Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

While she keeps watch, her three comrades bring out medium-sized wrenches, wire-cutters, jacks, industrial pliers and screwdrivers from their bags. Each instrument has been carried separately and individually to prevent clanking during the walk. They lie flat on the tracks, one on each side and one on the stone chips in the centre, and begin to dislodge the fishplate holding the rail-ends in perfect alignment. The trick is more than forty years old, she has been told during her training. Someone had come from Chhattisgarh to show them the ropes, and he had mentioned that according to local Maoist lore it was a Bengali invention, the work of a man known as Pratik-da in the late Sixties in some district bordering West Bengal and Bihar. Or was it West Bengal and Orissa? Pratik-da was no longer alive — he had been tortured and killed by the police in the notorious Naxalite purges in 1970 and ’71 in Calcutta — but his gift to his future comrades survived and, for those who cared to or were old enough to remember, he lived on in his bequest.

It is not easy work — their necks have to be held at an angle of forty-five degrees to the ground while their bodies are stretched out flat — and their hands have little purchase because of the limited freedom of movement. The sounds of creaking and clinking, of the tinkle of metal on metal and of metal on stone, of the occasional crunch of the loose chips, are too loud to their ears. They cannot concentrate fully on their work because a part of them is forever listening out for the slightest whisper of something awry, something outside the ordinary. But they are lucky. Their chosen area is nowhere-land, between two tiny stations in the middle of such abandonment that people talked of the place as being in the blind spot of even god’s vision; the nearest station is nearly ten kilometres away on one side and seven on the other. Besides, the fear of Maoists means that no one ventures outside after darkness falls. There are no vehicles passing on the dirt road running mostly parallel to the railway line a few hundred metres away, but at this time of night that is normal.

When at last they are done, they put the fishplate away in a shoulder bag, first swaddling it tightly in clothes. Then they try to wedge a jack in the tiny gap between the two rail ends, but this defeats them. They are not surprised; they had discussed this during training. They had decided not to leave anything to chance, which is why they are taking out fishplates at more than one point along the same track; one of them is bound to work; the average speed of the train is between 70 to 80 kilometres per hour on their chosen stretch. They strain a little bit more and ultimately leave the end of a curved machete wedged in the crack. They pick up their instruments and turn off the torch. Then they cross the tracks and disappear into the night and into the forest, these new children of the trees. Their work here is over. They will leave the forest now and never return to this region again.

In three hours, well before dawn breaks, the Ajmer — Kolkata Express, carrying approximately 1,500 people, is going to hurtle down these tracks.

In any Bengali family the members address each other relationally. Only children’s first names are used; also, a husband addresses his wife by her first name (but not the other way around). These four prefixes show the relative seniority of a person being addressed:

Boro-: eldest

Mejo-: middle

Shejo-: between middle and youngest

Chhoto-: youngest

So if your father has three older brothers, you would call the eldest Boro-jyethu (jyethu being the term for father’s older brother); the next one, Mejo-jyethu; and the youngest, Chhoto-jyethu. The prefixes can be added to all the relational terms listed below:

Bhai: younger brother

Boüdi: brother’s wife

Dada: older brother, often shortened to — da

Didi: older sister, often shortened to — di

Jaa: husband’s older sister

Jyethima: Jyethu’s wife; sometimes abbreviated to ‘Jyethi’

Jyethu: the older brother of your father

Kaka: the younger brother of your father

Kakima: Kaka’s wife; sometimes abbreviated to simply ‘Kaki’

Mama: maternal uncle, brother of your mother. The same term is used of uncles older and younger than your mother, unlike paternal uncles, who are classified as Jyethu and Kaka based on their ages relative to your father.

Mami: Mama’s wife

Mashi: mother’s sister

Pishi: father’s sister.

The relational terms can also be appended to names outside the family, thus: Mala-mashi, Namita-di, Rupa-boüdi, Sunil-mama.

These are some other terms used in the book:

Boro-boü: the eldest daughter-in-law of a large, extended family Thakuma: paternal grandmother.

aanchol= The ‘n’ is nasal. An entire cultural complex resides in this part of the sari, the endpiece, which hangs over the shoulder at the back (mostly; it can sometimes hang from the front, depending on the way in which it is worn). Because it can be used to cover the back, arms and shoulder, it is the ‘display area’ of the sari, its peacock’s tail, as it were, for which the craftsman or mass-manufacturer reserves the showiest of embellishments. Its uses are legion, from wiping tears to drying plates; from tying keys to draping it around the arms and shoulders to feel less exposed; from covering the mouth and/or nose to fanning oneself in the humid heat.

ablush= Ebony.

achchha= Literally ‘well’ (ejaculative, not adjective), ‘okay’, ‘right’ or ‘I see’, the word can denote assent or stand as just a filler.

adda= A Bengali institution. It consists of long sessions of aimless conversation, mostly between men. Bengalis try to give it a high intellectual gloss, believing that it is the soul of life and productive of great breakthroughs in the arts, sciences, politics, etc., but don’t be fooled — it’s classic Bengali idleness, a way of wasting, cumulatively, months and years of one’s life in procrastination and ridiculous self-importance.

anjali= Prayer.

aparajita= Clitoria ternatea , or butterfly-pea, or blue-pea. A perennial climber that bears strikingly blue flowers singly (white variants obtain, too). The fruit resembles a smaller, narrower, flatter, downier sugar-snap.

arrey= Very difficult to translate, this could mean ‘Hey’, or express surprise, or simply act as a filler, a kind of cultural verbal tic.

ashad= The first Bengali month of the monsoon season, usually mid-June to mid-July.

ashirbad= Literally, ‘blessing’. In the context in which it is used in the story, it is the formalisation of a nuptial match by the visit of the groom’s parents to the bride’s home to bless her, usually with a piece of gold ornament.

ashtami= The third, and grandest, of the five days of Durga Puja.

ashwattha= Ficus religiosa , or peepal tree — an iconic tree, because the Buddha obtained enlightenment under one.

bahurupi= An itinerant folk performer with a wide repertoire of roles and corresponding disguises. He assumes several forms and wholly inhabits the identities, which are dizzying: gods, goddesses, demons, tradesmen, conmen, animals, children, professionals — nothing is potentially outside his reach. An endangered species now. For an adequate overview, see www.tribuneindia.com/2008/20080308/saturday/main1.htm.

baju= An ornament for the upper arm; a gold armband.

bargadar= Sharecropper.