The Lives of Others (10 page)

Baishakhi goes with her parents to the pandal for anjali around noon. She sees Shobhon, an ardent worker in the Puja Committee, as busy as clockwork with some other young men, and looks through him. She has known that she will see him and, though she does not give the slightest indication of having done so, he knows that she has clocked him and she knows that he knows. As she stands at the bottom of the stage, between her parents, trying to gather her mind to the gravitas of communal worship, she notices that Shobhon has taken it upon himself to distribute the flowers for anjali to the people gathered for worship. The sudden thudding of her heart is raucous to her own ears: what is he
doing
? She imagines every eye there in the pandal on them. She is certain Baba and Ma, flanking her closely, almost touching her sides, can feel the heat radiating off her. When Shobhon reaches them, she can barely bring herself to put her hand into the big basket of flowers to pick out a small handful of marigold petals. She imagines a spectral brush of his arm against her fingers as he moves on to her mother, and then to the next person and then the next along the row, perfectly composed, cool and unruffled, as if she were only just another familiar neighbourly face. Baishakhi keeps her head resolutely down. Her face is burning. Coursing through her heart and mind is a seam of a delicious mixture of outrage, fear and awe at Shobhon’s foolhardiness.

What is said about the darkest spot being directly under the light is nowhere more true than of the area behind the puja pandal: all that crammed symphony of festival lighting barely a few yards away does not have much effect on the dark here. Here the jutting ribs and carcass of the pandal have not received the care of being covered up with yards of coloured cloth; here you have the feeling of being in the wings of the makeshift stage of a travelling theatre company in the provinces, all bamboo, old tarpaulin, discarded nails, coiled snakes of rough ropes, damp earth, patchy clumps of tough, unruly grass. Here Baishakhi stands, on ashtami evening, quivering with fear that someone has spied her slipping into the shadows at the back of the pandal. If someone has noticed a young girl negotiating her way through the narrow gap on the side of the big tent, they would indeed have been alerted enough to ask themselves why she was heading for the back, the discarded side as it were: a tryst with someone perhaps?

Chhaya has lured Priyo into sitting with her on the balcony on the first floor –
Let’s go and look at people from the verandah before we go out later in the evening, the crush of people will be terrible now, it’ll certainly ease
– and from their vantage position they have an unimpeded view of the milling crowd, the pandal, the sea of faces and heads where the known mingle with the unknown. The PA system airs songs from the hit film
An Evening in Paris
. Chhaya chatters on, ‘Look, look, Rupa-boüdi is wearing a parrot-green silk-tangail. Gorgeous! Pity her face is so scarred by that terrible teenage acne. O ma, Pushpa-babu has come out too, he’s using his cane, someone’s helping him. Priyo, isn’t that Pushpa-babu? Not very considerate of them to have let the old, ill man out at this peak sightseeing hour.’

Priyo gets up and peers. ‘Yes, it is. His first time in years, no?’

‘First time since we heard he was not well. We should persuade Baba to go out too.’

Then the meandering aimlessness of all this ends as the grail swims into view. Chhaya tugs at Priyo’s sleeve and says in a voice pitched perfectly between surprise and uncertainty, ‘Priyo, look, isn’t that Buli? Why is she trying to go to the back of the pandal? Quick, quick, she’s about to disappear.’

Priyo asks, ‘Where? Where?’ before he manages to pick out the flash of an orange kurta, which, like a rare visitation from a species of butterfly assumed to be lost, disappears almost as soon as it has been spotted. ‘Couldn’t make out anything, it’s so dark. Are you sure?’

Chhaya, with measured casualness, then says, ‘Now look, isn’t that our next-door neighbour’s son, Shobhon, going there now?’

Priyo, suddenly alert, sharp, looks again, this time with more focused intent.

Yes, it is.

Baishakhi, after much coaxing, has laid her head on Shobhon’s chest. He has clinched the embrace with an apposite line from a new film,
Aamne Samne
, starring Shashi Kapoor and Sharmila Tagore. He holds her close to him, trying to move, as subtly, as imperceptibly as he can, from stroking her back to stroking her sides. All he wants to do is fondle her breasts, but he will have to be very, very slow and cunning. Baishakhi, beginning to feel as if she is free-falling towards a floor that isn’t there, has at last relinquished her nervous attention to all kinds of sounds that could announce an intruder.

A sudden crashing, like a miniature stampede, and rapidly advancing voices make them spring up, but, frozen by utter panic, they remain entangled when Baishakhi’s father and mother appear like vengeful, unappeasable gods.

To the background music of
An Evening in Paris
, distorted ever so slightly by the volume of its amplification, thrilled neighbours see a weeping Baishakhi being frogmarched home by her parents, both of whose faces are black and brimful with imminent thunder.

Severe weather rips through the Ghosh home and, when not inflicting damage, it sits brooding, umbrous, threatening, a pall over day-to-day activity. The frenzy first. Several rounds of immediate disciplining follow the discovery of Baishakhi: intense interrogation by her mother, physical punishment in the form of generous slapping during the questioning sessions, locking the girl in her room. All of these are accompanied by hysterically raised voices. Crueller measures follow. A lock is added to the door to the terrace. It remains shut day and night, and Purnima holds the only key to it. Baishakhi is forbidden to leave the house. When school reopens after the puja holidays, she is to be accompanied there and received at the gates after school is over and chaperoned back home. She cannot meet any of her friends unless they come to see her at home. These visiting friends are questioned fiercely by Purnima and asked if they are carrying letters or acting as go-betweens in any capacity. If she could, she would have frisked them. There is a clotted silence in the house, pulsating with reproach and judgement; Baishakhi feels she is being treated like a pariah, which indeed she is. All eyes are upon her, the elders’ dark with accusation that she has brought shame upon herself and the name of the Ghoshes; the children’s awed, embarrassed and a bit frightened, because they know she has done something terrible, but what exactly they have not been told. They are shielded from the whole truth in case it corrupts their morals. There is nothing new or unusual in all this; it runs along the well-ploughed furrows of middle-class Bengali life.

Chhaya seems to be the one who is most eloquently upset. She speaks of it at every mealtime and will not let the topic drop off the conversational horizon. ‘Eeesh, how shaming the whole thing! What are people thinking about us? Being caught with a loafer . . .’ and lets the silence carry the rest. At other times, she tries another tack, her voice modulated to the articulation of sympathy: ‘But I hope the girl is all right. Who knows what advantage has been taken of the poor flower by that immoral man?’ The silence after this is even more damning. No one notices how animated she has suddenly become, how buzzed, as if a hidden ecstasy is exerting her to too keen and bright an enthusiasm.

As a consequence of this unfolding drama, bijaya, two days after Baishakhi is caught, is a muffled affair. But tradition has to be upheld at all costs, so the annual practice of buying quantities of assorted sweets from Girish Ghosh and Putiram is observed faithfully this year too. Adinath is driven to North Calcutta and back by Gagan, the boot of the Ambassador full of terracotta pots and paper boxes and cartons. Certain things cannot be done this year, such as allowing Baishakhi to go to the puja pandal to watch the enormous statue of the goddess being transferred by the young men of the neighbourhood from the stage to the lorry that will take it to Babughat for the immersion ceremony. Not a single person stays at home during this dismantling; it is the one event of the festival that comes close to a spectacle. This year Purnima stays indoors with Baishakhi, guarding her with the vigilance of a trained dog. They do not go to their balcony to watch the preparation for the final immersion, in case Baishakhi and Shobhon catch sight of each other. The rest of the Ghosh family stays in too, and misses seeing off Durga and her offspring on the three tempos hired for the occasion, because they are apprehensive of the neighbours’ acute curiosity, their weighted, probing gaze. They watch from their respective verandahs.

The tempos, packed with scores of men and children holding onto the effigies, leave Basanta Bose Road at a crawl. They are preceded by an entourage of people, a band, and a group of locals who dance along to the music the band plays as the pageant makes its creeping progress to Babughat. When this farewell crowd departs, bijaya is officially declared. In the Ghosh house, wives bend down to touch the feet of their husbands with their right hands and bring the hands forward to their foreheads and then to their chests in the gesture of pranam; sons and daughters do the same to their parents and elders, younger relations to older, and the men embrace each other three times in quick succession. The sweets are distributed and the stricken looks resulting from Baishakhi’s intransigence two days ago – it is difficult to estimate where the genuine strickenness ends and its self-conscious enactment begins – are relaxed enough to allow the usual bijaya practices to proceed.

Purba, on the one evening she is suffered to come to the grand living room on the first floor and mingle relatively freely, so that everyone else can have the desirably short-lived luxury of playing One Big Happy Family, is, in reality, on menial duty, as always; she stands in a corner and hands out plates of sweets, clears away empty cups and saucers, refills glasses with water, even though there is a small fleet of servants to do these chores. For once, Charubala does not bark at her, but files away, for later use, the fact that she gives two pantuas each to Sona and Kalyani when she knows she is not supposed to give them more than one. Charubala chooses to ignore that it is Supratik who insists that Purba gives extra sweets to her children; she does not have to, thinks Charubala, just because someone is persistently asking her to do it, does she? Purba could have been equally obstinate in not giving in. A hot flash of irritation blooms inside the old woman, but now is not the time. She cannot even have the satisfaction of baring her teeth at Sona and Kalyani; Supratik is teaching them a game that involves paper and pen and they are absolutely rapt. It will have to wait.

On the morning after, a few minutes into her matutinal duties in the prayer room, Sandhya discovers the following note in a sealed envelope at the foot of the statuette of the goddess Lakshmi:

Ma, I feel exhausted with consuming, with taking and grabbing and using. I am so bloated that I feel I cannot breathe any more. I am leaving to find some air, some place where I shall be able to purge myself, push back against the life given me and make my own. I feel I live in a borrowed house. It’s time to find my own. Trying to discover my whereabouts won’t get you anywhere, so save that energy; you might find you need it for something else. I’ll write periodically to let you know I’m alive. Forgive me. Yours, Supratik.

II

I left the city to work with landless peasants, the sharecroppers, wage-labourers and impoverished tenants who were the backbone of our movement. My job was to go to the villages and organise them into armed struggle.

That was the only way – to seize power, one field, one village, one district at a time.
1
) Formation of armed squads in every village;
2
) collection of arms by seizing them from class enemies and the police;
3
) seizure of crops and arrangements for hiding them;
4
) constant propagation of the politics of armed struggle – these were our aims, outlined by Chairman Mao first and then Charu Mazumdar. We went to indigent agricultural areas where feudalism was still the order of the day, where the exploitation of farmers by jotedaars and moneylenders and landowners was at its inhuman worst. Along the Bengal–Bihar–Orissa borderlands this feudalism was supplemented by the plight of the tribal peoples whose ancient lands had been taken from them and who had been reduced to a form of slavery. Or else they had run away into the forests, hoping for some kind of life in hiding.

Of the people I knew, three groups went to the Gopiballabhpur area in south Medinipur, near the border with Orissa; another two, where Purulia edged into Bihar. I formed a group with Samir and Dhiren. Samir, from Naktala, was a Part II Bengali Honours student at Bangabashi, a budding poet and short-story writer, also reputed to be the brightest student his department had seen in the last twenty-five years. He had got record marks in his Part I exams last year. How he had pulled off that trick, given that all his time was devoted to ‘doing politics’, no one knew, but it seemed unlikely he was going to be able to hold onto his first in Part II. Or even sit his exams. How could he? He had abandoned all that and thrown in his lot with the roving revolutionaries. A classic rice-eating, timorous, creature-comforts-loving, head-in-the-clouds Bengali, you’d think, to look at him, and he was all those things, but behind that there was a core of steel. It took me a while to discover that.

Dhiren, on the other hand, had the toughness of someone who had known only want in his life. Mind you, Samir didn’t come from a particularly well-off family – his father was a clerk in the Electric Supply Corporation – but he and his family lived in a house built by his grandfather, so at least they had a roof over their heads that they could call their own. Dhiren came from Uttarpara. His father worked in a light-bulb factory, which had seen its entire workforce go on strike against its owners’ decision to fire nearly a quarter of them; the factory had been shut for three years now. The family had been without an income for that period. Meanwhile, Dhiren, the eldest son, on whose BCom degree course in City College the family’s hopes of sustenance rested, had barely attended college, choosing to change the world instead of adding to its aggregate of unquestioning petty-bourgeois invertebrates.