Quite apart from the enormous investment needed for this, there was the great labyrinth of regulation to negotiate first. The new foreign-trade laws of the country meant that a licence had to be obtained to import the machines and they could only be imported as prototypes to be used to construct, by imitation, similar models with home technology and home resources. ‘Licence’ was, of course, a euphemism for bribing a chain of employees in the bureaucracy juggernaut set up for issuing these permits. The cost of greasing the requisite number of palms was a not inconsiderable percentage of the expenditure in buying and importing the machines, and businessmen were beginning to get into the practice of factoring this into their informal accounting, for whatever licence it was they wanted, be it the import of foreign technology or sanction to run a transport or liquor or retail business.
But this bribe was a fluid, moving, protean creature: the number of people with their palms open to receive first and facilitate afterwards always increased, so that the figure factored in, even if it was thought to be overestimated, was found to be, in reality, always short. The Ghoshes had begun the conversation about technology in 1950 and then spent six years obtaining a permit to import, despite spending a fortune in bribes at every step during this period.
It had taken over a year to settle on two German machines from Nettlinger-Kilb in Hamburg, and two from W.H. Cottrall in England. The managers of the state-owned banks that the family used had long been friendly with the Ghoshes, but even they baulked at the sums involved in the purchase and shipping. Adi and Priyo had signed off on the relevant papers, but they were soon to find out exactly how the complex and huge loans had been secured. In this, their inattention to detail had allowed Prafullanath to circumvent any theoretical opposition from his sons.
The new machines had the power and design to stay ahead of the competition in the Indian market for the foreseeable future. Or so Prafullanath had said; otherwise, Adi would not have known a thing about it.
Those endless evenings at home over dinner, with their father droning on: ‘You know, this new turbo separator, the drill screen is between 1.8 and 2.8 milimetres. Ours belong to ancient times, we really need to get a new one to deal with all the new impurities. How long are we going to carry on with that relic? What do you say?’
Adi’s eyes had closed with boredom as he clamped down his jaws on a yawn. He had said something cursory, like ‘Yes, you’re right’, or some such.
The notification for the arrival of the imported machines at the docks came through. After more bribing, the machines were released; it took a year between their arrival at Kidderpore Docks and their transportation to Memari. From this point, Adi firmly believed, a particular alignment of planets and heavenly bodies occurred to cast maximal malign influence on the Ghoshes. It began with Prajwal-da informing them that a sectional drive had the wrong gearbox and helical parallel shaft, so the revolution systems of two of the units, instead of being synchronised, were slightly off. Work stalled at Memari for a year while this was fixed. The plant couldn’t carry on using its older machines and continue production, since they had been dismantled to allow the fitting of the new.
The foreign machines had been ordered in 1956, just before the family tragedy, a piece of timing that was to prove crucial in the undoing that followed. Prafullanath’s rapid deterioration in health following the tragedy meant that he was laid up in bed, having survived what the doctor’s called a ‘massive cardiac arrest’, and everyone was under strict orders to protect him from trouble, anxiety and stress. The whole mess was left to Adi and Priyo to sort out, a thing they did not succeed in doing with any degree of competence or even a thin, superficial professionalism.
Prafullanath, his sons discovered, had not done a rigorous, watertight and airtight costing for the upgrade to new technology, and the cost-benefit analysis, or what there was of it, was so far out, in both columns, that their heads reeled. Who would have thought that this had emerged from the head of someone who had been a successful businessman for thirty years? It did not, for example, take into account the substantial amount of money that had to be paid by way of bribes to acquire a permit. More critically, there was no accounting for the interest on the loans during the period of stasis, from the time of ordering to the beginning of enhanced production at Memari, a period of five years; the enhanced production still remained a mirage, having gone up by only 20 TPD. Why had Baba not thought of something as elementary as a risk calculation, assuming a fixed period of servicing the debt while the plant lay idle? How had he arrived at those hugely inflated production figures? Adi and Priyo would keep returning to those questions.
Two things with the power to scrunch Prafullanath’s plans into a shapeless paper bag had not occurred to his myopic mind. First, there was a thriving market in second-hand parts and units for existing technology – they did the job – so importing the latest machines at such cost seemed criminally profligate. Second, the well-established paper manufacturers in the country – the competition, that is – had played the game with older machines for so long that there appeared to be no clear advantage to what Prafullanath was setting out to do. The projected benefits column alone was a staggering piece of wishful thinking, on a par with fairytales and children’s stories. In it, Prafullanath had fantasised that a loan of the size they had taken out could be repaid in seven years.
Seven! Adi had gaped at the number; it wouldn’t be possible to dent appreciably the compound interest alone in that time. The returns should have been realistically projected so far into the future that they wouldn’t begin to break even in Baba’s lifetime, perhaps not even in his and Priyo’s. Besides, Charu Paper was too small, almost a cottage industry, to have the capacity or the capability to manufacture replacement sections for those machines. Who was going to do it? Prajwal Sarkar was a man of the past; manufacturing parts belonging to machines he had dealt with for three decades was an activity that belonged to the backward past. How could he bring that same inventiveness to the latest technology from Germany and England, to the objects of the future, in what he affectionately called his ‘machine kitchen’?
Adi and Priyo on their own would have been unable to parse the situation in its full complexity, but in a year when their only income was from the Bali factory, they were compelled to sit down at separate meetings with Samik Mitra, the head of the eastern region of the State Bank of India, and Barun Chatterjee, his counterpart at United Bank. It was only when the directors of the bank gradually elucidated the details of the structure and the fine print on the loans that the sky fell on the brothers’ heads: Prafullanath had offered up Bali as collateral, concentrating risk on one factory. It became ever more imperative that Bali shouldn’t fall behind, otherwise the Ghoshes would be unable to honour their debts. Four years into living with this dangling terror, the sword fell on their heads: Bali closed down.
This is how it all ends, Adi thinks; a slow erosion, beginning with lethargy, then . . . then what? Nothing except the hoeing of the same row by a yoked man over and over again, until the attrition of days eats into you and you are just a bit of chaff, obedient to the wind. He doubts even the wind will be able to lift him off. A scrap of elementary physics flits in and out of his head – what if the force of gravity brought about by his inertia is so great that the force of the wind is unable to lift him? One weighty husk, that. The bladder presses. His mouth is sweet-sour-furry with the whisky. From Johnnie Walker Black Label to Diplomat; what a fall. With unionisation going the way it was, and the communists flexing their muscles and grabbing key portfolios in the state government, things had become so bad that they had had to close down the Bali factory indefinitely. It had produced, at its peak functioning capacity, before all the troubles hit, 125 TPD and had formed three-fifths of the Ghoshes’ business. If it didn’t start functioning soon, the last one standing, at Memari, would have to be sold to pay off the debts. Then fragments from the other bit of arithmetic, still elementary, that has built a permanent residence in his head
(he can almost feel it, as a tumour): a mill with a production capacity of 100 tonnes of paper a day costs eighteen crore rupees, give or take, to set up; desirable annual production capacity of a mill if it is not to go under = 30,000 tonnes; at the current rate of government tax on paper, which is 35 per cent, plus the freeze on the retention price of paper since 1962, while the government allowed the increase of prices of vital items such as iron, coal, cement, etc., this means that for every 300 working days a year (with closures, strikes, holidays, walk-outs, union activity all factored in, in the conservative remainder of sixty-five days), the factory would have to produce . . . Other variables present themselves now – the retail price of paper produced by the said factory, the interest on the bank loan for setting up the same factory – and increase the pressure, oddly enough, not in his head but inside his bladder.
At this point Adinath topples over into superstitious territory: if he can solve the equations mentally, it will signify that he will be saved, that the Ghoshes will not be ruined; if he cannot do it before he has to go to the toilet, well . . . defeat. That is the sign he signifies for himself. The bet taken, something else instantly breaches his attentiveness to the self-imposed arithmetic problem. A wave ripples through his insides. It is caused by a sudden image of Supratik flashing through his synapses: a little boy, concern and curiosity battling to take control of his face, looking up at him, asking, ‘But what if the orange pip I’ve just swallowed grows into a tree inside me? Will I die?’ At that remembered word – he will not repeat it to himself – something breaks; his mouth contorts and he feels a heat in his eyes. Only by concentrating on his urgent need to piss does he return himself to some semblance of control. And yet, the exhaustion will not let him get up to go to the toilet.
By the time he gets there he has already let out a small dribble. He contracts all his pelvic-floor muscles; the effort could be defeated in a breath. He pushes the bathroom door; it is locked.
Swapan Adhikari recalls, with great deliberation, every detail of the events over the last month, to savour them almost, before he sits down to write the letter to his friend Ayan Basu.
It was an ordinary day in school: the usual boredom, the usual predictability. He was introducing cosine curves to Class Seven. Half the class was numb with boredom, some switched-off, some insulated by stupidity from what he was trying to teach. The borderline delinquents, sitting right at the back of the class, had begun to show signs of their usual restlessness. Two of them, sitting on the same bench, were nearly choking with the effort of suppressing their giggles. He was certain they were cracking up over dirty pictures that one of them was drawing. Not for the first time an intense sense of waste gripped him briefly and then let him go, but not before it had managed to make him feel reduced.
He had been one of the prize pupils in Ashish Roy’s stable at Presidency, all set to go to ISI, at the very least, for a PhD in number theory, maybe even Cambridge or MIT or Stanford . . . but his father’s untimely death had meant that he, as the eldest son, had to shelve all those lofty ambitions instantly and find a job to support his mother, and his two younger brothers and one sister, all three of whom were at school. It had been impossible to find a job for which he was not overqualified; shocking, a starred first-class Mathematics (Hons) degree from Presidency and no employment after seventeen months of application and job searches. Without his friend Samiran’s help this humiliating position of mathematics teacher at St Lawrence – a school – would also have been a mirage.
‘Take it,’ Samiran had advised. ‘In this current climate, how are you going to hold out for what you call a “proper job”? Did I tell you that last week I got an interview letter from the Geological Survey of India? They were interviewing applicants for the post of assistant field researcher. One post, a single one. Guess how many applicants? Four hundred. I’m not joking. They were giving two minutes to each candidate. Eight hundred minutes, so over thirteen hours. Which meant that they were not going to be done in one day: the babus doing the interview needed their breaks, of course, tea break and snack break and lunch break. There were candidates from parts of West Bengal you have never heard of. You think they were going to give the job based on those two-minute interviews? They had picked the person beforehand, someone’s nephew or son; this was just a show. And you’re still chasing a “proper job”, you crazy fool.’
Swapan had been in similar situations over the last year and a half. Still, that childhood indoctrination in the moral principle of just deserts – that the right and the deserving always win at the end of the day – was a terribly tenacious thing, difficult to shake off.
‘Listen, don’t be stupid,’ Samiran had advised. ‘Which college is going to give you a lectureship? Are you a Party member? Even then, you’ll have to serve time in Siberia – in those appalling colleges in the sticks: Bardhaman, Kalyani, Jalpaiguri . . . are you prepared for that fate worse than death?’
So St Lawrence it was, to stave off debts, rent and bills in arrears, the shrinking of days through squalor. Every day now, work on Riemann’s zeta function seemed more and more like the depleting memory of having had a dream, not even of the dream itself. His reality, instead, was a bunch of slothful, slow-witted, smelly idiots, not one of whom, not a single one of them, was destined for anything higher than a nine-to-five job as a low-to-middle ranking manager in a local bank. And that was the destiny of the best of the lot.
Well, maybe there was one exception, that eerily quiet and shy new arrival, Swarnendu Ghosh, whose sole aim in life, it would appear, was to make himself invisible. That boy, he knew, was gifted; not only full marks in mathematics in the few exams and class tests he had taken, but also something about the way he did mathematics had alerted him to this boy’s talent. It was not the standard cud-chewing ease with set questions and exercises that came with regular practice and drill, but something far deeper, something to do with an effortlessness of movement in the world of abstraction. The boy thought mathematically.
But he too seemed to be paying no attention that day, staring at a small collection of paper on his desk, so still that he appeared not even to be breathing. Right, time for some order.
‘Swarnendu,’ he called.
The boy remained shut in his world.
‘Swarnendu!’
No reply. No change in posture.
‘S-W-A-R-N-E-N-D-U!’ It was a bit mean to pick on him when dozens of others would have done – every one of them was inattentive – but something about the paradox of the boy’s seemingly endless drift, yet brutal concentration, caught his interest.
Now the class was focused on this diversionary drama, a welcome relief from the impenetrable talk of horizontal and vertical axes and anticlockwise movement of a circle and intersection with the positive horizontal axis. A tiny choir of tittering and whispering had erupted.
Swapan Adhikari stepped off his dais and strode over to Swarnendu.
‘What is keeping you from paying attention? Let’s see,’ he said and pulled the sheaf of paper away. The boy involuntarily tried to protect it by bringing down his arms, but too late; he had been taken by surprise.
‘Since you’re such a whizz at mathematics that you think there’s no need to listen to what I say in class, why don’t you tell us about the cosine curve? And stand up when I’m speaking to you.’
It was cruel, Swapan Adhikari thought, but he had the right to make them take notice. The boy stood up, his eyes fixed to the ground at his feet.
‘Go on, then, tell us something about the cos curve.’
Silence.
‘I see you’re not with us yet. Can you tell us the relationship between the sine and the cosine curves?’ That’ll teach him.
The boy looked up at the board, then down again.
‘Here, go up to the blackboard. Take this piece of chalk. I want you to explain to the class.’
He had pushed the boy too far; he looked as if he was going to burst into tears. Instead, he obliged. He stood facing the b
lackboard, his back to the class, and held this pose for a minute, two minutes, absolutely still. Then he started writing:
2π = 1 complete revolution of circle.
He drew the x and y axes afresh, showing all four quadrants, and marked off equal intervals on the x-axis: -2π, -1.5π, -π, -0.5π, 0, 0.5π, π, 1.5π, 2π. Then he plotted a sine curve on it, beginning at (0,0) and marked it, accurately, y = sinx. Even the sound of ordinary susurrus had been hushed in the classroom. Swapan Adhikari felt the beginnings of what he could only think of as an effervescence somewhere in his throat, trying to move up and out, as he watched from the side Swarnendu plotting a cosine curve, again with cast-iron accuracy, on the same axis and naming it y = cosx. He mumbled something. Swapan Adhikari asked him to repeat it.
Sona mumbled, ‘The cosine curve is to the left of the sine curve by a distance of .’
He wrote on the board again:
cosx = sin (x + ) or sinx = cos (x – ).
He stopped for a bit, looked at his teacher for an instant, immediately looked down again, then once again faced the board. He wrote:
From the above, sin2x + cos2x = 1.
Again he glanced briefly at Mr Adhikari. This time he gathered up enough courage to ask, ‘Shall I prove it?’
The Lives of Others Page 31
