Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

‘Did you know Supratik was involved in all this student politics?’ she asked Adinath.

‘How do you know that?’ he asked in return.

It was rumoured that a lot of students who went missing during the student violence had either been taken into custody and beaten up by the police, or had gone up to North Bengal and joined the militant Maoists in Naxalbari. He didn’t know which was worse. He tried to console himself with the fact — was it a fact? — that if his son had been picked up by the police, he would have found out, sooner or later, through all the connections they had with the police and the Congress Party. As for Naxalbari, the rebellion had lasted a short four or five months: the cadres and miscreants had been rounded up, imprisoned, beaten, tortured, shot. A cold wave of fear bore him up and flung him down: surely he would have heard if something had happened to Supratik? Besides, there were two postcards to prove that he was alive, he thought, grasping desperately at anything that would keep the unmentionable at bay.

‘I talked to his friends in college,’ Sandhya said. ‘Some say that he was an important figure, a student leader or something, although no one seems to be certain about anything. A young man called Partha said that Supratik had been expelled from college for fomenting student action; a girl called Bolan contradicted him and asked, if that was the case, why did so few people know him around college. My hands and feet turned cold with fear as I listened to them. They were very nice, they called me Mashima and gave me tea in their canteen.’

‘You found out so much and didn’t tell me?’ Adinath asked, incredulous.

‘I’m telling you now.’

‘But if he was involved in student politics, wouldn’t we have known?’

‘How? He was always so quiet, so secretive. Just before he disappeared, he had become even more so.’ Sandhya covered her mouth with the corner of her sari draped over her shoulder and neck.

Adinath tried to console her, without feeling a shred of conviction. He heard the thinness of his voice as the weak banalities — ‘He might not write frequently, but at least we know he’s alive and well. When he returns, we’ll find out that he was up to something quite innocuous, like social work in a village, or travelling or something. Don’t you worry, it’ll all come good’ — tried to smother the question looping and turning inside him: was his son a Naxalite?

Sandhya, on the other hand, could not bring herself to articulate the fear, even inside the privacy of her mind, and endow it with form and shape by giving it a name. That fear remained frozen in her, a vast, solid sea, but, unknown to her conscious self, she kept feeding it with the fuel that would one day combust and set it in unstoppable thaw. She read every single item in Ananda Bazar Patrika on the Naxalites — they were tucked away deep inside the paper and only infrequently got prominent coverage — and secretly got Arunima to translate the English articles from The Statesman and Amrita Bazar Patrika . She put dates to the violence in Naxalbari, to the eruptions of peasant violence in different parts of the country, to the Naxalite leader Charu Mazumdar’s declaration, a week or two before Supratik disappeared, that hundreds of Naxalbaris were smouldering in India, that Naxalbari had not died and would never die. But, instead of teasing out the only design possible in this bunching of events, portents, rumours and facts, she smothered the cluster, pregnant with meaning, in a blanket of denial and turned her frightened self to what she did best: she became an even more ardent supplicant to her gallery of gods and goddesses.

She fasted three days a week now instead of her usual Thursdays. She found newer, more minor deities and saints to worship, each with her or his own specialisation: Santoshi-ma for lost things (her son was lost, was he not?); Manasha, so that wherever Supratik was, he was not bitten by snakes; Baba Lokenath, so that he would not come to any harm in wars, forests, rivers or seas. She awoke from dreams that her son was ill and got it into her head that he was going to be afflicted by pox, so she found the nearest temple of the goddess Shitala, whose weapons of choice were the smallpox and chickenpox germs, and lay prostrate in front of her statue for twelve hours. While she lay on the floor of the tiny temple on Abhay Sarkar Lane, just along from Jadu Babu’s Market, yet another conversation, the last proper one she had had with her son, unspooled in a repetitional loop in her head.

She had been trying to tidy up his room and make his bed. ‘Paper, books, more books, in all four directions. God, what a mess! Can’t you be a bit tidier? You will drown under all this one day. What you read and scribble all day long cooped up in here, god alone knows.’

‘Ma, do you like the life you’re in?’ he had asked out of the blue.

‘What kind of a question is that?’ She felt that sinking fear again, that anxiety, and started to steel herself.

‘All this well-heeled comfort, this house, this large family, nothing wanting, no lack, no troubles, don’t you find it a bit sealed off from the big world outside?’

‘I have no idea what you’re saying. Where do you see no lack, no troubles? Do you run the family? What do you know of how it works? Do you know what bad times our business is going through? We’ve had to sell off two cars, and even’ — she was not sure she should be saying this to anyone, not even her son — ‘some of Ma’s jewellery to repay part of the bank loans. The business is on the brink of folding up in its entirety. The mills are all gone, shut. We cannot even sell off the last remaining one. Your childhood’s days of ease — those are gone. Have you not noticed? But, then, how would you? You have no time for all this, all your time is devoted to your scribbling and reading and. . and the stuff that you do when you stay away from home.’ She smuggled in the final addition in a headlong rush of daring.

‘Don’t you ever think that we have too much, and others have too little? Take, for example, the Food Revolution agitations going on outside our four walls: do they affect us in any way?’

‘By god’s will we’re lucky that all that unrest doesn’t involve us. The one above looks after us.’

‘Clearly only us, and not everyone else. You think it’s the one above who looks after us? Don’t you think we look after our own? Cushion our own corner and let others rot?’

‘What on earth are you talking about? I don’t understand you any more. It is not up to us to look after everyone in the universe. The rule of the world is to look after your family, your elders, your children, and see that you do the best you can for them all the time.’

‘The rule of the world? Okay, let us assume it is the rule of the world, then do you think it’s right ?’ He had started speaking in a way that made the italics all too obvious to her ears.

‘That’s. . that’s what we’ve believed all our lives. What. . what we’ve been taught to believe.’

‘Do you ever think that that’s wrong ? That what you’ve been given is wrong and that you have to make the world from scratch again?’

‘What is all this you’re talking about? I’m beginning to fear for you. You’re not doing Red politics, are you?’

‘Let’s leave out politics for a minute. Are you happy with the inequalities of our family? Of the power-on-top-ruling-people-below kind of hierarchy? Do you think it’s right? Has the thought ever crossed your mind that the family is the primary unit of exploitation?’

‘Inequalities? Power on top? Hierarchy? Exploitation? What are you saying?’ she found herself repeating like a slow learner.