The Lives of Others

by Neel Mukherjee

  Kalyani is now all assailed by doubt; this is not going to happen, her mother is almost certain to veto it and, if not she, then her grandmother, definitely.

  Just as suddenly as the beginning of her flash of generosity, Baishakhi’s interest in her cousin switches off, before the girl has had time to work out fully the treat that has been handed her.

  ‘All right, you go back downstairs now, I have lots to do,’ Baishakhi says.

  Kalyani lowers her head and leaves the room, but not before stealing a final glance at Baishaki, who lies reclined on the bed, squashing some of her new clothes, chewing her nails and staring at the ceiling, looking both languid and restless, her pose not that of someone who has just announced that she has lots to do.

  X

  Dhiren tracked Senapati’s movements. Somehow the fact that it was winter seemed to be significant – it would have to be done now, when the dark came early and stayed for long.

  Who would have thought that something as thickly crowded and public as the annual winter mela in the neighbouring village of Gidighati would present us with the opportunity? We did not go following him there; that was a matter of chance. We went to the mela to meet other activists in the area, mostly AICCCR members, formally or informally, and to discuss strategies and update each other with news of our respective villages. It was a good place for such things: we wouldn’t stick out as strangers; there was a sea of men, women and children in which we could become invisible. It was here that we learned what was going on in other villages, in other districts (24 Parganas, Hughli), even in Muzaffarpur, Darbhanga and Champaran in Bihar, Koraput in Orissa.

  There were couriers and Communist Revolutionary members here. There were rumours floating about of the formation of a new party, cleansed of all revisionism, bringing together all ex-CPI(M) members, some AICCCR people and the CR group, under one umbrella.

  The din of the mela was somehow comforting: local drums; palm-leaf flutes; wooden flutes; performing singers; people talking and shouting and laughing and haggling; squealing and crying children; calls advertising wares; a horbola, mimicking all kinds of bird calls and animal sounds; several bahurupis, each performing dozens of roles and changing his appearance accordingly . . .

  I recognised several farmers from Majgeria. At one point Dhiren gripped my arm and said – Come.

  I went with him, pushing through the crowd. We stopped at what seemed a random spot. I could see a line of people selling things: toddy, fritters, dried chillies, pinwheels, painted terracotta toys.

  Dhiren said through his mouth firmly pressed – That fat man, bending down, buying toy bow-and-arrows, that’s Senapati Nayek.

  I nodded very slowly.

  – How are we going to keep an eye on him in this mela?

  – Follow him until he leaves.

  – All of us?

  – Yes, otherwise we’ll lose each other.

  – But . . . but . . . we have nothing with us.

  I knew what he was saying. I couldn’t answer him. A wasted day when the target was so near, when the causes were so immediate: that would not be good. Yet an impromptu individual action – but how? where? with what? – seemed dangerous and could set us back in Majgeria for ever. Besides, we needed the farmers with us, we could not be an assassination squad of three acting on their behalf. Everything about this looked, felt, smelled wrong. And yet that prodding inside, that we were letting an opportunity slip, wouldn’t leave me. Us.

  It remained this kind of welter until sundown. We were tense and bored at the same time, a dangerous combination, as we tailed Senapati for what felt like hours and hours. He met a lot of people he knew. Sometimes he became one of a group of three or four or five. Sometimes he was alone. He watched a bahurupi performance, alone, for a while – we too caught it, although on the margins of our concentration; the bahurupi was enacting Hanuman setting Lanka on fire – then moved on to the corner where the local liquor was being sold. We looked at each other with despair.

  Samir said – He could be here for ever. Especially if it leads on to visiting a prostitute, as these things do.

  The gap between sunset and darkness was short. It would be the easiest thing in the world to lose him to the night now. Bands of people were leaving, the mela was breaking up. There were no lights in the eight-mile walk to Majgeria. An idea had been going through my head ever since Senapati had sat down to drink. I outlined this to Samir and Dhiren, then we looked for holes in it. There were many, but we had progressed from the anxious chaos and flailing around that had held us when we first spied the moneylender.

  Dhiren began to walk back to the village while Samir and I moved closer to our drinking quarry. There were enough people for us not to stand out. I was thinking of how wrong I had been to believe that taking a man out was a matter of swift action, impulsive, done on the crest of a wave of great passion. And there I was, stalking someone, and it felt like the growing of paddy from seed to harvest.

  We whispered about the possibilities that could throw us off-course. What if Senapati did not return to the village, but went off somewhere else? What if we lost him in the dark? Or on the long walk back? What if he realised he was being shadowed? What if he was accompanied all the way to the village, all the way to his home? We drove ourselves mad with the chatter of doubts and possibilities.

  But luck or chance – same thing – dealt us one good hand after another. First, Senapati left early. He didn’t seem drunk: he hadn’t forgotten the set of bow-and-arrows he had bought for his children or the other assorted things that we had noticed throughout the day: glass bangles, a big aluminium pot, paper bags of snacks, a disc of solid molasses. He would normally have brought a servant along to carry everything, but he appeared to be on his own. Had he sent for a cart or a rickshaw?

  I was now certain that we would lose him on the way back, or be discovered ourselves. As we walked over aals and through fields, I noticed that we were not the only people headed towards Majgeria. It was impossible to determine how many, but I knew there was a group of four between us and Senapati, and a few people behind us. There might well have been several ahead of Senapati too. The cold began to bite in the open country through which we made our way. What if Senapati recognised friends and fell in with them? Our heads and most of our faces were covered with chadors. I found myself thinking random thoughts, skittering about from one worry to another.

  Then luck handed us our next two breaks, one after the other. Samir and I noticed that everyone else appeared to have peeled off somewhere, absorbed by the dark. Maybe they were somewhere out there, but we could neither see nor hear any of them. We could not make out Senapati, either. He too had disappeared into the night. My big fear was that if we tailed him too closely he might turn round and notice us or want to talk to us, since it would be apparent to him that we were all headed for Majgeria together and he would want to be friendly and would want to know where we were going and whom we knew and what we did . . . he would probably recognise one of us. But the flip-side of maintaining a safe distance was losing sight of him. I felt I had made one error after another and I was thinking that the whole plan should be aborted, and how best to get the message to Dhiren, waiting back at the village with Shankar for our arrival, when the second piece of good luck presented itself: the unmistakable sound of a man pissing and humming to himself.

  If that was Senapati, we were still on track. Yes, it was. My ears picked out the sound of objects being handled – all the stuff that he had bought at the fair and had had to set down to relieve himself. Not a minute passed after I thought this before I negated it: it could be anyone. I knew Samir was even jumpier than I was because he hadn’t had a single bidi in this endless walk in the dark.

  We were close to the bat tree, near what everybody thought of as the mouth of the village – it was here that a path forked, the left one going to the lower-caste, poorer section of the hamlet, the right to the landlords’ and upper-caste neighbourhoods. I counted fifty paces, then ten more
, then another ten – he was in front of us, there was no mistaking that now – then I nudged Samir and we broke into the song that one of our comrades back in Calcutta had devised out of the story, in The Little Red Book, of the foolish old man who tried to remove mountains. This was our signal to Dhiren and Shankar.

  We were loud, as we had agreed to be, and the words – Boka buro, o you foolish old man / What a cretin you are! / With two mountains in your way / How are you going to go far? – rang out clean and clear in the quiet, cold night. Senapati wheeled round and took a step or two towards us, calling out – Who is it?

  Then we were lifted up by the wave I had always thought was the shape of this kind of event and it happened very quickly, all the actions fitting into a portion of time that had itself become compressed into a hair-thin sheet. Senapati turned and started to walk towards us. He could not make us out in the dark. Samir handed me his chador and stepped further away so that Senapati wouldn’t be able to see his exposed face.

  I had only one chance at this. Only one.

  I replied to Senapati – No one. No one you know.

  I could tell that he was suspicious – it gave off like an odour, or maybe it was my self-consciousness – because he could instantly tell by my accent that I did not belong here. I moved closer and furled Samir’s chador over his head and clamped my hand onto his mouth with all the force in my body and soul and nerves, and whispered in his ear – One little sound from you and you’re finished.

  The aluminium pot containing the wheel of winter jaggery, the bow-and-arrows, the paper bags of nuts and sweets, all hit the ground and I sensed more than saw everything spill out. Dhiren and Shankar leaped out from where they had been stationed, in the bushes behind the tree, just beyond the fork in the path. They held a tangi each in their hands. Only their eyes were exposed. I didn’t know who drove the tangi into Senapati’s chest first, but I heard it – felt it more – as a thud with the hint of a crack somewhere in it. It transmitted itself through the mass of Senapati’s body that I was holding so tightly around the mouth and neck. He bucked once, twice, and I had trouble holding onto him. He was trying to lift his legs off the ground to shake me off and ward off his attacker at the same time. Even through the clamp of my hands, an ‘aaak’ sound leaked out; it did not originate in his throat or mouth, it seemed to issue from where the tangi was buried in him.

  Then the second tangi – I didn’t know, again, who wielded that one – was lodged in his fat, springy stomach. I was wet with a warm liquid. There was a metallic, peculiar smell that I would only later understand was the smell of blood. I wanted to let him go, but I couldn’t. He seemed cemented to me. I tried to push, but it felt as if I’d forgotten how to execute that basic little thing. The more I tried, the more I grasped him to me. We had become one. Then I physically sensed a slackness in his body. I simply lifted my hand from his mouth and loosened my arm around his neck, and he fell to the ground in a sacky heap. He didn’t move. It was over for him. My knees gave and I too fell down. Dhiren and Sankar were nowhere to be seen.

  Samir whispered very close to my ear – Move!

  He put his hands under my armpits and tried to get me to stand. I could discern something in the dark, something on the earth. It felt like a long time before I could identify the toy bow-and-arrows Senapati had purchased a few hours ago at the fair.

  This was a beginning.

  Later, I didn’t know how much later, Samir led me to the pond so that I could wash the blood off my clothes and myself. As I lowered myself into the freezing water, my teeth chattering, my heart beating so fast because of the shock of the cold water that it hurt, Samir recited from memory:

  – All men must die, but death can vary in its significance. The ancient Chinese writer Szuma Chien said, ‘Though death befalls all men alike, it may be weightier than Mount Tai or lighter than a feather.’ To die for the people is weightier than Mount Tai, but to work for the fascists and die for the exploiters and oppressors is lighter than a feather.

  A half-moon, slipping closer to the horizon, blackened the trees in front of it.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ONCE THE COMPLAINTS began, Charubala found herself facing a flood of them from boys and parents she did not know, had not heard of, did not know where they lived. A bespectacled woman, accompanied by a thin, fair boy who seemed to want to hide behind her, knocked on the door of 22/6 one afternoon and asked to speak to ‘Somu’s mother’. Standing outside the threshold, the lady, clearly belonging to a different order from Charubala in the way she spoke, the kind of words she used, some of which were English, which left in no doubt that she was one of those educated ‘mod’ women that Chhaya spoke about – who otherwise would have had the nerve to defy social rules and call on a stranger? – this intimidating woman very politely but sternly pointed out that her son had been coming home lately covered with bruises and nicks and scratches, and on being asked their cause had reluctantly admitted that an older boy called Somu had been bullying the younger boys, hitting and terrorising them. Charubala, cowed somewhat, hardly took in what she said. So great was her relief after the woman had gone and she had shut the door that the substantives of the complaint were forgotten and the accidentals that remained – something blurry about Somu being a rowdy boy – did not deserve to be made a big deal of, so she neither told her husband nor questioned Somnath; it was hardly an important matter.

  Then, over time, more evidence began to pile up. Another complaint, this time from a man to Prafullanath; he said that he spoke not only for his two sons, who had been beaten ruthlessly by Somnath, but also for other boys in the neighbourhood. If Somnath was not disciplined, he threatened, then he was not going to be allowed to play in Diana Club any more.

  ‘A bunch of Brahmo ninnies,’ Prafullanath said. ‘If his sissy boys can’t put up with some natural, healthy rough-and-tumble, they should stick with their singing assemblies and other effeminate stuff.’

  It was true that Diana Club was a predominantly Brahmo organisation and the boys and young men there, while very good at sport, especially cricket and football, did have the refined genteelness of the community to which they belonged, but this was only an excuse for Prafullanath.

  Charubala agreed with her husband’s reasoning, but she was reminded of that first complaint; now she was left in no doubt that that fiercely intelligent-looking and eloquent woman was a Brahmo too.

  Somnath, never a good student, failed his Class Six exams lamentably; not in one weak subject, as the mitigating case could be, but in all the major ones – English, Bengali, Arithmetic, Science. Despite the indulgent affection lavished on this boy, his worsening performance in school seemed not to have come to his parents’ attention at all. When the red-mark-filled report card arrived at the end of the year, there was a little bit of tut-tutting and his father’s usual ‘It doesn’t matter, it’s only book-learning, real knowledge is in hands-on experience of the real world.’ If Charubala thought this was the last thing he should have been saying, especially within Somu’s hearing, she did not bring up the matter with her husband.

  While Somnath repeated Class Six, she began to notice other things about him: a certain insolence in his manner, an open defiance of his elders, spending a lot of time in front of the mirror doing his hair, growing it long and combing it over his ears . . . the answering back to his elders and the disobedience seemed so much a continuum of the kind of child he had always been that Charubala would have failed to notice them particularly, had it not been for these other telltale external manifestations of a boy becoming what was known in the culture as ‘spoilt’, much as one would use the term of milk that had gone off. As if she had invoked their presence by thinking about these attributes, they began to show up. Somu was rusticated from school after being caught smoking in the toilets. Prafullanath raged and ranted, but fell well short of any of the fearsome disciplinary measures that were the common currency – taking a belt to the boy, imposing a curfew; he had never been one for corporal
punishment, not because of any high liberal principles, but because his private experience of what went on in the name of disciplining made him unable to mete it out to his own children.

  Somnath scraped through the repeated year, just about, then failed his Class Seven annual exams. He was now the oldest boy in his class by more than two years. Over and above the stigma attached to that, there was the burgeoning physical evidence of him belonging to a world beyond a boundary – nascent moustache, broken voice, disparate colonies of acne breaking out on his chin, forehead, cheeks. He hung out in bad company, with similarly overgrown boys who had something of a sullen uselessness about them. Some saw in them a foreboding of a blasted future of mediocrity and misdeeds. When Somnath failed the Class Seven exams a second time, he was asked, as the school rules dictated, to leave St Xavier’s. Prafullanath, who did not nurture any great hopes of his youngest son becoming a doctor or an engineer, thought twice about forcing Somu to run the entire gamut of secondary education – better to have him start learning the ropes in the business now – and then reluctantly decided to have him admitted to another school, this time to the downmarket Ghosh Institution, where Bhola had been sent as a child.

  Somnath fell into worse company here. Reports of the boy spending most of his time with the futile, unemployed young men who sat on the stoops of houses, killing time chatting and smoking and ogling women, reached his parents’ ears. He seemed to be some sort of hero to this group of wastrels because of his prowess in football and cricket. He was indispensable when local teams were formed – Bhabanipur XI or South Calcutta Football Federation, teams of amateur enthusiasts who dreamed of joining at state- or even national-level. ‘Somu’s leg-spin is a killer,’ they said. ‘No goalie I know has been able to obstruct his penalty kicks,’ they said. But in this world talent did not lead, through intensely hard labour, to the slow scaling of the ladder of achievement; instead, it took the easy lateral route of chatter and talk, and found itself shrivelling more or less exactly at the point at which it had begun to bud. His local fame, confined to about fifty or, at most, a hundred people, pleased Charubala enough. ‘At least he’s good at something,’ she thought.