The Lives of Others

by Neel Mukherjee

  Ajit assented vigorously, nodding his head. ‘These tribals don’t appear to have any inhibitions or boundaries – the men and women hug and touch each other and hold hands openly, the girls hang out in groups and are constantly giggling and falling over each other, have you noticed? And that outfit of theirs, that short cloth! I love the way they put flowers in their hair – just one flower or a head of blossom. It makes their dark skin glow.’

  ‘Here we go again,’ Shekhar sighed, ‘flowers and radiant skin . . . Man, you’re such a loser.’

  Somnath laughed and said, ‘Did you notice yesterday at the market that the women were drinking?’

  ‘Really?’ Incredulity in Shekhar’s voice.

  ‘Didn’t you see? The men and women were all sitting in a loose circle on the ground, passing the bottle around. Mahua or fermented-rice haandiya. Drinking and leaning against each other and then falling over.’

  Ajit said, slightly tangentially, ‘Shall we go for a walk in the forest? We’ll have light for another four hours or so . . .’

  Surprising him, Somnath and Shekhar agreed.

  It took them less than ten minutes to reach the edge of the straggle of small, ramshackle, dirty buildings that was the mining village of Patratu. Most of them had tin roofs and only a few were built out of bricks. The shops looked as precarious as if a child had drawn them. They were stained with darkness, dirt and indigence. Everything was covered with a patina of red dust. The air was dry, and the clear late-April heat too. The occasional bicycle, ridden by a man carrying a huge, unbalancing sack of coal tied to the pannier rack, probably on his way from the mines to sell the coal at Ranchi, twenty-five miles to the south, trailed a low cloud of this red dust as it made its way. The three holidaying friends too had this dust-swirl following their feet, like a pathetic little pet, as they walked the village’s only tarred road to the end. But everything was about to change. A big thermal power station was being constructed with Russian money. This sleepy little village in the Pithauriya-Patratu valley, surrounded by lush green hills and forests, criss-crossed by streams, rivers and waterfalls, was going to get a lick of developmental paint. Residential colonies were being purpose-built for the workers at the power station and the dam; the village was transforming itself into a small town. These newly arrived residents would join tourists, especially from the big town of Ranchi, for picnics in the surrounding forests and to the dam, while the more adventurous ones would head out westwards to the nearby Chatra forest. Already there was a small holiday lodge halfway towards the reservoir. It was this that they had luckily stumbled upon, looking for a place to stay. Patratu was within spitting distance of the more famous McCluskiegunj. It was only on a whim that the three friends had got off at Barkakana Junction instead of staying on the train for another hour for the Anglo-Indian colony.

  Walking towards the forest, which was everywhere and within reach, they felt that they had come, if not to the middle of nowhere, certainly to a place remote enough to allow them that superficial illusion, the surrounding scenic beauty providing a sufficient dosage of the untampered Nature they desired.

  Where the tarred road gave out the tribal women sat with their baskets in the early morning, selling what little they had to sell – vegetables, eggs, bidi, unidentifiable leaves. It was near this spot that Somnath had seen Santhal men and women drinking their home-brewed liquor. Now the young men walked close to the edge of a field. There were little brown hillocks undulating the middle distance, while on the far horizon a large green-brown range camouflaged itself in the haze by looking as if it were three-quarters of the way through a very slow disappearing act. There were a couple of better-heeled detached bungalows now, freshly painted and set within their big, gated front gardens, clearly the holiday homes of wealthy city people. Then the human habitations ended. Beyond another field on the other side, the forest lay like a dark-green, almost black shawl, extending from the dissolving hill in the distance. It appeared to be a repository of condensed dark, the vessel from which evening and night leaked out at a certain hour and covered the land and sky. They made their way towards it.

  Once inside, the darkness proved to be a trick that the forest – assuming its magician incarnation, like its companion, the hill, which was trying to become invisible – habitually performed for everyone outside its boundaries. The light, so flat out in the open, became dramatic and mobile: it seemed to have somersaulted up high to form a canopy over the heads of the trees, but even that, after a few minutes of advancing inwards, turned out to be an illusion. Instead of the white uniformity outside, it had broken itself up into legion entities, all different: shafts and beams entered the middle heights, some breaking against and streaking the tree-trunks, some coming to rest on the ground, so miraculously free of undergrowth, in stippled pools of light and shade. The forest floor, of the same red soil, was dry; large leaves from the sal trees, which largely constituted the forest, lay here and there like brown plates with curled edges; occasionally a branch or some twigs. The hide-and-seek light, the unending series of sal, a whole different world hidden so openly within the shell of the soiled one they knew – all the things these city boys had never experienced before – silenced even Shekhar and Somnath.

  Their ears opened not to silence, but to what they had derided a few minutes ago: the music of the forest. An unknown bird sent out an atonal tu-tui-tuiieeee at regular intervals. With a papery rustle a leaf dropped somewhere. Crickets vigorously churned out an unremitting background of their anthem. Now that the men’s senses had opened to this secret world, they heard all kinds of things: a clatter of wings accompanied by the swishing of the displaced air; a brief tap-tap-tapping; a whirr and click repeated in a monotonous cycle for a few minutes, then nothing; the repeated one-note of a string being plucked, most probably a hand-held cotton-carder, far, far away. They walked as if in a trance, spellbound in this kingdom of magic, until, with a snap up above and then a fluttering descent, a small, flowering branch landed near them. They stared at it as if it had come from outer space. Ajit broke the silence first.

  ‘Did you know the sal tree bore flowers?’ he asked no one in particular.

  Shekhar and Somnath shook their heads, still too enmeshed in the spell to make a sound or to indulge in their mockery of Ajit’s inexplicable fascination with Nature. Ajit lifted up the branch from the ground and all three looked at the cluster of flowers in silence; an inflorescence of fully bloomed, small, coral-pink flowers, with a contained explosion of anthers in the middle and, under them, alternate rows of greenish buds that looked like fruits, invisible when on the tree except as a spray of hazy yellowish-orange tint on the canopies, so easily ignored or not noticed but now, on closer inspection, a dense, intricate miracle.

  Then the spell broke and Somnath said, ‘Isn’t this the flower the Santhal women had tucked in their hair when we saw them dancing yesterday evening?’

  No one could answer the question, but Ajit hazarded a guess. ‘No, I think that was the mahua flower, the one from which they make their alcohol.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Shekhar immediately countered. ‘Have you ever seen a mahua flower in your life?’

  The brief brush with the sublime was over. The world outside, the one they knew, had entered the forest.

  Ajit now put up a small fight. ‘How do you know that I do not know? Have you ever seen the mahua flower?’

  Uncharacteristically, Shekhar withdrew. ‘No, it’s just that I thought you were again beginning your flower-fuckery poetry shit.’

  Before Ajit could retort, Somnath said, ‘Will you two cut it out, squabbling like dogs in a beautiful place like this? I feel like staying in this forest for ever.’

  Shekhar and Ajit burst out laughing.

  Somnath smiled and said, ‘No, really, I’m serious. Sometimes . . . sometimes’ – a different tone crept into his voice, something at once serious and tired – ‘I feel responsibilities have been piled upon me as you’d burden a load on a donkey. I can’t move with
all that weight on my shoulders.’

  What could he be referring to, wondered Ajit and Shekhar silently. Surely not his beautiful, curly-haired boy, whose first birthday was celebrated last month? Or his meek, silent, beautiful wife? They could not find a suitable response to their friend’s abrupt introspection, but just as suddenly as the brief cloud had cast its shadow, it quickly flitted past. The sun shone unobstructed again. Somnath wiped his face with his hand, once, twice, as if he were brushing off cobwebs that he had accidentally walked into, smiled with the full force of his radiance and said, ‘Where were we?’

  Relieved at the passing of the unexpected, and unwelcome, sounding of a minor key, Ajit and Shekhar plunged, with somewhat excessive zeal, into the safer music of laddish chat.

  After a little bit more wandering Somnath observed, ‘Listen, guys, don’t you think it’s darkened a bit in here? Shouldn’t we be heading back to the bungalow?’

  Shekhar agreed, ‘Yes, darkness comes down suddenly in these upland areas. It wouldn’t do to get lost in the forest at night. And the bungalow’s right at the other edge of the town.’

  The light outside the forest had indeed changed. That white glare, which had seemed to cast no shadows, had now become golden air, present in that it tipped everything with its hue, but itself absent. There were shadows nestled against the hillocks and against the sides of all physical objects. The light turned orange, then pink. At the open area where the market sat, stray groups of Santhals congregated. And there, at the edge of the road, the young men instantly spotted a group of half a dozen Santhal women sitting on their haunches and doing what they did best – nothing. They whispered to each other, giggled, fell over laughing at some imperceptible jest, stared at nothing in particular, giggled some more . . . They lacked the discipline of works and days.

  Ajit said, ‘Look, that woman in the middle, look at her hair! Have you seen? Mahua blossom! We can ask them and settle the issue once and for all. Ei, Somu, you go and ask them, you are the least shy among the three of us.’

  Somnath did not demur. He bounded off and stood in front of the circle, pointed to the blossom stuck in the young woman’s hair and asked, ‘What’s the name of that flower?’

  The women stared at him, then began their laughing and falling-over routine as if this urban stranger had told them the most cracking joke they had ever heard. Somnath remained unperturbed. All these girls swaying like reeds afforded him an almost licensed opportunity to feed his eyes on their bodies. They wore no additional garment to cover their breasts, only the parsimonious piece of cloth they wrapped around themselves, leaving so much of their lower legs, waist, back, neck, throat, shoulders exposed. In this tawny light of dusk, their black skins shone as if each had just emerged from a vat of oil.

  He repeated his question. The same reactions were re-enacted. This time, however, the girl in question turned coy and shy and tried to hide her face on her friend’s shoulder. Soon Somnath established that this was nothing but coquetry, for the girl kept peering at him like a child playing peek-a-boo.

  Then, stunning him, for he had mentally prepared himself to have this game played, unchangingly, for a good while longer, the girl asked him directly, ‘Babu, you give me money if I tell you the name of the flower?’

  Somnath felt unstrung. That use of tui, the ‘you’ reserved for close friends, peers and intimates, or for juniors and servants: it was unthinkable for him to be the subject of that mode of address from a person of her standing. A squeezing sensation went through his insides. Trying hard to steady his voice, he too replied with tui: ‘How much money do you want?’ How could he be so unmanned by her language, an extraordinarily musical mixture of Bengali and Hindustani, by the lilt that animated her looks, her every gesture, her diction, her tone?

  ‘You give me one rupee?’ she sang.

  One rupee! He would give her one hundredfold to have her continue speaking, calling him tui. An earlier incipient plan suddenly consolidated itself in his head. He asked, ‘Will you be dancing tomorrow in the market place?’

  ‘Why? You’ll come and join us?’ she asked in return. A peal of laughter rippled through her friends.

  Somnath turned to his friends and said, ‘They are inviting us to dance with them tomorrow’, then, without missing a beat, his usual confidence restored to him, he addressed the girl, ‘Yes, I will, but only if you’ – here he pointed to her emphatically – ‘if you dance with me.’

  Once their eyes became adapted to the near-total lack of electric lights outside, Shekhar, Ajit and Somnath found that the low orange moon, like a large dinner-plate in the sky, gave so much light that they could see the garden with ease. The moonlight did queer things to objects. The shadows it cast looked painted; they lapped and hugged their parent objects in such a way that their inkiness leaked, as if by capillary action, back into the buildings or shrubs or humans and cloaked them in that same unreality. If you looked at them long enough, they, especially the rose and dahlia bushes and the grass, appeared not black, but a green or blue iteration of the dark. This light was not meant to illuminate; it was meant to create its antithesis, shadow; even the stretches in broad moonlight looked secretive.

  Ajit said, ‘It’s like daytime. So much light! You don’t get to see this in the city.’

  ‘On a full-moon night during a power outage, if you walk the streets of your neighbourhood in Kankurgachhi, you will get the same effect,’ Shekhar quipped.

  Ajit replied by breaking full-throatedly into a Tagore song: ‘On this full-moon night, everyone has gone to the forest . . .’ The bottle of rum they were sharing in the garden of their guesthouse had not yet begun to tell in the melody. Whatever his friends made of Ajit’s aesthetic impulses, they always fell respectfully silent when he sang; he had a beautiful voice and had had singing lessons throughout his childhood.

  Faint drumbeats, sometimes near, at others distant, carried over in the air in a way that confused the men about their source and direction. When the percussion became more pronounced, it created such a rhythmic dissonance with the song that Ajit stopped before reaching its end.

  ‘What do you think they are celebrating?’ he asked.

  ‘Who knows?’ Shekhar said. ‘Do you think this is a regular thing with them?’

  ‘No idea,’ Ajit said.

  Were they dancing? Was that woman part of the carousing? That was Somnath’s only thought. The caramelly taste of the rum turned to a sourish sugar in his mouth.

  ‘I know you’re going to disagree with me,’ Ajit now said, ‘but I find these tribal people really innocent and pure. Qualities we city-dwellers have lost.’

  ‘No, mairi, you’re totally right,’ Shekhar said. ‘They have no money, no jobs, no solid houses, yet look how happy they are. They sing, dance, laugh all the time, drink alcohol, all as if they didn’t have a single care in the world.’

  ‘And we, who have everything, are weighed down with anxiety, illness, tension, worry, from cradle to grave,’ Ajit finished his friend’s thought.

  Shekhar asked, ‘Really, you have everything? Everything?’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘But everything?’ Shekhar persisted.

  ‘Ah, I keep telling you, it was a way of putting things. Stop harping on that one note.’

  Shekhar would not be budged. He had caught something between his teeth and he would not let go now. ‘But everything?’ he repeated. ‘Do you have a girlfriend?’

  Ajit tried to ignore this; best not to encourage Shekhar, who was probably well on his way to getting sozzled, which would explain this resurgence of the bullying. ‘The less one owns in life,’ he said, ‘the happier one is. Santhals = few worldly possessions = happiness. Ajit & Shekhar & Somnath = family and friends and home and expectations and responsibility = sorrow. Straightforward equation.’

  ‘Don’t forget Santhal women = beauty,’ Somnath interjected.

  ‘Do you have a huge family house like Somnath does?’ Shekhar asked. ‘Three cars? A fle
et of servants?’

  Ajit clenched his teeth. ‘Has the rum gone to your head?’

  ‘A wife? A son?’ Shekhar continued, following his own train of thought as if the aimless convivial chit-chat had turned into a monologue; his interlocutor had disappeared.

  Ajit returned to his old tack. ‘Innocence belongs to these tribal people,’ he said. ‘They are closer to the pure state of mankind than we are, less corrupted, more noble.’

  Somnath had only a small part of his mind on the increasingly drunken conversation of his two friends, participating absent-mindedly. He heard the splattering stream of one of them pissing against a bush, so loud in the surrounding stillness that it felt slightly obscene. He wanted to concentrate solely on the sound, which was no longer dispersed in the night air in intermittent shreds and patches, but was continuing louder, he felt, in his pumping heart.

  The air was mazed again with that very rhythm the following afternoon. In the market place there was a sizeable crowd – where did so many people come from? – that seemed to swell as the afternoon deepened from white to gold. In a clearing at the edge of a field, where the human habitations gave way to open space, a circle of Santhal men and women, linked to each other with their arms across their neighbours on either side, expanded and contracted to the unerring rhythm of a drum, with the grace of a dream. On the red soil they formed at one moment a small ring, then, at another moment, obeying the syncopations of the drummer, a larger one. Somnath thought of a bud blooming into a day-long flower, then collapsing into a shrivelled prepuce at the beginning of nightfall. Expanding and contracting, expanding and contracting. The men and women bowed as they moved inward, then lifted their heads up on the outward move. The effect, unfurling to the repetitive drumbeats, was hypnotic.

  He wrenched his eyes off the collective harmony of the dance to search for his Santhal girl, but had trouble picking her out – all the women were wearing flowers in their hair. And then he saw her, an ebony figure of perfect grace and form, her skin strangely luminous in its contrast with the dark-red cloth that she had wrapped around herself, leaving so much of her legs and body unencumbered. The thuds in his heart outpaced the drumbeats. He followed the circumference of the dancing circle until he stood diagonally behind his girl at a distance of a few feet, part of a looser circle of the audience gathered to watch. Then, suddenly, the mesmeric hold broke, the harmonic duet between the drum and his heart snapped. An immense hunger seemed to be devouring him, a hunger exacerbated by all this nibbling away at the scene in front of him with only his eyes; he wanted a different kind of assuaging.