The Lives of Others (61 page)

The inner ring of men shuffled, but didn’t move back. Prafullanath felt a squeezing in his chest, a slight thickening of the air that he was breathing. He inhaled more deeply and said, ‘Move your men, I’ve come to talk. I have no time for a CPI(M) pimp like you’, but it came out in a whisper.

Priyo, sensing something, took him by the shoulders.

Adi now tried to reason with the men. He pleaded, ‘Ashish-babu, Bijan-babu, please, look at him, he’s an old man, he’s feeling ill. If you could just move back a little bit . . .’

Priyo heard his brother’s wheedling tone and hated him.

Bijan snapped back, ‘We’re ill too. We haven’t eaten for ten months, we haven’t been able to feed our wives and children for
ten months
.’

As if on cue, another cry went up:
We’re not listening to the false promises of the owners. We shan’t listen.

Not listening! Shan’t listen!

The people churned. Ashish whispered something to a man standing next to him. The man turned and pushed his way into the throng behind him and disappeared. The meaning of this emerged later, when Gagan poked his head out of the car and called out, ‘Babu, Babu, come inside, come and sit in the car.’ Priyo looked quickly behind him and saw an incipient spar of men forming, trying to come between the Ghoshes and the car, cutting off their access to any form of safety. The men were spoiling for a fight and, if it came to that, it would later be reported that the Ghoshes had initiated it, that they had come to the locked factory with hooligans, despite having been warned by the police not to show up, with the express purpose of demoralising the sacked workers and sabotaging their just revolution. Nobody would listen to the owners’ side of things; they wouldn’t even have a side then.

Priyo looked at his father; Baba was dripping like a tree after an hour of uninterrupted rain.

From this point, things accelerated.

Prafullanath said, ‘I know Dulal is behind all this. I know you’re all in the pay of the CPI(M). That’s why the police didn’t come, they’re in the pockets of the CPI(M) too.’ With each word a wheezing racked his frame. Again the words, which were meant to be thundering, came out hoarse and whispery.

Our demands must be heeded, must be heeded.

Adi and Priyo each held an arm and started moving their father gently towards the Ambassador. It was a distance of only a few feet.

Prafullanath’s chest had become an infernal anvil. He could barely bring out the words, ‘Chest . . . my chest . . .’ The light around him seemed to buckle like a rod.

Gagan, who had noticed the beginning of a kind of loss of rigidity to Prafullanath’s frame, now saw him gulping for air and Adinath and Priyonath trying to prop him up. He started the engine, found a gap between the men trying to cut him off from Boro-babu and his sons and edged closer. Perhaps this move on Gagan’s part had not been foreseen by the playscript: the men, moving in discrete groups of one and two and three, trying to impose a wall between the Ghoshes and the car, were thrown by this unrehearsed bit of stage-direction. Gagan kept the car moving. Survival instinct, deeper than revolutionary strategies, forced the men to swerve aside. By the time they woke up to what was happening, Adi and Priyo had succeeded in bundling Prafullanath into the back seat.

Adi, shaking in the passenger seat beside Gagan, said, ‘Drive. Drive now!’

Gagan said, ‘But how?’

The Ambassador had finally been cordoned off by the workers.

‘Drive,’ Adi cried.

Gagan moved the car gingerly forward until he was inches away from the ring of men. A noise of great confusion spread among the crowd, submerging the now half-hearted
Crush! Grind!
The men surrounding them didn’t move. The car was like a flimsy boat in the moment before the waves closed in on it. Gagan swore filthily, backed the car, engaged second gear by mistake, made it give out an almighty revving sound, then jerked it forward at speed, hitting two, three, maybe four of the workers. A cry of astonishment, then pain or rage. Disbelief at this breaking of such an inalienable rule froze the men for a few moments, then that primitive coding for self-preservation again asserted itself. The crowd fell back and Gagan drove the car, without stopping or slowing, through the furrow that was opening up. The passage was narrow and people continued to press against the sides of the Ambassador, and Gagan didn’t know, didn’t care, how many men he was knocking down. That whimpering wheeze from the back seat had become the only point on which his world was concentrated.

As they reached the periphery of the crowd, where the dense clot had thinned out to a few stragglers and the road out was in clear view, Priyo looked out of the rolled-up window glass and caught a flash of Dulal, a dark, thin man but now with a moustache and a paunch, flanked by several men, all of whom were caught by surprise by the steadily accelerating car, staring at it, momentarily frozen in their behind-the-scenes commanding of the action.

Lately his father has taken to trotting out the old mantra: ‘One generation builds, the next generation sits on it and consumes it to nothing.’ How Priyo would like to turn that against him. The generation that builds is also the generation that destroys; the next generation is only the audience outside the invisible fourth wall, watching the antics of its elders puffing themselves up with hubris then getting deflated, like balloons four days after a child’s birthday party. For a change, Priyo can draw a clear, linear map of causal links: his father lies half-dead in his bed upstairs because he disregarded everyone’s advice and visited the factory at Bali in 1966 because it was so important that Bali became functional as quickly as possible because the survival of their business depended on it because he had pledged it as collateral to the banks because he had had the brilliant idea of wanting a complete technological overhaul of their other plant at Memari. That flare lights him up inside again. Baba built the business; he started to extinguish it too.

The thought of upstairs drags Priyo back: if he does not rejoin the company of his wife and restart the supervision of caterers and electricians and decorators, she is going to give him hell. As he climbs up to the terrace, taking two steps at a time, he sees Bhola, in a hurry too, coming downstairs.

‘Mej’-da, listen,’ Bhola says, ‘the electricians seem to be having some problems with the decorators, something about how crossing the bamboos one way and covering them with cloth will prevent extra lights from being placed on the façade of the house. I didn’t quite understand. You need to tell them what you want, otherwise they’ll make a royal mess of it.’

‘Come, let’s see what’s up,’ Priyo says, then adds, despite himself, ‘So, which of your literati luminaries are coming to grace us with their presence?’

Bhola, as always, does not get it. He laughs his signature silly laugh and, glowing with pride, says, ‘A young man called Sunil Ganguly’s coming, you may not have heard of him.’

Priyo ignores the jab and asks, ‘You mean
the
Sunil Ganguly, the poet?’

‘Yes, the very same. He’s written four fine novels too. Do you know them?
Exposure
,
Young Men and Women
,
Days and Nights in the Forest
and
The Exiled Heart
,’ he reels off their names.

Priyo swallows this presumption of ignorance, too. A childhood feeling visits him briefly: his right hand itching to give Bhola a resounding slap. He asks through clenched teeth, ‘And any of the authors you so generously supported?’ He was going to add ‘with family money’, to leave Bhola in no doubt that others could respond to his barbs with sharper quills, but restrains himself; he has more information to winkle out.

Bhola looks crestfallen for a second or two, then recovers his foolishly grinning self.

‘Just one or two, one or two. Not very well known, not yet, but one day they will be, mark my words.’

‘But of course!’ Priyo says. ‘If
you
have foreseen their fame, not even fate can stop them.’

Shocking Priyo, who has always taken his younger brother’s impermeability for granted, Bhola looks stung. He goes quiet for a bit. Then, the habitual ebullience gone out of him, he says, ‘Yes, I’m not very good, am I?’ Pause. ‘This business-thisness, not my thing, you know. I know everyone’s disappointed in me.’

Priyo feels as small as the nail on his little toe. He interrupts his brother with a faux-gruffness designed to hide his own shame at causing distress: ‘Enough, enough. No such talk on an auspicious day like this. Only good things today.’

Bhola immediately reverts to his cartoonish smileyness. ‘Right, right, you’re absolutely right. No such talk. You go upstairs, let me go and make myself useful with the catering staff.’

Really, that man is a yo-yo; Priyo nods, turns away and continues climbing upstairs, now one step at a time.

Bhola calls out to him: ‘Mej’-da, do you know if Didi will be singing this evening?’

Priyo freezes. Nearly twenty years have not bleached his wedding evening of its full horror. His heart does a fierce dance of shame. He turns around slowly, composing his face first, he hopes, into a perfectly affable mask of normality, and says, ‘I haven’t been told anything. Why don’t you find out and let me know?’

Bhola bounds down the stairs, giddy with joy: he has managed to throw some ink on Priyo’s unblemished day. And today of all days. That foolish fucker.

It could easily have been Purnima’s week – it is
her
daughter who is getting married – but instead she feels an ambivalence casting shadows in corners. She feels she has not won the jewellery war, although Priyo has told her a dozen times what her mother-in-law had apparently said when he had broached the prickly subject: ‘All this is for my eldest granddaughter, I’ve been saving them up for this day.’ Purnima does not quite believe this; it is simply not in her mother-in-law to give away her life’s treasures like so much puffed rice. Even if that had been the case, in some counterfactual supposition, it certainly would have been negated by the argument they had had recently. Lest she come too close to conceding her own role in that clash, she quickly chases away any rerun of that memory – it is ever so slightly different every time she lets it play inside her head – and wills herself to concentrate on the real thing: the spoils. But that too is not an entirely happy rumination. How typical of Priyo to think that he could ‘cover Baishakhi in gold’ with the pieces he has been fobbed off with. A few bangles and armlets (a pair of kankan, yes, but no chur or mantasha), four necklaces (only a thinnish five-stranded one among them, not the seven-stranded one she was hoping for), two chiks (both grudgingly admitted) and a miscellaneous category in which she lumps what she considers the loose change of jewellery – earrings (no kaan), rings (no ratanchur), chains and other sundries. Taken together and adorning her daughter, you could say – and it cost her to admit this – that she is not being sent off too badly, at least loss of face has been avoided, but ‘covered in gold’? No, no, no, no. Purnima has made Baishakhi do several dress-rehearsals wearing every single piece of jewellery given by her mother-in-law and she could still see large windows of her daughter’s clothes and flesh behind the sparse covering of gold and jewels. What to do? She has had to part with some of her own stuff to hide those shameful gaps. Her mother’s heart burns with shame.

Baishakhi enters the room with a jewellery box in her hand. ‘Ma, I have something to show you, I’m shutting the door.’

Before she can sit on the bed Purnima says, ‘What’s that? What’s that? Show me’ and reaches out her hand.

She opens the long red box. Nestling in the red velvet inside is a gold shaat-lahari haar, the seven-stranded necklace of her dreams.

Her eyes widen to cartoon Os. She whispers, ‘Where did you find this? Who’s given this to you?’

Baishakhi says, as if it is the most expected and ordinary thing in the world, ‘Pishi gave it to me just now. She asked me to wear it for boü-bhaat, not the wedding.’

Purnima’s hands clutch the bedclothes ineffectually. She can only let out a ‘Jah!’ of profound disbelief. Chhaya? The queen lioness in the valley of lions where she, Purnima, is a calf? That . . . that walking capsule of poison? Why would she give
her
daughter this amazing heirloom piece of jewellery?

‘You’re not lying?’ Purnima asks. ‘Is it true that your pishi’s
given
you this?’

‘Why would I lie?’

‘Was she smiling when she gave you this? Or muttering with anger?’

‘Why would she be muttering? She said it was best to have the gift-giving within the family out of the way and not done in public. So I bent down and touched her feet and she said that she was blessing me with this necklace. “Go, go adorn someone else’s home, I never had the chance,” she said and then her eyes filled with tears and she turned her head away.’

Purnima can find nothing to return to this. She feels odd, as if she has been caught doing something wrong and been chastised by someone much younger; a mixture of shame and indignation. In its peculiar way it seems to be a version of the loss of face she had been so keen to avoid by making up the shortfall in Baishakhi’s wedding gold. But it is not in her nature to sit with an ambiguous feeling for long, not in front of her daughter.