The Lives of Others

by Neel Mukherjee

  Which people?

  No answer.

  ‘And are you sure he wasn’t threatening you?’ Priyo had asked Ashoke-babu. ‘We were all under the impression that he was a force for good, you know, holding everything together. So competent and so amiable. You’ve brought really disturbing news.’

  ‘No, his tone was not threatening at all. But the content . . . I decided to come to you straight away because, if there is anything the matter, then it should be nipped in the bud.’

  ‘You’ve done the right thing. Definitely. And, as you know, we may soon have to discuss some reduction of the labour force there. Not just because of mechanisation, but because of . . . of other problems. It won’t be possible to keep all the mills running at full capacity. But how do you think he knows? What is he going around doing?’

  ‘How else but from Party HQ?’ Ashoke-babu had answered. ‘They know that you’ve had to close one of your mills’ – the words had come out of an unthought momentum and he had visibly and audibly regretted them immediately afterwards – ‘er . . . I mean . . . times are bad, we know . . . What can one do?’

  Priyo had flinched inwardly at the correction, but had not allowed it to mark his face. The gist had been this: the CPI(M) were combing the countryside, recruiting, canvassing, and one of their policies seemed to be to target potentially troubled outfits under the same ownership. It stood to reason that if the Ghoshes had had to shut down one mill, others could be in similar danger, so the CPI(M) fanned across the provinces, looking to stir up trouble and add to their numbers. And trouble, as even a child knew, was the vivarium of politics.

  A picture was coming into focus for Priyo. All the praise and endorsement and support for Dulal, which had slowly built up after he had been given a job at the mill, was turning out to be that old trick Nature used to hide poison or danger – camouflaging it in beauty; the more virulent the toxin, the more captivating its vessel.

  Who could have known that behind the pleasant, reliable surface a different drama had been churning away? The soothing pictures from the past were slowly revealing themselves as optical tricks. The annual celebration of Bishwakarma Puja every September at the factory was not really the joyous congregation of factory workers and their friends and families come together in kite-flying, ceremonies, distribution of blessed offering and public feasting, but the amassing of foes for a future strike, a mobilisation of forces. That thin, pitiful face of Dulal, in which they had read, no doubt encouraged by their regard for Madan-da, a story of deprivation and blight, was, in truth, the lean and hungry look of the ever-resentful poor, trying to wring more from the people they considered infinitely rich and, if that was obstructed, then to bring them down. With the milk they gave him the Ghoshes had reared a snake.

  ‘But does Baba know?’ Priyo had asked Ashoke-babu. Prafullanath had started coming to work again, although on a part-time basis. The old man was not innocent of the knowledge of union activity in his mills, but the Ghoshes had always managed to avoid the worst of it, partly through luck, partly through Prafullanath’s canny and far-seeing management policies. This new piece of information spelled setback in more than one area.

  ‘No, not yet,’ said Ashoke-babu, ‘I thought I should tell you first.’

  ‘You’ve done the right thing. Sit on it for a while. Baba is a bit . . . fragile still, as you know. His health . . . We don’t want anything to upset him again.’

  ‘No, sir. Yes, sir. Absolutely, sir.’

  A different line of thought opened up in Priyo’s head. If union trouble did rear its head in Bali, then Ashoke-babu, as manager, had the most to fear since he would be directly in the line of fire, even physically so. Workers rarely had access to their employers, if at all; the conducting wire between labour and capital was the manager. This implied that Ashoke-babu could well be looking to sow, for whatever reason, the seeds of suspicion between Dulal and the Ghoshes. His motive remained opaque to Priyo. To protect himself? Yes, that seemed axiomatic, but only in the case of friction with the union. He was back to where he and Ashoke-babu had begun. And the futile nature of that circularity had made him decide to forget about it for the time being and watch what developed. What else could they do? Confront Dulal? On what evidence?

  Barely two years after this meeting there had been some kind of a blockage at the pulp-feeding end of the Fourdrinier machine and the foreman of the factory, Sujan Hazra, had inserted his hand inside the funnel to clear it. Another worker, who had not known that this operation was in progress, had seen the machine switched off and had taken it upon himself to rectify that oversight. Sujan Hazra’s right hand had been first chewed, then sliced off. The trouble, at least for Ashoke-babu, and, by extension, the owners of the factory, had not been the incident, which had been only a mishap that had befallen a stranger. The Ghoshes had paid for Sujan’s initial hospital care and had assiduously circulated, in tones of great regret, the hard-nosed consolation of the doctors’ supposed words – ‘Only god can sew back a severed hand.’ The trouble had begun a few months later, when Ashoke-babu, with the consent of his paymasters, had decided to let go of Sujan Hazra and hire someone else to replace him. Without his working hand, Sujan was not very useful; his salary was an unnecessary waste.

  What unfolded next followed so exactly Ashoke-babu’s forewarning that in his more deranged moments – and there were several in the months that followed – Priyo thought that the manager had somehow scripted the whole thing and then willed it into being. Or had known about it all along because, cunning schemer, he really belonged to the other side. The union, led informally by Dulal, had reacted to the foreman’s dismissal with unbending recalcitrance. The strikes began: at first, one working day of the week, but when that did not make Ashoke-babu or the ownership relent, Dulal instigated a gherao of Ashoke Ganguly in his office adjoining the mill. More than thirty workers surrounded the room, with Ashoke-babu inside, and refused to let him leave, even to go to the toilet. They chanted slogans: ‘Our demands must be heeded, must be heeded’ and ‘Crush and grind the black hand of the owners, crush, grind’. They wanted the fired foreman reinstated, otherwise the entire factory would go on strike indefinitely. Nothing – threats, incentives, reasoning – could shake them from their position.

  Ashoke-babu remained imprisoned by this human cordon for fifty-eight hours; his captors clearly worked on a shift-and-rota basis. At the end of the ordeal, when Ashoke-babu collapsed, the men were still unwithered, shouting out their mantras with undiminished vigour. When Dulal showed no inclination to call off his men after twenty-four hours, Adinath stepped in and requested Police Superintendent Dhar, a family friend of nearly twenty years’ standing, to talk to his colleagues at Bali and have the local police deployed to break up the gherao. The arrival of the police and the crumpling of Ashoke-babu almost coincided. It was later said that if the police had not arrived, the factory workers would have happily continued until Ashoke-babu died.

  The police presence was deemed intolerable by the workers, the breaking of an adamantine contractual code, something sacrilegious. Before Adi and Priyo, on the brink of firing the entire fleet with the explicit consent of their father, could make any move, Dulal ratcheted up the conflict by sanctioning a complete lockout of the mill. The long stalemate began. Posters went up everywhere, signed ‘Charu Paper Mill Workers’ Union’, abbreviated to CPMWU. Every available external wall space was covered with angry slogans. In the bristling thicket of painted signs, all screaming imperatives, the letters CPI(M) were easily smuggled in. Priyo noticed it and knew that Ashoke-babu had been prescient. A new set of workers could be hired, theoretically, but how would they cross the picket lines that had been set up? This time the police dragged their feet about intervening because, presumably, orders had come from above, from a power higher than the informal networks of string-pulling that was the motor of Bengali life. The Ghoshes knew this or that minister, or could grease so-and-so’s palms, but this economy of personal favours was less than nothing co
mpared with the infinitely more potent arithmetic of consolidating vote-banks. Would a tiger be distracted by a toy-replica of its prey when it was following the smell of the real thing?

  So the striking workers, feeling intrepid, and confident of remaining undisturbed by further police action, stayed on, beginning as a furiously boiling mass and then, over time, under the assault of the seasons and their self-willed impoverishment, simmering down until, all their heat leached, they were nothing but a thin, raggedy slum, their posters and placards faded and feeble, their numbers reduced to single figures, the huge locks on the factory gates and the threatening words on the walls mocking them as much as the evil capitalists who had brought them to such a pass.

  The Ghoshes knew that bypassing them to hire a new set of workers to resume production in the mill was not a possibility, because the lockout men had the might of the CPI(M) behind them. Their visibly waning presence on the outskirts of the factory was an illusion. They might look like a tiny handful of people on the brink of beggary, but their numbers could be swelled instantly if provoked or offended; the Party would see to that. The Ghoshes’ most productive factory – an output of seventy tonnes per day, down from 130 TPD in its heyday – lay fallow, an impasse so intolerable that Prafullanath swallowed his rage and humiliation and decided to confront Dulal in a private capacity and work out some kind of compromise.

  If the Ghoshes had thought they had seen the worst, what with Dulal’s betrayal, and the resignation of an ill and terrified Ashoke-babu, and the closure of their only profitable mill, the one that mitigated a fraction of their losses, they soon recalibrated their notion of the nadir.

  When everything began to detonate in a way that seemed both unstoppably fast and yet somehow prolonged, Priyo was to persist in thinking that he had done the right thing by ignoring Ashoke-babu’s early warning. His only mistake, he would grudgingly admit, and that only to himself, had been in not apprising Adinath and their father soon enough. He was back to that estuarine domain again, causality, responsibility, blame, all forking into a dizzying number of streams of ‘what ifs’, and he did not know which would carry him to some kind of consolation.

  There is a good ten-minute walk after Priyo gets off the bus. This tributary of Nawabpatty Street is all open drains and squalid houses, densely clustered together along the lane, with rust stains from leaking drainpipes down their fronts. Plants take tenacious root in the cracks in the façade and the walls, clothes hang on lines or over railings on the verandahs. There is crumbling and broken masonry everywhere, and peeling plaster and paint, and the ubiquitous darkening presence of wrought-iron grilles and railings makes the windows and balconies look like the cages and penning coops of battery-farmed poultry. The sound from a radio left on in one of the houses drifts out into the murkiness outside and seems to contribute to the gloom, as if it has been endowed with the special quality of sucking in light. Although darkness is falling from the air and dim, naked yellow bulbs or white fluorescent tubes have started coming on, one by one, in the houses, Priyonath wonders if the lane is, even in the daytime, ever unenshrouded. It seems to him that this place lost its battle with shadows and darkness long ago and, in the uneasy treaty devised in the aftermath, the dark retreated only insufficiently into corners, waiting impatiently to flow out and take over entirely again.

  Lately, the straggle of whores outside the slum-dwellings, in dim doorways like open, toothless mouths, and on the lane have begun to leave him alone and let up on the catcalls and lewd addresses. They know where he is headed and, he supposes, his particular predilections, so they almost welcome him as a regular or an old familiar. When he reaches a decrepit two-storey building, an amphibious thing between a brick-and-cement house and a makeshift slum-shack, he hesitates for a second or two before walking in. Someone has scratched the number 12/A with a piece of flint on the right-hand wall of the entrance. Inside, the dimness is exacerbated by the single strip-light burning in the front room and the pitiful attempt at papering over the squalor with framed, cheap reproductions of art, probably torn from magazines, all featuring naked women, in a move to add erotic charge to the place. Priyonath cannot identify any of the paintings, but they are conspicuously Western; of that he is certain. There is one of a nude woman, with her back to the viewer, and a winged boy holding a clouded mirror to her; another baffling, objectionable one of a little boy tweaking an older woman’s nipple while standing almost behind her, the woman’s smiling face turned back so that their mouths just touch. Covered with dust, the pictures hang crooked on the wall, unnoticed pieces of junk that have forgotten the role foisted on them. The place reeks of sewage overlaid with cheap incense and kerosene, and something more elementally biological for which he cannot quite find a name, something that suggests putrefying animal matter.

  He walks through the front room into the inner chamber. Nandita had said she was sixteen when he first visited the place more than two years ago. She had looked a lot older, not because of her trade, or the company she kept, or the fact that she had tried to cake her face with cheap snow and powder and colour her dry lips in an attempt to look alluring, but because her eyes had not been those of a sixteen-year-old. The flash and spark, the quickness in an adolescent’s eyes, had settled into a calculating lethargy, a caution that was also a hopeless inertia; they were not out of place in their turbid surroundings. After that first visit, he has tried never to look at her face.

  In her room, with its meagre pallet, the grimy plastic curtain on the window and, hanging off a rusty, bent nail in a pockmarked and peeling wall, a Jay Ma Kali Jute Trading Co. (Pvt. Ltd) calendar, with its eponymous image of the fearsome black goddess made to look somehow smiling and benign, despite the garland of human skulls and her bloody red tongue, Nandita is waiting for him. He knows she is expecting him because she has a thin pile of newspapers at the foot of her bed. With a curt, ‘What, ready?’ he starts to take off his clothes. He fishes out a small paper packet from the pocket of his trousers and lies down on the bed in his underwear only. Even after more than a dozen sessions with him, Nandita has lost none of the hesitancy that seizes her at this stage of spreading newspapers in layers on his torso.

  He chivvies her along with a gentle, ‘Come’ and watches her take off her cheap, glittery petticoat and blue blouse. She has dressed up for him, although that blue, easily the colour of some chemical effluent, could induce an instant headache. He says ‘Come’ again as she gets up onto the bed and tries to perch herself in a squatting position on the newspapers she has spread on his chest. It is just as well that she has a bony bird-like frame, otherwise it would have been difficult to have her squatting on him, her feet planted on his ribs, rather than the (to him) useless position of having himself straddled with her feet on the bed, on either side of him.

  She now has her back to his face.

  ‘Done it today?’ he asks.

  She takes off his briefs and says, ‘No’.

  ‘Good. So you’re ready and full, right? Good girl. Try then.’

  Nandita sits on him and waits for a bowel movement. None comes. Priyonath tumesces at the sight of the puckered stitch of her arsehole, its dark stain of a mouth now relaxed to let loose her uncoiling shit onto him. He starts playing with himself, but soon notices that although the lips of the hole are flexing and unflexing, nothing is emerging from it.

  ‘What’s the matter? Why are you taking so long?’ he asks, his voice hoarse with arousal.

  ‘Going to happen, wait-wait,’ she says. The red glass bangles on her outstretched arms jangle thinly as she gestures to him with her hands.

  A minute passes, then two. Priyonath is on his way to a full erection now, but there is still no sign of the gloriously emerging turd.

  ‘Try a bit harder, go on. Put some pressure.’

  ‘Just keep quiet. Rush me like this, it will go up to my head.’

  After another minute of watching, Priyonath starts losing his three-quarters of an erection, but he does not want to make the gi
rl more anxious, so he stays quiet and keeps getting limp.

  Suddenly Nandita starts to strain and grunt. ‘Gnnnnh, gnnnnhhhh!’ – the sounds are punctuated by forceful expulsions of breath from her mouth.

  Priyonath gets caught up in the exertion too. ‘Once more, try once more, go on,’ he eggs her on. ‘I’ve got glycerine suppositories with me, do you want? I thought they’d come in handy.’

  ‘What are they?’ the girl asks, flushed now with all the arid effort to evacuate.

  ‘If I put one up your arse, you’ll be able to shit easily. It’ll just slip out.’

  ‘Nooooo!’ the girl whinnies loudly. Her voice turns shrill and panicky: ‘Last month a man showed up, a gentull-man like you, and buggered me. It was really painful and I bled afterwards, blood and blood. No way you’re sticking anything up my arse.’

  ‘Arrey, no, no, it’s a small, slippery pellet. You push it up children when they have constipation. It dissolves inside and makes the resistant shit slip out softly,’ he explains patiently to calm her down.

  ‘Nothing doing. And now you jabber-jabbered so much, I lost it, it was coming down before that.’

  They have also talked away Priyonath’s excitement: the sleepy curl of his flaccid penis now rests against his thigh.

  ‘Why don’t you try again?’ he coaxes.

  Nandita compliantly grunts and strains and huffs, but Priyonath hears the excess of an empty performance, not the real thing.

  ‘But you said you hadn’t shat today, so where is it? You could have saved up from the day before – you knew I was going to come.’

  At this, the girl breaks her position and gets off the bed. ‘You telling me what? I deliberately holding it in?’

  ‘No, no, I didn’t say that, I was just pointing out that it might be a good idea to build up some pressure inside for a few days, in preparation for my visit.’