Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

The police presence was deemed intolerable by the workers, the breaking of an adamantine contractual code, something sacrilegious. Before Adi and Priyo, on the brink of firing the entire fleet with the explicit consent of their father, could make any move, Dulal ratcheted up the conflict by sanctioning a complete lockout of the mill. The long stalemate began. Posters went up everywhere, signed ‘Charu Paper Mill Workers’ Union’, abbreviated to CPMWU. Every available external wall space was covered with angry slogans. In the bristling thicket of painted signs, all screaming imperatives, the letters CPI(M) were easily smuggled in. Priyo noticed it and knew that Ashoke-babu had been prescient. A new set of workers could be hired, theoretically, but how would they cross the picket lines that had been set up? This time the police dragged their feet about intervening because, presumably, orders had come from above, from a power higher than the informal networks of string-pulling that was the motor of Bengali life. The Ghoshes knew this or that minister, or could grease so-and-so’s palms, but this economy of personal favours was less than nothing compared with the infinitely more potent arithmetic of consolidating vote-banks. Would a tiger be distracted by a toy-replica of its prey when it was following the smell of the real thing?

So the striking workers, feeling intrepid, and confident of remaining undisturbed by further police action, stayed on, beginning as a furiously boiling mass and then, over time, under the assault of the seasons and their self-willed impoverishment, simmering down until, all their heat leached, they were nothing but a thin, raggedy slum, their posters and placards faded and feeble, their numbers reduced to single figures, the huge locks on the factory gates and the threatening words on the walls mocking them as much as the evil capitalists who had brought them to such a pass.

The Ghoshes knew that bypassing them to hire a new set of workers to resume production in the mill was not a possibility, because the lockout men had the might of the CPI(M) behind them. Their visibly waning presence on the outskirts of the factory was an illusion. They might look like a tiny handful of people on the brink of beggary, but their numbers could be swelled instantly if provoked or offended; the Party would see to that. The Ghoshes’ most productive factory — an output of seventy tonnes per day, down from 130 TPD in its heyday — lay fallow, an impasse so intolerable that Prafullanath swallowed his rage and humiliation and decided to confront Dulal in a private capacity and work out some kind of compromise.

If the Ghoshes had thought they had seen the worst, what with Dulal’s betrayal, and the resignation of an ill and terrified Ashoke-babu, and the closure of their only profitable mill, the one that mitigated a fraction of their losses, they soon recalibrated their notion of the nadir.

When everything began to detonate in a way that seemed both unstoppably fast and yet somehow prolonged, Priyo was to persist in thinking that he had done the right thing by ignoring Ashoke-babu’s early warning. His only mistake, he would grudgingly admit, and that only to himself, had been in not apprising Adinath and their father soon enough. He was back to that estuarine domain again, causality, responsibility, blame, all forking into a dizzying number of streams of ‘what ifs’, and he did not know which would carry him to some kind of consolation.

There is a good ten-minute walk after Priyo gets off the bus. This tributary of Nawabpatty Street is all open drains and squalid houses, densely clustered together along the lane, with rust stains from leaking drainpipes down their fronts. Plants take tenacious root in the cracks in the façade and the walls, clothes hang on lines or over railings on the verandahs. There is crumbling and broken masonry everywhere, and peeling plaster and paint, and the ubiquitous darkening presence of wrought-iron grilles and railings makes the windows and balconies look like the cages and penning coops of battery-farmed poultry. The sound from a radio left on in one of the houses drifts out into the murkiness outside and seems to contribute to the gloom, as if it has been endowed with the special quality of sucking in light. Although darkness is falling from the air and dim, naked yellow bulbs or white fluorescent tubes have started coming on, one by one, in the houses, Priyonath wonders if the lane is, even in the daytime, ever unenshrouded. It seems to him that this place lost its battle with shadows and darkness long ago and, in the uneasy treaty devised in the aftermath, the dark retreated only insufficiently into corners, waiting impatiently to flow out and take over entirely again.

Lately, the straggle of whores outside the slum-dwellings, in dim doorways like open, toothless mouths, and on the lane have begun to leave him alone and let up on the catcalls and lewd addresses. They know where he is headed and, he supposes, his particular predilections, so they almost welcome him as a regular or an old familiar. When he reaches a decrepit two-storey building, an amphibious thing between a brick-and-cement house and a makeshift slum-shack, he hesitates for a second or two before walking in. Someone has scratched the number 12/A with a piece of flint on the right-hand wall of the entrance. Inside, the dimness is exacerbated by the single strip-light burning in the front room and the pitiful attempt at papering over the squalor with framed, cheap reproductions of art, probably torn from magazines, all featuring naked women, in a move to add erotic charge to the place. Priyonath cannot identify any of the paintings, but they are conspicuously Western; of that he is certain. There is one of a nude woman, with her back to the viewer, and a winged boy holding a clouded mirror to her; another baffling, objectionable one of a little boy tweaking an older woman’s nipple while standing almost behind her, the woman’s smiling face turned back so that their mouths just touch. Covered with dust, the pictures hang crooked on the wall, unnoticed pieces of junk that have forgotten the role foisted on them. The place reeks of sewage overlaid with cheap incense and kerosene, and something more elementally biological for which he cannot quite find a name, something that suggests putrefying animal matter.

He walks through the front room into the inner chamber. Nandita had said she was sixteen when he first visited the place more than two years ago. She had looked a lot older, not because of her trade, or the company she kept, or the fact that she had tried to cake her face with cheap snow and powder and colour her dry lips in an attempt to look alluring, but because her eyes had not been those of a sixteen-year-old. The flash and spark, the quickness in an adolescent’s eyes, had settled into a calculating lethargy, a caution that was also a hopeless inertia; they were not out of place in their turbid surroundings. After that first visit, he has tried never to look at her face.

In her room, with its meagre pallet, the grimy plastic curtain on the window and, hanging off a rusty, bent nail in a pockmarked and peeling wall, a Jay Ma Kali Jute Trading Co. (Pvt. Ltd) calendar, with its eponymous image of the fearsome black goddess made to look somehow smiling and benign, despite the garland of human skulls and her bloody red tongue, Nandita is waiting for him. He knows she is expecting him because she has a thin pile of newspapers at the foot of her bed. With a curt, ‘What, ready?’ he starts to take off his clothes. He fishes out a small paper packet from the pocket of his trousers and lies down on the bed in his underwear only. Even after more than a dozen sessions with him, Nandita has lost none of the hesitancy that seizes her at this stage of spreading newspapers in layers on his torso.