The Lives of Others

by Neel Mukherjee

  How wrong I was. How innocent I was not to have understood the vote-bank calculus of the CPI(M). By appearing to be on the side of the landless peasant, they added nearly five lakh of them to the party in a clean, swift stroke. You had to admire them for their far-seeing chicanery. They had no intention of pursuing real and radical land reforms, as envisioned by Charu Mazumdar. They only wanted enough votes so that they could come to power in West Bengal as a majority, not in a coalition, as they are now, in the United Front.

  Their mask slipped when Naxalbari happened. They had not reckoned for this – they had wanted the peasants to stay within the boundaries set by them. They underestimated what would really happen if the landless were given a taste of their own power. So when that began to happen, the CPI(M)’s true colours were revealed – every bit as reactionary as the Congress, every bit as supportive of the Establishment, as fearful of upsetting the apple-cart, as ingratiating to the central government . . . If they alienated the central government with their tacit, even open, support of all this militancy and land-grabbing, they would never come to power in the state. So they had to trim their sails to that end.

  We had decided early on to avoid the villages that had seen this kind of state-sanctioned land-grabs. Admittedly we would have had an advantage if we’d gone there – we would have had far less work mobilising, because farmers would already have been organised and militised (up to a point). But there were disadvantages too: 1) we were the erstwhile radical wing of the CPI(M), some of whom had been expelled from the Party in June last year, so any CPI(M)-led farmers’ movement to redistribute land and kill landlords, however much our aims coincided (again, up to a point), would not have been sympathetic to our invitation to move even further to the left towards guerrilla action; 2) we worked in units of three to seven in each village, so we were nothing against the might of the bigger, better and more centrally organised CPI(M) cadres; 3) landlords were not stupid people. Wherever the CPI(M) had organised peasant-led forcible land redistribution, the landlords had quickly sworn allegiance to the CPI(M), paying protection money to the Party’s local leaders, so that the land they held far in excess of the ceiling wouldn’t be grabbed by the landless peasants marching against them. Classic CPI(M) politics, it has to be said; petty-bourgeois revolution-mongering.

  There wasn’t enough space in one farmer’s hut to put up the three of us together so we went to different places – I was billeted in Kanu Mahato’s, Samir at Anupam Haati’s, Dhiren at Bipul Soren’s.

  Early winter afternoon: green and brown everywhere under a white-blue sky. And much cooler than in the city. There was a constant breeze that was very enjoyable in the sun, then it gave us goosepimples after the sun went down. Flocks of chirruping birds flitted above. The fields were parcels of straw-coloured gold where the paddy was almost ripe. Occasionally, tiny pairs of frantically gesticulating hands emerged from the top of this uniform gold sea, their position in it changing rapidly. I realised that there were children, entirely hidden by the crop, running around inside.

  – They’re chasing off babui pakhi, Dhiren said.

  So this was the weaver bird.

  Something happened to me when I saw the children going about this job as if they were playing. Well, they were playing; they were running across the fields and wheeling their arms about and shouting at the birds and waving them away. They used a scarecrow as a post that marked either a beginning or an end to their game. Something happened to me and I wanted to run into the fields and join them, waving my arms over my head, copying the children. What looked graceful when they did it, in me, I was sure, was going to appear ungainly, making me resemble some kind of lunatic on the run. I would explain to them that I was a scarecrow, a live scarecrow, as big as the rag-and-stick-and-earthenware-pot one they had in the corner. Soon we would all be shouting and running about in the golden paddy, the flocks of birds above us dispersed.

  The fantasy too flitted away like the birds.

  I asked Samir and Dhiren to accompany me in two reconnoitres of our hamlet, once while there was still daylight and the other in the total darkness that was the village night. Some of the plots were tiny, say, about four or five times the size of our garden. How much rice would each yield? Not enough to feed one person for a couple of months. My head spun when I tried to think what the peasants ate for the remainder of the year. The breeze set the paddy swaying. It gave out a sound somewhere between rustling and rattling.

  Dhiren said – We’ll have to learn how to use the sickle soon.

  A meaningful look passed between the three of us. We had our eye on three huge acreages on the other side of the village, beyond the outer edge. Three enormous fields belonging to the three big jotedaars of the village – Haradhan Ray, Kanai Lal Kuiti, Bhaben Sinha.

  At our end of the village, the Mahato and Santhal end, there were banana and palm trees all around us. I pointed out possible exits and escape routes. The crop-filled fields might shelter us now, but after the harvest they would be open stretches of pure danger where we would be completely exposed.

  Samir said – We’d never make it.

  Nervousness was something all too easy to activate in him. I said – Look around you. Don’t you see the forests?

  – But they’re some distance away. We’d have to cross these bare fields to get to them.

  Dhiren said – It’ll all appear different at night. They won’t be able to make out one person, dressed in black clothes, running across these fields in the dark.

  Samir wasn’t convinced. He said – But there’ll be many of them and only three of us. And they’ll be armed to their teeth: sticks, axes, knives . . . They’ll hunt us down.

  He had that familiar wobble in his voice that made Dhiren and me erupt into laughter each time we heard it. But not this time. This time we were in the field of action, not in the safe luxury of imagining it while sitting in Calcutta.

  Dhiren said – You know the line, no more than three to five people in a squad.

  The words were meant to instil determination, but they came out hollow.

  Everyone went to sleep around seven or seven-thirty. It was the rhythm of life in the hamlet. During the growing and harvesting season, the farmers were too exhausted after a day’s toil in the fields to stay up for longer. Besides, kerosene, or any other oil, was in short supply and to stay awake would mean burning already-tiny rations.

  Being on the outskirts of the village, we weren’t far from the jungle: bamboo groves, a pond, little copses, fields, another small pond, the burial grounds of the Santhals, then forests of sal, mahua, kendu. The effect of moonlight on the trees and fields, with no sound or other light to dilute the experience, was startling and pure. I’d never seen anything like it, or rather, what I’d seen so far now struck me as having been a very adulterated version of the real thing. It silenced us. There was only the sound of the breeze. The night was cold, and clear as glass. We had many things to talk about – where to hide our weapons, which route to take when walking all night to the next village, how to go about getting together small groups of farmers without arousing anyone’s suspicions – but this bath of silvery light made those discussions appear as small violations.

  Dhiren broke the silence by starting to hum a tune under his breath, very gently and with feeling. It sounded so familiar that for a second or two I was fooled into thinking that it was a revolutionary anthem, until I got it. It was as far away from revolution as that moon was from this hamlet. ‘The smile of the moon has spilled over its banks’ . . . that was the song. I knew it because I’d heard Pishi sing it on moonlit summer evenings on the terrace. I was filled with – with what? An affectionate contempt? A sense of ridicule? Shock that Dhiren, the earthy, self-styled tough guy, had any truck with the kind of music he’d consider effeminate? Tagore seemed to be carried inside all Bengalis, regardless of class or social background, like some inheritable disease, silent, unknown, until it manifested itself at the unlikeliest of times. How irredeemably middle-c
lass all this was: The Little Red Book and On Practice on the one hand; on the other hand, the poetry of Jibanananda Das in his cloth sidebag and a coy, cloying Tagore song almost involuntarily on his lips. There really was no hope of escape for us.

  I wondered if I should say something about the absurdity of this. Could I get it across with humour and warmth and lightness? I decided to hold my tongue. Then, all of a sudden, I was blurting out – For god’s sake, Mao by day and Tagore by moonlight?

  Dhiren didn’t miss a beat. He put his right arm around my shoulders and said – That’s the quintessential Bengali soul for you. Did you think that because I come from a poor, lower-middle-class set-up, my kind wouldn’t have been touched by culture?

  I couldn’t see his eyes in the dark, but I could certainly hear the big, teasing smile in his voice.

  I said – But that particular song is such rubbish! It’s supposed to be about a full-moon night and he brings in blue skies and flying birds . . . which just goes to show that the quintessential Bengali soul is both confused and inconsistent.

  And I almost forgot to tell you one big reason why we were in this corner of West Bengal: this was the hamlet where Nitai Das killed his family – his wife, his son, his two daughters – and then swallowed poison last year in May.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  NOT ALL FAMILY bonds are equal. The lie so assiduously propagated by mothers – ‘How can you ask who is my favourite? They are all my children, I love all of them equally. Are you partial to one finger of your hand over another?’ – is disbelieved by everyone, yet it is quite astonishing what pervasive currency it has in the outward show of lives. Everyone is hectically denying the existence of favourites, of special affections and allegiances and alliances within a large group of siblings, or between parents and children, while, just under the surface, the empty drama of equality is torqued to its very opposite by the forces of conflicting emotions and affinities.

  The Ghosh family unwittingly followed this paradigm with slavishness. The existence of four brothers and one sister, with a gap of twelve years separating the oldest from the youngest, meant that the siblings, with the exception of Somnath, were close in age. Priyo and Chhaya were born almost back-to-back, within a year of each other. If a reason had to be found for their extreme closeness, this could do for the moment. It was said that the first word Chhaya uttered was ‘Dada’, even before ‘Ma’ or ‘Baba’; no one really cared that this was not a very robust proof, especially since, defying the laws of appellation in a Bengali family, Chhaya called Priyo by his first name and reserved ‘Dada’ for Adinath.

  As children, they had formed one unit, slightly separate from the other two. In any game, Priyo and Chhaya could be relied upon to gang up with each other against Adi and Bhola. They helped each other cheat in hide-and-seek even if they were on opposite sides: Chhaya gave away the hiding places of Adi and Bhola if Priyo was doing the seeking, and Priyo kicked up a fuss if Chhaya was made the seeker, wanting to join her instead of hiding with his brothers. In a game of ‘Blind fly buzz-buzz’, Priyo left subtle clues for the blindfolded Chhaya to locate the others. The real game for them was the inset one, the one of how not to make their collusion transparent, rather than what they came to consider as the framing game; in that, they had little or no interest. It was the embedded core of duplicity and coalition that got them going. The effect of this was the inevitable withering away of the assumed game to a boring charade, and it took Adi and Bhola years to understand why all the games they played between the four of them turned out to be so wet, so unexciting, when those identical ones with their other friends retained their element of fun and spark. They shouted, ‘Cheating! Cheating!’ at their middle siblings, because they instinctively understood that some vital element was missing, but could not put their fingers on what exactly was undermining everything.

  Before long, Priyo and Chhaya were left to their own devices, which was what they had desired all along. They designed games no one else could understand. Even their mother started to comment, ‘You are like twins, you think each other’s thoughts and say each other’s words.’ They sat next to each other in the back seat of the car, or on a train or bus. Other members of the family took to leaving a seat beside Chhaya vacant, for they knew it was marked for Priyo.

  At an enthusiastically planned function on a summer evening on the terrace of 22/6, a sort of informal private variety show, with the children and other members of the family and friends from the neighbourhood acting in skits, singing, miming, and a clothes line with two or three huge bedcovers serving as the curtain separating the ‘stage’ from the audience, six-year-old Priyo sang, ‘There’s a game of hide-and-seek between the sun and the shade in the paddy fields today / Who has set afloat boats of white clouds in the blue sea of the sky?’, while Chhaya danced across the concrete, gracefully miming the words: here covering her little face with her tiny hands and uncovering it again, there joining her hands to form a boat and lifting them up above her head, fluttering her child’s fingers to indicate the expanse of the sky . . . She knew the song well: a music teacher, Shipra-di, had just been engaged to come to the house and give the little girl singing lessons, and this was the first Tagore song that she had been taught. The applause was deafening. In the audience, Charubala and Prafullanath beamed and looked triumphant.

  For months afterwards, whenever anyone saw the boy and the girl, they went into raptures about the pair’s magical performance until it became a kind of local legend, sticking, with increasingly piteous glamour, to the lives of Priyo and Chhaya like the residue of a lingering illness. Even when they started going to college, elderly men and women of Basanta Bose Road, whose lives consisted only of chewing the cud of memory, reminded them of that performance, drawing from them strained smiles that never quite managed to reach their eyes.

  Seven years after that memorable evening on the terrace, the connection between Chhaya and Priyo edged, more by chance than natural progression, into a different territory. At that time, Charubala and Prafullanath occupied the first floor with their daughter and youngest son, while the three older boys lived on the second floor. At around noon one Sunday, Charubala was harrying all her children to have a bath and get ready to sit down for lunch. Priyo, discovering that the bar of soap in the bathroom upstairs had been worn down to a tiny nub, ran to fetch a fresh one from a bathroom downstairs. The door was closed, as always, but not locked, so he pushed it and rushed in.

  The rest happened in increasingly suspended time, moving from fast to very, very slow as if the events had been rolled into a small ball and shot with force through a tube of viscous liquid. Chhaya was squatting on the latrine built into the floor, letting out a large, dark cheroot of turd. Before the shriek from Chhaya’s horrified open mouth could become sound, Priyo raised his index finger to his lips and, in one seamless movement, reached back his hand to slip the shutter into its catch and lock the door. There was a quiet, calm majesty in his gestures, as if he had rehearsed this episode numberless times in the recent past, that settled Chhaya. Priyo leaned back against the wall, silent, watching with a devouring intent. As the convergent point of that gaze, Chhaya became a pliant puppet, almost with no will of her own, carrying on her unspeakably private hygiene activities as if she were all alone. The silence in the bathroom, punctuated by the drip-drip-drip of the tap onto the water’s surface in the full bucket under it, conducted Priyo’s supplication, and Chhaya’s instant granting of it, in a way that would only have been ruined by language.

  Priyo watched Chhaya sluice her arse, pour four big mugs of water down the latrine to flush the shit away, then wash her hands with soap. There was no trace of shame or inhibition in her, just the abiding fluidity of something routine done without thought. Very oddly, the threshing that had taken over Priyo’s insides served only to calm and slow him down. He watched his sister, oblivious to any potential discovery, oblivious to any sense of wrongdoing, of shame, a statue of solid desire.

  From outside came the
frantic symphony of everyone going about their busy Sunday routines: the clatter-and-hiss from the kitchen downstairs; the chaotic bass of footsteps of people running up and down the stairs; music from the gramophone in his parents’ room; and, as the top line above all this, Charubala’s barrage of instructions and commands – ‘Madan, if you leave grinding it till late, no one will be able to eat poppy-seed fritters with their dal’; ‘Adi-i-i-i, have you had your bath?’; ‘Chhaya-a-a-a-a, are you still hogging the bathroom? Do you think no one else needs to use it?’ – while she thud-thudded around the first floor.

  At the sound of her name Chhaya panicked, but only briefly because Priyo stepped forward and turned on the tap. The water ran; added to this sound was the one of water overflowing the rim of the bucket, splashing onto the floor, running and gurgling down the drain. More time passed, although neither could have guessed how much. This dent in the normal perception of things was nowhere more apparent than in the continuation of the trance-like state brother and sister found themselves in, even when their mother came to the bathroom door and hollered, ‘Chhaya, I can hear running water, there are five others in the house needing a bath, if you finish all the water the pump will have to be turned on again.’ Once again, the arc of private, silent language welded Priyo and Chhaya together as she replied from inside, raising her voice, ‘Ma-a-a-a, forgotten to get my chemise, will you fetch one for me? The yellow, floral one. It’s on the clothes-horse.’ From outside, an irritated response from Charubala, ‘Ufff, unbearable all this running around, serving . . .’, receding further. Stillness for the measure of one-two-three beats. Then, in a movement that could be missed in a blink, Priyo opened the bathroom door and slipped out and Chhaya locked it again. Madan-da and the servants were in the kitchen downstairs. From Baba and Ma’s room came the raspy wailing of the Atulprasadi song Baba was listening to on the gramophone: ‘Fill me right up to the brim, fill up my life’.