Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

Kalyani freezes with fear. She knows she should scream but she cannot, her tongue and throat will not move. The man, his head wrapped in a filthy gamchha, holds her arm in his grip. She cannot see his face, only his huge, coal-black eyes, blazing with menace. There are threatening noises coming out of his mouth, but they are muffled by the red-and-white chequered cloth. She shivers like a leaf. All those warnings about kidnappers on the prowl in the streets, waiting to pick you up and put you in their huge sack and take you away and sell you into beggary after blinding you and chopping off your arms and legs so that you could not run away, so that you could extract more sympathy from passers-by as you begged, all those warnings were not tall tales but true, and now they have come back to bite her: a kidnapper is about to whisk her away. A tumble of thoughts tries to go through her fear-paralysed head: can no one see what is happening to her? Why are they not intervening? Why can she not produce any sound? How is she supposed to know that kidnappers loiter just outside her home? They are supposed to hunt in dark alleys and outside school gates, lying in wait for children to come out after classes are over. She had only stepped out to buy a ribbon for her hair from old Panchanan’s shop with the four annas her mother had so unexpectedly given her.

The kidnapper shakes her arm. With his other hand he removes the covering from his mouth. His face is covered with the most foresty beard she has ever seen. His lips move, but she does not hear a word.

The man’s hand now takes hold of her shoulder and shakes her gently. ‘What, you don’t recognise me?’ she can hear him say at last, but she can only look at him with terror.

‘Kalyani, what’s happened to you? You don’t recognise me through my beard, is that it? Look, look at me carefully! Tell me — who am I?’

The man is staring at her and laughing. Yes, laughing. He is not a kidnapper then, he knows her name; he is looking at her and asking her to identify him and laughing. . He is. . he is—

‘Listen, where’s your mother?’ he asks.

She has it: this is her missing Bor’-da! She screams it out — ‘Bor’-da’ — but it comes out as a grating whisper.

‘It took you so long? Have I changed so much?’

Kalyani nods and manages to sound the first audible words: ‘Such a bushy beard! And you’re so. . so thin, like a skeleton. Where were you?’

‘Where’s your mother?’ he asks again.

‘Inside. Shall I call her? When did you come back? Won’t you come inside?’

‘Yes, I will. But, first, go and tell your mother that I’m back and whisper it to her. Don’t tell anyone else, all right? No one, not even my mother. Did you get that? Go on.’

Kalyani does some kind of calculation in her head and asks him, ‘You’ve not been to the house yet? Does no one know that you’ve returned?’

At that moment the front door opens and Purba looks out, first left, then right, searching for her daughter who has been gone longer than she should have. She does not, at first, notice them standing directly opposite her, about fifteen or twenty feet away. Kalyani shouts, ‘Ma!’; Bor’-da’s grip on her arm becomes a vice, Purba looks at them, a quizzical expression on her face, then her eyes widen.

Unlike her daughter, she recognises Supratik instantly. How could she not?

‘DID YOU KNOW that sal forests have their own music?’ Ajit said.

‘Music of the forest? What’ve you been smoking? You must have started early today,’ Shekhar mocked.

‘Can you drop your poetry rubbish now that we’re on holiday?’ Somnath joined in with Shekhar. ‘It’s made you soft in the head. All this poetry business hasn’t landed you the big fish yet. And we all thought chicks like that kind of stuff, you know, the sensitive-romantic drivel.’

‘Is it open season on me?’ Ajit protested weakly. ‘Do you guys ever think of anything other than women?’

‘Who do you think you’re trying to kid, eh, pretending that it’s moonlight and birdsong and flowers that goes through your head, and sewage through ours?’ Somnath said. ‘You think we didn’t see you unable to take your eyes off the ripe tits of these Santhal women?’

Shekhar said, ‘Ufff, those tits! You’re absolutely correct, Somu, they’re exactly like ripe fruit. The only thing you want to do when you see them is pluck and shove into your mouth. Mairi, my hands are itching at the very thought.’

Ajit, to fend off accusations of being cerebral and effete, joined in with extra zeal. ‘They fill every single sense. But not only tits, have you noticed their waists? The way they wind that cloth around themselves, it hardly covers anything, leaves nothing really to the imagination. High-blood-pressure stuff.’

Now it was Somnath’s turn. Ajit and Shekhar deferred to him with something approximating reverence: Somu had a reputation as a ladykiller, an experienced kind of guy who had started the business of sexual liaisons at an early age and had continued with unimpeded ease, so much so that he had had to be married off unusually young, in the standard attempt to have his ways mended. Had it reined him in, a wife and a one-year-old son, had it thrown cold water on his libidinous impulses, focused, like a pack-animal’s blinkers, his permanently roving eye? Ajit and Shekhar scrutinised surreptitiously for signs, but found none. The desired gravitas that marriage and fatherhood were thought to bring seemed to have omitted to visit their irrepressibly priapic friend. Somu was ragingly horny, and infamous for it in their circle of friends in South Calcutta, but that very ill-repute gave him a sheen of glamour; he had ranged freely as a guest in the room they had wanted access to for so long, but had only succeeded in getting in a few toes so far. There was a grain of envy in this, but the larger part of it was awe, admiration. How did he do it? When he had come to invite them to his baby son’s rice-eating ceremony he had said, ‘Listen, I’ve just had an idea. If I were to invite loads of people, in the inevitable crush on the stairs and the roof where the eating’s going to happen, we could brush against women’s tits, even elbow them, as if by accident. What do you guys think? Brilliant or what?’

It was not a new idea: ever since they had been friends, Somu had suggested the same thing to them every year; to go to a public ceremony of the immersion of the goddess Durga at the end of the five-day festival at some huge ghat or lake and there, in the thick of the milling, crushing crowds, feel up, to their hearts’ content, the breasts of women they would engineer to have pressed against them.

No, becoming a regular family man was not going to uncrease his soul; in him was invested the ineluctability of the shape of a leaf — no amount of doctoring was going to change the paradigm of that shape Nature had so forcefully wrought.

The defiantly unreformed Somnath now said, ‘Yes, those maddening tits, the narrowing at the waist, the cleft where their thighs join their upper halves, all just delicious. But do you know what I like best about these tribal women? They look at you in this completely uninhibited way as if they have never known how to be shy. Have you noticed that? They stare at you and smile and giggle. Do you think that’s a come-on?’

Shekhar said, ‘City girls would never, ever look at you like that in their entire lives. Would not look at you, full stop. After two films, four outings for ice-cream and spicy puffed rice, half a dozen walks and more expenditure, they may just about allow you to hold their hand for five minutes.’

Ajit assented vigorously, nodding his head. ‘These tribals don’t appear to have any inhibitions or boundaries — the men and women hug and touch each other and hold hands openly, the girls hang out in groups and are constantly giggling and falling over each other, have you noticed? And that outfit of theirs, that short cloth! I love the way they put flowers in their hair — just one flower or a head of blossom. It makes their dark skin glow.’