Read Online The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee - Free Book Online Page A

the cascading head, green, blue and red, blink on and off, as do the yellow lights of the column, and the whole thing gives the magical impression of an upward-flowing capital of water spewing into a polite fountain at the head. This is the pièce de résistance of the lighting display. These displays are competitive affairs between neighbourhoods, but this year everyone in Basanta Bose Road looks smug in the knowledge that they have the edge over their rivals’ parsimonious offerings of coloured fluorescent tubes and strings of fairy lights hung on trees and across balconies. The lighting will be turned on in three days’ time.
    A welcoming arch at the entrance to the pandal spells out in lights ‘Sharodiya shubhechha’, autumn good wishes, and the fixture, again made out of lights only, on the water tank on the top of the Dasgupta house features an animated boy kicking a football. The football appears in staccato stasis in three different points of its parabolic trajectory, then reappears, in a slightly Sisyphean manner, at the foot of the kicking boy, for him to start all over again. There is also the light-installation marking the twentieth anniversary of Independence: the Indian tricolour, flanked by one freedom-fighter, Netaji Shubhas Chandra Bose, and one poet, Rabindranath Tagore, has been made to do an impression of stop–start fluttering. Gandhi is, of course, pointedly left out and the light-manufacturers have not tried to simulate a breeze waving Tagore’s long beard. Words of light on top say ‘Twenty Years of Independence 1947–1967’. But everyone agrees that although this has its novelty value, it is nothing compared to those flowing palm trees of light.
    In the brimming light of the early morning a gauzy mist lies on the ground in shreds and patches, a mist so thin that you have to look away and then quickly back to perceive it; gazed at for too long, it disappears. The garden at the back of the Ghosh house is full of fragrant shiuli, some flowers having fallen on the grass in the night, making that small section of the garden look like a green shawl flecked with white in one corner. If you look minutely, you can pick out the orange stalks of the flowers; a subtler, more delicately patterned shawl.
    There is the smell of puja in the air: a crisp, cool, weightless sensation. In the collective Bengali imagination, fields of kaash phul, with their enormous plumes of satiny cream flowers, bowing gracefully to the clement autumn breeze, are easily visualised, although there are no patches of pampas grass to be seen anywhere, not in this part of the city anyway. And to the collective ear the sound of the dhaak, beaten to a whole complex repertoire of rhythms and syncopations by the dhaaki, is already veering on the air, phrasing a sudden sentence in the mind of someone here, a group of words spoken by someone there, to follow the beat and curve of its percussive line. With one voice, the choir made up of the grass, the drum, the sky, the dew sings out, ‘Holiday, holiday, holiday’.
    Knowing well that there will be a possessive rush to grab the puja special autumn issue of Ultorath between Ma, Pishi, Boro-kaki and herself, Baishakhi picks up the family copy, which has arrived that very morning along with bumper issues of Nabokallol , Anandamela (for the children, she thinks derisively) and Ananda Bazar Patrika , and smuggles it to her room. She has a quick flick through it – novels by Ashapurna Devi, Bimal Kar, Bimal Mitra, Shankar. Two years earlier the serialised novels in Ultorath and Nabokallol would have been forbidden reading for her, on the grounds that they were for adults, and she would have been asked to stick to Anandamela , but those rules have now been relaxed somewhat, although she is not wholly confident that her mother or Pishi will not tell her off if she is caught with her head buried in either of these magazines. She hides the copy under her pillows and decides to avoid any possible