Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

A swirl of amazement at this catalogue, absurd coming from such a source, injects itself into the stream of Supratik’s fear and anxiety. He was prepared to tackle the questions straight on, but now he feels he is being ridiculed, that their revolution is being attacked not only in the usual way, with the police and military and the machinery of state power, but also with comic derision. The immediate sting of this is more irritating.

‘What? Am I right or not? What a terrible time you must have had. And if you fell ill, what then? The nearest hospital would have been in Jhargram or Medinipur Town, no? Long walk from where you were, very, very long. Days, right? Trains were out of bounds, weren’t they, because of increased police presence in the stations? But you boys had a lot of practice in walking, walking from one village to another in the night. What? Am I right?’

Before Supratik has had a chance to stifle his pique and subject his words to a measure of control, they rush out — ‘Yes, you are.’

The man seems taken aback by the simplicity of the admission, and the ease with which it appears. There is a pause to accommodate the unexpected before he resumes, ‘So why did you young men do it? You had the whole world to look forward to. Such bright futures, now, now all. . all. .’ He leaves out the culminating word pointedly, maybe out of an incongruous sense of politeness.

Supratik does not know where to begin; the profusion of the points of entry stump him. Are the questions in earnest or a form of entrapment that he has not been able to decode? Surely this man is not really asking for a lesson in politics; their individual sides have been chosen a long time ago, and each is settled into his own with the inextirpability of giant trees. Whatever he says now in response will be, on several levels, an exercise in futility. Or is the man extending a covert invitation to help him mitigate his own circumstances of imprisonment, and worse, by mounting an ideological plea? Since when did that work, Supratik asks himself, incredulous that the absurdity of thought has infected him too.

‘I keep stumbling over that bit. Not so much on why you went to the villages, not so much all that, that’s easy to understand — your brains were washed by this this this propaganda, and you are all young, your blood is hot, you are restless and and, if I may say it, a bit reckless, a bit of adventurism, it’s natural that that runs in all your blood; this, after all, is the age for doing, not for sitting still or thinking deeply about things. What I cannot understand is why you didn’t dabble in it briefly and then return home to your books and your comforts. A lot of your, ah, comrades did that.’

Supratik decides to steer clear of sarcasm. Instead he says, ‘Because who else will be the defence counsel for humanity?’ He has to do his old trick of twisting his thumb to its most extreme possible to prevent himself from adding, ‘Not you or your type.’

‘Eh?’ Not the more polished ‘What?’ this time, but a shortcut into the rustic interjection.

‘Who will fight the corner for those who have nothing?’ Supratik elucidates. ‘For those who don’t even know that something can be done? That they can fight back? That their expendable lives needn’t be fodder, generation after generation?’

‘Whoaaah. Stop stop stop stop, my head hurts with all these big words. .’

Supratik marvels again at the man’s chameleon-like capacity for seamless transition, this time into feigning to be a simple-minded buffoon; how many skins does the man have? Is he going to be entertained with all of them, one by one? But on no account must he be drawn into talking about the moral basis of his politics; that would only serve to make him outraged, lose control, go down the road of vicious sneering attacks, all of which would not do him any favours. He feels small that such a self-serving calculation has entered his head; has he fallen so far, become so emasculated, that, when called upon to defend the revolution, he has traded off his possible personal safety against it? Is this how it all ends?

‘All this bleeding-heart sensibility,’ the man says, ‘not really very sensible. If you feel so much for the poor and the needy, why did you let your cook, Madan, take the blame when it was you who had stolen your aunt’s jewellery?’

The mood and tone, chameleons themselves, have shifted their colour and shape. There is cold metal in the man’s voice. The recent clown could have been imagined by Supratik.

‘You stole her jewellery to finance your terrorism. You think everyone moves with their faces to the grass? The “urban intelligentsia” is not so intelligent, after all. Or perhaps it doesn’t credit others, of different political stripes, with much intelligence?’

So the police know: Supratik feels the shock as a moist heat that suddenly wicks into his face. It enters his ears, from the inside, as a ringing, and as the droning din subsides he can hear the man saying, ‘. . not know that? So clearly no fighting Madan’s corner, for you? His life was not fodder, as you put it, to you middle-class boys playing around with some dangerous fireworks? Tsk-tsk.’

Supratik can hear the hiss-and-burn of acid as the bass to his questioner’s words; the sarcasm, now no longer his prerogative, is not another colourful skin the man has stretched over his personality. Supratik thinks that some residue of dignity — that word will have to do — prevents him from answering the questions. Shame consumes him. He tries to think back to the moment when he had hatched the plan to steal his aunt’s jewellery and have Madan-da framed for the burglary, but he seems unable to return to that point of origin. What had he felt during the planning? Excitement that he had found a way of injecting easy and substantial funds into the urban side of his party’s ongoing revolution? Had it been mitigated by at least a tiny blot of pity for the old man he was offering up as sacrifice? Had there been any guilt? Shame? He keeps returning to that word and, like a giant landslide blocking the way, it won’t allow him to get to his destination; he will have to reckon with it first.

The ruin of a kind, loving, innocent old man in the evening of his life against the money necessary for reaching the next stage of the revolution’s city-based operations — the exchange reveals itself with such starkness now that he feels the shame as a bloom of terror right in the centre of his body. Could it be that he felt no dilemma, no queasiness, at all about it when the idea first began to germinate in his head? Could he not have engineered the theft in such a way that his pishi, Chhaya, was suspected for the deed? That would have seemed so natural, a public culmination of the two women’s decades-long animosity. Instead, he had deliberately and carefully placed his aunt’s ruby-and-diamond ring under Madan-da’s hollow statue of Krishna, hoping that it would be turned up during the ensuing raid, leading to the old man’s arrest.

The calculation at that time, he remembers, had been strictly mathematical — if one have-not had to be sacrificed so that fifty have-nots could be benefited, nothing trivial such as emotions could stand in the way. He had chosen accordingly and, now, that arithmetic, for which he and Madan-da have paid such an unthinkable price, will not provide him with a crumb of comfort. The questions of feelings and principles and inhuman betrayal that he has had to wrestle with surge back, this time without the soul-destroying arithmetic to balance them out: did he. . did he go down that route because of reasons of class, because a servant stealing is so much more credible, so much more natural , than a member of the family? Was it to make the theft believable to the police that he had framed Madan-da, or was it because it had cost less to betray a servant than one’s own kind?