The Lives of Others

Looking at others life, but seeing your own! 

What a marvelous book and I wished it never ended. This is one of those books which makes me realise why do I even read.  Which is to look at others life to understand my own. The complex maze of a joint family with complex characters living in such close parameters but hiding their real selves in the layers of their conscious. The author Neel Mukherjee details nuances of each character evolved over time thru their history of emotional, social and physical growth. The social hierarchy, family matriarchy, political environment, emancipation of women mixed with underlying hatred and secrets leads to the fall of a family thru generations giving you the feels of Marquez epic 100 years of solitude. What more is there to say... the previous lines from the book tell you that it’s worth reading every word of it. 

The accuracy or incorrectness of what her mother in law is accusing her of it irrelevant; the fact that it has been articulated means that a certain set of assumptions has been made about her character and given public existence in the form of an utterance. It is in the nature of flung mud that some of it sticks. 

When the don boscoschool bus passes theirs, the girls lean out of the windows to shout in chorus, 'Donkey boys, donkey boys', to the boys' combined retort of 'Camel girls, camel girls'. 

There was no intentional or premeditated cruelty in these games, not always, much of it had an anthropological interest for the perpetrators. Chhaya found her little brother between the ages of three and four so edible sweet that she wanted to handle him much like a comestible, presented in portion sizes pieces to devour. She found her teeth clenching when she ran her hand through his curls, her hands notched with the desire to inflict pain; often she tightened her fist, his hair caught in it, one step beyond the acceptable boundary between petting and something murkier, more elemental. As soon as Som yelped, she retreated to cosier ground. Often while squeezing his chubby cheeks, she would dig her fingers in so that she could feel his gums and the roots of his teeth through the intervening membrane of skin and flesh and fat, and Som would start crying. 

A new kind of knowledge surprised him as he looked at the dark hair, oiled down, combed and parted on the left, on his sons head. Did they all become their own persons, these creatures you gave birth to, these children whom you thought were an extension of your own self, endowed with your features, with aspect of your own personality and character, but who in the end came asunder and floated away from you, no longer like your arm or your leg, doing what you willed them to do, but puppets that suddenly became animated, only to rebel and set off on their own? 

She became a mistress of the art of insinuation. Those childish tags, 'You told him not to', 'He swore me to silence', were now dropped. She had an unerring knack of sniffing out the balance of power between people and she played it for all she could. Her veins and arteries ran with a bitter fluid, not blood. 

But one aspect of the hardship of like in villages I must truthfully confess to you - more that going hungry or the absence of tippets, was the weight of time. 

A legendary lecatire given by so and so in presidency college in 1926, it's iconic status related by a 19 year old in 1965 with the words 'You needed to be there to feel the goosebumps'. The memory of a martinet kept alive by stories recounting his disciplinary measures from fifty years ago, handed down a dendritic chain of people across the generations. This is the way this world runs: self mythologising through anecdotes proliferating like a particularly virulent strain of virus. Chatter chatter chatter, always the chatter of what others did and others said in a golden age of an unrecoverable past. 

Bhola tried to divert his attention by extemporising on a story, an old trick, but to far an effective one. But, for the first time, the words that emerged were not in the shared private language; the words began to be spun in children's Bengali, ordinary, comprehensible, reassuring. And so Bhola's logorrhoea began to mutate into story telling, the transparent, sense filled words now a clear pane of glass between sound and meaning, offering a view of a fanatically confabulatrd world of woof fairies, incarnations and metempsychosis, of imaginary bears and birds and their magical powers, of mangoes so sour that a whole forest of monkeys was struck dumb after eating them off the trees... and so it went on, over the years. 

A particularly colourful story about speaking fish that could transform themselves into malignant spirits residing in tamarind trees. 

The story of Byangoma and Byangomi, the bird couple who knew the fates of the princes and men who fell asleep under the tree in which they lived, the birds who talked about the future of those mortals, alerting them to what was to come.