The Lives of Others (19 page)

How could these be shown in one drawing? Adi wondered. ‘You mean, draw each room, one by one?’ he asked hesitantly.

‘Aha,’ said his father, his eyes gleaming. ‘There is a way of showing the whole house from the inside in one drawing.’

Adi, now even more confused, asked, ‘But how? There are walls . . . and floors and . . . well, floors and ceilings between storeys. How can . . . how can
one
drawing show all the rooms on different floors?’ The boy didn’t have any notion of or terms for isometric projection, perspective and three-dimensionality, and his mind was trying to stretch itself around that lack.

‘We’ll have to learn that,’ his father said. ‘But not now. When you’re a little older, you’ll learn how to do it. But it won’t look like your house from the outside; it’ll look different, not like a house at all. But enough. Why don’t you go and share your pencils and paper with your brothers and sister?’

Priyo and Chhaya had been waiting upstairs on the balcony that ran the inner perimeter of the house on each floor, circling the courtyard in a squarish formation. As Adi ran up the stairs, Chhaya advanced towards him excitedly, ‘Show us, show us what your father’s brought you today.’

Many years later, an unbidden memory of that casual, unpremeditated possessive adjective, ‘your’, before ‘father’, was to give Adi another lesson in perspective and the layout of the interior world. But now it did not strike him at all. The three of them oohed and aahed over the pencils, admired Adi’s drawing, then decided to give a few of the pencils and some paper to Bhola, who was only three at the time, to see how he would delight in them. Off they went.

At school, Adi slowly started picking up how to represent three dimensions in two, the elementary rules of perspective, the difference between photographic representation and stylised diagrams. He was not formally taught all this, but found his way in slow degrees. Then Somnath was born and things got further deferred. The baby grew, gathering to himself all the skeins of love and attention in the house, and wrapped himself in a tight cocoon with them. The diagram of the interior of the house remained untaught by Prafullanath and undone by Adi, at least for now.

Somnath’s birth was like the sudden appearance of a blazing comet or a new planet in a known alignment of heavenly bodies: a previously understood system was now dented by a new presence and had to be subjected to a recalibration, a new set of calculations. No one could predict how the alliances and balances of different forces that kept everything in a stable equilibrium would now respond.

Initially, it was all jubilation at the birth of a baby brother. Adi, at twelve, was growing too old to find it such a thrill, although he appeared to participate in the general festal mood, at least until eighteen months or so down the line, when he began to discover the facts about human reproduction, and the proximal nature of the two, the recent baby brother and birds and bees, filled him with distaste, embarrassment and, at times, a physical sense of revulsion. He stayed up thinking uneasily about carnal intimacy between his parents, such
recent
sexual congress between them, and felt a mild nausea. He could not look at the curly-haired, cooing toddler without the shadow of shame falling over his own self. He became parsimonious and stilted with the expressions of affection – almost paternal, given the age difference – expected of him.

He saw his father trying to catch fireflies for the four-year-old Som and the initial, momentary enchantment, during which he even toyed with the idea of running out to pick up the little boy and get him closer to those magical, flickering points of living light, suddenly become soiled by that familiar cloud of queasiness. He watched the whole family caught up in a huge song-and-dance to feed his little brother (a fussy eater) – Madan-da distracting Som by pointing out pigeons in the attic of the house next door and singing ‘Come, come, o long-tailed bird’, Chhaya shaking rattles and belled anklets and doing peek-a-boo with a shiny scarf, their mother making little patties of Som’s food and planting tiny florets of cauliflower on top, in an effort to convince him that they were little wooded hills and wasn’t he a brave giant to swallow them one by one – and Adi felt a cindery taste on his tongue that was nothing but pity and a hooded distaste for his mother. But not for a moment did these unaccommodated intrusions impinge on his relations with the child, for whom he was bound by the bonds of family to feel the protective love of a much older brother.

When Bhola had his plum position as the family’s youngest child usurped by Somnath, he was only seven years old. In one of those wholesome surprises that a family can occasionally throw up, Bhola, instead of grudging Som the privilege that had been his for so long, took his baby brother to his heart. He stared and stared, in the beginning, at this tiny, warm, quick thing, no bigger than a large toy, then took to devouring him with his eyes when he was asleep; when he was blinking and awake, bringing up liquid ropes of curdled milk from the corner of his mouth; when he was wailing with all the might of his tiny lungs; when he was gurgling at nothing at all, engaged in some frolic of his own, unknowable mind. Bhola watched the baby being rubbed with Nardelli olive oil and washed in a shallow plastic basin of warm water. He took to propping him up and chattering to him while his mother poured small mugfuls of water over the boy’s hairless head. He loved watching the baby gasp for breath as the water streamed down his face. He watched his mother put kaajol, from a tiny tin, with her little finger under his eyes in a fat curve. ‘Makes the eyes brighter,’ she would say. Then she put a big, fat circle of kaajol on his forehead or, sometimes, awry, almost on his temple, to one side. ‘To ward off the evil eye,’ she said. Then she mimicked biting his nails, followed by a mimicking of spitting on him. ‘Thhoo, thhoo,’ she said. Bhola watched, transfixed.

‘Did you do that to me when I was his age?’ he asked his mother.

‘To all of you,’ she replied.

‘Why?’

‘So that no one gives him the evil eye.’

‘But why would they do that?’

‘Because he’s looking lovely.’

‘Did I look lovely too?’

‘Yes, you did. Now run off, I have a hundred and one things to do, I can’t spend all day chatting to you.’

Then Bhola innocently asked the question that had the effect of a blow to her chest.

‘Did Didi look lovely too?’

This was the first time Charubala was brought face-to-face with the nature of the way the outside world saw her daughter. If Bhola could ask such a question, did that mean that others had similar, or even more merciless, thoughts going through their heads? Or was it her own guilt, the unnatural cruelty and small-mindedness of a mother thinking that her own daughter was ugly, that this child had read and reflected back at her? Could he have asked the question in all innocence, without the injurious implication she saw lurking behind it? Before she could decide, the answer tumbled out and, along with it, her refusal to engage any longer.

‘Yes, she did. Lovelier than all of you. Now, don’t you have anything to do? You’re keeping him from falling asleep, jabbering away non-stop. Go, go!’ she said, practically shooing him away.

Minutes after he left, she felt a cloudy sense of melancholy at having compared all of them unfavourably to Chhaya; the overcompensation was neither going to transform the truth nor make Bhola feel better. If only two lies could add up to one truth, she sighed to herself and concentrated on feeding the baby. Her milk flooded through the clamping gums of the infant at her breast. She decided to send Madan out for those reddish-black hot-and-sour boiled sweets Chhaya loved so much. And let her eat the dried raw mango with black salt that she wanted all the time.

It was around this time that Bhola developed a habit that was, in a more modified form, to mark him for life. It began with him baby-talking to Som – idle, nonsensical chatter, strings of pure sounds that were only a simulacrum of words, opaque, meaningless, not just a distortion of adult speech through the glass of the perceived aural understanding of a baby with one or two nonce-words thrown in. It seemed to be an entire vocabulary, giving the impression at once of being spun out on the hoof and of being a fully limned and realised world, which Bhola had had inside him all the time and had been waiting for another creature from that undiscovered planet to appear and spark him off into communication. A sea of private language, with intoned waves riding up and down, the surface a mesh of movements and agitation of inflection, song-like points of expressiveness, of ascendants and descendants, walls of thick-stacked sound-cascades in motion. It was like hearing any language, of which you did not understand a single word, being spoken. It gave the hearer the feeling of listening to pure abstraction, like music, except that this language had no meaning under the surface of its words; it
was
pure abstraction of a kind.

Bhola returned from school, the local Mitra Institution, in the afternoons and rushed to his little brother the instant he was through the door. Som gave a smile of room-filling radiance when he saw Bhola and they launched into their world of nebulous music, now lit up here and there by an occasional word or phrase of Bengali. It was a wonder to watch: the toddler wide-eyed, rapt – you could even imagine his ears, delicate as sea-shell, pricked to catch every note – while his elder brother set him in the middle of the torrent, cut off the rope tethering him to his life of meals and sleep and children’s rhymes and mollycoddling, and set him wildly adrift.

‘What you say, ashes and cinders, I cannot understand a word,’ Charubala complained; half-heartedly, because she was secretly pleased to have such a ready tool for calming the toddler. Instead of Madan, Bhola was now summoned to deal with the more refractory moods of the new child. And Bhola was so effective that Charubala’s initial wonderment at his powers gave way to an uneasy sense of being spooked.

‘What if he grows up speaking that nonsense-language?’ she asked one day.

‘I’m not teaching him anything. Anyway, I speak to him in Bengali too.’

But at the age of two years and seven months Somnath, to the anxiety of his parents, had not spoken a single word, not even basic things such as ‘Baba’, ‘Ma’, ‘Dada’. He stared and heard everything and the way his huge eyes took on the look of attentive stillness meant that he understood some things, if not all, but speak he could not or would not.

Charubala badgered Bhola. ‘Does he speak when you’re alone with him?’ she asked.

‘No, he only listens. And laughs.’

‘Do you expect me to believe this? That you spend so much time with the boy, eating the worms in his ears,’ she exclaimed in pique, ‘and he doesn’t even open his mouth?’

‘No, he doesn’t. I’m telling the truth.’

‘Lying again?’ she threatened.

Bhola, intimidated, said, ‘You can come and listen if you don’t believe me.’

‘Fine, that’s what I shall do. But what if he sees me and decides not to speak?’

‘But he doesn’t speak anyway!’

Charubala was on a roll now. ‘I know what I’ll do. I’ll hide outside and you carry on as you do. If you tell him that I’m outside, I shall punish you severely.’

Charubala alerted Madan; no one was to go into the room and no one was to pass outside it for the duration of her spying. She heard Bhola constructing walls of sound with the ease and fluency of a wizard. They seemed to flow out of him and, once in the common world, they remained there, of their own magical accord. On their surface Bhola occasionally stuck a window or two of comprehensible Bengali words – ‘bird’ featured more than once, and she noted ‘monkey’ and ‘glow-worm’ – but those came as mild shocks to her, embedded as they were in such a huge, furled fabric of strangeness that the familiar became the exceptional, the odd. She could not bring herself to peep in case Som caught her watching, and all she had was this strange music to go on, but for the quarter of an hour that she listened with intense concentration she only heard Som let out a carillon of laughter twice. That was all.

The experiment failed.

Som was now taken by his father to a renowned paediatrician in Shyambazar. The doctor tested the child’s hearing, asked him to open his mouth, stick out his tongue, say ‘Aaaaa’ – Bhola was taken too, to make Som comply – and finally said to Prafullanath, ‘Nothing wrong with him. He’ll speak in time.’

‘But he is nearly three years old and he hasn’t said one word,’ Prafullanath said.

‘Have you ever come across an adult who doesn’t speak unless he is dumb? And the child isn’t a deaf-mute, I assure you. Take him away, he’ll start speaking soon.’

And he did. Shortly after the visit to the doctor, Som exploded into speech – ordinary, Bengali speech, halting, part-incomprehensible as a child’s speech usually is, but with not a single element of Bhola’s private language adulterating it. Charubala was relieved of a worry that was beginning to become burdensome.

She called Bhola aside and said, ‘You must not talk any more nonsense to Som. He’s learning how to speak, I don’t want you to hamper that.’

Bhola felt crushed. Did this mean his special claim on Som was over? Would he not be his little brother’s favourite person any longer? Something settled on him; he began to feel heavy.

‘But . . . but he . . . he seems to like it,’ Bhola said.

‘Never mind like. You listen to me. I don’t want to catch you speaking all that rubbish to him. Is that clear?’ she warned sternly.

He nodded his bowed head once. His eyes began to prick, but he was determined not to cry, at least not in front of his mother. He felt more baffled than sorrowful; why did Som abandon him so capriciously?

Madan-da slipped into the room. He came up to Bhola and whispered, ‘Ma’s scolded you?’

Bhola nodded. He was not going to be able to hold back the tears, definitely not if he had to speak.

‘Come with me to the kitchen, I have something for you,’ Madan-da said. ‘But you mustn’t tell anyone.’

Bhola couldn’t look up. What if Madan-da saw his tears?

‘Come on, quick. We don’t want to be seen, do we?’