The Lives of Others

by Neel Mukherjee

  Two weeks later Samir was still quoting lines from Beautiful Bengal. Dhiren joined him now. Seeing an insect poised on the edge of a leaf, he quoted – On a leaf in Bengal, the glass-insect has gone to sleep.

  So I said – That’s not a glass-insect, you fool, it’s a dung beetle.

  He said – Really, you have no soul, no . . . no finer juices in you.

  – The first requisite of revolution: evaporate your finer juices.

  – What about soul then?

  I quoted Mao – That is for the ‘concrete analysis of concrete conditions’, the very soul of Marxism, according to Lenin. Not for empty and superficial aesthetic pleasures. This beautiful green in front of you is an instrument of the oppression of the masses.

  That shut him up.

  There was a breathing space after the transplanting. After the burst of intense physical labour, we were back once more in the old, eddying whirlpool of talk, going round and round in circles.

  I worried that so much thought – and so much talk – was making the action become insurmountable. Perhaps the first step, the first stroke, that was what was difficult.

  Dhiren asked – Do we have the movements of everyone on the list? We have to get that absolutely right: their movements during every day and every evening of every season of the year. Where they go, whom they see, their habits, the places they visit, the roads they take . . .

  I said impatiently – Not everything in that calculation will be perfect. There will be variations and changes and interruptions. Do you do the same thing every day, or every hour of the day, or every, say, 12th August?

  – No, no, but there are patterns.

  – Yes, patterns. We have to get the patterns of their movements correct. But we can never eliminate chance. Your moneylender, Nirmal Maity, for example, does not go to Medinipur Town or Garhbeta every ninth day of the month, setting out of his home at midday, then returning at eight in the evening. You have to accept that if we lie in wait for him when he’s alone, based on previous instances, we may well be disappointed. He may not be going to Medinipur Town that day, say.

  – I understand, but the opposite strategy, attacking on the spur of the moment, seems riskier. What if we’re not prepared? What if he’s prepared instead?

  – The guerrilla should always be prepared, because he doesn’t know when an opportunity is going to present itself.

  Samir intervened – What about a median way?

  – That would mean being armed all the time?

  – Exactly my position: being prepared all the time, I said.

  Samir said – No, I meant something slightly different, something more spur-of-the-moment, something that happens as the consequence of a flashpoint . . . We take advantage of a heated moment and push things forward. Once one action is under our belt, the second one will be easier, the third easier still. And we’ll be able to increase our numbers, if the munish see that we mean business, that our hands are already bright with blood, like a true communist revolutionary’s. I have the Chairman’s words to support me.

  True, he did.

  The paddy plants will grow, bear flowers and then the grain, the grain will ripen, finally they will be harvested. It rained and rained and rained. Mosquitoes, dense clouds of them, kept us awake with their biting; their whining was even worse. Kanu’s child slept badly and cried a lot. It kept Bijli and me awake for a large part of the night.

  The weeding began. I leaped towards it greedily: it was something to do for a small period until time froze again and we went back to the endless waiting. Large groups of munish, we among them, spread out over the aals, about twenty to twenty-five munish per bigha of land. We wore a toka on our heads and carried a small, sharp sickle, niraani, in our hands and went about uprooting weeds and the different types of grass – durbamukho, moina, shyam, an old Mahato man told me as I worked alongside him – that had sprung up on the aals and were creeping along, extending their long, tenacious roots into the green felt of the paddy fields they bordered.

  We squatted and moved forwards and sideways slowly. It was impossible to do this job standing up and bending down; I felt my back and neck were going to break if I did that. The squatting motion was better, but only marginally, I soon discovered. At least I should be able to sleep better at nights. In the intervals between the rains, the cooling effect disappeared instantly and the land seemed to exhale its warm breath in the form of an invisible vapour . . . It was impossible to do anything more than breathe, and even that seemed strenuous, so you can imagine what the weeding did to me. No amount of gritting my teeth and murmuring the Chairman’s words about discipline was going to lessen the immediate pain of this work. Would I come out of the other side, stronger? Would it make me steelier, more disciplined, the ideal guerrilla? I didn’t know. There were frequent days when the answer was a very straightforward ‘No’.

  CHAPTER NINE

  WHO WOULD HAVE thought that when the toddler Somnath had been inconsolable after the brown mynah had snatched a dragonfly out of his fingers’ grip he had been reacting not to loss, or to the knowledge of the mercilessness of Nature, but had really been giving vent to frustration at an impulse thwarted? That inclination found its full flowering as Somnath grew older. He became adept at catching alive all kinds of flying insects – mosquitoes, flies, butterflies, moths, cockroaches – without squashing them, tore off their wings or legs with the utmost delicacy so that their bodies were not damaged in the traction produced by the pulling, and then set them free and watched them unblinkingly. He took immense delight in their limbless writhing, short-lived sometimes, but not always. At other times he left on a couple of their legs and watched them hobble and skitter. That sent him into fits of clapping and hopping about; joy was such an easily attainable thing. After a heavy rain-shower, when the big, black ants came out, he dripped hot wax from a burning candle on them and achieved a kind of instant embalming; this was a special thrill.

  ‘O ma, how clever of you to think up this one,’ his mother said.

  ‘But it’s so cruel!’ Chhaya protested.

  ‘What’s cruel about it? He’s doing us a favour by getting rid of these pests.’

  At the apex of this pyramid of pleasures was the setting of larger insects on fire. Stealing a matchbox was not difficult. It was tougher to go about the business of immolating insects without anyone discovering it; the house was full of people and he could be spied all too easily. His favourite creatures for this purpose were the shiny, rust-brown centipedes, which were quite common, especially on the ground floor, during the monsoon. Somnath loved the way they curled up into a tight spiral as soon as they were touched. He spent hours trying to stretch them out to their natural length, once they had rolled into themselves, by impaling them with safety pins or needles to isolate their two ends and then pulling on both simultaneously. Without being formed in so many words, the thought went through his head that if the touch of any object was so inimical to their uncoiling, what would happen if they were exposed to another kind of stimulus, one that would force them to unfurl? The answer appeared almost instantly to his budding pyrophile’s brain.

  It was in this act that he was caught by Charubala one afternoon: the inert coil of the centipede first doused in a few drops of kerosene filched from the kitchen, then a lit match held to it, causing instant ignition, the flames hardly visible in the strong sunlight, and the insect leaking a yellow-orangish fluid. He was given a resounding slap to his face, the first ever in his life. Uproar followed. Madan and the servants were rounded up and scolded for neglecting to catch the child getting his hands on something as forbidden and dangerous as kerosene (‘What if he had mistakenly set something bigger, or even himself, on fire?’), then reprimanded again for leaving matches lying around. Somnath went into a sulk that kept the whole family dancing for two days. And yet it was clear to Charubala, torn between chagrin and pique, that she had slapped Som not to discipline him and deter him from unhealthily cruel activities, but out of protectiveness
, so that he did not injure himself playing with fire. It was not a lesson in morality, but in self-preservation.

  Nineteen forty-three offered Somnath’s particular brand of creativity a broader array of opportunities. Madan began to save the starch-water from the drained cooked rice for the skin-and-bones beggars who had gradually proliferated all over the city in an attempt to escape the famine in the countryside. They came begging throughout the day, these cages of bone covered in loose folds of skin. They could not bring themselves to ask for rice, begging for the cooking water instead. Ten-year-old Som, standing at the front door, fascinated, watched them drinking the lukewarm starch-water from dented aluminium bowls. His mother called from inside, ‘Come in, come in right now’, an angry panic in her voice. She could tell by the clothes they wore and the way they spoke that this shrivelled mother and her two little daughters who had come begging were not the indigent poor, but came possibly from the rural lower-middle classes.

  Som watched them lap up the gruel. The sound it made was subtly different from sipping or slurping.

  ‘Come inside,’ Charubala ordered and tried to move him physically by force.

  The boy, not used to having his will opposed, refused to budge, but his mother, bigger than he, tried again, this time nearly lifting him up in her arms. Som fought back, throwing about his arms and legs. In the tussle, he kicked the half-empty aluminium bowl, which one of the little girls had set down for a minute to watch the struggle, and sent the gruel spilling in first a swift then a slow, broad lick across the top of the stairs where the woman and her girls were sitting.

  A short, sharp cry came out of the woman’s mouth, then silence. The older-looking of the two girls went down on all fours, prostrated herself on the floor and started to lick up the spill. Transfixed, Somnath and his mother looked on. Charubala returned to life quicker; as if they had witnessed something unspeakable, she and Somnath, now more pliant, left for the interior of the house swiftly, silently.

  The incident, played out for, it seemed, a few infinitely elastic seconds, caused a certain calculation to go through the boy’s head. When another set of starving beggars turned up at their door, two or three days after this, Somnath was ready. He knew that he was not supposed to be around, staring at them, so he waited until Madan-da had gone into the kitchen, then sneaked downstairs, ran stealthily to the man – a shadow of a man, really – and his stick-thin daughter, snatched the bowl out of her hands and dripped the remainder of the cloudy liquid onto the rags the girl was wearing. Then he stepped back and said, ‘Wring your clothes and drink what comes out.’

  Father and daughter stared at Somnath, their breathing seemingly suspended. What meekness and subordination differences of class and wealth had hard-wired in them were consolidated by hunger and debility. They got up from their sitting positions slowly. The man pulled his daughter close to him, as if wishing to protect her and, without turning their backs to Somnath, they climbed down the four steps and reached the front gate backwards, the entire while keeping Somnath pinned with their eyes. At the iron gate they turned their backs to him, facing the street at last, but then the father spun very slowly around to look at Somnath one final time and said, ‘May god keep you well’, and shuffled away with his daughter.

  Around the time Somnath turned twenty, his childhood mischief had become the stuff of local anecdotes, recounted over and over, as if in celebration, by Charubala mostly, but certain incidents had either been forgotten or were never mentioned. The story that was retold frequently was the one involving a cat.

  It was a white animal with an orange tail and an orange sock on three of its paws, the right front leg missing out on the droll detail. Madan-da used to say that the creature had used that paw to swipe so much food, stealing into the kitchens of the neighbourhood, that the sock had fallen off. The explanation was not entirely without merit: in the year of famine, when the corpses of emaciated cats and dogs and humans could be seen lying around the city, this cat seemed to have miraculously avoided that end. It was notorious in Basanta Bose Road – a fish head, waiting to be cooked, would go missing; cooked fish, left uncovered and unsupervised in the kitchen while the cook had her back turned for only a few minutes, would be attacked brazenly, the cook returning to find a piece gone or fish bones sticking out from the bowl. The cat clearly knew where fish was being cooked and when; it lay in wait nearby, endlessly patient, for it knew an opportunity would come along soon. Its reputation had reached such a height that it was shooed off energetically whenever anyone saw it loitering with intent, and children threw stones at it or hid behind doors, their breaths held, a big stick in their hands, waiting for the cat to enter so that they could bring the stick crashing down onto their unsuspecting adversary’s back. Somnath, now nearly eleven, loved this game of guerrilla attack, but the cat proved wilier after a couple of occasions of being taken by nasty surprise. When the animal got swifter in its evasion of or escape from Somnath wielding a lathi, the boy became more determined to do it real damage; his blood was up.

  He had a foolproof idea. He stole a couple of his father’s Valium pills from the medicine box in his parents’ room, crushed them to powder, mixed them in warm milk in a shallow bowl, left this by the steps to the back garden and waited, this time not armed with the stick, but watching only. Soon enough he was rewarded with the sight of the cat lapping up the milk in one go. The question now was this: would the cat oblige by falling into a stupor right in front of him or would the pills take some time to work, during which period it would lope off goodness-knows-where and sleep off the effects of the drug? Somnath was faced with a dilemma; he did not know which would give him more pleasure – the drug-induced death of the cat or beating it to a pulp with the lathi, once the tranquillisers had kicked in and it was incapable of escaping.

  As it turned out, the cat sat down to wash itself after the milk, then began to have trouble getting up. It tried, failed, tried again, and stumbled after the first couple of steps. Then it stood still, swayed for a few seconds, tried to move forward, now in a kind of drunken uncoordination, and toppled over sideways. It stood up again and shook its head, as if trying physically to shed the veil of confusion and sleepiness that had descended, suddenly and heavily, upon it. Its normal gait now became a loopy, erratic curve for a while, then it fell again, unable to keep its head up. Som, his heart hammering, watched with joy. Now that the cat was so obviously powerless to run away, he emerged from his hiding place. The cat took no notice. It did not try to raise its heavy head to look at him. Som took the lathi, moved towards the cat and brought it down on the nearly comatose animal with all the force in his body, but the lathi was bigger than he and he had misjudged how close he needed to be to the animal to maximise the force of the long stick, so the blow came as an anti-climax, at least to him. The cat tried to yelp and move, neither of which it could achieve. Som remembered someone mentioning that the best way to kill a cat was to hit it hard on its head. He moved back a few steps so that he could have optimal leverage.

  Before he could raise his arms a second time, Madan-da appeared from the house and called out, ‘What are you doing with that lathi, what are you doing?’

  By coincidence, Charubala too appeared on the scene. She repeated Madan’s cry, took in the scene and added, ‘What’s happened to the cat? Why is it lying down like that?’

  ‘I gave it Valium mixed in milk. Now I’m going to beat it to death. Look, it can’t move. What fun! No more stolen fish.’

  ‘Where did you get your hands on Valium? How?’ she demanded, panic making her voice rise.

  ‘Where else? From Baba’s medicine box,’ he said, contemptuous that she did not know something so obvious. ‘I know where it’s kept. Baba told me he takes those tablets at night to help him go to sleep, so I gave two to the cat. Then I can beat him and beat him and beat him.’ The contempt modulated to pride; he was clearly expecting to be praised for his cleverness.

  Charubala reacted quite differently. She flew into a ra
ge.

  ‘What nerves, taking Baba’s medicines! Don’t you know you’re not supposed to touch that box? Those medicines are strictly forbidden to children. What if you had taken some by mistake? Valium is poison, don’t you know, poison,’ she screamed. ‘What if you had come to some harm? My hands and feet are turning numb at the very thought. You need to be taught a lesson. You were sent into the world to turn my flesh and bones black . . .’

  Leaving them to carry on, Madan discreetly picked up the cat in his arms and took it to his room. He got some warm milk from the kitchen, dipped a clean piece of cloth in it and squeezed slow drops into the sleeping creature’s mouth when he noticed it beginning to stir. Would it live? At least it was still breathing. He put the cat’s head on his lap and covered the lower half of the animal with a sheet so that it did not get cold. Was it only last year that he had stayed up two nights in a row, putting cold-water compresses on Somnath’s forehead when he was burning up with fever? Ma’s face had been thin and desiccated with worry. The doctor had said that the boy should be given cold sponges every hour and monitored throughout the night to ensure that his temperature did not shoot up. It was nothing for him to obey those orders, to see Somu-babu returned to health again. His Dulal, whom he got to see only once a year during the month-long visit to his village, was just under a year younger than Somu-babu. For the eleven months of the year that he was in Calcutta, Somu-babu was a substitute Dulal; Madan held little distinction in his head between the two boys.

  Chhaya carried tales, not all of which were innocent. She got a thrill out of poisoning people’s minds and playing them off against each other. ‘Bhola’s digging dirt in the garden, you asked him not to,’ she said to her mother to try and get him into trouble; she snitched about Adinath: ‘I saw Dada going to the terrace in the afternoon sun and he told me not to tell you.’ She expected to be rewarded for all this. When the kulfiwalla went down the road in the late afternoon, with his terracotta pots, covered in woven jute, full of ices and kulfis, Chhaya kept an eye on who among the four siblings got ordinary kulfi (two annas), malai kulfi (three annas) or double cream (four annas); god help Charubala if her daughter thought she had been fobbed off with the cheapest.