Family Matters

Neel Mukherjee’s second novel gives us the Calcutta family in all its crumbling glory.

Almost by definition, the great Calcutta novel of the 20th Century—and there are plenty—must include the following: the Naxalite movement, the bombing of Calcutta by the Japanese, Durga Puja, Mohun Bagan’s victory in 1911, the rise of new money, the decline of local gentility, the lives of servants and maids, the daughter who cannot be married off, incest (real or hinted at), a family home with the balcony running around its central courtyard, Sonagachhi (the red light area), one brilliant student, lots of Bengali food and wedding ceremonies.

For a novelist harbouring the ambition of writing such a novel, it would be easy to fall into the trap of checklist fiction—and award-winning writer Neel Mukherjee’s second novel, The Lives of Others, gets dangerously close. Chronicling the dwindling fortunes of the Ghosh family for much of the 20th century, it covers all of this common ground and ends with the Naxalite movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. But Mukherjee also adds more nuanced elements and plays with the formula a little. So, we have the mathematical genius, forbidden love between brother and sister, the long-standing servant who is betrayed, all in a new mould. If The Lives of Others goes a longer distance it is because, as the title suggests, the novel never settles into a comfortable narration of intra- family drama from the point of view of the ubiquitous observer. Instead, it constantly examines each of the people through shifting perspectives, sometimes stepping into their minds, at other times withdrawing to a distance.

The joint family is a superb invention, if only for the purpose of literature. No one in the Ghosh family—its patriarch and his wife, their four sons, one spinster daughter and numerous grandchildren—quite understands the other. Prafullanath has built a small business empire in the paper industry from scratch, and is too caught up in battling for its expansion and, later, survival, to spare a glance for any of his children. His daughter Chhaya, passed over for marriage, wreaks emotional and physical havoc. Adinath, the eldest, and his wife Sandhya are almost faceless creatures, while his brother Priyonath is too caught up in his personal anguish and business responsibilities to empathise with any of them. The others, too, follow their private roads to their personal hells. Despite the visible as well as beneath- the-radar family bonds between them, each individual here is an island, and can only look upon the other members of the family from a distance. This inability to understand the lives of these familiar others, despite the fact that they hail from the same familial, architectural, linguistic and cultural space, leads to the conflicts that power the story.

The Ghoshes live on money made from business enterprises built through a combination of fortuitousness and unethical means, money that is being eroded under the continued onslaught of the World War and, later, industrial unrest. Their hereditary entitlements, overflowing plates and excessive jewellery are shown up as obscene not only by starvation deaths in Calcutta and in the countryside, but by the challenges thrown in its face by one of its grandsons, Supratik, the urban revolutionary whose journals form a counterpoint to the story of his family.

In its devastating detail—lavished on everything from clothes and ornaments to food and mathematical formulae— this novel leads us to that all-Indian clash between lives of material excess and lives of abject deprivation and poverty. But while there is a complex arc in the dramatic, even melodramatic, incidents and accidents that assault three generations of the Ghosh family, the heart of this work lies in what Supratik is told by the ancient family retainer Madan: “Boro-babu, the world does not change, you destroy yourself trying to change it, but it remains as it is. The world is very big and we are very small. Why cause people who love you to go through such misery because of it?”

There you have it: the dilemma of choice, between betterment of the world and protecting those who love you. Supratik, of course, rejects the possibility that familial protection can be more important than the revolution, but circumstances lead him to betray the cause of the oppressed twice over.

Is this a dilemma powerful enough to inform every leaf of this 500-page work? Much of the richness of incidents in the novel does not, ultimately, add up. Mukherjee’s first novel, Past Continuous—which juxtaposed a young man’s journey away from home and his confrontation with his own sexual identity with the tale of Miss Gilby, Bimala’s English music teacher in Tagore’s The Home and the World—was a searing journey through the protagonists’s life. But the events here do not lead to a destination grand enough to justify the wandering.

Still, Mukherjee brings Calcutta and the Bengali life alive in two remarkable ways in this book. The first is through his use of dialogue, where he translates Bengali idioms and phrases quite literally: ‘Rush me like this, it will go up to my head’, or, ‘You spend so much time with the boy, eating the worms in his ears’. While only those who know the language will realise this, the obvious deviations will alert all readers; they are really hearing a different language in their heads.

The second achievement in this regard is the use of food. What is cooked and served in the Ghosh family is a more telling commentary on the relationships and hierarchies within the family than any verbal description. Food is also a potent medium for conveying deprivation. In one telling sequence, the spoilt child Somnath plays cruel tricks with the gruel that the kindly servant has just ladled out to starving paupers desperate for some food. In another, the breaking of a basic culinary tenet—of never mixing stale food with fresh—becomes a potent symbol for a daughter- in-law’s minor rebellion. And, of course, there are the half- cooked, coarse vegetables that Supratik has to eat in the jungles and villages as a party worker and, later, as a fugitive.

With its foregrounding of the Naxalite movement, The Lives of Others is bound to elicit comparison with Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowlands, which also built its narrative around the life, death and impact of one of two brothers taking up arms for the Naxal cause. But the similarity ends there; while Lahiri’s novel soars beyond the movement to the individual lives of lonely people, Mukherjee uses it as an end in itself and a climax of sorts.

Mukherjee paints his scenes vividly, from rooftop flirtation to kinky sex gone bad to police torture, even: ‘Their ranks are swelled to six now, but, it is obvious from the moment they enter, that this Superintendent … will not be participating; he sets himself slightly apart … The remaining man, kind-looking, almost fatherly, with chubby cheeks and a luxuriant ink-black moustache, turns to the SP and makes a querying motion with his head; the SP nods, once, calmly, then moves to stand behind Supratik’s head, from where he cannot see him. Chubby Cheeks takes out a short length of what looks a nylon rope and a pair of pliers from the pocket of his voluminous khaki trousers and advances towards Supratik.’

For all his skills, though, Mukherjee draws up characters who embody one or two particular traits too strongly for them to feel completely real: Madan, the family retainer, has a heart of gold; Suranjan, Supratik’s brother, is the classic wastrel. Even with the authenticity of their experiences, one cannot help feeling that these individuals are not the wonderful bundles of contradictions people are in real life.

The Lives of Others is a novel for the outsider. This work will not tell the insider who is familiar with the history and the city something he doesn’t know. Perhaps that is just as well: Calcuttans have lived too much through the success and failure of their city to have to read about it again. The bibliotourist, however, will delight in this recreation of the city’s past and its inhabitants; particularly in their doomed attempts at bringing about change.

Neel MukherjeeRandom House IndiaThe lives of others