Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

Tonight the exhaustion has crossed a barrier — I feel I’m too tired to sleep, if that makes any sense to you.

Until now it has been all right sleeping on what I can only call their verandah, the narrow raised space between their threshold and the two steps leading to the general earth. The weather was cool, and it was getting colder, but it hadn’t started biting yet. When we first came to Majgeria, Kanu said that I could share their one twelve-foot by ten-foot room, sleep in a corner, with him and his wife and their little child (six months old) and his wife’s old father, but something in me could not assent to that arrangement. The room was spick and span — washed with red mud; what few possessions they had were in their places, the little dung-cake-burning oven in a corner, one dented aluminium rice pot, the jointed tongs, two plates, one terracotta vessel for drinking water. . not much, as you can tell. But everything was neat, there was no mess. The low coir-and-wood pallet was for the old man, who lay or sat on it all day and all night long, wheezing but otherwise silent. Beautiful drawings, done with quicklime, of gods and goddesses, rising from the floor to nearly three or four feet up the walls on all four sides. The straw and palm-leaf thatch on the roof came down low and protected my ‘verandah’ from the sun and the rain.

The thatch was compact but sometimes, when I lay awake at night, or when something had woken me up, I didn’t know what, and there was a breeze, I imagined I could hear the loose ends at the edges stir up in the barest whisper of a rustle, as if it was trying to say something secret to me. It was at those moments, when there was nothing between me and the secret sounds of the inanimate world, that I asked myself — Why didn’t I accept their offer of sharing their tiny space inside? I had a ready answer: because one more person in that tiny space, bringing the number up to five, would have been difficult for them, yet they wouldn’t have been able to say no. It was a true answer; I didn’t want to add yet another small difficulty to their already hard-bitten lives. But at this hour of the night, with a silence only deepened by the occasional rustle in the thatch, I wondered if it was the entire truth or even the only truth. Could it be that I was going to be more inconvenienced than they by sharing their small space? This ‘verandah’, after all, was bigger in the sense of person-to-space ratio. And it was all my own. I had come here with my comrades, inspired by Charu Mazumdar’s words, to become one with the lowest, the neediest of rural people, to eat with them, to live with them, to live as them. ‘Like a fish with the other fish in the sea.’ Then why did I pick the ‘verandah’ over the room? Did it not, by emphasising, even making literal my apartness, give the lie to our most basic principle, the very soul of our movement: oneness with those who had nothing?

The doubt was like a breach in a dam. Other thoughts rushed in, all to do with the awareness of my separation from those with whom I wanted to be at one. Quite often, for example, I had some difficulty understanding the dialect of the Santhal people. One day Kanu said something about how sleeping on the ‘verandah’ now, in winter, might be all right, but once summer, and especially monsoon, came along, I might like to rethink because — then he said something short, two words or three, that I couldn’t quite decipher. After some questioning, he mimed it for me with his hands: the palm cupped and held upright, the inside facing me, then a swift movement of that cupped palm coming down.

Ah. Snake. Snake-bite.

Some more details emerged — in the monsoon the rains brought out a lot of snakes, not all of them poisonous, not the ones that lived in the flooded rice fields, but some certainly. Sleeping outside then was not such a great idea. I nodded. I was about to say that moving inside was hardly going to protect me since their room was not exactly insulated from the entry of snakes, but I bit my tongue.

Kanu said — A lot of snake action around these parts in the rainy season, lots of cases of snake-bites.

Something else made sense to me then. Throughout the village we had noticed tiny shrines housing amateurish clay figures of many-headed snakes, all poised to strike, sometimes accompanied by a figurine of Manasha, the goddess of snakes. Now I understood why the propitiation of this particular minor goddess was so universal here.

Much later Samir pointed out to me that the more numerous of these shrines did not hold either snakes or the goddess of snakes. They were to Shitala, the goddess of smallpox, chickenpox and other fatal and contagious diseases. The reason? In my naïvety I had thought this was the usual rural overdependence on religion and superstition, but Samir corrected me. He pointed out that this was the district that had been struck hardest during the 1943 famine, the very district from which hundreds and thousands of people had fled to Calcutta in large exoduses, only to die on the streets in the capital. And they had thought that appeasing the goddess of epidemics would spare them, so the shrines to Shitala had proliferated everywhere.

The picture kept getting muddier. From the convoluted measures Kanu gave me, I did a swift calculation to work out what his share from sharecropping each plot, one of 1.5 bighas, the other slightly over three, should be. Kanu received eight ser of rice from the first plot and twelve ser from the second, a total of half a mon of rice. Under several rules, not a single one enforced or enforceable in this country, he should have received slightly more than double the amount, just over one mon. Half-mon rice will feed him and his family one square meal a day for two months. The two plots where we worked as wage-labourers earned us five rupees a day for each plot. We should have ended up with a hundred rupees each, but the manager of the bigger piece of land decreed that because of an unusually low yield this year, only six mon per bigha on average, the labourers would get only three rupees a day. Thirty rupees for working a ten-hour day for ten days in which even breathing seems a luxury.

Kanu said that when the midday meal was given while harvesting this plot, they discovered that the portion of rice served to each labourer had been halved. Four other workers confirmed this. There were murmurs. Then there was an answer from the masters — How could you have the cheek to ask for more food in a straitened year such as this, when the effects of the past years’ drought was not quite over and when it had depleted previous years’ yields so drastically? Where was the extra food going to come from? From the air? They should be thankful for what they were getting; the alternative might well be no work and, therefore, starvation. Wasn’t half a plate better than nothing on the plate?

I told Kanu that I was going to deal with them. He looked ill with fear and said — Babu, then what we are getting is going to go too. Don’t make that mistake. Half-stomach is better than an empty stomach, they’re right. If you cause trouble, you’ll be marked out and then you’ll never get work again.

His calculation, however destroying, was shrewder than mine. Besides, despite being called ‘Babu’, I was here to be one of them, not to tell them what to do. Except for our ultimate business when the time came.

I hear Bijli shout at Kanu — What are you going to eat? Why did you give him only your money? Why not give him your rice as well? Take it, go on, take it and give it to him.

Then her anger ends in her voice breaking into choked sobs. From what I can piece together, she’s aghast that Kanu’s entire earnings had to be given away to the moneylender to repay a fraction of the interest on the loans they had taken out.