A Life Apart (14 page)

The only established fact he had about his father’s jobs was their requirement of his long presence. The regularity of his mother waiting for his arrival home from work, first in the
balcony, and then walking out to the bus stop, was a stable cornerstone of his boyhood. There were late nights; eleven or midnight was worrying, especially for a man who had suffered three cardiac
arrests. Ritwik remembered a tired man with his head down walking so slowly along the edges of the road, beside the margins of the open drains, that he could have been looking resignedly for
something he had lost along the same stretch of the street as he had walked on it in the opposite direction earlier on in the day. An old old old man, thrown in unregarded corners, already half in
the shadow of death.

Ritwik had always been, as far back as he could remember, embarrassed by an old and sick father. Until the age of eleven, he had been taken to school – a forty-minute bus ride from
Jadavpur to Park Circus – by one member of the family or another. Sometimes, his father took him there and insisted on seeing him inside, seeing him mingle with the other boys before the bell
rang for morning assembly. He tried to dodge and parry the growing unease and sense of shame, which set upon him as soon as they neared the school building, by several clumsy strategies –
walking faster to create a distance between them, insisting that his father went home once they had reached the main gate and not accompany him inside,
see nobody’s father goes inside why
should you why don’t you go back now I’ll be all right
. The truth was that he didn’t want to be physically associated with this shabby old man. On a few occasions he had even
gratuitously lied to his friends that the man with him was the driver dropping him off to school en route to taking his father to his swanky office.

Although Ritwik didn’t understand it then, part of the problem may have arisen from his unconscious reaction to the contrast between the class of boys – from well-heeled,
middle-class to upper middle-class families – who attended that school and his own lot. Always a progressive man, his father had decided that the children’s education came first.
‘Without knowledge of the English language, you’re crippled,’ he used to say. If sacrifices had to be made for it, they would be made in some other household department. No
compromise was ever to be made with the boys’ schooling: that was sacrosanct.

That, and books. Not in any superstitious way that was the general air in his uncles’ house, where he had to pick up books, paper, pens, pencils, erasers, pencil sharpeners –
anything remotely connected to the world of study – and touch them to his forehead and chest, in the quick gesture of prayer, if he touched them accidentally with his feet. Books and related
objects were sacred to Saraswati, the goddess of learning, and to bring feet anywhere near them was a mark of grave disrespect and would bring down a curse from her: she would never bless the
offender with the gift of learning. Ritwik did all these things out of fear and, later, out of habit, but his father taught him a different sanctity of books.

It started when he was six. His father bought him a slim, big book, so thin it could be used for swatting mosquitoes with the sound and motion of a slap, a slipper book, as it was called. The
title of the book was
Maya of Mohenjo-daro
and it told the story of Maya, also six, who lived in the ancient city of Mohenjo-daro and accompanied her father one morning to the Great Bath and
from there to the Great Granary via the paved and clean streets of the town, which were laid out in such a way that the winds cleaned them every day. At the end of the day, both father and daughter
made their way back home after he had bought her an orange woollen ball the colour of the setting sun. Happy, Maya returned home and was ready to go to bed when she noticed that her ball was like
the sun, now sinking below the horizon in a blaze of orange and red fire.

Ritwik read it over and over again, and asked his father scores of questions: ‘Where is Mohenjo-daro?’, ‘What is an ancient city?’, ‘How old is ancient?’,
‘What is civilization?’, ‘Can I have a fluffy orange ball the colour of the sun?’ This last was, of course, the main thrust. In a book almost wholly illustrated in sepia and
other shades of brown, the orange ball stood out like a lamp in the environing dark, almost ready to jump out of Maya’s dark hands into his. Every time he turned back to the page in which the
bright ball first appeared it would seem to Ritwik that an added luminosity had stolen into his room. He stared and stared at the ball as his father told him about things he barely understood
– Harappa, Indus Valley, ancient civilizations. In the book, Maya and her father were always smiling serenely. He didn’t know it was a strange longing that he felt each time he opened
it.

Whenever a book was demanded by Ritwik, it arrived. His father went and ordered it in ‘Study’, the tiny bookshop in Jadavpur Central Market, paid in advance, and the book appeared,
wrapped in crisp brown paper, in a week or two.
Baba, I’d like to join the school quiz team I need General Knowledge books the four volumes of the Bournvita Quiz Book. Or, Baba, volumes
five to seven of the Bournvita Book are out now can I have them soon.
This was at a time when the landlord, Khokababu, visited the house weekly to demand the back payments on arrears and his
father pretended to be too ill to go to work so that Khokababu could extend the deadline on sympathetic grounds. The household subsisted on rice and boiled potatoes for an entire week but there was
no stinting with Ritwik’s books, no complaints about how expensive they were. His mother said, ‘You’re spoilt, you know. Before the words fall from your lips, your father goes out
and does your bidding.’ He never understood whether she said this with disapproval or pride.

The Bournvita books were hardbound, the size of coffee-table books, with gold lettering on the spines. He guarded them with his life while his uncles looked at them with silent recrimination. On
one occasion he heard Pratim saying to his mother, ‘All this talk of no money, no money, no money, rents unpaid, electricity bills unpaid, we’re constantly under fire from Jamaibabu,
where’s all the money for these swish books coming from?’ Ritwik promptly hid them and only took them out when his uncles were out and when he was sure he could hide from the prying
eyes of Dida.

And then one day the
Collins Concise Encyclopaedia arrived
, stout, big and substantial, in its bright red dust jacket, twelve hundred-odd pages of close, compact type on thin, tissue-like
paper. It had black and white pictures as well: the bearded Louis Pasteur and Johannes Brahms; a severe yet benign Marie Curie; Keats reading an octavo volume with one hand on his forehead; a
Chardin still-life with a vase of flowers; winged seeds that are dispersed by the wind; Byron in Greek headgear. It cost forty rupees and he had gone out with his father to get it from
‘Study’. He had beamed all the way there and back while his father cautioned him, ‘Don’t let anyone find out, especially Dida and your uncles. Keep it in a safe place, it
costs a lot of money. . .’ Ritwik plunged into it like a fish released from captivity into the waters again.

The excitement of the book never wore off; instead it surprised him with its myriad forms. First, there was the excitement of discovering an entry that was familiar to him. It gave him a little
shiver of joy to see on the certainty of the printed page little areas of his mind précised into three or four close-knit lines. He looked up
Tagore, Rabindranath; photosynthesis;
mycology; Beethoven, Ludwig van; electrocardiogram
with the thrill of seeing known things in unfamiliar and new settings, in the prestige of print. It endorsed his knowledge in some kind of way
at the same time as it opened up new avenues in a proliferative dance. So
gene
led to
DNA, DNA
led to
double-helix
, from there to
Watson and Crick
through
meiosis
and
mitosis
,
cell division
to
McClintock, Barbara.
It was like the picture of nerve dendrons in his biology book, a web of paths and sub-paths, a familiar road suddenly leading
him down unknown ones till he ended up himself as a wide-open space from the initial little cluster he had started off as.

At other times it was a different joy of finding out totally unknown things. There was curiosity, bafflement and, once again, that intense chasing dance, the moves of some of which he could not
master for a long time. Someone had mentioned Bach in school so he came home and looked it up. There seemed to be a lot of them, and he didn’t know the first names, but he assumed it must be
Bach, Johann Sebastian
, because he had the maximum number of lines to his name. It led him on separate enquiries: a slowly enclosing one from
counterpoint, to canon, to fugue, to suite;
the other, a widening dance: Bach, Johann Sebastian; Rameau, Jean-Philippe; Albinoni, Tomasso; Vivaldi, Antonio; Couperin, Louis
... It reminded him of those funny chapters in the Old Testament
which went on and on and on about how Shem begat Arphaxad begat Salah begat Eber begat Peleg, theoretically stretching to the here and now, but this one was different: each name, each term was a
new world, not a dead proper noun on the page.

There was a lot he didn’t understand. When this happened, he committed the thing to memory or read it over and over again, ten times, fourteen times, repeating
counterpoint
The
term comes from the idea of note-againstnote, or point-against-point, the Latin for which is
punctus contra punctum
. It consists of melodic lines that are heard against one another, and are
woven together so that their individual notes harmonize. In this sense Counterpoint is the same as Polyphony,
repeating it in his head as a rapid chant, as though manipulating this stubborn
thing and chasing its strewn spores across other pages with such white-hot doggedness would suddenly make it give up its resilient secret. When he shut the book at last and looked around him, at
the bare whitewashed walls, the cobwebby mosquito nets in the windows, the gathering dust everywhere, he saw them differently, as though the whole world had been newly named. Was this what Brother
Matthew meant when he talked about new heaven, new earth?

Outside, another conflict had erupted. Pratim had been hiding for three days because Mr Malvya from across the street had told Ritwik’s mother that he had lent Pratim some money which he
said he would return in a week. ‘He wanted about three hundred rupees; he said you haven’t been able to pay the boys’ school fees for over two months now. I didn’t have
three hundred with me, I gave him a hundred and seventy-five,’ he said. He had been clearly embarrassed confronting her with their inability to pay for their children’s education.
Ritwik’s mother had been furious at this unashamed lie; she didn’t know which was worse – telling Mr Malvya that Pratim had lied or letting him continue to think that it was she
who had sent her brother out to beg for some money. Each was equally humiliating.

As always, it was Dida who had informed Pratim that everyone knew what he had done. So he had lain low for a few days, but it was a small, enclosed world, and as Dida frequently said, ‘The
world is round, remember; things have a habit of coming back full circle.’ Pratim too reached the completion of this particular circle a bit too quickly for his comfort and faced the wrath of
his sister and Jamaibabu.

‘We won’t be able to show our faces to our neighbours any more,’ Ritwik’s mother shouted. ‘The shame, the shame!’ Pratim decided to keep quiet and ride it
out; all this was so much bluster and wind, it would blow over soon. After all, everyone knew he couldn’t repay the money and, because he had used the boys’ school fees as an excuse,
Jamaibabu was going to be shamed into paying it back to save his face, never mind what the truth was. Besides, he didn’t care. It was embarrassing for them, not for him; he was going to keep
himself in the shadows for a few more weeks and everything would be buried under the weight of a new crisis.

Ritwik listened to the shouting outside with horror. His mother had begun crying, deep, wretched sobs of frustration and anger. There was going to be more of this when his father returned home.
She would have to tell him; another round of recriminations, bitterness, tension would ensue. That heave and slow rattle behind his ribs was starting again. He didn’t want to hear any more,
he just wanted the draining thudding inside to stop, stop now. He squeezed his eyes shut, tight tight tight, till there were exploding colours inside his eyeballs, and let his voice articulate the
words he had memorized from the page in front of him, to drown out the squabble:
sonata form:
. . .
regular sonata form movement falls into 3 main sections: 1. EXPOSITION (usually
containing two subjects, the first subject is in tonic key, the second subject . . .

‘What have you done with the money? WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH IT?’

in dominant; there may be further subjects), often repeated and giving way to 2. DEVELOPMENT (here the material from the Exposition . . .

‘. . . gambling or drinking? How low can you sink? Did you think about the boys when you did it? Did you? I try so hard to raise . . .’

This time with effort coiled up into a ball:
3. RECAPITULATION (in which the essential feature is the return of the second subject but now in the home key or the tonic, and the repetition of
Exposition material, though often with modification). The Recapitulation has a coda, which helps provide a proper feeling of finality. Some composers, including Beethoven, extend this coda into
what, to all intents and purposes, is a second Development section. The principle behind sonata form is key relationships.

Everything fell away. He was left just with a rustling page and the accumulative music of repeated words.

The space between the shit-brown door and the hinge offers him a strip of view, just a thin, long line of fluorescent-lit space. He has to keep one eye shut, though, and one
side of his face pressed to the cold metal of the door. If he shifts between the right eye and the left, the view from the crack changes in a parallactic dance. Right left, right left, right left.
They don’t add up to a seamless whole, there is either an overlap or a gap, he can’t understand which.