The Lives of Others (36 page)

The incident, played out for, it seemed, a few infinitely elastic seconds, caused a certain calculation to go through the boy’s head. When another set of starving beggars turned up at their door, two or three days after this, Somnath was ready. He knew that he was not supposed to be around, staring at them, so he waited until Madan-da had gone into the kitchen, then sneaked downstairs, ran stealthily to the man – a shadow of a man, really – and his stick-thin daughter, snatched the bowl out of her hands and dripped the remainder of the cloudy liquid onto the rags the girl was wearing. Then he stepped back and said, ‘Wring your clothes and drink what comes out.’

Father and daughter stared at Somnath, their breathing seemingly suspended. What meekness and subordination differences of class and wealth had hard-wired in them were consolidated by hunger and debility. They got up from their sitting positions slowly. The man pulled his daughter close to him, as if wishing to protect her and, without turning their backs to Somnath, they climbed down the four steps and reached the front gate backwards, the entire while keeping Somnath pinned with their eyes. At the iron gate they turned their backs to him, facing the street at last, but then the father spun very slowly around to look at Somnath one final time and said, ‘May god keep you well’, and shuffled away with his daughter.

Around the time Somnath turned twenty, his childhood mischief had become the stuff of local anecdotes, recounted over and over, as if in celebration, by Charubala mostly, but certain incidents had either been forgotten or were never mentioned. The story that was retold frequently was the one involving a cat.

It was a white animal with an orange tail and an orange sock on three of its paws, the right front leg missing out on the droll detail. Madan-da used to say that the creature had used that paw to swipe so much food, stealing into the kitchens of the neighbourhood, that the sock had fallen off. The explanation was not entirely without merit: in the year of famine, when the corpses of emaciated cats and dogs and humans could be seen lying around the city, this cat seemed to have miraculously avoided that end. It was notorious in Basanta Bose Road – a fish head, waiting to be cooked, would go missing; cooked fish, left uncovered and unsupervised in the kitchen while the cook had her back turned for only a few minutes, would be attacked brazenly, the cook returning to find a piece gone or fish bones sticking out from the bowl. The cat clearly knew where fish was being cooked and when; it lay in wait nearby, endlessly patient, for it knew an opportunity would come along soon. Its reputation had reached such a height that it was shooed off energetically whenever anyone saw it loitering with intent, and children threw stones at it or hid behind doors, their breaths held, a big stick in their hands, waiting for the cat to enter so that they could bring the stick crashing down onto their unsuspecting adversary’s back. Somnath, now nearly eleven, loved this game of guerrilla attack, but the cat proved wilier after a couple of occasions of being taken by nasty surprise. When the animal got swifter in its evasion of or escape from Somnath wielding a lathi, the boy became more determined to do it real damage; his blood was up.

He had a foolproof idea. He stole a couple of his father’s Valium pills from the medicine box in his parents’ room, crushed them to powder, mixed them in warm milk in a shallow bowl, left this by the steps to the back garden and waited, this time not armed with the stick, but watching only. Soon enough he was rewarded with the sight of the cat lapping up the milk in one go. The question now was this: would the cat oblige by falling into a stupor right in front of him or would the pills take some time to work, during which period it would lope off goodness-knows-where and sleep off the effects of the drug? Somnath was faced with a dilemma; he did not know which would give him more pleasure – the drug-induced death of the cat or beating it to a pulp with the lathi, once the tranquillisers had kicked in and it was incapable of escaping.

As it turned out, the cat sat down to wash itself after the milk, then began to have trouble getting up. It tried, failed, tried again, and stumbled after the first couple of steps. Then it stood still, swayed for a few seconds, tried to move forward, now in a kind of drunken uncoordination, and toppled over sideways. It stood up again and shook its head, as if trying physically to shed the veil of confusion and sleepiness that had descended, suddenly and heavily, upon it. Its normal gait now became a loopy, erratic curve for a while, then it fell again, unable to keep its head up. Som, his heart hammering, watched with joy. Now that the cat was so obviously powerless to run away, he emerged from his hiding place. The cat took no notice. It did not try to raise its heavy head to look at him. Som took the lathi, moved towards the cat and brought it down on the nearly comatose animal with all the force in his body, but the lathi was bigger than he and he had misjudged how close he needed to be to the animal to maximise the force of the long stick, so the blow came as an anti-climax, at least to him. The cat tried to yelp and move, neither of which it could achieve. Som remembered someone mentioning that the best way to kill a cat was to hit it hard on its head. He moved back a few steps so that he could have optimal leverage.

Before he could raise his arms a second time, Madan-da appeared from the house and called out, ‘What are you doing with that lathi, what are you doing?’

By coincidence, Charubala too appeared on the scene. She repeated Madan’s cry, took in the scene and added, ‘What’s happened to the cat? Why is it lying down like that?’

‘I gave it Valium mixed in milk. Now I’m going to beat it to death. Look, it can’t move. What fun! No more stolen fish.’

‘Where did you get your hands on Valium? How?’ she demanded, panic making her voice rise.

‘Where else? From Baba’s medicine box,’ he said, contemptuous that she did not know something so obvious. ‘I know where it’s kept. Baba told me he takes those tablets at night to help him go to sleep, so I gave two to the cat. Then I can beat him and beat him and beat him.’ The contempt modulated to pride; he was clearly expecting to be praised for his cleverness.

Charubala reacted quite differently. She flew into a rage.

‘What nerves, taking Baba’s medicines! Don’t you know you’re not supposed to touch that box? Those medicines are strictly forbidden to children. What if you had taken some by mistake? Valium is poison, don’t you know, poison,’ she screamed. ‘What if you had come to some harm? My hands and feet are turning numb at the very thought. You need to be taught a lesson. You were sent into the world to turn my flesh and bones black . . .’

Leaving them to carry on, Madan discreetly picked up the cat in his arms and took it to his room. He got some warm milk from the kitchen, dipped a clean piece of cloth in it and squeezed slow drops into the sleeping creature’s mouth when he noticed it beginning to stir. Would it live? At least it was still breathing. He put the cat’s head on his lap and covered the lower half of the animal with a sheet so that it did not get cold. Was it only last year that he had stayed up two nights in a row, putting cold-water compresses on Somnath’s forehead when he was burning up with fever? Ma’s face had been thin and desiccated with worry. The doctor had said that the boy should be given cold sponges every hour and monitored throughout the night to ensure that his temperature did not shoot up. It was nothing for him to obey those orders, to see Somu-babu returned to health again. His Dulal, whom he got to see only once a year during the month-long visit to his village, was just under a year younger than Somu-babu. For the eleven months of the year that he was in Calcutta, Somu-babu was a substitute Dulal; Madan held little distinction in his head between the two boys.

Chhaya carried tales, not all of which were innocent. She got a thrill out of poisoning people’s minds and playing them off against each other. ‘Bhola’s digging dirt in the garden, you asked him not to,’ she said to her mother to try and get him into trouble; she snitched about Adinath: ‘I saw Dada going to the terrace in the afternoon sun and he told me not to tell you.’ She expected to be rewarded for all this. When the kulfiwalla went down the road in the late afternoon, with his terracotta pots, covered in woven jute, full of ices and kulfis, Chhaya kept an eye on who among the four siblings got ordinary kulfi (two annas), malai kulfi (three annas) or double cream (four annas); god help Charubala if her daughter thought she had been fobbed off with the cheapest.

It served Charubala’s purpose on occasion that her daughter acted as an extra pair of eyes and ears, and she knew that children love to tell on each other and squabble among themselves, but all hope she had that Chhaya would outgrow this unpleasant trait proved to be in vain when it continued, unabated, as the girl turned twelve, then thirteen, then fourteen . . . By the time Chhaya sat her Matriculation Exams, Charubala had stopped noticing that her daughter’s childhood habits were still present, still strong. Now, without a child’s innocence to lighten it, the full unsavouriness of the personality revealed itself.

Servants regularly found themselves to be the focus of Chhaya’s malignant attention. From overt accusation (‘I saw the dish-washing maid eating off our brass plates in the kitchen’ or ‘Madan-da was in Baba’s room this afternoon when he should have been having his nap’), meant mostly for her mother’s ears but often mentioned in the presence of the servant concerned to cause maximum discomfort, she became a mistress of the art of insinuation. Those childish tags, ‘You told him not to’, ‘He swore me to silence’, were now dropped. She had an unerring knack of sniffing out the balance of power between people and she played it for all she could. Her veins and arteries ran with a bitter fluid, not blood, Adinath exclaimed in fury one day.

Just one glance a fraction longer than the ordinary duration of a casual look would be construed by Chhaya as being a look of derision or revulsion because she was dark or cross-eyed. Slights were imagined and built upon with creative architecture. Anything could become mined in her imagination. It had the effect of a kind of psychological terrorism – people around her became hyper-conscious of what they were saying or doing, or not saying and not doing, because Chhaya’s susceptible, paranoid mind could alight on anything she chose and make it into a cause for war.

The exception, of course, was Priyo. It sometimes appeared that Chhaya distinguished insufficiently between her person and Priyo’s to the extent that she often did not communicate with him verbally or through signs, assuming that the unity of their minds did not necessitate such things; unity in the strictest sense it was, a oneness, an indivisibility. When Chhaya enrolled in Bethune College to do her Intermediate and then a BA, it was Priyo who frequently accompanied her there and brought her back home. (One of the family cars – there were two – could always have been at her disposal, and sometimes she availed herself of this service, although never unaccompanied; someone from the family had to be with her in the car.) Although buses were now seen frequently on the city streets, the idea of Chhaya boarding one on her own, or a tram, to go back and forth between home and college, was unimaginable. Bethune proved to be convenient for such arrangements involving decorum and social rules: Priyo, who was studying Commerce in City College, could chaperone Chhaya a bit further north of College Street to Cornwallis Street and then retrace his route south to go to his own college.

Sometimes they took the tram, changing at Esplanade. At other times they took a bus, which reduced the journey time by half. What no one knew was how often Priyo and Chhaya played truant from their respective colleges to take in a matinee at a cinema together.

This was a fun time for Priyo and Chhaya. War had broken out in Europe, but at first the flames were so far away that no one felt much heat. A small item in the papers, about a warship making its way towards Bangkok from the Far East, seemed like someone else’s story. Bhola said it was a Japanese ship, and Japan was on the side of the enemy – Britain’s enemy, that is; it was customary to see enemies of Britain as enemies of India and the ruling power’s allies as the colony’s friends. Then the rumour began that because Calcutta was on the eastern flank of the country, it was in real danger of being bombed by the Japanese. Prafullanath came home one day with blackout shades for the lights at home.

‘One and a half rupees I paid for each of these, one and a half rupees,’ he grumbled. ‘Now there’s a ban on car headlights. Neon lights, signboards – all off. The whole place has turned into a ghost city.’

Every single light in the house was shrouded in black paper. The effect was eerie, much like an eclipse; only the area directly under the shaded bulb remained in a small circle of light. Black curtains on doors and windows, black paper gummed onto skylights – all added to a depressing subfusc air. The objective was not to let a single crack or hairline of light be detected from outside. The Air Raid Patrol checked on this with the vigilante’s zeal.

‘O moshai, I can see a line of light under your door,’ came the holler from an ARP going about his rounds.

The Japanese will strike on a full-moon night, the rumour went. The first bombs fell just before Christmas. The city emptied like a bottle with a large leak. Adi and his father, who had to go near Sealdah on work, complained about the seething throng of people at the railway station trying to flee the city.

Prafullanath said, ‘The station is thick with people. We bumped into Chatterjee-babu and his family. He was sitting on his holdall, surrounded by luggage and people streaming everywhere, holding two cauliflowers, one in each hand. So we asked him what on earth he was doing carrying cauliflowers around in an emergency. Do you know what he said? “Arrey, moshai, don’t ask. On our way here I see this woman selling cauliflowers by the roadside. They were so fresh, so tight, I couldn’t resist, so I bought a couple. We have to eat wherever we go, no?” We didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.’

Huddled in the big sitting room now, with the six other members of her family, all wrapped in shawls and sweaters against the cold January night, Charubala began her predictable harangue.