The Lives of Others (47 page)

‘Achchha, what if we got a new set of photos? Got a really good photographer and asked him to do some top-notch studio portraits?’

‘How is that going to help? They will eventually have to come here to . . . to see her.’

They had come face-to-face with the unacknowledged party in the dance. They started again.

‘What about those families who don’t bother to get back after they’ve visited? Are there any of those still left that we’re waiting to hear from?’

‘There can be only one meaning to their silence, don’t you think? What’s the use of contacting them? They’ll only come up with the usual excuses.’ Pause. ‘Or tell us the truth that we all know.’

There, the presence again, unignorable.

Charubala broke part of the taboo.

‘Achchha, don’t dark girls get married? They are becoming brides by the hundreds, thousands, every day. Our Chhaya is hardly the blackest imaginable,’ she said.

In through the opening Prafullanath went, somewhat reluctantly. ‘Y-y-yes, that’s true. But . . .’

‘But what?’

‘But . . . I mean . . . her . . . her blackness is a . . . is slightly different, no?’

Silence again, which was answer enough.

Now that the breach had been made, it seemed to hurt them less to widen it.

‘Then there is the other matter.’

‘I did look into it . . .’

‘We should have had it done when she was small.’

‘But who could have predicted at the time that a slightly lazy eye would have become so prominent? I suppose others see it more than we do. We live with her, we see her every day, we don’t even notice it any more.’

‘Yes. Do you remember, one family wrote back to accuse us of lying by omitting to mention it? They were really nasty about it, all respectability thrown to the winds. Thank god our Chhaya didn’t end up at theirs.’

‘Yes, small mercies. Do you think we should seriously start looking again into the eye-operation business?’

‘We must. She’s not getting any younger, you know. As it is, she’s marred her chances by doing an MA. I told her then, what’s the need? Isn’t a BA enough? I reminded her that it would be difficult to find a match for her, if she kept doing one degree after another. Do you know what she said? “You seem to be in one hell of a rush to get rid of me. Am I such a burden to you? I am happy to go out and look for a job so I can earn my keep.” Can you imagine? I could hardly speak, I was so upset.’

‘She has a dangerous tongue, like a knife.’

‘She’s twenty-six this year. Soon she’ll be over the hill. We’ll also have to start thinking of Priyo and Bhola’s marriages.’

‘We haven’t been able to get Priyo to renege on his foolish oath of not marrying until Chhaya is married off. Do you think he’ll budge?’

Charubala was again on the brink of thoughts she had managed to keep unthought, just about, for many years. She looked into the whirlpool briefly and felt dizzy with . . . with what? Fear? Or shame? She looked away quickly and decided it was a matter of the greatest imperative that either Priyo or Chhaya, and preferably both, got married as soon as possible. This winter, she decided. It had to be.

Why Priyo agreed – on a whim, it appeared to his mother – no one knew. Charubala did not dare ask him in case he went back to his previous position of intransigence. Maybe he had forgotten his foolish pledge, she thought; and let it rest at that. The wedding was rushed through, even though Charubala had her doubts about the girl. Priyo’s ‘yes’ had such immediate weightiness that she did not think about speculative and lighter counterweights on the other half of the scales. It did not occur to her to ask her son why his choice had alighted on Purnima – the caste, the family, the woman herself, everything was a fraction of a degree off – when she, Charubala, had preferred at least three or four of the matches that had come in. There was that shy, modest Datta girl who had so decorously kept her head down throughout the first meeting. The family was not well-off, but that had seemed a small blot. Then there was the pretty, smiley, child-like Das girl; lower-caste, yes, but such a sweet disposition; she would have been such a radiant presence in the house. And she had been as fair as the dawn too. But no; Priyo had to go for a dark, coarse girl, with a voice that could curdle milk instantly. But hers was not to reason why or question; it would not do to look a gift-horse in the mouth. So on a cool February evening Charubala and Prafullanath ticked yet another box in their long list of responsibilities towards their children; two down, three to go. Only Charubala knew that she had ticked her box feebly, with fading ink, for could it be that Priyo unmarried but Chhaya stable was a more desirable option than a married Priyo with a sister who was becoming more intractable by the day?

How much Chhaya had relied on Priyo’s rash oath – taken by everyone else as frivolous, as a kind of performance of solemn intentions – became apparent during the days over which the knowledge of Priyo’s assent percolated down to the core of her understanding. The occasional match presented to Priyo by their mother: this Chhaya had learned to bat away, for she knew Priyo would go through the motions and then come up with a final ‘no’. That the game would change she had no idea. Through all the early stages of the matchmaking, Chhaya had been genuinely unbothered, even, initially, by the news that Priyo had said ‘yes’. It could have been disbelief, it could have been denial, but the first contact with the truth was like a stone flung at delicate, innocent glassware. The reassembling took an effort that was hundredfold the energy of the shattering: it was her abnormally pitched voice as she pulled out the trembling words ‘What good news! It’s time for celebration’ from inside her, when she was informed that the final talks between the two families had begun; the way her face seemed so frangible, so effortfully held back from disintegration; the way she seemed scrunched up on herself, but bravely trying to go through the ordinary motions and reactions of life; a smile that never reached her eyes, a mechanical answer, a choked muffledness sometimes at the edge of her voice when she spoke – it was all these that pierced Charubala at the same time as chilling her soul.

Fear. That is what Charubala felt in the presence of her daughter. Ordinary conversations felt like booby-trapped enclosures.

‘Have you decided which saris you’re going to wear?’ she asked her daughter, instantly regretting missing out on articulating the occasion she meant.

Chhaya called her on it; the time for sensitivity was long over. ‘Wear when?’ she said.

Charubala made her second mistake. ‘You know very well when.’

‘If you know that I know, then clearly you do too. Why such difficulty in spelling it out?’

Terror had emptied Charubala’s mind; she had no response. In any case, Chhaya did not wait for one.

‘Yes, of course, I have been thinking a lot about
Priyo’s wedding
and what I should wear at
Priyo’s wedding
,’ Chhaya said, that raggedy edge to her brittly-pitched voice. ‘Tell me what to wear at
Priyo’s wedding
, on the different days of
Priyo’s wedding
– one for each day and another for each night of
Priyo’s wedding
. What an auspicious occasion.’ Her voice rose higher and higher at each recurrence of what her mother had thought it tactful to leave out.

Charubala cried out, more in fear than anger, ‘What’s happened to you? Why are you behaving like a madwoman?’

Unnervingly, Chhaya did not snap. Instead she gave a high, unjoyous laugh and turned her back to her mother. Charubala thought that she had turned away to avoid being seen to cry, to appear weak. A long-buried memory shifted in her mind, of an afternoon when this daughter, then much younger, had looked into her soul and confronted her with an insuperable choice. It was too much for her. She would have to ask Sandhya to deal with this, but what precisely was she going to say to her daughter-in-law? She fled from the room, from the sight of that dangerous suppuration.

In the four-month lead-up to Priyo’s wedding, Chhaya’s behaviour became more and more erratic. She secluded herself in her room, pleading some kind of illness or the other. At times she appeared for dinner wearing stale clothes, her unwashed hair all over the place, looking the picture of wildness, not far from an incarnation of the goddess Kali. At other times she showed up wearing what seemed like a shopful of heavy ceremonial jewellery – bangles up to her elbows, chokers and necklaces, earrings that covered the entire ear – looking even more precarious, her face a mask of a sick excess of powder and snow and lipstick. She resembled a malignant, bloodthirsty goddess even more. On these occasions, with everyone else around her walking as if on eggshells, she asked her rhetorical questions, ‘How do I look? Good, don’t you think? At least I don’t look so dark with all the make-up. What do you think? Why aren’t you answering me? Tell me, tell me, why aren’t you answering me?’ And, poised teeteringly at that pitch, she took off her ornaments, piece by piece, and dashed them onto the floor, against the furthest wall.

Sandhya gently said, ‘Chhee, such expensive stuff, and sacred to Lakshmi too, it’s not good to hurl these things onto the floor.’ She almost crooned the words, as if lulling a child to sleep. ‘Give them to me and I’ll pick out the ones that will look best on you and match your sari and blouse, come now.’

Charubala thought of the imminent wedding and her hair stood on end; what unknown heights would Chhaya ascend on those climactic days? It did not bear thinking about.

Sandhya suggested, ‘Ma, I think Chhaya may be feeling left out. It’ll be all right if we involve her in more things. What if we asked her to sing on the evening of boü-bhaat? Such a wonderful singer. She just needs to feel that she too has a role in all this.’

Sandhya was a year younger than Chhaya but relationally her senior, since she was married to Chhaya’s elder brother; Charubala had always thought this was a felicitous combination – Sandhya could be a mixture of sister and friend for her daughter and still have a kind of gentle, subtle command over her. In the six years that Sandhya had been in the family, she had taken on more and more responsibilities and become a solid, reliable, gentle sanctuary, but she was also efficient and hard-working. Even with two little sons to look after, she worked in tandem with her mother-in-law as the core that held the Ghosh household together, its central nervous system, its head factory. Charubala foresaw a day in the near future when Sandhya would be running, with her blessing, the entire show, so that when she suggested something, such as this solution to the problem of Chhaya, Charubala was always willing to heed it.

Pointedly Chhaya did not go to the bride’s house in Behala for the main wedding rituals; she said she was too ill to move out of bed: nausea, head-spins, high temperature, a throbbing inside her head, palpitations, extreme weakness. A doctor was called. Charubala was torn between extreme irritation – what a fine time to fall sick! in the middle of a frenetic circus at home, with scores of people, decorators, caterers, guests milling around, everyone rushed off their feet – and the need to put on a mask of caring sympathy. Yet something inside her also registered relief. Chhaya was a loose cannon nowadays, and who knew what she would do at the bride’s house during the wedding? Best that she remained at home, even if that meant wasting precious time trying to organise people to stay back to look after her and, vitally, to act out, with tears and theatrical excess, a drama of trying to persuade her to come to Behala; she was safe in the conviction that Chhaya would not budge. It set back the wedding by three hours; there was hysteria in Behala that the auspicious hour was passing; Chhaya extracted a tiny morsel of satisfaction from the compounding wreckage of her life.

Purnima arrived that evening to take up residence in her new home. Chhaya did not come down to join the throng of women welcoming bride and groom at the threshold, showering them with paddy and new grass, blowing on conch-shells. Her face was not at her window upstairs, furtively feeding her curiosity about her new sister-in-law. Sandhya found time to visit her, sit on her bed, give a short account of the wedding. Chhaya lay on her bed, silent and somehow abbreviated. Then Sandhya asked, ‘Will you be well enough to sing tomorrow? We’re all counting on it.’

Chhaya nodded. ‘Of course. I’ll be fine,’ she said. The words, the tone, her expression, all pulled in different directions.

Number 22/6 Basanta Bose Road had turned into a fairground. The 400 invitees were going to be fed in batches on the roof, which had been covered in coloured fabric and lights for the purpose. Long trestle tables had been set up. Flowers, fairy lights, a specially constructed eyrie of bamboo and cloth and planks twelve feet above the front door, to house the shehnai-player and his accompanists as they played one raag after another through the evening, the aroma of pulao and mutton curry and fish-fry and women’s perfumes and tuberose – in the midst of all this Chhaya seemed the unappeased wraith who had come back to haunt and curse.

In the big room on the first floor, where the newly-weds sat, receiving guests and the presents they had brought with them, Sandhya ushered in Chhaya. She had suggested this odd thing, that the groom’s sister was going to entertain the guests coming in and going out of the room with her singing, but now she was doubtful about the appropriateness of the idea. Charubala had called her aside and confessed her misgivings about it too. But it was too late to go back on the plan. That Chhaya, who was ordinarily so reluctant to perform in public, seizing up with shyness and inhibition when asked to do so, had readily agreed in the first place without any cavilling should have alerted both her mother and Sandhya, but there was a wedding celebration to organise, they had a hundred other things to attend to.

As Purnima was introduced to Chhaya, she got up and then bent down to touch her sister-in-law’s feet. Chhaya graciously played the game of coy reluctance, followed by the inevitable giving in. Guests milled around. There were so many people that it did not seem unusual that Chhaya did not once look at Priyo. On Prafullanath’s insistence, the house had been turned into a blazing core of light. There were no shadows in that cruel room. The chatter and laughter of people rose and fell like spume on grand waves, swelling and partially disappearing, then appearing again. Word quickly went around that Chhaya was going to sing. Someone was sent off to fetch the tanpura from her room.