Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

There is an amused, avuncular twinkle in Chubby Cheeks’s eyes. One of the restraining policemen says, ‘A squealer, this one. He’ll drive us crazy, the fucker.’

‘And this is just the beginning,’ another policeman observes.

Chubby Cheeks gives a resigned smile.

The voice from behind Supratik’s head is terrier-like with its query. ‘Tapan Mukherjee and Ashim Mondol?’ it echoes itself.

There is no available cell or nerve inside Supratik’s head to deploy in conjuring up a lie or a diversion; everything has been conquered by the sensation of pain — it fills his entire being. But he finds that he cannot utter the simple words required of him, or bring himself to lift his head and look at his hand, which they have now released, although he is still held down by the other hand and at his knees and legs. If he says something, anything, there will be an end to this; all he wants to do is buy his reprieve with a few words, but he has lost the capacity to form them. At last, when he can, they come out as a sobbing croak, which he has to repeat three times in order to hear it himself — ‘Don’t know, they’ve run away. Don’t know where.’ How could he ever have imagined that ideology, revolution, the needs of others, abstraction, all these, combined or individually, could have been weightier than the simple business of self-preservation, of the sheer physicality of pain?

‘Lies, all lies,’ comes that voice.

‘No! No!’ he says with as much strength as he can gather, because if he fails to convince them. . His mind refuses to go there.

Chubby Cheeks speaks for the first time. ‘Get on with number two?’ he asks. His voice matches his face: it is kind, purring, the sort of thing one imagines as part of the arsenal of the ideal doctor’s perfect bedside manner.

The voice from behind says, ‘Where are they? We want to know, before the trail goes cold. Then there are other questions. Such as the addresses of all the places where you make your fireworks.’ Supratik takes a while to work out that the question is addressing him and not replying to the short question Chubby Cheeks asked.

The answers tumble out of Supratik without a whit of thought. ‘Don’t know where they’ve gone, I swear, this is the truth, I’m telling you the truth,’ he manages to say, haltingly, in a groan. ‘Bombs — in Kankurgachhi, Motilal Basak Lane, right after the jute mill, number seventy-six, you have to go through it to the back, there’s a tiny alley. Then in the Kasai slum, off Potopara Lane in Narkeldanga, 15/1, between the Canal Road and a lane in the slum. It’s not easy to find.’

The pain stops him there. He feels hot, malleable rods shooting up his arm, in his armpit and elbow.

Another question: ‘The numbers again?’

Supratik obliges.

‘That can’t be all. Where are the others? What are the names of the people in these places?’

‘Can I sit up?’ he entreats.

There is a short pause. The policemen holding him down let go of him. He lifts himself up from his neck and shoulders, then tries to sit up; all he wants to do is see what they have done to his finger. But the sight of it — the nib of a strange pen, dipped in dry blue-black ink — draws a howl from him. It sets him sobbing again, tears, snot, saliva, all running down his face and chin; the time for dignity or maintaining a hard, impervious front is long over. He trots out the names, matching them with the addresses; gives them more names, more locations; pain is everything. They ask him to repeat; he obeys like a good little child. Suddenly, without any warning, they grab hold of him again, but leave him sitting up. He cannot feel the grip restraining his left hand. Chubby Cheeks draws a different pair of pliers, one with thinner, more pointed pincers, much like tweezers.

Supratik screams and sobs simultaneously, ‘No! No! NO! I’ve told you everything, everything, all true, every single word, let me go now, please, let me go, I’ve told you all that you wanted to know.’

Matching the decibels of his plea, the policemen enter into a chorus of yowling:

‘Squealing before anything’s done! A precious prince, do you see?’

‘Put something in his mouth, stuff something in.’

‘Gag the foolish fucker!’

‘Hold him tight, hold him tight!’

They unleash a pandemonium of noise, as if the auditory energy will galvanise them into executing their task; they shout themselves into action. Chubby Cheeks grabs hold of the overgrown nail of Supratik’s big toe with the thin pliers while Supratik, prevented from writhing, screams himself hoarse, so that when the toenail is first twisted and then uprooted, like a fish-scale, and before he passes out, the sound from his vocal cords comes out as long arcs of a breathy, grating rasp.

The SP says, ‘That’ll teach him to go around killing policemen.’

Chubby Cheeks laughs and says, ‘Did you see how I got it in one go?’

‘No wonder they call you Doctor-babu. You should preface all this with, “It won’t hurt at all, trust me, I’m a doctor, I’ve been doing this for decades, just trust me.” What about it, eh?’

They burst out laughing. The SP adds, ‘He’ll think twice about lying when we come back next. The beginning of a meal should always be memorable, don’t you think?’

When Supratik comes to, he is alone; he has no idea how much time has elapsed. All day and all night, for an ungraduated period, he flickers on and off like a light with a faulty connection. In his lucid moments, his thoughts appear like weak, wiggly stripes on the black matrix of pain. They will not find anything in most of those addresses; they have left it too late. Had they extracted the information from him hours after he was brought in, yes, then they could have turned up people and things in their trawl, but now? The news of the raid on his home and his arrest would have spread immediately; they will have known to vacate and go into hiding.

He looks, desultorily, first, then with more intent, for his ripped-out toenail, but cannot find it. In any case, he is hardly mobile enough to search for it properly. He pities himself for ever having harboured ideas of what police torture entailed; they have all been proved wildly incorrect. He does not have any sharp memory of it, the real having supplanted the imagined, and so recently too, but he had thought it involved beatings with sticks, a broken rib or two, punches to the face, broken teeth, a black eye. . The imagination mostly deals with the permissible. He had imagined the pain all those relatively large-scale, crude things, such as mass beatings, assault with sticks, could cause, but who knew that this miniaturist’s art, concentrating on tiny areas, working with instruments finer and more delicate than the stick or the fist, could make all the unsubtle, old-school acts that he had contemplated seem like children’s games — amateurish mimicking of the real things, endearing in their predictability and harmlessness, ultimately preferable.

Then fear begins to eat at his soul: what if they think that he has lied and led them up the garden path, when they go to all the locations he has given them only to find out there is nothing or no one there? For the first time those rust-coloured splatters and drip marks that he has seen distributed sparsely on the walls, in corners and where the walls meet the floor, change their meaning from ‘paan stains’ to something else. The urge to piss is suddenly uncontrollable, but his bladder is dry. It is only then that he notices his pyjamas are damp and the faint whiff of ammonia is coming off him.

A square of black jelly marks where his toenail has been.

He has become clairvoyant: they come for him engorged with anger, not in the diffuse spirit of an idle reconnaissance that they had begun with on the previous occasion. There is the SP again, some of the lower-ranking policemen from earlier, but no Chubby Cheeks; instead a thin broomstick of a man in civilian clothes — seven men in total. The repetitious nature of it all, as if the ordinary sequential flow of life has become circular in his case, makes him feel dizzy; is he hallucinating it all? The five khaki-clad policeman fall on him in a riot, like a pack of starving dogs, the moment they enter; the dream-like feeling ends. The beating is accompanied by rousing shouts and abuses, all in a continuous stream, drowning out his pitiful mewling. He reacts in the usual human way, by curling up into a ball, but this time there are no niceties observed by the assailants; the blows land everywhere, back, rump, hip, arms, head, shoulders, legs, neck, thighs. He is an open receptacle.