A Life Apart (13 page)

A man with a wife and two children was not allowed to do that sort of thing. Whatever a marriage was for a woman, it certainly wasn’t an invitation on the part of her family to her husband
to extend the household. It was
decreasing
the numbers by giving the daughter away. To leave and then return with a retinue was one of those things which was socially forbidden, almost
taboo. And to break that tacit rule was to invite the neighbourhood’s tongues and eyes and ears inside the house and give them free play. Which may well have been the case all those years ago
but with an important twist: Ritwik’s father was silently expected to provide for everyone already living in the flat in Grange Road – a disabled grandmother, four unemployed uncles,
one marriageable aunt – besides his wife and two sons.

Ritwik’s grandfather had died nearly four years ago, having vehemently opposed the marriage of his daughter to a man thirtythree years older than her. He had apparently relented when
Ritwik was born and had gone to see his first grandchild in hospital. With his death, the household in Grange Road had lost its breadwinner. He had left no savings, there was nothing in the way of
investments, the flat was a rented one and they had fallen behind with the rents and bills for four years. The electricity had been cut off and one of the first things Ritwik’s father did
when they moved in was to have it restored.

Since the death of Ritwik’s grandfather, his grandmother and uncles and aunt had lived from hand to mouth, sometimes on the charity of neighbours and distant relatives, at other times on
meagre handouts and soft loans begged from people. Ritwik’s father could not have moved in at a more opportune moment. It was an extended family of ten now, living in a three-bedroom flat,
with one tiny kitchen, an equally small bathroom, a balcony fronting the street, and a larger room which was really no room, in the true sense, only an open space on to which all the bedrooms
opened.

In some ways, there seemed to have been a barter, as tacit as the social rules his father’s move to his in-laws’ home broke. It was an understanding that this shameful thing would be
tolerated if he took on the mantle of the chief (it turned out, only) earner. So to atone for the shaming move here his father took upon himself the more respectable and empowering role of head of
family: head of family who earned money on which nine other people lived. It was only much later that Ritwik unravelled the killing illogic of someone trying to undo his own weaker position by
accepting to be hobbled with leaching burdens: it was the Third World Debt principle. It was submerged blackmail, pure and simple. His father was sixty-one when all this was set in motion.

The continued unemployment of his uncles was a central source of tension in the family. Pradip, the eldest of the four brothers, did have a short-lived job as a bus conductor in a minibus on the
Garia to BBD Bagh route but gave it up when his girlfriend at the time complained that this was not a suitably dignified job. ‘It’s a prestige issue,’ she said, using that
incontrovertible argument of the Bengalis.

Ritwik’s childhood was signposted mostly by the frictions between his father, resentful of having four young men in their twenties and thirties living off him, and his uncles, who evaded,
dodged and hid from his father and from any sense of adult responsibility. Sometimes this erupted into open confrontations, with his father trying to reason with them, or taunt and humiliate them
into some sort of contribution to the running of the household. His uncles swallowed everything in guilty silence, and then slunk away, avoiding another run-in with their brother-in-law by
returning home well after midnight. Weeks went by in this careful dance of avoidance, with Dida acting as choreographer, warning her sons off if her son-in-law was at home, or carrying news of the
dominant mood to them so they could stay away or time their return home. In their absence, Ritwik’s father took out his frustration on his wife with words carefully chosen for maximal
damage.

‘A bunch of illiterate spongers, that’s what your brothers are. Don’t they feel any shame, living off an old man? I’m not paying for them anymore; we’ll have
separate kitchens from now on – they can fend for their own food. You can tell them that. Parasites, parasites!’

Silence from his mother.

‘And your parents, both illiterate, they were good for nothing except breeding. Look at this bloody nest of vipers they’ve produced. All they did was litter. They didn’t
provide for your education, they did nothing, as if just animal breeding were qualification enough for title of parent. It reminds me of dogs. That’s what your family is, a bloody bunch of
strays.’

More silence from his mother. Sometimes quiet tears, or a storming out of the room. Then there were days of noncommunication, slamming of doors, badly cooked food, setting down of plates with a
crash and clatter. She took her anger out on her two sons, mostly on Ritwik. As soon as his father left the house, she rounded on him on some pretext or the other.

‘Have you done your homework? Have you? Why are you wasting time then?’ He got a sharp slap across his face, or was dragged by his hair across the room and pushed to the corner where
his schoolbooks were piled. ‘Now don’t dare move until you’ve done the lesson. If it’s not ready in an hour, I’ll finish you off, do you understand, finish you
off,’ she screamed.

Ritwik, whimpering and scared, pulled out a book, any book, and let his eyes swim over random pages: irrigation in Punjab, how plants made their own food, why we should love and obey God.
Nothing sank in; the words were just empty black marks on the page held down by trembling hands.

Whenever his father lashed out against his mother’s family, Ritwik blindly took her side. There was no doubt that all that he said was true but articulating it so cruelly and corrosively
made it an unfair stealth-weapon. As a child, he felt anxious and unhappy when his parents quarrelled: at the merest whiff of it – something in the set of his mother’s jaw, or the
menace in her heavy tread – his heart began thudding painfully against his ribs. From a very early age, he learnt to sniff out gathering tension in the air, much like old people who can tell
changes in the weather by the feeling in their joints. But this was inseparable from the sympathy he felt for her; he must have sensed how difficult it was for her to be in the middle, riven by
divided affections and allegiances. She seemed to Ritwik to be a pathetic pawn in this war.
When elephants fight, it’s the grass that suffers
, Dida used to say. Yes, his mother
suffered.

Truth was, there was no effort on his uncles’ part to make things better. They just grew a thicker hide. They knew they had it good: sleeping in till mid-day, having food waiting for them
(when it was there), no rent to pay, no bills to think about. They knew if they left it long enough, a crisis would develop and their brother-in-law would have to do something about it, so they
left it to him. The confrontations, unhappiness, the dividing lines that were slowly developing – all these seemed to them a small price to pay for the larger pleasures of laziness and living
off someone else.

And if there were occasions when they did not have food waiting for them, they could always take it out on their mother. The whole family was a twisted version of some domino effect. They were
all linked by their use of each other as channels of anger and resentment; a pressure on one point in this chain would invariably lead to effects all along the line. So Ritwik’s father
shouted at his wife; Ritwik’s mother screamed and beat up her sons; his uncles either went underground or, when a showdown became inevitable, braved it out and then took out their humiliation
on their paralysed mother.

Any excuse would do. Shirt was a recurring one. Pratik had one decent shirt that he hid zealously away from his brothers. Every time one of his brothers felt the need to wear something special,
something other than the one frayed shirt and one pair of trousers each of them had, he stole Pratik’s fancy shirt. He either found out the hiding place by coercing his mother or, if she
refused to tell, ransacked the whole house till he found it. By some malign law of probability, the shirt would go missing the very evening Pratik wanted to wear it himself. When he found out it
had been stolen, his first target was his mother.

‘You must have told Pradip. Only you knew where it was kept,’ he shouted. (That was another thing: nobody spoke in that house, everyone shouted. Everything was done slightly awry to
the civilized norm.)

‘No, I didn’t. I didn’t know where you hid it,’ Dida muttered.

‘You did. You saw me putting it away under the mattress,’ Pratik challenged.

Dida was scared now. ‘Nn . . . o . . .’ She started limping away.

Pratik saw that chink and pounced. Literally. He clutched her hair, pushed her against the wall and started banging her head against it. ‘You did, you did. What am I going to wear tonight
then?’ he kept on shouting.

Ritwik’s mother rushed in and separated them. She shouted back at her brother, ‘How dare you do this to your own mother? You’re an animal, an animal.’ It petered out,
aware of its own futility.

Pratik simmered till Pradip returned very late at night, hoping Pratik would be asleep so that he could slip the shirt back in under the mattress. No such luck: Pratik was waiting in the dark
like a crouching feline.

Another fight broke out. The sound of two men fighting in a confined space in a tiny flat was like a little earthquake of thuds and crashes; it woke up everyone, even some of the neighbours. In
the room where Ritwik and Aritra and his parents slept everyone started stirring. Ritwik’s father did not miss this chance of delivering another blow to his wife. ‘There, the dogs are
at it again. There’s no bloody peace in this house.’ He made as if to get up and intervene but she stopped him.

‘Why do you want to get involved if you hate them so much? Let them tear themselves to pieces, what do you care?’ Her voice was like a spring coiled to the point of breakage.

‘It’s because of my sons. How can you bring up children in this hell? What do you think they’re going to pick up from this?’ he replied. The boys were wide awake now but
they pretended to be asleep; at least they could spare their parents one added concern. Not only was Ritwik’s heart knocking painfully against his chest again, there was also something new
– a rising and falling column of sharp fire from behind his chestbone up to his throat, then down and then up again. He knew Aritra was awake because his breathing had gone very quiet and
measured.

‘Why did you come here then? How many times did I tell you, before we moved, don’t give up the flat in Park Circus, don’t give up the flat in Park Circus. Why didn’t you
listen to me?’ Her words were a jet of acid hiss against glass: they were both trying not to wake up their children.

It was his father’s turn to remain silent now, a guilty silence in that pitch dark room, as if she had exposed his complicity in the whole business and he had no reasonable defence with
which to counter her accusation.

There was a loud crash followed by a thud in the other room. As one by one the neighbours’ lights came on, Dida tried to intervene in the fight taking place right under her nose. She
mumbled, ‘What will the neighbours think?’

This was all the excuse the brothers needed. It was Pradip’s turn to have a go at his mother. Like a feral dog, he turned his attention on her, crouching low beside the bed on which she
lay. ‘What did you say about the neighbours? What did you say?’ he shouted.

She was too scared to answer. This just stoked the fire. He started slapping her face – one, two, three, four, the sound of skin on skin a neat sharp crack each time. ‘You told him I
wore his shirt. You’re behind this.’ She couldn’t even move away from this assault: it took her a long time to shift her body from one side to another.

Pradip continued shouting, ‘You’re the bitch behind all this. That’s what you do all day – carry tales from one camp to another, play people off against each other.
You’ve nothing else to do all day, you sit in your chair and gossip.’

She was crying now, her mouth a helpless rictus of pain, but no sound escaped from her, not even a sob; it was as if she was trying to erase any sign of life that marked her out as another human
being, to reduce herself to an inanimate object, so that her sons could ignore her and vent their fury on something else. At that point, Ritwik’s mother entered the room.

‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves?’ she said. Her voice was between a shout and a threat. ‘What will everyone think?’ The brothers loped away like chided dogs with
their tails between their legs. It had happened before, it would happen again. Sometimes she tried to scare her brothers by reminding them that violence towards their own mother was one of the
greatest sins possible. It was as bad as killing a cow; it would call down certain vengeance from the gods. Surely the gods had already cursed them for such unnatural behaviour: the squalor, the
unhappiness, the menace, weren’t all these really just effects of their displeasure with the family? This only had a loose hold on her brothers’ minds for it came undone, readily and
with slick, perfect ease, at the next flashpoint.

And so it went on.

Ritwik never understood what his father did for a living but felt instead a growing anxiety at its irregularity and meagreness. A broker, maybe? An in-between man in deals? A
facilitator? As a young boy, when he had asked his father his profession, possibly because he had been set the standard school homework of writing five sentences on ‘My Father’, the
answer had been, ‘Engineer’. That had stuck for a very long time, along with other things whose residue he has started to scrape off slowly only now. It had acquired the status of
truth. Even to this date, the ‘father-as-engineer’ picture stole in microseconds before the certainty of its untruth.

So what
did
he do? He really didn’t know and not having been very close to his father, especially in those abrasive late teenage years, he hadn’t made much of an effort to
find out. It was partly to save both of them the embarrassment of having to address an issue which demanded fixed, stable answers in accordance with the fixed, stable structure given to
parent-child relations. How would his father have faced up to an answer that was fuzzy, for he really did not have a profession category in which he could slot himself? How would Ritwik have taken
such an answer, or shored up against his own uncertainties of childhood the flotsam of an old man’s shame and insecurities?