The Lives of Others

by Neel Mukherjee

  chik = Vernacular for choker.

  chur = A flat decorative bracelet of varying width, usually in filigree, but also in floral chasing; mainly a marriage ornament.

  crore = Ten million.

  dhaak = A kind of drum slung over the shoulders in a sling and played with sticks. The man who plays it is a dhaaki.

  eeesh = One of the most eloquent words in Bengali, it can express – depending on context and the tone in which it is said – disgust, distaste, wonder, regret, sympathy, revulsion, and no doubt a few more feelings.

  fatua = A short-sleeved, shorter version of the panjabi (q.v.).

  gamchha = The poor man’s towel, very thin, coarse, and invariably chequered red-and-white.

  ghaghra = Long, flared skirt, colourfully, often garishly, decorated, common in north-western parts of India.

  gherao = The practice of aggrieved labourers surrounding members of the management (or the owners) and creating a wall of humans through which the encircled persons could not escape until the workers’ demands were met.

  gola = Barn for storage of grain.

  hanshuli = A stiff sickle-shaped hinged necklace that derives its form from tribal Indian jewellery; the equivalent of a collar.

  harijan = Literally, ‘people of god’; this was Gandhi’s term for the class of people considered as untouchables in caste-based Indian society.

  hartal = Strike.

  hashua = A knife with a curved, crescent-shaped blade, not unlike a sickle.

  horbola = A professional performer who mimics all kinds of sounds, chiefly bird calls and animal cries. The horbola used to be a regular fixture in village fairs, but is now an endangered species.

  hyan = Yes; okay. Often an interjection standing for ‘What?’

  jah = Yet another eloquent ejaculation, this is an intensifier that can denote regret, contempt, dismissal or disbelief.

  jamdani = The most exclusive and expensive of Bengali muslin saris (or Dhaka muslins, as they are called), jamdanis feature a distinctive style of supplementary-weft work woven into the fabric.

  jhalmuri = A spicy snack made with puffed rice, finely-chopped onions, spices, peanuts, mustard oil, chillies etc.

  kaajol = Kohl.

  kaan = Literally ‘ear’, this is a formal, dressy genre of earring, which covers the entire ear, hence the name.

  kaash phul = The flowers of Saccharum spontaneum, a perennial grass, which grows up to three metres tall.

  kadam = Neolamarckia cadamba. A large deciduous tree, capable of growing over 30 metres tall, bearing the most amazing flowers during the monsoon, which resemble perfectly round, dusty-orange or yellow woollen balls. They are fragrant, too.

  kaliya = A gem from Bengali cuisine, this is a rich, fragrant, spiced fish or meat dish. The basic spicing is bay leaves, ground onions, ginger paste, yoghurt and Bengali garam masala (a mixture of equal amounts of cardamom, cloves and cinnamon).

  kankan = An elegant conical bangle of repetitive motifs, once obligatory for married women.

  katha = of a bigha (q.v.), so, in metric terms, 66.66 square metres.

  kendu = Diospyros melanoxylon. A deciduous tree whose leaves are dried, then used to make the outer wrapping of bidi (q.v.), the poor man’s cigarette.

  khemta = A type of dance. Derives its name from a particular rhythm structure. In Bengali culture the dance is associated with dissolute lifestyles.

  khichuri= A dish of rice and lentils cooked together with spices. The English word ‘kedgeree’ derives from this; the dish is some distance from the original.

  kirtan = A very Bengali stripe of devotional music in which the songs describe the acts of Krishna’s life. Listening to them uninterruptedly for any length of time requires particular tenacity or strength of character. However, most Tagore songs where the idiom of kirtan is used in the melody are beautiful.

  kota = Named after the original home of its manufacture in Rajasthan, this sari has an open weave of alternating cotton and silk threads.

  kunjo = A round earthen vessel for storing drinking water.

  lakh = Hundred thousand.

  lathi = A wooden stick, usually bamboo, used as a weapon.

  lungi = Cloth worn by men, wound around the waist, to cover the lower half of the body.

  madari = A class of travelling player.

  mahajan = Moneylender.

  mahua = Madhuca longifolia, a rapidly growing deciduous tree that can attain a height of up to 20 metres. It bears creamy-white flowers in dense clusters through most of April. The flowers are sweet and edible and have a distinctive smell. Pradip Krishen writes in his wonderful Trees of Delhi: ‘Arguably the most valuable of Indian trees because its flowers are a nutritive lifeline for millions of poor people. In season, the succulent flowers fall to the ground just before dawn. Deer, monkeys, wild pig, jackals and bears compete to gather them. A large tree bears up to 300 kg of flowers in a season. They are eaten raw or sun-dried and are distilled into a strong country spirit with a smoky, nutty flavour . . . The extremely hard, durable timber has a dark, reddish-brown heartwood, but is seldom used because the tree is too valuable to be felled.’

  mairi = A mildly vulgar swear-word.

  mallika = Jasminum sambac, also known as Arabian jasmine, and as bel in Bengali. A small, woody shrub that bears small, white, gorgeously perfumed flowers. Like all jasmines, it is powerfully indolic, with that characteristic back-of-the-throat rasp.

  manimela = Literally, ‘a fair or gathering of gems’. A kind of informal and local children’s club, with most neighbourhoods boasting a couple, where boys and girls of the area get together in the afternoons, after school, to sing, play, do light drills, practise an instrument, rehearse a play. A bit of a pious and goody-goody kind of outfit with sound intentions – that children don’t fall into bad or idle ways – at its heart.

  mantasha = A fitted gold cuff worn unaccompanied around the wrist.

  mashima = Aunty. A generic term used to address senior women not known to one. Also commonly used for friends’ mothers.

  mastaan= Hooligan.

  mela = Fair.

  mon (weight) = An old weight measure, anglicised to ‘maund’ in British India. The maund was first standardised in the Bengal Presidency in 1833, where it was set equal to 100 Troy pounds (or 82.28 lb). This standard spread throughout the British Raj. After Independence, one maund became exactly 37.3242 kilograms.

  moshai = Mr, but more respectful than that sounds in English. Probably from ‘monsieur’.

  muri = Puffed rice.

  orre = A more polite (and rather endearing way) of saying ‘Hey, you’, and not only to call someone.

  panchali = A melodically simple, droning, sometimes long piece of narrative song in rhyme.

  panchphoron = A five-spice mixture unique to Bengali cuisine. It consists of equal amounts of fenugreek, fennel, cumin, nigella and mustard seeds.

  panjabi = Bengali word for a kurta – a loose collarless shirt, coming down to just above the knees.

  pantua = A type of sweet. Cottage cheese and thickened milk-solids mixed together, flavoured with black cardamom, shaped into patties, deep-fried and finally soaked in sugar syrup. Sublime.

  papad = A spiced wafer made out of lentil flour. Usually served fried or, sometimes, grilled/toasted. Inexplicably (and wrongly) called ‘poppadum’ in Britain. Why?

  patta = Literally, leaf; in the context used, a piece of paper, title-deed.

  pui = A green vegetable, often called Malabar spinach, with waxy, shiny, rounded leaves and smooth stems, both edible. The stems have a slightly viscous texture when cooked. Usually prepared with potatoes and pumpkin and sometimes lifted to another plane by the addition of tiny shrimps. Only obtainable in Bengali homes, it is considered, wrongly, too simple and frugal to be served to guests.

  ratanchur = An elaborate ornament that covers the wrist, hand and all five fingers.

  sal = Shorea robusta, a hardwood tree that can grow up to 30 metres, with trunks as wide as 2–3 metres.
Its broad leaves, when dry, are used to make leaf plates and bowls.

  sandesh = Bengal’s signature sweet, made out of sweetened and flavoured ricotta-type cottage cheese. The varieties are legion.

  ser (weight) = One-fortieth of a mon (q.v.) or maund. In Raj India it was written as ‘seer’. One ser is just under 1 kg (exactly 933g).

  shala = A mild swear-word; it originally implied sexual relations with the addressee’s sister.

  shataranchi = A thick woven cotton rug, traditionally of many colours.

  shatta = A gambling game, played with cards.

  sheel = A large slab of flat stone used as a mortar to grind spices.

  shingara = Bengali word for samosa – tetrahedral parcels of pastry, stuffed, most commonly, with a potato filling and deep-fried.

  shiuli = Nyctanthes arbor-tristis. A deciduous bush or small tree that bears beautiful clusters of night-blooming, fragrant white flowers. The petals occur at the end of a small, brilliantly orange tube.

  shukto = Of the many jewels in the crown of Bengali cuisine, this surely must rank as one of the most prized – a bitter vegetable dish, made with bitter gourd, green papaya, green banana, sweet potato, drumstick (the long, ridged, stick-like fruit of Moringa oleifera; not chicken) and dried lentil croutons, that usually opens a multi-course meal. It is delicate and subtle and you get it only in Bengali homes.

  simul = Bombax ceiba, or red silk cotton, is a glorious deciduous tree, which stands bare in the winter, then explodes into deep-red or coral conflagrations in the springtime, while still leafless: the large flowers have five leathery, fleshy petals. The fruit is a large brown capsule that splits open in the early summer, dispersing masses of white silk cotton along with the seeds.

  sindoor = The ‘n’ is nasal. Vermilion powder worn by married Hindu women in the parting of their hair and, sometimes, as a decorative circle, in the centre of their forehead.

  sitabhog = A kind of white Bengali sweet. It resembles long-grained rice.

  sloka = Verse(s) of prayer.

  sraddha = The Hindu religious ceremony that is the culminating point of the obligatory period of mourning after the death of someone in the immediate family. It is supposed to release the soul of the dead to wherever it is that souls go after the last rites have been performed. As always with these things, it involves feeding of the masses.

  taal = Rhythm or beat.

  tagaa = A kind of ornament for the arm.

  tagar = Tabernaemontana divaricata is a pointless, overcultivated, straggly evergreen bush that bears small, white, pinwheel-shaped flowers. In Trees of Delhi, Pradip Krishen calls it ‘a downmarket jasmine’. The description cannot be bettered.

  tangail = A class of jamdani (q.v.) sari. Although jamdanis were traditionally woven by Muslims, Hindu weavers who moved during Partition from Tangail, now in Bangladesh, developed India’s modern jamdani industry. West Bengali jamdanis are often called Tangail jamdanis, and they typically have many buti (small, usually floral motifs, created as a repeat against a plain ground) woven throughout the field, often diagonally.

  tangi = A kind of (lethal) axe.

  tanpura = A long-necked plucked lute. Its body shape slightly resembles that of the sitar, although it has no frets – and the strings are played open. It has four or five (occasionally six) wire strings, which are plucked in sequence in a regular pattern to create a harmonic resonance on the basic note. It is exclusively an instrument of accompaniment, usually to a vocal recital.

  tashar = A type of ‘raw’ silk. The entry in Hobson-Jobson is ‘tussah, tusser’.

  toka = A wide-brimmed hat made of dried palm leaves.

  ufff = Most commonly an expression of irritation, this can be an intensifier in contexts that express admiration and even fear.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This book could not have been written without the generosity of the Free Word Centre and the Belgian literary organisation Het Beschrijf/Passa Porta, which gave me a six-week residency in the Passa Porta writers’ apartment in Brussels in autumn 2011. Passa Porta also gave me a crucial three weeks in the apartment in summer 2012. I am very grateful to them for their support.

  I would like to thank the following people for all their help and support:

  Penny Hoare.

  Peter Straus.

  Clara Farmer, Poppy Hampson.

  Suzanne Dean.

  Sudeep Chakravarti, JM Coetzee, Judy Corbalis, Mahasweta Devi, Jean Drèze, Damon Galgut, Grant Gillespie, Michelle de Kretser, Dominic Leggett, Vestal McIntyre, Alison Mercer, Anuradha Roy, Amartya Sen, Rose Tremain.

  Sreyashi Dastidar, Devashri Mukherjee, Tushita Patel, Deeptanil Ray.

  Sumanta Banerjee, Arpita Bhattacharjee, Krishnendu Bhattacharjee, Kate Bland, the late Satyesh Chakraborty, Swapan Chakraborty, Ashim ‘Kaka’ Chatterjee, Sukanta Chaudhuri, Supriya Chaudhuri, Soumitra Das, Kanchan Datta, Ilke Froyen, Anik Ghosh, Shreela Ghosh, Meru Gokhale, Mandy Greenfield, Durgapada Hajra, Jenny Hewson, Ieuan Hopkins, Ian Jack, Seema Jayachandran, Pradip Krishen, Udayan Mukherjee, Amiya Nayek, Basudeb Nayek, Susannah Otter, Rohini Pande, Nicci Praça, Ritwik Rao, Debdulal Ray, Saktidas Roy, Chiki Sarkar, Malabika Sarkar, Sudipto Sarkar, Sumit Sarkar, Tanika Sarkar, Ruth Warburton.

  Richard Elwes, Tim Gowers, Christian Lübbe.

  For giving me a home away from home: Anubha Das, Bulbul Mitra, Devashri & Udayan Mukherjee, Brinda Sirkar.

  PERMISSIONS

  Parts of the descriptions of saris in the ‘Glossary’ are from The Sari: Styles, Patterns, History, Techniques by Linda Lynton. © 1995 Thames & Hudson Ltd., London. Reprinted by kind permission of Thames & Hudson.

  Some of the entries on trees and flowers in the ‘Glossary’ are from Pradip Krishen’s Trees of Delhi (Dorling Kindersley: Delhi, 2006), by kind permission of the author.

  The lines from Daniel Kehlmann’s Measuring the World (Quercus, 2009), translated by Carol Brown Janeway, appear by kind permission of author, translator and Quercus Books.

  The sentence from James Salter’s Light Years (Penguin Modern Classics, 2007) is reproduced by kind permission of Penguin Books UK.

  The sentence from War and Peace, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, and published by Vintage Classics in 2008, appears by kind permission of Random House UK.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN: 9781448192182

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  Copyright © Neel Mukherjee 2014

  Neel Mukherjee has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  Map drawn by William Bragg. (This map is a representation only and makes no claims of authenticity or accuracy with respect to the external boundaries of the country.)

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, event or locales is entirely coincidential.

  First published in Great Britain in 2014 by

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  ISBN 9780701186296