Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

Over the next three nights, Supratik watches his brother travelling into the land where no man can be his companion, where he is alone with himself, or a version of himself, in a solitude magnified and distorted so extremely that that reality seems as impregnable as death itself. In that aloneness, Suranjan, his eyes closed, his chin nearly meeting his chest, cannot even bring himself to stretch out on his bed; he is arrested in the position he is in when he begins his journey, the unmistakable debris of burnt foil, thick straw made from rolled-up card, black, curled stubs of spent matches littered around him. Every day Supratik has enjoined himself, I must catch him at it this evening ; every day he has missed it and failed, partly because Suranjan has mastered the self-protective stealth of the addict, but also because Supratik himself has been away — and, when not away, distracted — working out the great plans regarding an imminent action in the city.

Seeing Suranjan nearly unconscious in that awkward position, leaning at an impossible tilt and yet not falling, not jerking awake when his head has reached an excruciating angle with his neck and shoulder, fills Supratik with such a fury of protectiveness that he has to stop staring at his brother and force himself again to go over all the steps, written out in his head, as it were, in numbered points, leading to the big event planned for Monday night. It has the effect of counting backwards to induce sleep; it does not achieve the desired result, but it calms him somewhat so that when he looks at his narcotised brother he feels something slightly different, the same realisation one has of the limits of human understanding when faced with someone asleep, because one can never enter that insuperably private world of the sleeper, regardless of how intertwined the lives are of observer and observed. The melancholy is sharp and bitter; it makes him despair about being able to do anything about the hell Suranjan has got himself into. They have not managed to come out of the castles of their dented egos and wave a white flag since they fell out three days ago; they have stopped speaking, even looking at each other. Except for now, when Supratik allows himself to gaze unrestricted at Suranjan because he knows no one is looking. He cannot shoulder this burden himself, but he already knows what Purba, the only person he can think of confiding in, will say. He can hear her voice in his head this instant — ‘It’s not a good thing, this falling-out between brothers, and then this business of not being on speaking terms. He’s your younger brother, it is your duty to love, protect and forgive him, whatever he does.’

He makes up his mind. He will not tell Ma and Baba the truth, not now; he will act on it himself first. His initial port of call will be Suranjan’s friends, to attempt to establish the exact nature of his addiction. From there the subsequent course of action will follow. He will start the ball rolling the very day after the big event. He reads Chapter 23, ‘Street Tactics’, of Carlos Marighella’s mint-new mini-manual again:

When the police troops come wearing helmets to protect them against flying objects, we have to divide ourselves into two teams — one to attack the enemy from the front, the other to attack him in the rear — withdrawing one as the other goes into action to prevent the first from being struck by projectiles hurled by the second. By the same token, it is important to know how to respond to the police net. When the police designate certain of their men to go into the crowd and arrest a demonstrator, a larger group of urban guerrillas must surround the police group, disarming and beating them and at the same time allowing the prisoner to escape. This urban guerrilla operation is called ‘the net within a net’.

The opportunity to get to the bottom of his brother’s drug problems never arrives. At three o’clock in the morning on Tuesday, four black police vans enter Basanta Bose Road. About twenty policemen get out, break down the front door of 22/6 and enter the house. The noise of the wood splintering, the men shouting, ‘Police! Police! Open up!’, wakes everyone in the house. Purba, Sona and Kalyani are affected first; on the ground floor, they are nearest the breach. They lie frozen in the dark as the noise increases. Then their door is kicked in. Several policemen with torches almost fall into the room in a heap, the light is turned on, a voice commands, ‘Look everywhere. Under the bed, inside the almirah, everywhere.’ Another voice, now inside, raps out, ‘Get out of bed, all of you, get up and get off the bed, onto the floor. And don’t move.’ Before they have woken up properly, their room is turned into something on the route of a cyclone. The bed is partially lifted and set down on the floor with a crash. The almirah is opened, everything inside is flung out, then they kick its door and crack it. They knock and kick things over, trample on everything that is on the floor and exit.

They are everywhere at once. In the pantry on the ground floor they lift up the large glass jars, the utensils and earthenware, the pots, pans, tins, skillets, and fling everything down. In Purba’s dark cubbyhole of a kitchen next to the pantry they run their arms across every jar, bottle and tin standing — not many — and leave them broken or lying on the floor. They kick the small mud oven into small clods, leaving behind the heavy, worn disc of its iron grill. They enter the seldom-used living room on this floor, tear down the curtains, upend the coffee table and chairs, slit open the cushions, tear the stereo and the sound-boxes from their wires and hurl them, smash the impassive and inert terracotta Bankura horses and then do the same to the glass front of the bookshelf by throwing the two heavy ashtrays at it, pull out the books and hurl them too. A nearly empty bottle of whisky falls and smashes; the resinous smell of spirit from that small amount is surprisingly strong. No, they cannot find what they are looking for. ‘Not here, not here,’ someone shouts, ‘Will be upstairs, no doubt.’ They have smoked out Kamala and Malati from their room behind the pantry, down the short, narrow passage in the warren of outhouse-coops towards the garden. The women stand rigid with fear, speechless, as the police carry on their rampage. There are no more servants for them to flush out — the men and boys have already been hauled away.

But the ground floor is a picture of still-life compared with what is going on in the upper storeys. Heavy footsteps, an army of them, thudding up the stairs; men shouting, ‘Get out of our way, this is a police search’; the sound of things crashing, breaking, being kicked in. In the chaos, Chhaya’s hysterical, ‘What’s going on? What’s going on?’ is drowned out. The Ghoshes are all awake now, but the last few threads connecting them to the world of sleep are still not torn: they stand confused, terrified, their voices dead in their throats. A general questioning cry of ‘What is happening?’ rises and then that too dies. Jayanti tries to shield her daughter from the stampede, but their room too is vandalised. The words, ‘She’s a child, please leave her alone, why do you need to go into her room?’ resonate in her head, but fear prevents them from becoming sounds and emerging. A similar thing happens to Chhaya’s wail, ‘Priyo, Priyo, what’s going on? Someone tell me, please, please’, doomed to circulate only in the prison of her mind.

The police enter rooms simultaneously, in groups of three or four, and smash and break and ruin; they cannot find what they are looking for; they know they will, but none among the Ghoshes seems to know, or acknowledge in their souls, what it is. The police go into bathrooms, drag in chairs and stools, climb on them to reach the high cisterns, remove their heavy iron tops and fling them down, then run their hands through the water in the reservoir — nothing.