The Lives of Others

by Neel Mukherjee

  And what news of Sona? Yes, he does look like Chhoto-kaka, but that’s where the similarity ends. How detached he is from everything! Occasionally I used to think that there was something not quite right with him, but most of the time I was envious. That resilience to the outside world, that capacity of not being damaged, even lightly scratched, by it – what wouldn’t I give to be blessed with that? Although you’ve often complained that I am like that, indifferent to the world, hard, stony. Did you mean that seriously? You know that I’m not. Not to you.

  We were in the middle of harvest when Dhiren informed us that Bipul’s brother, Shankar Soren, whom we had assumed was slightly better off than Bipul because he had a tiny plot, had had to give up his entire harvest to Senapati Nayek, a small landlord who owns about twenty-five to thirty bighas.

  This was the story. There was a drought in ’65, then a mini-famine in ’66, and Shankar’s plot lay empty for those two years. Then his wife fell ill and he had to borrow money from Senapati – it was an informal side-business that most landlords had, to earn a little extra something, or to manoeuvre themselves into ever more powerful, ever more advantageous positions – for buying food and for his wife’s treatment. Senapati, instead of asking Shankar to mortgage his little piece of land, which was the usual practice, gave him 400 rupees; Shankar would have to pay him back nearly 600 rupees by the end of the year. It was impossible for Shankar to do this because his plot had produced nothing for two years running. If he could grow something there and sell it (instead of consuming it, as he normally did), he thought, perhaps he could pay some of the loan back, so he borrowed more money from Senapati to buy a bag of seeds to sow in his plot. The repayment of this loan was to be the amount of paddy cultivated that would theoretically pay off the loan and the interest, but Senapati had done something wilier than that straightforwardly exploitative arithmetic. He bought up Shankar’s harvest at half the market rate, thus alienating the poor man of his entire produce while giving him the illusion that he was repaying the whole sum he had borrowed.

  Senapati then reminded him that there was still the interest on the loan of seed-grains to be serviced; his harvest had only paid off part of the loan, not to mention the principal, plus the accruing interest on the previous loan for food and medical bills for his wife’s illness . . .

  This year Shankar woke up to the fact that while the interest on the loans, both money and seed, would go on increasing, his crop yield and his labour were both finite and would never be enough to clear his debts. He would be nibbling away at it for his whole life, then one day he would die, the size of the debt greater after a lifetime of trying to bring it down to zero and free himself.

  The realisation led him to vent his anger and frustration on the nearest person – his wife. He beat her regularly, blaming her and her illness for landing him in this situation, with this mountain of debt on his shoulders, until things got out of hand and Shankar’s wife threw herself into the well in the Muslim neighbourhood and killed herself.

  The story was common and universal. The Bengali novel had played its part in making it a matter of common and universal knowledge to the literate middle classes. So no surprises there. But the twist appeared at this point.

  Dhiren said – A dry-as-stick figure, this Shankar, you know. He looks like a shrivelled broom. You realise he doesn’t get enough to eat the moment you set eyes on him. Do you know what I did when I heard the story, when I saw that all the grain he was standing in, literally, was not going to feed him, or get him money, and the wages from his work too were not going to come to him, but be deducted by Senapati, do you know what I did?

  Even through our exhaustion the tale had filtered through, I didn’t quite know why: there was something in the way the story had been told, in the sixth sense we had that Dhiren was withholding something that he would spring on us towards the end . . . We were sitting up, quiet as children being told a ghost-story, almost unable to breathe, with Dhiren asking repeatedly – Do you know what I did?

  He answered himself – I moved close to Shankar; there were so many people around, I moved close to him, brought my mouth near his ear and whispered: What if we finish off this Senapati man?

  We were still holding our breath.

  – It took a long time to get the real meaning of this through to Shankar. He began by saying: If I could, I’d tear out his windpipe . . . But he said this as part of the twist-and-turn of conversation, responding in kind to what he thought was just a way of speaking . . .

  I couldn’t bear it any longer. I leaped up and asked – What next? What next?

  – I said to him: We can tear out his windpipe, truly truly, it can be arranged. Shankar then started to put two and two together and asked: You are the men from the city who our people have been talking to? Saying that we can have our land back? Not be slaves any more? Eat two full-stomach meals every day? So I said yes, and I told him that we were going to plan this seriously, he needn’t fear, no one would know . . .

  CHAPTER TEN

  1969

  SURANJAN SLUMPS SLOWLY sideways like a timber pillar showing the first gentle sign of collapse. His chin almost touches his chest. The crumpled rectangle of the silver foil, blackened now, from the Wills Filter packet, the short straw made out of rolled-up card, the match burned to a long black curl with a tiny pale end, a minute ago all bound to him in such a fierce concentration of unison, now fall from his loosened hold; the cohering force keeping human and object together has been suddenly dissipated. His eyes too have shut. The brown sugar will keep him in this trance for a good couple of hours, but this calibration of time means nothing to him in this state; it could be two minutes or two years. In the beginning he would have marvelled at identifying the perfect fit between the act and the term, ‘chasing’; at how the tiny heap of brown powder placed on the flattened-out piece of foil and heated from below with a match became a smoking trickle of liquid running down the length of the silver or gold paper and how you had to ‘chase’ the smoke down the course of that miniature rivulet on its silver lawn; he would have wondered with awe at the inherent poetry of heroin, at the deep wisdom of those who were the drug’s acolytes and servers.

  But those days of child-like wonder are behind him now. The poetry has been parsed, the mythologising has become a bit passé; they had been shiny sweeties to lure the child in. Now he has come of age. The first few times he had taken smack, all in the company of Bappa-da and his friends, he had been sick; not the racked-with-convulsions kind of vomiting, but a really easy sort, as easy and natural as breathing or seeing or hearing; just lean over sideways and throw up, then let the opiates suck you into their vortex. He had also felt his face itch agonisingly.

  ‘It’s the impurities in the smack,’ Bappa-da had said. ‘Don’t worry, it’ll go soon. Soon you won’t feel anything but perfect, unending bliss.’

  He had been right, certainly about the ‘perfect’, though not the ‘unending’. The bliss is becoming increasingly mortal, its life-expectancy inside him decreasing with a frightening exponentiality. Time is such an assassin. How fugitive all the pleasures of the world are; so much to hold on to, so much transience, he had begun to think a while ago, but had never managed to get to the end of that philosophising. That was the other thing about smack – it did not allow you to finish things. Everything kept hanging, his days and hours and thoughts all an agglomeration of loose ends like an amateurish piece of knitting unravelling.

  In the beginning brown sugar offered him the cushioniest, velvetiest ocean of support; instant relief from the multiplying anxieties of his life in the form of oblivion. And there were so many. He had felt lost in a labyrinth of those jagged edges of reality – a missing brother; a father sinking into alcoholic inertia every day; a mother who had checked out of life; escalating squabbling between his aunt and his grandmother. Then there was the diminishment of the family’s source of prosperity (now firmly erstwhile): the destruction of Charu Paper in slow degrees, for which his grandfa
ther and his father and uncles blamed each other. He had known only this falling-off, an inexorable downward slide, each year of his advancing life measured by shrinkage, by more bitterness amongst the family members, more economising, more tension.

  Bappa-da had once explained Marx to him. ‘All superstructures, including the family, rest on the base of one thing, and one thing only – economics. The family is the first and the primary unit of oppression and exploitation. Freud too agrees with this, although his take on it is different. From what you’ve told me about what’s going on in your home, we have living proof of Marx’s theories. You take away economic security and the whole pack of cards collapses. Everyone is at each other’s throats. All these vaunted bourgeois values that prop up society – love, duty, honour, respect – all rest on power-relations lubricated by economics. They are the gloss people put on the naked truth: self-interest. Hypocrites, the lot of them, fucking hypocrites! Here, have a toke, you’ll feel better.’

  And he did. But, of late, that ocean of comfort had shrunk from a sea to a river to a shallow brook; a stream of piss seemed not so unlikely in the near future. The only way back to keeping afloat in that ocean he had experienced in the beginning was through more and more frequent hits. So here he is, slumped on the bathroom floor, his back against the wall opposite the tap. His temporary, small ocean. Not brown sugar, not only that, but disappointing sugar, betraying sugar.

  He has no idea how long the sound has been going, but it hauls him up to the shore ultimately, a dull banging first, then, quickly, not so dull; someone is hammering on the bathroom door. Is he imagining it? His eyes close again and there is such a forceful tug away from where he has been beached back to the shallows. But the banging will not go away.

  Now he hears a vocal accompaniment too. It is his father, he identifies eventually, shouting outside the bathroom, ‘Open the door! Open up immediately!’

  There are several stages beyond exhaustion, beyond complete, meltdown fatigue, for which there are no words. Or at least not any known to Adinath. Contrary to the images and vocabulary of dullness and extinguishing, he feels it as a malignant incandescence. The click inside that whisky brings him, the click that presages the eventual falling into a feather bed, has become elusive; it is deferred further and further to a shifting point that Adinath fears he will not reach any longer. The journey to that click has become fearsome because of the uncertainty in ever reaching that destination.

  He can even pinpoint the turning point in that journey: ever since Superintendent Dhar from Bhabanipur police station had informed him that they had evidence Supratik was a Naxalite, and that he was somewhere in Medinipur, engaged in terrorism – that was the word the Superintendent had used, ‘terrorism’, that and ‘extremist’ – and things were going to move outside the Superintendent’s control soon.

  ‘I shall no longer be able to . . . how should I put it . . . keep an eye on him, Ghosh-babu,’ SP Dhar had said, exuding a novel mixture of power, arrogance and ingratiation. ‘You can see how tottering the United Front government is. The last one survived less than a year. God knows who’s going to come after Ajay-babu. He’s back again after President’s Rule, but for how long, do you think? The communists are the ones pulling all the strings now. And in power . . . What I’m saying is this: it’s going to be difficult to . . . to . . . er . . . shield your son. Playing with fireworks on College Street, shouting slogans, that’s one thing, but going on a killing spree, taking out policemen and landlords in the villages . . . well, that’s a big boy’s game, wouldn’t you agree? A completely different thing.

  ‘And we, the police, seem to be the targets in the city too. Not a day passes when there isn’t a bomb thrown at us by these good middle-class, fish-and-rice-fed boys who have turned terrorist,’ he had said with a different tone to his voice, as if through clenched teeth. ‘We won’t tolerate this state of affairs for too long. Something’s got to give, and give soon.’

  Over the years, the Ghoshes had tried to cultivate and maintain a good relationship with the police; gifts, not all nominal or token, sweeteners, things to keep them happy and on their side. It was Prafullanath’s old advice: ‘It is important to be on good terms with them, because you don’t know when they’re going to come in handy. They say, “Eighteen sores when touched by a tiger, but fifty-eight if by the police.” Don’t forget that.’ They started with their local police station and made their way up to Lalbazar and the CID. At no time had that piece of wisdom seemed more pertinent than in the last few years. What would they have done without friendly policemen in the first gherao at their factory? One manager, Ashoke Ganguly at Bali, had had to leave. It was only the arrival of the police that had broken the gherao and saved Ashoke-babu’s life.

  Now SP Dhar, a significant portion of his oily jowls and distended belly caused by the Ghoshes’ contribution to them, had told Adinath – and there was no reason to doubt his words – that his eldest son, the scion of the family, was a Naxalite. Or had he been asking for his palm to be crossed with more silver? The policeman had tiny eyes, the eyes of a hippopotamus, eyes that looked minuscule in the animal’s leaking-out-of-its-frame build. They were eyes that even his own shadow could not trust.

  The tricky business had been to keep the news from the women and children in the house. Priyo could be trusted to keep it to himself, but Bhola was the loose cannon. No information was safe with him. What Adi could count on was the power of denial: the word ‘Naxalite’ was like leprosy; it turned you into an untouchable instantly; no one would want to come anywhere near it.

  The whisky has begun to give him sour eructations. It burns slightly as it goes down and sits, tingling, somewhere behind his sternum. A Naxalite son. There is no recovery from that. The shame . . . they will have to move from Bhabanipur to a place where no one knows them, where rumours and whispers cannot reach their new neighbours. It feels like he is standing at the edge of an ocean and must swim across, beyond the horizon, to the other side that cannot be seen.

  How can he bring himself to tell his parents of SP Dhar’s visit? The last time Adi had to confront his father with something unpalatable, it had all blown up in Adi’s face.

  Adi will never forget the evening, just under a year ago, when everyone had heard his frail father berating him viciously after the closure of Basanta, the spin-off publishing house that Bhola, useless as the finance director of Charu Paper, the parent company, had been entrusted to look after.

  ‘It took me twenty-five years to build, twenty-five years of every drop of my blood and sweat to set this up, and from the moment you joined the company you let things slide. I should’ve known better. I should’ve trusted my instinct that you were useless, totally worthless. Not an ounce of business nous, not a whit of interest. This was all written on my forehead.’

  His mother had interrupted him, ‘Don’t shout like that, please don’t, your heart, your heart! Go inside now.’

  ‘What can I do if Bhola ruined the whole publishing venture by backing those unsellable poets and novelists, which was tantamount to standing on a street corner and giving money away?’ Adi bleated. The feeling of emasculation was intolerable: at the age of forty-seven he was being upbraided by his father for that quintessentially childhood thing – the faults of his younger siblings.

  ‘Giving money away,’ his father mimicked. ‘How old are you? Four? And how old is Bhola? Are you toddlers squabbling over who is taking whose sweeties away? Standing on a street corner and giving money away . . . you stupid, ineffective eunuch!’

  No one had heard his father like this, not in public.

  ‘Why are you shouting at me for Bhola’s failure?’ Adi had fought back. ‘He held soirées and adda sessions instead of working and gave money away to people he called “promising young talent”, basically, to anyone who came asking. Do you know how much he has frittered away like this? Do you know?’

  A devil had possessed Adi; the streamer of retaliatory rage coming out of his mouth seemed unstoppable.
‘And what gives you the right to talk about eunuchs? You are responsible for driving Charu Paper into the ground. You, you,’ he had accused, stabbing the air, with his finger pointed at his father, with each ‘you’.

  Charubala’s attempt to calm matters came out as highly pitched. ‘How dare you?’ she said to Adi. ‘Don’t shout at him, can’t you see he’s ill? Can’t you see he’s shaking? Something terrible will happen now.’

  The hysteria had only encouraged Adi: ‘How long will he hide behind his illness? The illness was two, three years ago. We’re cleaning up his’ – the pronoun spat out, like venom – ‘mess now, the mess he created with his project of modernising the factory at Memari. That was the beginning of our end. And he has the cheek to blame me and Bhola for it. How dare he?’

  The new machines for the aged and nearly obsolete units arrived at Kidderpore Docks seventeen months after their order, in 1958: a turbo separator; a huge new drying section to replace the dying dinosaur that was holding everything back at Memari; a new press section that would supposedly create a seamless join between the mould and the Fourdrinier parts; and, finally, the drives arrangements to bind old and new together. They had reached the end with their standard practice of replicating parts for the cylinder-mould machine, and anything else that required replacement, in what they grandly called their ‘Research & Development Wing’, a large, corrugated iron-and-asbestos barn. For ten years, the head of R&D, Prajwal Sarkar, some kind of a wizard of make-do, had visited mills more modern than his own workplace to spy and copy their machines, or had prevailed on the Ghoshes to pay for information from people who worked in these factories. It didn’t take anyone of exceptional business nous to see that this method, while ingenious in the short term, could not be relied upon indefinitely. Prafullanath wanted to upgrade the technology of the smaller mill first and, depending on how things went, eventually turn his attention to the far bigger project of modernising Bali.