The Lives of Others

by Neel Mukherjee

  Someone was shaking him by his shoulder, offering him something. He turned around. It was Shekhar, holding out what looked like a pint-bottle.

  ‘They’re selling mahua,’ he said. ‘Have some. It’s killer stuff, not what I was expecting it to be.’

  Somnath took a swig, swallowed and nearly choked. The liquor had a burning, laboratorial quality to it. It tasted of putrefaction. He grimaced and asked, ‘What were you expecting?’

  ‘Well, doesn’t the name lead you to believe it will be something fragrant and honeyed?’

  ‘Fragrant and honeyed,’ Somnath mimicked. ‘Man, you’ve been infected by Ajit’s poetry bug. Come on, give us another swig.’ It was a desperate attempt to swagger and fall into the comfortable macho camaraderie of their usual intercourse; he felt he had to keep his distracting, consuming hunger sheltered from the gaze of his friends.

  The drumbeats stopped; the dance had ended. There were hundreds of people jostling and milling around. A man was selling tin whistles, another one pinwheels, yet another gaudily painted bamboo baskets. Somnath noticed at least two groups gambling. Ajit seemed to have been swallowed by the crowd. Somnath turned to Shekhar and said, ‘Do you think you can get me another bottle of mahua?’

  ‘Yes, no problem. They’re selling it in that shack over there.’

  ‘Why don’t you give me this bottle and you go get a new one? I’ll be right here. Here, take some money,’ Somnath said, pulling a few crumpled notes out of the pocket of his trousers. ‘Will you be able to find me? It’s so bloody crowded, people are eating each other’s heads . . .’

  ‘Of course. But don’t you move from here, otherwise I’ll lose you,’ Shekhar said, handing Somnath the pint-bottle, still nearly half-full of the fiery liquid.

  As soon as Shekhar’s back was turned Somnath wheeled round and lost himself in the crowd. He had to find her; this was not even a village, more like a hamlet; he could find her without any difficulty; she would still be with her tribespeople, for the dance had ended only a few minutes earlier. After a few restless minutes of pushing through the press of people, he discovered her, sitting with other Santhals. It took him some time to work out that they were getting drunk in a silent and focused way. That aimless mirth, the inexplicable, fluid joy, were all gone, yet the concentration seemed desultory. There was a core of hopelessness to it, even perhaps of despair.

  Somnath stood beside her and said, ‘Ei, ei, are you listening?’ to draw her attention; he did not know her name and it embarrassed him.

  She looked up, smiled sleepily and turned away, her attention engaged more by the bottle doing the rounds. In the final blaze of twilight the flower in her hair glowed. Soon it would be dark; he found the thought oddly comforting. Run through with that thought, indivisible from it, were the words he spoke next, almost in a whisper, to her, ‘Come with me, I’ve got more of the stuff with me, you don’t have to share with anyone.’

  The man and the woman on either side of her turned round along with her. This time her smile had a little bit more interest in it. She tried to stand up, failed, leaned against the man, who continued to stare at Somnath. Somnath knelt down to be level with her.

  She giggled and asked, ‘You give me liquor? Where is it? Show me!’

  Somnath brandished the bottle and said, ‘There’s more.’

  The staring man now said to Somnath, ‘You bring the liquor here, she won’t go with you.’

  Somnath looked at him with contempt and said to the girl again, ‘Come.’

  The man answered, ‘No, she won’t.’

  Showing some spark for the first time, the girl let loose a shower of incomprehensible words to the man. He retorted with equal eloquence. This resulted in a veritable fusillade from her. Somnath watched with bemusement; even the seemingly heated exchange appeared to him to be oddly dotted with their habitual languor. Or was that the effect of the stuff they were drinking? A fair few of them seemed to be half-asleep, some swaying gently, others with their drooping heads nearly touching the earth. No one seemed to be paying much attention to this corner where a sudden display of energy was playing out. Except for the woman who was sitting on the other side of the girl. She called out to someone and said something that led to another woman, on the opposite arc of the circle, letting out a titter, then a few slurred words, and finally a giggle, before she fell back into the doziness that had taken over the group.

  Then, surprising Somnath, the girl got up, teetered for a bit, steadied herself and said to him, ‘Let’s go. You buy me some liquor.’

  Somnath leaped up and handed her his half-empty bottle. She took a swig, two swigs, passed the bottle back to him and in the same forward motion her upper body keeled towards him and fell against his chest. His free hand instinctively reached out to steady her. He held her elbow first, then her arm. Her warm skin was like an electric shock through his fingers. She disengaged herself, or maybe he foolishly encouraged her to do it; the contact was all over in a few seconds, but Somnath felt feverish from it. Was that moment of unbalanced lungeing a calculated move or was the unsteadiness an effect of the drinking? He would never know. She kept drifting in and out of a mild trance, not far removed from her slow, wakeful manner. This made it easy, even imperative, for Somnath to keep touching her so that she would not fall.

  He finished off the remnants of the mahua in one big draw from the bottle and winced; it was not as bad as the first time. The thought of touching his lips to the rim of the bottle that had just been in her mouth mitigated some of the rotting taste. He felt a momentary quickening that was at odds with her swaying lethargy. He was trying to lead her to the forest he had walked in yesterday.

  Suddenly the dark came down, swift as the falling of a mantle. Somnath had a brief sense of being caught in a wildly erratic flow of time, scrambled into sudden, unpredictable elongations and compressions, then that feeling left him too; he fell into a warp. How long had she been saying to him, ‘Ei, babu, the forest is in that direction, you said you give me liquor. That is in the other direction’? Then he was almost dragging her to the sheltering dark of the trees. Was he? Was he not simply supporting her in her inebriated condition? If she did not want to go with him, why was she not resisting? Why did he feel pulled along? How pliant she seemed. There was a moon now, low in the sky, again an enormous orange coin with a tiny, tiny bit from one side pared off. Was it waxing or waning? He felt puissant like a nocturnal predator. And then he sensed that the forest was around them. When had they entered it? How much time had elapsed? He thought of the mahua – his first time ever on that strong stuff, no wonder it had so gone to his head.

  She said, ‘Ei, babu, you take me to Calcutta, give me a job?’

  ‘A job? I’ll make you my queen!’

  She giggled and asked, ‘You speak truly?’ Then, again, ‘Where is the liquor? You said you give me some.’

  He would never tire of the meandering lines of her speech, the way she elided Bengali and Hindi together.

  ‘Babu, the forest is dark. You come back with me.’

  ‘No, let’s stay here. My eyes have got used to the dark.’ He pulled her close to him. He felt her resist him, first weakly, then with increasing force. She was no meek, wilting flower, she was a tribal woman; these people had the strength of wild animals. It excited him, this promise of a tussle first.

  The forest floor was crackly under their feet. They had entered a new world, where a wholly different order of sonic smudges brought it into its eerie being. It had the temporary effect of diverting his focus away from the demands of his pounding blood. A small creature went scurrying, setting off a series of rustling noises as if it were moving under an armour of dry leaves worn over its body. There was what he took to be the call of a night-bird, a long whirring ending with a tick-tick-tick, an unnerving sound. Its very unearthliness underscored the immediate matter; he was returned to the business at hand again. He had his hand on her arm like the grip of a feral beast’s jaw. Some atavistic instinct had perhaps
warned him that she knew the forest much better than he, was its denizen and, if released, could run away, never to appear within his orbit again. His dark-adapted eyes could make out the trunks of trees, as darker pillars embedded in the matrix of the dark of night, then understood there was enough diffuse moonlight breaking through the cover of the forest to enable a form of night-vision.

  The girl had stopped speaking. He had heard that these promiscuous tribal women had insatiable desires; they were at it all the time, with whoever approached them. The moment was now. As if on cue, a night-bird, a different one this time, emitted a loud, metallic chaunk, chaunk, chaunk in an unstoppable run and startled him out of his skin. He tried to ease her to the ground, but she was having none of it.

  ‘Babu, let me go, babu,’ she kept pleading. The counterpoint of the birdcall and her unvarying words flashed off a quick irritability; he barked, ‘Shut up!’ The game had changed. Why had she come so far with him if she wanted him to let go of her? It could only be a part of the performance that wily Santhal women put on to make keener the edge of desire.

  Her motions and behaviour, which had so far seemed as if taking place under water, suddenly speeded up, the drunkenness dispelled. She tried to twist her arm away, but Somnath now held her with both hands. She shouted out a string of words, presumably about how much he was hurting her, but this was only the first act of the tussle she so wanted. He pushed her against a tree and tried to keep her pinned against it using his whole body, but she kept twisting like a collared cat. It would have been so much better if they were on the ground, but he was now caught between making the most of their standing positions and wanting to bring them both to lie down; the two involved different actions and he tried to find some intersection between them.

  A larger rustle rippled through nearby: the presence of humans had clearly alarmed some bigger animal. Holding her against the tree with his waist and legs, he slightly leaned his upper half back and tried to get his hands everywhere, to free her from the cloth wrapping her. She cried out a couple of times in between heavy snorts and panting. A brief thought flitted through Somnath’s mind, that perhaps she was earnest in her resistance, and exited just as quickly, his concentration now wholly on groping and squeezing and subduing. There was a flapping of wings and a shrill kri-kriii-kri that ended with a muffled abruptness as if the bird had fallen asleep before finishing its cry. The rustling was getting louder.

  Then, shocking Somnath, she bit his hand; sank her teeth in with all the strength she could muster. He cried out and his unaffected hand went up, almost involuntarily, to slap her face, once, twice, three times. This time her screaming emerged unimpeded, with the full force of her lungs. Suddenly the rustling was all around them – they were surrounded by people.

  Things moved very fast. A man spoke out some sharp words, the girl ran towards him, wailing; the sound of angry words from the same man, another couple of slaps, then silence from the girl. A torch was shone on Somnath’s face, blinding him. Other men now started speaking. He had no idea how many men there were; at least three. Then the first blow fell before he could think of running away. It hit his side and was swiftly followed by several more, on his legs, back, neck, ribs. He let out a cry and collapsed. The torchlight had gone off. They were beating him with long sticks. A voice rasped out a string of urgent, angry words. Clapped in the stocks of pain and fear, Somnath began to discern Bengali abuse being fired at him – ‘Lowlife! Dog! Son of a sow! You think you can come from the city and do anything you want with our women?’

  He curled up, trying to protect his head with his hands and arms, reduced to the fragility of a foetus. Then another set of harsh words that sounded like a command. The torchlight went on and raked him in swinging, jerky arcs. It fell to the ground from the hand of the man who was holding it, its cone of light pendulating a few times before it came to rest. In that ghostly terranean light the men aimed their blows with greater precision. They tried to get to his skull in the way they killed a snake in these parts, by crushing the head with the blows of their sticks, for bringing them down on the body would not do, even if they damaged it and turned it to pulp. They knew that the snake could regrow its body and, once revived, it would come back for revenge, so you had to get the head and beat that into a paste to make sure that you had not just maimed it, but killed it properly.

  Later it was said, because Purba did not visibly erupt into the hysterical grief that was expected of a woman widowed two years into her marriage, that she had a heart of stone, but that was only the beginning, and a clement one too, of the weather that was coming.

  They tried to keep her from seeing Somnath’s corpse, but only half-heartedly. An accident in the forests of the Chhotanagpur plateau, someone had said. A road accident, said another. A whisper, quickly suppressed, that Santhals may have been involved in some way, but no one was talking about it, definitely not to her or in front of her; she could not ask anyone, she did not dare ask. How could she? This was not her family, but her lifelong exile among strangers. She saw the room on the ground floor, in which the body had been laid out, thronged with people at all hours, saw the brass vases full of cut stalks of green-tinged white tuberose, its smell mingling with the smoke from the continually burning incense sticks, and felt only the cold clutch of fear.

  She took in the clotted black jam that had been his head and tried to turn her face away, but was transfixed by a small line of ants leaving the mess and beginning a march in the opposite direction on the white sheets on which he had been placed. She wondered, sacrilegiously for a time like this, if the ants had been picked up in the forest as he was lying dead in the thick of trees and bushes or if they had come in search now, attracted as they were by rotting organic matter. Then she had thrown up right there and was rushed out of the room; her second great error, a defilement of the sacred room of the dead.

  The doctor who had come to write out the death certificate, and give Prafullanath and Charubala a sedative, looked in on her on his way out; she was pregnant with her second child, he said. She had cried then; the doctor had taken it to be for her great misfortune. And yet the tears had not been for her, or for the new child beginning inside her – that was not incarnate yet, only an idea – but for her son who would never know his father. Watching his curly head and his dark, innocent eyes, she felt something like a smashing of everything that was held behind her chest. In a household where she was the youngest adult, who had to defer to the wishes and commands and whims of her seniors, she deferred too on the matter of sorrow and grieving – Somnath’s death was a greater loss to these others.

  The little boy, Supratik, whom she had seen prancing up and down, wearing a child’s silk panjabi and a child’s dhoti, when she had got married two years ago, the child who had seemed like the principle of irrepressible energy and was only about seven years younger than she, now slipped into her room and announced sombrely, ‘This is the first death in this house.’ He was only eleven.

  Purba lifted up her head. She did not know what to say.

  Supratik said, ‘Do you know that story about the Buddha?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘A woman’s child died. She was very sad and crying, all the time. She went to the Buddha and said, “Buddha, Buddha, please bring my son back to life.” And she was crying, crying. So the Buddha said to her, “Go bring me some mustard seeds from a house in which there has been no death ever and I’ll bring your son alive.” So the woman went around from house to house, begging for mustard seeds, crying. But she couldn’t find a single house in which there hadn’t been a death. For days she went looking and crying but no one could give her those seeds. So she returned to the Buddha, fell at his feet and said, ‘I couldn’t find the mustard seeds. Every house I went to has had a death in it. What will happen now?’ The Buddha said, ‘I asked you to do the impossible. Every mortal is marked by death. No one can escape it. That is why you couldn’t find a death-free home. This was my lesson to you – death is universal, all of us h
ave to die.’ So the mother, crying, crying, still crying for her dead son, went away. And that is the end of the story.’

  She could not bring herself to speak.

  The boy let the silence tick for a little while longer, then said to the floor, ‘Don’t be sad’, and left the room.

  Several years later she would keep turning the little incident this way and that in the hope of discovering an answer to the question: could this have been the beginning?

  The day after Somnath’s cremation at Nimtala Ghat, Prafullanath, who had spent most of his time under sedation since the corpse of his youngest son had been brought back to Calcutta, woke up from the obliteration of his drugged sleep with a strange pain up his right arm. It was not very bad, but neither could it be ignored. He called out to his wife – where was she? – but his throat was too phlegmy for the call to carry. What time was it? There was so much light in the room, he had never known the room to be flooded with so much sunlight. Why had they opened the windows and the door if he had been sleeping? Where was all this light coming from? He got out of bed, felt for his slippers with his feet and managed to kick one under the bed trying to get his feet into them. He bent down to retrieve it. The room canted around him. The light exploded.