Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

What could he be referring to, wondered Ajit and Shekhar silently. Surely not his beautiful, curly-haired boy, whose first birthday was celebrated last month? Or his meek, silent, beautiful wife? They could not find a suitable response to their friend’s abrupt introspection, but just as suddenly as the brief cloud had cast its shadow, it quickly flitted past. The sun shone unobstructed again. Somnath wiped his face with his hand, once, twice, as if he were brushing off cobwebs that he had accidentally walked into, smiled with the full force of his radiance and said, ‘Where were we?’

Relieved at the passing of the unexpected, and unwelcome, sounding of a minor key, Ajit and Shekhar plunged, with somewhat excessive zeal, into the safer music of laddish chat.

After a little bit more wandering Somnath observed, ‘Listen, guys, don’t you think it’s darkened a bit in here? Shouldn’t we be heading back to the bungalow?’

Shekhar agreed, ‘Yes, darkness comes down suddenly in these upland areas. It wouldn’t do to get lost in the forest at night. And the bungalow’s right at the other edge of the town.’

The light outside the forest had indeed changed. That white glare, which had seemed to cast no shadows, had now become golden air, present in that it tipped everything with its hue, but itself absent. There were shadows nestled against the hillocks and against the sides of all physical objects. The light turned orange, then pink. At the open area where the market sat, stray groups of Santhals congregated. And there, at the edge of the road, the young men instantly spotted a group of half a dozen Santhal women sitting on their haunches and doing what they did best — nothing. They whispered to each other, giggled, fell over laughing at some imperceptible jest, stared at nothing in particular, giggled some more. . They lacked the discipline of works and days.

Ajit said, ‘Look, that woman in the middle, look at her hair! Have you seen? Mahua blossom! We can ask them and settle the issue once and for all. Ei, Somu, you go and ask them, you are the least shy among the three of us.’

Somnath did not demur. He bounded off and stood in front of the circle, pointed to the blossom stuck in the young woman’s hair and asked, ‘What’s the name of that flower?’

The women stared at him, then began their laughing and falling-over routine as if this urban stranger had told them the most cracking joke they had ever heard. Somnath remained unperturbed. All these girls swaying like reeds afforded him an almost licensed opportunity to feed his eyes on their bodies. They wore no additional garment to cover their breasts, only the parsimonious piece of cloth they wrapped around themselves, leaving so much of their lower legs, waist, back, neck, throat, shoulders exposed. In this tawny light of dusk, their black skins shone as if each had just emerged from a vat of oil.

He repeated his question. The same reactions were re-enacted. This time, however, the girl in question turned coy and shy and tried to hide her face on her friend’s shoulder. Soon Somnath established that this was nothing but coquetry, for the girl kept peering at him like a child playing peek-a-boo.

Then, stunning him, for he had mentally prepared himself to have this game played, unchangingly, for a good while longer, the girl asked him directly, ‘Babu, you give me money if I tell you the name of the flower?’

Somnath felt unstrung. That use of tui , the ‘you’ reserved for close friends, peers and intimates, or for juniors and servants: it was unthinkable for him to be the subject of that mode of address from a person of her standing. A squeezing sensation went through his insides. Trying hard to steady his voice, he too replied with tui : ‘How much money do you want?’ How could he be so unmanned by her language, an extraordinarily musical mixture of Bengali and Hindustani, by the lilt that animated her looks, her every gesture, her diction, her tone?

‘You give me one rupee?’ she sang.

One rupee! He would give her one hundredfold to have her continue speaking, calling him tui . An earlier incipient plan suddenly consolidated itself in his head. He asked, ‘Will you be dancing tomorrow in the market place?’

‘Why? You’ll come and join us?’ she asked in return. A peal of laughter rippled through her friends.

Somnath turned to his friends and said, ‘They are inviting us to dance with them tomorrow’, then, without missing a beat, his usual confidence restored to him, he addressed the girl, ‘Yes, I will, but only if you’ — here he pointed to her emphatically — ‘if you dance with me.’

Once their eyes became adapted to the near-total lack of electric lights outside, Shekhar, Ajit and Somnath found that the low orange moon, like a large dinner-plate in the sky, gave so much light that they could see the garden with ease. The moonlight did queer things to objects. The shadows it cast looked painted; they lapped and hugged their parent objects in such a way that their inkiness leaked, as if by capillary action, back into the buildings or shrubs or humans and cloaked them in that same unreality. If you looked at them long enough, they, especially the rose and dahlia bushes and the grass, appeared not black, but a green or blue iteration of the dark. This light was not meant to illuminate; it was meant to create its antithesis, shadow; even the stretches in broad moonlight looked secretive.

Ajit said, ‘It’s like daytime. So much light! You don’t get to see this in the city.’

‘On a full-moon night during a power outage, if you walk the streets of your neighbourhood in Kankurgachhi, you will get the same effect,’ Shekhar quipped.

Ajit replied by breaking full-throatedly into a Tagore song: ‘On this full-moon night, everyone has gone to the forest. .’ The bottle of rum they were sharing in the garden of their guesthouse had not yet begun to tell in the melody. Whatever his friends made of Ajit’s aesthetic impulses, they always fell respectfully silent when he sang; he had a beautiful voice and had had singing lessons throughout his childhood.

Faint drumbeats, sometimes near, at others distant, carried over in the air in a way that confused the men about their source and direction. When the percussion became more pronounced, it created such a rhythmic dissonance with the song that Ajit stopped before reaching its end.

‘What do you think they are celebrating?’ he asked.

‘Who knows?’ Shekhar said. ‘Do you think this is a regular thing with them?’

‘No idea,’ Ajit said.

Were they dancing? Was that woman part of the carousing? That was Somnath’s only thought. The caramelly taste of the rum turned to a sourish sugar in his mouth.

‘I know you’re going to disagree with me,’ Ajit now said, ‘but I find these tribal people really innocent and pure. Qualities we city-dwellers have lost.’

‘No, mairi, you’re totally right,’ Shekhar said. ‘They have no money, no jobs, no solid houses, yet look how happy they are. They sing, dance, laugh all the time, drink alcohol, all as if they didn’t have a single care in the world.’

‘And we, who have everything, are weighed down with anxiety, illness, tension, worry, from cradle to grave,’ Ajit finished his friend’s thought.

Shekhar asked, ‘Really, you have everything? Everything ?’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘But everything ?’ Shekhar persisted.

‘Ah, I keep telling you, it was a way of putting things. Stop harping on that one note.’

Shekhar would not be budged. He had caught something between his teeth and he would not let go now. ‘But everything ?’ he repeated. ‘Do you have a girlfriend?’

Ajit tried to ignore this; best not to encourage Shekhar, who was probably well on his way to getting sozzled, which would explain this resurgence of the bullying. ‘The less one owns in life,’ he said, ‘the happier one is. Santhals = few worldly possessions = happiness. Ajit & Shekhar & Somnath = family and friends and home and expectations and responsibility = sorrow. Straightforward equation.’