The Lives of Others (63 page)

Again, he is thrown by an observation that had never occurred to him while he was an inhabitant of the house that he watches now from the outside: why had Madan-da never tried to elevate the garden to his aesthetic standards, channelling instead all the relevant energies into improving the blighted concrete courtyard? Is it the lot of the insider to be marked, always and predominantly, by a kind of absence of thought, a bluntness of perception?

Apparently, his grandfather had bought this huge house for cash in 1926 or ’27 or thereabouts. The story went that the three brothers who had had the house built towards the end of the First World War went out of business overnight sometime in the mid-Twenties; his grandfather had saved them from destitution by buying their house; the original owners had moved, with their wives and children, to quarters somewhere else in the city. In keeping with his scrutiny of the building with new eyes, he now turns that childhood tale around, lifting it up to see if he can discern what lies underneath. Too much time has passed; the dead grass buried under it would be that unnatural shade of mutton-fat white. Besides, he had never really paid much attention to that story; which child is interested in the history of his parents and grandparents? The adults too, sensing this, perhaps concoct an easy formula that barely touches the true, and therefore complicated, history, choosing a short, convenient fiction over the dense adventitiousness of fact.

But now, as he stands watching the house that has become a separate, independent entity for the first time, detached from him, something in the outer world, he speculates: is the story true, that emphasis on his grandfather’s philanthropy? Isn’t a more credible story one in which his grandfather had seen an opportunity to acquire a large house cheaply from people who had backed themselves into a corner; that he had exploited them at their weakest moment, agreeing to save them from bankruptcy and ruin by giving them money with the house as collateral? That collateral had never been released, so maybe he had formally bought the house; the money given to the three brothers had been used by them to save their skins from their creditors.

The house seems to shift shape minutely for him and become subtly different, a bit more hostile and forbidding, its shameful history giving it an aggressive aura as if it has become defiantly shameless. From all the things he has bothered to find out about the way the Ghoshes ran their business – planting lumpens within unions to spark off violence so that all the union workers could be sacked; an old story of buying off a business from a friend’s widow, who did not know any better, for a fraction of its real value; using the Hindu–Muslim riots the year before Independence, the year he was born, to shut down mills, regardless of how many workers were deprived of their livelihoods, and buying up factories in areas emptied by the migration – all this immorality and opportunism, this was what characterised them, not altruism, as the stories they had spun would have you believe. But then, this is a world whose running fuel is anecdotes and stories, he reminds himself. The anecdotes need not be first-hand; in fact, better if they are not, better if they are repeated across several degrees of separation, because that proves how potent and pervasive they are, bringing everyone together in one huge, collusive matrix. A legendary lecture given by so-and-so in Presidency College in 1926, its iconic status relayed by a nineteen-year-old in 1965 with the words ‘You needed to be there to feel the goosebumps’. The memory of a martinet kept alive by stories recounting his disciplinary measures from fifty years ago, handed down a dendritic chain of people across the generations. This is the way this world runs: self-mythologising through anecdotes proliferating like a particularly virulent strain of virus. Chatter chatter chatter, always the chatter of what others did and others said in a golden age of an unrecoverable past.

He feels his blood flowing more quickly. The gamchha around his head and part of his face is making him steam. All the while, the building opposite him remains resilient, unyielding with the information he seeks from it. The slatted wooden shutters in the windows have been opened, an unchanging morning ritual, before he arrived on the street; but no one on the front verandahs as of yet. No sooner does he think this than a maid – a new one, it seems; he does not recognise her – appears on the second-floor balcony with a broom, gathers up all the dust and fluff and rubbish that she has swept and tips it out onto the street. That floor is Pishi’s and Mejo-kaka’s. How uninhabited the house seems – no one coming out onto the balconies, no one peeking out over the parapet, no face at any of the windows, no one coming out of the front gate. The new lick of paint it has had earlier this year, on the occasion of his cousin’s wedding, is already beginning to get stained and tarnished. How odd that the painters had not uprooted a couple of bat or ashwattha plants that have taken root in the cracks, one along the top left, near the roof, and the other on the low wall of the parapet itself. Everything needs a toehold here. The tenacious plants will grow and their roots will crack open the building like a butcher cleaving a joint of meat. He visualises a huge yawn running through the middle of the house, as if someone has taken hold of the two sides along a fissure and prised it open like a mouth, its deep insides exposed – the rooms, the furniture, the people, their lives. His heart thumps with the angry euphoria of retribution.

The house still appears devoid of people. What are they
doing
? It is quarter-past eleven, the men must have left for work and the children for school, but what about the servants? Why is no one coming out to go to the market or the shops? Where is Madan-da? It is impossible to glimpse the person he really wants to see because she lives on the ground floor; she does not use the barred and grilled dark cage of the front balcony, which, in any case, is blocked from view because the iron front gates are shut. Suddenly he feels deflated; the waiting outside is hopeless. What is he really expecting to see? And if he does catch sight of that, what is he going to do?

On the top floor of 22/6 Sandhya gets out of bed, ignores her head-spin, comes out of her dark bedroom and goes in search of her mother-in-law. There is a great turmoil in her, as if of dead leaves skittering around in a stiff breeze, about to be lifted clean off the ground in a mighty, sustained blast of gale. She feels a premonition of that particular kind of levitation that can only be effected by a force of Nature.

She announces to her stunned mother-in-law, ‘Ma, Boro will return today. I feel it in my bones.’

Looking at this woman with dishevelled hair, the inky shadows under her eyes, about to disappear into their sockets, the dull skin, Charubala wonders briefly if her eldest daughter-in-law has finally toppled over into madness, but the magnetism of sixth sense is stronger, especially if it is, as in this case, felt by a mother. She dismisses her suspicions of insanity and says, ‘What are you saying!’

‘Yes, I feel it. The goddess has at last smiled on me. Ma, I think this may be the day.’

‘Don’t say that, you’ll tempt fate. Let’s just wait and see what happens. Why don’t you have a bath and go to the prayer room?’ Charubala advises.

He can feel an intense impatience and longing breaking up his hard, silent core. He is beginning to fragment at last. No, this will not do. If he has put up with the unspoken rules for so long, reined in his feelings, been as careful as a predator stalking its prey, it will not do to ruin everything now by giving in to impulse, however strong that may be. To have the boat capsize so near the shore – no, no, it cannot be. He can feel his jaw muscles and the vein at his temples throb with the force of determination, so hard has he gritted his teeth to will himself to stand steady.

Kalyani freezes with fear. She knows she should scream but she cannot, her tongue and throat will not move. The man, his head wrapped in a filthy gamchha, holds her arm in his grip. She cannot see his face, only his huge, coal-black eyes, blazing with menace. There are threatening noises coming out of his mouth, but they are muffled by the red-and-white chequered cloth. She shivers like a leaf. All those warnings about kidnappers on the prowl in the streets, waiting to pick you up and put you in their huge sack and take you away and sell you into beggary after blinding you and chopping off your arms and legs so that you could not run away, so that you could extract more sympathy from passers-by as you begged, all those warnings were not tall tales but true, and now they have come back to bite her: a kidnapper is about to whisk her away. A tumble of thoughts tries to go through her fear-paralysed head: can no one see what is happening to her? Why are they not intervening? Why can she not produce any sound? How is she supposed to know that kidnappers loiter just outside her home? They are supposed to hunt in dark alleys and outside school gates, lying in wait for children to come out after classes are over. She had only stepped out to buy a ribbon for her hair from old Panchanan’s shop with the four annas her mother had so unexpectedly given her.

The kidnapper shakes her arm. With his other hand he removes the covering from his mouth. His face is covered with the most foresty beard she has ever seen. His lips move, but she does not hear a word.

The man’s hand now takes hold of her shoulder and shakes her gently. ‘What, you don’t recognise me?’ she can hear him say at last, but she can only look at him with terror.

‘Kalyani, what’s happened to you? You don’t recognise me through my beard, is that it? Look, look at me carefully! Tell me – who am I?’

The man is staring at her and laughing. Yes, laughing. He is not a kidnapper then, he knows her name; he is looking at her and asking her to identify him and laughing . . . He is . . . he is—

‘Listen, where’s your mother?’ he asks.

She has it: this is her missing Bor’-da! She screams it out – ‘Bor’-da’ – but it comes out as a grating whisper.

‘It took you so long? Have I changed so much?’

Kalyani nods and manages to sound the first audible words: ‘Such a bushy beard! And you’re so . . . so thin, like a skeleton. Where were you?’

‘Where’s your mother?’ he asks again.

‘Inside. Shall I call her? When did you come back? Won’t you come inside?’

‘Yes, I will. But, first, go and tell your mother that I’m back and whisper it to her. Don’t tell anyone else, all right? No one, not even my mother. Did you get that? Go on.’

Kalyani does some kind of calculation in her head and asks him, ‘You’ve not been to the house yet? Does no one know that you’ve returned?’

At that moment the front door opens and Purba looks out, first left, then right, searching for her daughter who has been gone longer than she should have. She does not, at first, notice them standing directly opposite her, about fifteen or twenty feet away. Kalyani shouts, ‘Ma!’; Bor’-da’s grip on her arm becomes a vice, Purba looks at them, a quizzical expression on her face, then her eyes widen.

Unlike her daughter, she recognises Supratik instantly. How could she not?

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

‘
DID YOU KNOW
that sal forests have their own music?’ Ajit said.

‘Music of the forest? What’ve you been smoking? You must have started early today,’ Shekhar mocked.

‘Can you drop your poetry rubbish now that we’re on holiday?’ Somnath joined in with Shekhar. ‘It’s made you soft in the head. All this poetry business hasn’t landed you the big fish yet. And we all thought chicks like that kind of stuff, you know, the sensitive-romantic drivel.’

‘Is it open season on me?’ Ajit protested weakly. ‘Do you guys ever think of anything other than women?’

‘Who do you think you’re trying to kid, eh, pretending that it’s moonlight and birdsong and flowers that goes through your head, and sewage through ours?’ Somnath said. ‘You think we didn’t see you unable to take your eyes off the ripe tits of these Santhal women?’

Shekhar said, ‘Ufff, those tits! You’re absolutely correct, Somu, they’re exactly like ripe fruit. The only thing you want to do when you see them is pluck and shove into your mouth. Mairi, my hands are itching at the very thought.’

Ajit, to fend off accusations of being cerebral and effete, joined in with extra zeal. ‘They fill every single sense. But not only tits, have you noticed their waists? The way they wind that cloth around themselves, it hardly covers anything, leaves nothing really to the imagination. High-blood-pressure stuff.’

Now it was Somnath’s turn. Ajit and Shekhar deferred to him with something approximating reverence: Somu had a reputation as a ladykiller, an experienced kind of guy who had started the business of sexual liaisons at an early age and had continued with unimpeded ease, so much so that he had had to be married off unusually young, in the standard attempt to have his ways mended. Had it reined him in, a wife and a one-year-old son, had it thrown cold water on his libidinous impulses, focused, like a pack-animal’s blinkers, his permanently roving eye? Ajit and Shekhar scrutinised surreptitiously for signs, but found none. The desired gravitas that marriage and fatherhood were thought to bring seemed to have omitted to visit their irrepressibly priapic friend. Somu was ragingly horny, and infamous for it in their circle of friends in South Calcutta, but that very ill-repute gave him a sheen of glamour; he had ranged freely as a guest in the room they had wanted access to for so long, but had only succeeded in getting in a few toes so far. There was a grain of envy in this, but the larger part of it was awe, admiration. How did he do it? When he had come to invite them to his baby son’s rice-eating ceremony he had said, ‘Listen, I’ve just had an idea. If I were to invite loads of people, in the inevitable crush on the stairs and the roof where the eating’s going to happen, we could brush against women’s tits, even elbow them, as if by accident. What do you guys think? Brilliant or what?’

It was not a new idea: ever since they had been friends, Somu had suggested the same thing to them every year; to go to a public ceremony of the immersion of the goddess Durga at the end of the five-day festival at some huge ghat or lake and there, in the thick of the milling, crushing crowds, feel up, to their hearts’ content, the breasts of women they would engineer to have pressed against them.