The Lives of Others (12 page)

When Suranjan had joined Presidency College last year, it was still reeling from strikes and the agitation by the communist students who had been expelled from college and the adjoining Hindu Hostel. The college authorities had called in the police and there had been clashes between the rioting students and police on College Street almost every day: lathi charges, petrol bombs on several occasions, bloodied men on both sides, brutal beatings of the students, angry processions. At one point his mother, already consumed by worries about Supratik, had urged her younger son to apply to other places, or consider not going to university until the troubles had blown over. When she is not in the puja room, praying incessantly that Supratik might be kept out of harm’s way, she sits on a chair on the verandah all afternoon and most of the evening, waiting for the sight of his tall, gaunt form to appear around the corner of Basanta Bose Road.

Suranjan hardly ever thinks about his brother and, when he does, it is not really as another, separate presence. Like the air he breathes in, his brother is only noticeable to him when he is absent. And now that he has disappeared – well, not really, but as good as, because no one knows where he sent those two postcards from; the postmarks said Ballygunge – Suranjan starts the train of a correlational algebra in his head, bringing into proximity the fact of the disappearance and the suspicion of his brother’s involvement in the student political activism. Dada was so preternaturally quiet and secretive, so unyielding with any kind of response or reaction, that no one ever knew what he was up to.

But buzzing hornets of questions swarm into Suranjan’s mind now. Not a day had gone by in the winter of ’66–’67 without the circulation of fevered news: ‘The Students’ Federation are lobbing bombs at the police’, ‘The Superintendent of the Hindu Hostel has been gheraoed for thirty-six hours’, ‘There are buses burning on College Street’, ‘The police have opened tear gas on the student protesters’. If Dada had had anything to do with these conflagrations, wouldn’t the distant heat from them at least have been felt by his family? No sooner have some suspicions begun to join up together, like links in a chain, than other countervailing arguments break them apart and separate them until, racked by this dance of tmeses, Suranjan’s algebra stands in ruins.

Something starts pressing against him, as if some invisible walls are inching closer, trapping him, truncating his vision: surely this is the cannabis user’s typical paranoia? Suranjan tries to brush off the feeling that he is in a narrow well, and concentrate instead on where he really is: sitting with his friends and getting high in a secluded corner of Presidency College. Patchy grass, weeds, straggling, spindly plants, a big tree, earth, a small pile of orange-red bricks, a big drain, the new canteen to his left, one wall of the gym behind his back. He tries to hold onto something more than this solidity outside him and settles invariably on the liberating knowledge of this evening’s promise: smack, in Bappa-da’s house on Ironside Road. His very first time. He has heard so much about brown sugar, all in excited, slightly frightened whispers as if the talk was about
the
forbidden fruit. Bappa-da has done it half a dozen times and has told him it is a necessary graduation if Suranjan wants to have the doors of his perception cleansed and see the world in a grain of sand. The ritual was apparently called ‘chasing’; yes, the pursuit of the vision that reconfigured everything in its real contours, that showed not things but the design behind things, unmediated meanings. This had been what Blake chased, and Aldous Huxley, and what Allen Ginsberg, the new poet Bappa-da has introduced him to, was after. He will be their acolyte and disciple.

The Ghosh and Datta families talk formally and agree on Baishakhi and Shobhon’s marriage to go ahead next year. Both Priyo and Purnima are dead set against the marriage before Baishakhi finishes high school. They want it to be deferred until she is twenty-one, until she has finished university and acquired a BA degree, it doesn’t matter in which subject. Of the many things that exercise them the most pressing is the necessity of her being a graduate. But the Dattas think five years to be an immoderately long period of engagement, so the compromise of 1969 is reached. The Ghoshes try to extract a promise from their prospective in-laws that Baishakhi will be sent to college, but they know they are defeated right at the beginning of their entreaty, not so much by what appears to them, rightly, it will turn out, to be empty and perfunctory assurances from the Dattas, as by their own daughter’s placid indifference to any such concerns. The home side lets them down.

Her thinning and now greying hair spread out in a pitiful swathe across the bank of stale pillows on which her head rests, Sandhya runs the indelible film of her son’s two postcards in her head. She had taken to her bed ever since Supratik left a year ago, only very occasionally leaving it to perform the bare minimum of tasks that would keep her from puncturing a vital divisive membrane and slipping from the world of humans to that of something less-than-human. Overnight she had dropped out of her life and become a spectre, giving up on all her duties and privileges as the eldest daughter-in-law at the helm of the family ship and letting it drift, keelless and rudderless; she didn’t care any more about anything. The images of the two postcards burn through her: six inches by four inches (yes, she had measured them with a ruler) of light-beige ordinariness, the imprint of the head of the Royal Bengal Tiger, along with the denomination, fifteen paisa, on the top right-hand corner, just above the ruled space for the address . . . She knows every atom of those two postcards now.

She has stared at them so hard, willing them to release the imprisoned meanings from behind the cursive cage of the words, the
real
meanings that would communicate something special to her beyond what its surface said. She has handled them, stroked them, slept with them under her pillow, all with the wish to touch what he had touched, a kind of communion of distance, of air. And she had done it so often that even she was prepared to admit, had she been faced with such a requirement, that she had erased all traces of his touch from the postcards by now. There were times when she had wanted to ingest them, chew them into a bolus, swallow them and assimilate their essence into her blood. That would have been a way of holding on to his presence.

Two postcards in a year: that was all a firstborn owed his mother.

The first one, dated 19th April 1968 – it was her mother-in-law who had pointed out, over the weeks spent dissecting and anatomising it to its very elementary particles, that the date was the New Year – that first postcard, addressed to her, contained only five sentences:

Respected Ma, I am well, don’t worry about me. I hope all of you are too. The postal services where I am are a bit erratic and infrequent, so I’m getting someone to post it to you from Calcutta. I will be in touch again. Give everyone my love. Supratik.

It was his hand, confident, elegant, neat, there was no doubt about that; Sandhya would have been able to identify it as her son’s with her eyes shut. The second one, sent five months after the first, was even more parsimonious and ungiving:

Respected Ma, Hope all your news is well. I am in good health and spirit. Truly. Don’t worry about me. Again, this postcard is being mailed to you from Calcutta. My love to everyone, Supratik.

The arrival of the first one had created such a huge jag in expectation that for the ensuing month or two Sandhya had left her bed and taken up an almost immovable position in an armchair on the verandah in the daylight hours, willing the postman to arrive with another letter from her son. That hope had turned to ashes slowly and Sandhya had taken to her bed again. Over the year that Supratik had been absent, the harsh calculus of hope and despair, juggling with the usual variables of ‘Where is he?’, ‘What is he doing?’, ‘Is he still alive?’, ‘Who else knows of his whereabouts?’, always regressed to that one irreducible question, ‘Why?’, and came to a halt. Was her love not enough to keep him at home? Did nothing, no one, matter? How iron-hearted did one have to be to walk out on everything so suddenly, so quickly? And as easily as stepping out of stale clothes? How could she have given birth to someone like that? Who
was
he?

At times a different light fell on the boulder weighing down on her and it blazed into a burden of outrage: she wished she had cracked open his skull to read his brains, riced with the maggots of his secret thoughts, and prevented everything that followed. But that light, too, dimmed, and she was left with the weight of the darkness again.

In her head, she conflated several conversations she had had with Supratik, few and far between though they were, since he had joined college. With a mother’s intuition, she had noticed that he was changing, changing swiftly and radically, yet she could not tell in which direction or for what reasons.

‘You’ve become very quiet. Is everything all right?’ she had asked once. It was late at night; she had waited dinner for him, as always. Everyone else had eaten and gone to bed a long time ago. She broached the topic while serving him reheated rice.

‘Why should everything not be all right?’ he had countered.

‘Such silence nowadays . . .’

‘Would you like it if I jabbered away non-stop like Boro-kaki?’

‘No, I’m not saying that. When you were young, you wouldn’t shut up. Tearing up and down the stairs:
Ma, Ma
,
it’s Independence Day next week, I’m going to play the bugle and lead the Balak Sangha boys in a procession down the street, will you watch me from the verandah? Ma, Ma, you will sit in the front row on Sports Day in school, won’t you? Ma, Ma, look at all those lights on that house, is that a wedding? You must cover our house with fairy lights on my wedding
. What a lot of talking!’

‘I’m not a child any more.’

‘To me, you’ll always be a child.’

‘Achchha, if I have nothing to say, should I still keep chattering? People will think I’ve gone mad.’

‘Is it true that you have nothing to say? Why? There’s so much you can tell me: what you do in college, who your friends are, where you spend your time with friends, where you stay out until so late . . . My mother’s heart, it’ll always worry.’

‘Ah, so you don’t really want me to talk to you, you just want information of my whereabouts at any given time.’

‘Ufff, we can’t really cope with the twists and turns of your argumentative ways.’

A long pause.

‘Are you angry with me?’ he asked.

‘No, what’s there to be angry about? You’ll understand when you are a father yourself.’

Another pause.

‘Why do you wait up for me? I’ve asked you several times not to. And it’s not good for your health to have dinner with me so late.’

‘You don’t have to think about my health. If you’re so concerned, why don’t you return home at a more civilised hour?’

‘Ufff, I can’t really cope with the twists and turns of your argumentative ways,’ he rejoined, breaking into an unabashed grin.

Her heart swelled. She tried to accommodate it by changing the topic. ‘You’re eating like a sparrow nowadays. You’ve hardly touched your food.’

‘You give me so much. There are so many dishes.’

‘Where so many? One dal, one fry, one vegetable dish, a bit of fish, that’s it.’

‘And you don’t think that’s a lot?’

‘You’ve eaten like this all your life,’ she said, baffled.

‘Don’t you agree we eat too much?’

‘Who, you and I?’ she asked, still puzzled.

‘No, no, by “we” I mean all of us, everyone in our social and economic class. Don’t you think we have lots, that we could afford to lose a bit?’ The grin had disappeared and all its traces too. Those big eyes flamed with a different kind of light now.

‘I don’t understand what you say nowadays. We have always been like this, what’s wrong with our way of eating? Everyone eats like this.’

‘No, not everyone eats like this, Ma.’ The words were cold and heavy, like stones. ‘Gagan, Madan-da, Malati-di, the other people who work for us, do they eat like this?’

‘Tsk, but they are servants, they eat differently.’

‘Can you explain to me why the servants eat differently while they live in the same house?’ There was something else in his voice now, something cold and coiled.

‘This is the way it is. It has always been like this,’ she repeated, conscious now that she was failing to give him the right answer, the answer he was looking for. It was as if she had been forced to participate in an opaque game, the rules of which she didn’t know. The knowledge of her failure made her even more hesitant.

‘And what has always been must remain that way, must always be for evermore, right?’ Again, that edge of something like menace.

‘I . . . I . . . don’t understand what you’re saying.’ Pause. ‘I don’t understand you any more.’

‘No, you don’t.’ Delivered like three stabs. Then he had got up and left.

He had not spoken to her for weeks after that.

In the frenzied first two or three months after his disappearance, before she surrendered wholly to this lassitude, she and Supratik’s father, aided by Priyo and Bhola, had done everything within their power to trace him. They had talked to the police, who could not or would not help because he was technically not a missing person; he had pointedly left a goodbye note. Her father-in-law’s and Priyo’s contacts in the Congress Party and in the Calcutta Police had not yielded much. They had paid the police under the table to turn up information on Supratik’s whereabouts, even to locate, talk to and, if necessary, threaten his college friends who might have some knowledge. If anything had come of those lines of enquiry, Sandhya did not know or had not been told. She had got Gagan to drive her to Presidency College so that she could plead with the professors in the Economics Department to part with any news they might have, or anything he might have told them. She went there to find students who knew him, who were his friends – surely he must have had friends in the years above or below him – or even casual acquaintances who could throw her some scrap to sustain her diminishing life. Each time she returned home empty-handed.