Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

While Kanu was saying all this, I was reminded of the food riots in Calcutta last year: middle-class people behaving like wild dogs, looting from ration shops, fighting to grab what little was entering the public distribution system. If the middle classes were not getting enough to eat, what hope for these invisible people? They call themselves munish, or labourers; they have climbed down from manush, humans. They cannot imagine even thinking about food — even that is a luxury to them.

Do you know, I was reminded of something else too, a childhood memory surfacing, aided by Kanu’s words. I was seven or eight years old and all the adults in the room forgot that I was there, or thought I could be ignored, that I wouldn’t understand what they were talking about. The thing that has remained with me was Pishi and Boro-kaka recounting something they had seen: a woman lying dead on a narrow side-street and a crow pecking out her eyes, while her child, near-dead with hunger, watched the scene. This was during the famine of ’43. It struck me, listening to Kanu, that it was mostly the starving people from this very district, Medinipur, who had flocked to Calcutta in the hope of getting food in the city and had died like flies on the roads.

Nitai’s physical weakness: that was what I couldn’t get out of my head. Starving for days at a time, but having to work — back-breaking physical labour — double, three times his normal effort because whatever he earned, the rice that he harvested, say, belonged to the moneylender, who had secured it at a price below the market rate. I supposed his creditors gave him enough to keep him working: what use was a dead labourer to anyone? What was it like, having the last drop of your blood (and your land) squeezed out of you and there was nothing you could do about it? Was it like getting trapped in quicksand: the more you struggled, the more you sank in? How quickly did it break the frame of the man — the physical frame, I mean — as it would break a pack animal worked like that on a fraction of its food rations, and that too given intermittently? What had Bijli said? ‘He couldn’t bear the torments of his stomach any longer.’

The nights were getting colder. I longed for a sweater or a woollen shawl, I feel ashamed to admit it. But not to you. We had to live with the farmers as fish in the sea, Chairman Mao wrote. But who knew of these daily, minute changes in life as we adapted to swim in those seas? Some we were not prepared for before we jumped in. We had to adapt while in the water. This threadbare green chador will have to do.

I can see the Milky Way. It’s like the smudge of a cosmic giant’s fingerprints on the inky black sky. And stars — so many millions and millions of them that, if I let my eyes unfocus for a bit, they too become a smear in the sky. You never see this kind of a sky, living in the city. These stars, all revealed now, hide themselves from urban eyes. My heart hammers audibly every time I see a sky like this; yet another thing I didn’t know existed, this sheer density of pinpricks of light. And sometimes I see your face in the stars, just for a brief moment, as if they have arranged themselves in the shape of your face and nose and eyes and mouth and eyebrows. Then it disappears and I’m unable to find it again, however hard I try. At other times the stars seem to arrange themselves into spelling out your name in that infinite sky. Again, it’s an optical trick — the moment I become conscious of it, it’s gone, and the stars return to being themselves.

Samir raised it first — Ei, what’s that you scribble in your notebook so secretively?

— Hardly secretively, if you know all about it.

— But what is it that you write?

I felt panicky, so I tried to turn the tables against him — It could be the kind of revolution-tinged poetry that you scribble away yourself in small pieces of paper hidden inside The Little Red Book. Everyone thinks you’re reading Mao, but actually you’re practising to be a cross between Jibanananda and Sukanta.

A mixture of anger, embarrassment and sheepishness from Samir, some of it feigned — What?? You’ve read my notebook? You’ve been going through my things?

— No, no, don’t be stupid. Don’t you think the rest of the world has eyes? It’s obvious even to a child what you’re up to.

— Really?

He was most surprised at being caught out and, while I could understand a mild embarrassment at being discovered in this rather sweet and adolescent act of deception — no, too strong, that word, but you know what I mean — I couldn’t fathom the acuteness or depth of this discomfort. He had been caught writing poetry surreptitiously, not doing something unspeakable. At last he gave a sheepish laugh and it blew over.

In relief he began to play-attack me — And you? What do you scribble away? Poetry too, I bet.

— No.

— What then?

I told him a partial truth — Nothing very important. Just a record of our times here. A sort of diary.

Now Dhiren said — Careful! If it includes names and whereabouts of the people in the various regional cells and committees, it could be a godsend to the police. They’re dragging comrades away to jail if they so much as find poster paint and brushes in their homes.

Yes, I had thought of that. Which was why I decided that I wasn’t going to post you these pages. It wouldn’t do to have them discovered in your room, in the event of a police raid. Word reached us that the blacklisting of our comrades had begun. It was only a matter of time before our names reached that list. But, then, what was the point of noting all this down, having you in my head as its only reader, if it never reached you?

Then Samir, after some hesitation and hemming and hawing, came out with — All this writing business. . you know. . among people who are, almost without exception, illiterate. . Isn’t it. . isn’t it a bit. . you know. . Mao said we have to be like the fish with the fish in the sea. . This writing business is. . is. .

I put him out of his misery — Conspicuous?

— Yes, yes, conspicuous! That’s what I was thinking.

Another long and hair-splitting discussion of Chairman Mao’s words until I silenced him with — Don’t you think Mao himself wrote, when he was being one with the Chinese peasantry?

Samir wasn’t quiet for very long — Yes, that may well be true, but the Chinese peasantry is not illiterate like their Bengali counterpart, so writing amidst them wouldn’t have stood out so much.

ON A MONSOON day loud with downpour, during the short break at ten-past-eleven before the beginning of the English period, Arunima is summoned to Sister Josephine’s office on the ground floor. Here, she is grilled about the short essay, ‘A Day in the Life of My Mother’, she wrote and submitted as her homework two days earlier.

‘Is this true? Are all these terrible things you’ve had the cheek to write about your mother true?’ Sister Josephine asks.

The exercise copy sits on the glass-topped table between them. Arunima, head bowed, remains silent.

‘LOOK UP. Why have you written these awful lies about your mother?’ Sister demands. ‘Do you not know that lying is a sin? And lying about your mother, who has given birth to you, who has fed, clothed, loved, protected you, does this not make you feel ashamed? Do you not see what a big sin this is?’

Arunima lowers her head further, hoping that the posture conveys her wish to become the vessel for any punishment Sister deems fit for her sins; the ready humility could then go some way towards mitigating her anger.

Perhaps the performance works; there is a sudden diminishment in Sister Josephine’s ferocity as she says, ‘Come up to my desk. I want you to take this letter back home and give it to your parents. I’m going to keep the exercise book for the time being.’