The Lives of Others

by Neel Mukherjee

  ‘Easier said than done. Besides, we’ve already had Bhola’s wedding this year. It’ll be a big financial hit to have another one so soon. He’s our youngest son, everybody expects that his wedding will be a big affair. It’s not as if it can be a registry-office thing, in and out, then a reception at home.’

  Charubala mulled this over and said, ‘Why not? He has thrown quicklime-and-ink on our faces, let this be the price he pays for that.’ She found herself still caught up in the rapid pendular arc of hating Somu, wanting to punish him severely, and feeling protective towards him. All she wanted was a respite from that constant motion, some resting point.

  ‘No, no,’ Prafullanath said. ‘How can that be? Everyone will then say that it was a marriage for our convenience, to mend his ways. Will you be able to live with that?’

  ‘People can’t be saying anything worse than what they’re saying now.’

  ‘What is your point?’

  There was steel in Charubala. She said, ‘Marriage at any cost, that is my point. No point going to a matchmaker this time around. We should look amongst people we know.’

  ‘People we know?’

  ‘Yes. Listen: you, Adi, Priya, all of you know a lot of people through your work in the big world outside. You will have to put your heads together and find a girl soon. Leave the social side of things, reception and ceremony and invitees, leave all that to me.’

  In less than three months Adinath found a girl for his younger brother, which led to a regret-filled, jokey aside from his mother: ‘You should have been engaged to find a husband for your sister.’

  Prasanta, one of the clerks at the office, had come to Adi to ask for an advance on the following month’s salary. Eyes fixed firmly on the floor somewhere a few inches away from Adi’s feet, he poured it all out. ‘It’s not for me, sir,’ he said. ‘One of my uncles has fallen on hard times. He worked as the postmaster in Ranaghat: comfortable government salary, family house with some land around it. There were fruits and vegetables in the garden, even fish in a pond. They weren’t well-off, but they got by well enough. But eight years ago they closed down the post office and he hasn’t been all right since. Soon after that my grandmother, his mother, that is, died after a long illness. Then the four brothers squabbled over the land and the house. What can I say? I’m ashamed to say that my father was one of them, fighting over inheritance and property and how to divide the garden, the house, the pond. To cut an ugly story short, my uncle was left with hardly anything except two dingy little rooms. He seemed to have lost all will and the brothers exploited this. His wife fought back, but she didn’t have a chance. Anyway, since losing his job he has lost all interest in everything. Caught in the middle of all this, suffering the most, is their young daughter, about to sit her secondary-school exams. I feel most for her’ – here his voice caught and he had to gulp a few times before he could continue – ‘she’s sixteen, only four years younger than me, and we grew up together, she’s closer to me than my own siblings. I also feel doubly bad because my father is involved in all this. He’s responsible, to some extent, for their awful situation. And I don’t want to have any part in it. I help them secretly whenever I can: a sack of rice, a few kilos of lentils, cooking oil, salt, whatever. If they can’t pay Purba’s school fees, which have been in arrears for a few months now, they’ll deregister her and she won’t be able to sit her exams. Her parents don’t have the wherewithal to get her married; at least if she has a matric to her name, maybe . . .’

  The words dribbled to an end. But no, not yet. ‘Forgive me, sir,’ he added, ‘I’ve taken up a lot of your valuable time with my personal troubles. It’s not your business to listen to all this petty rubbish. But, sir, I . . . I didn’t know who . . . who to turn to . . .’ Here his voice cracked again.

  Adi knew in his guts that the man was not spinning him a sentimental tale, one told by so many so often that it had calcified into a giant pillar of cliché, one of those load-bearing struts that held up the structure of Bengali life. But perhaps it had become a cliché because it was a truthful situation for so many people: stretched lives, limited income, indigence, debts, the scrabbling and fighting of dogs replicated by humans. Could he deny that these were not true?

  ‘Don’t worry, this is not a problem,’ he said. ‘Just tell me how much your cousin’s school fees are and I’ll pay them all – it needn’t come off your salary.’

  It was only in the small hours, tossing and turning in bed, sleepless with anxiety over the correct structure of the loan for the new imported machines, that a hidden hook, which had caught in the shallows of his memory, revealed itself in a scrap of sentence he had heard earlier in the day. A scheme was murkily outlining itself in his mind; he would have to test the waters first.

  The next day he summoned Prasanta and said to him, ‘So Ashim-babu should be retired, we think. I was also thinking that maybe you could take over from him. Your salary will go up, of course, and that may help you with the situation in your uncle’s family. Talking of which, weren’t you saying yesterday about the trouble you will have getting your cousin married? Well . . . what does she look and sound like?’

  In a month’s time Somnath was married to Purba. Neither of them had much choice in the matter. The Ghoshes withheld from Purba’s parents the reason for the haste, and the true nature of their youngest son. Here was a beautiful girl, who looked like the goddess Lakshmi, as Charubala remarked on seeing her picture; surely she would be able to reform Somnath? The Das family, for their part, could not quite believe their luck: the disparity in class (and caste) was so huge as to be unbridgeable, but bridged it was. It never occurred to them to dig deeper or to question why; one doesn’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

  Prasanta, who was later going to be sorry to see Purba go, experienced the dazed detachment someone feels when events they ignited go far beyond any reasonable trajectory they had imagined. From a request for a loan against his salary from his boss, a trifling piece of the shabby everyday for his class of people, to the marriage of his cousin to the youngest brother of the boss, all within the speed of one month: he will later think that it left his imagination so far behind that he wondered if a faculty that could not imagine things should deserve that name. And there would be something else too, a cloudy suspension in all that clear amazement and disbelief that could only be called envy, as if a fellow prisoner had been released and he left behind to serve his indefinite sentence.

  Purba tripped on the edge of her red benarasi sari as she crossed the threshold of her new home. Charubala, Chhaya, Sandhya, Purnima, Jayanti, all the women of the house, were waiting at the doorstep to welcome the new bride with paddy, sandalwood paste, new grass. They bit on their tongues, swallowed their premonitions and got on with blowing on the conch-shells and making the ritual sound of jubilation, ulu ulu ulu ulu ulu.

  Because there was to be no wedding ceremony on traditional lines – there was a reception in three days – Charubala had decided to treat the day of Purba’s entry into the household as an informal boü-bhaat for the family only; she made Purba serve rice to everyone. Purba, transplanted overnight, it felt to her, from a tiny, homely back garden to the immensity of a cultivated steppe, started her new life with all the animation of a machine.

  By the time she was shown to her room, where the huge bed, of a size she could not have contemplated previously, had been strewn with flowers and the posters around it decked with hanging curtains of tuberose and tinsel, studded with red roses, it was four hours past her bedtime. She took up one corner of the vast land in front of her and sank instantly into an all-obliterating sleep. Her last thought before shutting down was: ‘It’s like the field beside the Double Pond back home, this bed, it will take me a very long time to roll from one end . . .’

  The nightmare was of a hot, heavy, unidentifiable weight, which seemed to surround her, at once over and around her, something bearing down to crush her ribs and all the breath out of her tiny, squeezed lungs . . . and she coul
d not breathe . . . breathe in . . . brea— She woke up to find a huge animal on her.

  She screamed, or tried to. She tried again, but terror seemed to have removed her vocal cords. It was a man wrestling her down, kneading her breasts, tearing at her red-and-gold benarasi, her matching red silk blouse, trying to flip her over and keep her pinned down on the bed at the same time, a man trying to climb her as he would a ladder. She could not even begin to fight back, she was too small. The man was breathing heavily and a terrible smell was issuing out of his mouth, a smell that caught at some corner of her memory. Then, in absolute fear, she began to piss on the bed. No sooner had she finished than the man put his hand between her legs to check on the enormity of what she had just done. As soon as it was verified she was punished for it: briefly, first, with the fingers, then a cracking rod of pain fissured her in half. This time the scream emerged, but a hand was quickly clamped over her mouth as the chastisement of fire continued. Just when she thought she was going to pass out, the man spasmed and grunted, as if seized with a great pain that was going to fell him, then that too stopped and she felt the point of her bisection flooded with a momentarily warm liquid; she knew it was blood; she was going to bleed to death on her wedding night. Her husband rolled off her and fell asleep, it seemed, before the movement had come to a halt.

  All she could think about was not her blood leaking out onto the flower-strewn bed, but how it would be discovered tomorrow that she had pissed on it and wet the mattress. The fear, a new kind now, and the shame released the flow of tears at last and she wept and wept, silently and motionlessly, at her absolute incomprehension of why she had been singled out for such searing pain. How long was this punishment going to last? That smell coming out of her husband’s open, snoring mouth hit the side of her face in little gusts. She suddenly knew what it reminded her of. Two years ago, just after Kali Puja, in the field beside Double Pond she had smelled something similar to this. In a corner of the grounds, loud with the buzzing of fat, blue flies, lay the blue-red entrails of the goat that had been sacrificed on the night of the puja; the meat was cooked and served to the people of the neighbourhood at a communal lunch the following afternoon. The smell of the rotting intestines had made her retch then. Now, too, she turned sideways and threw up onto the floor, her head leaning out of the side of the bed.

  XIII

  On our first afternoon hidden in the jungle we heard the sound of conch-shells, one after the other, until there was a kind of chorus of disharmony. Then it stopped. We knew that the police had arrived in Gidighati. The Santhal men had said that was how we were going to be warned.

  Nothing happened for a good few hours. Darkness fell. We secreted ourselves deeper into the trees in a fanning circle, so that if they sent the police to the forest, they would be surrounded by us regardless of the point at which they entered. We had only one pistol, the one Dhiren had brought us, a small packet of bullets, nine tangis and three spears (none of us, the city boys, could use a spear, which required years of practice; its weight alone dragged down one side of my body). The rest of our weaponry, sickles and daggers, could only be used in close combat with an unarmed or disarmed enemy, or by stealing up from behind.

  Our ears were strained so intently that we could hear every falling leaf, every scurry of a small bird or animal. Later, we picked up on raised voices, a cry or two, but maybe we imagined these. Bir had a pile of kindling ready to carry into the village so that he had a ready excuse if anyone asked what he had been doing in the forest. No one came for us. Bir left in the morning.

  Dipankar and I whiled away the hours in the forest, talking about the route we were going to take to Majgeria. I didn’t know why I persisted with what I thought of as ‘one last visit’ to the village I had left behind. Part of it was, of course, the way the fates of Kanu and Bijli haunted me. But part of it was also because I couldn’t let a silence descend on us in the daylight, when I felt so naked and exposed, my face and expressions so visible.

  I asked – How did you know to look for money and jewellery in mattresses and pillows?

  Dipankar said – I saw a pillow leaking some cotton stuffing. Then something, I don’t know what, maybe I had felt the corner of something hard while I was tossing the pillows onto the floor, maybe I had noticed a rough line of stitching in the middle of the mattress, something made me feel the pillows again. Bundled paper, I thought. The rest you know.

  Yes, the rest I knew. Suddenly, it was the word ‘rest’ that redistributed an unknown internal system of weights, hardly ever perceived, and brought an enormous heaviness to my chest that rose like a column and tried to escape through my throat and mouth, and I was sobbing like a beaten child, crying helplessly and without shame in front of someone else, my first time since the age of six or seven.

  – What am I going to tell Samir’s mother? I said through my tears. How am I ever going to be able to show my face to her? We’ve left him on Nabin’s roof, there won’t even be a body to return to her.

  Dipankar sat me against a tree and let me cry. He said – Be strong.

  That was all he said and I was grateful to him for that.

  Bir returned at night with food and water and news. The police had come to their corner of the village, rounded up about twenty men and taken them away to Jhargram. They said they were going to come back. Apparently nobody had opened his mouth, when asked about ‘some men from outside this village’.

  – But the men they’ve taken away, what’s going to happen to them? Ashu asked.

  Bir said – Lock-up for a few days, a little bit of beating to find out who was behind killing those dogs. The police are in their pay, so they’ll make an effort. If the dogs are all killed, who’ll pay them bribes?

  – And if the men talk?

  Bir laughed – No one will. Not a single one. They want to get rid of the police too. Let them come here, we’ll see to them. Not many policemen came. Before, there used to be more.

  I had a sudden revelation. I said – They’re short of manpower because all these actions in dozens of villages all over Binpur have had them running from one place to another. They’re stretched thin. This is our moment.

  And the moment arrived the very next day, heralded once again by the discordant and staggered chorus of conch-shells. Minutes passed, or it could have been hours, as we waited, spread out in a wide circle according to our formation plans. My pistol was with Dipankar – he was a far better marksman than I could ever be – and I felt a bit helpless without it. Then the unambiguous sound of humans walking on a dry forest floor: rustling, snapping, an occasional split-second crackle. I peeped from behind my tree with the utmost cautiousness. Nothing except sprays of green and brown vegetation. I was suddenly conscious of how denuded the forest was in winter, how much more cover it would have offered us in the summer and during the monsoon.

  The dry rustling stopped. Or maybe it left my field of hearing. I couldn’t see any one of us to my left or right. I tried to visualise the path that the policemen – how many of them were there? did they have guns? – would take through our circumscribing circle, and the image of them as a moving diameter came into my head. It was absurd. But what if they were nearer one arc than another? And what if they were out of range for Dipankar? How could he take aim with the trees and bushes and branches in his way, intervening between him and his target? My heart was beating so loudly that I turned round again, stupidly, to check if anyone had heard it. I had a sudden desire to pass water, but I knew I didn’t have that luxury.

  The noise began, a kind of distant susurration in the undergrowth. There was no breeze, so it could only have been the police. Why weren’t they talking or whispering? Were they moving in single file or spreading out? Did they have a plan?

  Time trickled like something so viscous, almost solid, that I had to ask myself: was it even moving? Then the report of a gun, followed after the space of two speeded-up thumps of the heart by another. A cry, a burst of rustling followed by voices, then the sound
of human chatter, the tone of panic and distress. I bent down, flattened myself against the ground and tried to move like a snake until I came to the next big tree behind which I could stand up. There was a closer, longer outbreak of rustling and movement, and then a brief blood-curdling cry that came to an abrupt stop with a thud. There was the sound of running; how many pairs of feet, I couldn’t tell, but they seemed to be coming from all directions. I stood up, forgetting all my training and caution, moved forward from one tree-trunk to another, stopped at an arbitrary one and peeped. I saw Babu and Ashu emerge from the thicket and run past me, tangis raised. I followed them. Soon there was Bir running after me too.

  I heard another cry from deep within the thicket where Bir and I were headed, following Babu and Ashu, whom we couldn’t see any longer. At a small clearing a sight met my eyes that made my head swim. Debashish was trying to release his tangi, which was lodged in the back of a fallen policeman. Dipankar was removing the gun from yet another policeman, this one with half his head missing. Giri was holding two guns, one in each hand.

  – There were six of them, Dipankar panted. One got away. Not into the village, but deeper into the forest. He has a gun.

  – Where are the other three? What were the gunshots? Were they firing? I asked.

  – No, I sniped two of them, one after the other. I saw their heads above the bushes and fired. I was lucky to get them, very lucky. Then they started running.

  – Then? My heart was still hammering.

  – Debashish and Giri moved closer to me after they heard me fire. We started chasing the policemen at the same time. They were fleeing us, they didn’t turn around to see that we had only one gun and there were only three of us chasing four of them. Giri got one with his tangi. The remaining three scattered. We followed the two that kept together and got them. The other one’s gone in that direction.