Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

Prafullanath, however, seemed to be buoyant on rage. With the demeanour of an emperor facing down a peasants’ revolt, he roared, ‘Where is Dulal? Bring him to me, bring Dulal over right now.’

Priyo, whose memory of a public mauling in the red-light area of Sonagachhi was still fresh, wished he could become invisible. He shut his eyes, opened them again; the labourers were now accompanying their chanting with determined forward thrusts of their arms, the textbook gesture of revolution. He was not confident that Dulal’s presence was going to ameliorate matters; quite the opposite, probably. He closed his eyes again. It had all appeared so benign fifteen years ago, the business of Dulal pouring balm over everything and bypassing all potential confrontation — what a picture of amity and harmony it had been. It had taken nearly a decade to see it for what it truly was: a long, wickedly misleading dress-rehearsal for the real play unfolding now.

Answer us! Answer us!

Where did all this fury, all this hate, come from? The strikers possessed the terrifying beauty of a fully reared-up snake, hood engorged, waiting to attack. Could he use that metaphor in one of his stories?

Prafullanath tried to shout down the men with his obsessive call for Dulal. The veins in his throat and forehead stood out. Standing on his left, Priyo could see the throbbing purple-green worm in his temple.

‘Baba,’ he said into his ear, ‘please calm down. Please. They’ve sent for Dulal, he’s going to come. Just calm down.’

Prafullanath had gone past the stage of turning to his son and shutting him up with a few forceful words. His focus was entirely on his elusive nemesis. Defying everything, Prafullanath advanced in his slow, limping, half-broken manner towards the crowd.

‘Baba!’ wailed Adi and Priyo together. They couldn’t bring themselves to move.

The sea of agitators inched nearer. The island containing the Ghoshes and the car and Gagan shrank.

The Ghoshes found themselves facing Ashish Majhi and Bijan Hazra. The chanting of slogans had given way to the ordinary, incomprehensible chatter of a crowd.

Prafullanath asked, ‘Where’s Dulal? Where’s your ringleader?’

Ashish said, ‘There’s no ringleader business. He’s not here. You speak to us.’

Adi called out, ‘Move back, move back’ to the nearest group of faces pressing in on them. The words had no effect.

Prafullanath said, ‘I head this factory. I’ll speak to no one but your head.’

Bijan Hazra said, ‘When will we get our salaries? We haven’t been paid for a year. What will we live on?’

‘I’m not going to negotiate with you,’ Prafullanath said, his tone falling back to the kind that a man of his class reserved for pestering beggars. ‘I want to see Dulal, he’s the man behind all this. Who are you?’

‘My elder brother lost his hand. You threw him out because he was no longer useful to you,’ Bijan said.

Adi intervened, ‘Move, all of you, move, give some space here. We’ve been through this before, hundreds of times.’

Priyo felt the refractory mood coming off the crowd as touch on his skin. He was appalled that these labourers were daring to answer back, and in tones of such disrespect, too. Then the distaste swiftly transformed itself into fear.

Ashish was so close now that Priyo could smell his sharp breath when he, startling the Ghoshes, gave out what seemed like a battle cry: ‘You must listen to our demands.’

You must! You must! went up the answering chorus.

Priyo wanted to tear out the windpipe of the snake. He could certainly see a long way towards his trachea through his wide-open mouth shouting out the slogan — the crooked yellow teeth, the furred pinkish-grey tongue, the stubby pink worm of the uvula.

Prafullanath was now visibly shaking.

Priyo whispered, ‘Baba, you must get into the car right now. Come.’

Adi shouted ineffectually above the din, ‘Move away, move away.’

Crush! Grind!

The inner ring of men shuffled, but didn’t move back. Prafullanath felt a squeezing in his chest, a slight thickening of the air that he was breathing. He inhaled more deeply and said, ‘Move your men, I’ve come to talk. I have no time for a CPI(M) pimp like you’, but it came out in a whisper.

Priyo, sensing something, took him by the shoulders.

Adi now tried to reason with the men. He pleaded, ‘Ashish-babu, Bijan-babu, please, look at him, he’s an old man, he’s feeling ill. If you could just move back a little bit. .’

Priyo heard his brother’s wheedling tone and hated him.

Bijan snapped back, ‘We’re ill too. We haven’t eaten for ten months, we haven’t been able to feed our wives and children for ten months .’

As if on cue, another cry went up: We’re not listening to the false promises of the owners. We shan’t listen.

Not listening! Shan’t listen!

The people churned. Ashish whispered something to a man standing next to him. The man turned and pushed his way into the throng behind him and disappeared. The meaning of this emerged later, when Gagan poked his head out of the car and called out, ‘Babu, Babu, come inside, come and sit in the car.’ Priyo looked quickly behind him and saw an incipient spar of men forming, trying to come between the Ghoshes and the car, cutting off their access to any form of safety. The men were spoiling for a fight and, if it came to that, it would later be reported that the Ghoshes had initiated it, that they had come to the locked factory with hooligans, despite having been warned by the police not to show up, with the express purpose of demoralising the sacked workers and sabotaging their just revolution. Nobody would listen to the owners’ side of things; they wouldn’t even have a side then.

Priyo looked at his father; Baba was dripping like a tree after an hour of uninterrupted rain.

From this point, things accelerated.

Prafullanath said, ‘I know Dulal is behind all this. I know you’re all in the pay of the CPI(M). That’s why the police didn’t come, they’re in the pockets of the CPI(M) too.’ With each word a wheezing racked his frame. Again the words, which were meant to be thundering, came out hoarse and whispery.

Our demands must be heeded, must be heeded.

Adi and Priyo each held an arm and started moving their father gently towards the Ambassador. It was a distance of only a few feet.

Prafullanath’s chest had become an infernal anvil. He could barely bring out the words, ‘Chest. . my chest. .’ The light around him seemed to buckle like a rod.

Gagan, who had noticed the beginning of a kind of loss of rigidity to Prafullanath’s frame, now saw him gulping for air and Adinath and Priyonath trying to prop him up. He started the engine, found a gap between the men trying to cut him off from Boro-babu and his sons and edged closer. Perhaps this move on Gagan’s part had not been foreseen by the playscript: the men, moving in discrete groups of one and two and three, trying to impose a wall between the Ghoshes and the car, were thrown by this unrehearsed bit of stage-direction. Gagan kept the car moving. Survival instinct, deeper than revolutionary strategies, forced the men to swerve aside. By the time they woke up to what was happening, Adi and Priyo had succeeded in bundling Prafullanath into the back seat.

Adi, shaking in the passenger seat beside Gagan, said, ‘Drive. Drive now!’

Gagan said, ‘But how?’

The Ambassador had finally been cordoned off by the workers.

‘Drive,’ Adi cried.

Gagan moved the car gingerly forward until he was inches away from the ring of men. A noise of great confusion spread among the crowd, submerging the now half-hearted Crush! Grind! The men surrounding them didn’t move. The car was like a flimsy boat in the moment before the waves closed in on it. Gagan swore filthily, backed the car, engaged second gear by mistake, made it give out an almighty revving sound, then jerked it forward at speed, hitting two, three, maybe four of the workers. A cry of astonishment, then pain or rage. Disbelief at this breaking of such an inalienable rule froze the men for a few moments, then that primitive coding for self-preservation again asserted itself. The crowd fell back and Gagan drove the car, without stopping or slowing, through the furrow that was opening up. The passage was narrow and people continued to press against the sides of the Ambassador, and Gagan didn’t know, didn’t care, how many men he was knocking down. That whimpering wheeze from the back seat had become the only point on which his world was concentrated.