The Lives of Others

by Neel Mukherjee

  The rhythm of life that I had had in Majgeria reasserted itself; the ancient, unchanging acts of ploughing and tilling and sowing and weeding and watching the paddy grow. I seemed to have exchanged one village for another. Memories of Kanu and Bijli could turn me still and silent for hours. I had no way of finding out what had happened to them, no means of helping them without endangering myself. Would we repeat our mistakes here too and expose this lot to the same fate? I couldn’t bear to think of it.

  Almost as if in atonement, or in a desire to write a different kind of story with the new set of villagers, I tried to get to know Bir in the time available, that slow time between weeding and harvest. Unlike Bijli, Bir’s wife, Bela, sat with us as we talked and didn’t hurry away with our empty plates to begin the washing-up or continue to hide herself behind domestic duties. She didn’t come with us on the evenings when Bir, some other Santhal men and we ‘city boys’ went into the luxuriant, rustling forest in the dark, but in the hut she was an active participant in whatever conversation was struck up.

  The Santhal men, Bir, Babu, Bimbadhar and others, came up with a plan that I began to see more and more as a kind of gift. It was the gift of protection. Individually and together, they suggested that they would protect us in the event of a police raid, smuggling us out if things got too bad, providing us with shelter in their own homes and, if that proved unfeasible or dangerous, arranging for our shelter in the homes of their trusted friends, in other villages nearby or, if it came down to it, in the jungle. They didn’t have a raft of set plans and strategies, and much of this emerged in conversation, through thinking aloud, with many crossings-out and reinstatements, but the upshot was this: the poor, landless farmers of Gidighati had decided to look out for us. The implications were enormous: instead of letting the status quo settle again over the surface of their lives, they had decided to be inspired by our teachings and actions. Armed rebellion it was going to be. They had made their choice.

  Dhiren arrived, on a passing visit, halfway through the monsoon. It was from him that we heard of the formal establishment of the CPI(M-L) by Charu Mazumdar and Kanu Sanyal at the May Day rally in Calcutta Maidan. He wasn’t there, he had heard from someone else, but he recounted the story – the speeches, the torchlit procession, the songs, the slogans – as if he were talking of his own memories. The final news had taken nearly three months to reach us, although at Belpahari we had listened in on the ructions going on inside the AICCCR. Dhiren had come on other work: first, to give us the names of farmers in three neighbouring villages in whose homes we could stay should the need arise; and second, to bring us a pistol and a box of bullets. But I couldn’t help thinking about the celebrations marking the formation of the CPI(M-L) and, for a while, wished I had been in Calcutta then.

  I realised I must have gone all quiet and distracted because of what Dhiren said, much later, when we went down, the Majgeria threesome, Samir, Dhiren and I, to the pond at the end of the day, for old times’ sake, to have a splash while it was raining. That same rattling, dissolving music on the green surface, changing to something so different just under it, and the shiny green shields of the banana leaves on the bank and scores of lush trees and plants I didn’t know the names of and wanted to ask my friend Dhiren, who had now become a visitor to these parts instead of a resident . . . His appearance now, as a courier bringing news from elsewhere, unsettled me by the strength of how much I missed him.

  – You mustn’t feel left out because you weren’t in Calcutta for the May Day rally, he said.

  – No, no . . . not really, it’s nothing.

  – Listen to me: don’t you think it’s better to be in the thick of action than in city politics, which is all talk anyway? You got sick of all that, remember? You couldn’t wait to get out and do what you called ‘real work’ rather than ‘armchair politics’. Remember?

  He was right about that.

  – So why this backward glance now? Aren’t you happy here? Do you want to return home?

  The word ‘home’ did the trick. I said – No, I don’t want to return home, but sometimes I think I’m missing out on the action . . .

  – But the action is all here, in these villages!

  – I know, I know. It’s just a grass-is-greener-on-the-other-side feeling, it’s a momentary weakness, it’ll pass. In fact it’s already gone, talking to you. Anyway, are you finding this vagabond’s life to your taste?

  He made a face, then said – I keep telling myself that I’m the revolution’s eyes and ears . . .

  – Don’t forget legs, Samir quipped.

  – Yes, the transport and communication service, true. But it needs to be done until safe corridors are established. The things I had to go through to bring you this one pistol. Often there are no safe houses on the way, so you have to take your chance . . .

  – And all this walking, hundreds of miles cumulatively, does it not tire you out? You look like a broomstick, Samir said.

  – Sometimes . . . sometimes I wish I could fall into a sleep from which I’d never wake up.

  – That’s called death, stupid, Samir said.

  – Yes, yes, but you know what I mean; a long, long, long uninterrupted rest.

  – And would you go to Calcutta? How many times do you think that would be? I asked.

  – Don’t know. I know I have to, at some point, but so far there hasn’t been an occasion.

  He gave a pause, then asked – Why do you ask? Do you want something from there? Or do you want anything done while I’m there? Easily done, if we can get the timing right, because I don’t know when I’ll be in Majgeria again.

  – No, no, just asking, nothing particular . . .

  Bir and his family had not always been so poor. He used to own a small plot of land, about two bighas, but he had been finding it increasingly impossible to grow enough on it and so, on the advice of one of the village officials, he decided to lease it to someone the official recommended. Bir, an illiterate man, had put his thumb impression on the lease deed. When the rent fell overdue and Bir called to collect it, he was told by the lessee that Bir had sold the land to him. The plot belonged to him, the lessee, now; the deed on which Bir had put the imprint of his thumb was a sale deed, not a deed of lease. The village official, it turned out, had been in cahoots with the lessee or, more likely, had been handsomely bribed. Bir Mandi’s plot had been sold to Nabin Sarkar for a sum of 1,500 rupees, less than one-fortieth of the value of his land.

  Once again, no recourse to redress: the village official in question was the person through whom such complaints were made. When Bir started complaining, he was told to leave off if he valued the honour and life of his wife. Bir threatened to go to the police in Jhargram. The police said they couldn’t do anything because Bir had signed away his land. In any case, the police wouldn’t do a thing because Nabin Sarkar had the wherewithal to grease their palms, Bir didn’t. Two months after this, Bir’s hut was ransacked and destroyed by a group of men; he had been living, as he had always done, in the hut at the edge of his (now Nabin Sarkar’s) land. This time the police told him that he was on it illegally and, if he didn’t move out, or if he attempted to build again on the same spot, he would be thrown into jail. And who knew what could happen to his defenceless, protectorless family, they added, when he wasn’t around to look after them?

  That was how he came to build the hut where we were now, in the poorest circle of Gidighati, almost where the treeline of the forest began.

  I did something that I wished I had thought of in the first place. But in this imitation of the words and action of a friend there was more admiration than envy, and also a kind of invoking of his presence, a wish that he would materialise in front of us. I leaned forward and uttered a variation of the words that Dhiren had said to Shankar – Bir, tell me, what if we remove the village official and Nabin Sarkar? Silently. No one will know a thing. And we’ll burn the sale deed that has your thumb impression on it . . .

  Thirty of us raided Nabin S
arkar’s home on a late November night. Harvest was just in, so we got Babu to organise twenty men as backup, to wait, with sacks and whatever they had to hand, to empty his granaries as soon as it was safe to do so.

  On Dipankar’s suggestion, we did a pincer-movement on the house: fifteen men entering from the front, fifteen men leading the rear action.

  We broke down the doors and the noise alerted the men inside. They got their act together fast, so that when we entered they were waiting. We were at close range and they charged at us with axes and knives and sticks and spears. I heard a cry of pain: one of the Santhal men had been hit. I thought we were facing sure death. At no such action in the past had we encountered fully prepared men waiting to engage us in pitched battle. I was right at the front, abreast with three other men, one of whom, I thought, had been struck. Were the dozen men behind me still there? Had they turned tail and run off?

  Nabin Sarkar’s men were shouting, baying for our blood in the filthiest language imaginable. I had no idea whether to advance or retreat when the decision was made for me. Our rear flank had entered the house from the back and, swinging their tangis, spears and lathis, the men were hacking their way through Nabin Sarkar’s men, now caught in the middle between our two groups. The man who had got one of ours with his tangi turned to see what was going on. I seized my opportunity: I aimed my axe, with all the force in my body, at the back of his head, missed, and got his neck and shoulders instead. He fell. At that very moment the men behind me surged forward, shouting too, expressions of pure hatred and rage.

  It was a messy battle, our most difficult so far. They were not that many in number – I initially thought about five; it turned out to be eight – but they fought back instead of taking fright and escaping. When we thought they were running away, we discovered shortly that they were trying to fool us into dropping our vigilance. They were fleeing the immediate fray, yes, but they were doing this to hide behind doors, in other rooms, under the stairs, and catch us by surprise and hack or stab us.

  We had caught them on a night when four guests were staying overnight. We put this together much later, only when we asked ourselves why there were so many of them, and especially what two village officials, one of them the man who had duped Bir, were doing there. Someone got that evil official in the back with a tangi. (When Bir discovered this, he ran to the fallen, dying man and decapitated him.)

  I took out a man as he was tiptoeing out of the pantry to escape into the courtyard. It took me two attempts. The first blow caught him in the shoulder. He fell, screaming. I moved closer and finished him off. He didn’t even get a chance to plead for his life.

  The search of the house began. Ashu had already given the green light for the redistribution of grain to proceed. The farmers, who had come prepared for this, were waiting outside.

  Nabin Sarkar’s men had all turned, unknown to themselves, into guerrillas, but they had got a very fundamental principle of that kind of warfare wrong: you didn’t turn to the guerrilla mode in an enclosed space with an enemy who was more numerous than you. We won ultimately only because they were outnumbered.

  With much misgiving (and dread), I was the first to enter each of the rooms. We got one more of theirs: he had positioned himself behind a door off the landing on the first floor, tangi poised to get one of us the moment we entered, but we rushed in, more than eight or nine of us, in such a fast torrent that he missed and the blow landed on the floor, unbalancing him. A farmer sent a spear through his chest. The force sent him across the landing and halfway down the staircase. The skewer held him at a strange angle to the stairs so that he looked like a piece of bad workmanship, a rejected clay effigy with one oversized bar of his framework showing.

  We found four others, hiding, armed, dotted around various places in the house. We rounded them up as we went about searching for money, jewellery and documents. Apart from the walls and other concrete structures, we took everything apart; no Nabin. He had fled. I looked down from the first floor at our ring of men outside and said – No sign. He’s gone.

  Babu shouted back – We haven’t seen him. He can’t avoid us. They smuggled him out before we arrived.

  – Send a few out to scour the gardens and grounds around us.

  But I had little hope: burning torches and hurricane lamps only dazzled the eyes of the person holding them, making the larger surrounding darkness much darker; they didn’t shed any useful light. Who knew in which of the neighbours’ houses he was hiding, or to which nearby village he was running, as we picked apart his home?

  Dipankar discovered money and jewellery stuffed inside pillows and in mattresses, some also in the main almirah. We took what we could use, burning the documents as usual.

  As we were getting ready to leave, I managed to put a name to the anxiety that had been tightening around me: I hadn’t seen Samir for a while.

  After three-quarters of an hour of frenzied searching, Dipankar and I found him on the roof. A tangi driven through his left shoulder and neck was making his half-lopped head lean at a strange angle, a branch of a tree both attached and loosened from the trunk. His eyes were still open to the world, but now they saw nothing.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ‘HE MUST BE married off immediately,’ Charubala said.

  ‘Yes, that much is obvious,’ her husband replied. ‘But who will marry him? He’s brought our name so low, to dust, which sensible father is going to want his daughter married into a family like ours?’

  Charubala heard the rare note of resignation in his voice; she had temporarily lost the will to rally him.

  ‘True, all too true. Was this written in our fate? Who would have thought? Chhee, chhee . . . what humiliation!’ The memory of it brought on a strange kind of nausea, one that seemed to come from the neck, not from the pit of her stomach. That blood-pressure business again, she thought; the doctor had asked her to be careful and avoid situations of stress and anxiety. He might as well have asked a fish to avoid water.

  ‘One cannot discipline a man of twenty-one,’ Prafullanath said. ‘In any case, he has gone beyond the reach of any kind of control or punishment we can impose on him. You stop eating for three days and sulk, I become like a storm cloud for a week . . . do you think these things have any purchase on him? I used to think that putting him to work in the office would do him some good, since he was never going to finish school or go to college. At least he would have to account for his time there; he’d be out of mischief for seven to eight hours a day. He used to show up late, spend an hour adjusting his clothes and hair, then pull rank over the rest of the workers, shout at a few, crack jokes with others, chat, disturb others’ work, sing, then leave around two and not show up for the rest of the day. Then he wouldn’t turn up for the next two days and would show his face briefly again on the third. To tell you the truth, we reached a point where we were relieved that he didn’t come to the office. Six, seven months of this and we discover that he has been taking company money from Ashim-babu, the head clerk, then from Bhola, from the publishing house. Do you know what he does with the money, do you know?’ Prafullanath’s voice rose dramatically.

  Charubala instinctively began to flex an inward defensiveness; she could say what she felt like about Somu, but the slightest shadow of criticism from someone else, even from his father, made her feel uneasy. She was his mother; she had rights that no one else did.

  ‘You’re right,’ said Prafullanath. ‘Everything was ordained by fate. Or it is all in the blood. Bad blood will tell one day. All those things I thought I had left far behind . . . I was so wrong. All that depravity and excess, they’ve all been passed on by me to my children. I feel I have just been a conducting pipe between the bad in the past and the bad in the future.’

  Charubala had to staunch this immediately. Very soon, she knew, the self-excoriation would turn sickly and maudlin and, who knew, even into some real threat against Somu.

  ‘There’s no point punishing yourself like this. What has happened has
happened. We should think about what to do now. I think we should find him a wife immediately, a nice girl who’ll set him right, reform his ways.’