Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

He finished off the remnants of the mahua in one big draw from the bottle and winced; it was not as bad as the first time. The thought of touching his lips to the rim of the bottle that had just been in her mouth mitigated some of the rotting taste. He felt a momentary quickening that was at odds with her swaying lethargy. He was trying to lead her to the forest he had walked in yesterday.

Suddenly the dark came down, swift as the falling of a mantle. Somnath had a brief sense of being caught in a wildly erratic flow of time, scrambled into sudden, unpredictable elongations and compressions, then that feeling left him too; he fell into a warp. How long had she been saying to him, ‘Ei, babu, the forest is in that direction, you said you give me liquor. That is in the other direction’? Then he was almost dragging her to the sheltering dark of the trees. Was he? Was he not simply supporting her in her inebriated condition? If she did not want to go with him, why was she not resisting? Why did he feel pulled along? How pliant she seemed. There was a moon now, low in the sky, again an enormous orange coin with a tiny, tiny bit from one side pared off. Was it waxing or waning? He felt puissant like a nocturnal predator. And then he sensed that the forest was around them. When had they entered it? How much time had elapsed? He thought of the mahua — his first time ever on that strong stuff, no wonder it had so gone to his head.

She said, ‘Ei, babu, you take me to Calcutta, give me a job?’

‘A job? I’ll make you my queen!’

She giggled and asked, ‘You speak truly?’ Then, again, ‘Where is the liquor? You said you give me some.’

He would never tire of the meandering lines of her speech, the way she elided Bengali and Hindi together.

‘Babu, the forest is dark. You come back with me.’

‘No, let’s stay here. My eyes have got used to the dark.’ He pulled her close to him. He felt her resist him, first weakly, then with increasing force. She was no meek, wilting flower, she was a tribal woman; these people had the strength of wild animals. It excited him, this promise of a tussle first.

The forest floor was crackly under their feet. They had entered a new world, where a wholly different order of sonic smudges brought it into its eerie being. It had the temporary effect of diverting his focus away from the demands of his pounding blood. A small creature went scurrying, setting off a series of rustling noises as if it were moving under an armour of dry leaves worn over its body. There was what he took to be the call of a night-bird, a long whirring ending with a tick-tick-tick , an unnerving sound. Its very unearthliness underscored the immediate matter; he was returned to the business at hand again. He had his hand on her arm like the grip of a feral beast’s jaw. Some atavistic instinct had perhaps warned him that she knew the forest much better than he, was its denizen and, if released, could run away, never to appear within his orbit again. His dark-adapted eyes could make out the trunks of trees, as darker pillars embedded in the matrix of the dark of night, then understood there was enough diffuse moonlight breaking through the cover of the forest to enable a form of night-vision.

The girl had stopped speaking. He had heard that these promiscuous tribal women had insatiable desires; they were at it all the time, with whoever approached them. The moment was now. As if on cue, a night-bird, a different one this time, emitted a loud, metallic chaunk, chaunk, chaunk in an unstoppable run and startled him out of his skin. He tried to ease her to the ground, but she was having none of it.

‘Babu, let me go, babu,’ she kept pleading. The counterpoint of the birdcall and her unvarying words flashed off a quick irritability; he barked, ‘Shut up!’ The game had changed. Why had she come so far with him if she wanted him to let go of her? It could only be a part of the performance that wily Santhal women put on to make keener the edge of desire.

Her motions and behaviour, which had so far seemed as if taking place under water, suddenly speeded up, the drunkenness dispelled. She tried to twist her arm away, but Somnath now held her with both hands. She shouted out a string of words, presumably about how much he was hurting her, but this was only the first act of the tussle she so wanted. He pushed her against a tree and tried to keep her pinned against it using his whole body, but she kept twisting like a collared cat. It would have been so much better if they were on the ground, but he was now caught between making the most of their standing positions and wanting to bring them both to lie down; the two involved different actions and he tried to find some intersection between them.

A larger rustle rippled through nearby: the presence of humans had clearly alarmed some bigger animal. Holding her against the tree with his waist and legs, he slightly leaned his upper half back and tried to get his hands everywhere, to free her from the cloth wrapping her. She cried out a couple of times in between heavy snorts and panting. A brief thought flitted through Somnath’s mind, that perhaps she was earnest in her resistance, and exited just as quickly, his concentration now wholly on groping and squeezing and subduing. There was a flapping of wings and a shrill kri-kriii-kri that ended with a muffled abruptness as if the bird had fallen asleep before finishing its cry. The rustling was getting louder.

Then, shocking Somnath, she bit his hand; sank her teeth in with all the strength she could muster. He cried out and his unaffected hand went up, almost involuntarily, to slap her face, once, twice, three times. This time her screaming emerged unimpeded, with the full force of her lungs. Suddenly the rustling was all around them — they were surrounded by people.

Things moved very fast. A man spoke out some sharp words, the girl ran towards him, wailing; the sound of angry words from the same man, another couple of slaps, then silence from the girl. A torch was shone on Somnath’s face, blinding him. Other men now started speaking. He had no idea how many men there were; at least three. Then the first blow fell before he could think of running away. It hit his side and was swiftly followed by several more, on his legs, back, neck, ribs. He let out a cry and collapsed. The torchlight had gone off. They were beating him with long sticks. A voice rasped out a string of urgent, angry words. Clapped in the stocks of pain and fear, Somnath began to discern Bengali abuse being fired at him — ‘Lowlife! Dog! Son of a sow! You think you can come from the city and do anything you want with our women?’

He curled up, trying to protect his head with his hands and arms, reduced to the fragility of a foetus. Then another set of harsh words that sounded like a command. The torchlight went on and raked him in swinging, jerky arcs. It fell to the ground from the hand of the man who was holding it, its cone of light pendulating a few times before it came to rest. In that ghostly terranean light the men aimed their blows with greater precision. They tried to get to his skull in the way they killed a snake in these parts, by crushing the head with the blows of their sticks, for bringing them down on the body would not do, even if they damaged it and turned it to pulp. They knew that the snake could regrow its body and, once revived, it would come back for revenge, so you had to get the head and beat that into a paste to make sure that you had not just maimed it, but killed it properly.

Later it was said, because Purba did not visibly erupt into the hysterical grief that was expected of a woman widowed two years into her marriage, that she had a heart of stone, but that was only the beginning, and a clement one too, of the weather that was coming.