The Lives of Others (13 page)

Or not exactly empty-handed; the first impression she carried back with her was of dread. In the recent aftermath of the student unrest and the violence on the streets, there was a reluctance to give up information, however innocent, even to benign parties. No one knew the loyalties, affiliations or politics of anyone else: in such times it would have been foolish to open one’s mouth. Accordingly, the faculty in the Economics Department professed ignorance. Amidst the usual ‘There are so many who come and go every year, it is impossible to remember each and every student’ and ‘We teach them at this college. We do not become friends with them or gather their personal data’, there was one that astonished Sandhya: ‘He hardly ever attended classes. He failed his Part I exams and did not resit them.’

She stood outside classes, waiting for them to finish, and when the students streamed out, she randomly grabbed hold of some of them and asked about her son. Most of them did not seem to know Supratik and those who knew someone who might have known him redirected her. She went from pillar to post – someone could not be found, or had not come to college that particular day, or had already left – until, dizzy and weak, she returned home, swinging between hope and that familiar plummeting feeling. Day after day she went to his college, chased up elusive students, begged for names and addresses, until Supratik’s father found out and put a stop to it.

‘Have you gone out of your mind? What do you think you are doing? There are people already looking into this. Your weeping, pleading presence is only going to muddy matters,’ Adinath raged and reasoned. ‘Why don’t you believe me when I say that we’re doing everything, every little thing, to trace him? Isn’t he my son too?’

‘I am a mother,’ Sandhya argued. ‘How will you ever understand a mother’s heart?’

Before Adinath forbade her to do her own private digging in Presidency College, Sandhya had managed to piece together a nebulous story, but one potentially so sinister that she felt she had to pass on some of the burden to her husband.

‘Did you know Supratik was involved in all this student politics?’ she asked Adinath.

‘How do you know that?’ he asked in return.

It was rumoured that a lot of students who went missing during the student violence had either been taken into custody and beaten up by the police, or had gone up to North Bengal and joined the militant Maoists in Naxalbari. He didn’t know which was worse. He tried to console himself with the fact – was it a fact? – that if his son had been picked up by the police, he would have found out, sooner or later, through all the connections they had with the police and the Congress Party. As for Naxalbari, the rebellion had lasted a short four or five months: the cadres and miscreants had been rounded up, imprisoned, beaten, tortured, shot. A cold wave of fear bore him up and flung him down: surely he would have heard if something had happened to Supratik? Besides, there were two postcards to prove that he was alive, he thought, grasping desperately at anything that would keep the unmentionable at bay.

‘I talked to his friends in college,’ Sandhya said. ‘Some say that he was an important figure, a student leader or something, although no one seems to be certain about anything. A young man called Partha said that Supratik had been expelled from college for fomenting student action; a girl called Bolan contradicted him and asked, if that was the case, why did so few people know him around college. My hands and feet turned cold with fear as I listened to them. They were very nice, they called me Mashima and gave me tea in their canteen.’

‘You found out so much and didn’t tell me?’ Adinath asked, incredulous.

‘I’m telling you now.’

‘But if he was involved in student politics, wouldn’t we have known?’

‘How? He was always so quiet, so secretive. Just before he disappeared, he had become even more so.’ Sandhya covered her mouth with the corner of her sari draped over her shoulder and neck.

Adinath tried to console her, without feeling a shred of conviction. He heard the thinness of his voice as the weak banalities – ‘He might not write frequently, but at least we know he’s alive and well. When he returns, we’ll find out that he was up to something quite innocuous, like social work in a village, or travelling or something. Don’t you worry, it’ll all come good’ – tried to smother the question looping and turning inside him: was his son a Naxalite?

Sandhya, on the other hand, could not bring herself to articulate the fear, even inside the privacy of her mind, and endow it with form and shape by giving it a name. That fear remained frozen in her, a vast, solid sea, but, unknown to her conscious self, she kept feeding it with the fuel that would one day combust and set it in unstoppable thaw. She read every single item in
Ananda Bazar Patrika
on the Naxalites – they were tucked away deep inside the paper and only infrequently got prominent coverage – and secretly got Arunima to translate the English articles from
The Statesman
and
Amrita Bazar Patrika
. She put dates to the violence in Naxalbari, to the eruptions of peasant violence in different parts of the country, to the Naxalite leader Charu Mazumdar’s declaration, a week or two before Supratik disappeared, that hundreds of Naxalbaris were smouldering in India, that Naxalbari had not died and would never die. But, instead of teasing out the only design possible in this bunching of events, portents, rumours and facts, she smothered the cluster, pregnant with meaning, in a blanket of denial and turned her frightened self to what she did best: she became an even more ardent supplicant to her gallery of gods and goddesses.

She fasted three days a week now instead of her usual Thursdays. She found newer, more minor deities and saints to worship, each with her or his own specialisation: Santoshi-ma for lost things (her son was lost, was he not?); Manasha, so that wherever Supratik was, he was not bitten by snakes; Baba Lokenath, so that he would not come to any harm in wars, forests, rivers or seas. She awoke from dreams that her son was ill and got it into her head that he was going to be afflicted by pox, so she found the nearest temple of the goddess Shitala, whose weapons of choice were the smallpox and chickenpox germs, and lay prostrate in front of her statue for twelve hours. While she lay on the floor of the tiny temple on Abhay Sarkar Lane, just along from Jadu Babu’s Market, yet another conversation, the last proper one she had had with her son, unspooled in a repetitional loop in her head.

She had been trying to tidy up his room and make his bed. ‘Paper, books, more books, in all four directions. God, what a mess! Can’t you be a bit tidier? You will drown under all this one day. What you read and scribble all day long cooped up in here, god alone knows.’

‘Ma, do you like the life you’re in?’ he had asked out of the blue.

‘What kind of a question is that?’ She felt that sinking fear again, that anxiety, and started to steel herself.

‘All this well-heeled comfort, this house, this large family, nothing wanting, no lack, no troubles, don’t you find it a bit sealed off from the big world outside?’

‘I have no idea what you’re saying. Where do you see no lack, no troubles? Do you run the family? What do you know of how it works? Do you know what bad times our business is going through? We’ve had to sell off two cars, and even’ – she was not sure she should be saying this to anyone, not even her son – ‘some of Ma’s jewellery to repay part of the bank loans. The business is on the brink of folding up in its entirety. The mills are all gone, shut. We cannot even sell off the last remaining one. Your childhood’s days of ease – those are gone. Have you not noticed? But, then, how would you? You have no time for all this, all your time is devoted to your scribbling and reading and . . . and the stuff that you do when you stay away from home.’ She smuggled in the final addition in a headlong rush of daring.

‘Don’t you ever think that we have too much, and others have too little? Take, for example, the Food Revolution agitations going on outside our four walls: do they affect us in any way?’

‘By god’s will we’re lucky that all that unrest doesn’t involve us. The one above looks after us.’

‘Clearly only us, and not everyone else. You think it’s the one above who looks after us? Don’t you think we look after our own? Cushion our own corner and let others rot?’

‘What on earth are you talking about? I don’t understand you any more. It is not up to us to look after everyone in the universe. The rule of the world is to look after your family, your elders, your children, and see that you do the best you can for them all the time.’

‘The rule of the world? Okay, let us assume it
is
the rule of the world, then do you think it’s
right
?’ He had started speaking in a way that made the italics all too obvious to her ears.

‘That’s . . . that’s what we’ve believed all our lives. What . . . what we’ve been taught to believe.’

‘Do you ever think that that’s
wrong
? That what you’ve been given is wrong and that you have to make the world from scratch again?’

‘What is all this you’re talking about? I’m beginning to fear for you. You’re not doing Red politics, are you?’

‘Let’s leave out politics for a minute. Are you happy with the inequalities of our family? Of the power-on-top-ruling-people-below kind of hierarchy? Do you think it’s right? Has the thought ever crossed your mind that the family is the primary unit of exploitation?’

‘Inequalities? Power on top? Hierarchy? Exploitation? What are you saying?’ she found herself repeating like a slow learner.

‘Fine, stay inside your bubble for as long as you can, because you won’t be able to for much longer, the clock’s ticking.’

The persistent rubbing against what she perceived to be her own stupidity in her son’s presence, now something of a predictable pattern of things, suddenly ignited a rasp of rebellion in her; even the slowest learner in a class occasionally lets his idiocy tumble over into rage at the cleverness of others.

‘All this book-learning, what good is it going to do you? We may not be learned, but we are content with our lot. I don’t understand your mighty knowledge, and I don’t want to,’ she cried, then felt the flame of her anger snuffed out as Supratik refused to respond.

Thinking of that last exchange before Supratik disappeared, she had moved her initial focus on the mysteries and puzzles in his words – there could be no solution to those – to the regret, wringing her now, at her brief flash of temper. Was that what had driven him away, upset and hurt at her impatience with his ways of thinking? Surely that must be the reason, for what else could it be? There was only one way left for her to atone for her intemperance and that was to punish herself.

Her self-devised sumptuary rules became more and more refined: no meat, no fish, no eggs, no onions or garlic. She lost weight and had dizzy spells, seconds of blackout when she stood up too quickly from a lying or sitting position, so she took to lying down most of the time except when she had to brave the stairs to go up to the worship room on the terrace. By the time she gained it, her head spun and she had to cling to the banister in order to keep herself from falling. There were comments made about her visible debilitation, and concerns were voiced, sometimes forcefully, but she remained obdurately immured in the purity of her pursuit.

In the midst all this diminishment, she let go of her role as the eldest daughter-in-law of the Ghosh family, the person who had held it together with her efficiency, kindness and understanding. All her interest in what everyone would be fed every day, orchestrating the servants, the cook, the maids, the driver, everything withered away: she felt it was a play in which she had acted for thousands of performances, and now she had suddenly become an unengaged spectator of the repetitive drama, unable to sustain any regard for it, bored, removed, absent.

Purnima took on her role with gusto. Occasionally Sandhya heard her ill-tempered orders issuing from the kitchen downstairs – ‘The mustard paste in which you cooked the fish yesterday was so bitter that we couldn’t bring ourselves to eat it. How many times have I told you to grind black and yellow mustard together and put a dried chilli in it, then strain the paste? How many times, eh?’ – her voice rising with every subsequent word. She found fault with everything the servants did and reduced Malati to tears by scolding her for not having shelled perfectly enough the tiny shrimps that Kamala had added to a dish of arum leaves. Haranguing the servants at last gave Purnima a point of convergence for all her diffuse days and energies to focus on, and she took to it like a spindly, undernourished sapling to rich loam.

Lying in bed, Sandhya now overhears Purnima barking at one of the boys who does the trivial, miscellaneous domestic chores, and feels nothing, absolutely nothing.

On the 30th of every month Priyonath makes his way by bus from the southern boundary of Barabazar to Chitpur, over Bagbazar Khal, to a dingy alley through the godowns and slums off Kashipur and Dilarjung Roads. This humid and choking late afternoon in September is no exception. It is a long journey, and he has to change buses, but a taxi wouldn’t do for these trips, and certainly not the one private car that is still owned by the Ghoshes. On these days he dresses ordinarily, even shabbily: untucked shirt, sandals instead of shoes, no briefcase. He could be an ordinary state government official.

Over the last few years, instead of excitedly anticipating what lies ahead, he has fallen into the enfeebling habit of returning in his thoughts to a juncture in his recent past that he identifies as a turning point. But every time the hope for a neat, single locus, where the bend marks the before and the after, defies him, and what he had hoped was going to be apparent as a clear turning point dissolves into something resembling an estuary, the unitary flow of events fracturing into a prodigal multiplicity of streams of cause and effect, so that he can no longer identify what or who to blame for everything that followed. And every instance of this sieving of his recollections begins with Dulal.