Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

The questions are so unbearable that Supratik’s mind throws him toys and baubles to distract, and one of them is a memory of himself as a four-year old riding his red tricycle in the garden and suddenly finding that he was unable to stop and crashing against the trunk of the guava tree.

Madan-da had come running to pick up the bawling child in his arms and had put Mercurochrome on his skinned knees and elbows.

‘Eeeesh, eeeesh, poor little baby’ — Supratik can hear Madan-da’s voice in his head — ‘it’ll be all right, all fine. Here, look, here’s the magic red medicine, I’ll put it here, and here, and there, look; I can see it healing as we speak, the red medicine is spreading its goodness all over the little cuts, eeesh, eeesh. .’

Red medicine. At the age of nine or ten, Supratik had discovered that Madan-da couldn’t get his tongue round the complicated name, Mercurochrome, so he called it ‘red medicine’ instead. He had tried to teach Madan-da, but the hilarious attempts had come out repeatedly as ‘Mar-coo-kom’.

He feels as if a careless hand has swiped through a shelf of delicate china in his chest. The sobs emerge from him as a series of retches.

The man mocks him, ‘What? Feeling uncomfortable? Did part of the jewellery you stole fund the Shyambazar bombing?’ he asks.

From the strangely sliding territory of the irrefutable accusations of a few minutes ago, these straightforward questions return Supratik to more comfortable land; he begins to feel steady, solidity under his feet again. He does not have it in him to put on a drama of denial — ‘What on earth are you talking about? I don’t understand at all’ kind of rubbish — so he suffers the questions in silence again. That is a kind of answer, he knows, but it is the best he can do; he does not hold many cards in his hand.

‘And what will it finance, the loot?’ His voice has the serrations of a knife in it. ‘Home-made bombs and pipe-bombs, maybe a gun or two? But those you’d rather steal from the police or from others, given that stealing and looting form such pillars of your Charu Mazumdar’s politics lectures, right? How long will it sustain your revolution, this petty thieving?’

With that, he suddenly gets up and leaves the room, unusually quickly for a person like him, before Supratik has had time to process what is happening. He will never see him again, never find out who it was that subjected him to such an oddly formal two hours.

Three more days in solitary confinement with his handcuffs removed and then the regime changes. Two khaki-clad policemen enter his cell, start to taunt and abuse him — the terms deployed are standard currency among the lower classes — and, when he does not rise to this, beat him with their regulation sticks with a kind of mindful randomness, letting the blows fall anywhere except on his head or neck, then depart, still swearing. Supratik uncurls himself and, through the blanket of pain, finds himself thinking that if this is going to be the level of mistreatment involved before they let him go, he will take it in his stride; this much is endurable.

But he is wrong.

The following day four policemen enter his room. One holds him down by his hands, one by his knees, the third one keeps his feet straightened, while the fourth man beats the soles of his feet with such concentrated energy and vigour that he can hear his screams punctuated by the policeman’s panting. He thinks, in so far as the pain has left him any capacity for thought, that he will never walk again. Later, much later, after the sharp but localised agony has become dully pervasive, creeping up from his feet to his knees and, oddly, his testicles, his lower abdomen and head, he will remember from somewhere that they beat you on the soles so as to leave no bruising on you.

No less than the Senior Superintendent is sent to look in on him the next day; Supratik has long known how to tell their rank by reading the insignia on their shoulder-flashes.

He launches directly into business. ‘What? Do you think you will talk now?’ he asks Supratik.

Supratik, lying down in the cartoon shape of a lightning bolt, turns his head and looks at him, then goes back to his original position, head bowed and nestled against one side in the crook of his arms.

‘These are not good signs,’ the SSP says opaquely. ‘We have ways to make you talk.’

It seems to Supratik that they forget about him for days, he is not sure how many. In that time he can only think and dream about the purple-bordering-on-black butt-end of one of his comrade’s fingers.

When they come next they are prepared; and they come as if sent by a malignant god who gives the heft of physical reality to dreams and thoughts. The panting man who beat him is there along with one, maybe two, of the posse attending on him that day; he cannot clearly tell. Their ranks are swelled to six now, but, it is obvious from the moment they enter, that this Superintendent — only one metal star this time, as if he, Supratik, has been demoted in their consideration — will not be participating; he sets himself slightly apart. The reason for this emerges soon enough. A policeman grasps his right wrist, another his left, two hold down his legs, one each; all of them grip like a vice winched to breaking point.

The remaining man, kind-looking, almost fatherly, with chubby cheeks and a luxuriant ink-black moustache, turns to the SP and makes a querying motion with his head; the SP nods, once, calmly, then moves to stand behind Supratik’s head, from where he cannot see him. Chubby Cheeks takes out a short length of what looks like a nylon rope and a pair of pliers from the pocket of his voluminous khaki trousers and advances towards Supratik. It takes a while for Supratik to extract the meaning from what he sees; there is no space or time between that comprehension and his involuntary, hoarse cry, ‘No!’ It comes out so low that he could have been mistaken for expressing disbelief in a session of gossipy chit-chat.

But the SP has heard him all right. His voice says, ‘Who planned the bombing in Shyambazar?’

‘No,’ Supratik says again, this time in a whisper. Chubby Cheeks looks beyond him for a signal, asks the policeman holding his left wrist, ‘You’re sure you have it all right?’, then brings the pliers near his fingers.

Supratik closes his hand into a fist, as much as the grip will allow; his bladder gives at the same time. Chubby Cheeks taps sharply on the knuckles with the pliers; he instantly unclenches his hand for a moment; in that brief second, his longest finger, the one next to his index finger, is held in the jaws of the pliers. Gently.

There is a question again, but Supratik does not hear it, so he does not answer. The pressure on his finger increases infinitesimally; maybe he imagines it. His eyes are wide, unblinking.

‘Where are Tapan Mukherjee and Ashim Mondol? Where are they hiding after the bombing?’

Chubby Cheeks presses down on the short curved handles of the pliers, the blunt jaws bite obediently, Supratik screams and screams and his body tries to buck up and out, but he cannot, he is being held down at exactly the points they know he is going to rear. The jaws unclamp. His screams turn, with a will of their own, into a whimpering. He sounds like a dog.

‘Do you now remember where your friends are?’

The whimpering continues, but it is not a response to the question; that was inserted as if aimlessly into the flow of the sound coming out of Supratik. It is posed again. Supratik does not even try to shape into intelligible words the unmanning, acoustic flux he is producing; he has no will. This time he imagines the sound of the crack of bone; it is the crack of a pistol shot giving the ‘Go!’ signal to the run of his animal scream as the pliers press down and press down and press down, wishing to obliterate the obstruction of the tip of his finger standing between the perfect union of the two metal jaws. His screams end in billowing sobs, one after the other, unstoppable.