The Lives of Others

by Neel Mukherjee

  Processions of hatred and anger along Harrison Road, Mirzapur Street, Amherst Street became a daily occurrence; college was not going to reopen anytime soon. Then, as soon as the monsoons were over, the Hindu–Muslim riots and killings began. For days in August no one left home. Charubala sent up hourly prayers of thanks that they lived in a Hindu neighbourhood. Prafullanath, Adi and Priyo, who had recently joined Charu Paper full-time, sat at home, relaying news, gossip, rumour and statistics to each other and everyone else who cared to listen. Hordes of Muslim men, armed with sticks, shovels, spears, knives, axes, kerosene and matches, were slaughtering Hindus on sight, entering Hindu homes to kill, loot and burn. The city became a warren of no-go zones. People said, ‘Rivers of blood are flowing in our streets.’

  Prafullanath paced about and complained bitterly.

  ‘Four of our mills in the countryside have had to be shut down, Ilam Bazar, Chalna, Meherpur, Nalhati, because of the riots. Apparently the Muslims are beheading Hindu men like you cut the heads off fish,’ he said to his wife, ‘and all you can think of is petty rubbish like not leaving home.’

  Prafullanath himself was half-frozen with fear at the killings – he had expressly forbidden anyone to leave home – but he had other fears to contend with too. They made him tetchy. His wife’s nagging gave him an excuse to vent his irritation.

  ‘There’s a war on, in case you’d forgotten. Everything is in short supply – food, kerosene, newsprint, paper – and the price of everything has touched the sky. The government is requisitioning whatever it can get its hands on. I thought if we could keep production going at slightly over our usual output we could sell it elsewhere and make a neat profit, but sand has fallen on that bit of molasses.’

  He meant, of course, the plan that he and Adi had hatched of hoarding paper and selling it on the black market, an idea sparked off by the hoarding of rice three years ago during the famine.

  ‘Business wasn’t going too badly, then the famine came and now the riots . . . I blame everything on my burnt forehead,’ he said.

  ‘But, Baba, worse could be in store for us,’ Adi pointed out. ‘Think what will happen if the mills in the Muslim-majority areas go to Pakistan after the division. What are we going to do then?’

  ‘Yes, say all this,’ Prafullanath hissed with irritation, ‘and make it easier for fate to bring it to pass! I weathered the recession in the Twenties, even made a profit in the last recession in ’36. But this . . . this’ – he was at a loss for words – ‘this will bring us to our knees.’

  ‘I don’t understand all this ree-shey-shaan thi-shey-shaan,’ Charubala hit back. ‘I want to see all of you safe from harm and I’m going to keep on praying for that. Is it too much to ask?’

  A frenetic accounting of acquaintances, friends and relatives in Muslim-dominated areas of the city began. Chhaya pointed out that her erstwhile music teacher, Shipra-di, lived in Moulali. Somnath, on the other hand, could only wish the rioting would continue so that he would not have to go to school – close enough to Muslim-heavy Park Circus to be out of bounds now – for the foreseeable future.

  The foreman in the mill at distant Chalna, a Muslim man, was killed by rioting Hindus: his head was bashed to a pulp. His relatives had to identify him by a birthmark on his back. The Ghoshes sat at home and wrung their hands. They feared that all their factories were going to be set ablaze; the news from the countryside left them in little doubt that the nation had turned into an abattoir: Noakhali, Bihar, United Provinces, Delhi . . . an endless cycle of revenge, a snake swallowing its tail.

  Shipra-di’s son turned up at Basanta Bose Road, unclothed to the waist, unshod, unshaven; his father, missing for nine days at the height of the carnage in the city, had been discovered, both his arms hacked off, blocking a drain off Muchipara Road. The son had come to invite them to his father’s sraddha.

  ‘I know people who’ve lost everything – family, home, the roof above their heads – in these riots. They only have the clothes on their backs to call their own. But I keep thinking: buildings, property, savings, all these one can accumulate again . . . but you can’t get back the people you’ve lost’ – his voice came out stifled – ‘especially in . . . in this way.’ Then he whispered, ‘I’ll remember that corpse forever.’

  Chhaya and her mother wept silently. The men in the house were horrified into silence. Prafullanath knew that the man was going to ask for money sooner or later.

  Fretting about the mills kept him awake at night. When he thought how much money he was losing, his heart started hammering. How was it all going to end? He fingered the rings on his hands – sapphire to avoid the wrath of Saturn, coral to appease Mars, topaz for Jupiter – and wondered, not for the first time, about the astrologer’s warning that a tricky phase involving Saturn was about to begin, but prescribing the wearing of sapphire was a decision that he could not take lightly. So what did these bad times tell him: that the phase of the destructive reign of Saturn over his life had begun, or that wearing the sapphire to mitigate the planet’s malign influence had been ill advised in the first place? His heart thumped away faster and faster.

  When the Ghoshes started venturing out again, elaborate plans had to be made to share one car; the other two had to be kept in the garage because of the petrol shortage. Avoiding Muslim-dominated areas necessitated convoluted detours. So in order to drop off Prafullanath, Adi and Priyo on Old China Bazaar Street, Niranjan-da, the driver, had to avoid the area north of St Andrew’s Church; most of the route was straightforward and safe, but after Old Court House Street it got tricky; the Muslim spread south of Harrison Road began. Chhaya was not allowed out of the house for months. Bhola, who had to negotiate the most perilous route from Bhabanipur to north of Pataldanga, talked to a couple of his Muslim peers at City College who, appalled at what was happening, had decided to speak up for unity; these Muslim students banded together and began to accompany their Hindu friends and colleagues along the dangerous stretch from Old Ballygunge to Wellesley Street on journeys both to and from the college. Bhola did not breathe a word of this arrangement to anyone at home.

  With news of the ways in which the subcontinent was going to be carved up between Hindus and Muslims coming in on a regular basis, of the squabbling and negotiations and fiats between their British overlords, the Congress and the Muslim League, Prafullanath’s worries now came to rest wholly on how the manufacturing plants he owned would be distributed along the dividing line. Would Calcutta at least remain a part of India? Anything else seemed inconceivable to him. And not only to him – in an echo of the slogan that had ignited the riots last year, there were now processions shouting ‘Ladke lenge Calcutta.’

  The Boundary Commission’s decision just before Independence came as a shock: the Ghoshes were to lose the mills at Chalna and Meherpur to the new country, East Pakistan.

  Charubala said, ‘Arrey, Baba, at least Calcutta will remain ours. We won’t have to move with our belongings or become refugees. So what if a couple of mills have gone? Buy another two here.’

  Prafullanath said, ‘It’s a bit too late in the day to explain business to you. We’ve been running well below optimal output for over two years. Then for one year the mills have been closed because of all this rioting. Now two of them have gone to another country overnight. If I had known this was going to happen, I would have sold them years ago, like all these East Bengali families who have been selling all their possessions and land and houses for decades and decades now.’

  Charubala fell back on her old reasoning. ‘I don’t understand all this output-foutput. That we are all alive and safe in these times is enough for me.’

  ‘There’ll be riots again, you mark my words. Otherwise why would Gandhi come to the city again? Precious little he could do last year, wearing his loincloth and walking barefoot – all this unbearable rubbish! – and talking to villagers. The riots and killings went on erupting here and there: Calcutta today, Noakhali tomorrow, Bihar the following. Ashes and cinders h
e could achieve! I hear he’s going to set up camp in Rash Bagan with the Muslims. This sucking-up to the Muslims will be the end of the Congress. At every stage, sitting up, standing down, they are appeased. Could the Congress do anything to Jinnah, who is about to take away half the country for the bloody Muslims?’

  Charubala muttered, ‘Ufff, all this politics . . . it’s eaten your head.’

  Listening to Nehru’s speech on the radiogram at midnight of the 14th August, with the set turned up loud, all of them stoked up, for once, in the patriotic blaze sweeping the country, Charubala came up against the limits of her understanding again.

  At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake . . .

  Charubala, who had sat through the Vande Mataram and the speeches of Chaudhry Khaliquzzaman and Dr Radhakrishnan grumblingly – ‘Ufff, why they decide to do all this so late at night, don’t these people need to sleep?’ etc. – could no longer check herself.

  . . . A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new . . .

  ‘Oh, I can’t bear this prattling in English any longer! Why isn’t anyone speaking in Bengali?’

  ‘Will you be quiet for just a second?’ Prafullanath cried.

  At this point Somnath piped up, ‘But the whole world is not asleep! He’s wrong. Everyone in Japan is awake because it is morning there, and everyone in Britain and America too, because it’s evening and afternoon there. We were taught this in our Geography class, time zones and time differences.’

  He looked like a puppy who expected to be patted on the head for mastering a new trick.

  The achievement we celebrate today is but a step, an opening of opportunity, to the greater triumphs and achievements . . .

  IX

  There was news of the outside world occasionally. (Look, look, how odd that I used the words ‘outside world’. When I used to live at home, I considered the villages, deep in the heart of rural Bengal, the ‘outside world’, or even, the ‘real world’. But away from home, the city and everything elsewhere, even other villages or another part of rural Bengal, became the ‘outside world’. Does that mean that the world is wherever one is? Is that not the most accurate and strictest of all definitions of self-centredness? Does that mean that there is no escape from the self? After chanting to ourselves millions of times, Change yourself, change the world, is this the outcome – failure?)

  Yes, people from Calcutta showed up sometimes, bringing copies of Deshabrati, Liberation; we pounced upon them. It was only on reading those papers that we realised that our people had fanned out into the rural heartlands of at least three states: West Bengal, Bihar, Orissa. I had no idea that the spread was so extensive, that we had so many in our team. My spirits lifted.

  The news items obviously did not report setbacks, such as our people not being allowed to work in a village and being chased out, or comrades going to hamlets and not being able to last the race because of the hardships that such a life entailed.

  I can hear you asking if it was truly so hard. Yes, it was. Rats bit us – some of them could be as big as kittens – while we were asleep; the rice fields were full of them. In desperate times, I was told, the Santhals caught and ate them. Snakes came into the huts during the monsoon. Upset stomachs and a mild dysentery were our doggedly faithful companions – we knew they would go away, but also that they would be back before we could fully appreciate their absence. Then there was the business of eating once a day, if you were lucky (rice, a watery dal, a little bit of fried greens of some kind); of days of eating puffed rice only, or water-rice with chillies and salt; or not eating, days of fast followed by a half-meal, that instantly set you running into the bushes. There was the lack of bathrooms or any kind of sanitation. Above all, there was the slow pace of life, with nothing happening and nothing to do for enormous chunks of time, nowhere to go, nothing to read, no one to speak to.

  I try not to write about these because I can hear you taunting – Aha re, my cream-doll! Besides, I feel ashamed to admit to feeling the bite of those hardships; really, a middle-class cream-doll, that’s what I am. It hurts to acknowledge this.

  I worried about how swiftly this catalogue of difficulties and woes could descend into an easy horrorism; I have always wanted to avoid that. What use did it serve to emphasise the unbridgeable gap between the lives of these people and people of our kind? It only consoled and comforted the middle classes that their lot was better. They will tell you that they want to know the details of the daily hardships of rural life in order to be aware, in order to be moral, but the appetite really was for propping up their idea of themselves as people with sympathetic souls and sensitive social consciences. It was not awareness they were after, it was the reinforcement of the separation between ‘us’ and ‘them’.

  Did you see how easily I fell into ranting again? I must stop.

  But one aspect of the hardship of life in the villages I must truthfully confess to you – the thing I found most difficult to bear, much more than going hungry or the absence of toilets, was the solid weight of time. That had the potential to crack me. The books we had brought with us had been read over and over again. We could recite The Little Red Book backwards. We talked until our tongues felt loosened from inside our mouths. We instilled Mao’s words into the farmers and wage-labourers like teaching a parrot. Yet we didn’t manage to budge that solid sphere of time even a little; it was always there. There were long evenings and nights when there was nothing to do except listen to the din of crickets. Sometimes I thought people in these parts went to sleep early not because of their days of bone-breaking work, but because there was nothing to do. Sleeping was an activity. If you could manage it, it made you forget the stasis of time, its sheer, pressing weight on a life. Much like work did.

  The measure of time too was different. I asked Kanu how far it was to Titapani. He said – Far, quite far; then – Very far. I persisted in nudging him to be more accurate, expecting an answer in terms of hours and minutes. He finally came up with – About six bidis can be smoked easily on that walk.

  Later, I began to notice this subjective, if picturesque way of measuring cropping up everywhere: short distances by the number of paces, length by the number of hands, even growth of paddy by the number of fingers. You had to get a feel for it otherwise a lot of basic communication was doomed.

  And when you let yourself down into this different stream of time, you had no choice but to align yourself to its flow. In the lull between weeding, removing snails from the fields and the ripening of the paddy, I followed Kanu and the other Santhals and Mahatos as they went about other jobs that brought them a little bit of money or food – erecting woven-cane barriers, catching fish in the ponds (but not in the private ponds of the jotedaars, or the ones in the upper-caste sections towards the interior of the village; they were not allowed to do this; if caught, they’d be beaten mercilessly), growing vegetables next to their huts, repairing straw roofs.

  Dhiren said that a group of a dozen or fourteen had set out with their ploughs to look for potato cultivations in places as far-flung as Nadia and Murshidabad and Bankura because they couldn’t find enough work locally to feed themselves and their families.

  At least they were not migrating to cities. I had seen for myself how the migrant workers were slowly extinguished, crushed to death by the jaws of the city; working, yes, but in such jobs that we would have to find a word other than ‘life’ for what they had. Very few of them got lucky and found a better life.

  Madan-da would be one such fortunate one. Ma and Thakuma were not exactly forthcoming or clear with details about Madan-da’s life before he came to us, and I had never asked Madan-da myself, but from what I could piece together, he was from a tiny village in a particularly impoverished district in Orissa. The same story: drought, famine, death, failure of crops year after year, no hope, nothing. The lucky ones were those who escaped this, found a better kind of job in a city, sent money home, moved thei
r families into a brick house. In that scheme of things, Madan-da had been the luckiest; or, if you prefer, he sat right on top of the ladder of people who sought a livelihood in cities.

  But nine out of ten of those leaving their villages in the hope of making a better life for themselves faced exactly the opposite fate. After having lived in Majgeria for a while, I was no longer sure if migrating to urban areas was such a terrible thing.

  The tufty fronds of the grain-heads had begun to show. We were being steam-cooked in the humid heat of late September.

  The weaver-birds were beginning their plunder again. Harvest soon. This time I hoped to be less of an embarrassment to myself and to others.

  It’s been a year since I left home. You are a constant presence in me, so I won’t ask after you – it feels like I’m talking to you inside my head all the time – but I also think of Ma, Sona and Kalyani. I dreamed of Ma the other night. In the dream I was famished, craving food, and she was serving me dinner, but when I looked down at the plate and the bowls I found only ashes, heaps of black, burnt scraps. I looked at her with confusion and I saw her laughing, as if in contempt. I was seized by a great anger then, my heart was hammering away, and I began to shout at her, and the more I shouted, the more defiantly amused and uncaring she became. She was laughing at me. I wanted to be violent, to do some harm to her . . . and then the mad thumping in my chest woke me up. I could hear the beats in the first sweaty moments of wakefulness. Above that thudding rose the billows of my anger still. And then shame, deep shame and confusion at the content of such a stealthy revelation: did I really harbour such resentment towards someone who loved me so vastly and unconditionally?