The Lives of Others

by Neel Mukherjee

  Chhaya seems to be the one who is most eloquently upset. She speaks of it at every mealtime and will not let the topic drop off the conversational horizon. ‘Eeesh, how shaming the whole thing! What are people thinking about us? Being caught with a loafer . . .’ and lets the silence carry the rest. At other times, she tries another tack, her voice modulated to the articulation of sympathy: ‘But I hope the girl is all right. Who knows what advantage has been taken of the poor flower by that immoral man?’ The silence after this is even more damning. No one notices how animated she has suddenly become, how buzzed, as if a hidden ecstasy is exerting her to too keen and bright an enthusiasm.

  As a consequence of this unfolding drama, bijaya, two days after Baishakhi is caught, is a muffled affair. But tradition has to be upheld at all costs, so the annual practice of buying quantities of assorted sweets from Girish Ghosh and Putiram is observed faithfully this year too. Adinath is driven to North Calcutta and back by Gagan, the boot of the Ambassador full of terracotta pots and paper boxes and cartons. Certain things cannot be done this year, such as allowing Baishakhi to go to the puja pandal to watch the enormous statue of the goddess being transferred by the young men of the neighbourhood from the stage to the lorry that will take it to Babughat for the immersion ceremony. Not a single person stays at home during this dismantling; it is the one event of the festival that comes close to a spectacle. This year Purnima stays indoors with Baishakhi, guarding her with the vigilance of a trained dog. They do not go to their balcony to watch the preparation for the final immersion, in case Baishakhi and Shobhon catch sight of each other. The rest of the Ghosh family stays in too, and misses seeing off Durga and her offspring on the three tempos hired for the occasion, because they are apprehensive of the neighbours’ acute curiosity, their weighted, probing gaze. They watch from their respective verandahs.

  The tempos, packed with scores of men and children holding onto the effigies, leave Basanta Bose Road at a crawl. They are preceded by an entourage of people, a band, and a group of locals who dance along to the music the band plays as the pageant makes its creeping progress to Babughat. When this farewell crowd departs, bijaya is officially declared. In the Ghosh house, wives bend down to touch the feet of their husbands with their right hands and bring the hands forward to their foreheads and then to their chests in the gesture of pranam; sons and daughters do the same to their parents and elders, younger relations to older, and the men embrace each other three times in quick succession. The sweets are distributed and the stricken looks resulting from Baishakhi’s intransigence two days ago – it is difficult to estimate where the genuine strickenness ends and its self-conscious enactment begins – are relaxed enough to allow the usual bijaya practices to proceed.

  Purba, on the one evening she is suffered to come to the grand living room on the first floor and mingle relatively freely, so that everyone else can have the desirably short-lived luxury of playing One Big Happy Family, is, in reality, on menial duty, as always; she stands in a corner and hands out plates of sweets, clears away empty cups and saucers, refills glasses with water, even though there is a small fleet of servants to do these chores. For once, Charubala does not bark at her, but files away, for later use, the fact that she gives two pantuas each to Sona and Kalyani when she knows she is not supposed to give them more than one. Charubala chooses to ignore that it is Supratik who insists that Purba gives extra sweets to her children; she does not have to, thinks Charubala, just because someone is persistently asking her to do it, does she? Purba could have been equally obstinate in not giving in. A hot flash of irritation blooms inside the old woman, but now is not the time. She cannot even have the satisfaction of baring her teeth at Sona and Kalyani; Supratik is teaching them a game that involves paper and pen and they are absolutely rapt. It will have to wait.

  On the morning after, a few minutes into her matutinal duties in the prayer room, Sandhya discovers the following note in a sealed envelope at the foot of the statuette of the goddess Lakshmi:

  Ma, I feel exhausted with consuming, with taking and grabbing and using. I am so bloated that I feel I cannot breathe any more. I am leaving to find some air, some place where I shall be able to purge myself, push back against the life given me and make my own. I feel I live in a borrowed house. It’s time to find my own. Trying to discover my whereabouts won’t get you anywhere, so save that energy; you might find you need it for something else. I’ll write periodically to let you know I’m alive. Forgive me. Yours, Supratik.

  II

  I left the city to work with landless peasants, the sharecroppers, wage-labourers and impoverished tenants who were the backbone of our movement. My job was to go to the villages and organise them into armed struggle.

  That was the only way – to seize power, one field, one village, one district at a time. 1) Formation of armed squads in every village; 2) collection of arms by seizing them from class enemies and the police; 3) seizure of crops and arrangements for hiding them; 4) constant propagation of the politics of armed struggle – these were our aims, outlined by Chairman Mao first and then Charu Mazumdar. We went to indigent agricultural areas where feudalism was still the order of the day, where the exploitation of farmers by jotedaars and moneylenders and landowners was at its inhuman worst. Along the Bengal–Bihar–Orissa borderlands this feudalism was supplemented by the plight of the tribal peoples whose ancient lands had been taken from them and who had been reduced to a form of slavery. Or else they had run away into the forests, hoping for some kind of life in hiding.

  Of the people I knew, three groups went to the Gopiballabhpur area in south Medinipur, near the border with Orissa; another two, where Purulia edged into Bihar. I formed a group with Samir and Dhiren. Samir, from Naktala, was a Part II Bengali Honours student at Bangabashi, a budding poet and short-story writer, also reputed to be the brightest student his department had seen in the last twenty-five years. He had got record marks in his Part I exams last year. How he had pulled off that trick, given that all his time was devoted to ‘doing politics’, no one knew, but it seemed unlikely he was going to be able to hold onto his first in Part II. Or even sit his exams. How could he? He had abandoned all that and thrown in his lot with the roving revolutionaries. A classic rice-eating, timorous, creature-comforts-loving, head-in-the-clouds Bengali, you’d think, to look at him, and he was all those things, but behind that there was a core of steel. It took me a while to discover that.

  Dhiren, on the other hand, had the toughness of someone who had known only want in his life. Mind you, Samir didn’t come from a particularly well-off family – his father was a clerk in the Electric Supply Corporation – but he and his family lived in a house built by his grandfather, so at least they had a roof over their heads that they could call their own. Dhiren came from Uttarpara. His father worked in a light-bulb factory, which had seen its entire workforce go on strike against its owners’ decision to fire nearly a quarter of them; the factory had been shut for three years now. The family had been without an income for that period. Meanwhile, Dhiren, the eldest son, on whose BCom degree course in City College the family’s hopes of sustenance rested, had barely attended college, choosing to change the world instead of adding to its aggregate of unquestioning petty-bourgeois invertebrates.

  ‘What good will the degree do?’ he had once said to me. ‘There are hundreds of thousands like me, graduates who are sitting twiddling their thumbs because there are no jobs. I’ll be joining that great herd of unthinking cattle. The thing is to get to the heart of the sickness, not tinker around with the symptoms, do you understand?’

  Of course, I did.

  I headed towards the westernmost region of Medinipur with Samir and Dhiren, towards its border with Bihar – past Jhargram, past Belpahari, near Kankrajhor in the Binpur area. Sometimes the places were so small that they didn’t have a name, they called themselves by the name of the nearest village. We operated in Baishtampur, Gidighati, Chhurimara (what a name! ‘knife-stabbed’; still haven�
�t been able to find out the history behind it), Majgeria, Chirugora.

  There were jungles on the near horizon everywhere, dense, dark forests of kendu and sal. It was not accidental that most of our comrades worked in or near areas under the cover of trees. The jungle provided protection, obviously. In our line of work, the ability to go into hiding quickly was a matter of life and death. Literally. These were the forests that received the tribals of the area when their land was grabbed by a landlord, a moneylender, a coal or iron company. There were mines nearby – coal, iron-ore. Jamshedpur and Bokaro were just a short hop across into Bihar. And north, across Purulia and Bankura, there were the big dams, Maithon, Massanjore, and the mining towns of Dhanbad and Jharia. All these had been built on the lands of tribal peoples, flooding or displacing them. Who was going to listen to 100, 500, 1,000 or even 10,000 dark-skinned, backward, jungle-dwelling adivasis, the so-called ‘scheduled tribes’, over the collective might and muscle of Steel Authority of India, Tata Steel and Hindustan Cables?

  These areas had been seeing agitation for some time now. We decided to begin here because, in some sense, our work had a ready, if somewhat basic, foundation in the region. Naxalbari happened in North Bengal because unrest at tea plantations there had been brewing for a long while – the labour movement, agitating for rights, better working conditions, better pay, rights over the land. The beginning of our revolution there didn’t come out of thin air. Similarly, here too there was a continuing history of great wrongs. We could build on that.

  Have you seen how I cannot keep away from talking shop? Awful, I know. There I was, trying to tell you the story of my journey to Medinipur and, without being aware of it, I got pulled back into politics. I’m sorry. I keep thinking of you reprimanding me gently, saying, with so much laughter held in check in your voice – There goes the parrot again, reciting its textbooks.

  Yes, our journey. That was what I really wanted to write about. From Gidhni Junction the railtrack became a loop-line, my first time on one such. Nature seemed to change its looks and personality as the loop-line separated from the broad-gauge. The earth had turned dry, dusty and red. The distance between the large trees became greater and greater. Instead of those big ponds, surrounded by coconut and palm trees, we saw little ponds – large puddles, really. The density of everything, vegetation, human habitation, people, thinned out. Huge fields of rice, then a few dots of thatched mud houses. Some dwarf date palms, that was all I could recognise.

  Actually, to tell you the truth, I thought they were betel nut trees until Dhiren laughed and said – You’re such a dyed-in-the-wool city boy, you don’t know your betel nut from your date palm; really, what are we going to do with you? We’re going to be living with peasants and you’ll stick out like a pylon in a flat, empty field and embarrass us all.

  More laughter. Because he was not from the big city, Dhiren fancied himself as a bit of a Nature man, at one with trees and birds and flowers and such things. He was always playing this game of one-upmanship with me; his way of reducing the distance between us, I suppose. There had been several times in the past when I’d had to bite my tongue to stop myself from saying – Dhiren, it’s Uttarpara you’re from, the mofussil, hardly open countryside and the very heart of Nature, is it?

  Then Dhiren pointed out simul trees – not in flower, so I wouldn’t have been able to identify them anyway. I can hear you laughing and ganging up with Dhiren, saying – He’s right, you’re a through-and-through city boy, you can’t even put a name to the simul tree? To which I can only say that this is the tyranny of you rural folk . . .

  When the train left the main railway line and went over the cutting, the music of the wheels changed. The people at the stations were taller, darker than city people. They had curly hair. The women who boarded the train were much shyer. They did not want to sit on the benches, but sat on the dirty floor of the carriage.

  At a tiny station we bought tea in small terracotta cups. Dhiren said – Have your fill, there’s no tea where we’re going, and it wouldn’t do to drink tea anyway when we are with the farmers, because they don’t have any and it’s considered an urban luxury. Where would they get money to buy tea?

  Ufff, Dhiren did talk so . . . jabbering away constantly: squad formation, methods of warfare, teaching class politics to farmers, how there was no transport where we were going, we would have to walk scores of miles . . . unending, his chatter. No wonder he was the de facto leader of every activity that required talking – speeches in assemblies, canvassing votes during elections, student-body meetings . . . anything you could think of. I kept looking with suspicion at everyone in the carriage. Whose ears were picking up on all this? I made a sign to Dhiren to stop. It took some time before he caught on.

  Then, suddenly, scrubland. And the promise of forest beyond the horizon. I didn’t know how I had sensed it.

  Red earth. Have you ever seen it? The dust that catches in your hair, in your clothes, when you walk over the dry soil, is red. I had never seen red earth before.

  We got off at Jhargram. Samir said we should look out for police at the station, we should get off the train and walk out singly. From Jhargram to Belpahari in a bus. Right at the other edge of Belpahari, from where you could see the forests of this corner of Medinipur spreading out in all directions, was the home of Debdulal Maity, our contact in this region. He ran a cycle-repair shop and we put up in the shed where the cycles, tools, spares, tyres and all manner of jumble were kept. It wasn’t a good idea to stay at his home. First of all, there wasn’t much space there. Besides, it wouldn’t do to implicate his wife and children. What they didn’t know, they could neither confess to nor reveal.

  So his shop it was: mats on the floor, no mattresses, only a few layers of folded-up shataranchi, mosquito nets. Only one hurricane lamp – he could not afford more kerosene – sooting up rapidly. The little flickering yellow light that it cast seemed like a timid, jumpy prey, which knew that the darkness around it was going to get it soon.

  – Only four hours of electricity every day, Debdulal-da said, and that too after paying 500 rupees' bribe to the man who had come to connect it. And the four hours that we get are so weak that it’s not worth the name of electricity. All these villages: not a single one has electric power.

  – But you are in dams territory, there’s so much hydel power in your back yard, I protested.

  – That’s hardly for us, he said, that’s for the cities and the big companies. We are little villages in the backwaters here, mostly full of tribal and lower-caste people and harijans and scheduled tribes. Who cares about us? We’ve been forgotten.

  Samir opened his mouth to say something, but stopped himself. I knew what he was going to say: that the land for the dams and the mines belonged to the tribals and lower-caste people. It was their villages that got submerged, their livelihoods that got destroyed, they did not get even a minuscule fraction of the resettlement money; in most cases they got nothing for being kicked out of their homes and their land.

  Why didn’t he say it? It wasn’t as if we hadn’t talked endlessly about it. Maybe that was the reason . . . There had been too much talk.

  Dhiren had a tired but tense look on his face. He watched me take in the arrangements. I didn’t even blink. Before Dhiren could say anything, could say what I thought – feared – he was going to say, I said to Debdulal-da that the shataranchis could go, mats on the floor would be enough for us. I didn’t want his family to have to do without rugs because some boys from the city had to be made comfortable. The tension left Dhiren’s face. I felt I’d scored a point.

  Samir lit a bidi and said – Let’s see if the smoke drives the bloody mosquitoes away.

  Mosquitoes everywhere, whining away, clouds of mosquitoes. There didn’t seem to be much energy or enthusiasm to talk, but we had to hang the mosquito nets and get inside and talk from our beds if we wanted to have a conversation.

  Then Samir, breaking the silence that seemed to be solidifying around us, said
– Erm, guys, can we keep the hurricane lamp on? I mean, turned down very low but burning, so that we’re not completely in the dark?

  Dhiren, laughing loudly – Oh, I’d forgotten, you’re afraid of ghosts, aren’t you?

  I was too amused to be surprised by this revelation. I started laughing too – Afraid of ghosts? At your age? This is too good to be true . . .

  I couldn’t make out Samir’s expression – it seemed to have become darker in the room – but I hoped he was looking sheepish. He sounded it when he said, almost laughing himself – Okay, cut it out, bravehearts. Stop pretending that you don’t have any irrational fears.

  Dhiren – But come on, fear of ghosts? That’s ridiculous! I can imagine Supratik not having any fears, least of all irrational ones, but, Samir, you loser, only children are afraid of the dark. You are twenty-one. Nearly a quarter of a century, that is.

  Samir, huffily – All right, all right. The question is: are we going to leave the lamp on or not?

  I wasn’t keen on talk of such things – fears, feelings, emotions, they’re all irrational, right? – so I opened up another line of teasing.