The Lives of Others

by Neel Mukherjee

  It may be said, not unfairly, that Prafullanath, having missed out on the experience of higher education himself and, therefore, to some extent, partly unsympathetic to it and partly unable to enter its potential imaginatively, had stumbled upon the business of educating his sons and daughter as an afterthought, extemporising on the basis of whim, or the chatter of other people, or the prevailing fashion in circles more elevated than the one to which he belonged, a familiar variant of the aspirational urge. So when the issue presented itself, the matter of convenience overruled all other considerations: Adi and Priyo were sent to Ballygunge Government High School on Beltala Road, a bare one and a half miles north-east from their home and, later, Bhola, to whom his parents gave the least attention, to the even nearer Mitra Institution. An unusual thing happened when it came to his daughter. It was only by a stroke of chance that the imminence of sending Chhaya to school coincided with one of Prafullanath’s acquaintances remarking on the vital necessity of English education. The idea caught. In an uncharacteristic and momentary fit of daring, he had Chhaya admitted to an English-medium school, St John’s Diocesan on Elgin Road. As if to atone for it, there was a throwback with Bhola, then again a reaching for the heights when it came to the jewel of his life, Somnath, who was sent to the highly reputed missionary school, St Xavier’s, on Park Street.

  In the twelve years between Adi and Somu, Prafullanath had felt, in every pore of his body, the toil involved in making a business stand on its feet, so he had banished, with wry casualness, the grand ambitions for several varied businesses that he had harboured for himself and his sons; in that sense, Adi was correct that his father had forgotten what it was that lay between them. While unable to acknowledge that the vastness of his earlier designs was linked in a straightforward if intricate causality to the life he had had before the great rupture happened, Prafullanath was steadfast in his aim of handing over the captaincy of Charu Paper in the future.

  A new kind of knowledge surprised him as he looked at the dark hair, oiled down, combed and parted on the left, on his son’s head. Did they all become their own persons, these creatures you gave birth to, these children whom you thought were an extension of your own self, endowed with your features, with aspects of your own personality and character, but who in the end came asunder and floated away from you, no longer like your arm or your leg, doing what you willed them to do, but puppets that suddenly became animated, only to rebel and set off on their own? Prafullanath felt a mild dizziness at the realisation; this was a parent’s separation anxiety, the melancholy at the inevitable parting of ways. Why had he not foreseen this? Did one ever know the mind and soul and personality of one’s child, even little segments of them?

  The meditation only served to stiffen Prafullanath’s spine. He said, firmly and with finality, ‘No, I will have none of this newfangled college-going business. You will start coming to the office immediately.’

  Adi’s head remained bowed, as if receiving a sentence.

  Adi never perceived when his indifference to taking over the reins at Charu Paper had begun to develop. But there it was, the apathy, like a tree one has uncertainly seen in a dream and in the morning it is there right outside, its branches brushing the window, impatient to get in. Adinath went through the motions on the six days of the week that he attended the offices of Charu Paper in Old China Bazaar Street. He listened respectfully to his father, in silence, talking about the advantages of the kraft process over the sulphite, the difference between internal sizing and surface sizing, how to avoid excessive rush or drag on the wire . . . Meanwhile, his mind wandered and took off from the occasional word of his father that would enter through his ears to spin elaborate, playful traceries of equations about the strength of materials or the number of beams required to hold together a room of dimensions x X y X z, when the other variables consisted of p = weight of roof, q = thickness of walls . . .

  Khoka-babu, Prafullanath’s factotum in the office and a kind of manager, always gave the impression of bowing low to Adinath during these occasional visits. He ordered tea and sweets from the nearby Annapurna Mishtanna Bhandar, made a fuss of the teenager, whom he called ‘Chhoto-babu’, partly as a joke, but partly also in earnest ingratiation because he knew that he would have to work under this boy one day. Adi smiled tightly, ignored him and waited for the whole thing to be over. That dream-tree gripped him tight in the embrace of its branches as he sat in a room on the ground floor of the building on Old China Bazaar Street and tried to focus his mind on files, papers, receipts, bills, challans, tenders, all of which filled him with a disaffection bordering on vague nausea.

  Had he felt like this when his father had dragged him to Bardhaman and Hooghly ten, twelve years earlier, to ignite his interest in the business? Father and son had set out to visit the family mills in trains that moved slowly through the lush green countryside. Adi remembered the rice fields as parcels of bright emerald during the monsoon, and the flat land in late autumn all gold and green as far as the horizon, with patches of white cotton-clouds in the low blue sky, and the stubble brown in the red soil after the harvest in winter. He remembered his father pointing out to him the fountain-like banana trees, with their enormous, clattery leaves and their bizarre flower, a large inverted teardrop-shaped growth, maroon-black in colour, hanging solidly at the bottom of a long stalk. How could that be a flower? he remembered asking his father. The land had seemed so remote and uninhabited, full of trees and copses, the tight cover of vegetation everywhere. At the station, a car would be waiting to take them through dirt roads to a Charu Paper Mill. Prafullanath would point out to his son the various elements of the work-in-progress in response to the boy’s questions.

  ‘Why are there flowers on this machine?’

  ‘The labourers have just done Bishwakarma puja. It’s to consecrate the machine so that no harm comes to the production.’

  ‘What harm?’

  ‘Oh, just inauspicious things.’

  ‘Why is that man loading rubbish onto that slope?’

  ‘That’s what is going to be turned into pulp.’

  ‘What is pulp?’

  ‘The stuff that becomes paper.’

  ‘Why do you need so many machines to make paper into paper? Why can’t you ask the men to stick the rubbish paper together?’

  ‘Because we need to get rid of the impurities.’

  ‘What is impurities?’

  Thinking of those afternoons now, all the different occasions spliced together, the images appeared like mounted photographs in an album. The forceful gush of brown water into the open maws of huge drums and cylinders and churners, creating almighty whirlpools. The innumerable vats of dirty greyish-white chyme that floated up to the top as the raw material was subjected to dozens of chemical processes and churning and beating and swirling and sieving. The mounds of wet rubbish – plastic, buttons, bits of metal, straw, clips, particles of rags, unidentifiable coloured solids – left behind in the meshes. The tall, narrow, cylindrical cages of iron rods sticking out of the water at regular intervals, like the carpals of a futuristic skeleton. Shreds and scraps of wastepaper everywhere, in the walkways connecting the different units and on the ground, as if after a battle fought entirely with paper. A heart-pumping climb on a rickety ladder, supported firmly by one of the managers from below and his father from above, to the lip of yet another enormous drum; held in his father’s arms, he had looked down on its contents of a kind of fleecy off-white foam circulated slowly by two huge rotating arms half-submerged in the substance, moving closer and closer towards him until he had cried out in fear. And pipes, pipes everywhere, in all styles of ribbing and all kinds of colours, straight and curved and curled and looped: the site was an eviscerated mythical beast and they its entrails. And that pervasive, wet, slightly suffocating reek of the forty chemicals – the figure had been proudly proclaimed by his father – that went into the making of an ordinary thing such as paper.

  Where was he in all that excessive effort
to produce something so common, so disappointing, after the massiveness of the process involved? Adi remembered being told off by his father for chucking stone chips, one after another, into the bore-well tank from which the mill drew its water, trying to make a bigger splash than the one that preceded it, or perhaps even trying out his recently learned trick of ‘tadpole’ – making one stone skim the surface of the water one, two, three, four times before it sank; the challenge here was to make it work in the severely confined space of the tank. Had he done all that out of boredom? He could not remember. And now, surrounded by the building blocks and tricky manoeuvres for making money, not bridges or roads or theatres, he could not map this more urgent boredom onto the lost memory of the probable one from his boyhood.

  VI

  They were not all innocent of what we had to teach them. When we began with our small evening meetings nearly five months ago, there were perhaps three or four farmers in attendance, the numbers almost totally made up of men from the three homes that had received the three of us. Then harvest was quickly upon us, and we hardly had the time even to breathe, and no energy at the end of the day either to explicate or to listen to Mao’s theories. This was no bad thing: the situation at the end of the harvesting made it easier for us to spread our word. Then the numbers went up – six, ten, twelve, seventeen, at one time, even twenty-three, our high point.

  At these meetings there were farmers who had no money to buy seeds for the next season, but without planting they would die, so they got deeper into debt. A few of them grew vegetables by the side of their huts; this was all the food they had in some months of the year. And when the season for waxed gourd and ridged gourd and bottle gourd was over, they would starve.

  We told them that sacks of rice had been smuggled out at two in the morning.

  We began by taking small steps: the reversal of ‘the crop belongs to the owner of the land’ to ‘the land belongs to the cultivator of the crop’; the 1⁄3 : 2⁄3 rule of harvest grain distribution. At night, Samir, Dhiren and I again and again debated the relative merits of economism versus militancy. We told the farmers about the uprising in Naxalbari last year. Without putting it in so many words, we knew we were moving towards militancy. The business of living with them, learning to be them, was not an end in itself, as we now began to understand. It had always been a stepping stone towards more radical action.

  I knew from the moment that Dhiren brought out The Little Red Book, pointed to it and said – This man has freed eighty crore people from the noose around their necks, the kind of halter you have around your necks now – and I saw every pair of eyes in the room turn to look at the book, that we had crossed the line. Our work had begun. From the dissemination of the words of Chairman Mao and Comrade Charu Mazumdar, we will soon move on to squad formation and, from there, to ‘action’.

  As I was saying, the farmers were not totally innocent: Anupam Haati told the meeting – The city people who came here when we were sowing, they showed us a small red book too, they said the book will show you how to punish jotedaars.

  Before coming here I had often wondered how difficult it would be to convince and mobilise villagers. I had made myself exhausted thinking about the months of talks and meetings, posters and expounding. It had felt, in my imagination, like the effort that would be required to move a giant crag by pushing at its base. Within a few days of our arrival, however, that sense of impossibility had become its opposite: an easy, achievable optimism.

  Do you know why?

  Because I saw the kind of lives they led: going to bed on an empty stomach for over half the year; drowned in debt without any hope of ever surfacing; their unborn generations bonded to service those debts; their blood sucked dry (talking of which, the Bengali word for ‘sucking’ and ‘exploitation’ is the same, have you ever noticed?); their children bony but with swollen bellies, arms and legs like reeds, hair bleached to brown with malnutrition; their lives shrivelled by worry. Because their lives were like this, I thought they would be simmering with anger and all we needed to do was a bit of stoking and there would be a giant conflagration that would bring down the blood-suckers and burn them to cinders. How hopeful it all seemed.

  Then that hopefulness curdled: what I hadn’t reckoned with was that decades and decades of this slow-burning flame of resentment and deprivation had burned them, not the perpetrators. The embers of anger we had thought of fanning had burned down into the ashes of despair. They were already dead within their lives. They had no hope, no sense of a future, just an endless playing out of this illness of the present tense until its culmination in an early death. In other words, we had to kindle a fire with ashes. Have you ever tried doing that?

  Once again, the three of us by the pond near the bamboo grove at night. The cry of an animal in the distance is picked up, briefly, by more cries, all identical, then they stop.

  – Jackals, Dhiren says.

  – Nocturnal, like us, says Samir.

  – Not quite. We work in the daytime too, we don’t sleep it away.

  – Tomorrow we have to walk thirteen miles in the dark.

  We were going with eight farmers from Majgeria to Munirgram for a huge poster exhibition and mass assemblies organised by the Medinipur Coordination Committee. It was going to be a big day. Farmers and activists were coming from villages all over the western Medinipur region. Our aim was to educate them in class dynamics, arouse hatred in them against their class enemies, explain the events of Naxalbari and Telengana to let them know that they were not alone, that class uprisings were happening throughout the country, peasants were snatching their land and crops back from landowners, shaking off the yokes of their slavery. We were going to explain to them in simple, direct language that their lot would never be improved by the corrupt, slow process of parliamentary democracy and elections, that their freedom could only come about through armed rebellions of the kind that were erupting everywhere around them.

  In Munirgram, endless prattle. Endless. Sometimes I felt I was chewing on sand. Should we work with ex-hooligans who had been the domestic pets of the Congress, but now wanted to join us? Were they motivated by ideology, as we were, or did they only want to settle scores, or an easy path to quick material gains? What if, under pressure, they betrayed us? For that matter, the exhibition and assembly were teeming with card-carrying CPI(M) cadres: we didn’t know if they had made their break from the Party, or had been expelled, or were drifting towards the ideology being outlined by Charu Mazumdar and others. They were as dangerous as the paid ex-Congress criminals, if not more so. What if they betrayed us?

  Jaw, jaw, jaw . . . my temples began to throb. I stuck to my line and quoted Chairman Mao: ‘If you set a ball rolling, it will reach its target at some point. But if you keep being hesitant, and stop to discuss matters at every point in the trajectory, it means slowing down the ball. It may then never reach its destination.’

  While writing all this I found myself hesitating at one point, the bit where I mentioned going to bed on an empty stomach. I saw your calm face suddenly worried by such a disarmingly predictable question – Did I too eat half-stomach?

  I won’t – I can’t – lie to you. Yes, I did. Most days.

  On some days there was nothing to eat, only water to drink, drawn from the well shared between this neighbourhood and the Maheshwar colony next to it. Most of the time it was not a fast, but a fraction of a meal: a plate of cooked gourd and mashed yam, once a day, not enough to fill your stomach, but just enough to see you from one day to the next. Nobody will die eating only this, because you’re getting something to eat, but nobody will live either on this, only subsist. The picture of starvation here, the picture that we city-dwellers carried around in our heads when we thought of rural poverty, of bony, half-naked people withering to death, was wrong – that was what happened during times of famine. In ordinary times, like now, the truth was different: the boniness remained, but it was no longer day after day of fasting; instead, weeks and months of hunger,
of not having enough to eat, of meagreness and undernourishment and weakness.

  I remembered Mejo-kaki once commenting on the food eaten by the servants, Gagan-da and Kamala-di and Malati-di, and especially the temporary daytime staff – Look, just look at the amount of rice on their plates. It’s a hillock.

  The comment was mocking: it was a matter of amused condescension for her. I was too young then to read the observation for what it was; I too had giggled.

  It is true that rural people eat a lot of rice, but not for the reasons she had assumed. They eat rice because there isn’t much else to eat: the vegetables they grow; the roots and leaves they forage; the occasional fish from the ponds and canals; the even rarer duck, which sometimes appears on the flooded rice fields during the early part of the growing season. But that is the ideal, almost aspired-for, scenario. The truth is more naked: they eat so much rice because they are filling themselves up against the time they know will come when they won’t even have this staple to fill their stomachs.

  Dhiren laughed when I mentioned it to him – This sounds a bit like the camel theory of eating. Camels can store water in their humps, they’re desert creatures, they don’t know where or when their next drink is coming from. You think the same is true for farmers and rice? It’s a nice, romantic kind of theory for someone so . . . so tough as you.

  But how much waxed gourd and ridged gourd and bottle gourd can you eat? I have tried it, and I can tell you that it doesn’t fill you up for long; in a couple of hours, even less, you are hungry again.

  A thought keeps me awake. It’s like a stubborn, delicate fish-bone stuck in your throat – it doesn’t cause you any harm, but every time you swallow you know it’s there, so you keep swallowing, hoping that it’s suddenly going to happen cleanly, without that prickle. Nights when I can’t sleep because of hunger, I wonder what Debdulal-da must have said or done to make these destitute Santhals and Mahatos, Kanu and Bipul and Anupam, agree that we could stay in their homes – after all, we were extra mouths to feed, one extra per household, even if we were extra hands during sowing and harvesting and, therefore, additional income. Did the two columns tally and balance each other? What was going through their heads when they said yes? Could it have been, besides all the calculation involved, also that our idealism about trying to be one with them sparked off a kind of responsive idealism, so that they thought – Yes, here was a chance to . . .