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?
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.