She was always on this edge of fury, like a restrained storm, about to burst any moment. Every aspect of her, every word, every intake of breath, every movement of her eyebrows seemed to have been dipped in an acid bath of anger; in an instant her relatively benign demeanour could change, as if some inner demon had flipped a trip switch with a sudden surge of current. She shouted and raged, the neighbours came out on to their balconies or heard every single word through their open windows and commented, ‘Bidisha-di is so scary. The boys fear her as if she were Yama.’ It was a commendation of the highest order: it meant the boys would grow up straight.
That was the thrust of Moral Science classes in school as well. The central metaphor was of an upright tree, growing up towards light, growing up tall and straight, because the careful gardener had tended it in its youth, guided its pliable green twigs and branches, supported it with twine, wire, stakes, trained its wayward shoots and tendrils around strong rods. Such was the importance of discipline and correction during the early years, when children could easily go astray, like the crooked plant which no one looked after so it became a jumbly, untidy mess and was uprooted with the noxious weeds and thrown into the flames. No teacher tired of this parable and, at home, Bidisha discovered that it sounded a sympathetic chord in her when she supervised the boys’ homework. Practically every week the parable was wheeled out in that storm-cloud tone of voice. Neighbours whispered respectfully, ‘Bidisha-di is a perfect mother. Look how well she disciplines her boys. Look how wonderfully she keeps them on the straight and narrow.’ Her fame spread, her name was on every tongue.
The incessant shouting became an issue between Bidisha and her husband. He was a kind, gentle, elderly man who believed children should be brought up with love and tenderness, should never be shouted at, and should never, never be hit. Whenever she went on the rampage, he quietly asked her to keep her voice down. ‘Why do you have to shout, Bidisha,’ he said, ‘why can’t you just make your point softly but firmly? There’s no need to bring the house down.’
This fanned the fire to a mighty crackling roar. ‘You keep quiet. You’re spoiling the boys; all this business of affection, affection, affection, it’s had them dancing on our heads,’ she shouted, her voice rising by a few more decibels as her sentence neared the end.
He made another gentle attempt. ‘Can’t you just speak to them? And how exactly do you see them behaving badly? They seem all right to me.’
She played her trump card. ‘You’re not helping things by criticizing me in front of everyone. This will later give the boys licence to do the same,’ she said. And then she lobbed the little grenade: ‘Fine, if you think you know best, you deal with them. You bring them up. You feed them, make them do their homework, take them to school and bring them back, you do everything.’ With every clause, her voice rose, till she almost spat out the last word and rushed out of the room. In the kitchen she could be heard handling utensils so noisily that they were afraid she was breaking half of them.
This silenced their father. He gave up in despair; he wasn’t combative enough. She could only be tackled by her means: shouting, aggression, that precarious positioning on the precipice of violence. He didn’t have those in him.
Meanwhile, the boys instinctively understood that this bit of friction between their parents was going to take its tolclass="underline" as soon as their father left the house, she was going to take it out on her sons. They waited in terror and not knowing what she was going to peg her fury on made it worse. It could be a spelling mistake in one of the sets of homework from school; not knowing ‘by heart’ the last Geography chapter, including every single punctuation mark; or a slip-up in the perfect arrangement of books in the school satchel, the biggest one at the bottom, the smallest one on top and everything in between in descending order of size; an unsharpened pencil in the pencil-box — it could be anything. She could even manufacture something to suit her purpose. They could only wait with churning stomachs and small, dimmed faces, but even during their mother’s worst excesses, they prayed and hoped their father wouldn’t intervene.
Ritwik was the convergent point of all these coiled energies in her. Her excuse was simple: he was the older of the two; he had to be flawless so that Aritra could follow in the track made by him. That was what Ritwik became, a bit of substantiating evidence around which the flux of daily life was organized. He was the furrow which her cultivating zeal carved out. He was to become her creation, her prize garden, her impeccable son. He was going to be her bulwark against everything that life had ranged in battle against her. Bend him, buckle him, mould him like wax, like clay, like putty, he’s mine, my love will build him anew, I’ll show them I’ve won, the ooze of oil comes only from pressing and bruising, the life in him is going to be the shine of oil, not the dullness of uncrushed seed and I’m going to be responsible for the radiance, she thought.
The first zone in which this experiment was put to practice was Ritwik’s education. Every evening, from six to nine, was homework time: she supervised this, in between cooking dinner for the family, with the sharpness of a predatory bird.
‘What subjects do you have for school tomorrow? Take out your diary, let me look at the timetable,’ she began, her voice already poised between command and threat.
Ritwik passed the diary to her.
‘Why can’t you open it to the right page and read it out? Can’t you read?’ she shouted.
‘But. . but you asked. .’ he muttered.
She cut it short, ‘Don’t dare answer back, do you understand?’ Her voice was beginning to hurt the inside of his eyes and the juddering place behind his ribs.
She took a quick look at the timetable. ‘Moral Science, Spelling & Dictation, English Language, Bengali, Science, History & Civics, Math. .’ she read out. ‘All right, take out your Moral Science textbook. I want you to learn the questions and answers at the end of the chapter you did in school today. After that, I’m going to give you a spelling and dictation test from the new lesson in Radiant Way Reader, “The Cook and the Crane”. I’m going to the kitchen now, I’ll be back in an hour. I want both subjects thoroughly prepared by that time. Otherwise you have trouble on your plate.’ Every word, every sentence, was a fusillade of command.
She thud-thudded off, leaving the scared boy fumbling with books, having trouble focusing on the words on the page. She returned almost immediately and shouted, ‘I want you to read the lessons out aloud, so I can hear you from the kitchen. I want to be sure you’re not wasting time.’
Ritwik mounted a feeble opposition to this. ‘Why can’t I do it silently?’
She deigned to reason with this one. ‘It’s because reading out aloud fixes the work in your head better because you read it and hear it.’
‘But I think I learn better if I read things in a murmur rather than aloud.’
‘You know better than I do?’ That fireform again. He gave in.
For the next half an hour or so, the cheap waxy pages of the Moral Science textbook, with their faint whiff of rancid glue, and the catechism-type exercise at the end of each chapter, became a compact prelude to terror. Its opening chords were so loud and consuming in his ears and his blood that the words on the page were either not fixable or they were meaningless. Why must we love, honour and obey God? We must love, honour and obey God because He made us in His image and likeness, put us in this beautiful world to enjoy His goodness and generosity, blessed us with life and gave us the chance to glorify Him. He also gave us parents to love and take care of us. They were in an opaque code, he could have been reading hieroglyphics; he was so scared that willing his voice to give sound to them, one by one, could not give them any meaning. How could he ever learn all this ‘by heart’ if they never moved from mark to meaning?