The Lives of Others (68 page)

Madan stands apart, at a distance from him, and says, ‘Boro-babu’ – Big Boss, that only half-ironic term of affection from his childhood has fused to him; there is no hope that Madan-da is ever going to call him by his first name – ‘your mother has survived a lot of pain.’

Supratik does not, cannot, say anything.

‘We are poor people, Boro-babu, what do we know? You and your lot are educated, you’ve read books, been to college, will you listen to what we have to say?’

‘Why don’t you try?’

‘Boro-babu, the world does not change, you destroy yourself trying to change it, but it remains as it is. The world is very big, and we are very small. Why cause people who love you to go through such misery because of it?’

Once again, what response can he give to this?

‘Your mother took to her bed after you were gone. At first she wouldn’t even touch water until you returned. I’ve made a bargain with god, she said. She was shrivelling up like leather in the sun. I’ve known her ever since she came to this house as a daughter-in-law, it burned my chest to see her like that’ – his voice breaks.

Supratik looks up sharply. Madan-da’s eyes are red with unshed tears. Supratik turns his face quickly away.

But Madan reins himself in. ‘What good will come of all this that you are doing?’ he asks.

‘What is it that you think I’m doing?’

Madan answers tangentially, ‘Being kinder to your near and dear ones – isn’t that a bigger thing than doing good for the unknown mass of people?’

A switch is flicked somewhere. It sends through Supratik a surge of cold fury that he is being given a lesson in political morality by the family’s cook. His answer is like the crack of a whip: ‘Was that what you were doing when you prostrated yourself in front of my grandmother after Grandfather’s heart attack, and wept and begged her to forgive you for your son’s part in gheraoing him? You asked her to mete out whatever punishment she thought fit for your betrayer of a son.
Let loose the police on him, let him go to jail
, you said. Was that kindness to your near and dear ones?’

Madan looks as if he has been slapped. The lower half of his mouth goes slack for a moment or two before he can begin to assert some kind of control over it.

Supratik is not done. ‘Remember? You told her that you wouldn’t see your son’s face again, he had destroyed your honour and dignity with the family who employed you, who had given you a home for decades? Do you remember?’

Madan looks at Supratik with the unblinking gaze of an idiot; Supratik expects the corners of his mouth to start dripping with drool any minute. His own initial reluctance to engage is gone. In its place is that familiar saw-toothed hardness.

‘What? Have you forgotten? A CPI(M) stooge, that’s what you said your son was. You were right, as it turned out. But what did you think was more important – that he served your petty interests in not rocking the boat for you or that he fought for the rights of scores who have nothing?’

Madan begins, ‘Boro-babu . . . where did you—’

Supratik cuts through his feeble words: ‘It’s irrelevant where or how I came by all this. You were looking after yourself when you were grasping my grandmother’s feet and wailing,
your
self-interest. But it was all couched in the language of feelings for your near and dear ones, as you are doing now.
Punish him, he’s done great wrong, but don’t abandon me
, you said then. Did you ever think of Dulal? The factory’s been shut down, possibly for ever; your son’s out of a job, struggling to set up an electrical-goods shop. All the men who worked at that mill are jobless now, thanks to the people you work for, the people you are now pleading on behalf of. In these times of shortage, of hundreds and thousands of unemployed and no jobs to be had, how are these men going to eat? How are they going to feed and clothe their families and keep the roof over their heads?’

Madan now visibly flinches as the hissing, which is what Supratik’s words have become, hits him. Supratik knows that somebody who is not a servant in their home can easily retaliate with the argument that Madan’s advice to him, that one must pay heed to the private over the public, otherwise one is inviting disaster in, is coherent for both situations, Dulal’s and Supratik’s, but he also knows that Madan-da will not answer back because his station in life has not taught him how to. Besides, as Madan himself pointed out, Supratik has had the benefit of higher education while the cook is, at best, someone who learned how to read at home – how could he ever have the competence to mount an argument exposing holes in Supratik’s logic?

And, predictably enough, Madan looks routed, as if he is staring at some devastation wrought by a natural calamity or war. He opens his mouth to try to speak, but thinks better of it. If Supratik feels a quantum of regret, it is because of the party Madan-da has been speaking up for – his mother – but that too vanishes almost as soon as it appears.

Only Sona seems to be unaware that Supratik has been gone for two and a half years, that he is now, like a circus lion, enclosed by a ring of fire.

Supratik catches hold of the boy downstairs in his quarters one day and asks, ‘What’s going on in the new school? Your mother seems unable to report anything to me.’

Purba, flustered at this direct reference, absents herself for a while. Supratik has forgotten the difficult trick of getting Sona to talk or, when he does, of extracting the real meaning from the little that he says.

Sona mumbles something; Supratik does not quite catch it, only half his attention is on the boy. He knows he must ask the boy again, so he dutifully poses another question.

‘Are you facing any trouble with English? What are they teaching you now?’

‘Agreement of prepositions with verbs,’ comes the succinct reply.

‘Difficult?’

‘Yes, very. You learn by heart things like “prefer to” and “abide by”, so if you don’t know the meanings of “prefer” and “abide” then things get quite tricky.’

‘Don’t you ask your English teacher for the meanings?’

Silence.

‘And how is the mathematics going?’ Supratik asks.

‘It’s going well. The maths teacher says he wants to see someone . . .’

‘See someone?’

‘Someone from here, from home . . .’

But before Sona can finish his sentence Purba enters the room and Supratik is all a-scatter again.

‘Get moving, get moving,’ she tells her son peevishly, ‘you can’t be sitting here all day, chatting away with anyone who gets it into their head to drop by to waste time.’

Sona does not bother to respond.

Supratik, his heart thumping, asks Purba, ‘How come I’ve become “anyone” suddenly?’

Purba turns her back to both of them. Her heart pummelling against her ribs, she scrapes up enough daring to reply, ‘If someone disappears for so long, sends no news, no nothing, no sign to let anyone know whether he’s dead or alive, yes, then he becomes just “anyone”.’ The last few words are bright with the smoulder of real anger.

‘To you too?’ Supratik brings himself to ask. Something has happened to his gullet. He feels the need to swallow repeatedly. It’s a feeling familiar from those sneaked moments on the terrace when he used to time his visits there to coincide with her routine of hanging up the washing in the afternoons. They had had to be so careful, even to the excruciating extent of him deliberately missing some days so that no one suspected anything. On those days, Supratik imagined the twenty minutes of Purba upstairs with such force of concentration, hearing every footfall, every wet slap of the washing, that he felt drained and weightless when he heard her footsteps going down the stairs back to the ground floor. And on the days they met in the sun-baked terrace, they went through an unvarying miniature drama.

‘You hang the clothes, I’ll peg them to the line,’ he would say, hardly able to bring out the words, or hear them himself over the roaring in his blood.

She would nod, her face flushed.

And then their hands would touch on the clothes line, the length of rope and a wet sari or shirt between them. He hadn’t trusted himself to speak then, for he had needed every particle of energy to prevent his teeth from chattering. He had clasped her hand with such ferocity, to steady as much himself as her.

She breathed the words ‘Someone will see us’ and held onto his hand even more tenaciously.

The kind of trembling that this memory ignites in him is much like the one he had felt in a tiny, injured sparrow he had once cupped in his hand. The pages and pages that he has written for her, the pages that have kept him going because through the faithful scribbling he has imagined her as their sole recipient and dedicatee, imagined her as the source of light, as if in a painting, illuminating his writing as she reads it – he has not found the courage to give them to her. What stays his hand, he now wonders? Fear? Fear that he has shown her too much of the flow in his heart that cannot have a destination, that can only eddy around endlessly inside him in an arid circle? Fear that she may be baffled by it or, worse, repelled?

It is true that he has not had the opportunity to bring the account up to date. The fraught experience of his own and Dipankar’s deliverance – that final disastrous action, which had culminated in abandoning Dhiren and Debashish and becoming fugitives for days, hiding out in patches of forests, in little villages and towns, until he and Dipankar reached Giridih, feverish with fear, exhaustion and starvation – remains unwritten. The two months in Giridih were spent lying low in Dipankar’s uncle’s home, writing the larger part of the account of the time in Majgeria and Gidighati, picking up from where he had left off, at the beginning of the first sowing season. The other substantial occupation was learning, with furious concentration and intent, the engineering of railway tracks and fishplate joins from Dipankar. They had walked for miles at night, for hands-on lessons – Dipankar called them ‘practicals’ – on far-flung railway tracks running through land that was so devoid of human habitation for miles around that they had sometimes felt they were on the moon. All that is yet uncommitted to paper. But it is truer that the incompletion serves as a convenient excuse not to give her what is already written; the writer’s timeless self-acquittal – ‘Oh, I need to write just the last couple of pages . . .’

Or is it another kind of fear that has been the cause of the procrastination, fear that he may be exposing her to knowledge that will make her vulnerable, put her in harm’s way? Several times a day he swings between cursing himself for leaving behind the pages in Giridih because of this particular variant of fear, the fear that they may compromise her if the house is searched by the police – he is, after all, in their cross-hairs – and thinking that he has done the prudent thing by not bringing his incriminating account back home.

Would she have called him ‘anyone’ if she had known what he had been up to in the last two and a half years? Or would it have pushed her further away?

There is no answer from Purba. Everyone in the room is pointedly looking at nothing in particular; a calculated indirection. Even Sona, who is impervious to ordinary reality most of the time, feels something in the air has thickened and acquired a quality he can only think of as waiting, expectant. Like the atmosphere in the vicinity of a bomb, seconds before it explodes.

‘Your maths teacher has sent for me. Do you know why?’ Supratik asks Sona.

‘No,’ is Sona’s brief reply. He seems to be taken aback by the contents of the letter that sir has given him to deliver.

The letter had surprised Supratik so much that he only has occasion to think much later about the implications of Sona handing it to him. An ordinary handwritten letter on a piece of paper torn neatly out of an unruled exercise book; the envelope has been addressed, in an upward-sloping hand: ‘The parents/guardians of Swarnendu Ghosh’; its contents brief: could the parents/guardians of Swarnendu Ghosh come to the school to see me, the senior school mathematics teacher, any weekday between the hours of eleven to one, signed Swapan Adhikari.

So Supratik is not prepared for what’s waiting for him. Why could Swarnendu’s parents not come? is the first question. Because his father had died when he was little, and his mother, well, she would be uncomfortable, out of place in this world, Supratik answers, leaving Mr Adhikari to fill in the gaps; he says that he is Swarnendu’s cousin and can be trusted with anything that requires looking into.

Nothing that needs looking into, Mr Adhikari assures him, but something quite different, something bigger. The boy is preternaturally talented in mathematics, a prodigy really; he is working on things better suited to the postgraduate level and is thinking about some crucial open problems in the subject of number theory, things he has never been taught, it all seems to come naturally to him; and the teacher has spoken to a close friend who is an associate professor at a university in the USA and has sent some of the boy’s work to him, his notebook and papers, and he too thinks this is no ordinarily gifted boy who is good in maths, but someone rarer, someone very special, and this friend is of the opinion that a place can be found for him in the mathematics programme of the university, right now. Swarnendu need not go through the business of completing school and sitting school-leaving exams and American university-entrance exams, the professor has spoken to his Faculty members already, the other professors in the department, the Dean and the Chair, showed them Swarnendu’s work, and he seems to be of the opinion that a place can be found for the boy, a fully funded place, on full scholarship; the university would like to welcome such prodigies and mature their talent, so will the family, the boy’s family, be willing to consider this? It is a chance in a million, so he would strongly, very strongly, advise them to think . . . to think, erm, positively and purposively about the whole business. It could all be arranged in six months, or maybe nine. A year, maximum. He, Swapan Adhikari, is, of course, going to do everything in his power to push things along.

That torrent of information – each point so unthinkable and, therefore, unimagined by Supratik – has exactly the opposite effect of drowning with confusion and surprise; yes, his hands shake a bit and turn cold and clammy, but the revelation also gives him such a sudden, brief burst of sharp-edged clarity that he thinks for a moment it is the opening chord of something like a seizure or a stroke. And in that extreme lucidity he thinks first of Purba, then, almost simultaneously, how odd it is that he does not any longer think of her as his aunt, Chhoto-kakima, that he thinks of her as her unadorned, naked name, not what she is relationally to him. Will she be happy, share his sense of levitation? Will she even understand? Here, at last, so close to home,
at
home in fact, is the first proof of that wishy-washy, folksy, superstitious hypothesis, that good things happen to everyone in equal measure, that the great distribution system in the universe sends down sweeties to everyone with a blind and stringent even-handedness. Cock, total and utter cock; it has been his long-held conviction that only shit happens to the world’s have-nots and no good ever comes their way without radical intervention; good things only happen to those to whom good things happened. Here, suddenly, mockingly, is a hole in his conviction. Here is something beyond good happening to someone in whose way nothing good has ever come in his small life. Will Purba understand at least
that
?