The Lives of Others (43 page)

Her mejo-jyethi calls out, ‘Madan-da, bring me some of the rice left over from last night.’

Madan says, ‘But there’s fresh rice, just cooked, here, on the table.’

‘But I don’t want the leftovers to go to waste. Why don’t you reheat it and bring it?’

Madan does as he is told. Charubala looks at nothing in particular, her eyes stony. Something is coming, Arunima knows. Her pishi, Chhaya, has that look on her face, the one that presages warfare.

The tiny spark comes from Purnima. ‘We can’t afford any waste nowadays, what with the recent state of things here,’ she adds as a coda to her request. ‘Someone has to start paying for the years of kingly behaviour of others.’

She is in a fiendish mood.

Arunima notes that she is taking on the collective might of her grandmother and her pishi; no mean feat. She feels vicariously afraid.

Madan brings in the reheated leftover rice. Charubala says, ‘Madan, pass the
fresh
rice this way, will you? It wouldn’t do to mix the two’, and moves the bowl of fresh rice far away from the old one, as if the grains had the agency and ability to mingle on their own.

In one surprisingly agile movement, Purnima gets up from her chair, carries her container of warmed-up rice to the receptacle containing the new, spoons the old into the fresh, gives a few thorough stirs, picks up the full bowl and moves back to her place, where she serves herself some rice. All this before Charubala and Chhaya can open their mouths to cry out in protest.

The very air seems cloven. A shiver of terrified delight goes through Arunima.

Charubala responds first. ‘Madan,’ she calls, her voice almost a high, quavering trill with the effort to keep clutching onto dignified behaviour, ‘take the rice away and throw it out.’

Madan comes in from the kitchen. He has the cultivated detachment of someone who has long experience of being used as a device by warring parties. But he is pushing sixty now, no longer a green boy who could be shouted at, punished, for not doing anyone’s irrational or machinating bidding. Besides, he has been with the family for longer than anyone at the table except Charubala, so he knows where his loyalties lie. He begins to do as he has been told; he picks up the rice and asks Charubala, ‘Ma, what will you eat if I throw this out? I can put on some rice for you now, but it’ll take some time.’

Unwittingly Madan gives Charubala a bit of fuel. ‘No need to, Madan. Bin it. If it’s been willed that I won’t eat, fine, so be it, but I’ll make sure that those who have willed it don’t eat, either.’

Arunima, wise to the ways of quarrels among people who refer to each other in the third person, now begins to get interested in how sustainable the trope can be in this particular flare-up.

‘Yes, Madan, do take it away and throw it out,’ Purnima says. ‘How else to show one’s empty snobbery? Cutting off the nose to spite one’s face – if, at the age of seventy, one doesn’t understand how stupid it is, I wonder when one will.’

Madan leaves for the kitchen; it is best not to offer himself as a conducting rod.

Chhaya butts in and addresses her mother. ‘I warned you many, many times not to bring this . . . this creature into our house.’ The claim is not true, but she has said it so often over the years that it has become the truth. ‘She’ll burn it down,’ Chhaya says. ‘It turns out you have nurtured a snake on milk.’

‘At least I was lucky enough to have the option of marriage and of going to another home to live, although it turned out to be a pit of vipers. Some amongst us are so ugly and so venomous that marriage has passed them by,’ Purnima says.

Chhaya sits there, shaking, then manages to bring out a strangulated, ‘Ma, my heart is hammering again, I think something’s going to happen to me.’

‘About time,’ Purnima says.

Charubala rises to the challenge. ‘It is imperative that one behaves in a civilised manner in a civilised house, regardless of one’s background,’ she begins, addressing, it would appear, the framed black-and-white photograph on the wall opposite her, of her husband receiving a prize at the Bengal Chamber of Commerce nearly twenty years ago.

‘Civilised!’ Purnima says. ‘Show me where civilisation is in this house!’ She breaks the unwritten third-person rule and attacks Charubala directly now. ‘I can see father and favourite son skimming off money from the business and pretending that it’s going down the tubes. I suppose someone like you, in cahoots with them, would call that civilisation.’

In the time that Charubala takes to draw breath, Purnima charges again. Today she is indefatigable; if at this point, when Adinath is at his lowest, losing control of the business, haemorrhaging money and reputation, if now she cannot strike to dislodge him and make her husband usurp his position, they will never get another opportunity again.

‘“Bad times, bad times”,’ she mimics the dominant line that has been the unremitting background noise in the house for several years. ‘I ask you, who is
responsible
for those bad times?’ Her voice rises to its extraordinary pitch, that split-toned duet caused as if by a cracked voice. Madan cringes in the kitchen, but cannot help soaking it up. He stops clattering about with pots and plates and glasses.

‘Now that you’ve feathered your nests, it’s up to us to make the economies. Thieves, that’s what you are, low, common thieves,’ she shrieks.

Charubala finds her tongue. ‘Careful, very careful now,’ she warns. ‘You are no longer in the house of riff-raffs and common scum that you came from. If you are to stay on as a daughter-in-law here, you have to abide by our rules, otherwise . . .’

‘Otherwise what? Are you threatening me? Are you?’ Purnima, already standing, tucks the end of her sari at the waist, prepared even for physical conflict.

‘Yes, I’m threatening you. You will have to leave. I will not put up with this kind of behaviour. This is
my
house and you will learn to know your place in it and behave accordingly.’

‘
Your
house?’

‘Yes, it’s in my name.’

‘Well, you won’t be around for ever. What’ll happen then? Oh, don’t tell me, it’s going to be equally divided among your children. Not for a moment in your shitty little life have you done anything governed by equality. I know you’re going to leave it all to your eldest son. But I’ll see how you do it. We’ll talk to lawyers and pursue litigation until you will beg, beg to be forgiven.’

Chhaya finds her voice again. ‘Ma, you mustn’t shout, you’ll fall ill. Let’s leave her to stew in her own poison.’

‘Did you hear what she said?’ Charubala asks. ‘Lawyers, litigation . . . Is this what has been lurking in that cesspit of your venomous mind?’

‘Cesspit? Poison? Looks to me like a case of the sieve saying to the colander, “Why do you have so many holes in your arse?”’ Purnima modulates her tone to fit the glory of her colloquial style. ‘Your daughter could give a snake a few lessons in “poison” and “venomous mind”.’

Another frisson of shock goes through Arunima.

Chhaya says, ‘You are shameless,
shameless
. An animal, a greedy animal out to devour us. I warned everyone about you, the moment I heard your vulgar voice during the matchmaking. This is all so predictable.’ She pauses for breath, already aware that her hits lack the force of her sister-in-law’s earthier words, her more skilfully targeted darts. The knowledge makes her even angrier, but a secret anxiety, just beginning to whisper inside her head, leaches it away somewhat: does she . . . could she
know
?

Purnima fires her final shots. ‘I’m telling you this now, this is your last chance to come to a settlement, otherwise I’ll have walls erected to divide the house.’

A common enough story in joint families, the threat has not been defanged by the frequency of its occurrence; it curdles and slows the hot flow of anger in both Charubala and Chhaya.

In the kitchen Madan thinks: How did it come to this? Will the family really break up into smaller units? Where will I go if that comes to pass? What’s going to happen to me in my old age?

Charubala can only return a few feeble words to this incendiary thrown at her: ‘It will not happen while I am alive.’ But, she thinks, to announce in public such an enormous intention to rive must mean that Purnima has discussed it with Priyo; the thought is like thunder. How could
her
son have colluded with this woman against his mother, against his father and his siblings? No, no, that is unthinkable, unnatural. So what gave Purnima the power to utter such a thing? Does she really hold so much sway over her son? Division of the house . . . Her head is reeling with the reverberations of those unspeakable words. It is true that the situation with Priyo and Purnima has not been ideal for a long while; tension in the air, an undercurrent of animosity rippling through all the time, congealing silences, avoidance or minimising of contact, a coldness and formality in the ineludible conversations and interactions that one was forced to have because of living in the same house. But whose fault was it all?

Priyo is not the most intimate among her children, or the most expressive with his affections and emotions, he never has been, but ever since he married this woman, who did not think anything of using the language of the gutter in front of her elders, something befitting slum-dwellers, ever since then there seems to have been a gradual swerving away from all familial bonds. Yet Charubala has never noticed Priyo to be uxorious, or even minutely different from his usual phlegmatic and detached self in his deportment with his wife; he has behaved towards everyone with a total democracy of what she could only call indifference. And she is convinced that it is not the split between his public and private faces; living in one house together means that all the things one imagines are private are not really so – the walls and floors have eyes, ears and interpreting minds. Charubala knows that Priyo does not possess a secret self for his wife’s consumption only.

As she sits feeling humiliated in front of her granddaughter and in the hearing of a servant, an idea takes shape in Charubala’s head. Before it has fully formed she blurts out, ‘All right, if dividing up the house is what you’ve been plotting, I hope you will remember that I too have some say over the division of other things. It’s Baishakhi’s wedding later in the year. She won’t even get the dust from the jewellery I’ve been saving up for her.’

This has the effect of a forest fire reaching the line where all the trees have been felled to contain it.

During the matchmaking leading to Priyo and Purnima’s marriage, the bride’s family had quickly discovered that the groom’s father was the younger son of
the
Ghosh family, which had made its money and name in the gold business. Jewellers were thick on the ground in Calcutta, but the Ghoshes had long attained the electricity of legend, helped generously by rumours of family dissension, dissolute living, all manner of excess, even rumours of a suicide and gunfire in their family seat in North Calcutta long ago. Didn’t someone kill herself? Poison or self-immolation? Didn’t they regularly have to bring back one of the sons or brothers, unconscious with drink, from the brothels? The risk of becoming a daughter-in-law in a family tainted with scandal was heavily outweighed by the possible riches, in the form of gold and jewellery, that would accrue; this was Purnima’s parents’ sharp reasoning. Besides, wasn’t the groom’s father a breakaway who had reinvented himself in a new business and had nothing to do with the decadent main line any more? Purnima herself had been dazzled by the idea of gold; the lure of metal made her forget that she was actually marrying into paper; forgotten too was the fact that the connection of her husband’s family with gold was historical, not real.

Yet Purnima had not been deceived in her acquisitive ambitions, not totally. Although he never talked about jewellery, certainly never within Purnima’s earshot, Prafullanath had a secret obsession with it; or so she speculated. It gradually emerged, a few years after she had taken up residence in Basanta Bose Road, that her father-in-law bought gold ornaments, almost ritualistically, about three times a year and kept them in a State Bank of India vault in his wife’s name. The jewellery he bought was not trinkets like rings and thin gold chains and bangles, but of the heavier, showier and more intricate kind, the kind that would be worn by the women of an extremely wealthy family on the big social occasions, a wedding or a family puja. Some of them could not be worn, in public or private, any longer; the era of gold hair pieces, tiaras studded with gems, drooping and baroquely decorative chains linking nose to ear had probably passed.

Rumour within the family – a word slipped into conversation by her jaa, Sandhya, an unguarded comment by Priyo, evasive answers given to her dogged and strategic questions about the existence, nature and exact content of this jewellery vault – had convinced Purnima that a far bigger hoard lay beyond the usual loose change of necklaces, rings, bangles, earrings and chokers that the women of the house, herself included, kept in the steel lockers in their bedrooms. There were stories about the Ghoshes of Garpar, with whom her father-in-law had had no connection for nearly fifty years, of how they wrapped their daughters in so much gold at the giving-away ceremony of their weddings that only their eyes could be seen, two quick, black holes in the dull yellow glitter. But she had never known her mother-in-law to wear such stuff, not even when she went to attend upper-crust weddings. Where was it all then? How much jewellery did Sandhya have? Did she have her own private locker in a bank? And what about Chhaya? Traditionally, most of the jewellery would have been saved up for her, a gift from her parents when she got married. Now that that possibility had been ruled out, where was her share? In a bank? In her almirah? What good was it going to do Chhaya? It was like a feast of pork for a starving Muslim.

The only time Purnima got to see what the other women in the house possessed was when they dressed formally to go out. She strewed seemingly innocuous questions in their way, hoping to elicit information about how much more they had beyond the fraction they chose to display.