The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee Read Free Book Online

symmetrical ascending curves on either side that join in a final point at the top. Inside, in a blaze of red silk and gold, is housed the reigning deity of the Ghosh house, the gentle goddess of wealth, Lakshmi, with her faint, inscrutable almost-smile, her sheaf of paddy and her docile barn-owl. Sandhya had heard long ago that in her father-in-law’s family home in North Calcutta – there is very little mention of that chapter in his life – the goddess was stripped of her clothes after the puja and left naked throughout the year so that she couldn’t run away.
    The conducting of the annual puja on a full-moon night in late October was the most honourable duty that had been bestowed on Sandhya when she married into the Ghosh family. In time-honoured fashion, this is really the eldest daughter-in-law’s investiture as the earthly, domestic symbol of the goddess. It is she who channels Lakshmi’s blessings on the family. In her is vested, by an understanding of priestly transference, the household’s economic prosperity, well-being and harmonious daily life. Beside it, her other daily chores as eldest daughter-in-law – supervising the cook and cleaners and servants and household accounts, caring for her elderly parents-in-law, looking after their meals and medication, deciding which tasks can be ceded to the wives of her three brothers-in-law, keeping a family of twenty (including the servants) ticking over without hiccups or mishaps – all these appear as milk-and-rice, as uncomplicated, bland and digestible as infant fare. Now that Lakshmi Puja is a little over a month away, she can feel the gathering thrill again.
    But something is clouding the excitement this year and she already knows its name: Supratik. Over the last year he has lost so much weight that the shadow he casts, in all light, is nothing more than a thin line. She can swear that his eyes have grown bigger as he has started to look more cadaverous; set deep within his bony face, all sharp angles and a luxuriant black beard, they make him look like a starving mystic, a Naga sanyasi on the banks of the Ganga in Gomukh. He has certainly grown as quiet and uncommunicative. Never the most garrulous of children, Supratik, now a young man of twenty-one, barely speaks and, when he can be bothered to, it is only in monosyllables as if he is conserving all the energy he needs to hold on to his cage-like frame. There is an incandescence about him: the large, blazing black eyes are devouring in their intensity, and the opacity of his inner world, its unknowable resilience, makes Sandhya fear far more for him than any mother should for her child. When had the change begun? She cannot put a time to it. Does that make her a bad mother? Where does he disappear to for days on end? Where is he, out until so late at night that she has long lost any handle on when, or if, he returns? Why has he become like a furtive ghost? How can one’s own son, her flesh and blood, nurtured in her womb for nine months, become such a stranger? Who is he?
    Sandhya’s hands shake as she refills the terracotta lamps with oil and she spills some of it onto the marble counter. She has the cast of mind that sees omens in the number of birds congregated on telegraph wires and portents in a child’s killing of a scurrying spider or touching food with the left hand – nothing falls outside a predestined design – and the small spill grips her heart. Is Ma Lakshmi trying to tell her something? Is she offended? Has she, Sandhya, not done something right in the daily ceremony or in last year’s big puja? The very contiguity of her worries about Supratik and the oil spill makes her think of the minor accident as heaped with meaning about some imminent evil related to her son, maybe some danger that is about to befall him. As she mulls on this, a cold fear rises in her and she forgets to ring the bell that announces the evening in auspiciously.

I
    I want to set down an account of all that has