Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

‘Not there, not there, how can you have a grown-up man in there?’ a policeman comments.

‘You can’t trust these fuckers,’ someone replies. ‘If not a person, then maybe explosives, bomb-making masala, guns — who knows?’

A scream comes from someone on the top floor; it is impossible to say who it is. There is a surge in the thudding and crashing; several voices scream in a hell’s chorus of atonality. Within that the shouted words, ‘Found him! Found the bastard! Here, here. Come, come quickly, we need a hand’ can be discerned in shreds, as Supratik is dragged out by his hair by two policemen from his bedroom.

‘Hold him tight, be careful! See that he doesn’t escape.’

‘Where’s he going to go? Every single lane and by-lane is blocked by our men outside.’

‘Hiding under the bed, he was. Fucking around with bombs outside, a mouse at home when the police come knocking — typical! Where’s all your Naxalite courage now, eh?’

Inspector Saha, who has been directing the raid, says to Supratik, ‘You think we’re so stupid that we don’t know who is the mastermind behind the bombing in Shyambazar tonight? You think, if you do your terrorism far away from home, we’ll not know who it is?’ He slaps Supratik across his face; Sandhya flinches and tries to cry out; Inspector Saha orders, ‘Take him away’, then, as a coda addressed to the assembled wax-dolls that the Ghoshes have turned into, ‘The game’s changing, these sister-fuckers are going to be hanging from every lamp-post in town.’

The disappearance of the ingratiating Inspector — three months ago, when he came to arrest Madan, he was bowing low and doing his ‘We are your servants, it is for you to command us’ patter, punctuated by the laugh that was both oleaginous and menacing — and his replacement by this obscenely swearing, disrespectful dog has been so swift that it is on this that the Ghoshes focus their attention. Their momentary outrage about superficial points of conduct offers a respite from the far greater upheaval playing out in front of them. Another thought briefly fans open in their minds: every single person in every house in the neighbourhood must be awake in their beds now, or peering from behind their windows, all ears pricked, the frisson of this undreamed of drama right outside their front doors galvanising their lives. The thought allows, yet again, the welcome postponement of the taste of ruin.

Sandhya whispers, almost to herself, ‘Please leave him, please let him go.’ This is ignored; it is not even clear that anyone has heard it. She turns to her husband and implores, ‘Why are you standing there? Why aren’t you doing anything?’

Adinath remains impassive, frozen. Three months ago, during another search-and-arrest scenario at home, the Ghoshes had been aghast, but not so much that they had not been able to point out, with the confident arrogance that comes so easily to people of their kind, that the police had been mistaken in their arrest of Madan. Now fear has devoured them; it is only their shadows who stand and watch. It is one of their own who is in trouble now, not an adopted servant. Angry remonstrances, their easeful way with giving out orders, could make the situation irredeemable, with consequences they cannot bring themselves to think about, but know on a level deeper than thought, in their cells and blood. The only performance they can put on is one of placatory, undignified begging.

But something gives and the person who has most to lose by not playing it cautiously liberates herself from this mummery of fear and calculation: Sandhya repeats her earlier whisper, but this time it lets itself loose as a scream, ‘Please leave him, please let him go! Why do you have to hold him like this? Can’t you see you’re hurting him?’

In response, two of the four policemen manhandling Supratik twist his arms, already pinned to his back, to the very edge of dislodging them from their sockets at the elbow and shoulders.

Supratik cries out in pain, the sound more animal than human.

Bhola, rooted halfway up the stairs, watching the proceedings like a child peering over the height of a wall at something terrifying and forbidden, tries to intervene with ‘Stop it! This is cruel’, but it emerges as a phlegmy clatter. The string of his blue-and-dirty-white-striped pyjama is hanging down the front of his flies to his knees. A segment of his hairy pot-belly, displaying the navel, is visible between the bottom of his vest and the crinkled circumference of the top of his pyjama. An officer dawdles up to him, as if this were a picnic and he is moving with dozy contentment to the basket that holds the oranges, and kicks him down the stairs. Chhaya and Charubala gasp audibly. From this point on, what little decorum there had been in the proceedings evaporates completely.

‘Shut up!’ growls the Inspector. ‘One more word or sound from you and I’ll have all of you arrested. You’ll see what it feels like to breathe the air in the lock-up.’ He turns to his men and says, ‘Take him to the van.’

Supratik tries to stand up from his kneeling position. Immediately the four officers surrounding him pounce and, before further orders can be given, drag him by his overgrown hair down the stairs as they would the carcass of a huge, butchered creature. Supratik roars in pain again and lets out an unearthly elongated call for his mother — ‘Maaaa!’ Or so it sounds to Sandhya. She has turned insane. She runs to the Inspector and entreats, ‘Take me away instead of him. I’ll answer for him. Take me away.’ At every iteration of the word ‘I’ or ‘me’ she brings down her clenched fist on her chest with a thump so loud that everyone shudders each time it occurs. She falls down to her knees and grasps the Inspector’s legs, sobbing, ‘Please let him go, I’m falling at your feet, please let him go.’ She has transformed everyone into stone figures in a tableau.

The spell is broken by a thin wail coming out of the bedridden Prafullanath’s room: ‘What’s going on? What is happening? Where’s everyone?’

The Inspector takes this as a kind of permission; he disengages himself roughly and bounds down the stairs.

His men have only just reached the ground floor with Supratik. That young widow is standing outside her room, weeping, her aanchol held to her mouth out of habit, or perhaps out of the usual sense of decorum. The Inspector is familiar with enough of the family’s history to know that she and her two children form a detached unit, a sort of dispensable parenthesis to the rest of the Ghoshes. It is odd for someone of her position to be standing outside her room, listening to the circus upstairs; much more normal for her to be inside, gripped by curiosity and yet hiding, unable to eavesdrop with any ease, because of fear. It is certainly unusual enough for the thought to occur to him at this time of such intense turbulence. Then he notices what it is that has made him pay any attention to yet another weeping woman in a home being raided — she is clawing the air around her waist with her free hand as if bidding him and his men to stop, but fear and inhibition have not allowed it to be expressed in its fullness. The aborted gesture has instead become diverted to a tic, the kind one would see in an old, ill man afflicted with some neurological problem. It gives him the strange impression that she has the edge of her sari clamped to her mouth to stop what she wants to say from getting out. A remarkably attractive woman, he notes, giving her the once-over with his eyes; she is at the apogee of her ripeness. How old could she be? Thirty, at the most? He files away the thought, of half a mind to return to it later perhaps; something has caught at the peripheries of his consciousness and he needs to bring it to the light. But this is not the time.