The Lives of Others

by Neel Mukherjee

  They have been trained in what they are about to do. They have maintained their individual jobs and other responsibilities within the Party, coming together only for the purpose of training for tonight’s action. They have been selected not merely on the basis of their military abilities, but also according to their political level and discipline. Tonight’s squad is under the leadership of Sabita Kumari.

  Sabita Kumari, twenty-eight, a graduate from a tiny college in Daltongunj, has never dreamed of this role. Her parents expected her to become a school teacher. But that seems to her a half-remembered page from a book of someone else’s story. Her two younger sisters were killed eight years ago – the sixteen-year-old beheaded with a machete while her parents, tied to the bed, were forced to watch; the youngest sister, fourteen, gang-raped, her eyes gouged out, her tongue cut out and then her neck stabbed. Their crime? The family had tried to resist the moneylenders’ attempts to take over their land in the village of Pabira. The police at the nearest station, in Ranchi, refused to issue an FIR in response to Sabita’s complaint unless she fellated the duty officer; more action would be taken according to the escalation in services she provided. That, too, seems so long ago, from a different life.

  People talk of rage as something fluid; it boils, flows, spills over, scalds. For her, it is not any of these things. Instead it is a vast, frozen sea, solid as rock, unthawable. She has never seen the sea, but she knows it wraps around three-quarters of the world. All her anger is that and more. When she joined the Maoists she was twenty. Within two years she had killed five officers at Ranchi police station, all those who had leered and asked for sex when she had gone to complain. When the little of her life had been reduced to nothing, the Party had held and rocked her in its iron cradle, told her that the nothing of her life could become a path, a straight, narrow, but tough one, at the end of which was a destination worth reaching.

  She has repeated the same words, almost without change, to her comrades who are silently marching with her now to their business of the night. She has picked them with great thought and care. Underlying her choice had been one immutable principle: they must be people who are nothing too, whose lives are nothing, who have nothing. No recourse to any form of redress or justice. Revenge was their last roar. And what was justice but revenge tricked out in a gentleman’s clothes, speaking English? She knows the relevant section of the recruits’ histories like she knows the back of her hand.

  From Simdega district have come two tribal brothers and their sister, Subir Majhi, Deb Majhi and Champa Majhi. The Majhis, members of a tribe who lived along the edge of Saranda forest, had been told that the land where their ancestors had lived from as far back in the past as the human mind could see is no longer theirs, but the state’s to do with as it wanted. They did not have a patta to prove ownership; the state did. Soon afterwards, policemen, contractors, officials spread out over it; their land was going to be mined; the earth there contained metals. A group of people from the city came and told them they would get compensation. But the forest was their home; what compensation would return that to them? Would they give them another forest somewhere? The compensation turned out to be 5,000 rupees per head, not exceeding 25,000 rupees for each family. The CRPF forces, with their AK-47s and metal breastplates, posted in the forest to deal with the Maoists, got 4,000 rupees a month. The tribal people knew what fate awaited them outside their land – daily wage-labourer in the city, maidservant in someone’s home, prostitute.

  When the Majhis joined forces with the hundreds of forest-dwellers who were also being driven out, their land no longer theirs, the state deployed the military police. The police were protecting the lawful property of the mining companies, the property that had been the tribal peoples’ last year or the year before; they had a right to use force against the tribals, for they were trespassers and outlaws now. The campaign of intimidation began: a house looted and then razed to the ground; someone maimed for life after being hauled off to prison on the flimsiest of excuses and beaten in lock-up; a girl raped; a well poisoned; a man shot; food shops destroyed and supplies cut off, so that the jungle-dwellers could be starved into submission.

  This had all happened before, their father said to them; it had happened in neighbouring districts, in Chiria, in Gua, when he had been a young man. The same story – forest-tribes banished after their land was sold by the state to mining companies; those meant to protect you turned into your attackers. Imagine coming home one day to find that your parents were waiting with knives to slaughter you. That is what the Maoists said when the tribes escaped into the forests to protect themselves from the military police. They had a choice: to be snuffed out overnight by the world or take on the world and wrest something from it; not very much, just a little, just to survive and live like a human, not an animal. This is the hope the Maoists offered, the hope of dark clouds gathering over parched, fractured soil; it could rain or it could not, but they brought something new into their lives: possibility.

  Sabita has planted IEDs in the forest and blown up military vehicles, she has raided outposts of the Indian Reserve Battalion and blown up their buildings, she has burned security vehicles sent to protect the Prime Minister’s village road-building programme, the Gram Sadak Yojana, in Belpahari in West Medinipur; she is itinerant, like the rest of her kind, through several districts in several abutting states: two nights in Saranda forest, three nights in Dandakaranya, a week in Karampada, constantly on the move, bringing to the country their promise of a mobile war. But the end of tonight’s action is unknown. None of them is going to be there to witness it. Were her thoughts in the past, before doing something terribly beautiful like an action for the first time, was her mind then like it is now, all a-whirl? They would all die one day – and it will come a lot sooner in their lives than in others’ – but it was better to die fighting, like a cornered wildcat, than crushed underfoot like an unseen worm. You kick a dog, it will run away, but you keep kicking it and kicking it, it will have no option but to bite you back just to stop being kicked. How could you want to live a life that makes you yearn for one thing only – its end? Every human being in this world wants, strives for, a better life, but they are deemed to be below that wanting and striving. Their lives are nothing, less than nothing. They are lower than animals. How has this come to pass? Is it true of everywhere in the world that some people are just fodder? Or has their country taken a wrong turning? She does not know.

  Her subgroup of four reaches the point near Hehegara Halt while the rest carry on towards Mangra. Not a whisper is exchanged. Even their breathing is cautious. A torch is produced, its light covered with a thin cloth before being switched on. They bend and squat and go down on all fours on the railway track, shining the torch close to the ground, until they find what they are looking for: the fishplate joining the ends of two rails to form the track. They are careful about not stepping on the stone chips between the rails; the crunching sound it produces is too loud. Sabita stands guard with her AK-47 removed from her shoulder to her hands, turning 360 degrees every eight minutes in four slow ninety-degree sweeps of two minutes each, with clockwork precision; the human equivalent of the swivelling turret on a tank. The night needs watching; she knows that the darkness skitters and slides between being a friend and an enemy with alarming unpredictability.

  While she keeps watch, her three comrades bring out medium-sized wrenches, wire-cutters, jacks, industrial pliers and screwdrivers from their bags. Each instrument has been carried separately and individually to prevent clanking during the walk. They lie flat on the tracks, one on each side and one on the stone chips in the centre, and begin to dislodge the fishplate holding the rail-ends in perfect alignment. The trick is more than forty years old, she has been told during her training. Someone had come from Chhattisgarh to show them the ropes, and he had mentioned that according to local Maoist lore it was a Bengali invention, the work of a man known as Pratik-da in the late Sixties in some district bordering West Bengal and Bih
ar. Or was it West Bengal and Orissa? Pratik-da was no longer alive – he had been tortured and killed by the police in the notorious Naxalite purges in 1970 and ’71 in Calcutta – but his gift to his future comrades survived and, for those who cared to or were old enough to remember, he lived on in his bequest.

  It is not easy work – their necks have to be held at an angle of forty-five degrees to the ground while their bodies are stretched out flat – and their hands have little purchase because of the limited freedom of movement. The sounds of creaking and clinking, of the tinkle of metal on metal and of metal on stone, of the occasional crunch of the loose chips, are too loud to their ears. They cannot concentrate fully on their work because a part of them is forever listening out for the slightest whisper of something awry, something outside the ordinary. But they are lucky. Their chosen area is nowhere-land, between two tiny stations in the middle of such abandonment that people talked of the place as being in the blind spot of even god’s vision; the nearest station is nearly ten kilometres away on one side and seven on the other. Besides, the fear of Maoists means that no one ventures outside after darkness falls. There are no vehicles passing on the dirt road running mostly parallel to the railway line a few hundred metres away, but at this time of night that is normal.

  When at last they are done, they put the fishplate away in a shoulder bag, first swaddling it tightly in clothes. Then they try to wedge a jack in the tiny gap between the two rail ends, but this defeats them. They are not surprised; they had discussed this during training. They had decided not to leave anything to chance, which is why they are taking out fishplates at more than one point along the same track; one of them is bound to work; the average speed of the train is between 70 to 80 kilometres per hour on their chosen stretch. They strain a little bit more and ultimately leave the end of a curved machete wedged in the crack. They pick up their instruments and turn off the torch. Then they cross the tracks and disappear into the night and into the forest, these new children of the trees. Their work here is over. They will leave the forest now and never return to this region again.

  In three hours, well before dawn breaks, the Ajmer–Kolkata Express, carrying approximately 1,500 people, is going to hurtle down these tracks.

  A NOTE ON NAMES AND RELATIONS

  In any Bengali family the members address each other relationally. Only children’s first names are used; also, a husband addresses his wife by her first name (but not the other way around). These four prefixes show the relative seniority of a person being addressed:

  Boro-: eldest

  Mejo-: middle

  Shejo-: between middle and youngest

  Chhoto-: youngest

  So if your father has three older brothers, you would call the eldest Boro-jyethu (jyethu being the term for father’s older brother); the next one, Mejo-jyethu; and the youngest, Chhoto-jyethu. The prefixes can be added to all the relational terms listed below:

  Bhai: younger brother

  Boüdi: brother’s wife

  Dada: older brother, often shortened to –da

  Didi: older sister, often shortened to -di

  Jaa: husband’s older sister

  Jyethima: Jyethu’s wife; sometimes abbreviated to ‘Jyethi’

  Jyethu: the older brother of your father

  Kaka: the younger brother of your father

  Kakima: Kaka’s wife; sometimes abbreviated to simply ‘Kaki’

  Mama: maternal uncle, brother of your mother. The same term is used of uncles older and younger than your mother, unlike paternal uncles, who are classified as Jyethu and Kaka based on their ages relative to your father.

  Mami: Mama’s wife

  Mashi: mother’s sister

  Pishi: father’s sister.

  The relational terms can also be appended to names outside the family, thus: Mala-mashi, Namita-di, Rupa-boüdi, Sunil-mama.

  These are some other terms used in the book:

  Boro-boü: the eldest daughter-in-law of a large, extended family Thakuma: paternal grandmother.

  GLOSSARY

  aanchol = The ‘n’ is nasal. An entire cultural complex resides in this part of the sari, the endpiece, which hangs over the shoulder at the back (mostly; it can sometimes hang from the front, depending on the way in which it is worn). Because it can be used to cover the back, arms and shoulder, it is the ‘display area’ of the sari, its peacock’s tail, as it were, for which the craftsman or mass-manufacturer reserves the showiest of embellishments. Its uses are legion, from wiping tears to drying plates; from tying keys to draping it around the arms and shoulders to feel less exposed; from covering the mouth and/or nose to fanning oneself in the humid heat.

  ablush = Ebony.

  achchha = Literally ‘well’ (ejaculative, not adjective), ‘okay’, ‘right’ or ‘I see’, the word can denote assent or stand as just a filler.

  adda = A Bengali institution. It consists of long sessions of aimless conversation, mostly between men. Bengalis try to give it a high intellectual gloss, believing that it is the soul of life and productive of great breakthroughs in the arts, sciences, politics, etc., but don’t be fooled – it’s classic Bengali idleness, a way of wasting, cumulatively, months and years of one’s life in procrastination and ridiculous self-importance.

  anjali = Prayer.

  aparajita = Clitoria ternatea, or butterfly-pea, or blue-pea. A perennial climber that bears strikingly blue flowers singly (white variants obtain, too). The fruit resembles a smaller, narrower, flatter, downier sugar-snap.

  arrey = Very difficult to translate, this could mean ‘Hey’, or express surprise, or simply act as a filler, a kind of cultural verbal tic.

  ashad = The first Bengali month of the monsoon season, usually mid-June to mid-July.

  ashirbad = Literally, ‘blessing’. In the context in which it is used in the story, it is the formalisation of a nuptial match by the visit of the groom’s parents to the bride’s home to bless her, usually with a piece of gold ornament.

  ashtami = The third, and grandest, of the five days of Durga Puja.

  ashwattha = Ficus religiosa, or peepal tree – an iconic tree, because the Buddha obtained enlightenment under one.

  bahurupi = An itinerant folk performer with a wide repertoire of roles and corresponding disguises. He assumes several forms and wholly inhabits the identities, which are dizzying: gods, goddesses, demons, tradesmen, conmen, animals, children, professionals – nothing is potentially outside his reach. An endangered species now. For an adequate overview, see www.tribuneindia.com/2008/20080308/saturday/main1.htm.

  baju = An ornament for the upper arm; a gold armband.

  bargadar = Sharecropper.

  bat = Ficus benghalensis, the iconic Indian banyan tree. Enough said.

  benarasi = A type of silk sari, named after the city, Banaras (or Varanasi), which is the centre of India’s zari figured-silk weaving industry (zari is gold-wrapped thread). Benarasi saris are rich, gorgeous and usually feature intricate floral and foliate patterns. Considered de rigueur for Bengali weddings.

  bene = A class of trader who deals exclusively in jewellery.

  bhari (weight) = Generally used of gold, 1 bhari is 11.664 grams.

  bheesti = Water carrier. A person, not an object.

  bidi = The native Indian cigarette, small and thin, made of tobacco wrapped in kendu leaves and tied at one end with a string. Very cheap, it is considered the poor man’s cigarette.

  bigha = A measure of land. In West Bengal, the bigha was standardised under British colonial rule at 1,600 square yards (0.1338 hectare or 0.3306 acre); this is often interpreted as being one-third of an acre (it is precisely acre). In metric units, a bigha is hence 1333.33 square metres. See also katha.

  bijaya = The last day of Durga Puja, the conceit being that after her sojourn in her parents’ home, Durga returns to her husband, Shiva.

  bonti = A sharp, curved blade, fixed perpendicularly to a horizontal wooden stand, and used in the kitchen for cutting fish and veget
ables.

  boü-bhaat = Literally, ‘bride-rice’. The wedding proper – that is, the rituals that bind bride and groom together as man and wife – is held in the bride’s home, after which she leaves her father’s house and comes to her in-laws’. The man’s family now throws a reception, a complement to the wedding, if you will; mass feeding invariably characterises it. The new bride is supposed to cook for her husband’s family and serve rice to her in-laws and the guests on this day, hence the name.

  Brahmo = This entry is going to be kept deliberately short. Interested readers can go to www.thebrahmosamaj.net. Brahmoism is an early nineteenth-century reformist movement within the Hindu religion that tried to free itself from cant, rituals, superstition, idolatry and all kinds of social ills that had come to plague the practice of Hinduism. Socially and doctrinally progressive, Brahmos had a central role in the Bengal Renaissance of the nineteenth century. The starriest of the two Bengali families, the Tagores and the Rays (Upendrakishore, Sukumar, Satyajit), were Brahmos. In some current, colloquial usage of the word, ‘brahmo’ can mean, slightly pejoratively, over-refined creatures floating a few inches above the vulgar, unwashed masses. As with all such colloquial usage, there is a small grain of truth in it.

  chador = A length of cloth, usually to cover oneself at night. The same word is used of bedsheets or cotton shawls.

  challan = Invoice for goods sent.

  charas = Hashish.

  chhatu = Flour made from roasted chickpeas or barley. Can be eaten uncooked and usually is, kneaded rigorously into a dough with oil, water, green chillies, salt, chopped onions, etc. Considered to be the poor man’s food.

  chhee = This is the exclamatory word to express shame mostly, but also sometimes distaste or disgust.

  chhillum = A small, simple, trumpet-shaped clay pipe for smoking marijuana. Often called chhilim.