The Lives of Others by Mukherjee Neel

Author:Mukherjee, Neel [Mukherjee, Neel]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2014-05-21T22:00:00+00:00

Finally, after weeks of mental preparation, Swapan Adhikari sits down to write to his friend Ayan Basu, now an associate professor of mathematics – ‘the one who left’, the one he was supposed to join, until fate dealt him a crippling card . . .

Dear Ayan, he begins:

I hope this finds you in good health and spirits. I have no excuse for the large gap that has fallen between this and your last letter to me except to cite the usual mess that is life. But I’m writing to you with a request you may well find a bit unusual. A little bit of the back-story, first. You may find it unbelievable too, as I did, but please be patient. There is a boy in my school, a Swarnendu Ghosh, thirteen going on fourteen, in Class Seven.

He stops there. How can he take it forward, short of sending Ayan the boy’s exercise book for him to experience it first hand? What else can he add about Swarnendu? The gentle questioning of the boy in the staffroom and outside the school yielded up very little. He had the strange capacity of returning pure silence to direct questions in a way that made the interrogator feel intrusive and, ultimately, embarrassed. It was Swapan Adhikari who had felt flustered and discomfited, as if the ordinary power dynamics between teacher and pupil had been reversed. About the mathematics, the boy had not been able to say anything at all except to confirm that it was his own work, done unaided in his private leisure time.

‘I . . . I think . . . and then . . . then the numbers take me from . . . from one step to another,’ he had said haltingly, struggling to put words to experience.

Other information too was minimal; he had refused to talk about his parents or any other members of his family, but had told Swapan Adhikari which school he had attended before he came to St Lawrence. Now, writing about him to Ayan, he realises that the boy is an absence, a geometric gap bounded by the facets of the different elements of analytic number theory that he had tried to think about.

A tiny spark at lunch. The family has long stopped sitting down together to eat, a result of the absence of Sandhya’s kind, superintending eye. Purnima and Charubala, not on talking terms for a good while now, go through the motions of sitting at the same table around half-past one or two every afternoon, even though they do not speak to each other directly. If this non-communication was a cause of active tension when the hostilities began, now it has calcified into something inorganic, like a darkening water mark down an external wall, that can be ignored; it seems the natural course of things. The age-old oppugnant relationship between mother and daughter-in-law in this instance is an apparently paradoxical variant: Purnima feels she has failed to elevate her husband to the top position in Charubala’s regard.

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