Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

Then he and his men are out of the house. Sounds of climbing into vans; the brief burst of a conflicting set of instructions about which van to bundle Supratik into, quickly resolved; the police watching the possible exit points in the vicinity returning to the vehicles; van doors slamming shut. Not a single light has come on in any of the doors or windows of the houses on Basanta Bose Road, yet each has a covert and intense quality of watchfulness, of absorption, about it; eyes and ears, stretched to their maximum sensory capacity, seem to have transferred their biological qualities to the portals behind which they are hidden. The silence itself is suspect, too silent. Then, cutting through that tense quietness, the vans leave, with the knock-and-rattle of running engines, one after the other.

THE ROOM SUPRATIK is taken to is bare and ordinary: whitewashed walls, the white turned to a tallowy grey; a table with two chairs on either side; a naked bulb hanging down a dusty plait of red, green and white wires from the centre of the ceiling; a rusting steel almirah; no windows. It could be anywhere. Although he is handcuffed, this is not a prisoner’s cell; maybe an administrative room, someone’s office, a meeting chamber. The two policemen who have brought him in here leave without a word; he can hear the door being bolted and locked from the outside. He knows it will be a long while, maybe even a day, before anyone comes down, knows that this is the stage they call ‘pickling’, where they let a suspect sit in total isolation and silence so that the speculation of what awaits him can loosen the tight coil of what is a human mind or soul. Often it is easy, this undoing; knowledge helps nothing. Or, rather, the knowledge helps the other side in doing half its preparatory work for them, which is why Supratik decides not to allow his mind to stray into the territory of what he has heard of the ways people such as he are dealt with by the police; he is not going to make their work easier by presenting them with the unravelled weave of himself when they walk in.

But the mind is the most impossible thing to empty and Supratik runs up against the obstinately contrarian will of his the moment it thinks its strategy of resistance: he can think of nothing other than what lies in store for him. Quite aside from playing its treacherous, self-consuming game of dividing itself into two camps and pitching them in battle against each other, his mind — a different creature, really; embodied inside him but a separate presence — introduces yet another combat. He thinks of the recent ‘shoot to kill’ orders given to the police, the military and the Central Reserve Forces across seven states to deal with his kind. But, surely, if they take him not in action in the field, as it were, but from home, that diktat does not apply? Perhaps they will let him go, after roughing him up a bit to extract any information they think will be useful? From second to second the answer flicks between yes and no, yes and no, a mad, manic child playing with toy light-switches marked ‘Salvation’ and ‘Despair’. In some ways he is immaterial to this conflict. It is as if two abstract principles are locked in their gladiatorial confrontation in a morality play, and he is just the stage on which they perform their encounter.

The rattle of the bolt and lock outside returns him to the solidity of the room. The door opens. The man who is shown in by two uniformed flunkeys is not someone who answers Supratik’s mental image of an interrogator, or even a policeman. This short, shy-looking, middle-aged man, with his salt-and-pepper hair and moustache, his jowls beginning to sag, his eyes hidden and distorted behind the powerful bifocal lenses of his thick black-framed glasses, could be anything from a college lecturer to the manager of a local branch of the State Bank of India. The utter ordinariness of the object that he is carrying, and then sets down on the table, adds to this impression: a tired, much-used brown paper file. He moves the chair and sits down, facing Supratik, but somehow managing to keep his face in the penumbral region that the almirah creates on his side of the table. Throughout this meeting Supratik will never properly get to see his expression, the changeable meanings in his eyes.

The voice too, when it issues out of those grey lips, could be a bureaucrat’s: cultured, impassive, bored. No leading up gently, lullingly from the margins; it launches headlong into the middle with, ‘Achchha, besides Debdulal Maity, you, Samir Ray Chowdhury and Dhiren Chatterjee, can you tell me who else was at the meetings in Debdulal-babu’s home in Belpahari in March/April last year? I mean, ’69?’

Two immediate things strike Supratik, although he does not acknowledge the surprise to himself, let alone betray it by any visible signs: he is being addressed respectfully with the highest form of ‘you’; and, second, they have a lot more on him and his comrades, even ‘micro’ details, as he would have once put it, of their whereabouts and activities than he would ever have given them credit for. The surprise is at the galling admission that he will have to make, shedding his condescension, of their nous and perspicacity. Supercilious hatred is easy; hatred tempered with the beginnings of respect — but in no way denting the antagonism — is much more difficult, Supratik finds. Or is this called fear?

He has no idea how he is going to play this. After all, he has only a limited range available to him: lying, denial, inability to recall; and those are intersecting sets, too. Where is he going to begin? Denial of the meeting? Denial that he knows, or ever knew, any of the people named? A brazen feigned surprise and ignorance, even outrage, that he is being questioned? It is a crucial question, for the response to it will set the parameters for everything that is to follow. He has to be as careful as a stalking cat.

The reply from his long-unused voice comes out all catarrhal, weak and risibly unconvincing to his own ears: ‘I don’t remember.’

There. He has gone down one path of the several available to him and foreclosed all other possibilities. He is now doomed to stick unveeringly to it and follow to its particular end, and who knows if that is not a destination more baneful than the others would have led him to? Besides, those three simple words have opened up other exposed flanks: that the meetings took place and that the meetings took place between the people named, in the place and time mentioned. He has, after all, not specifically denied them.

The man does not seem interested in attacking those weaknesses. Instead he asks, ‘And the tactical line of’ — pause — ‘of killing in small groups, “guerrilla action”, I think you call it? Who was the brain behind it in Jhargram and Belpahari? You?’

There is nothing that he can say to this. Is he expected to reply to every question? If so, is he allowed to ponder it as one would a chess move, expansively, with all the time in the world? Or would that be damning? Would swift, rat-a-tat replies be rewarded with a better conclusion?

Again his inquisitor does not prod, letting the silence lengthen and become the third voice in the play. The State Assembly has been dissolved and it is President’s Rule again in West Bengal, the second time in two years, but Supratik feels in his bones that this man must be someone high-ranking in the CPI(M) Politburo, the erstwhile Home Minister Jyoti Basu’s right-hand man, even.

‘What about the people you saw during the times that you returned to Calcutta’ — here he consults some papers in the open brown file on his lap — ‘let’s see, um, here, you visited Calcutta three times between February ’68 and January ’70? Or was it five? Before you returned. . returned for good in March this year? Or are you thinking of going back to Medinipur again?’ The man’s voice remains steady and polite, even sympathetic, but this casual little question he has just lobbed freezes Supratik’s blood and liquefies it, all in one instant, so that he suddenly feels light-headed, about to levitate. It is one of those few things that he has refrained even from writing down in his diary to Purba. He knows they have not got hold of that — they cannot. . But a few things become clear to him. Has Dipankar been caught and made to — here his thoughts buckle into performing an elision — made to give up some information or or or