Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

The plot didn’t look big when I saw it, but twenty minutes into disciplining myself to maintain the required inverted-U shape sent my neck and back screaming silently. The field seemed like a sea now and I had to swim across it. Already I was well behind Kanu and his wife, Bijli, and the three other munish working with us. They advanced with the choreographed grace and rigour of dancers, leaving me behind, standing alone, the bad student who couldn’t master the movements. How did they do it? I knew those tired lines about practice and acclimatisation, but didn’t their backs and necks and shoulders hurt too? In the beginning at least? I began to count small blessings: the fact that it was November (the thought of doing this in April was unthinkable) although my vest was stuck to my skin with sweat and the fatua over it was beginning to show signs of damp too. The sun was not strong enough for my head to be covered, not yet.

I bracketed the sickle around the base of a sheaf of stalks and cut using the ‘towards me’ motion that they’d taught me. The sickle was very sharp and there was no effort involved in the actual cutting. The cut stalks fell over my head. This was the thing I was failing to master, the way the left hand gathered the cut plants into a bundle, the bundle increasing in girth and the hand adjusting to accommodate that as you moved forward, cutting more stalks, until you had enough and you turned around and threw the harvested sheaves behind you and moved on. Even that flinging backward of the sheaves — even that required the mastery of a trick, a particular motion of the hand and wrist so that the stalks all fell with their bases aligned to the bases of the others already harvested, the tips to the tips. Mine fell in a fanned mess. How was I ever going to reach the end of the field?

And then I noticed: my palms and fingers were a mad criss-cross of little cuts from the sharp, dry edges of the rice leaves and stalks. Shame rose in me like bile. Hands that revealed instantly that I hadn’t done a day’s honest work in my life. The only thing I could do was ignore the sting, grit my teeth and keep cutting and advancing with all the strength and endurance I had. I wanted to make the cuts worse, deeper, my hands really bloody. It was the only way I would learn how to harvest properly and the only way my hands could stop being the shamefully middle-class hands they were now.

‘Change yourself, change the world.’

When you look at a field full of ripened grain ready to be harvested it’s a uniform brown-gold-sand colour. But as you cut with your sickle you notice that there’s still some green inside, hiding within the larger brown, a few long partially green leaves, a little green fraction of a stalk. And as you cut these down, a tiny cloud of insects hiding in their massed density flies out; some wriggle away into the thickets not yet harvested, some scurry into the grass and sheaves and earth around you. And yet another thing: the sound of the paddy plants as you enter the thicket and cut them down. That rustle and rattle, louder, much louder now, accompanied by something between the snap of an almost-dry stalk and the wet snip of cutting through a twig that’s still partly green. I can’t explain very well. Taken together, this swishing of dry, dense vegetation fills your ears. You can hear it at night, resounding in your head, before you slip into the total silence of sleep.

My hands were sore in the morning after a night’s sleep. I couldn’t make a fist. So I made myself make a fist ten, fifteen, twenty times with each hand. The cracks reopened and beaded with blood. Some were tiny red threads, the red smudging when I touched them. And speaking of sleep, I’d never known sleep like this before — a total wiping out of all senses, all consciousness. I hadn’t known exhaustion like this before either, a bone-breaking, bone-aching tiredness. That little revelation again, granted to an outsider, of the hidden inner cogs and wheels of the lives of others: now I knew yet another reason why everyone in the heart of rural Bengal went to sleep so early. When you worked in the fields from six in the morning to four in the afternoon the tiredness resulting from it stunned you into silence. You went from being a human, animated by a mind and spirit and consciousness, at the beginning of the day, to a machine without a soul at the end of those ten hours, moving your arms and legs and mouth because you felt some switch hadn’t been turned off. Then it was, and the machine was dead, or just a stopped machine.

The next step was beating the sheaves in bundles against a sizeable boulder, which was placed on a large expanse of gunny cloth or jute. The impact loosened the ripe paddy grains, which collected on the cloth. After ten or fifteen minutes of work, the accumulating matt golden grains looked like a giant colony of insects or insect eggs, thinning out towards the peripheries in an untidy scatter. This was a much more exposed activity: you worked in the clearing where there had been dense plantation before. While harvesting, you were hidden by the tall paddy in front of you and sometimes to your left and right, but here, as you raised your hands above your head and brought down the sheaves of rice on the stone with all your strength — and it had to be done with all the force that you could bring to it; this, too, was a skill you had to acquire — you were the solo performer on a stage. Here you stood out, there was no help for it.

In my first hour of doing this, I kept interrupting my work to pick up bundles of spent sheaves to check if all the grains had really come off. I had heard that Nitai Das, and others in his situation, used to secrete some of these grainless stalks in their clothes, or steal them later, in the middle of the night, as the sheaves lay outside, drying, before being tied up into cylinders of hay. He would boil and eat them in the hope that a fleck or two of tenacious grain had clung on to the stalk-tips here and there. This is what they did in times of famine. This is what Nitai did here last year.

The paddy was taken away to be threshed. I could hardly move my arms and shoulders when I woke up the next morning.

Kanu took me with him wherever he was engaged to work this season: two sharecropping plots, and two where he worked as wage-labourer in the plots of the two big jotedaars here, the Rays and the Sinhas, part of the upper-caste inner-core neighbourhoods of Majgeria. He told me that it was less than half the work he did during harvesting time in a good year; now it had dwindled to this. From sharecropping he got, as his wages, one eighth of the husked weight of rice from each of the fields that he had worked. From the daily work in the absentee landlords’ bigger plots, he got money.

In the wealthier parts of the village, the inner core that is, there were sumptuous harvest festivals with mass feasting and giving of gifts. Here, we gave the first new grains to crows, which were believed to be the reincarnations of the farmers’ ancestors.

It was a breathless time of the year. These were part of the ninety or so days of guaranteed work that Kanu and others like him had, and they passed in consciousness-obliterating labour. Rice left overnight in water was eaten in the morning with a couple of green chillies and salt, before we set out for the fields; coarse-grained rice and a vegetable or dal given at the end of a day’s work by the stewards of the farms where we harvested or threshed, then the walk back to Kanu’s hut — that was it. In the evenings, no serious talk of land reform, of putting Mao’s policies into practice in this particular context of a small Medinipur village with a population of 400 people, of debate on the relative virtues of ‘economism’ versus militancy, of rhetoric and corresponding action, of planning and consolidation and uniting the actions of various regional cells. . none of that intense conversation that brought the foam to our mouths. No small meetings with the farmers who lived on the outer edges of the village, that is, the lower-caste and Santhal landless labourers. (I’m going to spare you the contents of past meetings. They’ll bore you; they bore me sometimes. You’ll say, ‘Ufff, that same old chewing of the cud of politics.’ Quite.)