The Lives of Others (15 page)

If the Ghoshes had thought they had seen the worst, what with Dulal’s betrayal, and the resignation of an ill and terrified Ashoke-babu, and the closure of their only profitable mill, the one that mitigated a fraction of their losses, they soon recalibrated their notion of the nadir.

When everything began to detonate in a way that seemed both unstoppably fast and yet somehow prolonged, Priyo was to persist in thinking that he had done the right thing by ignoring Ashoke-babu’s early warning. His only mistake, he would grudgingly admit, and that only to himself, had been in not apprising Adinath and their father soon enough. He was back to that estuarine domain again, causality, responsibility, blame, all forking into a dizzying number of streams of ‘what ifs’, and he did not know which would carry him to some kind of consolation.

There is a good ten-minute walk after Priyo gets off the bus. This tributary of Nawabpatty Street is all open drains and squalid houses, densely clustered together along the lane, with rust stains from leaking drainpipes down their fronts. Plants take tenacious root in the cracks in the façade and the walls, clothes hang on lines or over railings on the verandahs. There is crumbling and broken masonry everywhere, and peeling plaster and paint, and the ubiquitous darkening presence of wrought-iron grilles and railings makes the windows and balconies look like the cages and penning coops of battery-farmed poultry. The sound from a radio left on in one of the houses drifts out into the murkiness outside and seems to contribute to the gloom, as if it has been endowed with the special quality of sucking in light. Although darkness is falling from the air and dim, naked yellow bulbs or white fluorescent tubes have started coming on, one by one, in the houses, Priyonath wonders if the lane is, even in the daytime, ever unenshrouded. It seems to him that this place lost its battle with shadows and darkness long ago and, in the uneasy treaty devised in the aftermath, the dark retreated only insufficiently into corners, waiting impatiently to flow out and take over entirely again.

Lately, the straggle of whores outside the slum-dwellings, in dim doorways like open, toothless mouths, and on the lane have begun to leave him alone and let up on the catcalls and lewd addresses. They know where he is headed and, he supposes, his particular predilections, so they almost welcome him as a regular or an old familiar. When he reaches a decrepit two-storey building, an amphibious thing between a brick-and-cement house and a makeshift slum-shack, he hesitates for a second or two before walking in. Someone has scratched the number 12/A with a piece of flint on the right-hand wall of the entrance. Inside, the dimness is exacerbated by the single strip-light burning in the front room and the pitiful attempt at papering over the squalor with framed, cheap reproductions of art, probably torn from magazines, all featuring naked women, in a move to add erotic charge to the place. Priyonath cannot identify any of the paintings, but they are conspicuously Western; of that he is certain. There is one of a nude woman, with her back to the viewer, and a winged boy holding a clouded mirror to her; another baffling, objectionable one of a little boy tweaking an older woman’s nipple while standing almost behind her, the woman’s smiling face turned back so that their mouths just touch. Covered with dust, the pictures hang crooked on the wall, unnoticed pieces of junk that have forgotten the role foisted on them. The place reeks of sewage overlaid with cheap incense and kerosene, and something more elementally biological for which he cannot quite find a name, something that suggests putrefying animal matter.

He walks through the front room into the inner chamber. Nandita had said she was sixteen when he first visited the place more than two years ago. She had looked a lot older, not because of her trade, or the company she kept, or the fact that she had tried to cake her face with cheap snow and powder and colour her dry lips in an attempt to look alluring, but because her eyes had not been those of a sixteen-year-old. The flash and spark, the quickness in an adolescent’s eyes, had settled into a calculating lethargy, a caution that was also a hopeless inertia; they were not out of place in their turbid surroundings. After that first visit, he has tried never to look at her face.

In her room, with its meagre pallet, the grimy plastic curtain on the window and, hanging off a rusty, bent nail in a pockmarked and peeling wall, a Jay Ma Kali Jute Trading Co. (Pvt. Ltd) calendar, with its eponymous image of the fearsome black goddess made to look somehow smiling and benign, despite the garland of human skulls and her bloody red tongue, Nandita is waiting for him. He knows she is expecting him because she has a thin pile of newspapers at the foot of her bed. With a curt, ‘What, ready?’ he starts to take off his clothes. He fishes out a small paper packet from the pocket of his trousers and lies down on the bed in his underwear only. Even after more than a dozen sessions with him, Nandita has lost none of the hesitancy that seizes her at this stage of spreading newspapers in layers on his torso.

He chivvies her along with a gentle, ‘Come’ and watches her take off her cheap, glittery petticoat and blue blouse. She has dressed up for him, although that blue, easily the colour of some chemical effluent, could induce an instant headache. He says ‘Come’ again as she gets up onto the bed and tries to perch herself in a squatting position on the newspapers she has spread on his chest. It is just as well that she has a bony bird-like frame, otherwise it would have been difficult to have her squatting on him, her feet planted on his ribs, rather than the (to him) useless position of having himself straddled with her feet on the bed, on either side of him.

She now has her back to his face.

‘Done it today?’ he asks.

She takes off his briefs and says, ‘No’.

‘Good. So you’re ready and full, right? Good girl. Try then.’

Nandita sits on him and waits for a bowel movement. None comes. Priyonath tumesces at the sight of the puckered stitch of her arsehole, its dark stain of a mouth now relaxed to let loose her uncoiling shit onto him. He starts playing with himself, but soon notices that although the lips of the hole are flexing and unflexing, nothing is emerging from it.

‘What’s the matter? Why are you taking so long?’ he asks, his voice hoarse with arousal.

‘Going to happen, wait-wait,’ she says. The red glass bangles on her outstretched arms jangle thinly as she gestures to him with her hands.

A minute passes, then two. Priyonath is on his way to a full erection now, but there is still no sign of the gloriously emerging turd.

‘Try a bit harder, go on. Put some pressure.’

‘Just keep quiet. Rush me like this, it will go up to my head.’

After another minute of watching, Priyonath starts losing his three-quarters of an erection, but he does not want to make the girl more anxious, so he stays quiet and keeps getting limp.

Suddenly Nandita starts to strain and grunt. ‘Gnnnnh, gnnnnhhhh!’ – the sounds are punctuated by forceful expulsions of breath from her mouth.

Priyonath gets caught up in the exertion too. ‘Once more, try once more, go on,’ he eggs her on. ‘I’ve got glycerine suppositories with me, do you want? I thought they’d come in handy.’

‘What are they?’ the girl asks, flushed now with all the arid effort to evacuate.

‘If I put one up your arse, you’ll be able to shit easily. It’ll just slip out.’

‘Nooooo!’ the girl whinnies loudly. Her voice turns shrill and panicky: ‘Last month a man showed up, a gentull-man like you, and buggered me. It was really painful and I bled afterwards, blood and blood. No way you’re sticking anything up my arse.’

‘Arrey, no, no, it’s a small, slippery pellet. You push it up children when they have constipation. It dissolves inside and makes the resistant shit slip out softly,’ he explains patiently to calm her down.

‘Nothing doing. And now you jabber-jabbered so much, I lost it, it was coming down before that.’

They have also talked away Priyonath’s excitement: the sleepy curl of his flaccid penis now rests against his thigh.

‘Why don’t you try again?’ he coaxes.

Nandita compliantly grunts and strains and huffs, but Priyonath hears the excess of an empty performance, not the real thing.

‘But you said you hadn’t shat today, so where is it? You could have saved up from the day before – you knew I was going to come.’

At this, the girl breaks her position and gets off the bed. ‘You telling me what? I deliberately holding it in?’

‘No, no, I didn’t say that, I was just pointing out that it might be a good idea to build up some pressure inside for a few days, in preparation for my visit.’

The girl appears to take this badly. ‘You know how difficult it is to shit on demand like this? You say
Shit!
and I shit, hyan? It is that easy?’ Her voice becomes louder and louder and she starts preparing her face for a bout of crying: her mouth quivers, her eyes start watering. Priyonath thinks: This is all to squeeze an extra fifty rupees out of me, the old waterworks.

What he has not reckoned for is that the brief mizzle will turn into a squall. Nandita begins by rehearsing, a bit amateurishly, a few sobs, but then gets carried away by her performance and modulates to loud, unstoppable wailing. Before Priyonath can ask her to calm down, three whores fling the door open and barge in.

‘What’s happened? What’s happened?’ a short, cylindrical woman demands. She has a face so round and fleshy that it looks as if she has got sweets tucked on the inside of each cheek. It is devoid of every single trace of benignity or kindness; she looks the sort to lead a rabble to arson, robbery or vigilante violence.

Another woman, clad only in petticoat and blouse and exposing a generous stretch of her cushiony midriff, envelops Nandita. The girl begins to sob on her shoulder.

The stout woman, clearly some sort of self-appointed leader, now takes charge. She puts her hands on her hips and turns to Priyonath, who has managed to struggle into his underwear and has moved from being supine on the bed, but only to a reclining position.

‘Ei je,’ she barks, ‘so much the gentull-man on the outside, what you have done to this little girl, hey, what you have done?’

‘Nothing,’ Priyonath says, trying to put the situation into words by way of explanation inside his head, but the unconventional nature of the purpose of his visit inhibits him and prevents the words from being spoken.

This laconic reply is taken by the shouting woman as a sign of incontrovertible guilt; she pounces on her prey. ‘You think we don’t know what you’re coming here to do, hyan? You think shirt-pant on the outside are fooling us? You think gentull-man on the outside-outside is fooling us, you son of a whore?’

Priyonath watches, frightened and aghast, silenced by the way this furious woman is whipping herself up to a pitch of such shrill rage, as more women troop into the room to watch the unfolding entertainment.

‘We throw you out onto the street naked,’ she shouts. ‘Ask your sister or your mother to shit on you. You not coming to us for this dirty stuff any longer. We’re seeing all this gentull-man stuff on the outside-outside and low dog on the inside-inside for many years, we’re knowing what to do with your types.’

A supporting murmur ripples through the gathered crowd. Priyonath can see faces of children outside the window, lifting up the curtain and peering in.

‘But . . . b-but . . . I’ve . . . she has . . .’ he stammers.

‘What you asking her to do, hyan? What? Why you quiet like a thief?’ the pack-leader screams. She turns to Nandita and commands, ‘You tell everyone here what he asking you do all the time.’

Nandita, by now whirled up in the excitement of the drama, has forgotten to continue crying. After a few nudges she sheds her coyness and reveals to everyone the services demanded of her by Priyonath. Another murmur goes through the crowd, different in tone, timbre and intent from the earlier one.

Priyonath, fearing a public beating in this insalubrious area of the city, decides to defend himself. ‘She’s done it before, many times, over ten times. I paid her well over the going rate. Ask her, if you don’t believe me,’ he says, moving his hand in a gesture that takes in everyone assembled, as though in appeal to a trial jury.

‘Money?’ the woman shrieks. ‘You showing us the heat and dazzle of your money? We seeing it all, sister-fucker. You can buy everything with money?’

With a jolt, Priyonath notices that she has descended into addressing him as
tui
, the irreverent version of ‘you’. Amidst diffuse paranoia about whether this is a set-up, one feeling isolates itself, a sense of mild indignation, so he says forcefully, ‘Yes, here you can.’

He can almost see her combust into a burning column. She lets loose a jet of abuse. ‘You son of a foolish fucker, I have your teeth broken with beatings. Then I plant the broken teeth in your mother’s cunt, you son of a whore. When your father come to fuck her at night, he sees her cunt grinning.’

The incipient outrage at the indignity that Priyonath has fleetingly experienced now disappears, replaced swiftly by fear; it is his bowels that seem on the brink of release. His madly palpitating heart reminds him of his blood pressure. Where are his Amdepin tablets, he thinks in a stab of panic, and lifts his hands to his chest to look for the pills in the pocket of his shirt, only to realise that he is not wearing one, that his hands have touched the hairy bulge of his breast. The gurge of a new fear now adds itself to the spinning inside him. As he reaches for his clothes, the berating woman moves closer to him and demands, ‘Where you think you going, hyan? Where?’