The Lives of Others (71 page)

Sandhya comes in with a tray of tea and snacks – only Marie biscuits; no Madan to direct the rustling-up of delights – and sets it down on the coffee table. She says, ‘Ma wants to come downstairs.’

Adi says, ‘Let me go up and help her’ and leaves the room with his wife.
Who knows what lies in store tomorrow?
Could the Inspector have been trying to send some kind of message to him? Why the prefix of that insinuating laugh otherwise? Could SP Dhar have sent Saha for that very purpose?

Inspector Saha is still distributing meaningless reassurances like cheap boiled sweets at a children’s party when Charubala comes into the room, supported on one side by Adi and on the other by Sandhya. The Inspector does not stand up.

All through the previous night Charubala has lain awake thinking of the configuration of words she would use to tell the policeman several things: how wrong he was, how one could trust Madan blindly, how they were not going to tolerate this terrible error of their Madan being in jail . . . She had driven herself to a keen point of agitation, even anger, but seeing the Inspector sitting right in front of her, slurping tea noisily from his saucer, dunking biscuits into his cup, that anger somehow dissipates. He is, after all, a policeman of senior rank, not a constable, but a powerful, well-connected person, and Charubala has never been able to shake off an early fear of both policemen and Englishmen.

All the impassioned speeches in her head fade to a meek, plaintive, ‘Inspector-babu, Madan is innocent. You must kindly release him. I give you my word that he hasn’t done this.’

Inspector Saha pulls off the difficult trick of looking concerned, condescending and respectful all at once; a miracle, Adi notes, given that a complex of emotions would find it tricky to play quickly through all that flesh and adipose tissue. Then he is gone, with an ominous, ‘Not everything is in our hands, as you think. Some things are in yours too. Also’ – here he pauses at the threshold of the living-room door, turns round, flashes his yellow teeth in a way that makes Adi wonder how a smile so greasy can have such a sharp, dangerous edge – ‘we don’t usually come to people’s homes to update them on the state of an investigation, they usually come to the police station. I came as a personal favour to Adi-babu. After all, Boro-saheb Dhar, Adi-babu and I go back so many years, we have so much history between us, heh-heh-heh-heh.’

Much like the iron grilles on the Ghoshes’ front balconies, poxy with rust under the recent new coating of paint, the steady conviction that Madan is innocent begins to corrode under the acid that the Inspector’s words have sprinkled on it during his visit. Purnima, loyal primarily to her material possessions, is the first to be swayed. ‘The Inspector is right,’ she says to Priyo. ‘Who else could have taken it? Madan-da knows the ins and outs of everything, the routines of everyone. Only he could have burgled us with such ease and with no one being any the wiser.’

Priyo too teeters: ‘I’m finding it difficult to get my head around it.’

‘He’s been nursing a grudge. It’s that business with his son. I think he has been biding his time.’

‘A long time to bide. But I cannot think of anyone better placed than Madan to burgle us, you’re right. Still, I find it difficult to believe. He has been with us since before I was born . . .’ Priyo’s words tail off. The worlds of reasonable doubt and dogged faith have never seemed more incommensurable.

Bhola consoles his mother with equally empty words. ‘Ma, what good is all this crying going to do? The Inspector can’t be lying. If he says Madan-da has stolen, then he must have reason to say so. We couldn’t counter any of his arguments.’

Charubala is heartsick. Memories play like clips from old films inside her head and she relays them weepily. ‘How can it be?’ she cries. ‘Do you know, when he and Adi had very high fever at the same time – Adi must have been around six or seven then – I put them on the same bed and stayed up all night, putting cold water compresses on their foreheads.’ What she wants to ask the world is whether that act did not fasten him to her and hers for life, but she cannot find the words, or perhaps the courage, actually to say this, because to embody it in words would be an acknowledgement of a sort of fissure between them that had been eternally present. She dwells on details that sieve through her soul, leaving behind both purified object and unwanted residue: Madan bringing her children gifts every time he came back after his annual visit to his home in the village in Orissa; Madan lying to protect the children from her anger when she knew they had been up to mischief; she and Adi making fun of Madan, affectionately, by asking him to sing Oriya songs, then cracking up at the outlandish language; Madan tripping over his reading from
Shahaj Path
in the early stages of his education at her hands . . . How could those instances, so funny or ridiculous or endearing at the time, have been sifted to become only repositories of pain now?

Sandhya is no better than her mother-in-law. Things are at sixes and sevens without Madan-da’s cohering presence. She finds herself lacking the energy to be the girder around the house; it has had to do without her for two and a half years, it will no doubt survive the two days of looseness brought about by Madan-da’s arrest. Yet this very pragmatism is the result of inertia. So many details were taken care of by Madan-da that in less than twenty-four hours of his absence cracks are proliferating everywhere. Did she then do nothing worthwhile? Or was Madan-da the real energy behind the scenes and she only a titular supervisory figurehead? Thoughts along these lines are interrupted by the appearance in her room of Chhaya and Jayanti. Without saying anything, they need, it is clear to Sandhya, some principle of reassurance from her in the middle of this unravelling.

Even Chhaya has no appetite for this particular spectacle of someone else’s unhappiness. She says, ‘Who would have thought . . .’ and stops. Previously those very words would have been the prelude to a ripe thrill of a conversation saturated with cheerful malevolence; now the words are only doleful.

Jayanti echoes her sentiment – ‘Yes, truly . . .’ – and brings the aanchol of her sari to cover her mouth.

Sandhya, attempting to emulate the rationality of her elder son, says, ‘Wait, wait. Nothing has been proven against him yet. They still haven’t found the missing jewellery.’

Jayanti says, ‘But they took him to jail. Would they have done it if he was innocent? Then there was all that business with his son . . . We didn’t know a word of that, did we?’

Sandhya cannot answer this; neither can Chhaya. There is a long pause marked by the same looseness, the same unbinding that has begun to rear its head everywhere. It manifests itself as a lack of energy in everything; this twilight gathering, with the darkness falling outside, is no exception. It is a testament to that dispersion of focus that no one gets up to turn on the lights, despite everyone’s firmly held belief, particularly Sandhya’s, that dark interiors at dusk drive out the goddess of wealth. Now if Madan-da had been around . . .

Madan has become, overnight, a ghost in the midst of the living.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

1970

ONLY THREE MONTHS
since the news about Sona has broken and already a different order is beginning to set in. Like the camouflaging of an insect, one saw the before and, with great effort, the after, but never the process in between. So how and when exactly, and in what degrees, the new dispensation arrived no one could tell, only the fact of its dawning and its presence afterwards. Purba, in turmoil, notices, but does not give it much thought. As for Sona, it is impossible to tell if he perceives at all in the first place, or if he senses and understands but will never bring himself to comment on it, or if he is simply above it all in the world of numbers.

But nothing escapes the fine sensor of Kalyani’s attunement to the unstable connections, forever careening, sometimes this way, sometimes that, between people. It is she who notices the increasing frequency with which food is sent down to them from upstairs, and although Madan-da’s recent departure has led to a lot of things beginning to fall to rust, this is one area that has, shockingly, improved. Then she notices that it is not stale food, on the cusp of turning, that is being sent to them, but freshly cooked marvels – any number of vegetable dishes, cabbage or bottle gourd with small shrimps, egg curries, yellow split peas with raisins and fried coconut, rui fish in yoghurt sauce, mince with peas and potatoes, mutton curries . . . This is what heaven is in her imagination – delights being sent down from up above. They even take care, she regards, to send her mother’s vegetarian food separately from Kalyani’s and Sona’s non-vegetarian dishes to avoid contamination, but she does not move one step further from observing to pondering on the reasons for this sudden newly-found consideration for her mother.

Purnima comes one evening, bearing a box of classy sandesh from Ganguram.

‘Baishakhi’s had a son,’ Purnima says, giving the paper box to Purba, ‘so I’m distributing sweets.’

Purba smiles and receives it with her usual, ‘Oh, really, there was no need . . .’

‘I’m giving it to everyone in the family, so why should you be excluded? You are family too,’ Purnima says. ‘Besides,
you
have your own reasons for eating sweets now, Purba, don’t you? All this wonderful news about our Sona . . . who would have thought that a boy from this house was a hidden genius? Really, unthinkable for stupid people like us! Anyway, some goddess is sure to be smiling on you now, things are beginning to look up, good news is beginning to come in . . .’ The tone for noting good tidings modulates to faint regret by the time she reaches the end of the sentence.

Purba only smiles wanly; it is left to Purnima to fill the silence.

‘Kalyani, why don’t you serve your mother some sandesh and help yourself to some, too?’

Kalyani runs out to fetch a small plate, picks out three pieces of sandesh and offers it to her mejo-jyethi first.

Purnima cries out, half in jest, ‘Oh god, not three! If you give three, you make an enemy of the person you’re serving. Hasn’t your mother taught you this? Here, why don’t you take one? Go on.’

Kalyani catches her mother’s expression of peeved strickenness and demurs. Purnima blithely continues, ‘You have to learn these things now, now that you’re growing older. What will your in-laws say about us, if you make these mistakes? What kind of a home has this girl come from, they’ll say.’ She laughs at her own witticisms as she polishes off all three pieces of sandesh on her plate.

Bholanath comes downstairs one evening, all booming camaraderie and jollity. ‘Here now, where is the boy? Where is the genius who is going to brighten the name of the Ghoshes? Here you are, sitting in a dark corner, head buried in a thick book. No doubt thinking grand mathematical thoughts. But your stupid uncle will say this to you: you’ve got to look after your eyes. If you can’t see the numbers, what proofs can you do? Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! That was funny. What book is it? Oh, let’s see –
An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers
. Ufff, too much for my little brain, too much. And such strange symbols in it, can’t understand a thing. And such tiny print, Sona-baba, you’ll really ruin your eyes. Just the other day I was telling someone, “This nephew of mine, all of fourteen years old, he’s some kind of prodigy, an American university is trying to snatch him away from us, like one would something precious, such as a gold chain; this nephew, we’ve always known that he was going to do something very big one day, something that would make us all so proud, and this boy is being offered a full scholarship to go to university before he has finished school. A double-double promotion.” Can you beat that? A double-double promotion, ha-ha-ha-ha. See if your silly uncle has been right with his arithmetic, you are the maths brains, see if he has calculated correctly. One double promotion – Class Ten; second double promotion to Class Twelve; so you skip two years, Nine and Eleven. What? Am I right? See, your mathematical gift must owe something to the blood that flows through your veins. It’s the Ghoshes’ blood, after all.’

Arunima fails her final exams in arithmetic and has to repeat Class Six. Jayanti is aghast.

‘I had no inkling that you were struggling in these subjects,’ she chides, ‘otherwise I would have asked your father to find a private tutor for you. Why didn’t you tell us earlier? Why? Oh, the shame, the shame!’

Word gets out that Arunima has to repeat a year. It is Chhaya, as always, with her infallible talent for neatly isolating the afflicted nerve and aiming for it, who gives voice to the greater shame: ‘How strange that our recently discovered mathematics genius should be helping out other boys in the neighbourhood and not his own cousin. If he can go to Mala-di’s house and give mathematics tuition to her son, can he not do it out of charity for our Arunima? They are cousins, after all.’ Then she twists the knife – ‘Perhaps Mala-di gives him a little something? Jayanti, maybe you could ask Bhola to give Sona some money?’

Chhaya announces this, like all her calculatedly murderous comments, loudly and in public, as if addressing the air, for maximum dispersal. Even Supratik, who has long cultivated a stony indifference to dirty domestic politics, is jolted out of its armour enough to say directly to her, ‘Pishi, you’ll find that it was I who arranged, through Ma, to have Sona give maths lessons to Mala-mashi’s son in exchange for Sona receiving English lessons from their private tutor. Chhoto-kaki cannot afford private lessons for Sona, as you well know, and it would have been a great shame if that bright boy fell behind because of the one handicap of knowing no English.’ Behind his back he twists his right thumb as far as it will go without snapping, so that he can channel his anger into that small act of violence, leaving his voice and tone and delivery imperturbably steady.

‘Oh, you were behind it,’ Chhaya says, sounding disappointed, but she is not to be outdone. There is a final flick of the scorpion’s tail: ‘How charitable of you to have done that! All these inexplicable generosities – these are what make men noble. I’m slow on the uptake, so I’m still left behind, trying to figure out the reasons behind these selfless acts.’