The Lives of Others

by Neel Mukherjee

  There was a short interim when Prafullanath was prepared to rehire the same workforce in its entirety, even pay them their salaries for the duration of the lockout, if they were willing to drop their intransigent demand for the reinstatement of Sujan Hazra, the man who had been dismissed after he had lost his hand in an accident. The issue became circular and, for Prafullanath, it was a matter of honour not to capitulate; he had made enough concessions. So this new tune, of a direct meeting with the man they considered to be the central nervous system of all their woes, was not born out of a mood for compromise and conciliation. That would be like a lion lying down with a lamb although, in Priyo’s mind, the roles of predator and prey kept shifting. He had the presentiment of something coiled and dangerous, something that could only end in terrible things, and said as much to his father.

  ‘I have a better business head than you,’ Prafullanath had shot back. ‘In ten years you and your brothers have turned to dust what I built up from nothing. Now you’re asking me to pay heed to your old woman’s fears?’

  This was of a piece with Prafullanath’s recent attitude towards all his sons, so Priyo had merely clenched his teeth and wished, for more than a fleeting moment, that serious ill would really befall his father during the confrontation.

  And so it had.

  Red pennants, bearing the sickle-and-hammer insignia, planted for a good half a mile along the stretch of road leading to the factory, squashed any residual doubt that this was an isolated incident at one factory. When the request for some policemen to escort them had been turned down, Prafullanath had insisted on having a carload of paid local Congress goons to accompany them in case the laid-off workers got violent.

  ‘The CPI(M) will have planted anti-social elements among the picketing workers there. We’ll be murdered without protection,’ Prafullanath had said.

  ‘But only the police can deter them. They’ll know you’ve come looking for mischief, that you want confrontation, if you turn up with the neighbourhood tough guys,’ Adi had argued. ‘Then there will certainly be violence. Whereas now there’s only a very slight possibility.’

  Adi had prevailed, but it took only the sight of the little flags fluttering in the breeze to unnerve him. Had he made a mistake? What if something happened? They wouldn’t dare, would they? It’s one thing to gherao a manager, but to rough-handle the owning family? No, no, that couldn’t be; they had the invisible aura of protection that royalty and god-men had; they couldn’t be touched.

  They had kept their visit secret for several reasons: chiefly, they wanted to catch Dulal off-guard, but equally important was their fear of a crowd of more than 200 people barring their way, shouting slogans, trying to intimidate them with sheer volume of noise, or standing on the margins, silently watching them with a kind of simmering and vengeful alertness, waiting for a signal to be let loose.

  But there was only a handful of people squatting outside, six or seven at the most. The rusty red iron gate of Ghosh Paper Mill now had more locks and chains than its security had ever needed; that shameful, mocking excess marked its descent into a more permanent state of closure. Posters obscured almost its entire surface. There was no GHOSH PAPER MILL, painted in an arch, followed by the smaller BALI, DISTT. HOOGHLY, to be seen, but instead: We’re fighting for unfairly dismissed Sujan, we’ll keep fighting; Owners, answer why you shut down a profit-making factory! The pending salaries of the fired workers must be paid without delay; Workers of the world, unite, among scores of others.

  The presence of a car outside the gates seemed to rouse the men. Adi rolled down a back-window, pushed his head out and asked, ‘Is Dulal here?’

  He thought he would be recognised instantly, but clearly these stragglers didn’t know who he was.

  ‘Dulal-da’s not here. Who are you?’ a man asked.

  Before Adi could answer, Prafullanath intervened. From the front seat he said haughtily, ‘I’m Prafullanath Ghosh, the owner of this mill. Bring Dulal.’

  In the back, his sons, expecting contempt and defiance, clenched themselves, but were wrong-footed by that ineradicable tendency towards the bent knee in the labourer-class of people. The man bowed his head, lifted up his joined hands, but before he could settle into full servility, Prafullanath got out of the car and repeated, ‘Send for Dulal. Tell him Prafulla Ghosh has come to see him.’

  Priyo croaked, ‘Baba, what are you doing? Have you lost your mind?’

  The man ran off, whispered with the others, then came back to the car and said, ‘It won’t be possible to get hold of Dulal-da now. He’s not around. What do you want? Maybe someone else . . .’

  Prafullanath cut him short with, ‘What do you mean by “not around”? Where is he then?’ The hauteur was now mixed with irritation.

  Two men left the symbolic picket and started making their way across the fields in the direction of the town.

  The sun climbed the sky. Prafullanath, a bent, desiccated figure, barely managing to steady his bony grip on the silver lion’s head that topped his polished black cane, tried to pace hobblingly outside the car. All he managed was an impression of an old, injured crab. Then he got in, slammed the door, got out again, paced a while longer, re-entered the car . . . It carried on like this for an hour, maybe two.

  ‘This is my mill and I and my sons can’t enter it,’ Prafullanath spat out the words. ‘It’s my last standing mill and I’m not going to die before I modernise it. I’ll not let another Marwari swallow this one, too. If I have to shoot every single one of these striking beggars, I’ll do it, but I’ll see my mill opened.’

  A trembling took him as he spoke these words. Adi and Priyo shook too, inwardly and with terror; their father seemed like someone possessed. This unbending mood of confrontation was not what they had bargained for when they had so reluctantly given in to their father’s determination to face down Dulal.

  More people arrived and joined the four or five still standing near the gate. They stood at a distance, staring at the Ghoshes. It was here, Priyo later reminisced, that some kind of slippage in perception or memory took place, a kind of foggy passage between the before and after. When they next noticed, more staring men had gathered, and they weren’t positioned only at the picket lines in front of the locked factory gate, but were on both sides of their car, and in front of it, and at the back: Prafullanath, Adi, Priyo and Gagan were being slowly ring-fenced. It didn’t occur to Priyo even then that something was afoot, that this staring was anything other than the customary curiosity of provincial people who had never seen a car, who had so little excitement in their lives that the arrival of city-folk in an Ambassador was a spectacle.

  The Ghoshes got out of their car, leaving Gagan inside. It was only then that the pattern began to acquire significance: the Ambassador had gradually become an island, surrounded, after a clear ring of fifteen feet or so, by a thickening circle of people. Beyond them, Priyo saw more coming over the fields, crossing culverts, emerging from behind banana trees. Who were they? They seemed to be rising out of the earth, like in that story he had read as a child, in which demons sprang out of teeth sown in the ground.

  The signal for what happened next remained unseen and unheard, but not the result. A chant went up: Why was Sujan Hazra fired? Owner, answer us! Answer us! Then, two different ones, old, reliable mainstays: Grind and crush the black hand of the owners. Grind! Crush! and Our agitation is continuing, will continue. Priyo located and recognised the man who was leading the chanting. His name was Ashish Majhi. He worked in the boiler room and the Foudrinier room. That recognition released something, for Priyo now began to identify more and more of the faces in the crowd. They were surrounded by their former employees or, more accurately, the whole workforce that they had fired ten months ago. A current of fear thrilled through him.

  Prafullanath, however, seemed to be buoyant on rage. With the demeanour of an emperor facing down a peasants’ revolt, he roared, ‘Where is Dulal? Bring him to me, bring Dulal over right now.’

&nbs
p; Priyo, whose memory of a public mauling in the red-light area of Sonagachhi was still fresh, wished he could become invisible. He shut his eyes, opened them again; the labourers were now accompanying their chanting with determined forward thrusts of their arms, the textbook gesture of revolution. He was not confident that Dulal’s presence was going to ameliorate matters; quite the opposite, probably. He closed his eyes again. It had all appeared so benign fifteen years ago, the business of Dulal pouring balm over everything and bypassing all potential confrontation – what a picture of amity and harmony it had been. It had taken nearly a decade to see it for what it truly was: a long, wickedly misleading dress-rehearsal for the real play unfolding now.

  Answer us! Answer us!

  Where did all this fury, all this hate, come from? The strikers possessed the terrifying beauty of a fully reared-up snake, hood engorged, waiting to attack. Could he use that metaphor in one of his stories?

  Prafullanath tried to shout down the men with his obsessive call for Dulal. The veins in his throat and forehead stood out. Standing on his left, Priyo could see the throbbing purple-green worm in his temple.

  ‘Baba,’ he said into his ear, ‘please calm down. Please. They’ve sent for Dulal, he’s going to come. Just calm down.’

  Prafullanath had gone past the stage of turning to his son and shutting him up with a few forceful words. His focus was entirely on his elusive nemesis. Defying everything, Prafullanath advanced in his slow, limping, half-broken manner towards the crowd.

  ‘Baba!’ wailed Adi and Priyo together. They couldn’t bring themselves to move.

  The sea of agitators inched nearer. The island containing the Ghoshes and the car and Gagan shrank.

  The Ghoshes found themselves facing Ashish Majhi and Bijan Hazra. The chanting of slogans had given way to the ordinary, incomprehensible chatter of a crowd.

  Prafullanath asked, ‘Where’s Dulal? Where’s your ringleader?’

  Ashish said, ‘There’s no ringleader business. He’s not here. You speak to us.’

  Adi called out, ‘Move back, move back’ to the nearest group of faces pressing in on them. The words had no effect.

  Prafullanath said, ‘I head this factory. I’ll speak to no one but your head.’

  Bijan Hazra said, ‘When will we get our salaries? We haven’t been paid for a year. What will we live on?’

  ‘I’m not going to negotiate with you,’ Prafullanath said, his tone falling back to the kind that a man of his class reserved for pestering beggars. ‘I want to see Dulal, he’s the man behind all this. Who are you?’

  ‘My elder brother lost his hand. You threw him out because he was no longer useful to you,’ Bijan said.

  Adi intervened, ‘Move, all of you, move, give some space here. We’ve been through this before, hundreds of times.’

  Priyo felt the refractory mood coming off the crowd as touch on his skin. He was appalled that these labourers were daring to answer back, and in tones of such disrespect, too. Then the distaste swiftly transformed itself into fear.

  Ashish was so close now that Priyo could smell his sharp breath when he, startling the Ghoshes, gave out what seemed like a battle cry: ‘You must listen to our demands.’

  You must! You must! went up the answering chorus.

  Priyo wanted to tear out the windpipe of the snake. He could certainly see a long way towards his trachea through his wide-open mouth shouting out the slogan – the crooked yellow teeth, the furred pinkish-grey tongue, the stubby pink worm of the uvula.

  Prafullanath was now visibly shaking.

  Priyo whispered, ‘Baba, you must get into the car right now. Come.’

  Adi shouted ineffectually above the din, ‘Move away, move away.’

  Crush! Grind!

  The inner ring of men shuffled, but didn’t move back. Prafullanath felt a squeezing in his chest, a slight thickening of the air that he was breathing. He inhaled more deeply and said, ‘Move your men, I’ve come to talk. I have no time for a CPI(M) pimp like you’, but it came out in a whisper.

  Priyo, sensing something, took him by the shoulders.

  Adi now tried to reason with the men. He pleaded, ‘Ashish-babu, Bijan-babu, please, look at him, he’s an old man, he’s feeling ill. If you could just move back a little bit . . .’

  Priyo heard his brother’s wheedling tone and hated him.

  Bijan snapped back, ‘We’re ill too. We haven’t eaten for ten months, we haven’t been able to feed our wives and children for ten months.’

  As if on cue, another cry went up: We’re not listening to the false promises of the owners. We shan’t listen.

  Not listening! Shan’t listen!

  The people churned. Ashish whispered something to a man standing next to him. The man turned and pushed his way into the throng behind him and disappeared. The meaning of this emerged later, when Gagan poked his head out of the car and called out, ‘Babu, Babu, come inside, come and sit in the car.’ Priyo looked quickly behind him and saw an incipient spar of men forming, trying to come between the Ghoshes and the car, cutting off their access to any form of safety. The men were spoiling for a fight and, if it came to that, it would later be reported that the Ghoshes had initiated it, that they had come to the locked factory with hooligans, despite having been warned by the police not to show up, with the express purpose of demoralising the sacked workers and sabotaging their just revolution. Nobody would listen to the owners’ side of things; they wouldn’t even have a side then.

  Priyo looked at his father; Baba was dripping like a tree after an hour of uninterrupted rain.

  From this point, things accelerated.

  Prafullanath said, ‘I know Dulal is behind all this. I know you’re all in the pay of the CPI(M). That’s why the police didn’t come, they’re in the pockets of the CPI(M) too.’ With each word a wheezing racked his frame. Again the words, which were meant to be thundering, came out hoarse and whispery.

  Our demands must be heeded, must be heeded.

  Adi and Priyo each held an arm and started moving their father gently towards the Ambassador. It was a distance of only a few feet.

  Prafullanath’s chest had become an infernal anvil. He could barely bring out the words, ‘Chest . . . my chest . . .’ The light around him seemed to buckle like a rod.

  Gagan, who had noticed the beginning of a kind of loss of rigidity to Prafullanath’s frame, now saw him gulping for air and Adinath and Priyonath trying to prop him up. He started the engine, found a gap between the men trying to cut him off from Boro-babu and his sons and edged closer. Perhaps this move on Gagan’s part had not been foreseen by the playscript: the men, moving in discrete groups of one and two and three, trying to impose a wall between the Ghoshes and the car, were thrown by this unrehearsed bit of stage-direction. Gagan kept the car moving. Survival instinct, deeper than revolutionary strategies, forced the men to swerve aside. By the time they woke up to what was happening, Adi and Priyo had succeeded in bundling Prafullanath into the back seat.

  Adi, shaking in the passenger seat beside Gagan, said, ‘Drive. Drive now!’

  Gagan said, ‘But how?’

  The Ambassador had finally been cordoned off by the workers.

  ‘Drive,’ Adi cried.

  Gagan moved the car gingerly forward until he was inches away from the ring of men. A noise of great confusion spread among the crowd, submerging the now half-hearted Crush! Grind! The men surrounding them didn’t move. The car was like a flimsy boat in the moment before the waves closed in on it. Gagan swore filthily, backed the car, engaged second gear by mistake, made it give out an almighty revving sound, then jerked it forward at speed, hitting two, three, maybe four of the workers. A cry of astonishment, then pain or rage. Disbelief at this breaking of such an inalienable rule froze the men for a few moments, then that primitive coding for self-preservation again asserted itself. The crowd fell back and Gagan drove the car, without stopping or slowing, through the furrow that was opening up. The passage was narrow and pe
ople continued to press against the sides of the Ambassador, and Gagan didn’t know, didn’t care, how many men he was knocking down. That whimpering wheeze from the back seat had become the only point on which his world was concentrated.

  As they reached the periphery of the crowd, where the dense clot had thinned out to a few stragglers and the road out was in clear view, Priyo looked out of the rolled-up window glass and caught a flash of Dulal, a dark, thin man but now with a moustache and a paunch, flanked by several men, all of whom were caught by surprise by the steadily accelerating car, staring at it, momentarily frozen in their behind-the-scenes commanding of the action.

  Lately his father has taken to trotting out the old mantra: ‘One generation builds, the next generation sits on it and consumes it to nothing.’ How Priyo would like to turn that against him. The generation that builds is also the generation that destroys; the next generation is only the audience outside the invisible fourth wall, watching the antics of its elders puffing themselves up with hubris then getting deflated, like balloons four days after a child’s birthday party. For a change, Priyo can draw a clear, linear map of causal links: his father lies half-dead in his bed upstairs because he disregarded everyone’s advice and visited the factory at Bali in 1966 because it was so important that Bali became functional as quickly as possible because the survival of their business depended on it because he had pledged it as collateral to the banks because he had had the brilliant idea of wanting a complete technological overhaul of their other plant at Memari. That flare lights him up inside again. Baba built the business; he started to extinguish it too.

  The thought of upstairs drags Priyo back: if he does not rejoin the company of his wife and restart the supervision of caterers and electricians and decorators, she is going to give him hell. As he climbs up to the terrace, taking two steps at a time, he sees Bhola, in a hurry too, coming downstairs.