Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

Som howled and said something that was more garbled by the sobbing than his usual clotted child’s speech, then howled some more.

Bhola tried to divert his attention by extemporising on a story, an old trick, but so far an effective one. But, for the first time, the words that emerged were not in the shared private language; the world began to be spun in children’s Bengali, ordinary, comprehensible, reassuring.

By the time Bhola was about five minutes into his telling, Somnath was a figure carved in stone.

A shout came from inside the house: ‘Bholaaaa, Sooom, what are you doing outside? Come in right now. I’m making bananas-milk-puffed-rice for you. Come in quickly.’ Their mother.

Som clung tighter to his brother’s neck and shook his head forcefully. Bhola put a finger to his lips and said, ‘I’ll come with you too.’ The hold on his neck relaxed somewhat.

And so Bhola’s logorrhoea began to mutate into story-telling, the transparent, sense-filled words now a clear pane of glass between sound and meaning, offering a view of a fantastically confabulated world of wood-fairies, incarnations and metempsychosis, of imaginary beasts and birds and their magical powers, of mangoes so sour that a whole forest of monkeys was struck dumb after eating them off the trees. . and so it went on, over the years.

One day Adinath overheard, in passing, a particularly colourful story about speaking fish that could transform themselves into malignant spirits residing in tamarind trees and remarked, ‘Arrey, you are not half-bad at spinning tales. When you grow up, you will be a writer.’

Bhola, who saw his eldest brother as an adult really, and accorded him appropriate respect, felt himself puff up with pride. The stories got wilder.

His mother reacted differently. ‘All day you talk rubbish. Where do you pick up these monsoony tales? Really, I sometimes wonder if there is madness in store for you. Your father used to say that there was madness in his family, some uncle or aunt. Why can’t you concentrate on your studies instead? I can see that your relationship with your books is nearly over.’

Bhola’s school reports had seen a proliferation of marks in red ink. He had scraped through Classes Five and Six, just, struggling chiefly with his English. The English teacher at school, a brown saheb, pointed out repeatedly that his ‘native tongue’ got in the way of English acquisition: Bhola’s spelling was appalling; he read aloud in a ridiculously Bengali-accented English, confusing the ‘z’ sound with ‘j’ and short accents with long; his grammar was parlous; his sentence-construction still at the level of a seven-year-old’s. English was a key subject in school. If he did not pass his English exams, he would have to repeat the year.

Meanwhile, he was more than happy to recline on the easy chair on the front balcony, watching the shapes of the white clouds against the blue sky: a crocodile with its mouth slightly open, trying to swallow a fluffy dog, which was heading straight into the fall of the veil on a woman’s face. . Now, how did that configuration happen? Was there someone behind the blue of the sky, drawing out the shapes with a giant pencil that had white clouds in it instead of lead? There, there was an idea. .

Nitai used to live on the periphery of the neighbourhood of his caste, one circle inwards from where we were. There seemed to be some taboo about speaking of him, or at least referring to him directly. But his ghostly presence and the story of his fate were just under the surface of all our conversations with the villagers. How could it not have been so?

I fought my urge to bring up his name in my usual daily chit-chat with Kanu and Bijli until one night I gave in. I asked Bijli, while she was serving me food, if she knew Nitai or his wife.

— Nitai’s wife used to come sometimes. In the beginning she couldn’t bring herself to ask for food, but I could tell. She used to bring the baby and the girl with her. Dry and thin, all of them, like jute sticks. I felt very bad for them. Sometimes I gave them what I could, not much, a handful of rice, another of dal, maybe some waxed gourds or ridged gourds. Shame held her back from asking for food, but I knew. And then that shame went when the hunger became too much. It filled my soul with pity. Poor thing! The almighty gave her a burnt forehead at birth. Towards the end she stopped coming. Maybe out of shame — she had been reduced to a beggar. Maybe she didn’t have the strength to come here. But it’s not as if we had a lot to give away. I gave her as much as I could. The drought over the last two, three years had been so severe. . Many people died here, around this area. Eeesh, I see her shrunken face in front of me now. . One afternoon I came out and found that she had fallen asleep just outside the door. I didn’t understand then that it was because of weakness, I thought she had been working hard, sowing or collecting kindling in the forest, something. My heart bursts, thinking of those silent, downcast eyes now. . god gave us stomachs to punish us — the punishment of hunger is a great punishment. Nitai’s wife too used to say that all the time. Then she stopped coming. . Eeesh, if only I had tried to find out, maybe all this wouldn’t have happened.

And here is the ‘all this’ that happened. In this aman-rice-producing area, a small farmer like Nitai, who didn’t have any land of his own but worked as a sharecropper or, when times got really bad, as a wage-labourer, had work for only three to five months of the year. Majgeria was not close to the river, so it wasn’t a double-cropping area, which would have meant nine months of work. The meagre money that he got as wages from labour, and the tiny percentage of the yield that he got as a sharecropper, rarely stretched to enough sustenance for a family of three, and then, killingly, four. And there were very few opportunities of employment outside agriculture — what else could he do? Break bricks and stones by a road under construction? Dig? Physical labour at a factory somewhere? Who would look after his wife and children if he left the village and went wherever such work was available?

He had a tiny vegetable patch next to his hut, the size of a bitten nail, no more, and on that he grew some gourds and onions. He had to pawn even this apology of a plot to a moneylender when he desperately needed money to feed himself and his family.

Kanu said — You’re desperate then, and the moneylender knows he can get anything out of you at that point. If he says, I’ll give you two kilos of rice, but you’ll have to return three kilos to me in a month’s time, you don’t think then: Where am I going to get three kilos of rice in a month? You think: I don’t care what you want, give me the rice now, my family is starving now, I’ll think of what comes later later. And they’ve got you then.

That was the time-honoured way they got Nitai. He couldn’t pay the interest on the loans he took out in desperate times, loans of money and rice, and had to sell that scrap of land of his, the land that could have kept his family just about surviving until times improved. The interest accumulated. Nitai had to service it with labour on the land the moneylenders owned, but this time it was labour for which there were no wages, not even, sometimes, the subsistence meal given to the daily labourer working someone else’s land.

Kanu again — The last two years have been so bad with droughts and starvation and crop-failure, but it’s like an opportunity for the landlords and moneylenders; they use these things as an excuse to lower our wages and not give us the daily meal when we work on their land. Bad times, they say, we can’t afford to pay you so much or feed you. They think that we poor people don’t see what’s really going on, that they are using this shortage of food grain to hoard it in their barns and warehouses, then sneak it out in lorries and trucks in the dead of the night to the cities, where it’s sold at a huge profit on the black market. And they tell us that they can’t afford to give us our daily meal when we work for them.