The Lives of Others

by Neel Mukherjee

  He had pitched it perfectly. Nirmala Kundu agreed, partly in relief that someone was taking charge of the messier sphere, leaving her to get on with her grieving and bringing up her children, things to which she was more attuned than company finances. He had bribed the auditors of Kundu & Co. to undervalue the firm to a figure that he had set with the men, thus acquiring Kundu & Co. for something between 40 and 50 per cent of the company’s true value. Crucially, he had known from his now-dead friend that two enormous contracts were shortly coming the way of Kundu & Co.

  Prafullanath’s own mills in Memari and Bali exclusively supplied the paper for these two contracts. With the financial muscle they brought him, he managed to stave off the worst of the recession. That year, in 1933, his youngest son Somnath was born.

  VII

  Scalp-splitting sun. It killed you. Darkness now came slowly, like a leisurely, majestic predator, unafraid of anything, swallowing the far things on the horizon first, then the near. You saw the line of trees in the forest in the distance go first, then the nearer trees, the palms and bamboos, then the fields became stretches of a featureless sea of black. After a while, you couldn’t see your toes.

  The soil had the surface of stone, punctuated with the stubble from last year’s harvest. Kanu followed the plough hitched to the bullock – the plough was his, the bullock belonged to the man whose land Kanu was preparing for cultivation – and explained to me how I needed to keep the share steady in the soil and the bullock moving in a straight line. I was like a guttering candle turning to liquid. Kanu looked at me and asked – Are you suffering?

  I was ashamed to be thinking of sunstroke when beside me Kanu, drenched, smelling awful, seemed indifferent to the sun. I looked at him and was struck again by how everything about him was wiry: his thin legs and arms, the veins on them bulging out like ribs; the dark, curly hair, like a dense pile of wire clippings. Where did this beaten physique, as if something carved in oily dark stone, come from, if all he and his kind got to eat was chhatu and rice and puffed rice once, maybe twice, a day? I couldn’t even bring myself to ask if the sun didn’t bother him. When I tried to do the third row myself, without his help, I thought I’d got it, until the bullock reached the edge of the plot and I had to turn it round and position the share so that the same line was furrowed again, but now in a different direction. I failed utterly. The bullock went off in a line at a thirty-degree angle to the one just ploughed.

  By ten in the morning a nerve behind my left eye started jumping, I began to feel dizzy and, when I tried to get up, after sitting down to drink some water and catch my breath, I saw black and then some popping colours.

  Samir and Dhiren were both working in plots to be used as seedbeds, but for a different landlord. We could barely talk at the end of the day after we had bathed in the pond and washed our clothes – we felt turned into something solid and inanimate with exhaustion. But even through that solidity something of the intricate nature of the timing of everything trickled through and amazed me. The plots that were right next to the landlord’s house were generally used as seedbeds so that they could be kept under constant guard. The plot that Kanu and I and two others were working was going to be used to transplant the paddy saplings from the seedbeds one month into the monsoon. Kanu had explained the timing to us. And it all turned on the arrival of the rains.

  The land was a stretch of huge, upturned clods. If I thought harvesting was difficult, I changed my mind when I began ploughing. Now I changed my mind again during this process of halui – churning those enormous clods into looser, smaller pieces of soil. Kanu said – The large boulders of earth, they keep soaking up the rain . . .

  Here he paused and looked up at the sky. Would it arrive this year? his eyes seemed to be asking; would it be late? would it be enough? There was both anxiety and resignation on his face.

  Kanu continued – These large chunks, they soak up the rain, they are greedy, but however much they drink, they don’t seem to turn to clay easily. And we want this to be tight clay, so tight that the rainwater will stay on the surface. The plot must be underwater, here, see, this much water – he stretched his palm and marked off a point at the base; five or six inches, I reckoned – here, one hand of water, he said.

  So the next ten days, twelve, passed in raking and beating and pounding the clods to dust. We kept ploughing the furrows over and over again, then the plough was replaced with a multi-toothed rake and we went through the same process again. The soil looked like red-black cottage cheese now. The June sun beat down upon us. The soil was hard and totally dry. When we brought out the sticks used to beat it to dust, it gave in and disintegrated. Then we needed to rake it up again to bring the bigger, more solid layers below up to the surface so that we could beat that to looseness.

  Kanu has brought only his plough to the halui work. The bullocks belong to the landlord, as the seedlings, later, will too, so Kanu will get only 20 per cent of the crop produced. If he had been a bargadar, he would have got 40 per cent for the same work. I couldn’t make any sense of this logic, that the better off got more and those who had little got less. The world ran on this law, and only on this. Some magnetic field began to develop around those who had a little something – power or money or influence or friends, you name it – and the more these things accrued, the more that magnetism increased (it was as if the things that flowed to them had attracting properties themselves), drawing more inside its orbit and away from those whose funds were already depleted, making them even more impoverished, depriving them of even more. It was like gravity: everything flowed, and could only flow, in one direction. Or a type of circularity: the more you had, the more will come to you, the more you will have.

  Sometimes when my body simply couldn’t move, when I was incapable of lifting even my little finger, incapacitated by the combined tyranny of the sun and the humidity, I forced myself to beat and rake and pulverise the clods of earth by thinking I was beating and raking and pulverising and eviscerating men like Bhaben Sinha, men like the Rays, who were smuggling rice at night, men like the police, who were standing guard over the operation, all the jotedaars and mahajans in this village. I wanted to stand outside the world, wielding a giant wooden stick, and use that to shatter the planet into tiny bits. I wanted to break the air, tear the wind, smash the water.

  No nightly planning sessions during the sowing season; we were too exhausted to talk. I shall have to stop writing this and pick up at some point later when I have more time, more energy.

  Kanu noticed my tiredness. He brought me a lipped, dented aluminium plate of chhatu kneaded with chillies and raw onions and some mustard oil, and asked – No more meetings for the city babus?

  – No, Kanu, our bodies won’t take it. You’re talking to the others, as we asked you? They’ll come once the paddy growing begins?

  – Yes, Babu, they will. Those other two babus, your friends, they’ll have a lot of work to do, just before the rains begin, to prepare the seedbeds. You’ll work with them?

  – No, Kanu, I’ll be working with you wherever you get me work.

  I knew what he was thinking: he was remembering closing his hand over the thirty rupees I had given him last time.

  The monsoon didn’t break crashingly one day. First, there was a light drizzle that barely wetted the soil, but it released that loamy-fresh-rotting smell. When the drizzle stopped, Kanu’s face took on that constricted look.

  – This little pissing, Babu, he said, it’s not a good sign. It means something is holding back the water in the sky. It can be held back throughout the season then.

  He was wrong. Two more days of dark, rolling clouds and another half-day of drizzling, then the sky broke upon us. Even his dying father-in-law seemed to register it: his face had an expression different from its usual one of resigned blankness, not far from a smile. The baby too appeared to be crying less. I had to move inside now.

  – You’ll get wet outside, Babu. And sometimes the water rises and floods everything arou
nd the hut and water comes into the room. No, no, Babu, you come inside now.

  It was exactly as I remembered from childhood – sheets of water coming down for hours and hitting the ground with such force that you thought the road would dissolve – except that here the ground, which is earth, does dissolve.

  The ploughed soil first turned dark with saturation, then became mud, a fractionally lighter shade than the wet soil. The mud started to retain water on its surface here and there. Then the watery stretches began to grow. Kanu said that the real work began now.

  I laughed – What were we doing until now? Playing children’s games?

  He laughed too. – Preparation, he said.

  Samir and Dhiren had been calf-deep in mud in their seedbeds for the last week, trying to keep them flooded. It was my turn now in the growing plots. I missed out on the sowing. When I mentioned this to Kanu, he said that it required years of skill to get the throwing of the germinated seed-paddy right; Samir and Dhiren wouldn’t be sowing, only preparing the beds and perhaps guarding them.

  I stepped into the mud, the mud that I’d avoided in the city all my life, that ever-present mud during the rainy season, which crept over the front edge of your sandals, seeped up between the toes, was lifted by the back of the slippers on every uplift of the feet and splattered all over the back of the legs of pyjamas and trousers; a thing that held only disgust, and a little bit of terror, for all Bengalis. So I had to leap over a mental barrier, erected through years of conditioning, to jump into a very sea of it. Silly petty-bourgeois things went through my head very briefly, such as how difficult it would be to get my mud-spattered clothes clean, get myself clean, in the pond at the end of the day, and would my clothes dry in the rain . . . Then I stepped in.

  My feet immediately sank in to my ankles, then gradually to the bottom of my calf muscle. I clenched my toes. It was difficult to move: the mud embraced my feet and didn’t want to let go. It was a slight wrench every time I lifted them up, as the mud slucked itself into the mini-vacuums my feet were leaving behind. There was a small danger of slipping and unbalancing on the tread down, but my feet adjusted. The clay felt velvety, then there was a strange sensation of it gently tickling and caressing my feet. I almost giggled out loud. I was, for a moment, returned to an elementary, tactile pleasure from childhood: playing with mud. What, a moment before, had held a small charge of something to be avoided had now become so desirable that I wanted to roll about in it.

  There were sacks of cow-dung fertiliser sitting on the aal bordering the plots. We brought them into the mud and each sack was emptied at intervals of about five to seven metres along the area. I had to clamp down my jaws and swallow a few times because the pungent smell made me want to retch, but even this I got used to after a few minutes. But my joy in the mud abated – walking calf-deep in rainwater and clayey soil was one thing, doing the same in soil freshly enriched with fertiliser was another. Once again we directed the bullock, now fitted with a huge horizontal stick in place of the ploughshare, to flatten out the clay and make the earth level throughout. After the fertiliser had been spread evenly, the stick was replaced with that many-tined rake and the earth was ploughed again to mix the cow-dung thoroughly, letting it reach the bottom layers. The rainwater rushed squelchingly into the gaps in the raked soil. The skies opened again.

  Herons and cranes did their old man’s staccato walk through the fields, jerking their necks down to catch a worm or a fish, then resumed their odd gait – they seemed to lift their legs up a lot more than was necessary. They were intrepid, doing their thing cheek-by-jowl with our activities. As for the bullocks, they simply didn’t care about the presence of the birds, not even when they perched on their necks.

  The pond where we bathed and washed our clothes was full to the brim. That afternoon, during a small interval in the pelting rain, while we splashed about in the pond and beat our clothes vigorously against a stone ledge, Samir and Dhiren entertained me with their experiences of sowing that morning.

  – They do a little ceremony before the sowing, did you know? Dhiren said.

  – The usual stuff with new grass and blowing a conch-shell? I asked.

  Samir said – No, different. The farmers’ wives do it. They put on new clothes, it looked like. They carry a little quilt with germinated seeds on it, and a small plate with oil, and salt and sindoor. The farmers stand back, each holding little sacks of seeds. But the women have to consecrate the whole business first. They bend down, pick up a tiny bit of soil, touch it to forehead and then to tongue. Then they walk over the aal, along the full perimeter of the seedbed, singing a song and throwing a small handful of the seed grain mixed with oil and salt and sindoor at each corner. Do you remember the song, Dhiren?

  – Not all of it, only snatches here and there.

  – Sing it, I said.

  – It’s very elementary, there’s no complicated melody or anything to it, it’s more like a children’s rhyme or a panchali, he said, and sang in a monotone:

  Where are you, Mother Lakshmi?

  Rise and show your face.

  Our men are cultivating paddy

  But there’s no rice in the store-room.

  What are we going to live on?

  How are we going to get through the year?

  I smiled, but a bracing thought went through my head: these lives had never been easy. From the very beginning, their core had consisted of a constant wrestling with dearth and want and, above all, hunger. All the so-called reforms brought in by the government in the twenty-one years of Independence, the Zamindari Abolition Act, the Land Ceiling Act, the Bargadar Act, they had not improved the condition of the munish one whit. The actors had changed; the play remained the same. That great magnetism was still at work: power spoke to and connected only with power; the government and its laws were for the benefit of the landlords, the powerful and the wealthy. Their interests were aligned: they looked out for each other, therefore they would always be looking after each other. That great circularity again.

  It started raining, big, fat drops, slowly first, then faster, bigger drops, then a proper downpour. Samir raised his voice above the din of the water and said – Have you ever been underwater when it’s raining? It’s a beautiful thing.

  He submerged his whole body, including his head, under the rain-strafed skin of the pond. I followed him. It was strange and unearthly. In the grey-green watery light just under the surface the sound was neither the ‘tip-tip-tip’ of raindrops hitting water nor the usual downpour sound that was like a large collection of little, dry seeds shaken inside a hollow rattle. This came muffled, and so changed by the intervening membrane of water that it sounded like the kind of percussion angels would use in their music, distant and dreamy.

  I stayed under as long as I could, then I gasped out of the surface for air.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  1969

  BECAUSE HE IS so lost in imagining the intervals between primes, and visualising their distribution to the extent of the furthest number that his mind, using a rough-and-ready kind of modular arithmetic, will allow him, his heart nearly leaps out of his mouth when his wrist is grabbed by a grasping hand, accompanied by the words, ‘There, caught you!’

  He looks up to see the crazed smile of the neighbourhood’s resident madman, nicknamed ‘Mad Ashu’, who lives somewhere on Rupchand Mukherjee Lane and is supposed to roam the streets at dusk, Sona had been told when he was little, and to catch hold of little boys and girls who were not safely inside their homes by then. What he did with those children after he put them in his sack was left to the imagination. At nearly thirteen, Sona is not quite a child, but he feels some of the residual thrill of fear from the stories that had so stubbornly rooted themselves in some cobwebbed corner of his mind all those years ago. Besides, the man, whose real name is Ashish Roy, does look menacing – staring eyes magnified to distortion by thick lenses, the earpiece of the spectacles broken and held together by filthy loops of red string; unshaven face
, bristling with silver hairs halfway between stubble and short quill; drool at the corners of his slack, mobile mouth, now grinning, now grimacing; grubby, frayed fatua that comes down to just below his waist, and even dirtier pyjama, enormous, almost ballooning, with the drawstring hanging down the front, drawing attention to the unmistakable stain of dribbled piss on the area around the crotch. Sona shudders inwardly and notices the veined hand still clutching his arm; the nails of the man’s hand are hard and have a yellowish tinge.

  ‘There, caught you, where will you escape now, eh?’ Mad Ashu says again, but the threatening tone is so exaggerated that it seems to be a broad-brushstroke performance aimed at gullible children. Before Sona can compose a suitable reply Mad Ashu says, ‘Can you tell me which prime numbers can be expressed as the sum of two squares?’

  Something opens up in the boy. The sound of rickshaw horns and the ‘ting’ of the tram bell that punctuates its groaning trundle as it makes its way up Russa Road and the sound of water from a burst standpipe and of evening puja from a house nearby all disappear in an instant, as if all this were happening in a dream. At discrete moments in his future Sona will invariably picture this instant as a differentiable point in a smooth curve, the point, that exact point, where the tangent grazes it; it is that one point of contact that will, in a long concatenation of events, change his entire life. The origin of it is this moment when Mad Ashu asks him a question about prime numbers.

  When the sound floods back, Sona hears himself answer, ‘All primes above 2 that leave the remainder 1 when divided by 4. So 4n + 1.’ He has known this from the age of seven: that all primes above 2 are odd; that they consequently fall into two categories – those that leave the remainder 1 when divided by 4, and those that leave the remainder 3; that only (4n + 1) primes can be expressed as the sum of two squares, not the (4n + 3) numbers. This had emerged as a branch-line while he was pursuing, at the age of six, a way of determining which numbers between 1 and 1,000 were primes. He wrote them down on pages and pages, then began to strike off 2 and every second number after 2, since they were all divisible by 2. Then he put a line through 3 and deleted every third number after 3. Then 5 and every fifth number after 5. And so on until all the remaining numbers were indubitably primes. He has favourites among them: 37 is one; 3 + 7 gives 10, 1 + 0 gives 1, which is yet another favourite number. (And also interesting; he has read the story of G.H. Hardy telling Ramanujan how 1,729, the number of the taxi in which he arrived to visit the ailing Indian genius, was a rather dull one, whereupon Ramanujan instantly replied that, on the contrary, it was very interesting for it was the smallest number that could be expressed as the sum of two cubes in two different ways: 1,729 = 13 + 123= 93 + 103. To which Sona found added glamour in the fact that the sum of all its numerals yielded 1, his favourite number.) These numbers come to him clothed in a beauty that surpasses everything in his dim, crumpled, shabby life. They are luminous, they speak to him in a way that gives him something precious, protected from the rest of his hours and days. They belong to a world that consists only of him and the numbers, nothing else, a world of absolute and utter perfection that cannot be expressed, and therefore debased already, by words.