Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

He can almost see her combust into a burning column. She lets loose a jet of abuse. ‘You son of a foolish fucker, I have your teeth broken with beatings. Then I plant the broken teeth in your mother’s cunt, you son of a whore. When your father come to fuck her at night, he sees her cunt grinning.’

The incipient outrage at the indignity that Priyonath has fleetingly experienced now disappears, replaced swiftly by fear; it is his bowels that seem on the brink of release. His madly palpitating heart reminds him of his blood pressure. Where are his Amdepin tablets, he thinks in a stab of panic, and lifts his hands to his chest to look for the pills in the pocket of his shirt, only to realise that he is not wearing one, that his hands have touched the hairy bulge of his breast. The gurge of a new fear now adds itself to the spinning inside him. As he reaches for his clothes, the berating woman moves closer to him and demands, ‘Where you think you going, hyan? Where?’

The crowd of spectators has thickened. The flapping and beating in his chest becomes more urgent. He grabs his trousers. As he is trying to get into them, a cracking slap lands on his left cheek; he has been hit by the screaming harridan. The shock freezes him for a few seconds, then the fear surges in again: what if he were beaten by this gathered crowd of prostitutes out in the open street? These things are all too common in the city, he knows. As if to stem the shame that such an event would bring about — being thrashed in public by a bordello of whores, imagine that — he looks around for the presence of a man, any man, a pimp or someone; somehow a beating administered by a man would be easier to bear.

‘Give money. Give all money you have,’ the woman screams, inches from his face. A sour stench gusts out from her twisted mouth. Priyonath involuntarily moves back his head. ‘Give your shirt-pant. Right now, give your shirt-pant,’ she orders, then snatches the trousers from his hand. She turns the pockets out: side, front, back. One hundred and seven rupees, eighty paise. The hundred-rupee note was for Nandita, payment substantially above her standard fee. Even in the middle of this thuggery, Priyonath feels a small thread of relief course through him: he has been wise in leaving his wallet back in his office, bringing only what was necessary for this visit.

The prospect of possibly no more money hidden away turns the fury even more fractious. ‘Only this, byas? Where you hide the rest, hyan? Where, arse-fucker?’

Priyonath answers, ‘That’s all I have with me. You’ve checked my pockets. There’s nothing in the pocket of my shirt.’ He reaches out for it, shows it to her, then puts it on. The Amdepin is not in the pocket of his shirt.

‘You tell me you have no money and I believe, hyan? What you take me for? That milk comes out if you squeeze my nose, hyan? Wait, I show you fun,’ she says and, picking out someone from the crowd, commands, ‘Go call Badal.’

There is a rustling as a few of them peel off to fetch Badal. In all probability a strongman-pimp-goon figure, Priyonath thinks, now jolted out of all residual inertia.

His cock has shrivelled to the size of a pea. He debates whether to go on the offensive, threaten with names of police and politicians, or be meek and retreating, in the hope that perhaps that will somewhat abate their concocted fury. But either stance can backfire.

A short, lean young man, with dark skin, his face pitted from a bad case of childhood pox, and oil-slicked hair combed flat over his head and ears and curling to a well-maintained wave right at the nape of his neck, walks in. He wears a tight, short-sleeved white shirt, a golden chain around his neck and a green lungi. The shirt is unbuttoned almost to his stomach, showing off his hairy chest.

Priyonath closes his eyes in terror at the thought of the physical pain awaiting him. Through the fear runs one dark thought: how is he going to explain his bruises and wounds when he gets home? Then another thought: is he even going to get home?

We walked the twelve miles to Majgeria. Walking will be our chief, indeed only, way of travelling from one place to another. Bus no. 11, Dhiren calls it.

We had a list of the villages in this block of the district, places that would be receptive to our mission. That particular piece of groundwork had been done for us by our All-India Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries (AICCCR) cadres. Samir and Dhiren, especially Dhiren, were not new to the business of large meetings, public speeches (‘fire-in-the-mouth’ addresses, as they were called). I, as you well know, have no gift for the work of eloquence to move and activate. Samir was from the southern suburbs of Calcutta, Dhiren from the mofussil; both were attractive candidates for the CPI(M) since it was well known that the party recruited mostly from the provincial working- and lower-middle classes. They had been inducted to the Party early and had been doing this for longer than I had, in any case — a meeting in Sonarpur, an assembly at Bansdroni, at Chunchura, at Srirampur, swelling the numbers at a students’ strike in Kanchrapara, constantly on the move: this was the real legwork. I’m not cut out for it. Maybe I grew disillusioned with ‘communist’ politics faster than they did. Maybe I realised earlier where the real politics lay — in the countryside.

Did I imagine it or was there really a slight distance between my friends and me, a small, cold gap that could never be bridged? That they took me as someone not quite belonging to them, despite the equality of comradeship, because I hadn’t gone through the apprentice years in the CPI(M) with them? I don’t know.

Sometimes, in the great silence of the nights here, when I couldn’t sleep, or in the minutes before sleep took me, it was one of the many thorns that I became suddenly conscious of. But what could I do? I was made this way. Training myself to become an orator-activist would have had the end result of making me look like an animated puppet, never the real thing that Samir and Dhiren and Biman and Badal and Rathin and Debdulal-da and others so clearly were.

I remembered a recent comment made about me at one of our secret meetings in Calcutta. These ‘cell meetings’ were set up in an interesting way. You went to a tiny, narrow, dense lane in Santragachhi and realised, while looking for the number that had been given to you, that no such number existed. A boy of eight or nine, playing marbles in the alley, came up to you and asked which number you were looking for. Only after he led you to a completely different number, in a different lane, did you realise that the deliberately wrong number that you were initially meant to look for functioned as a kind of password. The boy was part of the game. Anyway, all this by way of saying that at one such meeting, full of young men my age, mostly, and a couple of more senior men, one of these older leaders had asked the assembled activists, barely hiding his contempt and speaking of me in the third person — Will he be able to last the race? After all, everyone here is of a certain kind of background, we’ve all led tough, hardbitten lives, we know about life’s difficulties. . whereas. . he is from a different world altogether. A prince, really. Will the prince be able to become one with his subjects?

There were some muffled titters after that.

Those words came back on sleepless nights and rang repeatedly in my soul’s ear.

Sometimes I felt I was behind the curve, missing out on the crest of the vital activities. I had sat in the city and devised elaborate theoretical strategies for: 1) building a village defence force in every village to protect the residents from police attacks, and attacks from the lumpens paid by class enemies; 2) directing crop production; 3) arbitrating disputes among farmers; and 4) setting up people’s courts to judge and punish class enemies and their agents and flunkies. Others, meanwhile, had been the ones to work actually in the villages, with the farmers, watching them sow and harvest, talking to them day after day, listening to the problems they had with the village head or landlords and moneylenders. What do I know of crops?