‘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.