Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

‘Fine, stay inside your bubble for as long as you can, because you won’t be able to for much longer, the clock’s ticking.’

The persistent rubbing against what she perceived to be her own stupidity in her son’s presence, now something of a predictable pattern of things, suddenly ignited a rasp of rebellion in her; even the slowest learner in a class occasionally lets his idiocy tumble over into rage at the cleverness of others.

‘All this book-learning, what good is it going to do you? We may not be learned, but we are content with our lot. I don’t understand your mighty knowledge, and I don’t want to,’ she cried, then felt the flame of her anger snuffed out as Supratik refused to respond.

Thinking of that last exchange before Supratik disappeared, she had moved her initial focus on the mysteries and puzzles in his words — there could be no solution to those — to the regret, wringing her now, at her brief flash of temper. Was that what had driven him away, upset and hurt at her impatience with his ways of thinking? Surely that must be the reason, for what else could it be? There was only one way left for her to atone for her intemperance and that was to punish herself.

Her self-devised sumptuary rules became more and more refined: no meat, no fish, no eggs, no onions or garlic. She lost weight and had dizzy spells, seconds of blackout when she stood up too quickly from a lying or sitting position, so she took to lying down most of the time except when she had to brave the stairs to go up to the worship room on the terrace. By the time she gained it, her head spun and she had to cling to the banister in order to keep herself from falling. There were comments made about her visible debilitation, and concerns were voiced, sometimes forcefully, but she remained obdurately immured in the purity of her pursuit.

In the midst all this diminishment, she let go of her role as the eldest daughter-in-law of the Ghosh family, the person who had held it together with her efficiency, kindness and understanding. All her interest in what everyone would be fed every day, orchestrating the servants, the cook, the maids, the driver, everything withered away: she felt it was a play in which she had acted for thousands of performances, and now she had suddenly become an unengaged spectator of the repetitive drama, unable to sustain any regard for it, bored, removed, absent.

Purnima took on her role with gusto. Occasionally Sandhya heard her ill-tempered orders issuing from the kitchen downstairs — ‘The mustard paste in which you cooked the fish yesterday was so bitter that we couldn’t bring ourselves to eat it. How many times have I told you to grind black and yellow mustard together and put a dried chilli in it, then strain the paste? How many times, eh?’ — her voice rising with every subsequent word. She found fault with everything the servants did and reduced Malati to tears by scolding her for not having shelled perfectly enough the tiny shrimps that Kamala had added to a dish of arum leaves. Haranguing the servants at last gave Purnima a point of convergence for all her diffuse days and energies to focus on, and she took to it like a spindly, undernourished sapling to rich loam.

Lying in bed, Sandhya now overhears Purnima barking at one of the boys who does the trivial, miscellaneous domestic chores, and feels nothing, absolutely nothing.

On the 30th of every month Priyonath makes his way by bus from the southern boundary of Barabazar to Chitpur, over Bagbazar Khal, to a dingy alley through the godowns and slums off Kashipur and Dilarjung Roads. This humid and choking late afternoon in September is no exception. It is a long journey, and he has to change buses, but a taxi wouldn’t do for these trips, and certainly not the one private car that is still owned by the Ghoshes. On these days he dresses ordinarily, even shabbily: untucked shirt, sandals instead of shoes, no briefcase. He could be an ordinary state government official.

Over the last few years, instead of excitedly anticipating what lies ahead, he has fallen into the enfeebling habit of returning in his thoughts to a juncture in his recent past that he identifies as a turning point. But every time the hope for a neat, single locus, where the bend marks the before and the after, defies him, and what he had hoped was going to be apparent as a clear turning point dissolves into something resembling an estuary, the unitary flow of events fracturing into a prodigal multiplicity of streams of cause and effect, so that he can no longer identify what or who to blame for everything that followed. And every instance of this sieving of his recollections begins with Dulal.

Madan’s son, Dulal, had been a rickety teenager from the darkest depths of Orissa when he had been brought over by his father to Calcutta to be given a job by Madan’s employers, the Ghoshes, at their factory in Bali in ’51. When Priyo first met him over fifteen years ago he was a boy who kept searching out corners and shadows and walls so that he could hide. It had given him a little tingle of pride that Madan-da’s son had since done so well. Dulal had a peasant’s capacity for physical labour, so unexpected from the frame that generated it, and, it soon emerged, an even more surprising gift: an inherent talent for working with tools and machines and understanding them. Crowning these two abilities was the trickiest art, a knack for getting on well with people across all manner of divides. He was friendly, warm, caring, and everyone on the factory floor looked up to him as a kind of protective leader, a man of their own, someone who would take care of their interests. Those interests rarely clashed with those of their paymasters, as they did elsewhere in West Bengal.

When 20 per cent of the unskilled workforce in Bali had to be laid off only five or six years after Dulal’s arrival, because of integrating the factory and bringing the pulp- and paper-making together under one roof, it was Dulal who had defused the potentially explosive confrontation with the union, which could otherwise have resulted, all too easily, in an indefinite shutting down of the factory. The management called him a safe pair of hands; the workers, their banyan tree. One less thing to worry about, the Ghoshes had thought and moved their attention to problems that needed fixing.

Then one day Ashoke Ganguly, the manager at Bali, had come in to see Priyo to deliver some astonishing news. Behind the scenes Dulal had been working as a CPI(M) stooge; he was the de facto union leader. He was rallying the workers in preparation for a strike.

‘What are you saying?’ Priyo asked. ‘Are you sure about this?’

Ashoke-babu nodded vigorously, ingratiation and emphasis compressed into that one movement.

‘I’m not lying, sir. You can visit and make your own enquiries,’ he said. ‘This is how the Party expands its supporter base and vote-bank. They send their cadres out to villages and small towns, to factories, mills, fields, farms, everywhere, and get them to join, promising them all kinds of things. Do you know, in the ’54 floods, I saw this with my own eyes. The Party cadres in Bangaon, they went around in boats, doing relief-work, distributing sacks of rice and lentils, but they would give them only to people who had voted for them, not to Congress supporters. One of their biggest power bases is the unions in factories, shops, offices — every workplace you can imagine.’

‘Yes, yes, I know all this,’ Priyo said dismissively. What did it matter to him, this modus operandi of the Communist Party, as long as they were in a world far removed from his? Even then, he had trouble adding it all up and reading correctly that sum — that it had reached his world already.