Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

Now that Supratik has learned to bifurcate his concentration, the referents behind the SP’s words once again begin to become legible and the relentless interrogation makes his mind, in its own peculiar state of fugue, wander into bizarre, aberrant territories. He thinks, for example, about that standard first question asked of a child by any stranger — ‘What is your name?’ Faced now with a different kind of query about names, his own disintegrates into nothing. Who is he? Is he his name? Could the two be uncoupled? What would he see in that gap?

Then there is a particularly grievous rip on his thigh. His constrained mouth, deprived of any freedom of movement, transmits the action of silent screaming into such a contortion that it is forced to bite down on his tongue. The cloth binding his mouth, already wet from leaking saliva, begins to turn pink, then red, as the salty, metallic taste in his mouth expresses itself visibly. The air curves in front of him. His mind, flirting with derangement, now brings to him, following its helter-skelter illogic, lines from the closing song he used to sing as a boy of eight in chorus in manimela: ‘Lift up this body of mine / Make me a burning lamp in your temple. . / Touch my soul with the touchstone of fire / Sanctify my life with this burnt offering.’

They bundle him — he is not capable of much movement on his own — into a black police van in the dead of night.

‘We’re going to let you go,’ he was told; no reason was given, but he assumed it was because he had given them enough useful leads.

A dark shadow, of what lies in wait for him around the corner as a consequence of singing to the police, has briefly flitted through his mind, but immediate pain, and relief and incredulity at being released, have held that in abeyance.

He has no idea where they are taking him and he knows better than to ask. They are probably not giving him a lift back home, that much he can safely assume. The pain-induced hallucinatory darts-and-tumbles of his mind keep revisiting him. Now he has a gratuitous vision, no longer yoked to the dry words of propaganda, but something akin to a thing half-dreamed, half-experienced in the raggedy borders between sleep and waking — a vision of a near future, maybe fifty years, maybe seventy-five, a hundred, when the seeds that he and his kind have been busy sowing have grown, hidden from the human eye, or denied until unignorable, into forest cover for most of the country. It brings tears to his eyes and, for the first time in his life, he cries moved by the possibility of fulfilment; not tears of joy, but of a kind of proleptic hopefulness.

The van stops and he is ordered to get out. It is slow, painful going. Four policemen get out of the van too, as if concerned about his impaired ability to stand, move, walk. Again that playful deception of the mind: is the wood before him real or is he seeing things from the metaphors in his very recent thoughts fleshed out in the real world after a time-lag? Has he gone mad? Where is he?

‘Where is this?’ he asks.

‘Go. Walk. Go home,’ comes the answer.

What was it that his mother used to say about such situations? Don’t spurn the goddess of wealth, waiting and ready at your hand, by pushing her away towards your feet. The thought of his mother brings a sudden constriction in his throat — have they robbed him of any kind of self-control, of masculinity?

How will he ever find the words to ask her for forgiveness?

He hobbles, stops, limps a bit more; no, he really cannot move. The policemen are watching him in silence. Should he crawl on all fours? He would be much faster if he did that. He tries walking on the sides of his feet; it is impossible after two steps. An axis of pain has brought together, in one rod, the discrete epicentres of where he has been worked upon — the right big toe, the soles of both feet, his raw, bloody left thigh — and is driving that into his entire body, from toe to head. He takes another couple of steps.

‘Run,’ comes an order.

How can he run? He can hardly breathe.

A shot rings out, then another. The first bullet gets him in the back of his skull, the second in his back, under his left shoulder blade. He falls to the ground face-down.

A WEEK OF mild, half-hearted beatings, followed by three months of being left alone in his cell with other criminals, then suddenly Madan is set free; no explanations, no threats, no reasons, only the mocking, harsh words from the minion who unlocks his cell and leads him to an officer on the ground floor: ‘Freedom. The effect of some good deed by your dead forefathers trickling down to you.’ He is given papers to sign and finds himself surprised at feeling insulted, after all that he has been through, when the officer barks at him, ‘Are you lettered or will it have to be a thumb impression?’ When his effects are returned to him, Madan discovers his watch is missing, and the twenty-rupee note he had taken out of his pocket before being ushered ungently into his cell. The loose change, assorted keys, two pieces of folded-up paper, the folded picture of Ma Kali, they are all there. He wants to ask about the watch, but stops himself; what if they use it as an excuse to keep him inside for longer?

He comes out onto the confluence of Anwar Shah Road and Gariahat Road. Although it is past dusk, the residue of daylight in the sky and air hurts his eyes for a few seconds. Instinctively he crosses over to Gariahat Road and starts walking north. The missing watch silently nags at him until he thinks about how he came by it — it was his wedding present from Charubala nearly forty years ago; it was the most precious thing he possessed, a Citizen watch — and that little pleat of history transforms his minor irritation into something else. He sits down on the lowest of the three steps leading to the hardware shop just before Selimpur crossing because he suddenly feels weightless, a thing about to be blown away by a breeze; perching on the edge of concrete may moor him for a while.

There is a new branch of Carmel High School opposite him, right beside the petrol station. Didn’t Arunima go to that school? At that thought he presses both his fists against his cheeks so that the roaring inside cannot escape his mouth, but they are already wet. He gets up and resumes his empty walking northwards because he does not want people to take him as a blubbing drunken fool. There is nowhere to go. He had heard Shej’-da once explaining to his children, when they were little, how birds made their way home to their nests at sundown: apparently, a small but very powerful magnet at the bottom of their nests navigated them back surely. At which point Arunima, after a moment’s thought, had asked, ‘If each nest has a magnet pulling birds to them, why don’t they end up in each other’s homes?’

A similar invisible thread of attraction is leading him, almost unawares, towards Bhabanipur; but that story had been Shej’-da’s usual high nonsense. To Madan, home has always meant Basanta Bose Road, not his village, Amlapali, in Orissa.

Everything had seemed so small, so bare, when he had first returned, on his two weeks off, to the village, five years after he joined Baba and Ma in Calcutta. People had come from every single hut — everyone, men, women, children, old people — to see, even touch, ‘our city boy’, expecting whatever transformation they had imagined to touch their lives, too. Some of them had hung around for days, expecting something of him: a rupee or two, a shiny coin, a used shirt, a rubber ball, marbles, anything. On future visits he had remembered to bring little things — baubles, really — to distribute. Yet another feature that had remained unchanged for long was his parents’ home (his mind had, unknown to his conscious self, already begun the process of stopping to think of it involuntarily as his own): one small room that housed anywhere between six and eight people; the needs of Nature answered in the open air in the fields around them. All these things that he had never noticed, or thought of as anything particular to be taken note of, had gradually become marks of difference. There was his father’s back-breaking work growing onions on his tiny plot; his increasingly despairing complaints about how he made no money selling them to the middlemen and merchants who made all the profit; his wish to go and sell his crop on the open market himself. But how could he go to the nearest market in Tarbod with his sacks of onions without a cart? There was his mother, a silent, dark woman, thin as the kindling she collected from the forest. He wanted his parents’ lives, and his two brothers’ and sister’s, to aspire to the conditions of his own in the city. He sent them money so that they could move up from one meal a day to two. He sent them shawls; the after-effects of malaria, contracted when they were children, made them shiver even during the summer months. Two of his brothers had died of the disease when he was little.