The Lives of Others

by Neel Mukherjee

  Although the events are recent, to Bhola it appears that the clouds, which have begun to settle across the sky of his heart, have acquired a tenacious staying power. Bhola is unsettled by this new, growing grain of – of what exactly? This is what he cannot put his finger on, and the inability distracts him significantly enough to bleed into other areas of his life; he cannot safely shut it away in a room to be revisited in the silence of introspective solitude.

  Sitting at work now, it continues to gnaw at him; nothing major or disruptive, nothing painful or upsetting, just a kink that will not go away. The debate around him is in wild spate; he has not heard a word for a long time. Where are they? Someone is saying agitatedly, ‘Let me tell you, the Shakti-Sunil-Niren crowd will become a shrine, a shrine!’

  V

  Samir said – Do you know how Debdulal-da referred to you?

  – No. How?

  – Pratik-da. The ‘Su’ prefix to your name has been – here he made a cutting movement, but with his hand held sideways, so probably indicating a sickle – chopped off.

  Much laughter from Samir and Dhiren.

  I asked – Did you not correct him?

  Samir answered – Arrey, at least six times, but it was like a dog’s tail: the moment you let it go, it curled back again.

  – Not a bad change, what do you say, from Supratik to Pratik?

  Dhiren said – Not bad at all. From ‘auspicious symbol’ to ‘symbol’ only. Who wants to be auspicious? Bloody cant of the bourgeois ****ers!

  I, too, thought: Not bad, this loss of weight in the name. I could happily live as Pratik, as pure symbol only . . .

  I had been handed a sickle and shown how to cut the paddy stalks at the base, about three inches from the soil. Each of us went to the plot that his host was working. Kanu, mine, was a wage-labourer, on the lowest rung. This, I realised later, had its uses: a number of class enemies could be pointed out to me – owners of small plots who overworked and underpaid day-workers; the subset of yes-men of big landlords among these; the absentee jotedaars’ managers who cracked the whip . . .

  The plot didn’t look big when I saw it, but twenty minutes into disciplining myself to maintain the required inverted-U shape sent my neck and back screaming silently. The field seemed like a sea now and I had to swim across it. Already I was well behind Kanu and his wife, Bijli, and the three other munish working with us. They advanced with the choreographed grace and rigour of dancers, leaving me behind, standing alone, the bad student who couldn’t master the movements. How did they do it? I knew those tired lines about practice and acclimatisation, but didn’t their backs and necks and shoulders hurt too? In the beginning at least? I began to count small blessings: the fact that it was November (the thought of doing this in April was unthinkable) although my vest was stuck to my skin with sweat and the fatua over it was beginning to show signs of damp too. The sun was not strong enough for my head to be covered, not yet.

  I bracketed the sickle around the base of a sheaf of stalks and cut using the ‘towards me’ motion that they’d taught me. The sickle was very sharp and there was no effort involved in the actual cutting. The cut stalks fell over my head. This was the thing I was failing to master, the way the left hand gathered the cut plants into a bundle, the bundle increasing in girth and the hand adjusting to accommodate that as you moved forward, cutting more stalks, until you had enough and you turned around and threw the harvested sheaves behind you and moved on. Even that flinging backward of the sheaves – even that required the mastery of a trick, a particular motion of the hand and wrist so that the stalks all fell with their bases aligned to the bases of the others already harvested, the tips to the tips. Mine fell in a fanned mess. How was I ever going to reach the end of the field?

  And then I noticed: my palms and fingers were a mad criss-cross of little cuts from the sharp, dry edges of the rice leaves and stalks. Shame rose in me like bile. Hands that revealed instantly that I hadn’t done a day’s honest work in my life. The only thing I could do was ignore the sting, grit my teeth and keep cutting and advancing with all the strength and endurance I had. I wanted to make the cuts worse, deeper, my hands really bloody. It was the only way I would learn how to harvest properly and the only way my hands could stop being the shamefully middle-class hands they were now.

  ‘Change yourself, change the world.’

  When you look at a field full of ripened grain ready to be harvested it’s a uniform brown-gold-sand colour. But as you cut with your sickle you notice that there’s still some green inside, hiding within the larger brown, a few long partially green leaves, a little green fraction of a stalk. And as you cut these down, a tiny cloud of insects hiding in their massed density flies out; some wriggle away into the thickets not yet harvested, some scurry into the grass and sheaves and earth around you. And yet another thing: the sound of the paddy plants as you enter the thicket and cut them down. That rustle and rattle, louder, much louder now, accompanied by something between the snap of an almost-dry stalk and the wet snip of cutting through a twig that’s still partly green. I can’t explain very well. Taken together, this swishing of dry, dense vegetation fills your ears. You can hear it at night, resounding in your head, before you slip into the total silence of sleep.

  My hands were sore in the morning after a night’s sleep. I couldn’t make a fist. So I made myself make a fist ten, fifteen, twenty times with each hand. The cracks reopened and beaded with blood. Some were tiny red threads, the red smudging when I touched them. And speaking of sleep, I’d never known sleep like this before – a total wiping out of all senses, all consciousness. I hadn’t known exhaustion like this before either, a bone-breaking, bone-aching tiredness. That little revelation again, granted to an outsider, of the hidden inner cogs and wheels of the lives of others: now I knew yet another reason why everyone in the heart of rural Bengal went to sleep so early. When you worked in the fields from six in the morning to four in the afternoon the tiredness resulting from it stunned you into silence. You went from being a human, animated by a mind and spirit and consciousness, at the beginning of the day, to a machine without a soul at the end of those ten hours, moving your arms and legs and mouth because you felt some switch hadn’t been turned off. Then it was, and the machine was dead, or just a stopped machine.

  The next step was beating the sheaves in bundles against a sizeable boulder, which was placed on a large expanse of gunny cloth or jute. The impact loosened the ripe paddy grains, which collected on the cloth. After ten or fifteen minutes of work, the accumulating matt golden grains looked like a giant colony of insects or insect eggs, thinning out towards the peripheries in an untidy scatter. This was a much more exposed activity: you worked in the clearing where there had been dense plantation before. While harvesting, you were hidden by the tall paddy in front of you and sometimes to your left and right, but here, as you raised your hands above your head and brought down the sheaves of rice on the stone with all your strength – and it had to be done with all the force that you could bring to it; this, too, was a skill you had to acquire – you were the solo performer on a stage. Here you stood out, there was no help for it.

  In my first hour of doing this, I kept interrupting my work to pick up bundles of spent sheaves to check if all the grains had really come off. I had heard that Nitai Das, and others in his situation, used to secrete some of these grainless stalks in their clothes, or steal them later, in the middle of the night, as the sheaves lay outside, drying, before being tied up into cylinders of hay. He would boil and eat them in the hope that a fleck or two of tenacious grain had clung on to the stalk-tips here and there. This is what they did in times of famine. This is what Nitai did here last year.

  The paddy was taken away to be threshed. I could hardly move my arms and shoulders when I woke up the next morning.

  Kanu took me with him wherever he was engaged to work this season: two sharecropping plots, and two where he worked as wage-labourer in the plots of the two big jotedaars here, the Ra
ys and the Sinhas, part of the upper-caste inner-core neighbourhoods of Majgeria. He told me that it was less than half the work he did during harvesting time in a good year; now it had dwindled to this. From sharecropping he got, as his wages, one eighth of the husked weight of rice from each of the fields that he had worked. From the daily work in the absentee landlords’ bigger plots, he got money.

  In the wealthier parts of the village, the inner core that is, there were sumptuous harvest festivals with mass feasting and giving of gifts. Here, we gave the first new grains to crows, which were believed to be the reincarnations of the farmers’ ancestors.

  It was a breathless time of the year. These were part of the ninety or so days of guaranteed work that Kanu and others like him had, and they passed in consciousness-obliterating labour. Rice left overnight in water was eaten in the morning with a couple of green chillies and salt, before we set out for the fields; coarse-grained rice and a vegetable or dal given at the end of a day’s work by the stewards of the farms where we harvested or threshed, then the walk back to Kanu’s hut – that was it. In the evenings, no serious talk of land reform, of putting Mao’s policies into practice in this particular context of a small Medinipur village with a population of 400 people, of debate on the relative virtues of ‘economism’ versus militancy, of rhetoric and corresponding action, of planning and consolidation and uniting the actions of various regional cells . . . none of that intense conversation that brought the foam to our mouths. No small meetings with the farmers who lived on the outer edges of the village, that is, the lower-caste and Santhal landless labourers. (I’m going to spare you the contents of past meetings. They’ll bore you; they bore me sometimes. You’ll say, ‘Ufff, that same old chewing of the cud of politics.’ Quite.)

  Tonight the exhaustion has crossed a barrier – I feel I’m too tired to sleep, if that makes any sense to you.

  Until now it has been all right sleeping on what I can only call their verandah, the narrow raised space between their threshold and the two steps leading to the general earth. The weather was cool, and it was getting colder, but it hadn’t started biting yet. When we first came to Majgeria, Kanu said that I could share their one twelve-foot by ten-foot room, sleep in a corner, with him and his wife and their little child (six months old) and his wife’s old father, but something in me could not assent to that arrangement. The room was spick and span – washed with red mud; what few possessions they had were in their places, the little dung-cake-burning oven in a corner, one dented aluminium rice pot, the jointed tongs, two plates, one terracotta vessel for drinking water . . . not much, as you can tell. But everything was neat, there was no mess. The low coir-and-wood pallet was for the old man, who lay or sat on it all day and all night long, wheezing but otherwise silent. Beautiful drawings, done with quicklime, of gods and goddesses, rising from the floor to nearly three or four feet up the walls on all four sides. The straw and palm-leaf thatch on the roof came down low and protected my ‘verandah’ from the sun and the rain.

  The thatch was compact but sometimes, when I lay awake at night, or when something had woken me up, I didn’t know what, and there was a breeze, I imagined I could hear the loose ends at the edges stir up in the barest whisper of a rustle, as if it was trying to say something secret to me. It was at those moments, when there was nothing between me and the secret sounds of the inanimate world, that I asked myself – Why didn’t I accept their offer of sharing their tiny space inside? I had a ready answer: because one more person in that tiny space, bringing the number up to five, would have been difficult for them, yet they wouldn’t have been able to say no. It was a true answer; I didn’t want to add yet another small difficulty to their already hard-bitten lives. But at this hour of the night, with a silence only deepened by the occasional rustle in the thatch, I wondered if it was the entire truth or even the only truth. Could it be that I was going to be more inconvenienced than they by sharing their small space? This ‘verandah’, after all, was bigger in the sense of person-to-space ratio. And it was all my own. I had come here with my comrades, inspired by Charu Mazumdar’s words, to become one with the lowest, the neediest of rural people, to eat with them, to live with them, to live as them. ‘Like a fish with the other fish in the sea.’ Then why did I pick the ‘verandah’ over the room? Did it not, by emphasising, even making literal my apartness, give the lie to our most basic principle, the very soul of our movement: oneness with those who had nothing?

  The doubt was like a breach in a dam. Other thoughts rushed in, all to do with the awareness of my separation from those with whom I wanted to be at one. Quite often, for example, I had some difficulty understanding the dialect of the Santhal people. One day Kanu said something about how sleeping on the ‘verandah’ now, in winter, might be all right, but once summer, and especially monsoon, came along, I might like to rethink because – then he said something short, two words or three, that I couldn’t quite decipher. After some questioning, he mimed it for me with his hands: the palm cupped and held upright, the inside facing me, then a swift movement of that cupped palm coming down.

  Ah. Snake. Snake-bite.

  Some more details emerged – in the monsoon the rains brought out a lot of snakes, not all of them poisonous, not the ones that lived in the flooded rice fields, but some certainly. Sleeping outside then was not such a great idea. I nodded. I was about to say that moving inside was hardly going to protect me since their room was not exactly insulated from the entry of snakes, but I bit my tongue.

  Kanu said – A lot of snake action around these parts in the rainy season, lots of cases of snake-bites.

  Something else made sense to me then. Throughout the village we had noticed tiny shrines housing amateurish clay figures of many-headed snakes, all poised to strike, sometimes accompanied by a figurine of Manasha, the goddess of snakes. Now I understood why the propitiation of this particular minor goddess was so universal here.

  Much later Samir pointed out to me that the more numerous of these shrines did not hold either snakes or the goddess of snakes. They were to Shitala, the goddess of smallpox, chickenpox and other fatal and contagious diseases. The reason? In my naïvety I had thought this was the usual rural overdependence on religion and superstition, but Samir corrected me. He pointed out that this was the district that had been struck hardest during the 1943 famine, the very district from which hundreds and thousands of people had fled to Calcutta in large exoduses, only to die on the streets in the capital. And they had thought that appeasing the goddess of epidemics would spare them, so the shrines to Shitala had proliferated everywhere.

  The picture kept getting muddier. From the convoluted measures Kanu gave me, I did a swift calculation to work out what his share from sharecropping each plot, one of 1.5 bighas, the other slightly over three, should be. Kanu received eight ser of rice from the first plot and twelve ser from the second, a total of half a mon of rice. Under several rules, not a single one enforced or enforceable in this country, he should have received slightly more than double the amount, just over one mon. Half-mon rice will feed him and his family one square meal a day for two months. The two plots where we worked as wage-labourers earned us five rupees a day for each plot. We should have ended up with a hundred rupees each, but the manager of the bigger piece of land decreed that because of an unusually low yield this year, only six mon per bigha on average, the labourers would get only three rupees a day. Thirty rupees for working a ten-hour day for ten days in which even breathing seems a luxury.

  Kanu said that when the midday meal was given while harvesting this plot, they discovered that the portion of rice served to each labourer had been halved. Four other workers confirmed this. There were murmurs. Then there was an answer from the masters – How could you have the cheek to ask for more food in a straitened year such as this, when the effects of the past years’ drought was not quite over and when it had depleted previous years’ yields so drastically? Where was the extra food going to come from? From the air? They should
be thankful for what they were getting; the alternative might well be no work and, therefore, starvation. Wasn’t half a plate better than nothing on the plate?

  I told Kanu that I was going to deal with them. He looked ill with fear and said – Babu, then what we are getting is going to go too. Don’t make that mistake. Half-stomach is better than an empty stomach, they’re right. If you cause trouble, you’ll be marked out and then you’ll never get work again.

  His calculation, however destroying, was shrewder than mine. Besides, despite being called ‘Babu’, I was here to be one of them, not to tell them what to do. Except for our ultimate business when the time came.

  I hear Bijli shout at Kanu – What are you going to eat? Why did you give him only your money? Why not give him your rice as well? Take it, go on, take it and give it to him.

  Then her anger ends in her voice breaking into choked sobs. From what I can piece together, she’s aghast that Kanu’s entire earnings had to be given away to the moneylender to repay a fraction of the interest on the loans they had taken out.

  The next day I give Kanu my thirty rupees. He says no, but he can’t look me in the eye. His gaze is fixed on the notes in my outstretched hand.