The Lives of Others

by Neel Mukherjee

  Over the drumbeats of his heart he heard his voice whisper from very far away, ‘Take it out. Take it in your hand.’

  He reached forward to touch her breasts, then, encountering no resistance, pushed his hands inside her clothes to feel them naked against his fingers and palms. Meera deftly exposed his aching cock from the covering of his dhoti and underwear. In the space of two strokes, maybe three, Somnath juddered and came all over her hand. She contemplated the mess for a fraction of a second, then carried on with her earlier wiping as if she were still mopping up the water from the previous spillage. Her face was unreadable. Somnath, released by his orgasm, noticed for the first time that she was wearing new, dressy clothes, probably given by his mother on the occasion of the celebrations. Without a single word Meera finished her business of cleaning up, then left the room with the cloth and the empty glass.

  Somnath put his detumescing cock back in place. He would have to put on a new pair of underwear and dhoti; these were too wet to be worn. Or maybe he could stretch out on the bed and contemplate this new milestone in his life. He would have to tell Subir and Deepak and Paltu that he had had his first fuck – the exaggeration was obligatory – that he was not a virgin any longer. He was first off the mark in his group of friends. But now that a barrier had been crossed, would he really get to go the whole distance and fuck her? He felt confident that it was going to happen soon. The idea of it made him begin to get aroused again. Had she deliberately spilled that glass of water? Who was in the driving seat, he or she? Then another thought struck him – he had totally forgotten to test her on how she addressed him.

  Six weeks later Charubala discovered her youngest son taking the maidservant, Meera, from behind in the attic prayer room. Its instantaneous effect was the firing of the girl. Horrified by what she had seen, Charubala felt herself incapable of acting in the right way. What were the correct measures to take in a situation like this? The dismissal was a natural beginning, but she could not bring herself to face that filthy creature ever again. So after some deliberation about what kind of loss of face and honour was involved in confiding in Madan – after all was said and done, he was still a servant, on the other side of the line – she got him to do her dirty work, but not before some recalibrating of the scales of power in order to remind him that she, or her side, was not weakened by this. Or perhaps she needed to convince herself.

  ‘It is your responsibility to engage the temporary servants in this house,’ she told him off. ‘How could you have made such a mistake? You’ve been in this home for nearly thirty years, you are like one of us.’ She did not exactly reveal to him what had brought this on, only giving some vague hints within the general hand-wringing about ‘fallen girls’ and ‘loose morals’, leaving Madan to read between the lines. He would, in any case, find out in the servants’ quarter what had happened.

  ‘The shame, the shame!’ Charubala raged. ‘What entered your head that you allowed a . . . a growing, young girl like her to come into a house where there’s a boy who’s turning into a man? She must be out of this house before the day is over, I don’t want to have to tread even on her shadow. Chhee, chhee! And in the prayer room too . . .’

  Madan hung his head lower. In the prayer room! They were daring, he thought; that at least must be said about them.

  ‘I can’t begin to think of what will happen if the news gets out. The whole neighbourhood will come and spit on us. Madan, let no one find out a word about this. Promise me!’ Her tone changed to pleading. ‘The shame, the shame,’ she repeated. ‘How much I must have sinned in my past life to have given birth to a son like that!’ And at this she gave in to the tears that she had kept in check in front of Madan.

  XI

  Only he who has dipped his hands in a class enemy’s blood can be considered a true revolutionary.

  The police did not know where to begin. We feared that they would suspect one of Senapati’s debtors. If that crossed their minds, it was not acted upon. I thought this was because there was little by way of formal records of the loans he had given to farmers. We feared a rounding up of the poorest of the village, a raft of trumped-up charges, imprisonment and beatings – but none of these came to pass. Not this time. We were baffled by this quiet indifference on their part.

  Meanwhile rumour did its work. Senapati’s wife was having an affair, and her lover did it. Senapati had made an enemy of the powerful Sinhas, one of the biggest jotedaars of the area – they lived in Jhargram, but owned about 300 bighas of land around here – and they had had people kill him. Some said the enmity was with the local Rays, another big landowning family. They meant to get the more powerful man whom Senapati was accompanying (no one knew who that was), but got the toady instead. Some unappeased ghost had done it. Senapati had got into a fight about debts with someone drunk. He had tried to have his way with some farmer’s wife and the farmer saw it and dispatched him. In twenty-four hours the village was humming and buzzing with stories.

  And with fear. You could feel it in the air, a sort of invisible mantle that had come down over everything. The place seemed even more deserted in the evenings. People stayed in because they thought they might be next. A strange sensation had us in its grip – not quite ennui, or quite inertia, but the lull that sets in after you think you’ve achieved what you had set out to do. I realised how dangerous this feeling was: we had removed one tiny, very minor class enemy, a little minnow in a sea of sharks. Our warfare had only just begun. If we slackened now, we were going to be extinguished in no time at all.

  In the bamboo forest at night, Dhiren asked – Have you noticed any change in Kanu or Anupam?

  Samir – What sort of a change?

  Dhiren – You tell me?

  I – No . . . nothing . . . nothing that I can tell.

  Dhiren – Maybe it’s to do with the rest of the Sorens then. They seem more . . . more daring, less cowed by the people who’ve been sucking their blood for centuries. I heard Bipul say, Now for a few more to send down Senapati’s way. So I said to him, We can do bigger things if we combine our forces, all of you, hundreds of you. They thought – I don’t know, this is all speculation on my part – they thought that we were going to egg them on and then disappear, leaving them to do the hard work and face the music afterwards. Now they see that’s not the case. And that’s what they’re talking about among themselves. What do you say?

  I – Very possible. And if that’s true, we need to capitalise on this trust and sense of unity.

  Samir – So all these months of talking Mao to them, it’s had some kind of an effect. That, combined with our guerrilla action.

  I – So let’s make the most of it.

  Dhiren, Samir and I, Kanu, Bipul, Shankar, Anupam: seven in total. Shankar said – We can bring more, many more. All the wage-labourers will come. You want?

  I – Not now. We may need them later. But no one must know that we’re together, otherwise . . .

  Kanu – Even if they hack us with tangis, we won’t talk, don’t fear.

  We worked systematically, enjoining them to secrecy at every turn, pointing out the consequences if they opened their mouths even to their wives. First, we made a note of all the jotedaars in the village, where they lived and who their men were. I told them, again, that if even a whisper of this reached the ears of the jotedaars’ flunkies . . .

  The web was deeply complex. Landlords were also moneylenders; flunkies doubled as pawnbrokers; middlemen and yes-men owned small parcels of land; anybody who owned more than two or three bighas called himself a farmer; on bad harvest years middle peasants rented out their labour, becoming munish for a season or two; big landowning families used the same families of wage-labourers whose earlier generations had been engaged to work for them by their grandfathers or great-grandfathers, making the connections of obligation more intricate, both formal and informal. The landlords had their fingers in other pies too – retail, cement, jute factories, clothing – and ran shops from which the villagers bought some
of their basic things . . . All this scratched only the surface. And everyone knew everyone else, so the prospect of secrecy was not very likely. We had had more than a year to think about this, but in a theoretical kind of way. Now that it was crunch time, we found it impossible to draw clear lines of demarcation. A rule of thumb would have to do, so I suggested one, a simple one that everyone would understand and agree on: who was the most hated jotedaar in Majgeria, the one responsible for the maximum misery and injustice and anger? That was as good a metric as any.

  Four names emerged: three jotedaars, one overeager toady. The jotedaars – Dwija Ghosh, Haradhan Ray, Kanai Sinha – we had known of before, as we had about the toady, Bankim Barui, himself a small landlord, owner of about seventy-five bighas, a not inconsiderable amount. Bankim had featured in our calculations from the moment we came to Majgeria – Nitai Das used to work for him. Then one day Nitai was dead. Who knows what happened on that last day of Nitai’s life? That was unknowable, but what was beyond doubt was the role Bankim must have played, directly and indirectly, in driving Nitai to his destiny.

  The shortlist was deceptive. It lulled you into thinking that you had a manageable job ahead of you. We had been lucky with our first attack; that was certainly not going to be repeated.

  Then there was the issue of weapons. Because Kanu, Anupam, Bipul and Shankar were adept with lathi, tangi, hashua, daa, spears and javelins, it was best to stick with those. The question no one was prepared to voice was this: what if the people on our list owned guns and were all too ready to use them?

  Samir quoted Mao at length – All the guiding principles of military operations grew out of the one basic principle: to strive to the utmost to preserve one’s own strength and destroy that of the enemy. How then do we justify the encouragement of heroic sacrifice in war? Every war exacts a price, sometimes an extremely high one. Is this not in contradiction with ‘preserving oneself’? In fact, there is no contradiction at all; to put it more exactly, sacrifice and self-preservation are both opposite and complementary to each other. For such sacrifice is essential not only for destroying the enemy, but also for preserving oneself – partial and temporary ‘non-preservation’ (sacrifice, or paying the price) is necessary for the sake of general and permanent preservation.

  Explaining these concentrated ideas in simpler words, I had to grasp that big thorn: what happened if one of us died in action?

  Samir said – We knew what we were letting ourselves in for. If we wanted jobs, money, ease, power, influence, we could have stayed on in the CPI(M). When we decided to follow the Chairman and Comrade Charu Mazumdar, we knew we could pay with our lives, become martyrs.

  Are you flinching reading this?

  Our four new comrades pledged their lives. Anupam said – This is not life that we have. This is a kind of death. If we die fighting so that our children can have better lives, we will die fighting.

  He was echoed by Kanu, Bipul, Shankar. There was no reaction that could measure up to this, so we let the silence fall. But not a total silence: there was the sound of bamboo leaves shivering in the occasional breeze.

  But this guilelessness – I’ve wanted to tell you about it for some time. How easily these Santhals and Mahatos had made us one of them. They still fell into the bad old habit of addressing us as ‘Babu’, but if they had only one plate of rice between five of them, they made sure to share it with us. They seemed to be governed by a ‘what is mine is also yours’ principle, especially when it came to food and shelter. Selflessness and generosity – that’s what I’m trying to say. But also, beyond those, a kind of simplicity, a unity between what they said and what they felt and meant. There was no dissembling or contortion of feelings. I felt as if a kink inside me, one that I was born with, had been smoothed out. Now that it wasn’t there, I knew that the knot had bothered me and scrunched up my soul. Yes, these people had filthy mouths and they swore colourfully and imaginatively – I’ve been busy censoring their speech while reporting to you – but this was of a piece with the simplicity of their hearts.

  We banged our heads against that old problem: how to go about mobilising hundreds of farmers without anyone on the other side becoming any the wiser?

  Samir offered a line: each guerrilla attack would bring us ten or twenty farmers, so we needed to mount another two or three before word spread to the optimal number of people that we wanted to attract for a bigger squad action. They would come and offer to join us because it would be clear to them that we were doing something. That was Samir’s reasoning.

  This sank in and seemed sensible. It would be foolish to fritter away time. The police were going to be here sooner rather than later, so why not take advantage of the lull?

  Bipul said that the easiest home to raid would be of Bankim Barui because it was in the middle of Majgeria, whereas the really big landlords, the owners of hundreds of acres, didn’t live in the village proper. They had large, concrete homes in bigger villages or small towns in Binpur or elsewhere in the district, mostly in Jhargram. Those could be target projects for a later phase of the revolution, not now, Bipul added.

  Crucially, there was his connection with Nitai. It was odd that although we didn’t speak about it, all of us knew that there was an inevitability about picking on Bankim. We went through so many planning sessions to settle on the most appropriate person to attack, but that choice had already been made for us by history.

  So Bankim Barui it was. We knew he had about seventy-five bighas of land, most of which had been acquired by evicting farmers who had been poor tenants. He was up to all kinds of tricks: falsification of deeds of lease to facilitate his land-grab; being aggressive about letting the police loose on farmers who were protesting at his crimes and also slapping trumped-up charges against them . . . The usual, then.

  Bankim’s house was two-storeyed, built of brick and cement. There was a courtyard at the back; unenclosed land to its west; another, smaller tract of land enclosed by a woven-cane barrier to the south of the garden; a front door set in a box of a balcony, and a back door leading to the courtyard; about six rooms in total on both floors, not including kitchen and bathroom. There was also an outhouse in the south garden and two golas for grain storage. It was surrounded by five similar houses and about half a dozen much smaller affairs. Kanu and Anupam provided us with other vital pieces of local knowledge: Bankim lived there with his elderly mother, his uncle (late father’s brother), his wife, their three children (all under twelve or ten), two servants and his uncle’s son, who had a job in another village, Barashal, and visited frequently but was away at the moment.

  We decided to strike around 2 a.m.

  Shankar, Samir and I, faces covered, broke down the front door with a spear and a tangi. It gave after about six to eight blows, then we rammed it, all three of us, with our shoulders, and got in. The other four were stationed at the back door (we were certain that Bankim was going to try to use that route to escape). We heard the terrified screaming even before we entered. What if the cries for help brought people running, armed and ready to defend Bankim? Villagers were known for the closeness of neighbourly ties, unlike cities. Too late, it was too late to worry about that.

  No one in the front room. We moved to the next one. An old man in a vest and a lungi was trying to hide under the bed. This, we assumed, was the uncle. A punch would kill him. We dragged him out by his feet and pushed him into the dark kitchen, but just as we were about to lock him inside we noticed a boy, maybe fifteen or sixteen years old, the servant, probably, cowering in a corner but with a lathi gripped in his hand. The screaming from upstairs, a chorus of women and children, was now in full swing. They were standing on the front verandah upstairs, shouting – Help! Help! Robbers! Robbers!

  The servant boy couldn’t decide between trembling like a leaf and attacking us. I decided for him: I brought my tangi to his neck and said – Sit quietly here, one word or one move from you, your head will be rolling on the floor – and pushed him to the corner. Then I got o
ut of the kitchen and fastened the chain on top of the door to the hook on the lintel post. I felt I’d done all this in the space between one inhalation and one exhalation. And there was an odd sensation: my heart was beating so hard and so fast that it seemed it had actually slowed down to those few beats in between that knocked against my chest. The rest I could not feel, but I knew they must be there.

  We rushed into every room downstairs – three in total – and scanned every possible place that could be used for hiding: behind an almirah, under another bed, under a divan. Then we stormed upstairs. This was what I had been waiting for. The screaming people had barricaded themselves inside the front room, the one connected to the verandah. I had a feeling Bankim was hiding there too. We needed to get in there to shut them up. What if Bankim managed to climb down and escape from the front while we had our comrades waiting at the rear? We forced open the door – the screaming had stopped – after hacking it with tangis, then pushing a spear through the crack to make out what it was that they had pushed against it. The big bed. How on earth did Bankim’s wife and children manage it? Bankim must be in there. It would take some time to push it away, so we splintered the door to pieces and stepped on the bed to enter the room. No Bankim, or not obviously, but a boy of ten or so, a younger girl, their fat mother and an old woman, all squatting or crouching in the furthest corner, some squeaking, some frozen.

  Samir shouted at them, much the same words that I had used in the kitchen downstairs. Bankim’s wife gave out a shriek, which she had the good sense to cut short, knowing that more screaming was not going to be doing her any favours. We ransacked the room. When Bankim’s wife refused to hand over the keys to the big almirah, Samir grabbed hold of the girl (more shrieking, ear-splitting this time), pulled out the hashua he had had Kanu tie around his waist with a gamchha and held it against her neck. The keys were produced before we could blink.