Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

There was a short interim when Prafullanath was prepared to rehire the same workforce in its entirety, even pay them their salaries for the duration of the lockout, if they were willing to drop their intransigent demand for the reinstatement of Sujan Hazra, the man who had been dismissed after he had lost his hand in an accident. The issue became circular and, for Prafullanath, it was a matter of honour not to capitulate; he had made enough concessions. So this new tune, of a direct meeting with the man they considered to be the central nervous system of all their woes, was not born out of a mood for compromise and conciliation. That would be like a lion lying down with a lamb although, in Priyo’s mind, the roles of predator and prey kept shifting. He had the presentiment of something coiled and dangerous, something that could only end in terrible things, and said as much to his father.

‘I have a better business head than you,’ Prafullanath had shot back. ‘In ten years you and your brothers have turned to dust what I built up from nothing. Now you’re asking me to pay heed to your old woman’s fears?’

This was of a piece with Prafullanath’s recent attitude towards all his sons, so Priyo had merely clenched his teeth and wished, for more than a fleeting moment, that serious ill would really befall his father during the confrontation.

And so it had.

Red pennants, bearing the sickle-and-hammer insignia, planted for a good half a mile along the stretch of road leading to the factory, squashed any residual doubt that this was an isolated incident at one factory. When the request for some policemen to escort them had been turned down, Prafullanath had insisted on having a carload of paid local Congress goons to accompany them in case the laid-off workers got violent.

‘The CPI(M) will have planted anti-social elements among the picketing workers there. We’ll be murdered without protection,’ Prafullanath had said.

‘But only the police can deter them. They’ll know you’ve come looking for mischief, that you want confrontation, if you turn up with the neighbourhood tough guys,’ Adi had argued. ‘Then there will certainly be violence. Whereas now there’s only a very slight possibility.’

Adi had prevailed, but it took only the sight of the little flags fluttering in the breeze to unnerve him. Had he made a mistake? What if something happened? They wouldn’t dare, would they? It’s one thing to gherao a manager, but to rough-handle the owning family? No, no, that couldn’t be; they had the invisible aura of protection that royalty and god-men had; they couldn’t be touched.

They had kept their visit secret for several reasons: chiefly, they wanted to catch Dulal off-guard, but equally important was their fear of a crowd of more than 200 people barring their way, shouting slogans, trying to intimidate them with sheer volume of noise, or standing on the margins, silently watching them with a kind of simmering and vengeful alertness, waiting for a signal to be let loose.

But there was only a handful of people squatting outside, six or seven at the most. The rusty red iron gate of Ghosh Paper Mill now had more locks and chains than its security had ever needed; that shameful, mocking excess marked its descent into a more permanent state of closure. Posters obscured almost its entire surface. There was no GHOSH PAPER MILL, painted in an arch, followed by the smaller BALI, DISTT. HOOGHLY, to be seen, but instead: We’re fighting for unfairly dismissed Sujan, we’ll keep fighting; Owners, answer why you shut down a profit-making factory! The pending salaries of the fired workers must be paid without delay; Workers of the world, unite , among scores of others.

The presence of a car outside the gates seemed to rouse the men. Adi rolled down a back-window, pushed his head out and asked, ‘Is Dulal here?’

He thought he would be recognised instantly, but clearly these stragglers didn’t know who he was.

‘Dulal-da’s not here. Who are you?’ a man asked.

Before Adi could answer, Prafullanath intervened. From the front seat he said haughtily, ‘I’m Prafullanath Ghosh, the owner of this mill. Bring Dulal.’

In the back, his sons, expecting contempt and defiance, clenched themselves, but were wrong-footed by that ineradicable tendency towards the bent knee in the labourer-class of people. The man bowed his head, lifted up his joined hands, but before he could settle into full servility, Prafullanath got out of the car and repeated, ‘Send for Dulal. Tell him Prafulla Ghosh has come to see him.’

Priyo croaked, ‘Baba, what are you doing? Have you lost your mind?’

The man ran off, whispered with the others, then came back to the car and said, ‘It won’t be possible to get hold of Dulal-da now. He’s not around. What do you want? Maybe someone else. .’

Prafullanath cut him short with, ‘What do you mean by “not around”? Where is he then?’ The hauteur was now mixed with irritation.

Two men left the symbolic picket and started making their way across the fields in the direction of the town.

The sun climbed the sky. Prafullanath, a bent, desiccated figure, barely managing to steady his bony grip on the silver lion’s head that topped his polished black cane, tried to pace hobblingly outside the car. All he managed was an impression of an old, injured crab. Then he got in, slammed the door, got out again, paced a while longer, re-entered the car. . It carried on like this for an hour, maybe two.

‘This is my mill and I and my sons can’t enter it,’ Prafullanath spat out the words. ‘It’s my last standing mill and I’m not going to die before I modernise it. I’ll not let another Marwari swallow this one, too. If I have to shoot every single one of these striking beggars, I’ll do it, but I’ll see my mill opened.’

A trembling took him as he spoke these words. Adi and Priyo shook too, inwardly and with terror; their father seemed like someone possessed. This unbending mood of confrontation was not what they had bargained for when they had so reluctantly given in to their father’s determination to face down Dulal.

More people arrived and joined the four or five still standing near the gate. They stood at a distance, staring at the Ghoshes. It was here, Priyo later reminisced, that some kind of slippage in perception or memory took place, a kind of foggy passage between the before and after. When they next noticed, more staring men had gathered, and they weren’t positioned only at the picket lines in front of the locked factory gate, but were on both sides of their car, and in front of it, and at the back: Prafullanath, Adi, Priyo and Gagan were being slowly ring-fenced. It didn’t occur to Priyo even then that something was afoot, that this staring was anything other than the customary curiosity of provincial people who had never seen a car, who had so little excitement in their lives that the arrival of city-folk in an Ambassador was a spectacle.

The Ghoshes got out of their car, leaving Gagan inside. It was only then that the pattern began to acquire significance: the Ambassador had gradually become an island, surrounded, after a clear ring of fifteen feet or so, by a thickening circle of people. Beyond them, Priyo saw more coming over the fields, crossing culverts, emerging from behind banana trees. Who were they? They seemed to be rising out of the earth, like in that story he had read as a child, in which demons sprang out of teeth sown in the ground.

The signal for what happened next remained unseen and unheard, but not the result. A chant went up: Why was Sujan Hazra fired? Owner, answer us! Answer us! Then, two different ones, old, reliable mainstays: Grind and crush the black hand of the owners. Grind! Crush! and Our agitation is continuing, will continue . Priyo located and recognised the man who was leading the chanting. His name was Ashish Majhi. He worked in the boiler room and the Foudrinier room. That recognition released something, for Priyo now began to identify more and more of the faces in the crowd. They were surrounded by their former employees or, more accurately, the whole workforce that they had fired ten months ago. A current of fear thrilled through him.