Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

‘Here we go again,’ Shekhar sighed, ‘flowers and radiant skin. . Man, you’re such a loser.’

Somnath laughed and said, ‘Did you notice yesterday at the market that the women were drinking?’

‘Really?’ Incredulity in Shekhar’s voice.

‘Didn’t you see? The men and women were all sitting in a loose circle on the ground, passing the bottle around. Mahua or fermented-rice haandiya. Drinking and leaning against each other and then falling over.’

Ajit said, slightly tangentially, ‘Shall we go for a walk in the forest? We’ll have light for another four hours or so. .’

Surprising him, Somnath and Shekhar agreed.

It took them less than ten minutes to reach the edge of the straggle of small, ramshackle, dirty buildings that was the mining village of Patratu. Most of them had tin roofs and only a few were built out of bricks. The shops looked as precarious as if a child had drawn them. They were stained with darkness, dirt and indigence. Everything was covered with a patina of red dust. The air was dry, and the clear late-April heat too. The occasional bicycle, ridden by a man carrying a huge, unbalancing sack of coal tied to the pannier rack, probably on his way from the mines to sell the coal at Ranchi, twenty-five miles to the south, trailed a low cloud of this red dust as it made its way. The three holidaying friends too had this dust-swirl following their feet, like a pathetic little pet, as they walked the village’s only tarred road to the end. But everything was about to change. A big thermal power station was being constructed with Russian money. This sleepy little village in the Pithauriya-Patratu valley, surrounded by lush green hills and forests, criss-crossed by streams, rivers and waterfalls, was going to get a lick of developmental paint. Residential colonies were being purpose-built for the workers at the power station and the dam; the village was transforming itself into a small town. These newly arrived residents would join tourists, especially from the big town of Ranchi, for picnics in the surrounding forests and to the dam, while the more adventurous ones would head out westwards to the nearby Chatra forest. Already there was a small holiday lodge halfway towards the reservoir. It was this that they had luckily stumbled upon, looking for a place to stay. Patratu was within spitting distance of the more famous McCluskiegunj. It was only on a whim that the three friends had got off at Barkakana Junction instead of staying on the train for another hour for the Anglo-Indian colony.

Walking towards the forest, which was everywhere and within reach, they felt that they had come, if not to the middle of nowhere, certainly to a place remote enough to allow them that superficial illusion, the surrounding scenic beauty providing a sufficient dosage of the untampered Nature they desired.

Where the tarred road gave out the tribal women sat with their baskets in the early morning, selling what little they had to sell — vegetables, eggs, bidi, unidentifiable leaves. It was near this spot that Somnath had seen Santhal men and women drinking their home-brewed liquor. Now the young men walked close to the edge of a field. There were little brown hillocks undulating the middle distance, while on the far horizon a large green-brown range camouflaged itself in the haze by looking as if it were three-quarters of the way through a very slow disappearing act. There were a couple of better-heeled detached bungalows now, freshly painted and set within their big, gated front gardens, clearly the holiday homes of wealthy city people. Then the human habitations ended. Beyond another field on the other side, the forest lay like a dark-green, almost black shawl, extending from the dissolving hill in the distance. It appeared to be a repository of condensed dark, the vessel from which evening and night leaked out at a certain hour and covered the land and sky. They made their way towards it.

Once inside, the darkness proved to be a trick that the forest — assuming its magician incarnation, like its companion, the hill, which was trying to become invisible — habitually performed for everyone outside its boundaries. The light, so flat out in the open, became dramatic and mobile: it seemed to have somersaulted up high to form a canopy over the heads of the trees, but even that, after a few minutes of advancing inwards, turned out to be an illusion. Instead of the white uniformity outside, it had broken itself up into legion entities, all different: shafts and beams entered the middle heights, some breaking against and streaking the tree-trunks, some coming to rest on the ground, so miraculously free of undergrowth, in stippled pools of light and shade. The forest floor, of the same red soil, was dry; large leaves from the sal trees, which largely constituted the forest, lay here and there like brown plates with curled edges; occasionally a branch or some twigs. The hide-and-seek light, the unending series of sal, a whole different world hidden so openly within the shell of the soiled one they knew — all the things these city boys had never experienced before — silenced even Shekhar and Somnath.

Their ears opened not to silence, but to what they had derided a few minutes ago: the music of the forest. An unknown bird sent out an atonal tu-tui-tuiieeee at regular intervals. With a papery rustle a leaf dropped somewhere. Crickets vigorously churned out an unremitting background of their anthem. Now that the men’s senses had opened to this secret world, they heard all kinds of things: a clatter of wings accompanied by the swishing of the displaced air; a brief tap-tap-tapping; a whirr and click repeated in a monotonous cycle for a few minutes, then nothing; the repeated one-note of a string being plucked, most probably a hand-held cotton-carder, far, far away. They walked as if in a trance, spellbound in this kingdom of magic, until, with a snap up above and then a fluttering descent, a small, flowering branch landed near them. They stared at it as if it had come from outer space. Ajit broke the silence first.

‘Did you know the sal tree bore flowers?’ he asked no one in particular.

Shekhar and Somnath shook their heads, still too enmeshed in the spell to make a sound or to indulge in their mockery of Ajit’s inexplicable fascination with Nature. Ajit lifted up the branch from the ground and all three looked at the cluster of flowers in silence; an inflorescence of fully bloomed, small, coral-pink flowers, with a contained explosion of anthers in the middle and, under them, alternate rows of greenish buds that looked like fruits, invisible when on the tree except as a spray of hazy yellowish-orange tint on the canopies, so easily ignored or not noticed but now, on closer inspection, a dense, intricate miracle.

Then the spell broke and Somnath said, ‘Isn’t this the flower the Santhal women had tucked in their hair when we saw them dancing yesterday evening?’

No one could answer the question, but Ajit hazarded a guess. ‘No, I think that was the mahua flower, the one from which they make their alcohol.’

‘How do you know?’ Shekhar immediately countered. ‘Have you ever seen a mahua flower in your life?’

The brief brush with the sublime was over. The world outside, the one they knew, had entered the forest.

Ajit now put up a small fight. ‘How do you know that I do not know? Have you ever seen the mahua flower?’

Uncharacteristically, Shekhar withdrew. ‘No, it’s just that I thought you were again beginning your flower-fuckery poetry shit.’

Before Ajit could retort, Somnath said, ‘Will you two cut it out, squabbling like dogs in a beautiful place like this? I feel like staying in this forest for ever.’

Shekhar and Ajit burst out laughing.

Somnath smiled and said, ‘No, really, I’m serious. Sometimes. . sometimes’ — a different tone crept into his voice, something at once serious and tired — ‘I feel responsibilities have been piled upon me as you’d burden a load on a donkey. I can’t move with all that weight on my shoulders.’