The Lives of Others (23 page)

Bhola obliged; he was much better at reading than at aural comprehension. But before long, a lag seemed to be opening up between the signs on the page and the meanings behind them and a corresponding one between meaning and sense. Acutely conscious of two pairs of judgemental eyes riveted on him, and also of his own deep anxiety brought about by a sense of lack, he nevertheless found himself forgetting them, ensnared by the peculiar nature of Arunima’s essay on Jayanti. What on earth had she written? This was not the Jayanti he recognised. What were all these wild fictions?

My mother’s name is Jayanti Ghosh. She is short and black and has hair till her waist. She gets up in the morning and shouts at me and my father to get ready to go to school and office. In my tiffin-box she gives a banana and a boiled egg, sometimes insects and worms.

She burns the food for my father and throws down the plate in front of him. Then she takes all the money from him and says, ‘I want to see your dead face today.’ Then I come to school and she spends all day beating the servants. One day she hit the maidservant so much that she went to hospital with broken arms and legs.

Then she eats lunch, all nice and delicious things that she does not give to me and my father – mutton, fish, chop, cutlet, sweets. After lunch she waits until all my aunts are asleep. Then she goes into their rooms and steals their saris and jewellery.

In the afternoon, I return back from school. She shouts at me and beats me with a wooden stick and sometimes with the handle of a hand-fan. Then my father returns back and she shouts at him. She gives him rice and water and salt to eat. Sometimes there are eggs of cockroaches and spiders in our food.

Then she sends my father and me to sleep on the floor at the bottom of the stairs. One day Jesus Christ will burn her like the thornbush.

He looked up at the four eyes watching his every nerve-twitch and eye-flicker then lowered his baffled face to continue reading. He switched back to the cover to read Arunima’s name on the label on the front, hoping that the Sisters had made a mistake, then wondered if there were two girls with the same name in the class despite the evidence of his daughter’s handwriting.

Then, shocking himself and the Sisters, he started giggling uncontrollably at the absurd nature of Arunima’s imagination.

For a startled few seconds Sisters Patience and Josephine dropped their masks and stared with incredulity at Bhola, until an even pricklier disapproval took over.

‘Why do you laugh?’ Sister Patience demanded. ‘Is it true what she has written? We are of the opinion that these are all terrible slanders. What do you have to say?’

The clear note of haranguing in her voice tethered Bhola somewhat. ‘Erm . . . yes, ma’am . . . no . . . meaning Sister . . . this is very laughing matter. No, I mean, writing funny,’ he said and halted. The Sisters heard the substitution of the fricative with a plosive in ‘funny’, but they were too far gone in their perplexity and outrage to find it even mildly amusing. Now barely concealed disdain took its place.

‘We, on the other hand, do not find it a laughing matter, Mr Gauche,’ said Sister Patience in her coldest, hardest voice.

Bhola made a swift calculation in his head: he did not have enough English, or nerves steely enough, to explain to the Sisters that the stuff Arunima had written was all fabricated, because he would then have to field further questions – whys, whats, wherefores – which would lead to larger stretches of communicative quicksands, so it might be a wise strategy simply to look apologetic, even outraged, and let the tide of the Sisters’ displeasure and disciplinary prescriptions for his daughter wash over him. Tussling with this decision was a more amorphous shame: what if the Sisters thought that Arunima’s essay was true? What kind of an idea would it give them of his domestic life, his family, his marriage, his general ineffectuality? This counter-feeling made him want to speak out, but he did not have the right words. Not for the first time in his life he felt himself fall into the gap between feelings and their articulation in language.

So relieved was he to step out onto Gariahat Road after his ordeal that he nearly forgot how he would be quizzed by Jayanti as soon as he returned home. She was fretting herself to dyspepsia. The English sentences Arunima had written would make little to no sense to her, so how was he to summarise the events of the morning? What
could
he say? Walking down to the bus stop on the other side of the road, he felt suddenly weak-kneed with pity: pity at Jayanti’s ignorance of English; pity for the incomprehension and then the puzzled sadness that would be her reaction, were she to be told the entire truth; compassion for the unknowable emotions that would be going through her in her private moments when she worried at the episode, trying to parse some kind of sense out of it.

He lit a cigarette from the burning tip of the braided coir rope hanging beside the narrow paan-bidi shack adjacent to the Ucobank building and inhaled deeply. He decided to weave a different tale altogether for his wife when he got back home, something along the lines of a new order they were trying out in Carmel Convent, which had to do with calling parents in at regular intervals throughout the year to keep them apprised of their daughters’ academic progress. Then he would make up something for verisimilitude and density: how they were satisfied with Arunima’s work, although there was room for improvement in some subject or the other. The prospect of lying calmed him instantly, more than the nicotine.

But far more treacherous were proving to be the currents running under the complicity that united him and Arunima now. He could barely bring himself to look her in the eye; he knew that she knew of his deception, knew also that some uneasy coalition into opposing camps across a dividing line had occurred. While this made him feel disloyal to his wife, and the screw of an odd discomfort now and then turned and turned inside him, Arunima seemed to have developed a silent, intentful intensity, refusing to let go of her pinning gaze on him, searching his eyes out, wanting something ungiveable. Her child’s heart knew that he had protected her, but its susceptibility to magnified fears and anxieties seemed, perhaps, to want also a kind of reckoning about the content of what she had written, an acknowledgement from him of the spirit and life under the surface of those words. This she would not get because he did not know it was demanded of him and, had he known, would have found it impossible to endow it with a form in which things of the soul or heart are given. What shape does collusive understanding take? What her innocent mind could not comprehend was that it was not her that he had shielded; that knowledge would have been reckoning enough. But that was not to be, not yet.

Although the events are recent, to Bhola it appears that the clouds, which have begun to settle across the sky of his heart, have acquired a tenacious staying power. Bhola is unsettled by this new, growing grain of – of what exactly? This is what he cannot put his finger on, and the inability distracts him significantly enough to bleed into other areas of his life; he cannot safely shut it away in a room to be revisited in the silence of introspective solitude.

Sitting at work now, it continues to gnaw at him; nothing major or disruptive, nothing painful or upsetting, just a kink that will not go away. The debate around him is in wild spate; he has not heard a word for a long time. Where are they? Someone is saying agitatedly, ‘Let me tell you, the Shakti-Sunil-Niren crowd will become a shrine, a shrine!’

V

Samir said – Do you know how Debdulal-da referred to you?

– No. How?

– Pratik-da. The ‘Su’ prefix to your name has been – here he made a cutting movement, but with his hand held sideways, so probably indicating a sickle – chopped off.

Much laughter from Samir and Dhiren.

I asked – Did you not correct him?

Samir answered – Arrey, at least six times, but it was like a dog’s tail: the moment you let it go, it curled back again.

– Not a bad change, what do you say, from Supratik to Pratik?

Dhiren said – Not bad at all. From ‘auspicious symbol’ to ‘symbol’ only. Who wants to be auspicious? Bloody cant of the bourgeois ****ers!

I, too, thought: Not bad, this loss of weight in the name. I could happily live as Pratik, as pure symbol only . . .

I had been handed a sickle and shown how to cut the paddy stalks at the base, about three inches from the soil. Each of us went to the plot that his host was working. Kanu, mine, was a wage-labourer, on the lowest rung. This, I realised later, had its uses: a number of class enemies could be pointed out to me – owners of small plots who overworked and underpaid day-workers; the subset of yes-men of big landlords among these; the absentee jotedaars’ managers who cracked the whip . . .

The plot didn’t look big when I saw it, but twenty minutes into disciplining myself to maintain the required inverted-U shape sent my neck and back screaming silently. The field seemed like a sea now and I had to swim across it. Already I was well behind Kanu and his wife, Bijli, and the three other munish working with us. They advanced with the choreographed grace and rigour of dancers, leaving me behind, standing alone, the bad student who couldn’t master the movements. How did they do it? I knew those tired lines about practice and acclimatisation, but didn’t their backs and necks and shoulders hurt too? In the beginning at least? I began to count small blessings: the fact that it was November (the thought of doing this in April was unthinkable) although my vest was stuck to my skin with sweat and the fatua over it was beginning to show signs of damp too. The sun was not strong enough for my head to be covered, not yet.

I bracketed the sickle around the base of a sheaf of stalks and cut using the ‘towards me’ motion that they’d taught me. The sickle was very sharp and there was no effort involved in the actual cutting. The cut stalks fell over my head. This was the thing I was failing to master, the way the left hand gathered the cut plants into a bundle, the bundle increasing in girth and the hand adjusting to accommodate that as you moved forward, cutting more stalks, until you had enough and you turned around and threw the harvested sheaves behind you and moved on. Even that flinging backward of the sheaves – even that required the mastery of a trick, a particular motion of the hand and wrist so that the stalks all fell with their bases aligned to the bases of the others already harvested, the tips to the tips. Mine fell in a fanned mess. How was I ever going to reach the end of the field?

And then I noticed: my palms and fingers were a mad criss-cross of little cuts from the sharp, dry edges of the rice leaves and stalks. Shame rose in me like bile. Hands that revealed instantly that I hadn’t done a day’s honest work in my life. The only thing I could do was ignore the sting, grit my teeth and keep cutting and advancing with all the strength and endurance I had. I wanted to make the cuts worse, deeper, my hands really bloody. It was the only way I would learn how to harvest properly and the only way my hands could stop being the shamefully middle-class hands they were now.

‘Change yourself, change the world.’

When you look at a field full of ripened grain ready to be harvested it’s a uniform brown-gold-sand colour. But as you cut with your sickle you notice that there’s still some green inside, hiding within the larger brown, a few long partially green leaves, a little green fraction of a stalk. And as you cut these down, a tiny cloud of insects hiding in their massed density flies out; some wriggle away into the thickets not yet harvested, some scurry into the grass and sheaves and earth around you. And yet another thing: the sound of the paddy plants as you enter the thicket and cut them down. That rustle and rattle, louder, much louder now, accompanied by something between the snap of an almost-dry stalk and the wet snip of cutting through a twig that’s still partly green. I can’t explain very well. Taken together, this swishing of dry, dense vegetation fills your ears. You can hear it at night, resounding in your head, before you slip into the total silence of sleep.

My hands were sore in the morning after a night’s sleep. I couldn’t make a fist. So I made myself make a fist ten, fifteen, twenty times with each hand. The cracks reopened and beaded with blood. Some were tiny red threads, the red smudging when I touched them. And speaking of sleep, I’d never known sleep like this before – a total wiping out of all senses, all consciousness. I hadn’t known exhaustion like this before either, a bone-breaking, bone-aching tiredness. That little revelation again, granted to an outsider, of the hidden inner cogs and wheels of the lives of others: now I knew yet another reason why everyone in the heart of rural Bengal went to sleep so early. When you worked in the fields from six in the morning to four in the afternoon the tiredness resulting from it stunned you into silence. You went from being a human, animated by a mind and spirit and consciousness, at the beginning of the day, to a machine without a soul at the end of those ten hours, moving your arms and legs and mouth because you felt some switch hadn’t been turned off. Then it was, and the machine was dead, or just a stopped machine.

The next step was beating the sheaves in bundles against a sizeable boulder, which was placed on a large expanse of gunny cloth or jute. The impact loosened the ripe paddy grains, which collected on the cloth. After ten or fifteen minutes of work, the accumulating matt golden grains looked like a giant colony of insects or insect eggs, thinning out towards the peripheries in an untidy scatter. This was a much more exposed activity: you worked in the clearing where there had been dense plantation before. While harvesting, you were hidden by the tall paddy in front of you and sometimes to your left and right, but here, as you raised your hands above your head and brought down the sheaves of rice on the stone with all your strength – and it had to be done with all the force that you could bring to it; this, too, was a skill you had to acquire – you were the solo performer on a stage. Here you stood out, there was no help for it.