Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

Why didn’t he say it? It wasn’t as if we hadn’t talked endlessly about it. Maybe that was the reason. . There had been too much talk.

Dhiren had a tired but tense look on his face. He watched me take in the arrangements. I didn’t even blink. Before Dhiren could say anything, could say what I thought — feared — he was going to say, I said to Debdulal-da that the shataranchis could go, mats on the floor would be enough for us. I didn’t want his family to have to do without rugs because some boys from the city had to be made comfortable. The tension left Dhiren’s face. I felt I’d scored a point.

Samir lit a bidi and said — Let’s see if the smoke drives the bloody mosquitoes away.

Mosquitoes everywhere, whining away, clouds of mosquitoes. There didn’t seem to be much energy or enthusiasm to talk, but we had to hang the mosquito nets and get inside and talk from our beds if we wanted to have a conversation.

Then Samir, breaking the silence that seemed to be solidifying around us, said — Erm, guys, can we keep the hurricane lamp on? I mean, turned down very low but burning, so that we’re not completely in the dark?

Dhiren, laughing loudly — Oh, I’d forgotten, you’re afraid of ghosts, aren’t you?

I was too amused to be surprised by this revelation. I started laughing too — Afraid of ghosts? At your age? This is too good to be true. .

I couldn’t make out Samir’s expression — it seemed to have become darker in the room — but I hoped he was looking sheepish. He sounded it when he said, almost laughing himself — Okay, cut it out, bravehearts. Stop pretending that you don’t have any irrational fears.

Dhiren — But come on, fear of ghosts? That’s ridiculous! I can imagine Supratik not having any fears, least of all irrational ones, but, Samir, you loser, only children are afraid of the dark. You are twenty-one. Nearly a quarter of a century, that is.

Samir, huffily — All right, all right. The question is: are we going to leave the lamp on or not?

I wasn’t keen on talk of such things — fears, feelings, emotions, they’re all irrational, right? — so I opened up another line of teasing.

— Listen, you know the outhouse is a few yards outside. . we’ll have to walk there in this pitch-dark and walk back. What are you going to do, Samir?

Samir, sounding really pathetic, weepy nearly — You think the thought hasn’t crossed my mind? That’s why I’ve been holding everything in for so long.

This made me and Dhiren erupt into loud, hooting laughter.

DECOROUSLY SURANJAN PASSES the chhillum to the man on his right, holding it in his right hand, as he has been taught to do, while keeping the lung-stretching volume of smoke he has just inhaled from it still locked inside, so that his blood can absorb the maximum amount of tetrohydrocannabinol. THC, he has learned to call it; he has all the lingo now. He lets out the smoke in a rush of dispersing cloud: there seems so much of it inside him. Six months ago, when he had first graduated from smoking grass in reefers to the chhillum, the native terracotta pipe made especially for it, his chest had found it difficult to accommodate the huge inrush of smoke flowing in like a geyser in reverse. He had spluttered and coughed and coughed and spat, embarrassed and ashamed at such a betrayal of his status as novitiate in Bappa-da’s cool circle of friends, until one day, shortly after his experiment with the chhillum, something had happened in his chest while he was inhaling, some expansion, as if a valve had opened or a secret panel had slid away to make for a vaster room. He had actually felt that lowering of the floor, that inner expansion.

Now, sitting around in a circle of seven men, with his back to one of the walls of the gymnasium, a few metres away from the student canteen in Presidency College, he thinks with great pride on his casual professionalism as a seasoned smoker as the tendrils of the hit hug him tighter and tighter in its delirious embrace. Sounds come closer and edge further away simultaneously in an imperceptibly choreographed movement shuffling background and foreground. Now he can feel the pulse of his heart in his throat. He knows his eyes have become smaller: he feels a tightening around and behind them, as if an army of ants were pulling at them with delicate, spider-web threads. Nikhil, sitting across from him, has a fixed, foolish, serene smile on his face, and Suranjan assumes that he must too.

‘Hey, Nikhil, far out, man,’ he says but so softly that the sound does not reach Nikhil.

All along his nerves and his spine and the base of his skull elusive blossoms are blooming and breaking up in ripples. The sounds outside, on College Street — of car horns, the clatter of trams, babble, music, shouts, a bell somewhere, commotion — all these flow in a harmony, recede, then flow back in again. He smiles. Debu is trying to say something to him, but he is too relaxed to ask him to repeat it; if it is important, he will hear it, the still-yet-turning chakra at the centre will ensure that he becomes a part of everything around him.

‘Where have all the hmm hmm hmm, / Where have all the people hmm hmm / La la la la. .’ Debu sings softly.

‘Grateful Dead,’ Suranjan checks. Two months ago Bappa-da had introduced them to the first album of a group from San Francisco. The epiphany of the music had exploded in Suranjan when, riding the gently sinuous curve of some very good grass from Mazhar-i-Sharif, he had deciphered the cryptic words on the record sleeve, a vision bestowed by the drug itself, without which all knowledge was but information, incomplete and crass. ‘In the land of the dark, the ship of the sun is drawn by the Grateful Dead.’ Bappa-da, after weeks of research, had turned up its source — The Egyptian Book of the Dead . The revelation had catapulted Suranjan into the top bracket: here was a real stoner, one whose perception was so cleansed by smoking that he could read what was opaque to the clouded eye. He had arrived.

Suddenly the embrace of the pot tightens to something more tentacular, more menacing, as a procession of unwelcome intrusions start their march through his head: abysmal attendance record in his English BA (Hons) class, professors unhappy with his continued absence. No sooner has it begun than others, from hidden byways and side-lanes of his life, start joining the marchers, swelling its ranks. His missing brother, now gone for nearly one year, with only two postcards to show that he is still alive, god alone knows where. His mother, almost an invalid, bedridden from the moment Dada had disappeared, with all interest in life gone overnight. In college there are rumours everywhere that Supratik is a Naxalite, but if he is that, then why is he not around in the city, where all the action seems to be?

When Suranjan had joined Presidency College last year, it was still reeling from strikes and the agitation by the communist students who had been expelled from college and the adjoining Hindu Hostel. The college authorities had called in the police and there had been clashes between the rioting students and police on College Street almost every day: lathi charges, petrol bombs on several occasions, bloodied men on both sides, brutal beatings of the students, angry processions. At one point his mother, already consumed by worries about Supratik, had urged her younger son to apply to other places, or consider not going to university until the troubles had blown over. When she is not in the puja room, praying incessantly that Supratik might be kept out of harm’s way, she sits on a chair on the verandah all afternoon and most of the evening, waiting for the sight of his tall, gaunt form to appear around the corner of Basanta Bose Road.