Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

All this talk of Santhals — I suppose I keep skirting around the issue that’s uppermost in both our minds. Does the word ‘Santhal’ make you quail? Still? Every time I use the word I hesitate, thinking of what kind of reaction it’ll spark in you, reading it. And I’m also conscious of the fact that I’m not very far from the Chhotanagpur Plateau area, where Chhoto-kaka died: it’s only a short hop away across the border into Bihar. Our Santhal friends, while they cannot possibly be related to the Santhals Chhoto-kaka and his friends encountered all those years ago, must be part of the lateral spread of the same people. I remember a story from childhood in which they were referred to as ‘people of the red soil’. The image stayed with me, dormant, until it germinated when I first came to these parts and saw those words in my memory given life and reality in the world.

Is it fanciful of me, do you think, to imagine the reason for the colour of the earth of this region — that it is red with the blood of its exploited people? Do you remember a story you told me when I was little (‘prancing around in silk dhoti and silk panjabi’, as you put it, on the day of your wedding)? Chhoto-kaka had just died and you had had to give up eating meat and fish and eggs, when I noticed one day that there seemed to be a sanction on eating mushur dal, red split lentils, as well? (I’ve never asked you this before, but I must now: all these intricate and punishing sumptuary laws, were they imposed on you by my grandmother? Or did you invite them upon yourself?) Yes, the innocent, obviously and purely vegetarian red split lentils — what wrong had they done? You explained that a god had once fought an evil demon above a plantation of pulses, and the god had slain the demon and the demon’s blood had stained the grain indelibly. This was the origin of red split lentils, in bloodshed, and so it was not as strictly vegetarian as I had assumed it to be, you said; there were things that a boy, regardless of his knowledge of stories about the Buddha, didn’t know, so there.

I was eleven years old at the time and you were eighteen.

The night was very cold. I could see torn scraps of the black night sky, almost smoky and milky with the dense scatter of stars, through the gaps in the tops of the trees, but no longer your face or your name; I couldn’t see a stretch of the sky big enough for that. When it wasn’t the cold that kept me awake, it was the continual sounds of the forest, the rustling and scraping and murmuring, as if a furiously busy world, unseen by the human eye, was going about its stealthy activity. Often, when the sounds got a bit louder or more sustained, I thought it was the escaped policeman who had come to look for us, to slaughter us in our sleep. And whenever I shut my eyes I could see Samir’s in death, open, unseeing, the whites disproportionately larger than the pupils.

Before I fell asleep I had this thought: forests, wherever available, could be profitably used for the purposes of our revolution. Our armies — no longer two or three or five guerrillas — could hide there; food, water and other supplies, including an advance warning system, could be provided by the inhabitants of whichever villages the forest skirted; the forests could be taken over completely and become no-go zones for the state and its organs of repression. . Very quickly, in my mind, the dream became swollen to something almost real. To deal with our future armies they would have to cut down entire forests, and how were they going to do that? I fell asleep to the imagining of an imminent new dawn.

Next day, Dipankar and I set out for Majgeria. We took the pistol with us. It was just a precaution — Dipankar swore blind that the journey was going to be entirely through the forests, so we were never going to be in a position to be discovered.

Before we left, Babu handed me a bundle of chhatu and what looked like a cloth side-bag.

Babu said — That friend of yours, that babu who. . who didn’t return, it’s his. I’m giving it back to you.

I didn’t know why I took so long to recognise Samir’s bag. His meagre belongings were in it: a short-sleeved shirt, musky with his odour; a pair of pyjamas; a box of 777 matches; a copy of The Little Red Book, almost every single line underscored in pencil and dot-pen, with notes written in the margins. There was a Collected Poems of Jibanananda Das, with lines from some poems marked. The book fell open at the poem ‘Wristwatch’; I noticed he had glossed a difficult word in it — he had underlined it and written ‘lust’ in the margin. I too hadn’t known the meaning of that word. There was a notebook too. My hands were shaking as I swiftly thumbed through the pages: drafts of poems that blurred and then became illegible because of my tears.

Dipankar and I stopped to eat from our bundle of chhatu. It was late afternoon. I felt tired and my eyes kept closing. From far away came the sound of the whistle, long and melancholy and pleading, of a train. I didn’t know why, but the lonely sound had sleepiness associated with it, and the promise of an untethering, as if the sleep it induced would liberate me from the here and now and set me afloat on some infinite ocean of peace and silence and calm.

My eyelids grew heavier. Dipankar must have seen me nodding off, so he tried to engage me in conversation. He too had heard the train’s whistle. He asked — What train do you think that is?

— Don’t know, I mumbled.

— How far do you think the nearest railway track is?

— No idea.

— Near Gidhni or Tatanagar and Jamshedpur, no? Do you think the sound’s coming from that far away? Impossible.

— Who knows?

— I should know, I think it’s the train route I used to go down as a child to visit a distant uncle in Giridih every year during the puja holidays. The uncle’s still alive, but we haven’t been for so many years. .

He seemed almost to be talking to himself. I felt unmoored from the ground I was sitting on, about to levitate.

Suddenly Dipankar’s momentary lull of introspection snapped and he turned his attention to me — You’re almost asleep. We need to get going. Come on, come on.

It wouldn’t do to nod off now, so I forced myself to make conversation.

— I’ve heard Giridih is a nice place.

He said — Yes, it is. Clean, and a nice dryness to the air. I loved it as a child. There are little hills dotted around the place. The city boy in me found that exciting. There are waterfalls and little streams and forests. It’s very pretty. And quiet. Do you want to come with me one day?

— That would be nice, but when?

— I would say as a holiday from all this, but maybe it’s more likely that we’ll need to go there to hide. Kharagpur, Jhargram, all the Calcutta stations, they’re bristling with policemen. They’re watching the trains and the stations in this area like hawks.

The thought of hiding in a calm, pretty corner of Bihar, away from all this action, was so appealing that my eyes began to droop again. A brown kite was wheeling above us, its squealing whinny working on me like the far-away train whistle.

Dipankar noticed and gamely made another attempt to engage my interest. He said — Let me tell you an interesting thing about railway tracks. Did you know about fishplates? They’re metal bars that are bolted to the ends of tracks to make them one and continuous.

Only an engineer would think he could keep someone awake by talking about engineering. Silly, innocent man.

All I wanted to do was find out about Kanu and Bijli, but I couldn’t risk being seen walking around in the familiar village even though the gapless dark of the rural night had long fallen. It was Dipankar who would have to be my eyes and ears in Majgeria. I had been repeating to him the detailed directions to identify Kanu’s hut so often that he asked me to shut up. He could tell I was on edge; I was behaving like a nervous mother seeing her son off to battle.