The Lives of Others (48 page)

Chhaya began with the love-songs of Tagore. Glances of approval were exchanged; her choices were fitting for the occasion. ‘I haven’t seen him yet but I’ve heard his flute’, ‘I yearn to speak what’s in my heart but no one wants to know’, ‘Clouds covered the stars at dusk’, the difficult ‘What radiance is this that fills my soul?’ As so often with Tagore, it was difficult to separate cleanly the spiritual from the romantic, and Chhaya leaned with the full force of her considerable talent on this chord of blurring and made the songs speak with unexpected luminosity. The chatter had ebbed away.

Purnima, looking appropriately bashful, was doing the usual bridal thing of keeping her eyes downcast in a show of modesty. God, she sang well, Purnima thought, but was it one of those families that was all Tagore songs and effete poetry quotations and literature-grazing? Her heart sank.

In Priyo’s roiling mind a clear photographic memory bobbed to the surface. A little boy singing, ‘I am a lost traveller. O flowers, you, night-blooming jasmine, mallika of the morning, do you recognise me?’ And a little girl singing out in joyous affirmation, ‘Yes, yes, I know you, new traveller, I have seen the edge of your colourful clothes in the forests . . .’ His chest was a tight band. Did betrayal feel like this then?

Now that she knew she had her audience captive, Chhaya began the crossing-over. With two mournful, almost unredemptive songs, ‘Both banks of my heart flood over, alas, my companion’ and ‘There is a thirst in my eyes, a thirst across my entire chest’, both more straightforwardly from the ‘Love’ section of Tagore’s songbook, she flicked the mood. No one seemed to notice it, no one registered that something about those two songs sounded some off-notes in a celebratory gathering. But her audience was of one. She knew for whom she was singing and she knew, with the knowledge of someone who has thought another’s thoughts, that a meaning occluded from the perception of everyone else was hitting its target with lethal accuracy. But it was not an audience of one, as she assumed; in a corner of the room Charubala wanted to be swallowed up by darkness, to disappear entirely. The meanings that were forming and disintegrating inside her could not be tolerated; she had to turn her mind away from them.

Chhaya moved on to the kirtan-inflected, ‘You appear only occasionally, why do I not get to see you for eternity?’ At the words ‘It’s as if clouds move over the sky of my heart, preventing me from seeing you’, Priyo felt the bitter taste of treason in his mouth again: it was like cinders, ashy one moment, burning the other. Out of the corner of his eye he saw his mother bring her aanchol to her mouth and hold it there. Nothing could have prepared them for this. Was it revenge, or was it the cry of a fatally wounded animal as it ran around in pain?

And then Chhaya twisted the knife in the final movement. She began by singing the compassion-drenched, minor-mode song that her mother had sung to her as a child to console her when she felt small in the eyes of the world because she was dark: ‘Clouds are black, the darkness is black / And scandal too is black / Black is the sin that caused Binodini to be cast out / But blacker than all these, my daughter, is the hair on your head.’ In one neat bundling, Chhaya threw back onto the face of the world, like spit, all that it had arrayed against her. She had been born into a melodramatic world; melodrama was the tool she used to banish it from her.

Meanwhile, to Bhola’s room on the second floor – Bhola, like everyone else, was mingling with the crowd of guests, friends and relatives – Somnath had succeeded in bringing the housemaid, Meera, on some pretext or the other. He had not only been eyeing up her healthy, curvy, nineteen-year-old’s body for some time, but also making sure that she knew he held it in admiration. The lightest of touches on her shoulder, a feathery and seemingly accidental brush of his arm against her breasts, a casually engineered, and equally debonairly executed, full-frontal bump into her while turning a corner – Somnath had played this with the subtle surety of an old rake, as if what he lacked in experience he made up for with the natural expression of something that was coded in him, something that ran in his blood. He did not know what Meera thought about his creeping advance, but she had appeared to be receptive enough, not pushing his hands away or making excuses not to be in his vicinity.

He had clocked all her movements and knew that she had her bath in the afternoon, then went up to the roof to hang her washed clothes out to dry. A fortnight ago he had timed his entry to the roof to coincide with this and had been rewarded with the sense-filling sight of her ripe-fruit breasts brimming out of her blouse as she had tried to put it on. Masturbating himself dry while fondling the memory of that image, Somnath had come to the conclusion that it had not just been a matter of serendipity, that there had been something deliberate, almost provocative, about the way those breasts had spilled out before she, taking all the time in the world, had tucked them in. The whole incident occupied barely five seconds, but it stretched itself in Somnath’s mind, adding to his perception of it as pointed, calculated. Over the next ten days or so Somnath planned furiously. He tried to catch her on her own, but was foiled by something or the other. The wedding preparations had made everyone so breathlessly busy that a snatched moment or two of privacy had become even more difficult to come by than it normally was in this populous, ever-public home. He could hardly lock himself in a bathroom with her; even that would be discovered – somebody was bound to come along and hammer on the door, wanting to use it, halfway through.

And then, amusing Somnath, the opportunity to hide presented itself at the moment of greatest publicness: there was so much going on elsewhere that no one was going to discover them in his brother’s room. But he had to hide his embarrassingly obvious erection from her first, so he asked her to fetch a glass of water.

‘Come straight back here, don’t get roped into doing other stuff on the way,’ he said.

Meera shook her head and ran off to do the errand. Somnath reclined on his brother’s bed and arranged himself and his clothes to hide his arousal. An odd thing occurred to him: he addressed Meera customarily using the lowest of the three forms of ‘you’, as everyone in the house did, but he could not think of a single instance in which Meera had spoken directly to him, either using the highest version of ‘you’, which would have been normal, or the middle one, which would have been disrespectful and impudent for a servant to use with someone of her employer’s family, even though he and Meera were more or less the same age. Had she always found ways of speaking to him in such a way that the ‘you’ had been avoided? How was that possible? The conjugations of the verbs would have given the game away instantly. He had to make her say something now and find out the answer.

Meera walked in with a glass of water. She advanced towards Somnath, he reached out his hand for it, she extended hers to give it to him, then he did not know how it happened, perhaps because of his awkward angle of repose on the bed, perhaps because the timing of the transfer of the glass was a whisker off, but it slipped in the moment of being passed, spilling its entire contents on Somnath’s lap.

‘Eeesh, jah, it slipped,’ Meera exclaimed. ‘Let me do it, let me do it,’ she said and before Somnath could move or react Meera had whisked off some piece of cloth from somewhere and begun to rub his crotch and lap vigorously, the area drenched by the water, in an effort to soak up part of it. In a dream Somnath watched and felt her rub his rock-hard penis as if it were the most natural action in the world. Was she doing it purposefully? Or was she just dabbing at the wet patch? Did she know, feel, that he had an erection? Why was she continuing to touch his cock as if by accident, if she knew what it was exactly? Or was she so innocent that she had no idea? The swarm of questions came like a trick of light or air, here one moment, absent the other, so that he had no idea, in the giddiness of his sensations, whether he had thought them at all or had retrospectively appended a kind of cerebration to what at the time was only an undifferentiated wash of sense-data. Swelling the excitement was the fear of discovery. He seemed incapable of asking her to shut the door.

Over the drumbeats of his heart he heard his voice whisper from very far away, ‘Take it out. Take it in your hand.’

He reached forward to touch her breasts, then, encountering no resistance, pushed his hands inside her clothes to feel them naked against his fingers and palms. Meera deftly exposed his aching cock from the covering of his dhoti and underwear. In the space of two strokes, maybe three, Somnath juddered and came all over her hand. She contemplated the mess for a fraction of a second, then carried on with her earlier wiping as if she were still mopping up the water from the previous spillage. Her face was unreadable. Somnath, released by his orgasm, noticed for the first time that she was wearing new, dressy clothes, probably given by his mother on the occasion of the celebrations. Without a single word Meera finished her business of cleaning up, then left the room with the cloth and the empty glass.

Somnath put his detumescing cock back in place. He would have to put on a new pair of underwear and dhoti; these were too wet to be worn. Or maybe he could stretch out on the bed and contemplate this new milestone in his life. He would have to tell Subir and Deepak and Paltu that he had had his first fuck – the exaggeration was obligatory – that he was not a virgin any longer. He was first off the mark in his group of friends. But now that a barrier had been crossed, would he really get to go the whole distance and fuck her? He felt confident that it was going to happen soon. The idea of it made him begin to get aroused again. Had she deliberately spilled that glass of water? Who was in the driving seat, he or she? Then another thought struck him – he had totally forgotten to test her on how she addressed him.

Six weeks later Charubala discovered her youngest son taking the maidservant, Meera, from behind in the attic prayer room. Its instantaneous effect was the firing of the girl. Horrified by what she had seen, Charubala felt herself incapable of acting in the right way. What were the correct measures to take in a situation like this? The dismissal was a natural beginning, but she could not bring herself to face that filthy creature ever again. So after some deliberation about what kind of loss of face and honour was involved in confiding in Madan – after all was said and done, he was still a servant, on the other side of the line – she got him to do her dirty work, but not before some recalibrating of the scales of power in order to remind him that she, or her side, was not weakened by this. Or perhaps she needed to convince herself.

‘It is your responsibility to engage the temporary servants in this house,’ she told him off. ‘How could you have made such a mistake? You’ve been in this home for nearly thirty years, you are like one of us.’ She did not exactly reveal to him what had brought this on, only giving some vague hints within the general hand-wringing about ‘fallen girls’ and ‘loose morals’, leaving Madan to read between the lines. He would, in any case, find out in the servants’ quarter what had happened.

‘The shame, the shame!’ Charubala raged. ‘What entered your head that you allowed a . . . a growing, young girl like her to come into a house where there’s a boy who’s turning into a man? She must be out of this house before the day is over, I don’t want to have to tread even on her shadow. Chhee, chhee! And in the prayer room too . . .’

Madan hung his head lower. In the prayer room! They
were
daring, he thought; that at least must be said about them.

‘I can’t begin to think of what will happen if the news gets out. The whole neighbourhood will come and spit on us. Madan, let no one find out a word about this. Promise me!’ Her tone changed to pleading. ‘The shame, the shame,’ she repeated. ‘How much I must have sinned in my past life to have given birth to a son like that!’ And at this she gave in to the tears that she had kept in check in front of Madan.

XI

Only he who has dipped his hands in a class enemy’s blood can be considered a true revolutionary.

The police did not know where to begin. We feared that they would suspect one of Senapati’s debtors. If that crossed their minds, it was not acted upon. I thought this was because there was little by way of formal records of the loans he had given to farmers. We feared a rounding up of the poorest of the village, a raft of trumped-up charges, imprisonment and beatings – but none of these came to pass. Not this time. We were baffled by this quiet indifference on their part.

Meanwhile rumour did its work. Senapati’s wife was having an affair, and her lover did it. Senapati had made an enemy of the powerful Sinhas, one of the biggest jotedaars of the area – they lived in Jhargram, but owned about
300
bighas of land around here – and they had had people kill him. Some said the enmity was with the local Rays, another big landowning family. They meant to get the more powerful man whom Senapati was accompanying (no one knew who that was), but got the toady instead. Some unappeased ghost had done it. Senapati had got into a fight about debts with someone drunk. He had tried to have his way with some farmer’s wife and the farmer saw it and dispatched him. In twenty-four hours the village was humming and buzzing with stories.

And with fear. You could feel it in the air, a sort of invisible mantle that had come down over everything. The place seemed even more deserted in the evenings. People stayed in because they thought they might be next. A strange sensation had us in its grip – not quite ennui, or quite inertia, but the lull that sets in after you think you’ve achieved what you had set out to do. I realised how dangerous this feeling was: we had removed one tiny, very minor class enemy, a little minnow in a sea of sharks. Our warfare had only just begun. If we slackened now, we were going to be extinguished in no time at all.

In the bamboo forest at night, Dhiren asked – Have you noticed any change in Kanu or Anupam?

Samir – What sort of a change?