The Lives of Others

by Neel Mukherjee

The girl appears to take this badly. ‘You know how difficult it is to shit on demand like this? You say Shit! and I shit, hyan? It is that easy?’ Her voice becomes louder and louder and she starts preparing her face for a bout of crying: her mouth quivers, her eyes start watering. Priyonath thinks: This is all to squeeze an extra fifty rupees out of me, the old waterworks.

  What he has not reckoned for is that the brief mizzle will turn into a squall. Nandita begins by rehearsing, a bit amateurishly, a few sobs, but then gets carried away by her performance and modulates to loud, unstoppable wailing. Before Priyonath can ask her to calm down, three whores fling the door open and barge in.

  ‘What’s happened? What’s happened?’ a short, cylindrical woman demands. She has a face so round and fleshy that it looks as if she has got sweets tucked on the inside of each cheek. It is devoid of every single trace of benignity or kindness; she looks the sort to lead a rabble to arson, robbery or vigilante violence.

  Another woman, clad only in petticoat and blouse and exposing a generous stretch of her cushiony midriff, envelops Nandita. The girl begins to sob on her shoulder.

  The stout woman, clearly some sort of self-appointed leader, now takes charge. She puts her hands on her hips and turns to Priyonath, who has managed to struggle into his underwear and has moved from being supine on the bed, but only to a reclining position.

  ‘Ei je,’ she barks, ‘so much the gentull-man on the outside, what you have done to this little girl, hey, what you have done?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Priyonath says, trying to put the situation into words by way of explanation inside his head, but the unconventional nature of the purpose of his visit inhibits him and prevents the words from being spoken.

  This laconic reply is taken by the shouting woman as a sign of incontrovertible guilt; she pounces on her prey. ‘You think we don’t know what you’re coming here to do, hyan? You think shirt-pant on the outside are fooling us? You think gentull-man on the outside-outside is fooling us, you son of a whore?’

  Priyonath watches, frightened and aghast, silenced by the way this furious woman is whipping herself up to a pitch of such shrill rage, as more women troop into the room to watch the unfolding entertainment.

  ‘We throw you out onto the street naked,’ she shouts. ‘Ask your sister or your mother to shit on you. You not coming to us for this dirty stuff any longer. We’re seeing all this gentull-man stuff on the outside-outside and low dog on the inside-inside for many years, we’re knowing what to do with your types.’

  A supporting murmur ripples through the gathered crowd. Priyonath can see faces of children outside the window, lifting up the curtain and peering in.

  ‘But . . . b-but . . . I’ve . . . she has . . .’ he stammers.

  ‘What you asking her to do, hyan? What? Why you quiet like a thief?’ the pack-leader screams. She turns to Nandita and commands, ‘You tell everyone here what he asking you do all the time.’

  Nandita, by now whirled up in the excitement of the drama, has forgotten to continue crying. After a few nudges she sheds her coyness and reveals to everyone the services demanded of her by Priyonath. Another murmur goes through the crowd, different in tone, timbre and intent from the earlier one.

  Priyonath, fearing a public beating in this insalubrious area of the city, decides to defend himself. ‘She’s done it before, many times, over ten times. I paid her well over the going rate. Ask her, if you don’t believe me,’ he says, moving his hand in a gesture that takes in everyone assembled, as though in appeal to a trial jury.

  ‘Money?’ the woman shrieks. ‘You showing us the heat and dazzle of your money? We seeing it all, sister-fucker. You can buy everything with money?’

  With a jolt, Priyonath notices that she has descended into addressing him as tui, the irreverent version of ‘you’. Amidst diffuse paranoia about whether this is a set-up, one feeling isolates itself, a sense of mild indignation, so he says forcefully, ‘Yes, here you can.’

  He can almost see her combust into a burning column. She lets loose a jet of abuse. ‘You son of a foolish fucker, I have your teeth broken with beatings. Then I plant the broken teeth in your mother’s cunt, you son of a whore. When your father come to fuck her at night, he sees her cunt grinning.’

  The incipient outrage at the indignity that Priyonath has fleetingly experienced now disappears, replaced swiftly by fear; it is his bowels that seem on the brink of release. His madly palpitating heart reminds him of his blood pressure. Where are his Amdepin tablets, he thinks in a stab of panic, and lifts his hands to his chest to look for the pills in the pocket of his shirt, only to realise that he is not wearing one, that his hands have touched the hairy bulge of his breast. The gurge of a new fear now adds itself to the spinning inside him. As he reaches for his clothes, the berating woman moves closer to him and demands, ‘Where you think you going, hyan? Where?’

  The crowd of spectators has thickened. The flapping and beating in his chest becomes more urgent. He grabs his trousers. As he is trying to get into them, a cracking slap lands on his left cheek; he has been hit by the screaming harridan. The shock freezes him for a few seconds, then the fear surges in again: what if he were beaten by this gathered crowd of prostitutes out in the open street? These things are all too common in the city, he knows. As if to stem the shame that such an event would bring about – being thrashed in public by a bordello of whores, imagine that – he looks around for the presence of a man, any man, a pimp or someone; somehow a beating administered by a man would be easier to bear.

  ‘Give money. Give all money you have,’ the woman screams, inches from his face. A sour stench gusts out from her twisted mouth. Priyonath involuntarily moves back his head. ‘Give your shirt-pant. Right now, give your shirt-pant,’ she orders, then snatches the trousers from his hand. She turns the pockets out: side, front, back. One hundred and seven rupees, eighty paise. The hundred-rupee note was for Nandita, payment substantially above her standard fee. Even in the middle of this thuggery, Priyonath feels a small thread of relief course through him: he has been wise in leaving his wallet back in his office, bringing only what was necessary for this visit.

  The prospect of possibly no more money hidden away turns the fury even more fractious. ‘Only this, byas? Where you hide the rest, hyan? Where, arse-fucker?’

  Priyonath answers, ‘That’s all I have with me. You’ve checked my pockets. There’s nothing in the pocket of my shirt.’ He reaches out for it, shows it to her, then puts it on. The Amdepin is not in the pocket of his shirt.

  ‘You tell me you have no money and I believe, hyan? What you take me for? That milk comes out if you squeeze my nose, hyan? Wait, I show you fun,’ she says and, picking out someone from the crowd, commands, ‘Go call Badal.’

  There is a rustling as a few of them peel off to fetch Badal. In all probability a strongman-pimp-goon figure, Priyonath thinks, now jolted out of all residual inertia.

  His cock has shrivelled to the size of a pea. He debates whether to go on the offensive, threaten with names of police and politicians, or be meek and retreating, in the hope that perhaps that will somewhat abate their concocted fury. But either stance can backfire.

  A short, lean young man, with dark skin, his face pitted from a bad case of childhood pox, and oil-slicked hair combed flat over his head and ears and curling to a well-maintained wave right at the nape of his neck, walks in. He wears a tight, short-sleeved white shirt, a golden chain around his neck and a green lungi. The shirt is unbuttoned almost to his stomach, showing off his hairy chest.

  Priyonath closes his eyes in terror at the thought of the physical pain awaiting him. Through the fear runs one dark thought: how is he going to explain his bruises and wounds when he gets home? Then another thought: is he even going to get home?

  III

  We walked the twelve miles to Majgeria. Walking will be our chief, indeed only, way of travelling from one place to another. Bus no. 11, Dhiren calls it.

  We had a list of the villages in this
block of the district, places that would be receptive to our mission. That particular piece of groundwork had been done for us by our All-India Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries (AICCCR) cadres. Samir and Dhiren, especially Dhiren, were not new to the business of large meetings, public speeches (‘fire-in-the-mouth’ addresses, as they were called). I, as you well know, have no gift for the work of eloquence to move and activate. Samir was from the southern suburbs of Calcutta, Dhiren from the mofussil; both were attractive candidates for the CPI(M) since it was well known that the party recruited mostly from the provincial working- and lower-middle classes. They had been inducted to the Party early and had been doing this for longer than I had, in any case – a meeting in Sonarpur, an assembly at Bansdroni, at Chunchura, at Srirampur, swelling the numbers at a students’ strike in Kanchrapara, constantly on the move: this was the real legwork. I’m not cut out for it. Maybe I grew disillusioned with ‘communist’ politics faster than they did. Maybe I realised earlier where the real politics lay – in the countryside.

  Did I imagine it or was there really a slight distance between my friends and me, a small, cold gap that could never be bridged? That they took me as someone not quite belonging to them, despite the equality of comradeship, because I hadn’t gone through the apprentice years in the CPI(M) with them? I don’t know.

  Sometimes, in the great silence of the nights here, when I couldn’t sleep, or in the minutes before sleep took me, it was one of the many thorns that I became suddenly conscious of. But what could I do? I was made this way. Training myself to become an orator-activist would have had the end result of making me look like an animated puppet, never the real thing that Samir and Dhiren and Biman and Badal and Rathin and Debdulal-da and others so clearly were.

  I remembered a recent comment made about me at one of our secret meetings in Calcutta. These ‘cell meetings’ were set up in an interesting way. You went to a tiny, narrow, dense lane in Santragachhi and realised, while looking for the number that had been given to you, that no such number existed. A boy of eight or nine, playing marbles in the alley, came up to you and asked which number you were looking for. Only after he led you to a completely different number, in a different lane, did you realise that the deliberately wrong number that you were initially meant to look for functioned as a kind of password. The boy was part of the game. Anyway, all this by way of saying that at one such meeting, full of young men my age, mostly, and a couple of more senior men, one of these older leaders had asked the assembled activists, barely hiding his contempt and speaking of me in the third person – Will he be able to last the race? After all, everyone here is of a certain kind of background, we’ve all led tough, hardbitten lives, we know about life’s difficulties . . . whereas . . . he is from a different world altogether. A prince, really. Will the prince be able to become one with his subjects?

  There were some muffled titters after that.

  Those words came back on sleepless nights and rang repeatedly in my soul’s ear.

  Sometimes I felt I was behind the curve, missing out on the crest of the vital activities. I had sat in the city and devised elaborate theoretical strategies for: 1) building a village defence force in every village to protect the residents from police attacks, and attacks from the lumpens paid by class enemies; 2) directing crop production; 3) arbitrating disputes among farmers; and 4) setting up people’s courts to judge and punish class enemies and their agents and flunkies. Others, meanwhile, had been the ones to work actually in the villages, with the farmers, watching them sow and harvest, talking to them day after day, listening to the problems they had with the village head or landlords and moneylenders. What do I know of crops?

  Well, I found out. And alongside knowledge of agriculture came also the knowledge of how much was being done by my comrades.

  This is what Samir said – When we first came here a few months ago, in the summer, they thought we were another party looking for votes. If they could have brought themselves to do it, they would’ve set upon us with their lathis. First of all, they vote for whoever the village head asks them to cast their vote for: either for the twin-bullocks sign or the hammer-and-sickle sign. The head is paid in kind for this, you know, his food grains taken care of for a year, or a parcel of land suddenly made out to his name. No such rewards for the farmers, mind you. And there’s a lot of murderous rivalry going on with acquiring these vote-banks, as you can imagine. Two years ago, during the drought, CPI(M) cadres were doing some relief work here, distributing sacks of grains to hard-hit villagers, but on the understanding that they would be casting their vote for the hammer-sickle-star. The aid relief was received only by villages that have always voted for them. There had been some mistake: some people in Changripota had already received some rice from the relief people when it was discovered that they had voted for Congress in ’62. The cadres went back and took away the rice from the starving farmers.

  So it wasn’t easy for us to convince them that we hadn’t come for their votes. One of them spat at us, an old man, thin, wiry, a bit stooped, white moustache on a black face. He said, ‘Twenty years we’ve been independent of foreign rule, but things have remained the same for us. No, they’ve got much worse. At that time we used to be told that the sahebs are sucking our blood dry, the sahebs are taking our land away, our crops away, the sahebs have stolen all our possessions from us, but the sahebs have long gone now, why are things still the same? We’re foolish, illiterate people, we can’t read, we don’t understand much, but we understand at least this: the bloodsuckers are still there, their skin colour has changed. That’s the only change that has happened.’

  – Later I found out that this man, Mukunda Mashan, used to be the tenant of four bighas of land. His father had been the tenant on it before that. Under the Land Tenure Act, Mukunda was eligible for occupancy because his father and he had rented it for so many years. When the government officials came to measure the land in this area, the jotedaar gave Mukunda a choice: if Mukunda wanted to register as a tenant, he would be evicted immediately; if he didn’t, he would be kept on as a tenant. What would he feed his family, what would he eat, how would they live if he got evicted? And in these times? And you know how people like to say that listening to what the landlord says, obeying him, is hard-wired in these classes of people. But the landlord and his legion of supporters and yes-men have other ways too: arbitrarily increasing rents, say, from half the yield on the land to three-quarters; or killing the tenant’s bullock so that he cannot work the rented land efficiently enough, thus falling behind with the rent; a son or a daughter or a wife threatened . . . these are probably some of the more benign methods of intimidating him. Fear is a much more reliable tool than hard-wiring, no?

  – And then there’s good old deceit: the jotedaar didn’t tell Mukunda that if he registered, he couldn’t be evicted, because of the number of years that had passed in their tenancy. They were illiterate people, so they didn’t, couldn’t, find out more. Mukunda thought that things had ticked along without registration for two generations, so what did it matter now? On top of that, Mukunda belonged to a lower caste, so it was not in the interest of the village head or any official to enlighten him. Soon after that the jotedaar evicted him anyway, and Mukunda had no recourse to the law because he was not the officially registered tenant.

  So the jotedaar pushes a family down, a demotion really, from tenants to wage-labourers, a demotion from year-round work to work for a quarter of the year. We know what that means for the family. And all for what purpose? To add four bighas of land to his existing 250.

  This was something about human nature I’d never been able to understand. Why did words such as ‘sufficient’ or ‘enough’ have no meaning, no traction in our lives? Greed ate the soul. Sometimes I felt that the haves in our society became giant magnets and, following some law of physics or astronomy transposed to human affairs, sucked in more and more, enlarging their states. You know that Arunima goes to a missionary school, so she has
to study the Bible. I have occasionally browsed through her copy. One day a sentence leaped out and hit me between the eyes: ‘For everyone who has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him.’ This was the way the world was, so why did I refuse to acknowledge and accept this truth? Why did I keep pushing against it and fighting it as if it were the greatest wrong in the world? Not as if; it was. That was why the only way to live was to battle its great error.

  Teaching the small farmers, the daily-wage labourers and the sharecroppers the politics of class was not my duty. Samir and Dhiren were seeing to it. They said that class analysis was something they found easy to get across. The day-labourers had an intuitive understanding of it. All over the villages here our comrades have fanned out, taking on the task of first educating the farmers, giving the examples of peasant revolutions from the last twenty years – Tebhaga and Telengana and Naxalbari – to encourage and enthuse. I was beginning to think that the basic work, a belief that things could not, need not, remain the same for ever, had been achieved.

  A little politics lesson now (I promise to keep it short):

  These regions had seen, in the last few years, a radical solution to the reduction of enormous landholdings by greedy jotedaars. Landless peasants, organised under some leftist party or another, have marched on Congress-supporting jotedaars, carrying knives and spears and lathis and axes, have driven out the landlords, planted red flags on the four corners of his illegally acquired (and illegally consolidated) land, distributed their hoarded grain, seized their crops. What were the police doing in all this? you may ask. Nothing. Orders had come from up high, from the CPI(M) headquarters, that this was legitimate, this was the true democratic struggle, the first step towards land reform and the ultimate abolition of private ownership of land.

  Was it?

  No.

  At first I too thought that it was. As Harekrishna Konar, the then Land Minister, put it: abolition of large-scale landholding → distribution of land to the landless → education of peasants in the disadvantages of cultivating small landholdings → peasants voluntarily adopt collective farming → END OF PRIVATE LAND-OWNERSHIP. Five easy steps, and the first two were already under way, the second one with the support of the police.