Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

Now that he is facing his father, who speaks of his confected luxury of shame, his inability to show his face to the outside world, Supratik is reminded of a more authentic, more painful variety of it, in his unwillingness to visit Badal’s mother after Badal’s murder. Could that be described accurately as shame, the real, soul-staining thing?

Or was it the feeling that went through him when, just before escaping from Majgeria, he had seen Kanu and Bijli’s ill two-year-old son squatting on the hut floor, unable even to cry out for his mother, and shitting his guts out, the ground clearance between his arse and the floor not big enough so that the virulent chemical-yellow, clayey stuff that came out of him was continuous between arsehole and floor, gluing him almost; and Supratik had seen the vermicular seethe of that infected shit and wondered if, by the time Kanu took him to Medinipur Town, to the abandoned ghost house that was the public hospital with its absent doctors and staff and nurses and the few medical supplies that came through stolen and resold on the black market by the staff, by the time he got lucky enough to have a doctor see the child, perhaps after days of waiting, he wondered if the child would be alive.

It struck him again, with vivid force, that all this talk of ‘the outside world’ turned round one thing only: what the outside world made of your own life. You were forever at the centre of things, the subject of the sentence; it was not the outside world you were thinking of, but where you stood in the regard of that world. He wanted to say to his father that others thought of their own lives too, perhaps more often, more deeply, than they did of his father’s. The assumption that his father would always have some sort of a privileged access to that outside world, much more so than his son, by virtue of his age, grated Supratik’s nerves raw. He wanted to quiz him, firing one question after another to this ridiculous man about the world outside. How much did he know about, say, the lives of those students who were being rounded up by the police in raids on neighbourhoods, men’s hostels of universities, taken into cells and tortured until they gave up names and whereabouts of their Naxalite comrades? Of those boys broken by beating and electric shocks, for whom betrayal was an abstract noun in all senses when placed beside the very real and immediate pain of a nail being uprooted with a pair of pliers? He, Supratik, had seen the blue-black stub of a comrade’s finger, not quite a human appendage, and the shadows under his eyes which looked as if they would never smile again. But it had been shame, that easily bandied-about emotion, that had cast its shadow on the comrade’s face: shame that, under torture, he had given the names and addresses of his comrades and was now an outcast from the Party; shame and fear, for if the police had not got him, then his comrades, whom he had thrown to the lions, would. The prospect of that punishment corroded him daily into a whittled-down version of his previous self, smaller, more frangible, as if that ruined finger had become, by some synecdoche, his entire soul.

He, Supratik, has witnessed all this, not the emasculated, pompous fool in front of him, making grand claims about the world outside. He can ask his father, for example, how much he knows about the nearly daily occurrence of bombings in the city, bombings that Adinath terms, with derision, ‘playing with fireworks’ in the same breath as he expresses relief because he occupies the third floor of the house, far above the ‘mosquitoes and the bombs that those dangerous Naxalites have taken to hurling’, as if the Naxalites are spoilt children with expensive toys? ‘Hurling’! Does he know that in at least half of these incidents explosives are being targeted at Naxalites by Congress and CPI(M) goons? Does he know that Naxalites are now caught in a pincer movement — if the bombs and guns and knives of the enemy parties do not finish them off, then the police will be only too happy to oblige?

This is going to be the next phase of their revolution now: the urban side. Supratik has been entrusted with drawing up the strategies for action in the city. But in all the operations that he has so far thought about, the line between offensive and defensive ones, already delicate, has become blurred: so much of their city activism originates in the need to defend themselves from the trident of Congress, CPI(M) and the state. And, as always, it boils down to a bare economics: if they cannot find enough money to finance their defence, they will be wiped out without ever managing to reach the proactive attack stage. It’s a question of survival now and that is the most ruthless question of them all. Us or them?

Us versus them.

It gives Supratik a little thrill to witness his father going to considerable lengths to avoid the word ‘Naxal’. He tries to manipulate the conversation so that he can get Adinath to bring himself to utter the word.

‘And how exactly have I brought so much shame upon you?’ he asks calmly. That is another thing — the great effort he puts into appearing so placid is repaid, with interest, in the way it makes his father more and more turbulent.

‘Y-y-ou. . you know it yourself, how dare you ask? Don’t you have any shame?’

‘How can I? You’ve just told me it’s all yours!’

‘If you’re to stay in this house, you have to obey the rules,’ Adinath splutters.

‘Otherwise?’

‘Otherwise. . otherwise. .’

‘Otherwise you’ll throw me out, am I correct?’ In his smoothest, most unruffled manner Supratik carries on, ‘You don’t have to go through the trouble of doing that. Perhaps you’ve forgotten that I had left of my own accord.’

Sandhya, who has eavesdropped on most of this exchange, confronts her husband at night. ‘What do you want?’ she cries. ‘That he goes away again? Do you want that? Do my wishes mean nothing to you? If he goes away this time, you’ll see my dead face, I’m warning you.’

Supratik does not know of this. He thinks his father is off his case because he has been defeated by his son’s cold contempt.

One lunchtime Madan lingers on, annoying Supratik with his usual ‘You didn’t touch your food, look what you’ve made of yourself, all skin-and-bones, this is what happens when you eat like a sparrow, did they not give you enough to eat where you were’, until Supratik realises that this mantra is only an excuse; Madan is stalling for time, waiting to have a moment in private with him.

He tries to make it easy for the old man. ‘Do you have something to say to me?’ he asks gently once the servants have departed. How old is he? he wonders. Pushing sixty? Older? He cannot think of a time when Madan-da has not been there. He remembers Madan-da reading aloud to him from Tagore’s Words and Tales when he was little. Or could that be a scene from his father’s life, told to him when he was young and now appropriated by him as a kind of false memory? Madan-da does little, if any, of the cooking nowadays, delegating it to a younger fleet of servants, whom he orders about and directs, but nobody has found it in their heart to let him go, certainly not while Supratik’s grandmother is alive, or indeed his mother.

Madan stands apart, at a distance from him, and says, ‘Boro-babu’ — Big Boss, that only half-ironic term of affection from his childhood has fused to him; there is no hope that Madan-da is ever going to call him by his first name — ‘your mother has survived a lot of pain.’

Supratik does not, cannot, say anything.

‘We are poor people, Boro-babu, what do we know? You and your lot are educated, you’ve read books, been to college, will you listen to what we have to say?’