The Lives of Others (52 page)

Bhola, on the other hand, seemed oblivious to how he was perceived. A certain percentage of the shares of Charu Paper was in his name, but he did not bother about it, nor was exercised about the fact that, unlike Adi and Priyo, he did not have a fancy designation to go with his decidedly unfancy job in the family firm, a mere bookkeeper, a director only in name, not in practice. It could be said of him that while others chased the mirage of happiness, he was happy with being content. And it appeared this was not something that he had arrived at after strenuous meditation or struggle, or application of scrupulous moral principles; it was an ease and carelessness he had been born with. At times Charubala thought that it was Bhola’s armour against the world; if it was, it had not been donned consciously. But there he was – a creature who moved a few inches above the ground on which everyone else walked.

But this very unworldliness proved an impediment to the plans Prafullanath had for Charu Paper and the ancillary companies he hoped his sons were going to own and manage. Bhola was crippled by a blind trust in people. He smiled too much, too often, and told them things that should never have left the office. He worked well enough when he was set a task, but had no initiative and, worse, no capacity for thinking creatively about business. Initially Prafullanath had thought that Bhola could look after the company accounts and be guided by him and his older brothers in the more creative aspects of company accounting, but very quickly he realised that even that called for sharp thinking, the capacity for which Bhola lacked.

Last year Adi had discovered a one-lakh-sized hole in the company accounts. When he had asked Bhola, his brother had pretended not to know anything about it. After a day or two of ferreting, the truth had been revealed: Bhola had simply forgotten, in the beginning, to chase up invoices and then this matter of overlooking had become active avoidance, settling ultimately into a gelid lack of interest. When his initial reminders to the agents about outstanding payments were met with the usual ‘Yes-yes, we’ll pay you tomorrow’ and ‘Of course, next week, definitely’ and ‘The cheques just need signing’, the deferrals fitted in like cogs to the grooves of Bhola’s laziness, his endless capacity to put off until tomorrow what could effortlessly be done today. The agents, sensing a weak spot, delayed payments to see how much they could get away with; as it turned out, a lot. The three agents in question worked out that they could probably get their consignments of paper for free, certainly in the short term. In several instances, when invoicing, Bhola actually forgot how much was owed by whom and when.

Prafullanath had tried to console himself with the thought that a weak son did not seriously jeopardise his grand plans because he had three others; Bhola needed an eye kept on him, that was all. Now he was being presented with a graceful solution, a foolproof get-out clause.

He was instantly imagining complex scenarios: a publishing house kept deliberately small – small outlay, small educational books, small profits – with Bhola as its head . . . But, wait, if it was an educational-books publisher, it would be taxed at a different rate, lower than the tax on paper, so a simple bit of transfer-pricing could shift most of the profits from Charu Paper onto the books of the publishing house, which would mean losing much less profit to tax. Or if the publishing house could be shown to be perpetually making a loss, which wouldn’t be difficult to do, since Bhola was going to make sure that was going to be the case . . . he had it. It was going to be easy to effect; not so his bigger dream of modernising the plant at Memari.

‘I want to begin a costing of a technological upgrade of Memari,’ he began. ‘Foreign machines. Latest things from Germany and England and Holland. It’s not going to be cheap, but in the long term it is going to be more costly carrying on with below-par production.’

Two days after New Year, in mid-April, Priyo took his wife out for their first evening outing, the 6.35 p.m. showing of
Jogan
in Rupali, followed by dinner at Firpo’s in Esplanade. It was something that Priyo had read about in a recent novel and the idea had caught; it was modern, new, with just the right touch of adventurous daring about it, a slight defiance of middle-class conservatism that he felt all writers should take it upon themselves to push against. There were two more visits to the cinema –
Babul
and
Tathapi
– before news of Purnima’s pregnancy was announced to the family on a blustery monsoon evening in July. Eleven days after this, in the bathroom on the first floor, Chhaya slit open the veins in her wrists with her father’s straight razor, appropriately called ‘Bengall’, manufactured by Luke Cadman, Sheffield, England, a simple and dangerous item of luxury that he had bought himself in 1930, following his father’s habit of spending occasionally on small, private pleasures to remind himself, in his father’s words, ‘that you have worked your way up to a world where you can afford these things; a treat from you to you’.

The Ghoshes tried hard to control the information from becoming public knowledge, tried to hide it even from the younger members of their own joint family, but how could they ever have contended with the supreme acoustics of Bengali life?

Their first recourse was to lie and spin the news: they gave it out to be understood that an ambulance had to be called that monsoon evening and Chhaya rushed to hospital because her blood pressure had dropped dangerously low and she had fainted in her bath. But the servants had had to clean up the blood from the bathroom floor, and hushing them up meant appeasement and bribes and playing a very long game whose dynamics and balances, bound to change with time, meant that the Ghoshes could not staunch that particular flow. Besides, the bandages around both her wrists, when Chhaya returned home, were not easily explained away. So people talked with jubilant ferocity and, as they talked, the Ghoshes changed the story to something involving broken glass from the bathroom window that Chhaya was trying to open when she slipped on the wet floor. That was concession enough. The whole neighbourhood pounced on it, feral beasts fighting over the meagre meat on a bone. This taint, it was later whispered, had ruined what little remaining chance she had had of finding a husband. Overnight, she became untouchable; it was as if the sharp razor she had used so imperfectly on her arteries had at least shredded, with hideous efficiency, both her marriageability, already attenuated, and her social standing.

By the time Baishakhi was born in late February of the following year, Chhaya could still be considered as recovering. Madan took it upon himself to serve only convalescent food to his Didi-moni for this period. All the dishes that he cooked when they were children, suffering from measles or fever or chickenpox or tonsillitis, he revived for her. Pish-pash, bone-marrow soup, gentle mutton stew with carrots and green beans and potatoes, soft kedgeree with an omelette on the side and that staple – magur or shing fish (both were supposed to aid the production of red blood cells) cooked with ginger. It was as if Didi-moni had regressed to childhood and needed all over again the things that a child required: nourishment, pampering, care. She had lost so much blood. The very thought turned him to cold stone. What was in his capacity to give her so that she could be whole again, except what he had given them for the span of their lives until now – his food? Would that bring her back from death’s door? That is where Chhaya had been, everyone whispered: death’s door. He heard other things, such as a figure (she had needed six bottles of blood in hospital) or a medical prescription (she had to have her wrists bandaged for two months), and pity reduced him to nothing. Random memories played through his head as Charubala spooned food, which he had brought in, into her daughter’s mouth and he stood in a corner of the room, watching, ready to obey Ma’s orders before she had even finished saying them. A six-year-old girl crying because she had chipped the paint off the clay figurine of a flute player that he had bought her from the Chadak Mela in his village. He trying to coax an obstinate girl, ill with chickenpox, to eat the incredibly bony pholi fish that was thought to help against the illness. A girl of twelve stealing into the kitchen and saying, ‘Madan-da, quick, give me a little bit of that spicy dried-fish fry-up, quick, quick, before Ma comes and catches me.’ A broken seed-necklace, the tiny seeds scattered all around it under a flowering bush and a little girl saying, ‘Madan-da, pick them up for me, won’t you, I’m afraid to go near that bush, you said there’s a girl buried under it.’ Was that girl and this bandaged, semi-conscious, broken woman on her bed the same person?

When Charubala was sure that Chhaya had mended, she moved her up from the first floor, which she had so far shared with Priyo and Somu and now Purnima, to the second floor. Whatever anyone felt for Chhaya, and this was different for each person, although it was a difference of degree rather than of kind, pity was a dominant emotion. This pity curdled partially to what could only be called fear.

When even Bhola, who was also thought to be unmarriageable, got married three years later, to a ‘nice, simple girl from a nice home’, as Charubala described Jayanti to everyone, they gave up trying to find someone for Chhaya. A worm of regret wriggled through Charubala, especially when she found herself sleepless during the small hours, but nursing and feeding this almost-grief seemed to consume less of her energies than the continual waging of what had become a battle, a battle she knew she had lost. Occasionally a small hope flashed in her, she scurried around for a day or two chatting to matchmakers, making enquiries, a kitten amusing itself with falling leaves; then the true nature of the deceiving glimmer made itself obvious to her and she subsided into a tearful inertia.

Chhaya took a job at a new school, Ballygunje Shiksha Sadan on Gariahat Road, in an attempt to start afresh; rumours had insinuated themselves into her previous workplace at Beltala Girls’ School, much closer to home than Gariahat Road. Every summer when Chhaya went on a school trip with her new students to Puri or Digha or Ghatshila, Charubala imagined her daughter was going to her husband’s home and her in-laws’. A week’s holiday elastically stretched itself in Charubala’s mind as a lifetime, then snapped back with the slap of limitation when her daughter returned; the whole episode had just been a cheap toy of her mind.

As Chhaya stepped outside the front gate on her way to work one morning two women came up to her. One of them asked, ‘That Ghosh house, aren’t you the sister?’

Belatedly Chhaya understood that they were talking to her; she had never set eyes on them before. Maidservants, she could tell immediately, but she was certain that neither of them had ever worked in their house. Unless it was during the time when she was in hospital and then, later, too sunk in slow recovery at home to take notice of temporary staff.

‘Yes. Why do you ask?’ Chhaya replied hesitantly.

‘Somnath your brother?’ The tone was harsh, aggressive.

‘Y-y-yes. What do you want?’

‘Your brother has a friend called Paltu, in that neighbourhood?’ she asked, pointing somewhere vaguely west with her left hand.

Chhaya was beginning to get irritated by this rude inquisition, so she said tetchily, ‘I don’t keep a list of Somnath’s friends. And, anyway, what is it to you? Now move out of my way, I’m getting late for work.’

‘No, we won’t. Take us to your mother, we have things to tell her,’ the woman insisted.

Chhaya, taken aback by such impudence on the part of a servant, tried a new tack. She said, ‘You think my mother has nothing to do except meet riff-raff all day? Think again. Now move.’ That note of command in her voice would ensure that these two women backed down.

The woman who had remained silent so far now spoke. ‘Your brother and Paltu have been frolicking with my sister. She works as a maid in that Paltu’s house. She’s with child now. People at your home know about this?’

The words had the effect of a furious slap across Chhaya’s face. She edged backwards and ran into the house. She wanted to shout, ‘Lies, lies, all filthy lies’, but this would have been too feeble. She ran up two flights of stairs, found her mother on the first floor and panted, ‘Ma, there are some people outside . . . servants, servants from another neighbourhood . . . Filthy stuff, filthy . . . Somnath and his friend, Paltu, all lies . . . They’re outside and want to see you. Don’t go, don’t listen to what they have to say. Send Madan-da to deal with them – throw them out.’

‘What is wrong with you?’ said Charubala. ‘Sit down. What are you babbling on about? Which servants, what filthy stuff?’

‘There, outside,’ Chhaya could only point weakly.

Charubala got up to go to the front balcony. Chhaya said, ‘Don’t listen to them!’

From the balcony Charubala looked down onto Basanta Bose Road, noticed nothing special and half-turned to Chhaya, still inside, to say, ‘Where? What am I looking for? What women?’

‘Two maidservants. They’re standing outside.’

‘Oh, maids. I see. Where . . . I can’t . . . oh, those two? Come here and point them out to me.’

Chhaya quailed at the prospect of facing them. She let out a brief ‘No’, then began to think whether it was not better that her mother heard from her, Chhaya, what she had been told than from those strangers. But how was she going to bring herself to say it? Even thinking about it made her feel polluted. How could people have such cesspools inside their heads? How typical of that class of women.

She heard her mother call out, ‘You, what do you want?’ The reply was inaudible. Then her mother again, ‘You want work? We have all the people we need. You should go elsewhere to look for work, there’s nothing here.’

A pause again, this time followed by an impatient outburst from Charubala, ‘Yes, yes, I am Somnath’s mother. Say what you have to say from there, and be quick about it, I don’t have all day.’

At the mention of Somnath’s name some familiar dread in Charubala was beginning to sound a warning that an ill-humoured attitude was probably not the wisest one to take, especially standing on the balcony, in view of the whole wide world. She gripped the balustrade tightly. She was glad of the support, because what the women then proceeded to say made the ground beneath her feet move as if to dislodge her. She squeezed her eyes tight shut and opened them again; the women were still there, this was not a dream; the snaky trails of poison were still streaming out of their mouths. The brief vertigo over, Charubala now felt seized by anger.