telling Mr Malvya that Pratim had lied or letting him continue to think that it was she who had sent her brother out to beg for some money. Each was equally humiliating.

As always, it was Dida who had informed Pratim that everyone knew what he had done. So he had lain low for a few days, but it was a small, enclosed world, and as Dida frequently said, ‘The world is round, remember; things have a habit of coming back full circle.’ Pratim too reached the completion of this particular circle a bit too quickly for his comfort and faced the wrath of his sister and Jamaibabu.

‘We won’t be able to show our faces to our neighbours any more,’ Ritwik’s mother shouted. ‘The shame, the shame!’ Pratim decided to keep quiet and ride it out; all this was so much bluster and wind, it would blow over soon. After all, everyone knew he couldn’t repay the money and, because he had used the boys’ school fees as an excuse, Jamaibabu was going to be shamed into paying it back to save his face, never mind what the truth was. Besides, he didn’t care. It was embarrassing for them, not for him; he was going to keep himself in the shadows for a few more weeks and everything would be buried under the weight of a new crisis.

Ritwik listened to the shouting outside with horror. His mother had begun crying, deep, wretched sobs of frustration and anger. There was going to be more of this when his father returned home. She would have to tell him; another round of recriminations, bitterness, tension would ensue. That heave and slow rattle behind his ribs was starting again. He didn’t want to hear any more, he just wanted the draining thudding inside to stop, stop now. He squeezed his eyes shut, tight tight tight, till there were exploding colours inside his eyeballs, and let his voice articulate the words he had memorized from the page in front of him, to drown out the squabble: sonata form:. . regular sonata form movement falls into 3 main sections: 1. EXPOSITION (usually containing two subjects, the first subject is in tonic key, the second subject. .

‘What have you done with the money? WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH IT?’

in dominant; there may be further subjects), often repeated and giving way to 2. DEVELOPMENT (here the material from the Exposition. .

‘. . gambling or drinking? How low can you sink? Did you think about the boys when you did it? Did you? I try so hard to raise. .’

This time with effort coiled up into a ball: 3. RECAPITULATION (in which the essential feature is the return of the second subject but now in the home key or the tonic, and the repetition of Exposition material, though often with modification). The Recapitulation has a coda, which helps provide a proper feeling of finality. Some composers, including Beethoven, extend this coda into what, to all intents and purposes, is a second Development section. The principle behind sonata form is key relationships.

Everything fell away. He was left just with a rustling page and the accumulative music of repeated words.

The space between the shit-brown door and the hinge offers him a strip of view, just a thin, long line of fluorescent-lit space. He has to keep one eye shut, though, and one side of his face pressed to the cold metal of the door. If he shifts between the right eye and the left, the view from the crack changes in a parallactic dance. Right left, right left, right left. They don’t add up to a seamless whole, there is either an overlap or a gap, he can’t understand which.

Luckily, he doesn’t have to stand in this position all the time, neck twisted, eyes strained. Because the toilets are underground, he can hear heavy footsteps descending; only then does he get up from the toilet seat and move to his spyline swiftly to catch the man entering the toilets while he passes through that narrow ribbon of vision for a fleeting second. He’s cautious and doesn’t want to lose the man during that split second so he rushes to the door as soon as he hears footsteps running down.

There are two staircases leading down to the two wide pissoirs, all brushed aluminium and falling jets of water, separated by a long length of mirrors with four washbasins and an open space off which four cubicles open on either side. The cubicle Ritwik occupies, his favourite one, is an anomaly that disturbs this elegant symmetry; it is placed diagonally behind the two small cubicles which open out from one side of the short wide corridor leading to the mirrors and sinks. There is no corresponding cubicle on the other side. If he draws a straight line through the middle of the sinks and corridor, each half of the St. Giles public toilets almost becomes a mirror image of the other. Almost, because his cubicle, the biggest one, breaks this symmetry: it is like a stray, careless note in a perfect fugue.

But he likes it best because it offers him a view of who’s coming in, who’s going out, without having to get out of the toilet and do all the ridiculous things to signal he was really using the loo — flush, wait two seconds, open the door noisily, get out, head straight for the sinks, wash hands for a long time, shake hands, go to the dryers and spend another five minutes there, pressing the ‘on’ button each time it stops, once, twice, three times, as if he is really drying his hands.