‘What? Am I right or not? What a terrible time you must have had. And if you fell ill, what then? The nearest hospital would have been in Jhargram or Medinipur Town, no? Long walk from where you were, very, very long. Days, right? Trains were out of bounds, weren’t they, because of increased police presence in the stations? But you boys had a lot of practice in walking, walking from one village to another in the night. What? Am I right?’
Before Supratik has had a chance to stifle his pique and subject his words to a measure of control, they rush out – ‘Yes, you are.’
The man seems taken aback by the simplicity of the admission, and the ease with which it appears. There is a pause to accommodate the unexpected before he resumes, ‘So why did you young men do it? You had the whole world to look forward to. Such bright futures, now, now all . . . all . . .’ He leaves out the culminating word pointedly, maybe out of an incongruous sense of politeness.
Supratik does not know where to begin; the profusion of the points of entry stump him. Are the questions in earnest or a form of entrapment that he has not been able to decode? Surely this man is not really asking for a lesson in politics; their individual sides have been chosen a long time ago, and each is settled into his own with the inextirpability of giant trees. Whatever he says now in response will be, on several levels, an exercise in futility. Or is the man extending a covert invitation to help him mitigate his own circumstances of imprisonment, and worse, by mounting an ideological plea? Since when did that work, Supratik asks himself, incredulous that the absurdity of thought has infected him too.
‘I keep stumbling over that bit. Not so much on why you went to the villages, not so much all that, that’s easy to understand – your brains were washed by this this this propaganda, and you are all young, your blood is hot, you are restless and and, if I may say it, a bit reckless, a bit of adventurism, it’s natural that that runs in all your blood; this, after all, is the age for doing, not for sitting still or thinking deeply about things. What I cannot understand is why you didn’t dabble in it briefly and then return home to your books and your comforts. A lot of your, ah, comrades did that.’
Supratik decides to steer clear of sarcasm. Instead he says, ‘Because who else will be the defence counsel for humanity?’ He has to do his old trick of twisting his thumb to its most extreme possible to prevent himself from adding, ‘Not you or your type.’
‘Eh?’ Not the more polished ‘What?’ this time, but a shortcut into the rustic interjection.
‘Who will fight the corner for those who have nothing?’ Supratik elucidates. ‘For those who don’t even know that something can be done? That they can fight back? That their expendable lives needn’t be fodder, generation after generation?’
‘Whoaaah. Stop stop stop stop, my head hurts with all these big words . . .’
Supratik marvels again at the man’s chameleon-like capacity for seamless transition, this time into feigning to be a simple-minded buffoon; how many skins does the man have? Is he going to be entertained with all of them, one by one? But on no account must he be drawn into talking about the moral basis of his politics; that would only serve to make him outraged, lose control, go down the road of vicious sneering attacks, all of which would not do him any favours. He feels small that such a self-serving calculation has entered his head; has he fallen so far, become so emasculated, that, when called upon to defend the revolution, he has traded off his possible personal safety against it? Is this how it all ends?
‘All this bleeding-heart sensibility,’ the man says, ‘not really very sensible. If you feel so much for the poor and the needy, why did you let your cook, Madan, take the blame when it was you who had stolen your aunt’s jewellery?’
The mood and tone, chameleons themselves, have shifted their colour and shape. There is cold metal in the man’s voice. The recent clown could have been imagined by Supratik.
‘You stole her jewellery to finance your terrorism. You think everyone moves with their faces to the grass? The “urban intelligentsia” is not so intelligent, after all. Or perhaps it doesn’t credit others, of different political stripes, with much intelligence?’
So the police know: Supratik feels the shock as a moist heat that suddenly wicks into his face. It enters his ears, from the inside, as a ringing, and as the droning din subsides he can hear the man saying, ‘. . . not know that? So clearly no fighting Madan’s corner, for you? His life was not fodder, as you put it, to you middle-class boys playing around with some dangerous fireworks? Tsk-tsk.’
Supratik can hear the hiss-and-burn of acid as the bass to his questioner’s words; the sarcasm, now no longer his prerogative, is not another colourful skin the man has stretched over his personality. Supratik thinks that some residue of dignity – that word will have to do – prevents him from answering the questions. Shame consumes him. He tries to think back to the moment when he had hatched the plan to steal his aunt’s jewellery and have Madan-da framed for the burglary, but he seems unable to return to that point of origin. What had he felt during the planning? Excitement that he had found a way of injecting easy and substantial funds into the urban side of his party’s ongoing revolution? Had it been mitigated by at least a tiny blot of pity for the old man he was offering up as sacrifice? Had there been any guilt? Shame? He keeps returning to that word and, like a giant landslide blocking the way, it won’t allow him to get to his destination; he will have to reckon with it first.
The ruin of a kind, loving, innocent old man in the evening of his life against the money necessary for reaching the next stage of the revolution’s city-based operations – the exchange reveals itself with such starkness now that he feels the shame as a bloom of terror right in the centre of his body. Could it be that he felt no dilemma, no queasiness, at all about it when the idea first began to germinate in his head? Could he not have engineered the theft in such a way that his pishi, Chhaya, was suspected for the deed? That would have seemed so natural, a public culmination of the two women’s decades-long animosity. Instead, he had deliberately and carefully placed his aunt’s ruby-and-diamond ring under Madan-da’s hollow statue of Krishna, hoping that it would be turned up during the ensuing raid, leading to the old man’s arrest.
The calculation at that time, he remembers, had been strictly mathematical – if one have-not had to be sacrificed so that fifty have-nots could be benefited, nothing trivial such as emotions could stand in the way. He had chosen accordingly and, now, that arithmetic, for which he and Madan-da have paid such an unthinkable price, will not provide him with a crumb of comfort. The questions of feelings and principles and inhuman betrayal that he has had to wrestle with surge back, this time without the soul-destroying arithmetic to balance them out: did he . . . did he go down that route because of reasons of class, because a servant stealing is so much more credible, so much more natural, than a member of the family? Was it to make the theft believable to the police that he had framed Madan-da, or was it because it had cost less to betray a servant than one’s own kind?
The questions are so unbearable that Supratik’s mind throws him toys and baubles to distract, and one of them is a memory of himself as a four-year old riding his red tricycle in the garden and suddenly finding that he was unable to stop and crashing against the trunk of the guava tree.
Madan-da had come running to pick up the bawling child in his arms and had put Mercurochrome on his skinned knees and elbows.
‘Eeeesh, eeeesh, poor little baby’ – Supratik can hear Madan-da’s voice in his head – ‘it’ll be all right, all fine. Here, look, here’s the magic red medicine, I’ll put it here, and here, and there, look; I can see it healing as we speak, the red medicine is spreading its goodness all over the little cuts, eeesh, eeesh . . .’
Red medicine. At the age of nine or ten, Supratik had discovered that Madan-da couldn’t get his tongue round the complicated name, Mercurochrome, so he called it ‘red medicine’ instead. He had tried to teach Madan-da, but the hilarious attempts had come ou
t repeatedly as ‘Mar-coo-kom’.
He feels as if a careless hand has swiped through a shelf of delicate china in his chest. The sobs emerge from him as a series of retches.
The man mocks him, ‘What? Feeling uncomfortable? Did part of the jewellery you stole fund the Shyambazar bombing?’ he asks.
From the strangely sliding territory of the irrefutable accusations of a few minutes ago, these straightforward questions return Supratik to more comfortable land; he begins to feel steady, solidity under his feet again. He does not have it in him to put on a drama of denial – ‘What on earth are you talking about? I don’t understand at all’ kind of rubbish – so he suffers the questions in silence again. That is a kind of answer, he knows, but it is the best he can do; he does not hold many cards in his hand.
‘And what will it finance, the loot?’ His voice has the serrations of a knife in it. ‘Home-made bombs and pipe-bombs, maybe a gun or two? But those you’d rather steal from the police or from others, given that stealing and looting form such pillars of your Charu Mazumdar’s politics lectures, right? How long will it sustain your revolution, this petty thieving?’
With that, he suddenly gets up and leaves the room, unusually quickly for a person like him, before Supratik has had time to process what is happening. He will never see him again, never find out who it was that subjected him to such an oddly formal two hours.
Three more days in solitary confinement with his handcuffs removed and then the regime changes. Two khaki-clad policemen enter his cell, start to taunt and abuse him – the terms deployed are standard currency among the lower classes – and, when he does not rise to this, beat him with their regulation sticks with a kind of mindful randomness, letting the blows fall anywhere except on his head or neck, then depart, still swearing. Supratik uncurls himself and, through the blanket of pain, finds himself thinking that if this is going to be the level of mistreatment involved before they let him go, he will take it in his stride; this much is endurable.
But he is wrong.
The following day four policemen enter his room. One holds him down by his hands, one by his knees, the third one keeps his feet straightened, while the fourth man beats the soles of his feet with such concentrated energy and vigour that he can hear his screams punctuated by the policeman’s panting. He thinks, in so far as the pain has left him any capacity for thought, that he will never walk again. Later, much later, after the sharp but localised agony has become dully pervasive, creeping up from his feet to his knees and, oddly, his testicles, his lower abdomen and head, he will remember from somewhere that they beat you on the soles so as to leave no bruising on you.
No less than the Senior Superintendent is sent to look in on him the next day; Supratik has long known how to tell their rank by reading the insignia on their shoulder-flashes.
He launches directly into business. ‘What? Do you think you will talk now?’ he asks Supratik.
Supratik, lying down in the cartoon shape of a lightning bolt, turns his head and looks at him, then goes back to his original position, head bowed and nestled against one side in the crook of his arms.
‘These are not good signs,’ the SSP says opaquely. ‘We have ways to make you talk.’
It seems to Supratik that they forget about him for days, he is not sure how many. In that time he can only think and dream about the purple-bordering-on-black butt-end of one of his comrade’s fingers.
When they come next they are prepared; and they come as if sent by a malignant god who gives the heft of physical reality to dreams and thoughts. The panting man who beat him is there along with one, maybe two, of the posse attending on him that day; he cannot clearly tell. Their ranks are swelled to six now, but, it is obvious from the moment they enter, that this Superintendent – only one metal star this time, as if he, Supratik, has been demoted in their consideration – will not be participating; he sets himself slightly apart. The reason for this emerges soon enough. A policeman grasps his right wrist, another his left, two hold down his legs, one each; all of them grip like a vice winched to breaking point.
The remaining man, kind-looking, almost fatherly, with chubby cheeks and a luxuriant ink-black moustache, turns to the SP and makes a querying motion with his head; the SP nods, once, calmly, then moves to stand behind Supratik’s head, from where he cannot see him. Chubby Cheeks takes out a short length of what looks like a nylon rope and a pair of pliers from the pocket of his voluminous khaki trousers and advances towards Supratik. It takes a while for Supratik to extract the meaning from what he sees; there is no space or time between that comprehension and his involuntary, hoarse cry, ‘No!’ It comes out so low that he could have been mistaken for expressing disbelief in a session of gossipy chit-chat.
But the SP has heard him all right. His voice says, ‘Who planned the bombing in Shyambazar?’
‘No,’ Supratik says again, this time in a whisper. Chubby Cheeks looks beyond him for a signal, asks the policeman holding his left wrist, ‘You’re sure you have it all right?’, then brings the pliers near his fingers.
Supratik closes his hand into a fist, as much as the grip will allow; his bladder gives at the same time. Chubby Cheeks taps sharply on the knuckles with the pliers; he instantly unclenches his hand for a moment; in that brief second, his longest finger, the one next to his index finger, is held in the jaws of the pliers. Gently.
There is a question again, but Supratik does not hear it, so he does not answer. The pressure on his finger increases infinitesimally; maybe he imagines it. His eyes are wide, unblinking.
‘Where are Tapan Mukherjee and Ashim Mondol? Where are they hiding after the bombing?’
Chubby Cheeks presses down on the short curved handles of the pliers, the blunt jaws bite obediently, Supratik screams and screams and his body tries to buck up and out, but he cannot, he is being held down at exactly the points they know he is going to rear. The jaws unclamp. His screams turn, with a will of their own, into a whimpering. He sounds like a dog.
‘Do you now remember where your friends are?’
The whimpering continues, but it is not a response to the question; that was inserted as if aimlessly into the flow of the sound coming out of Supratik. It is posed again. Supratik does not even try to shape into intelligible words the unmanning, acoustic flux he is producing; he has no will. This time he imagines the sound of the crack of bone; it is the crack of a pistol shot giving the ‘Go!’ signal to the run of his animal scream as the pliers press down and press down and press down, wishing to obliterate the obstruction of the tip of his finger standing between the perfect union of the two metal jaws. His screams end in billowing sobs, one after the other, unstoppable.
There is an amused, avuncular twinkle in Chubby Cheeks’s eyes. One of the restraining policemen says, ‘A squealer, this one. He’ll drive us crazy, the fucker.’
‘And this is just the beginning,’ another policeman observes.
Chubby Cheeks gives a resigned smile.
The voice from behind Supratik’s head is terrier-like with its query. ‘Tapan Mukherjee and Ashim Mondol?’ it echoes itself.
There is no available cell or nerve inside Supratik’s head to deploy in conjuring up a lie or a diversion; everything has been conquered by the sensation of pain – it fills his entire being. But he finds that he cannot utter the simple words required of him, or bring himself to lift his head and look at his hand, which they have now released, although he is still held down by the other hand and at his knees and legs. If he says something, anything, there will be an end to this; all he wants to do is buy his reprieve with a few words, but he has lost the capacity to form them. At last, when he can, they come out as a sobbing croak, which he has to repeat three times in order to hear it himself – ‘Don’t know, they’ve run away. Don’t know where.’ How could he ever have imagined that ideology, revolution, the needs of others, abstraction, all these, combined or individually, could have been weightier than the simple business of self-preservation, of the sheer
physicality of pain?
‘Lies, all lies,’ comes that voice.
‘No! No!’ he says with as much strength as he can gather, because if he fails to convince them . . . His mind refuses to go there.
Chubby Cheeks speaks for the first time. ‘Get on with number two?’ he asks. His voice matches his face: it is kind, purring, the sort of thing one imagines as part of the arsenal of the ideal doctor’s perfect bedside manner.
The voice from behind says, ‘Where are they? We want to know, before the trail goes cold. Then there are other questions. Such as the addresses of all the places where you make your fireworks.’ Supratik takes a while to work out that the question is addressing him and not replying to the short question Chubby Cheeks asked.
The answers tumble out of Supratik without a whit of thought. ‘Don’t know where they’ve gone, I swear, this is the truth, I’m telling you the truth,’ he manages to say, haltingly, in a groan. ‘Bombs – in Kankurgachhi, Motilal Basak Lane, right after the jute mill, number seventy-six, you have to go through it to the back, there’s a tiny alley. Then in the Kasai slum, off Potopara Lane in Narkeldanga, 15/1, between the Canal Road and a lane in the slum. It’s not easy to find.’
The pain stops him there. He feels hot, malleable rods shooting up his arm, in his armpit and elbow.
Another question: ‘The numbers again?’
Supratik obliges.
‘That can’t be all. Where are the others? What are the names of the people in these places?’
‘Can I sit up?’ he entreats.
There is a short pause. The policemen holding him down let go of him. He lifts himself up from his neck and shoulders, then tries to sit up; all he wants to do is see what they have done to his finger. But the sight of it – the nib of a strange pen, dipped in dry blue-black ink – draws a howl from him. It sets him sobbing again, tears, snot, saliva, all running down his face and chin; the time for dignity or maintaining a hard, impervious front is long over. He trots out the names, matching them with the addresses; gives them more names, more locations; pain is everything. They ask him to repeat; he obeys like a good little child. Suddenly, without any warning, they grab hold of him again, but leave him sitting up. He cannot feel the grip restraining his left hand. Chubby Cheeks draws a different pair of pliers, one with thinner, more pointed pincers, much like tweezers.
The Lives of Others Page 58