The Lives of Others (22 page)

Bhola, not to be cowed, not this time, said, ‘What good will it do any of us, your feeling afraid? I don’t think you should be poking your nose into this business at all. This has reached some pretty unpleasant and dangerous quarters.’

‘But what if something happens to
us
?’ The sarcasm had been short-lived.

‘What do you think will happen, eh, what, what?’ Bhola was not going to let this one go.

Arunima silently cheered her father on. Let him crush her with his heel, she thought.

‘There’s lots happening already,’ her mother flared into anger again. ‘Do you think I don’t have eyes? How long can you hide fish with greens? There are bombs in the city, people being killed . . . All this chatter about Supratik . . . some of it must be true.’

At the mention of Bor’-da’s name some kind of alertness was restored to the adults. A look passed between them, one that took into its arc Arunima as well. She understood that the conversation was over, at least in her hearing. She also had more support for her suspicion that something terrible had happened to the missing Bor’-da.

This afternoon Jayanti has worried herself into pacing up and down, from second-floor verandah to bedroom to verandah again, because her daughter is late returning from school. Arunima’s arrival soothes her somewhat. Now there is only her husband to fret about.

‘Is Baba back?’ Arunima asks.

‘Is this the normal time for Baba to come back?’ Jayanti answers. ‘He’ll be late this evening, the roads are all flooded.’

Arunima does not bother giving her mother any information about the current state of the roads. A sudden visitation of fear, as if the horrible face of a ghost has peeked at her from behind a pillar then removed itself again, unsettles her: what if the school discovers that the summons has not been delivered and gets in touch with her parents without her help or knowledge? Best not to think about it, she decides, willing it away. The thought of feigning illness and not going to school for two or three days begins to take shape in her mind. Surely by that time Sister Josephine will have forgotten the whole thing? The nuns have so many things to think about . . .

A Friday afternoon gathering at the offices of Basanta, a small publishing house, on West Range. Bhola has been in charge of this small subsidiary of Charu Paper ever since its inception in 1952 and has tried, of late, to extend its narrow remit of publishing only educational books to branching out into poetry and fiction, which is where his real interests lie. These Friday-afternoon addas brought together friends, friends of friends, aspiring writers and whoever someone who knew Bhola brought along, and amidst much talk of politics and how best to run the state and the world and how everything was going to hell and how the Bengali was never going to roar again, some scribbler read out a story or a section of a novel or a handful of poems to the assembled company in the hope that Basanta Publishing Co. was going to take to it enough to consider bringing it out. These addas had started acquiring the comfort and reliability of ritual amongst the small group of people who knew about them; and even if putative writers wanting to change the very course of Bengali literature – an ambition they shared with Bholanath Ghosh – found that Basanta did not always do the right thing by giving their dreams the fixity and immortality of print, they could get soft loans and handouts from Bhola.

Bhola saw himself as the centre of patronage in this fledgling court. Whenever he could, he helped out struggling writers and poets with money and, often, publication; how could he not support the pursuit of literature? That would be a betrayal of the very soul of Bengaliness. Besides, these Friday afternoons had another typically Bengali underpinning: it was not crassly purposive, or a means to an end that was commercial and material profit. It was, instead, an end in itself, a celebration of conviviality and the art of conversation and the sparklingly playful things one could do with time. He felt dismayed and besmirched even thinking about adherence to a business model or vulgar things like that; money was such a dirty, downright polluting thing.

Today there are six of them, including Bhola: his printer; the editor of a ‘little magazine’ and author of the fiery experimental novel
Endnotes for a Beginning
, recently published by Basanta Publishing Co.; Bhola’s colleague and employee at Basanta; an out-of-work theatre director; and today’s writer, an unemployed graduate of Bangabashi College earning a pittance from private tutoring, brought here by the editor, who has published a few of his revolutionary poems in his ‘little magazine’ named after a Sanskrit verse-form,
Mandakranta
.

There is a mild running joke in the circle along the lines of how Bhola lives up to the scatty forgetfulness that his name embodies. There is also great affection for the wild raconteur in this slightly distracted, slightly unanchored, slightly off-kilter man. Today, though, there is something more in the aura about his normally dispersed personality.

The printer asks, ‘Everything all right?’

Bhola answers, ‘Yes, yes, fine.’

‘Just thought you seemed a little more distracted than usual.’

‘Hmmm’ comes the frugal reply. That is eloquent enough to most of the company; in ordinary circumstances Bhola Ghosh would have seized on that calculated ‘more’ and spun a giant castle from it. ‘“More”? What do you mean “more”? Have you known me to be so distracted that I have walked into ditches or got on the wrong bus? Talking of which, did I ever tell you of the time when . . .’ it would begin.

Now, however, Bhola dodges, ‘No, no, it’s nothing. The buses and trams are so crowded nowadays . . .’

The theatre director and the editor are slightly puzzled by this reduction in Bhola Ghosh’s usual volubility; maybe it is nothing, maybe they are reading too much into it. But the greater matter of the adda awaits; the scribbler’s story, with its scalpel-like finger on the dying pulse of the terminally ill times, is sure to set a thaw in motion, of that the editor is sure.

He signals to his protégé to begin. The writer stubs out his Charminar, takes a sip of lemon tea and begins, ‘The story is titled “Prehistoric”. It’s set in the present time.’ He pauses to let the witticism register, then emphasises it, in case someone has not got it, by emitting a short, ironic snort.

PREHISTORIC

Eleven-thirty on a Tuesday morning. Writers’ Building is a crackling, buzzing hive of activity. Bechu Sarkar of the Housing Ministry has just arrived at work, a quarter of an hour later than usual. He puts his cloth side-bag on his chair, sits down, greets everyone in the office with his time-tested general bulletin – ‘Don’t even ask, it was murder on the number 74 this morning, I came here hanging from the door, I tell you, hanging from the door, like a bat’ – then hollers for tea, ‘What, is there a tea-strike on? Where has the tea-boy gone? Where’s my tea?’ As if on cue, a grubby boy with a huge blackened kettle enters and pours out milky tea into a smudged greenish glass.

Bhola’s mind is elsewhere today, on his own far more pressing situation, but he must force himself to listen to the reading, if only to save himself:

A crowd of people sit outside, waiting, hoping to get some work done by the officials inside – have a file traced or moved to another department, have papers signed and attested, enquiries answered, bureaucratic mazes unlocked, puzzles elucidated. One such petitioner, a shuffling, creased, dusty, creaky, bent man of about sixty-five enters and takes in the scene of smoke-wreathed business of the government before hobbling his way to Nakshatra-babu.

But Bhola’s attention soon drifts away from the dull, predictable hell of others to his own consuming one. It had been his own unpreparedness, his lack of all the necessary information, that Bhola had found so difficult to cope with while the Sisters had talked to him in their office; lightning in clear skies. Obviously he was going through some serious bad times, he mused, and when times were bad, even buggery resulted in pregnancy, as the salty theatre director never ceased to remind everyone who came within his orbit. The thought of the director forces him again to concentrate on the proceedings under way right in front of him:

Mr Das returned to the Employment Ministry, where the relevant PA, sighted only once, declared hurriedly, ‘The Minister is in Burdwan, he’ll be back tomorrow,’ and disappeared, not to be seen since. The following day the underlings and hangers-on in the PA’s office said that the Minister had gone to Siliguri; the day after, to Delhi. A polyphony of gossip, informal advice, chatter, loose talk, suggestions, the tabla keeping the
taal
to his eighty-two visits, kept sounding its infernal accompaniment throughout.

Bhola interrupts, ‘Achchha, this is all very well, but . . . but isn’t this, how should I say, isn’t this all a bit
familiar
?’

The young man’s face falls before he can rearrange it into a mask of defensive contempt. He is still trying when Bhola’s colleague seconds his boss, ‘Yes, yes, right, right, we know all this stuff. So much time to state the obvious . . . I’m sure there’s a twist coming?’

The magazine editor begins to defend the writer, ‘It may be familiar to us, but maybe it’s not familiar to a lot of people who have no first-hand or even second-hand experience of
all this stuff
. It’s new stuff to them.’

The theatre director says, ‘It opens up a more philosophical point: should stories be about the familiar world or should they show us something new each time?’

The young man, who has had some time to swallow his disappointment, now argues, ‘If you look at the work of the German writer Franz Kafka, you’ll find that what I’m trying to do is not dissimilar: the hellish nature of bureaucracy, the labyrinth from which man cannot escape, the going-around in circles . . .’

The director adds excitedly, ‘Yes, yes, Kafka, Kafka, we’re going to put on a play by him, it’s called
Insect
. Do you know that play, where a man becomes an insect? Masterpiece, masterpiece! We are all insects.’

Insect, thinks Bhola; that’s about right, that’s what he had felt during the incident at Carmel Convent yesterday, when he found himself facing two Christian nuns. Dressed in impeccably starched white blouses, grey skirts, grey wimples, with chunky crucifixes cradling on their shelf-like chests, Sister Josephine and the headmistress, Sister Patience, had throughout addressed him as ‘Mr Gauche’. Their English had seemed opaque, probably because authentic; accordingly, Bhola’s deep fear of the English language and those who spoke it well had taken the form of abject deference.

‘Mr Gauche, we are a bit worried about an essay Arunima has written,’ Sister Josephine said in clipped tones.

Bhola grinned in incomprehension, then, realising it was an inappropriate reaction, shut his mouth and tried to look serious.

Sister Patience took the baton now. ‘Would you say you were having problems at home?’ she asked. Not wishing for it to be construed as an unhealthy curiosity about domestic matters, she hastily added, ‘Problems with Arunima, I mean, of course.’ The severity in her voice was notched up to compensate for what she saw as an unfortunate slip.

Bhola quailed at the stentorian tone of the headmistress, even while straining to follow this alarming flow of
echt
-English, but he identified the repeated word, ‘problems’, and clamped onto it.

‘Problems . . . heh-heh . . . yes . . . I’m meaning no . . . heh-heh . . .’ he began. Perhaps they meant that his daughter was having problems with her English lessons, and he had been called in to be made aware of the glitch so that he could ask her to pull her socks up and get her to improve her performance? Yes, that must be it.

‘I asking my brother and . . . and brother’s son for helping in English all the time,’ he said, ‘but they . . . they busy.’ This last word he pronounced ‘bi-ji’ – his old problem of distinguishing between a palatal and a sibilant fricative – and set the Sisters’ stern mouths twitching.

Years of dealing with parents who had no English, but aspired to better for their daughters – thank the Lord for that – had made Sister Patience adept at recovering the real meaning from behind the fog of Benglish, so she replied, ‘No, Mr Gauche, I’m not referring to the quality of Arunima’s work. With that, we’re all satisfied. I mean this.’ With that she passed him an exercise book covered in brown paper, with a Sulekha ink label on it indicating name of owner of the copy, class, section, subject, school. He remembered bringing back from work sheets of brown paper, the regulation cover for his children’s textbooks and exercise copies, at the beginning of their school year. He had a slight tightness in his chest, seeing them in their correct use now, at imagining this aspect of his daughter’s life to which he had no access, to which he could never be a daily, present witness: her small hands opening the pages of the book in a classroom, writing in it, putting it away in her bag. It was as if this object was the bridge to a corner of her life that would increasingly become separate from his. He felt an invisible hand squeezing the inside of his chest again. Then the words of Sister Patience dissipated that momentary sensation.

‘If you could please read the piece that is on the last page that is written on. We are dismayed, too, that Arunima did not give you the letter in the first instance.’

Bhola, who was settling into his terrified state and therefore beginning to comprehend the Sisters’ words better, took the slim book and opened it on the requisite page. Two pages of his daughter’s rounded, cursive English hand under the title ‘My Mother’. His eyes began to smart at the evidence of her flourishing competence in the language; was it true that it was
his
daughter who had written so fluently in that treacherous language, which had eluded him with such obstinacy?

‘We’ll wait until you finish reading. It’s not going to take you long,’ Sister Josephine urged.