The Lives of Others (29 page)

Five years after Mohanbagan’s IFA Shield victory, his father was dead. It was 1916 and the war in Europe had temporarily disrupted the passage of the ships that brought the medicines for his father’s diabetes into India from the country of their manufacture. No amount of money, in which the Ghoshes were not lacking, could open this particular door.

When he was four, Prafulla had seen his brother, Braja, older than him by twelve years, celebrating British victory in the Boer War, and had joined him in running up and down the stairs, parroting his dada’s ‘The English have won! The English have won!’ They were all supporters of the English then; victory for the English meant their victory. Who would have thought that a dozen years down the line the distant thunder of another war in which the English were again involved would descend so crashingly on their little lives? He had not, then or later, linked up the British with his father’s death, stringing out the beads of cause and effect, in part because the rise in anti-British nationalism hardly touched the Ghosh family in North Calcutta. Four or five years after the child’s jubilation at British victory in the Boer War, when the nationalist movement in Bengal was in full swing, the Ghoshes in their enormous family mansion in Garpar Road had not boycotted English goods, or given up their jewellery, like most patriotic families, to fund the nationalist cause, nor had they consigned their foreign silks and fabrics to the regular bonfires that the swadeshi revolutionaries organised.

Prafulla, Manmathnath’s son from his second marriage, had lost his mother at birth. Manmathnath, cradling the motherless infant, had said to Braja, his elder son, ‘This baby has never seen his mother’s face. The two of us are his only world. We have to be mother and father to him, in the way I have tried to be both to you, after you lost your own mother. I married again so that you could have another mother in your chhoto-ma. That dream is now ashes. You are twelve years older than he, you must be not only a brother to him, but also another father.’

But it was the death of Manmathnath that was the true turning point in Prafulla’s life; to speak of his world and his father as two separate things was meaningless. Manmathnath had established and run Calcutta’s biggest and best jewellery house, Ghosh Gold Palace, and had lovingly explained to his younger son, without a trace of condescension in his voice, his innovations in the Bengali jewellery trade; Prafulla, despite himself, could still remember everything from those lessons, which he had absorbed eagerly as stories. He could remember the long, noisy, rattling trip in the Beeston Humberette to the huge showroom of the Great Eastern Motor Company in Park Street, where he was taken to feast his eyes on the steam- and motor-cars on display. The open-mouthed stares of people who stopped in their tracks to see that rarity, a car, phut-phutting down Circular Road. (The child Prafulla was not immune to this sense of wonder; he and his brother sat for long hours on the front balcony to watch motorcycles going down the street; when a horse-drawn brougham or a victoria or, better still, an Oldsmobile, made an appearance, the boys’ day was made.) Much earlier, when he was a little boy carried in the tight embrace of his father’s arms, the spectacular experience of watching the ascent of a gas-balloon carrying a man up-up-up from the Oriental Gas Company fields to the sky. The kadam tree in the garden that looked adorned with perfect spheres of creamy-golden light in the monsoon. The man who came around every evening, a ladder on his shoulder, lighting the street lamps. The unearthly rhythmic song of the Oriya palanquin bearers –
Dhakkunabor hei-yan nabor, dhakkunabor hei-yan nabor
– going about their business on the streets of Chitpur. Much later, the pale-brown-and-yellow trams with their many doors and their wondrous ting-ting-ting sound as they approached. The ‘khut’ sound as the conductor gave his father his ticket, which he handed to his son immediately. The priceless treasure of the Calcutta Tramways Company ticket, with writing in English and Bengali equally divided on front and back, which he saved in his little box of precious collectables along with pigeon and crow and sparrow feathers, coloured beads, pieces of shiny coloured glass, string, ribbons, buttons, a piece from a broken anklet, tamarind seeds, even a seashell. The drudgery of having to sit through Vidyasagar’s
Barna Parichay
and Parry Charan Sirkar’s
First Book of English
in the occasionally sooty light of hurricanes. Running his thrilled fingers over the tight and precise accordion of creases made by the servants, using gila seeds, on the sleeves of his father’s panjabi. The pile of sitabhog, like heaped petals of jasmine, brought all the way from Bardhaman on the train, and he seated on his father’s lap, being fed with a silver spoon from a silver bowl spoonfuls of that divine sweet. ‘The Great Bengal Circus’ one evening, once again sitting next to his father, his left hand clasped to his father’s right throughout, the boy, enchanted, watching the Bengali strongman, Shyamakanta-babu, breaking enormous boulders on his chest.

This father, who had loved his motherless younger son more than the irises of his own eyes, more than the weight and value of gold and diamonds that passed through his shop every month, this man had suddenly died and Prafulla, completely orphaned, had found himself falling falling falling as if he had chanced upon the trapdoor that connected his life to the black infinity of space.

Braja took to heart their father’s injunction, warming to the task, most enthusiastically in the disciplining duties of brotherly care. Prafulla would never forget the day when Braja had summoned every single servant in the house and had belted him mercilessly in front of them for the misdemeanour of calling one of the servants a ‘son of a pig’, a filthy term in the mouth of someone so green. That hectic performance of tough love under the stairs might have established the credentials of Braja as an ideal elder brother in the eyes of the world, but in the boy’s mind it planted the first seeds of the suspicion that Braja resented him for being the second wife’s son.

In the months after their father’s death Braja found a liberation, manifested in the frequent explosive flowerings of his cruelty. What shame and pain Prafulla had felt when he had been thrashed repeatedly without any reason, again in the view of everyone in the house who cared to see – and everyone did – and again without anything, or anyone, to restrain Braja. He knew then that nothing in his future could ever hold the terror of the prelude to these beatings: Braja taking off, one by slow one, the dozen or so rings that he wore to channel the propitious influences of the stars and planets, that warm-up exercise lovingly undertaken so that the metals or any protruding stone did not do any serious damage to his brother’s face or mouth or eyes – such consideration – and Prafulla standing there, trying to control his pelvic floor so that he did not add the humiliation of pissing himself to the deluge that was about to break over him. A chasm had long opened up between Prafulla’s public manner of respect and esteem for his dada, a mask that he put on every day and tried to keep firmly in place, and the private knowledge that the feelings which bound the brothers together were envy, rivalry, rancour.

First, there was Braja’s great reluctance in having Prafulla continue to come to the shop in the mornings, as he had started doing in the company of their father to learn the ropes. ‘In the jewellery trade,’ Manmathnath used to repeat like a favourite chant, ‘experience is
everything
, the first-hand, touched-by-your-skin, seen-with-your-eyes experience of handling gold and jewels – that is the greatest education.’ Braja had benefited from it; now it was Prafulla’s turn. While Manmathnath had been alive, Braja had had to keep a secure lid on his antipathy; now it became an open sanction against Prafulla coming in to Ghosh Gold Palace. Prafulla bit down on his indignation and acquiesced, but could no longer contain himself when his uncles and their grown-up sons started circling in the hope of rich pickings. His three uncles all had their own jewellery shops, all variants using the Ghosh name, but none a quarter as successful as his father’s business; this added to the animosity that had already led to the brothers setting up separate businesses.

Days and nights of people, his relatives, going in and out of their enormous house in Garpar, relatives who had hardly shown their faces during his father’s lifetime because jealousy and enmity ran so deep, now brimming over with solicitous tenderness for Manmathnath’s orphaned sons. Soon, the eloquent sympathies were directed only at Braja, and Prafulla was ignored; the uncles had only had to sniff the air to work out who held the keys. All these uncles, at once frayed and battened by their perfumed lives of khemta dances, alcohol, the obligatory visit to the brother before returning home – when they did return home – to the ministrations of their cosseting, dutiful wives, these uncles who had lived off their family wealth and dissipated it in such sybaritic style, they had all come rushing to see if they could invoke family and heritability and loot more fuel for their finite fires and infinite appetites.

From his room Prafulla could hear voices raised, sometimes in altercation, sometimes in calculating cheer, as if it were not around a death that they had congregated, but a jubilation. Often this was accompanied by the sharp methyl smell of the spirits that lubricated the raucous proceedings. Forbidden from participating, Prafulla paced his room like a caged beast.

Braja’s next step was to have everything transferred to his own name – the business, the house, the bank accounts, the assets and properties – effectively disinheriting Prafulla of his share of the patrimony and making him a dependant.

‘I have done it for your own good, you’ll come to understand one day,’ Braja said to him. ‘You will work your way up to the top. That training will be invaluable.’

Those who saw it as the barefaced robbery it was, most notably Chitta-babu, Chittadas Roy, the manager of Ghosh Gold Palace, and Manmathnath’s friend and accomplice for decades, kept their mouths sealed.

Prafulla could not choke down his outrage. ‘Why are you cutting me out like this? It’s wrong. I am as much my father’s son as you are,’ he said.

This was exactly the opening Braja needed; if he played it carefully, Prafulla was going to do Braja’s dirty work for him.

‘Alas, I can’t believe I’ve lived to see the day when I hear my very own younger brother talk of
my
father and
your
father,’ Braja said.

‘I have rights to all the things that you’re denying me.’

Braja ratcheted up his display of hurt. ‘Rights? I saw you being born, and you talk to me of rights? Has it now come to this?’ His voice did an impression of a wobble. ‘I feel I’m being called a thief by those very people for whom I do the stealing. This is all to protect you, and now you talk to me of division of . . . of . . .’ He let this trail off for maximum impact.

Wrong-footed, Prafulla dropped the matter for the time being. It was raked up again, this time by a meeting with Chitta-babu, at which the elderly gentleman, clearly struggling to present a calm surface over the roil of things he could not bring himself to articulate in front of this young man, hinted darkly, ‘If your father were alive, this . . . this sin would have been undreamt-of. One day you will understand all this. I can’t say any more than that. But if you soon find yourself in need of help, I mean
any
kind of help, look at me, child, look at me; any kind of help, come to me and I’ll see what I can do. More than this I cannot say. I hope you understand my constraints. But remember, He is seeing everything from above, He’ll not let this pass.’

Prafulla, who had a reasonable idea of what the great unmentionable could be, confronted Braja again. This time Braja’s wife, Surama, took a lead role. Speculation, not entirely baseless, had it that it was Surama who had poisoned her husband’s mind against his much younger brother: it was she who had made a big thing out of the fact that the two brothers had different mothers, gainfully exploiting, if not initiating, a wild suggestion that Braja’s mother, Manmathnath’s first wife, had killed herself in mysterious circumstances, no one knew how. The propinquity of Braja’s mother’s death and Manmathnath’s second marriage was a ready gift for this compulsive hyper-fictionalising tendency in Bengali culture; Surama was an exemplar. Yet Prafulla knew, even if he never gave it recognition in words, that Surama had had malleable material to mould.

‘He is the son from the “second phase”,’ she was reputed to have said to Braja, ‘he will usurp your place in your father’s affections and you’ll find yourself left with nothing. Act quickly.’

She had harped on the theme, with creative variations, for years until surmise and suspicion had solidified into truth; to Braja and Surama, Prafulla, a mere fledgling of ten when they got married in 1908, matured in their imagination into a raptor.

In the nine months since her father-in-law’s death and, crucially, a year since the longed-for birth of a boy, Surama had amplified the behind-the-scenes attacks: ‘You have to think about your son now,’ she said, ‘and secure his future. What if your brother takes everything away from us and lands us in the street? What will happen to your heir?’

The mask of filial duty had at last slipped at the final confrontation. Braja’s calculated air of grievance got so much on Prafulla’s nerves that he called his bluff.

‘Stop your acting!’ he said. ‘I’ve had enough. The pain you say you’re feeling, I know exactly how much that is. I want to go through all the property and shop papers. I want my name on half of everything.’

‘I told you,’ Surama said, addressing her husband, ‘I told you that we were raising a snake with milk and rice. “Acting,” he says. How can you swallow such an insult? We have practically brought him up, and this is our reward.’

Braja’s practised lugubrious conduct now allowed a very slight tug of amused contempt at the corners of his mouth, but the words that emerged continued with pretend hurt.

‘My heart feels ready to burst—’ he began, but Prafulla cut him short.