Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

An old discomfort resurfaces: he is bothered again by how few memories he has of Suranjan, or of he and Suranjan together, growing up, sharing the same room for nearly all of their lives. Did they read the same books and talk about them? Did they have different approaches to eating their food, one of them saving the best bits for the end, and the other gobbling them up right at the beginning? Had they ever fought over trivial things — who would go first with a detective novel, who had received more on a plate, whom Ma was perceived to be favouring, who bore the brunt of the blame when Ma disciplined them for some mischief? He cannot remember anything. How could his brother be just a hole in his life? How could he account for this absence? Purba has recently told him that her first sighting of him was on her wedding day: a little boy, dressed in silk dhoti and panjabi, with sandalwood buttons, prancing up and down the stairs, beside himself with joy. He had felt a mild sense of embarrassment, shame even, at this memory of hers. Now, if he asks himself whether Suranjan was dressed identically, whether he too was jumping around the place, he cannot come up with an answer; there is only a dark lacuna there. Would Purba have noticed and remembered? He would have to ask her.

Suranjan has transferred his fear to aggression. He snaps, ‘You are hardly the one to give lectures on how to behave.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Big words about the poisons of our generation don’t suit you. Your terrorism, your poison, is not without its side-effects.’

‘Don’t you dare talk about things you don’t understand!’

‘How dare you talk about pulling the wool over others’ eyes? What have you been doing all these years? Playing at revolutionaries, terrorism, killings, bombings — you didn’t do it exactly openly, did you, with the full knowledge of Baba and Ma?’

Supratik is amazed, not so much at the extent of his brother’s half-knowledge as at the intransigence of his speaking out with such vehemence. When did this kitten grow up into a snarling, clawing cat?

Suranjan takes advantage of the resultant pause to press ahead. ‘Keep your big talk to yourself, I don’t need any lessons from you ,’ he says, his voice rising. ‘You’ve forgotten that I’ve grown up. Or not quite “forgotten” — when did you ever know ? You haven’t been around much to know.’

Supratik can only say lamely, ‘What are you saying?’

‘Only this: keep your hypocritical talk for your Mao-reading comrades.’

‘Hypocritical?’ His hand is itching to slap the cur. ‘Your druggie friends have taught you some big words, it must be said.’

‘At least my druggie friends don’t go around killing innocent people.’

‘Killing? Innocent people? Do you have any idea of how little you know about such things?’ Supratik says, trying to keep his voice level and low. All he wants to do is to repeat those words to the rhythm of banging Suranjan’s head against the wall.

‘Much more than you give me — or, for that matter, anyone — credit for.’

A sharp stab of anxiety goes through him: does Suranjan know about the stolen jewellery?

‘The word “revolution” should not pass the lips of an idle, parasitic, basket-case like you,’ Supratik begins, but is cut short by Suranjan, who becomes unrecognisable in the escalation of his rage.

‘Shut up!’ he shouts, ‘enough of your moralising. Enough! What you do is revolution, of course, what others do is idleness and wastage. This is the problem with fuckers like you — you are unable to understand anyone else unless they fit into the standard-issue mould you have made for them. Chairman Mao! My cock!’

Supratik leaps off his bed and slaps Suranjan with all the force he can bring to his assaulting right palm, once, twice, three times across his face. While delivering the blows he tenses his body, fully expecting to be hit by a retaliatory punch, but what happens wrong-foots him again: Suranjan folds over, almost daintily, like a decorative collapsible chair, and falls to the floor. Supratik watches, unable to move a finger, as Suranjan, lying down, begins to cry, slowly at first, snifflingly, then with huge sobs racking his body. Supratik loses all track of time, all ability to react, until god knows after how long their mother enters the room and panics. ‘What’s happened? What’s happened? Why are you lying on the floor? Have you been fighting? Aren’t you too old for this kind of thing?’ Then she turns to Supratik and berates him, ‘Don’t you have any shame, hitting your younger brother like this? Do you think you’re both still little children?’

No, he does not, but he feels as emasculated and powerless as one.

Suranjan goes out some time in the afternoon and does not return home that night. Supratik, his insides tense as a taut bow, lies awake, debating whether to tell their father the truth about his younger son. Supratik does not know much about heroin addiction — it has not been around for long — but all that he has heard has come wrapped in a fog of hush-voiced fear. You can never recover from it, the addiction is so strong it’s irreversible. One hit hooks you for ever, and then your life as you and others around you know it is over. It sucks you out from the inside and finishes you . Not for the first time he thinks of how the Bengali word for ‘suck’ and ‘exploitation’ is the same. How typical of an exemplary specimen of the petite bourgeoisie to get hooked on a destructive drug that is an import from the decadent, evil, capitalist West. The predictability and the perfection of the fit would have elicited a contemptuous chuckle from him at any other time, but this illustration is too close to home. He finds this business of the micro-depredations of capitalism, one where the effects are felt on the smallest units, such as the family, and not just perceived as giant historical phases and on the masses, an interesting new direction in which he can take his dialectical thinking. Or is that only an illusion? Could that too be subsumed under the paradigms that had already been set down in the key texts? How would Charu Mazumdar dissect this fashion of killer recreational drugs amongst the middle classes and link it to historical process?

But what is he going to tell his parents? Would he tell them? Just a skirmish with words , he had said tersely to his mother when she had demanded an explanation. Those few words had damned him into an impromptu collusion with his brother; they both knew, after he had spoken them, that he was not going to tell on Suranjan. It had not led to a truce, but it had bound them in an unspoken conspiracy, an adult variation of a children-united-against-parents kind of scenario. Again he returns to that sticking point about memory: did they have such affiliations and groupings when they were children, brothers protecting each other from the prying, censorious regard of parents instead of snitching on each other? Was this the usual situation in other families where there were two brothers? Did his father and his uncles close ranks against his grandparents?

How clean he thought he had kept his life, unblotted by the inevitable stain of private life; and now that too is traduced. He wants to eat his pillow whole, shred the bedsheet into thin ribbons. How did this come to pass, especially when he had been so assiduous in standing away from it all? First Purba, now Bhai. Then there is the ticking time-bomb of the jewellery theft. Why does he feel both snared and duped? He cannot put a name to what or who has tricked him; maybe, when he was still trapped in the old, pre-dialectical ways of thinking and knowledge, he would have called it heart or emotions, but he has seen through that bit of politics a long time ago, so there is nothing to fall back against. There is only a void and himself.