Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

Dulal had approached Ashoke Ganguly, demanding to know if a significant percentage of the workforce was going to be slashed because of the grim financial outlook; if yes, things might get troublesome at the factory. Things were not looking great, and because Dulal had saved them once did not mean that he could do it again.

Was Dulal threatening him?

No, not at all, but it was wise to be aware of consequences before embarking on any course of action.

Well, Ashoke-babu was going to ask for Dulal’s advice when he needed it. Meanwhile, where had he picked up all these baseless rumours of redundancies?

No, he, Dulal, was just mindful of that possibility, given that times were bad. Besides, the integration and the new machines had cost people their jobs. Everything was getting mechanised nowadays, which surely meant that manpower would be less in demand. Or so people said.

Which people?

No answer.

‘And are you sure he wasn’t threatening you?’ Priyo had asked Ashoke-babu. ‘We were all under the impression that he was a force for good, you know, holding everything together. So competent and so amiable. You’ve brought really disturbing news.’

‘No, his tone was not threatening at all. But the content. . I decided to come to you straight away because, if there is anything the matter, then it should be nipped in the bud.’

‘You’ve done the right thing. Definitely. And, as you know, we may soon have to discuss some reduction of the labour force there. Not just because of mechanisation, but because of. . of other problems. It won’t be possible to keep all the mills running at full capacity. But how do you think he knows? What is he going around doing ?’

‘How else but from Party HQ?’ Ashoke-babu had answered. ‘They know that you’ve had to close one of your mills’ — the words had come out of an unthought momentum and he had visibly and audibly regretted them immediately afterwards — ‘er. . I mean. . times are bad, we know. . What can one do?’

Priyo had flinched inwardly at the correction, but had not allowed it to mark his face. The gist had been this: the CPI(M) were combing the countryside, recruiting, canvassing, and one of their policies seemed to be to target potentially troubled outfits under the same ownership. It stood to reason that if the Ghoshes had had to shut down one mill, others could be in similar danger, so the CPI(M) fanned across the provinces, looking to stir up trouble and add to their numbers. And trouble, as even a child knew, was the vivarium of politics.

A picture was coming into focus for Priyo. All the praise and endorsement and support for Dulal, which had slowly built up after he had been given a job at the mill, was turning out to be that old trick Nature used to hide poison or danger — camouflaging it in beauty; the more virulent the toxin, the more captivating its vessel.

Who could have known that behind the pleasant, reliable surface a different drama had been churning away? The soothing pictures from the past were slowly revealing themselves as optical tricks. The annual celebration of Bishwakarma Puja every September at the factory was not really the joyous congregation of factory workers and their friends and families come together in kite-flying, ceremonies, distribution of blessed offering and public feasting, but the amassing of foes for a future strike, a mobilisation of forces. That thin, pitiful face of Dulal, in which they had read, no doubt encouraged by their regard for Madan-da, a story of deprivation and blight, was, in truth, the lean and hungry look of the ever-resentful poor, trying to wring more from the people they considered infinitely rich and, if that was obstructed, then to bring them down. With the milk they gave him the Ghoshes had reared a snake.

‘But does Baba know?’ Priyo had asked Ashoke-babu. Prafullanath had started coming to work again, although on a part-time basis. The old man was not innocent of the knowledge of union activity in his mills, but the Ghoshes had always managed to avoid the worst of it, partly through luck, partly through Prafullanath’s canny and far-seeing management policies. This new piece of information spelled setback in more than one area.

‘No, not yet,’ said Ashoke-babu, ‘I thought I should tell you first.’

‘You’ve done the right thing. Sit on it for a while. Baba is a bit. . fragile still, as you know. His health. . We don’t want anything to upset him again.’

‘No, sir. Yes, sir. Absolutely, sir.’

A different line of thought opened up in Priyo’s head. If union trouble did rear its head in Bali, then Ashoke-babu, as manager, had the most to fear since he would be directly in the line of fire, even physically so. Workers rarely had access to their employers, if at all; the conducting wire between labour and capital was the manager. This implied that Ashoke-babu could well be looking to sow, for whatever reason, the seeds of suspicion between Dulal and the Ghoshes. His motive remained opaque to Priyo. To protect himself? Yes, that seemed axiomatic, but only in the case of friction with the union. He was back to where he and Ashoke-babu had begun. And the futile nature of that circularity had made him decide to forget about it for the time being and watch what developed. What else could they do? Confront Dulal? On what evidence?

Barely two years after this meeting there had been some kind of a blockage at the pulp-feeding end of the Fourdrinier machine and the foreman of the factory, Sujan Hazra, had inserted his hand inside the funnel to clear it. Another worker, who had not known that this operation was in progress, had seen the machine switched off and had taken it upon himself to rectify that oversight. Sujan Hazra’s right hand had been first chewed, then sliced off. The trouble, at least for Ashoke-babu, and, by extension, the owners of the factory, had not been the incident, which had been only a mishap that had befallen a stranger. The Ghoshes had paid for Sujan’s initial hospital care and had assiduously circulated, in tones of great regret, the hard-nosed consolation of the doctors’ supposed words — ‘Only god can sew back a severed hand.’ The trouble had begun a few months later, when Ashoke-babu, with the consent of his paymasters, had decided to let go of Sujan Hazra and hire someone else to replace him. Without his working hand, Sujan was not very useful; his salary was an unnecessary waste.

What unfolded next followed so exactly Ashoke-babu’s forewarning that in his more deranged moments — and there were several in the months that followed — Priyo thought that the manager had somehow scripted the whole thing and then willed it into being. Or had known about it all along because, cunning schemer, he really belonged to the other side. The union, led informally by Dulal, had reacted to the foreman’s dismissal with unbending recalcitrance. The strikes began: at first, one working day of the week, but when that did not make Ashoke-babu or the ownership relent, Dulal instigated a gherao of Ashoke Ganguly in his office adjoining the mill. More than thirty workers surrounded the room, with Ashoke-babu inside, and refused to let him leave, even to go to the toilet. They chanted slogans: ‘Our demands must be heeded, must be heeded’ and ‘Crush and grind the black hand of the owners, crush, grind ’. They wanted the fired foreman reinstated, otherwise the entire factory would go on strike indefinitely. Nothing — threats, incentives, reasoning — could shake them from their position.

Ashoke-babu remained imprisoned by this human cordon for fifty-eight hours; his captors clearly worked on a shift-and-rota basis. At the end of the ordeal, when Ashoke-babu collapsed, the men were still unwithered, shouting out their mantras with undiminished vigour. When Dulal showed no inclination to call off his men after twenty-four hours, Adinath stepped in and requested Police Superintendent Dhar, a family friend of nearly twenty years’ standing, to talk to his colleagues at Bali and have the local police deployed to break up the gherao. The arrival of the police and the crumpling of Ashoke-babu almost coincided. It was later said that if the police had not arrived, the factory workers would have happily continued until Ashoke-babu died.