Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

It all went horribly wrong.

Because the policeman on guard was dozing in his chair we thought we’d creep up on him and get him first: either finish him off or use him as a hostage. Ashu, Dipankar and I were moving very carefully for a frontal attack — Dhiren and Debashish, both in police uniform, were approaching the back of the school from the village for a rear attack — but we knew that we couldn’t nab him. There was too much open ground to cover and we would be exposed on all sides. I was surprised that no one was looking out of the first-floor windows at regular intervals. I hoped we were not visible if they did decide to scrutinise the surrounding darkness periodically. There was a bad feeling looping inside me, something coiled and heavy, taking in my heart and stomach. It was not the mixture of fear, exhilaration and anger that I had felt during the earlier actions. This one was dull, blunted, something that weighed me down and pushed me towards a kind of lethargy.

A dog, which had been asleep and making tiny squealing noises in its dream, woke up and started sniffing the air. Then everything happened together, so that writing it down as a string of events, one after the other, somehow falsifies the reality and the experience of it. The dog stood up and began to bark. The man started, woke up and, in the time that he took to work out that the dog had reason to be barking, all three of us were upon him. Ashu drove the tangi straight through his chest and I shot the dog, both at the same time. There was an explosion — clearly either Dhiren or Debashish had lobbed a grenade into the building — then another, followed rapidly by the sound of shots and men shouting. We crouched low and waited for someone to come out of the front.

The sound of confusion from the back of the building had reached a peak now. We couldn’t make out a word. The shooting continued, but there were no further explosions. This could only mean one thing: that they had got Dhiren and Debashish. Between them, they had ten bombs. We could see the light from the flames where something had caught fire. As Ashu was ridding the dead guard of his bayonet, two men charged out. One instantly bayoneted Ashu through his stomach. Before they could act further, Dipankar and I let out a roar and hurled two, three, four grenades into the building behind the men. We got one of the men on his thigh with a tangi while the other ran off sideways, presumably to get more men, now that he had seen only two of us. The building was burning. There was nothing to do except flee into the forest.

We ran in short zigzags, as we had been taught. Then we heard the sound of two more explosions behind us. At least one of them was alive! I expected to be shot at as we were escaping, but nothing; the soldiers were concentrating on bombs being hurled at them. Which meant that Dhiren and Debashish’s lives were going to be the price for ours, unless we were caught too.

I was panting so much that I thought I was going to have a heart attack. Once inside the brush, the running got difficult; we were nearing dense cover.

Dipankar’s words came out in small bursts, almost incomprehensible — Not towards Belpahari, no. Bihar. Bihar. Giridih, we’ll try Giridih, not very far. . My uncle, we could. .

— Can you lead?

They did not have enough numbers to mount a search in the forest, not that night, so we had to get out before they called up more troops and surrounded the forest, locking us in there with no hope of escape.

INCREASINGLY NOWADAYS PRAFULLANATH finds himself dividing to become two persons. One of those detaches and watches the old, nearly crippled, broken fool lying on his high bed, sometimes even unable to wipe the drool threading out from the corner of his slack mouth. It has not always been like this. The feeling of doubleness, of being a spectator in his own life, is new. What does one do with one’s own life but live it? Now, to watch what little there is left of it from the sidelines makes Prafullanath wonder — has he stopped living? If there are two of him, as he so strongly feels, which is the real he: the one who watches or the one who is embodied, on the bed, afflicted by the needles and rods of gout, by the creeping solidification of arthritis, by the capricious fluctuations of blood sugar and, reigning above, the omnipotent emperor of them all, the deadly, yet silent heart disease?

He can tell from the muffled noises that the final preparations are under way for Baishakhi’s wedding. She is the first of his grandchildren to get married and he will be lucky to be supported in a chair and wheeled out for a few minutes before being sent off to bed again. Both families will do a token obeisance to him as head of the family, blessings and all that rubbish, then will be relieved to carry on with the real business of celebration, away from his orbit of illness and senescence. No full-blown participation for him. Besides, what is there to participate in? It is not as if this wedding, in this falling time, is going to compare with the grand three-day events, loud with people and music, glittering with gems and wealth and opulence, that he had arranged for each of his sons. Well, for most of them, anyway. At each of those weddings he had insisted on a small projecting enclosure, much like a miniature balcony, to be constructed above the doorway for the musicians to sit in, so that guests could be welcomed with shehnai-music. At Adi’s wedding the terrace where the guests had dined had been wrapped in maroon velvet, and the maroon-velvet carpets on the stairs leading to it sprinkled with rose petals and rosewater. For Priyo, Prafullanath had had fifty-lamp chandeliers installed in every room. The finest caterers, four fish courses and three meat, and five types of sweets at the banquets — these were the luxuries to remind you that you had worked hard to get here, a private treat to yourself and to the sons who were going to carry on your line.

But something about that phrase ‘private treat’ brings on an anxious confusion. . some. . some search for an answering image that will explain this sudden unease but he can grasp at nothing nothing except for the idea of a sharp edge or maybe an image could that be an image of a sharp a sharp a sharp something and then blood. . oh god, it is best not to go there so he shuts that bad window because he has been warned by his doctor not to dwell on things that make him anxious or unhappy. But he has now lost the bookmark showing where he was before the intensification in his heartbeat began and cannot move back or forward from the bad thing that has cast its shadow over him but refuses to show itself.

The clatter of crockery, the busy feet up and down the stairs, electricians and decorators and catering staff and servants hollering and talking, children shouting, women chattering — does he hear it all or does he imagine them happening outside his door? One generation builds, the next generation consumes it to nothing; that is the abiding truth of life. That is the abiding law of Bengali life. Look at the Marwaris; they come from villages in Rajasthan, stick together, work together and build family empires in business that subsequent generations consolidate. Their wealth, power, dominion — everything expands. They buy up everything and keep it in their family concern because they know that the family is going to be the driving power, the unit of cohesion and commercial force. In his life, his family has been the eroding power: he built, his sons ate. His heart races again. He has exchanged his earlier bad place for yet another, as if each square on the snakes-and-ladders board he is traversing has the head of a snake on it.

Then the biggest head appears, its flickering forked tongue reaching out over several squares to get him. Those words again, those words that could have only been said into the darkness, not when light made faces and expressions perceptible, when one had to look at people to talk to them. How like a child’s terror it had been, a child admitting a misdeed to a savagely strict parent, that same sweatiness under questioning, that identical trembling and pummelling in the chest, as he spoke those shameful emasculating words to the darkness in the room, to the walls of the mosquito net, those words fearfully testing what Charubala thought of giving up some of her gold to. . to. . to help them out after all it was not for his own benefit but for the good of all of them and maybe it was all a temporary arrangement these switchbacks happened in any business and when times were good again just round the corner there would be restitution he knew there would. All the while a childish superstition tugging away like a stealth current under the churn of his words and thoughts — someone who gave something and demanded it back was reborn as a dog in Kalighat crematorium. Worse still, the foggy wraith from an early chapter of his life: Jyotish Pal crumbling down while telling him of that great unthinkable, selling off his wife’s jewellery to keep rack and ruin at bay, and he, Prafullanath, so moved by it that he had helped his friend with money so that he could hold on to his store on Harrison Road. He has now become what he was most terrified of.