Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

Who do you think they are? They are not beggars, and they are certainly not the worst-off in our country — they have the clothes on their backs and the physical ability to work, at least for now. They haven’t yet found a foothold in a slum, but the lucky ones among them will. A slum will offer them a roof made of sheet plastic, maybe of bundles of hay held together by wooden stakes to form a tent. They won’t always have to sleep in the open like this. But, in a few years, most of them will contract a disease — TB, cholera, dysentery, malaria — and die like animals. Do you know what happens to their dead? To take them to a crematorium would mean paying the cremation fee, registering the death. That means a death certificate and money; in fact, more money than they earn in a week. It means a name, an address, a next of kin, a date of birth. They have nothing. So they are slipped into the Hooghly in the dead of the night. There the corpses rot and bleach and bloat, wash up ashore, get half-eaten by dogs and foxes, rot on land for a while, then get pulled back into the water during high tide. . even in death their blighted lives won’t let go of them.

They come from the suburbs, the villages, the mofussils, to look for work in the big city. From Uluberia, Bansdroni, Ghutiarishwari, Medinipur, Birbhum, Lakshmikantapur, Canning. The lucky among them will become rickshaw-pullers, balloonwallas, streetside snack-sellers. The less lucky will dig ditches, carry bricks, sand, cement, stone chips on their heads on construction sites. Some will be reduced to begging. You may ask: why don’t they go back to where they came from, if this is what the city holds for them? I will answer with another question: do you know what life holds for them back home? We don’t see them, so we don’t think about them. But I have seen their lives, I have lived with them. For a while. I will tell you all about it.

But a small digression before that. You come from a lower-middle-class family from a small town. You’ve told me about the overstretched resources, the pinched lives, the relentless calculation of making ends meet going through your parents’ heads, the need to think long and hard, say, before you could be given five paise to spend on jhalmuri. You’ve talked about the look of fear in your parents’ faces when you came down with a cough or fever: where was the extra money for a doctor, to buy medicines, going to come from?

What did I know of such lives, sheltered, bourgeois boy that I was, living in the cushioned vacuum created by my grandfather’s temporary boom of minor-mode prosperity — four-storeyed house, cars, many servants? Nothing. Yes, I was a communist activist from my very first year in Presidency College, but there is a large gap between being an activist out of the idealism that comes from books, conversations, the fire of youth, and being one because you have lived through the depredations that life has thrown at you.

Last year, I witnessed riots outside a ration shop on Beniatola Lane on my way to college. Had you heard of food riots erupting everywhere in the city? Food prices rising like a baneful wind, no jobs, no prospects, no future — how could we not have heard the pervasive murmur outside our walls? And when the murmurs turned to shouts and slogans and angry processions and bus-burnings and violent demonstrations, did they impinge on our world at all? Yes, but as other people’s stories, as gossip, as tales told to fill the time.

One day on my way to college I had to get off the bus near Pataldanga Street because a huge procession was making its way down Harrison Road. ‘We want jobs, not diplomas!’ they shouted. Trying to avoid the big road where that giant, angry river in spate, a river of black heads, was inching its way, taking up all space, I started walking down side-streets. On Beniatola Lane there was another angry crowd, more shouting, furious tussling and stampeding. Occasionally, from that jostling clot, a man carrying a huge jute sack peeled off and tried to run away, hampered by the weight of his load. It took me a while to realise that a ration shop was being raided. The line between spectators and participants had been totally erased: anyone entering the street would have taken me, in the first few seconds, as part of the angry crowd too. Apparently the ration-shop owner had opened the shop, only to announce to the restive queue outside that he had no rice, kerosene or wheat to sell, only jaggery. Someone had shouted out that the shopkeeper was stockpiling staples to sell on the black market, and the idea had caught like a burr to soft wool. The people who had been waiting for hours every Thursday and Friday for over a month, only to go back home empty-handed, their food supplies depleted to practically nothing, had reached the end of their patience. A couple of local mastaans had leaped over the low gate in the front and started ransacking the shop. Others had joined in, distrustful of the mastaans, suspecting them of making off with the grains themselves to sell on the black market.

Ordinary, middle-class people, like you and me, scrabbling like dogs over food. How did we get to this?

Yes, as a student in Presidency College, I was ‘doing politics’, as the slightly shaming, slightly dirty expression would have it. I was, briefly, a member of the Students’ Federation, the student wing of the CPI(M), the Communist Party of India (the Marxist wing, as they like to think of themselves), and while I was their bright, short-lived star, I cut my teeth doing the usual. If posters had to be put up, if slogans had to be painted on walls, I provided copy (‘Exploited peoples all over the world are waking up today’, ‘Change the world, change yourself’, ‘Today is the day to burn like fire, to repay the debt of blood with blood’, ‘Poor, landless peasants have given their lives and blood to build this country. It’s our duty to repay that debt’). I decided who among us was going to work in which segment of the college or the city, I worked out the most favourable time to do it, safe from a possible crackdown by the police or Congress foot soldiers. If a procession or a sit-in needed to be organised, or a road-blockade or a bus-burning, I planned the route and logistics and exact manner of its execution, complete with fallback options, working out the possible weak points and allowing for those eventualities. There were class boycotts, and marches to the American Embassy to protest against the war in Vietnam, chanting, ‘Break and crush the black hand of American imperialism’ or ‘Your name, my name / Viet-nam, Viet-nam’. Another popular one was ‘Blood-bright Vietnam is Bengal’s other name’.

Coinciding with these standard issues of student politics there erupted the troubles in Presidency College over the expulsion of students from the Hindu Hostel. I was an active participant in the movement that rocked Presidency and genteel Bengali society in those six months in ’66 and ’67. Chucking a few young men out of the Hindu Hostel seems like such a small stone to have caused such endless ripples. The Food Revolution agitations in the city in ‘66 morphed seamlessly into this front of our war: the gherao of the college Principal, the subsequent lathi-charge by the police against the students standing guard at the gate of the college (since the police had no right to enter), the arrest of 150 of them, the angry ransacking of the science laboratory by the agitating students. Yes, I was part of the group that shut down all of Calcutta University for one and a half months and Presidency College for four. Unprecedented, this. All of these events, or their telling as stories, seem just a spark now, a tiny one; in time that spark will appear even tinier, dimmer. The blaze it lit, however, will far outlive the originary ignition.

I played a similar role here too, but with a difference, as you’ll see. All our actions, initially, were under the aegis of the CPI(M). I devised plans to get around Section 144, under which all of College Street had been placed during that period, meaning that the police could arrest you if they didn’t like your face. How to avoid them during processions? If they were stationed on Harrison Road and near the Medical College, I decided that going down College Street in one big crowd wouldn’t do. So the marchers were divided into two groups: one would start from the gate of Hare School, the other from College Square. If one set was obstructed by the police on this side, then the other could proceed past Eden Hostel towards Colutolla.