The Lives of Others

by Neel Mukherjee

  At this point a huge commotion began outside. It came from the back of the house, drowning out the racket the stray dogs were making at the front. I ordered Shankar and Samir to search the room and the verandah and ran to the back through two rooms, both empty. I couldn’t see what was happening in the dark, but there were shouts of – Beat the ***! Beat the ***! (unspeakable abuse, not for your ears) and there were far too many people. I couldn’t make out how many, but many more than the four from our squad. Before I could understand how foolish it was to make myself known (they could be paid guards, neighbours trying to fight us, people otherwise in the pay of or obliged to Bankim, even the police), I shouted – What’s going on down there? What’s happening?

  Dhiren answered – Come down. We’ve caught the ***.

  My head reeled. Who were all these people then? If our squad was under attack, how come Dhiren was in any position to reply? Wouldn’t he be fighting, or running away, hiding?

  The action was happening in the courtyard, spilling out into the adjoining land. Two brands had been lit and in the meagre, flickering light of these, I began to discern what was going on. A tight circle of fourteen or sixteen men, all holding some kind of weapon, had surrounded Bankim, who was now a corpse. He looked like a bulging sack of grain that had fallen out of the back of a truck. There were two spears through him, one through his neck, another through his shoulder and upper chest.

  – Shala was trying to escape around the back; poor *** didn’t know we were waiting for him in the dark. Trying to escape leaving the women and children to face the music. Didn’t have a chance, the dog. We didn’t even let him finish his miserable begging – Forgive me, forgive me, I’ve done a great wrong, it’ll never happen again, forgive me, I’m falling at your feet – but beat him down to the ground and then whack, whack, two javelins straight into him. All over.

  Dhiren was at my side, saying – The noise brought other farmers over. They came to help us out. Look, they have lathis and tangis and spears . . .

  I felt dizzy. Was this true? Had the unthinkable, something we hadn’t dared hope for, something that was the acme of all our striving and actions, had that come to pass with such ease, without us being even aware of it?

  I was still in shock. My heart was rattling, but it was a different kind of motion and sensation now, much closer to those moments of intense joy of childhood. I wanted to shout and embrace everyone and tell the whole world that revolting against oppressors was the natural state of man.

  There were two golas in the courtyard, one much larger than the other. The smaller one housed seed-paddy, the larger husked rice – for consumption, or selling, or for the other purposes to which it was unfailingly put: smuggling, lending it to extort interest or bind the farmer into ever greater ties from which he would never be able to free himself. The grain that gave life and took it away too.

  I said to Dhiren and Kanu – Distribute everything. Equal amounts to all.

  In the main bedroom, which Samir and Shankar had turned upside down, Bankim’s family was still cowering. I whispered to Samir – Good news.

  Bankim’s wife cried out – Please let us go, spare us, spare the little children, they’ve done no wrong . . .

  I took an instant decision not to tell her about her husband. She would find out soon enough.

  I rapped out – Shut up or I’ll slit your throat. And your children’s. Where’s all the money and jewellery? Where?

  She quaked and wept, a ham actress in a bad film. Even in this moment of great danger, faced with such a threat, she was reluctant to reveal the whereabouts of her material possessions. For a second I toyed with the idea of giving her a few blows with a lathi, but instead I got Samir to try out the keys on the huge wooden almirah in the room. Everything of any value was bound to be in there. It took some time, but we got there in the end: 3,000 rupees in cash, a fair amount of jewellery, no guns . . . but that wasn’t what I was looking for.

  – Listen, take all that stuff, everything you can get your hands on. But look for documents: loan documents, stamp paper, lease deeds, deeds of sale . . .

  They were not in the almirah. Samir said – We turned up a wooden box. It was on the verandah, with a pillow on it, pretending to be a seat. Then I noticed it had a keyhole and hinges . . .

  We broke open the box. There was no time to fiddle around with keys. Yes, a loose stack of papers, some with revenue stamps on them, some with thumb imprints.

  We took it down to the courtyard and set the whole thing on fire. The papers in it caught instantly. The box took its own time, but eventually it too went the way of the documents.

  The farmers downstairs were busy filling sacks and clothes and gamchhas with grain from the storage rooms.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  MADAN TIMED IT well. A month after he sacked the maid Somu had seduced, he came to Charubala with his petition.

  ‘Ma, my son is growing up. He’s a year younger than Chhoto-babu. It’s not a good idea to keep him in the village any longer.’

  ‘Why, what’s wrong with your village?’ Charubala asked.

  ‘There are no jobs to be had. Everyone says that now that the sahebs have gone, they are giving jobs in the big cities to our own countrymen.’

  ‘Yes, everyone says it, so you believe it. What sort of a naïve man are you? So, what will your son do? Be a cook like you? I can ask around.’

  ‘No, Ma, not a cook. I was thinking of some kind of a job in Calcutta, like an electrical shop . . .’

  ‘Electrical shop?’ Charubala seemed surprised. ‘How on earth are we going to find him an electrical shop? And what do you mean: working in someone else’s shop or setting up his own?’

  ‘No, no, not his own,’ Madan replied hastily. ‘Where’s the money for that? But if Baba can find him something – he knows so many people . . .’

  ‘So talk to Baba then. You see him every day, you live in the same house. What’s the big deal?’

  Madan looked abashed. ‘No, Ma. If you mentioned it first to him . . . then maybe . . .’

  ‘Ah, I see,’ she said. Now that she understood what it was Madan had in mind, it became easier for her to talk it through with him.

  ‘Yes, of course, I shall mention it. Have you given much thought to what it is that you want your son to do? He’s only sixteen years old. Will he finish school this year?’

  ‘Yes, Ma, this year. He can read and write. If something were to come up . . . If something could be found in one of Baba’s mills or factories . . .’

  More and more of the picture was beginning to get illuminated for Charubala. Yes, what a good idea, why had she not thought of it herself? This would be a good thing for Madan; she would make it her business to intercede. She performed a rapid calculation in her head, a piece of arithmetic that she has done without thinking an uncountable number of times over the years; a number, which never failed to amaze her despite its familiar and clockwork changeability, presented itself at the end of the process: next year Madan will have been with them for thirty years.

  When Charubala’s children were grown-up she used to remark frequently, ‘It is Madan who has raised them, on his lap and his back.’ Prafullanath and Charubala guessed Madan was about ten years old – his birth was not registered, so neither he nor his family knew his exact year of birth – when he started working for them in 1922, while they still lived in Baubazar. Adinath had just turned one and was crawling everywhere on his hands and knees, trying to lift himself up and start walking, putting every bit of rubbish he chanced upon into his mouth first. Madan had come from a tiny village in Nuapada in the province of Bihar and Orissa, led by his uncle, who was the cook in a neighbour’s house. He began as the general dogsbody, helping Charubala around the house: he ran errands, swept and cleaned the rooms, did the odd task that was required of him at any given moment – carrying the bags of shopping in from the car, fetching a glass of water, making tea, bringing food from the kitchen to the table, moving a chair; he was the beck-and-call
boy of the house. He looked after the children for short periods when Charubala was engaged in other things. He picked them up and carried them around, singing to them and rocking them if they grizzled or cried. ‘Careful, careful,’ Charubala laughed. ‘You’re leaning sideways under the weight of the child, you’re hardly any bigger than him.’ Like Prafullanath and Charubala’s children, he too called them ‘Baba’ and ‘Ma’.

  Charubala, whether in shrewd speculation about the future or out of the compassion in her soul, also started giving the illiterate young boy, a year or two after he came to them, lessons in Bengali and basic arithmetic.

  Prafullanath teased her, ‘Good plan. When he’s totally competent, I shall give him a job at the office and you’ll have to find another servant.’

  ‘Stop joking,’ she said. ‘I have my misgivings: I hear so many stories of people educating their servants and then the upstarts leave their homes and go and get a better job elsewhere.’

  Still, Charubala managed to bury her qualms and be generous; she felt a tug in her heart when she saw the motherless boy’s shrunken little face and rickety arms and legs. Slate and chalk were bought for him and she wrote out the Bengali vowels and consonants on the slate and asked him to trace his chalk over each of those at least a dozen times, while saying aloud the sound of the letter at each repetition. They progressed slowly to Barna Parichay and numbers, elementary addition and subtraction, then to multiplication and division. Madan was given paper and pencil, but he struggled to find the time to do his lessons in the erratic and increasingly rare lulls between his duties. Sometimes he tried to put in an hour at night, after everyone had gone to bed, but failed to keep his eyes open after the first ten minutes. He tried to make use of the afternoons, when everyone had a nap and he had his first uninterrupted break for the day.

  ‘Orre, where’s Chhaya gone? See if you can find her,’ a cry would reach him. Or ‘Where’s Bhola? I don’t see him. Quick, quick, he’s learning how to climb the stairs, see that he doesn’t go up to the roof.’ Any call or order without a name was for him to answer. It was this fragmented miscellany of tasks that ate into his studies. The enthusiasm and desire to learn, always there, saw him through. Despite the fitful application, Madan could read passably well and even write by the time Adi and Priyo were initiated into the ‘chalk-in-hand’ ceremony, although his spelling was parlous and his letters uneven, crooked, amateurish. When Bhola reached school-going age – they were ensconced in Bhabanipur by that time – Madan was not just functionally literate but fluent; he read the books the boys read: the illustrated children’s Ramayana and Mahabharata by Upendrakishore, Tagore’s Katha o Kahini. He even started on English, but never progressed much beyond the alphabet and ‘cat’, ‘bat’, ‘sat’; lack of guidance and time, increasing responsibilities, a whole household on his shoulders, all put paid to that ambition.

  By now, Madan’s Oriya accent had been almost totally leached out of his Bengali. But when he was younger, and for quite a few years after the family moved to Bhabanipur, Charubala and Adi and Priyo loved to poke fun gently at his accent; it was one of their occasional and reliable entertainments at home. It had taken him a while to work out why they so frequently asked him to sing songs that he had picked up in his village.

  ‘Go on, Madan, sing that one you sang last week, the wedding one,’ they implored.

  The innocent seventeen-year-old, in the clutch of shyness, demurred but ultimately had to oblige. ‘Girl’s wedding, girl’s wedding / Everyone is crying silently on the wedding day / Their eyes are streaming with tears,’ he sang, his voice nasal, the melody plangent, wailing at regular intervals, and oddly pitched, the lyrics impenetrable, ‘The wedding sari was chosen after looking at fourteen markets / It was one hand long, wide from thumb to little finger/The bride wore it in pleats.’

  At the Oriya expression for pleating, kunchi-kanchi, so primitive to their refined Bengali ears, Charubala and Adi collapsed, shuddering uncontrollably with laughter.

  Priyo, all of seven years old, was too young to know what was going on, but he could read that it was ridicule, albeit affectionate, that was making his mother and Dada double up.

  ‘Did you then “doonce” at the wedding?’ Adi asked, trying, and failing, to keep a straight face as he picked out Madan-da’s Oriya inflection of the word ‘dance’. ‘Come on, do a doonce for us.’

  Priyo pranced about, addressing him as ‘Udey’, the pejorative term for people from Madan-da’s province, and mocking, ‘Udey babu, udey babu, doonce-u for us-u.’

  Madan knew that he was being laughed at and felt an inchoate sense of humiliation, which did not, could not, grow, because they were his masters who were making fun of him. What could he do, except join in with them, laughing along aimlessly, a bit foolishly, with their more pointed laughter directed at him? But he really did not mind; he knew he had come from a backward village; these were city people, born and bred, they knew better; he too laughed at his backward ways of speaking.

  Charubala put Madan’s preternatural affinity for cooking down to his Oriya origins. She taught him the basics – which spices went with which dal; that hilsa was never cooked with onions, ginger and garlic; shukto was flavoured only with mustard seeds and ginger – and he consolidated that with an ease and talent that showed he had the real ‘cook’s hand’. He never burned the rice, oversalted or undersalted the food, made the staple fish stew too watery. Charubala did not have to guide him through every single step of a dish; a brief set of instructions before he began was sufficient. He did not make any mistakes or forget the recipe when he prepared the dish the next time. He introduced them to new tastes, new dishes that he picked up from his more experienced uncle or brought back, when he was older, from his annual trip back to his village; they were things unfamiliar to the Bengali palate.

  Charubala tasted the dal at lunch one day and said, ‘What’s this? I don’t think I ever taught you to make this.’

  Madan, nervous, almost hiding behind the door, answered, ‘No, Ma, this is biri dali.’

  ‘Oh, you mean biuli-r dal. It’s delicious,’ she exclaimed. ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I toasted it first,’ he said shyly, ‘then I fried panchphoron and chopped garlic and whole dried red chillies in mustard oil and added it to the boiled lentils.’

  ‘I’ve never had it before. Is this from your “country”? You must cook this more often for us.’

  It became known as ‘Madan’s dal’. Over time, things came to be called ‘Madan’s stem-vegetable fry’ or ‘Madan’s fish’ (fish cooked with curry leaves and mustard and garlic paste with lime juice added right at the end, an unconservative way of cooking something, over which Bengalis thought they had a monopoly of inventiveness).

  He even made thrift inventive. After squeezing out the milk from grated coconut, instead of throwing away the grounds, he mixed them with sugar and cardamom powder and set them in lightly oiled stone moulds in the shape of fish or abstract patterns. He fried up the gills and fins and bones of fish with garlic and chilli powder; this became so popular with the servants that Charubala heard of it, tasted it herself and became an instant convert. In later years Chhaya, as a young girl of twelve, developed a mild addiction to it. Madan firmly set his signature to dishes that one could get only in 22/6: fritters of mutton fat served during teatime at 6 p.m.; banana-flower croquettes; stems and buds of pui cooked with tiny whitebait. Charubala sent up thanks for his Oriya blood and never forgot how lucky she had been in finding Madan. Neighbours told her, only half-joking, ‘We’ll steal him from you one of these days . . .’

  Because Madan came to run this vital segment of the household – grocery shopping, cooking, suggesting what should be served to guests or at events such as birthdays and pujas and celebrations – he became not only indispensable but also, over time, someone whose say on certain domestic matters carried some weight, whose opinion was frequently consulted. For example, the maids who did all the menial jobs in the kitchen – cutting vegetables
, cleaning and gutting fish, doing the washing-up – were engaged only after they had been approved by Madan. Even the maids-of-all-work, responsible for the laundry and sweeping and swabbing the floors, were hired with Madan’s consent. In time, as the household grew and more servants had to be engaged, Madan came to be a sort of housekeeper in charge of all of them.

  As if this level of correspondence with culinary matters – and, later, the business of domestic staff arrangements – were not enough to make Madan a great catch, there was his wonderful way with the children. As with the kitchen matters, Charubala found him such a safe pair of hands that she left a substantial part of the childcare to him. Madan would be asked to keep an eye on the crawling babies or the unsteadily walking children – for several years Priyo, Chayya and Bhola formed one continuum of that – so that they did not fall, bang their heads, injure themselves or put dangerous things in their mouths. He would be asked to distract them when they refused to eat. Before long, he was asked to spoon food into their mouths as well. He helped Charubala when she bathed, dried and put talcum powder on them before easing them into their clothes. In winter, he massaged them with mustard oil, left out to warm in the sun, before they had their baths. When the four-year-old Bhola tried to pick up a caterpillar from the trunk of the guava tree in the garden, it was Madan who comforted the bawling child and extracted the barbs, one by one, from his forefinger and thumb. When the children were naughty or recalcitrant, and distracting or bribing with toys and games and goodies did not work, Madan tamed them with the thrill of fear.

  ‘Don’t go near the guava tree after dark. You see those big branches’ – here he pointed out the limbs of the tree – ‘those are actually the legs of the she-ghost who lives there. At night the branches move in the wind, but they are really her legs and hands that are moving, beckoning naughty children, so that she can wring their necks and drink their blood.’