The Lives of Others (18 page)

The rest happened in increasingly suspended time, moving from fast to very, very slow as if the events had been rolled into a small ball and shot with force through a tube of viscous liquid. Chhaya was squatting on the latrine built into the floor, letting out a large, dark cheroot of turd. Before the shriek from Chhaya’s horrified open mouth could become sound, Priyo raised his index finger to his lips and, in one seamless movement, reached back his hand to slip the shutter into its catch and lock the door. There was a quiet, calm majesty in his gestures, as if he had rehearsed this episode numberless times in the recent past, that settled Chhaya. Priyo leaned back against the wall, silent, watching with a devouring intent. As the convergent point of that gaze, Chhaya became a pliant puppet, almost with no will of her own, carrying on her unspeakably private hygiene activities as if she were all alone. The silence in the bathroom, punctuated by the drip-drip-drip of the tap onto the water’s surface in the full bucket under it, conducted Priyo’s supplication, and Chhaya’s instant granting of it, in a way that would only have been ruined by language.

Priyo watched Chhaya sluice her arse, pour four big mugs of water down the latrine to flush the shit away, then wash her hands with soap. There was no trace of shame or inhibition in her, just the abiding fluidity of something routine done without thought. Very oddly, the threshing that had taken over Priyo’s insides served only to calm and slow him down. He watched his sister, oblivious to any potential discovery, oblivious to any sense of wrongdoing, of shame, a statue of solid desire.

From outside came the frantic symphony of everyone going about their busy Sunday routines: the clatter-and-hiss from the kitchen downstairs; the chaotic bass of footsteps of people running up and down the stairs; music from the gramophone in his parents’ room; and, as the top line above all this, Charubala’s barrage of instructions and commands – ‘Madan, if you leave grinding it till late, no one will be able to eat poppy-seed fritters with their dal’; ‘Adi-i-i-i, have you had your bath?’; ‘Chhaya-a-a-a-a, are you still hogging the bathroom? Do you think no one else needs to use it?’ – while she thud-thudded around the first floor.

At the sound of her name Chhaya panicked, but only briefly because Priyo stepped forward and turned on the tap. The water ran; added to this sound was the one of water overflowing the rim of the bucket, splashing onto the floor, running and gurgling down the drain. More time passed, although neither could have guessed how much. This dent in the normal perception of things was nowhere more apparent than in the continuation of the trance-like state brother and sister found themselves in, even when their mother came to the bathroom door and hollered, ‘Chhaya, I can hear running water, there are five others in the house needing a bath, if you finish all the water the pump will have to be turned on again.’ Once again, the arc of private, silent language welded Priyo and Chhaya together as she replied from inside, raising her voice, ‘Ma-a-a-a, forgotten to get my chemise, will you fetch one for me? The yellow, floral one. It’s on the clothes-horse.’ From outside, an irritated response from Charubala, ‘Ufff, unbearable all this running around, serving . . .’, receding further. Stillness for the measure of one-two-three beats. Then, in a movement that could be missed in a blink, Priyo opened the bathroom door and slipped out and Chhaya locked it again. Madan-da and the servants were in the kitchen downstairs. From Baba and Ma’s room came the raspy wailing of the Atulprasadi song Baba was listening to on the gramophone: ‘Fill me right up to the brim, fill up my life’.

The incident was never repeated.

Somnath was nearly four at the time. Born seven years after Bhola, he had, at first, seemed like an afterthought, added distractedly after the main story. But the coda became more important than what preceded it. The deeper, more recessed locks of the dams of affection were opened for the baby in the family; he was everyone’s
golden moon
, the
iris of their eyes
, the
radiant prince
. Where Madan and the other servants had entertained the children with cautionary tales and stories that sent a tiny current of fear through them – stories of snakes biting children, children falling off trees or drowning in ponds, children tumbling to their deaths while flying kites from terraces without raised boundary walls, children tailed by evil spirits or possessed by malicious devils – for Somnath only the loveliness was ever distilled. There were stories of beautiful princes on their beautiful white, winged steeds; the prince always bore the name ‘Somnath’.

With his head of glorious loose curls, his fair skin, his chubby cheeks that dimpled when he smiled, his huge brown eyes, the term ‘prince’ seemed to be something he had a natural right to. Even Charubala, whose closeness and partiality to her firstborn, Adi, had by then ceased to be an open secret and become more of a much-narrated family story, even she felt the beginning of a new season in her. He could only be a blessing. Her husband’s business moved up several gears after the birth of Somnath; he was clearly an auspicious child. Prafullanath, who did not bother himself with the bringing up of children, considering it wholly women’s domain, Prafullanath, who did not go in for displays of fatherly affection or demonstrations of love or the occasional playing with his children, singing to them, telling them stories, whose onward narrative of life was not temporarily slowed by the parenthetical presence of the silly, playful, giddy expressions of love between parent and baby, even buttoned-up, costive Prafulla had his head turned by his new son. Like a bad comedian, who elicits laughter of derision and not the laughter resulting from successful comedy, the noviciate Prafullanath hit the wrong notes when he tried to do the traditional things with his baby. While throwing Som up in the air and catching him, an act that had the boy almost choking with delight, Prafullanath’s mouth became a rictus of tension, his face a pinched, nervous mask, as if he knew he was performing badly at an audition for the role of easy, happy father. His songs were strained, off-key and tuneless, his recitation of children’s rhymes strangulated, his dandling of the toddler on his knees stiff and regimented, the silly nothings and baby talk embarrassed. He appeared to be a marionette playing the role of father in a puppet play. The awkward matter of his heart would not animate his limbs and eyes, and yet that unaccustomed heart swelled with love and a kind of seduction, of bewitchment. This was a child, he knew, to whom he could not say no, one who would escape the strictures of discipline, of the tiniest of harsh words or irritated looks; an angel cannot offend.

This behaviour stood in marked contrast to his attitude towards his other four children. Always a stern and distant yet dutiful father, Prafullanath, because of his private history, would have been opposed to a notion of fatherhood that could consist, as well, of intimacy with children, of becoming a child with them, yet he would have been surprised if he had been told that he was not a loving parent. Mollycoddling was the mother’s duty; the father’s lay elsewhere. As a consequence, his four older children feared and respected him, as they had been taught to do, and the love they professed to feel, had they been asked and had they answered truthfully or even had access to that truth, was of a duty-bound, obligatory kind too, a love issuing from commandment and tradition and the notion of family, not one from the tides of the heart or the unbridled, inexplicable pull of feelings. If painted, that love would take the form of a polite and manicured wash of pleasant colours, not the hurl-and-splatter of impastoed reds. But having been the victim of the unintended consequences of his own father’s love for him, Prafullanath had been unconsciously moulded by forces in a way that had resulted in him becoming a fair if unpassionate father, or at least one who was undemonstrative with his fatherly feelings. Probably some deep instinct for protecting one’s offspring from internecine relations, from being exposed to the depredations of rivalry, as he himself had been, dictated to him that cast of personality. Yet with Somnath, the workings of this instinct slid into his blind spot; just as he did not know that he was not an expressively affectionate father with his four older children, he also did not realise he had become exactly that with his youngest.

When Adinath was born, Prafullanath had been cheered that his first child was a son because he could hand over, in time, the reins of the small paper business he had built from scratch and close his eyes in peace. That is what a son was for. Accordingly, the special place that Adi held in his father’s regard was almost exclusively connected to his future role as helmsman. But by the time Adi turned one, Prafullanath’s ambitions had swelled; he wanted his son to start a construction business, while he would consolidate the paper one, which could provide Adi with the start-up capital necessary for his scheme. He and his son, or sons, could run at least two, if not several, business empires together, not be confined by having to pass the baton of one trade down the line, as his grandfather, his father, his half-brother – and he too, had he not decided to disrupt the relay – had done to such baneful effect. Once again, an instinct, which had germinated in the turbulent soil of his past, led him to insure himself and his sons against any such possibility resulting from following a monadic trade; thus, the branching out. The idea of several different pieces joining up to form a pied world appealed to him. He had experienced the opposite paradigm, of one family business growing and becoming bloated and sick down the generations, leaking its toxins to those who inherited it, and he did not want that for his sons.

So, from a very early age, Adi was groomed by his father, trained in the language and texture and details and workings of the construction business. As a boy, Adi had heard from his father how houses were built: how concrete was mixed; what the functions of the various components of concrete were; how a collection of tall iron rods provided the spines of a building; how foundations were laid. This complemented, often substituted, the stories children are usually told, stories of djinns and fairies, of a prince whose life was tied to a gold chain that lived in the stomach of a giant carp in the pool of the palace gardens, stories from the
Mahabharata
, of Abhimanyu who had learned, while he was in his mother’s womb, the secret of breaking into an impenetrable phalanx, but not the secret of emerging from it. Adi assimilated the fundamentals of construction in stories. When he started going to Ballygunge Government High School and, like all children at a certain age when they are unstoppable with their questions, he too spent the entirety of his talking time asking endless whys and hows, Prafullanath channelled this curiosity to focus on buildings, on the strength of materials, on bricks, mortar, lime, sand, cement. The foundations were imperceptibly laid.

Prafullanath, on returning home in the evenings from the office he still retained where he had started up, in Old China Bazar Street, used to holler out ‘Adi-i-i-i’ as soon as he crossed the threshold. The boy, stationed on the ground-floor verandah, already on the lookout for his father’s return, would rush to him only after that deep, elongated call. Out would come something from the pocket of his father’s panjabi or his black Gladstone bag: a dozen A.W. Faber coloured pencils or a roll of discarded planners’ drawing paper.

‘Look what I’ve got you,’ Prafullanath said.

Adi nodded, too happy to speak.

‘Come, let’s have our tea in the sitting room and you can draw your Baba something with this. What is it going to be today?’

‘The house that I’ll build and we’ll all live in,’ the boy answered, not one whit of delight diminished from the game father and son had played dozens of times before.

‘Well, well. Let us see how grand this house is going to be and whether we’ll all fit in. You have to build a big, big house. Right, tea now.’ Another holler – ‘Mada-a-a-a-n.’

As Madan came from the kitchen at the back of the house with fried diced coconut and other savoury snacks on one tray and a maid, following, with the tea paraphernalia on another, Adi was already on the floor, pages strewn everywhere, busy erecting his house on paper. Over three or four years he had perfected his vision. From crooked lines and scribbles he had moved on to the basic shape of a house, a tall rectangle with a mouth-like door and the two eyes of windows, every single line at an angle or slightly wobbly, but the whole discernible as a diagram of a basic house-like structure. The lines had become straighter, stood at sharp right-angles to each other, the door had acquired a knocker, the front of the house a garden and steps leading to the door. Then, as Adi and his competence grew, the ideal house became proportionately detailed and mature. He kept a running commentary going as he carefully moved his hand about, his face radiant with effort and concentration, the tip of his tongue sticking out from one corner of his mouth, a habit his father found adorable.

‘One storey . . . two storeys . . . three storeys. Now, a front verandah on each floor. Round verandah or straight verandah, or a hanging one? Ummm, let’s try a round one this time . . . How many windows on the front? Eeesh, my hand shook a bit there, the line’s not quite straight . . . Now, the garden. Here, a bed of roses. Let’s keep the shiuli shrub, a lot of fireflies sit on it at night – I like them. What about a fountain? Or a pond, in which golden fish will play? Shall I put a dovecote on the roof?’

He talked to himself while the pencil in his hand moved over the space of the sheet of paper in a slow, cautious dance, smearing on it the geometry of his dreams. Prafullanath and Charubala, who had come downstairs to tend to her husband, let him chatter on. Once or twice, the boy’s father would intervene.

‘Bah, first-class! Excellent. It looks grand. Now what about the interior?’

‘Interior?’ Adi repeated, baffled. What did his father mean?

‘You’ve drawn how our house is going to look from the outside. But what about the inside – the different rooms, the staircase, the courtyard?’