Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

The preamble over, they lift him up and throw him on his cot, then tie his arms and legs together, much as hunted animals or animals about to be sacrificed are bundled up for ease of carrying.

‘Stop shouting!’ the SP orders Supratik. ‘Stop your screaming right now. We’ll teach you how to scream, you lying motherfucker. So forward with the addresses, so helpful and willing. Now we know why: there’s no one fucking there. No one! The birds have all flown. And no bomb-masala either.’

Supratik begins to explain to the ceiling from his supine position — ‘Listen to me, please, listen’ — but a slap across his face shuts him up.

‘You will talk now. We’ll make you talk now. Every name that you know, including the names of your fourteen forefathers, will come fucking out from you.’

They untie his pyjamas and draw it down to his ankles. He cries out, ‘I’ll tell everything, don’t do this, please don’t, everything I know.’ His sobs are now racked by hiccups, so his words come out oddly syncopated. Still he tries: ‘They got news that I had been arrested, so they ran away. You would have found out if you had gone earlier, I’m telling you the truth. .’

‘So it’s all our fault? Is that what you’re trying to say?’

‘No!’ he shouts.

The policeman holding him down at his knees, obstructing his view of what they are going to soon begin doing to the lower half of his body, says, ‘The fucker will sing, sing for his life. There will be a lot of noise. Shall we tie his mouth?’

‘How are we going to get things out of him if he can’t speak, you foolish arse?’ one of his colleagues notes with mirth.

A sudden silence descends in the room. In that stillness Supratik can discern something that he can only think of as the sounds of preparation — the rustle of clothing, a click, a suggestion of small, hard objects coming into brief contact with each other. . His mouth and throat are completely dry. If he could only see what it is they are taking out, what it is they are planning to do. .

The thin man in plain clothes says, ‘Hold him down really hard. He mustn’t move’ and sits down on the bed, next to Supratik’s naked thighs. He touches the inner left thigh and brushes it, as if smoothing down some paper before bringing his pen down on it. Supratik screams.

The SP says, ‘Now for some answers.’

Supratik cannot control the sounds coming out of him; they control him, not the other way around; the notion of agency has been inverted. He feels a prick on the skin where he has just been touched, like a hypodermic needle entering.

‘Nooooo! Noooo!’ Tides of screams break over him.

‘Don’t move. The more you move. .’

Then he feels a series of those pricks, slow, methodical, closely spaced, along a long curve on the skin of his thigh. With each insertion of the needle, his whole body tries to jerk; after half a dozen of these pricks he begins to find the pain not totally intolerable. His mind begins its habitual trickery, starting with salvaging the memory of a childhood game he used to play with Suranjan: they used to spell out words, letter by letter, on each other’s backs, using the tip of one finger, and they had to guess what the word was.

‘Names,’ the SP says. ‘Every Naxal you know in the city, I want to know their names. We’ll impale all of you fuckers.’

Supratik cannot think of a single name. He feels yet another curve being tattooed into his skin, this one close to and following the first one. It hurts more.

‘What are you doing? What are they doing? What are they doing?’ he begs.

‘Shut up!’ the SP commands. ‘The questions are ours to ask, you son of a whore. Names, I want names.’

‘Ashu Chatterjee, Ramen Niyogi, Debashish Ray Chowdhury, Debdulal Maity, Ashish Mukherjee,’ the names come out, as if from a tap; Supratik has no idea if they are real, or fabricated, or semi-fictional hybrids where the surnames and forenames, both tethered in truth, have become mismatched.

The needle is now picking out a line that feels as if it is running perpendicular to the curves just executed. He has no idea what is happening and the ignorance corrodes him into nothing. It feels less painful than what he has already been subjected to, unless. . Unless this is a throat-clearing before the real singing begins.

He lets out an involuntary cry, this one of fear, but it is indistinguishable from a cry of pain.

‘Again,’ the SP orders.

He recites a list, not congruent with the one he has given before.

‘Lies, lies!’ the SP shouts. ‘How did Ramen Niyogi become Ramen Mukherjee? How?’

The needle-artist has dotted out a pretty outline of a sickle and hammer over an area of nearly twenty square inches on Supratik’s thigh in pinpricks of blood. He pokes a sharp knife at one corner of the sickle and with a quick, sharp dig-and-twist movement loosens a little bit of skin, enough so that the pinch formed of his thumb and forefinger has a purchase on the flap.

Supratik howls as the pain reams his entire being.

‘Names and addresses and whereabouts,’ the SP demands.

How can he speak?

‘Names,’ comes the order again.

With one graceful movement of the point of the knife, the tattooist cuts along the dotted line of one curve of the sickle, then proceeds to do the same along the other arc. The craftsmanship is so fine that it takes a tiny fraction of time for the blood to bead along the bend of the line. He then begins to pull the skin, held by the corner that he has loosened, along the crescent of blood, bit by slow bit. An old-fashioned flaying is in progress.

‘Fucker’s screaming as if he’s being slaughtered!’

Another policeman suggests to the SP, ‘He could be gagged now and the questions could be asked after it’s over. He’ll know not to lie after this.’

As if to test the robustness of this hypothesis, the thin man pulls off the strip of skin that forms the metal blade of the representation of the sickle, in one quick tug. The sound from Supratik is indescribable. The peeled skin, a thin strip of wet, red rag, is attached to the bit where the joined-dots diagram of the sickle-handle begins.

The SP roars above this, ‘Taking out policeman, eh? Killing policemen. This’ll teach you, you son of a whore; this’ll teach you to stab and shoot and bomb the police.’ His delivery is a mixture of exultation and admonishment; he is delighted that policemen have been assassinated, otherwise how would this opportunity have come his way? ‘Cover up his mouth,’ he orders.

After silencing their subject, they continue with their exercise: the life-sized, live, tear-along-the-dotted-line game extends to the handle section of the sickle and, after that, the head of the hammer. Muzzled now, Supratik finds it difficult to breathe; respiration through his mouth has been made impossible — screaming in pain also doubles as a way of breathing, he understands now — and his nose has been given over to becoming predominantly a channel for leaking mucus. He will have to wrest away some of the energy in feeling pain to concentrating on the instinctive, unthought business of exhaling and inhaling.

Creating a distributary like this for his thoughts and senses, away from the main flow of the pain, however feeble this side-channel may be, brings him to a new understanding: that he can exercise a small amount of control over the pain, that it need not drown and erase him so completely.

The SP appears to be unaware that Supratik cannot answer his questions. He positions himself beside Supratik’s twisting, jerking head and keeps thundering, ‘Names, names of all the fuckers. We’ll eliminate them all, their family lines will end with them. We’ll show them exactly what fucking around with bombs leads to. Names, all the names, we’ll pull each and every letter out of you.’