The Lives of Others

by Neel Mukherjee

  ‘He is the son from the “second phase”,’ she was reputed to have said to Braja, ‘he will usurp your place in your father’s affections and you’ll find yourself left with nothing. Act quickly.’

  She had harped on the theme, with creative variations, for years until surmise and suspicion had solidified into truth; to Braja and Surama, Prafulla, a mere fledgling of ten when they got married in 1908, matured in their imagination into a raptor.

  In the nine months since her father-in-law’s death and, crucially, a year since the longed-for birth of a boy, Surama had amplified the behind-the-scenes attacks: ‘You have to think about your son now,’ she said, ‘and secure his future. What if your brother takes everything away from us and lands us in the street? What will happen to your heir?’

  The mask of filial duty had at last slipped at the final confrontation. Braja’s calculated air of grievance got so much on Prafulla’s nerves that he called his bluff.

  ‘Stop your acting!’ he said. ‘I’ve had enough. The pain you say you’re feeling, I know exactly how much that is. I want to go through all the property and shop papers. I want my name on half of everything.’

  ‘I told you,’ Surama said, addressing her husband, ‘I told you that we were raising a snake with milk and rice. “Acting,” he says. How can you swallow such an insult? We have practically brought him up, and this is our reward.’

  Braja’s practised lugubrious conduct now allowed a very slight tug of amused contempt at the corners of his mouth, but the words that emerged continued with pretend hurt.

  ‘My heart feels ready to burst—’ he began, but Prafulla cut him short.

  ‘Why have you cut me off from everything?’ he demanded. ‘Going to the shop is forbidden, learning the business hands-on is forbidden . . . What else is out of bounds for me? This house as well? When I last went to the shop everyone was avoiding looking directly at me, all the salesmen, the craftsmen, Chitta-babu, Samar-babu, Ramaprasad-babu. What have you said to them? Why do I feel like a pariah? Even the servants in this house, my home . . . There seems to be something I’m not getting, I’m being left out of. What have you and Boüdi done to them?’

  This was the opening Braja needed. ‘You are overstepping some boundaries here,’ he warned. There was flint somewhere in his voice now, so different from the faux-plush earlier.

  ‘You are stealing everything from me and you sit here talking of boundaries? Yes, I have overstepped the boundaries of my patience,’ Prafulla shouted.

  The opera of Bengali life, already pitched so high, had begun.

  ‘How dare you say that!’ Braja said. ‘Stealing? Stealing?’

  ‘Yes, stealing. Baba said to me that half of everything is mine. You’re trying to cheat me out of the business. Now I want to know what else you’re cheating me out of.’

  ‘Baba said, Baba said,’ Braja mimicked the voice of a whining child. Then the flint returned. ‘Can you prove what Baba said? Where is it written down that half of everything is yours? Go on, show me. And you’re still a minor and a dependant.’

  ‘No, I’m not, I’m nineteen. And you beat me like a dog because you are burning with envy, you have always known that Baba loved me more.’

  From this point the escalation was linear, short and simple. Prafulla declared that he was leaving home for ever; it was not his home any longer, his brother was a snake, poison ran in his veins; he had betrayed their father and the trust that had been vested in him and the duty of care and responsibility; he had engineered to bring it to a state where Prafulla would be left with no choice but to leave . . . In this world of overheated reactions and hysteria, words spoken carried with them the unearthable charge of honour and insult; they remained crackling and alive for generation after generation. Another boundary was crossed, this time without the possibility of return.

  Prafulla walked away from half of what was rightfully his, leaving behind a world of chandeliers, fleets of servants, the Beeston Humberette and a De Dion-Bouton, a world of diamond buttons on his panjabi, of womenfolk wearing fifty-bhari gold waistlets at ceremonies, of a 300-square-foot showroom on 130 Baubazar Street, which remained thronged with customers every single hour that it was open. He was never to return.

  When Prafulla could bring himself to narrate these events in his later life, he would always include the sentence, ‘The embers of my father’s funeral pyre had hardly died out before my older brother and his wife booted me out of my home.’

  It was to Chitta-babu that Prafulla turned after his dramatic departure from Garpar. Chitta-babu had put him in touch with Chunilal Saha, a paper merchant who owned a small shop in Old China Bazaar Street. Chunilal, an ageing, frail man, had long been looking for a reliable and hard-working assistant to run the business with, and possibly to include in a partnership – Chunilal was an only son and he had no male heirs, only a daughter – and the arrival of Prafulla appeared to be felicitously timed. That he was a scion of the famous Ghoshes of Garpar expedited matters greatly; questions about trust and reliability simply did not arise.

  Prafulla, in two years, had mastered all there was to be learned about paper retailing. Business ran in his blood, Chunilal noted admiringly. The Great War had just ended when Prafulla joined C.L. Saha and trade was depressed. A lot of the paper they sold to the Bengali market was manufactured in Europe, but no entirely Indian outfit could directly import that paper; it had to be done through English firms that had offices in Calcutta. Besides, the war had put an end to any import from the countries that had comprised the Central Powers. Prafulla, a young man of growing intuitive skills, did a shrewd pincer movement. First, he concentrated on the indigenous side of things. The output of the native paper mills – Titagarh, Upper India Cooper in Mohulla-Masjidbagh, Bengal Paper Mill in Raniganj, the recently opened Indian Paper Pulp in Hajinagar – was very low and the quality of the paper they produced was erratic. Prafulla decided to make C.L. Saha an agent of these mills and push their products in the market; they would be priced significantly lower than imported paper. It kept down costs while creating goodwill with the mill owners, something that Prafulla was convinced would come in useful one day.

  Second, in order to reduce overheads further, Prafulla threw himself into the business of establishing first-hand contacts with foreign exporters, bypassing the English companies, which had previously acted as intermediaries. In the teeth of fierce opposition from these interests, he managed slowly, over a period of nearly two decades, to build up a direct relationship with a fair few of these exporters.

  Towards the end of 1919, Chunilal was diagnosed with lung cancer and given less than six months to live. He said to Prafulla, ‘You were sent by Him so that my daughter doesn’t find herself in deep water after I leave this world. I would like you to marry Charubala and take over the business. You were sent to me for this purpose, I know it in my bones.’

  Two months after Prafulla married Charubala in February 1920, her father died. Chitta-babu, who had been fired from Ghosh Gold Palace shortly after Prafulla’s departure, reminded the young man that he had two bighas twelve kathas of land in his name left to him by his grandfather, Mahendra Nath Ghosh, and which had been held in trust for him until he reached the age of twenty-one; it was now his, to do with it whatever he wanted. Prafulla sold the land and channelled the money into the paper business. He also changed the name: C.L. Saha became Charu Paper Company (Pvt. Ltd) on 29th January 1921, a date ingrained for ever in his memory because of the drama leading to the birth of his first son, Adinath, that very day.

  Charubala had gone into labour the day before and although, as a man, Prafulla was not allowed anywhere near the delivery room, he remembered the anxiety caused by the inability that day to find a midwife or a doctor, or even a single vehicle on the roads to take her to the nearest hospital, should the need have arisen: the Duke of Connaught was visiting Calcutta to promote the Raj’s idea of diarchy and the Congress had called a hartal; the city had been in absolute shutdown. He had fretted and
bitten his fingernails and paced up and down, and prayed and made bargains with a whole raft of gods and goddesses; and, in the interstices of all this nervous vigour, imagining cloudily – he could not be said to have been very literate about natal matters – the rope of the umbilical cord coiled around his child’s blue neck or his wife haemorrhaging to death, he had cursed the Congress, raged and stormed that it did not matter a jot, this business of freeing a nation and all such grand dreams and designs, if they put ordinary people in harm’s way to get to their destination. After a long, difficult labour, mother and child had both survived and Prafullanath, in relief and joy, had come over all effusive, giving a name to his firstborn and his new company – all his now – in a purposeful act of joint naming; Adinath and the Charu Paper Company (Pvt. Ltd) were twins.

  The new company was a new direction for him too. Prafullanath had been thinking seriously for a while, even during his father-in-law’s lifetime, of moving the business away from being a paper agency into paper-manufacturing fully. He knew too that being both an agent and a novice owner of paper-making factories was an impossible exercise in acrobatics, like sitting on two horses; it would stretch him to the limit just to keep himself from falling. Now that Charu Paper was beginning to acquire power, it could suggest to the mills it agented that they should stop producing, say, four or five different kinds of paper in order to compete with the bigger mills and concentrate instead on the types of paper for which there was less competition among producers. If this should have the unintended consequence of making those factories uncompetitive and underproductive, creating losses and bringing down their value, then Prafullanath could snap them up at much-depreciated prices. It was in this way that he acquired, in 1923, his first mill, with a capacity of 75 TPD, in Memari in Bardhaman district. Charu Paper was no longer solely a paper agent. Two years later, Prafullanath bought what was to be the biggest mill of his business career, just outside the town of Bali, with an output that was twice that of Ghosh Paper Mill in Memari.

  In 1927, the Ghoshes, now a family of seven (including Madan), too large to stay on in Charubala’s childhood home in Jadunath Dey Road in Baubazar, sold the house and, in a move unheard of amongst North Calcuttans, moved to the southern area of Bhabanipur, to a four-storey residence on Basanta Bose Road. Prafullanath never mentioned it to anyone, not even to his wife, but he wanted to put as great a distance as possible between himself and the house where he had been born and where he had lived until the age of nineteen; if that meant moving to the newer south of the city, an area much looked down upon by the inhabitants of North Calcutta, then he was willing to do that too. The new house was enormous and he had acquired it quite cheaply from an acquaintance of a business associate because the family was in some hurry to sell; it obviated the need to buy land and the 101 problems attendant on building on it, which was the usual pattern. Besides, Bhabanipur was salubrious, leafy, wealthy – a lot of Marwaris were moving there – and was relatively distant from Muslim areas, which Baubazar was not quite. It was the southern edge of Bhabanipur, admittedly, almost shading into Kalighat, but at least it was north of Hazra Road, just; Bhabanipur was acceptable even to North Calcuttans.

  Prafullanath had inherited his father’s almost superhuman capacity for work; it was certainly of the order not seen or heard of among Bengalis. The mills that he had bought were weak creatures, stertorously gasping their way to imminent extinction. Their output was an ideal figure; in reality, they churned out around 125 TPD together. He worked out that one way to resuscitate them would be to have them make their own pulp, instead of buying their raw material from the pulp industry, a method that pushed up overheads. He installed hydrapulpers in both his mills and made them integrated factories. They bought wastepaper from the open market, made their own pulp and fed it to the cylinder mould or Fourdrinier machines to make the particular kind of paper that each mill specialised in.

  The streamlining that had benefited him so greatly when he was an agent was also the central governing principle in his reform of the mills at Memari and Bali. One of the first things Prafullanath initiated was the trend in bleached paper. He remembered the Srirampur and Bali paper that he was occasionally forced to use as ‘rough paper’ for scrap work – a brownish, coarse off-white, as if it had sand in it. He had an instinctive dislike of that murky thing and used it only when he had to. Charu Paper Mill at Memari switched from the manufacture of several types of this ‘dirty’ paper to one variety of bleached writing paper. The factory at Bali had produced, before Prafullanath took over, four different kinds of duplex board and grey board and made losses on two of those. Prafullanath began by stopping production of the loss-making varieties. Bali was now going to manufacture only two types of paper: coated duplex and uncoated grey board.

  The inevitable scaling back this resulted in throughout the rest of the 1920s brought focus and, with hindsight, it could be said that this retrenchment helped the Ghoshes to weather the global recession when it hit in 1930. They were saved, too, from the eventual financial ruin that reckless expansion would have brought. It was happening all around them: their friends, the Pals, for example, quickly consolidated their textile business, buying up factories, retail outlets, smaller businesses as if they were going to be asked to leave the planet tomorrow, and branched out into printing works, ink, a type foundry, only to be brought to their knees when the recession hit. They never recovered. It was only with Prafullanath’s help that his friend Jyotish Chandra Pal could hang on to their first store on Harrison Road. Prafullanath noted the lesson carefully and stored it away; he was to remember Jyotish crying for help – ‘I’m having to sell off my wife’s jewellery now; if you don’t help me, I won’t know what to do’ – for the rest of his life. Having to sell off the women’s jewellery: now that was unimaginable, Prafullanath had shuddered. He deferred his ideas about shareholdings and directorships in other companies, postponed too his ambition of regional branches, and concentrated on strengthening what he had.

  The ’30s began with Gandhi’s non-violent salt satyagraha. In College Street, people sat on the road, selling white piles of salt heaped on sacks in front of them, openly defying the Salt Tax. But Bengalis also answered with terrorism and a string of assassinations of high-profile British officials – the looting of the Chattagram artillery, the killing of Inspector General Loman in Dhaka, Binay-Badal-Dinesh’s assassination of Simpson. Something was turning; the atmosphere, the very air, seemed cleft with fear and tension and something else . . . expectation, was it? In 1931, the District Manager of Medinipur, Peddy, was killed. The British retribution was brutal.

  In 1932, one of Prafullanath’s closest friends, Gyan Kundu, became the unintended victim of the second terrorist attack on Alfred Watson, the editor of The Statesman. The first one, only a couple of months before, had involved only one assassin; he had been stationed just outside the newspaper office in Chowringhee, waiting for the editor’s car to pull up. When it did, he stuck a pistol through the open window and fired; incredibly, he missed. The subsequent attempt was a more elaborate affair. A carload of men pulled up behind Watson’s car and showered it with bullets. Watson took two bullets, survived, but had to be retired because he was no longer capable of active work. Gyan Kundu, who was in the back, died instantly. Kundu-babu, as Prafullanath mischievously called him (they were peers), had been on his way to a meeting – an unprecedentedly rare one – with the board of the British-run Statesman as representative of the Paper Merchants’ Association; the newspaper was looking to establish new connections with local newsprint, paper and ink suppliers as a way of cutting costs during this period of depression. It was the first time that Gyan Kundu had been invited to a mostly British gathering, especially of that echelon of British quasi-officialdom. The more nationalist-minded of the Bengalis could not refrain from pointing out that a freedom-fighter’s bullet was the end that lay in store for Bengalis who colluded and cooperated with the enemy.

  Prafullanath held no truck with such pa
triotic fools. ‘Khaddar and charka and cottage industries are not going to feed us,’ he said. ‘We’ll remain a nation of loincloth-clad, rib-showing beggars if we go down that route. The industries are controlled by the British and we should do business with them for our own good.’ In this he had been indoctrinated by what he had seen in his childhood during the swadeshi movement in the 1900s. Back then, Prafullanath had noted and remembered his father’s scornful words to a rich Bengali man; one of their customers, he supposed. ‘All these calls to shut my jewellery shop, to stop trading in British gold . . . Well, I ask them, what are we going to eat if I close my shop? What are my children going to eat? And you, Banerjee-babu, how are you going to marry your daughter without jewellery, hyan? Have you heard of a wedding without ornaments? Besides, all this jabber-jabber about the country’s economic development, how is the economy going to develop if we close down our small businesses?’ It was an argument Prafullanath was going to use himself, copiously, when confronted with a similar moral choice during the turbulent decades of freedom-fighting.

  In Gyan Kundu’s death, Prafullanath, who had business in his genes, saw an opportunity. Within days he presented Kundu-babu’s widow with an impeccably worked-out proposal, designed to hit all the right notes with a grieving woman left to look after her two small children, nine and six at the time. He offered to buy out Kundu & Co. at a substantial premium over the market value and invest the money for her, if she wanted, locking a percentage of it in a trust fund for the children so that Nirmala-boüdi did not have to worry about their school and college education and the girl’s marriage; the children would even come into money when they turned twenty-one. A terrible bereavement such as this, and in such circumstances . . . surely she could not be asked to make difficult decisions requiring intricate financial and legal knowledge? If he could spare his best friend’s widow the anxiety – and here he let his eyes brim over – then he would count himself a happy man. Besides, his business was the same as her late husband’s; he understood this world, knew it as well as the back of his own hand. ‘Look at your children’s faces,’ he pleaded, ‘and do the right thing.’