Free The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee Page A

First, they relaxed the category of the groom’s profession. In the beginning, nothing but doctors and engineers would do, particularly with the parenthetical word ‘London’ or ‘Edinburgh’ after FRCS or MSc, but a while later that ‘London’ or ‘Edinburgh’ clause was silently dropped. Then they relinquished their hold on FRCS and MSc; an ordinary MBBS or BSc would suffice. Soon, those requirements too fell away as the search was broadened (diluted, some said) to other professions – lawyers, lecturers, businessmen. From here, it climbed down further to white-collar worker, bank-teller, government employee, school teacher, even, at the final, desperate stages, clerk.
    When even this didn’t produce a husband for Chhaya, other variables were tinkered with and revised. The dowry money climbed up by a factor of 1.5 with every rejection; to a refrigerator and cooking range were added a gramophone, a flat in Purna Das Road. Then the age of the candidates was relaxed – it had to be, Chhaya was not getting any younger – followed by an attendant loosening of criteria in the looks department. The words ‘fair’, ‘young’, ‘handsome’ were all deleted from the matrimonial ads in the newspapers. Ads put exclusively in the matrimonial columns of the English dailies – The Statesman , Amrita Bazar Patrika – started migrating furtively to the Bengali broadsheets, Ananda Bazar Patrika , even Jugantar . Charubala had a new set of portrait photographs taken of her daughter by Robin-da, the neighbourhood’s professional photographer. It emerged during these sessions that her face had looked too polygonal in the previous pictures, her chin and jaws too prominent, her forehead too broad. Quantities of make-up and snow and powder were applied so that the fact of her dark complexion would not be revealed to the groom’s family, at least not right at the beginning. The lighting was ramped up, cruel suns were shone on Chhaya’s face and she was made to look very slightly away from the lens, as if something was just beginning to catch her attention outside the frame, so that the camera would not be able to capture the fact that she was cross-eyed.
    Herein lay the rub. Chhaya had been born preternaturally dark and with a squint that was not immediately noticeable – it depended on the light and the angle of her head and how obliquely she turned her gaze on something – but once it was detected it was impossible to unknow it. All those crucial final questions, such as ‘And do you cook?’ or ‘Will you stop working once you get married?’, were really an occluded reaction to that detection; an irreversible decision had already been made.
    Her very name, which meant ‘shadow’, was a backhanded acknowledgement by her parents of the undeniable and omnipresent fact of her complexion. Through her girlhood and adolescence the less well-behaved girls in her school and the less decorous people of Basanta Bose Road had called her by several derogatory names, Kali , Kelti , all to do with her skin colour. Never to her face, of course, but they also did not make a great secret of it; a stage-whisper, a catcall, an overheard remark as she passed the loafers gathered outside Bhawanipur Tutorial Home: all these brought home to her, relentlessly, the inescapability of her skin colour. Stringent regimes of applying to her face ground red lentils, the cream top of whole milk, and dried orange peel made into a paste with cream had not wrought any change. The patented and unpatented whitening creams and lotions available in the shops had proved equally deceitful. Throughout all this, Charubala consoled and encouraged and empathised, holding out dark-skinned women who had made it in public life as role models, trying to overturn familiar habits of thought by making her daughter aware of some of the positive associations with negrescence – ‘Have you seen a cloud that is not dark? It is because of dark rain clouds that life