The Lives of Others Read Online Free PDF

‘the good name of the Ghosh family will lie in the dust. Haven’t you done enough to make us suffer? I knew from the very beginning that you were trouble, I told your father-in-law, when the match was being made, Listen, she comes from a lower-caste family, her father is a mere postal worker, it’s not right that such a girl should come into our family , but he didn’t listen. Now we are all reaping the cost.’ Charubala, of course, was mindful that the Ghoshes were not perched on a high rung of the caste-ladder, so she was grateful to have a few upon whom she could look down. The gratitude expressed itself as venom for those below.
    Years of this kind of unceasing torrent have somewhat blunted but not eliminated, not by any measure, the keenness of the hurt and humiliation Purba feels when faced with it. She wants the ground to open up and swallow her. She shuts her eyes, hoping that when she opens them, she will discover all this is a bad dream, but the trick fails her yet again.
    ‘If I see you on the roof in the evening, I will have to take other measures. I shall see then how much appetite for secret love you have when you’re starving.’
    If she had any residue of dignity left, she would have long run out of the room, Purba thinks, but she has fallen far, far below that. Even anger at being treated like this has been burned out of her. What remains is a dead weight of darkness. Her eyes rest on the powder-blue sheets and pillowcases and the stripy blue and yellow tasselled bedcover. If she looks up, she knows she will see the rolled-up mosquito net, a large, crumpled, brooding bird, above the bedposts, but she cannot move her head or her eyes to glance upwards. There is no salvation to be had from the objects in the world.
    Supported by his silver-tipped cane, Prafullanath hobbles to the room adjacent to his bedroom, towards his daily ritual of early evening tea, unchanged for the last twenty years. It is the second and last time he leaves his bed during the day, for an hour, to sit, imprisoned in the hardened angularities of his pain, staring at the Charu Paper & Sons (Pvt. Ltd) calendar on the opposite wall, a cup of unsweetened, milky tea in his hands tilting slowly to spill out half its tepid contents onto the saucer and sometimes onto his pyjama.
    Prafullanath waits for Madan to bring his tea and a couple of Marie biscuits and with them, invariably, he notes with mounting dread, the compulsive jabbering. Ever since the upheavals involving Madan’s son, Dulal, last year, it has been deeply uncomfortable for Prafullanath to be alone in a room with him; and these teatimes, where Madan, in blithe denial, has not eased off his habitual pointless chatter, as if nothing in the recent past has happened to make him as uncomfortable as Prafullanath in each other’s presence, have been especially excruciating. The old man has toyed with the idea of asking Madan to stop jabbering, has spent months appearing to be conspicuously restless and impatient and distracted, often cutting him short and changing the topic, but the cook has persisted with such terrier-like tenacity, apparently oblivious to the signals being given out, that Prafullanath has accepted this small defeat and has locked himself away deeper inside his own head, while Madan has wittered on about chicken stew and how fish in mustard sauce gives you hyperacidity and about Patit, the driver, drinking, and Gagan, the general dogsbody, being caught gambling at shatta in the slums across the railway lines . . . Does Madan seriously think that Prafullanath, at the age of almost seventy, arthritic, diabetic, with an ischaemic heart and two heart attacks already behind him, is interested in these paltry nothings? Besides, domestic servants are the women’s domain; he does not remember if he has ever had a word with Charu, his wife, about this excess in Madan, now grown so trying. He must remember to talk to her tonight and see if she can arrange for it to stop;