Neel Mukherjee - A Life Apart

Anne is a submerged bird, a creature of hollowness, all air and insubstantiality, the broken doll of her body accentuated grotesquely by the way the bath water refracts her limbs and shrivelled dugs and torso into slightly skewed sizes and perspectives. The Barbour-green inflatable pillow props up her head because she often dozes off in her bath. Sometimes Ugo comes in, sniffs around, sometimes he jumps on to the edge of the bath and sits watching the movements, of water, of hands, with beryl-eyed curiosity.

Today, Ritwik takes the cream-coloured bar and starts soaping Anne under water, an act he has always found frustrating and futile: the soap doesn’t foam or stick to the body because the water dissolves and disperses it instantaneously. What is the point of soaping if you can’t build up a lather, rub and clean yourself with it, and only then wash it off? Wasn’t it a bit Sisyphean to have it all washed away even as you started? He tried to explain the point to Anne once but she didn’t get it at all. Slowly, the water turns into a milky suspension: dirty grey flakes of scum eddy about and move to the margins in a community. Ritwik hates the oily scum, this stubborn refusal of foam.

Anne is lying with her head resting on the pillow, her eyes shut. Ritwik is unsure whether she is asleep but he is used to her abrupt tunings out now. If she wants to speak she will. What he is not used to, not yet, is the feel of her crumpled tissue-paper skin against his hand. It is like touching a creature made up only of folds of hide, with the life taken out of it. That, and the pervasiveness of bones. When life wages war, it is as if these two last foot soldiers hold out until the end, stubbornly fighting a losing battle till they have to succumb to the inevitable as well.

‘The water’s too hot.’ She hasn’t opened her eyes.

‘Why didn’t you tell me when I asked you to dip your hand in?’ Ritwik asks.

‘That’s because it felt all right to the touch.’

It is a logic Ritwik understands, so he asks, ‘Do you want me to add some cold water now?’

‘No, it’s fine.’ And then, after a while, ‘You’ll take that cloth and rub my back, won’t you?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘That Haq woman has come looking for you a couple of times.’

‘Oh, yes?’

‘She seems very curious about you. Asks me all sorts of questions.’

‘What questions?’ There is a slight edge of anxiety in his voice.

‘Oh, you know. Your parents, your family, what you do, where you were before this, what you will do in life, that sort of thing.’ She opens her eyes; there is laughter in them. ‘But I tell her nothing. That’s because I don’t know anything, do I?’

‘Well, Anne, if you ask very politely, I might, I just might tell you a few of the things you are dying to know.’ He is laughing now, a clear and teasing sound in this enveloping miasma of steam.

‘Oh, I am not curious,’ she rushes in mock-huffily, in a little parody of his italicized speech. ‘I wonder where you get all these self-important ideas from. I was just making an observation about that nosy Pakistani woman.’

They are both laughing now, she, in a bass guffaw, he, taking the top notes above this line. Ugo appears, looks at them, sniffs the air and lopes away. By a tacit arrangement, they always leave the bathroom door open during bathtimes, as if closing the door would confer on the event an unwholesome intimacy, which neither of them desired or knew how to negotiate.

Ritwik rubs the lemon yellow flannel along her back in slow circles. More grey scum, which had come to rest along the points of contact between water and flesh and water and bathtub, swirl about, as if alive, like plankton.

‘I think she means to ask you to do something for her but can’t quite bring herself to do it. Probably doesn’t know how to put it. Maybe she wants you to be her mouthpiece,’ Anne says, leaning back against the pillow and closing her eyes again.

‘What do you think it might be?’ Ritwik feels slightly apprehensive. He knows Anne is right, as always; she has an uncanny ability to read people like an easy, accessible book.

‘I have no idea, but she is quite meddlesome, don’t you think? She keeps asking about my family, my children, my grandchildren, as if she hasn’t heard the gossip. I’ve always found this Indian curiosity about other people’s lives a bit disturbing. Not offensive, mind you, just a bit difficult to get used to. I found it difficult to cope with when I was living in India, the constant staring, the personal questions. I suppose it is natural in places where there is a strong sense of community.’ She slides down a few more inches in the water as if this longish speech has exhausted her.

‘What gossip?’ Ritwik asks, unsure whether Anne is going to take this as substantiating evidence of the infamous Subcontinental inquisitiveness.

‘What gossip?’ Anne echoes.

He breathes in deeply and says, ‘You said Mrs Haq pretends as if she hasn’t heard the neighbours’ gossip about you. So I asked what gossip.’

One, two, three. . Ritwik measures the pause in heartbeats; it is impossible to predict which way Anne will go.

‘There are a couple of people who’ve lived here for almost as long as I have. This place has seen a lot of new people, you know, some moving out, some coming in. The ones who died here, perhaps they passed on gossip to their children, friends, neighbours. I’ve always waited for the time when I would be the oldest person living in Ganymede Road and everyone who has known me for years and years either dead or long gone to a different place. There will be only new people on this street, people with no idea of who I am, how long I’ve lived here.’ She is visibly tiring after this torrent of words, but it is not over, not yet. She sits up a bit, opens her eyes again and says, ‘But gossip’s a weed, it keeps coming back. There is no way one can start with a clean slate.’ She shuts her eyes, cackles, ‘Not at my age. Yours might be a different case.’

Ritwik doesn’t fail to notice how she has evaded his question, fobbed him off with a non-answer and seen straight through his apology of a life, all in one seamless stream of words. But he won’t give up this time. He repeats, ‘What gossip?’ This has become a game now and he wants to have at least one won set behind him.

Did they say bad mother failed mother she is sure they did, they still do for all she cares, but is there anyone left from, god, when was it, sixty-six, or was it sixty-eight, no it must have been sixty-six, yes, she is quite sure, but it might just be sixty-eight and they’re not far from wrong for what sort of mother forgets the year of her son’s death, here she is wondering whether it was sixty-six or sixty-eight, shame on her, his brains blown out, a leaking dark jam everywhere, on the desk at which he had sat while doing it, on the wall behind, spattered with blood as if a naughty child had had an accident with a bottle of ink he had been forbidden to touch, no letter, no note, nothing except a forgive me, mother , in the refrigerator a day later when she had gone to look for milk for her tea and the police inspector no constable maybe a curl of paper or is she making this up there was no note nothing only the faint metallic whiff of blood and the tinny smell of internal organs her son’s brain her thirty-six-year-old son’s brain her thirty-six-year-old son who had torn out of her one August afternoon with the monsoon coming down in unforgiving sheets outside the bungalow and the Indian midwife inscrutable dumb in her foreign language and Clare’s ayah all crowding around thirty-one hours for a little head to come out but all tangled up inside and Dr Higgins despairing too unforeseen complications the child who made the beginning and the end unendurably difficult while her contractions racked her as if there were no end and no end to the deluge outside waters breaking everywhere this child who would almost take her life with him while receiving his and then who took his own and a bit of his mother’s forever so there is nothing anymore except that note or did she imagine it to save herself because there was no one else left to do it?