Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

The next day I give Kanu my thirty rupees. He says no, but he can’t look me in the eye. His gaze is fixed on the notes in my outstretched hand.

— Take it, I say, I eat your food, I stay in your home, take it as my contribution to your family expenses. Your brother or your son would have done the same, no? Wouldn’t you have taken it from them?

He takes the money from my hand and closes his fist around it, not to secure it in his grasp, but as if he’s hiding something shameful and dirty.

At night, the muffled sound of sobbing again from inside. .

I retold the story of ‘The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains’ from The Little Red Book to Kanu and Bijli one evening, but stumbled when it came to the ending, with god sending angels and all that rubbish, so I had to improvise quickly. Any reference to god would only have fed their natural fatalistic bent, so while explaining the story I laid special emphasis on the real meaning of god, repeating over and over the Chairman’s sentence, slightly tweaked, ‘Our god is none other than the masses of Indian farmers.’ I changed the two mountains of imperialism and feudalism to the two mountains of poverty and feudalism, then I explained, yet again, the evil that was feudalism in plain, simple language, referring constantly to their present situation in this village.

I felt the session had gone well when Kanu said to me — Babu. .

I flinched.

— Babu, you will have to come inside, it’s getting colder, it’s winter now. .

I said — If you keep calling me Babu. . Then I tried to laugh to make light of the barter I was trying to reach with him.

Kanu gave a shy and embarrassed smile, lowered his eyes and said nothing.

I pushed it — Go on, say Pratik. PRA-TIK.

He shook his head and cringed with shyness.

— Pra-tik, Pra-tik, I kept repeating.

— Per-tik, he said, at last — Per-tik babu.

Maybe I heard it because I was outside, sleepless and anxious with unbegun business. The sound was unmistakable, especially in a tiny village that saw a big motor vehicle only rarely and that too during peak times, such as harvest, which had just ended. Then, I don’t know how, I put everything together. Of course, how obvious. I got up, wrapped the two pieces of chador around my head and body and ran to Anupam Haati’s hut, where Samir was, and from there, three huts away, to Bipul Soren’s, to rouse Dhiren, who, when we got there, was already waiting for us. The identical thought had gone through his head, for he greeted us with a whisper — Did you hear it?

A lorry, maybe two, maybe more, shaking noisily on their way through the dirt tracks, the sound progressing nearer and nearer, too loud in the silence of the cold night, then cutting out, followed by the slamming of the doors of the vehicles.

The night was as chinklessly dark as hell.

Samir whispered — We must separate, each of us follow the sound on his own.

This was the man, who, in ordinary circumstances, was afraid to visit the outhouse in the dark. I told you, didn’t I, that he had steel in him, deep down?

There were trees and bushes and groves all around us and we could slip behind these at any time. There were proper brick houses in this neighbourhood, walls behind which we could crouch or against which we could flatten ourselves.

Sticking my head out from behind a huge tree near a pond, I observed what was going on less than a hundred metres away. The proceedings were illuminated only occasionally by hurricane lamps and torches, but what I could pick out in the dark was this: from the granary of the Ray house, the biggest house in Majgeria, as befitted the absentee landlord of more than 250 acres of land in the area, a string of three or four men came out, bearing sacks on their shoulders, and began walking in the direction of the eastern flank of the village. There were three, four, maybe five men holding up hurricane lamps to light the way. Others were walking around, pacing or standing still. These men, I could just about discern in the darkness only fleetingly and partially dispelled by the light of the lamps, were in police uniform.

I don’t know how long I stayed watching this shadow-show. Fifteen minutes? Half an hour? It certainly felt longer. I thought I saw more people leaving the warehouse with sacks, or maybe the same people who had gone out before came back in and then went out again, bearing more sacks, but I couldn’t be sure of this. I heard the occasional shout, a raised voice, or the murmur of a brief conversation, an order, but only as noises; I couldn’t hear any words.

Suddenly there was someone beside me.

I jumped out of my skin.

It was only Dhiren. He whispered very briefly in my ear — Let’s go back.

We had seen enough. This time, returning, Dhiren and I walked more or less together, keeping each other in our sights. There was a figure walking ahead of us in the same direction; it was Samir. By some telepathic argument we ended up, without consulting each other, near the small pond beyond our end of the village boundary, the place near the bamboo grove where we usually gathered in the night to talk and plan.

No one spoke for a long time. Samir asked — But what were the police doing?

Was it a rhetorical question? Did he really not know? Still I felt the need to answer him — They were standing guard. They were protecting Basudeb Ray and his servants as they transferred rice to the lorry to be taken to Calcutta or to cities in other states, Bihar, Orissa, where it will be sold on the black market at prices much higher than the official rate.

Saying something as barely factual as that did something to me and I could not stop myself from saying more, spelling out the obvious — The police were protecting the rich jotedaar in his act of avoiding the state’s procurement levy. .

Samir cut me short — Protecting from whom?

There was another silence. Dhiren answered him — Protecting the criminals from the honest. Hasn’t that always been the reason for the existence of the police? Why do you fall from the sky witnessing that?

Samir said impatiently — No, no, I know all that. I wanted to know if the Rays had called in the police to guard their smuggling because they know about us. I mean, not the three of us specifically, but our. . our activities, the activities of our larger group in these areas.

This gave us pause. Who knew? It could well be true. Little, if anything, could be hidden from the eyes of the state and its biggest instrument of control and repression, the police.

AS A GIRL, Chhaya was in the habit of visiting the roof after lunchtime and spending large amounts of time up there, an inexplicable thing in the long summer when the heat softened the tar on the roads.

Charubala had once asked her daughter, ‘What do you do up there in this heat? Your blood will dry up.’

Chhaya hedged and gave vague replies: ‘I want to see the mango pickle marinating in the sun’, or ‘I want to check that there aren’t any crows or sparrows sitting on the washing.’

Charubala, relieved to have at least one of her charges off her hands for a little while, did not raise any objections, except for a grumbled, ‘The sun will evaporate all the grey matter in your head if you’re not careful.’

On those occasions, little Som, if he was around, pleaded to go up to the roof, a rarely visited and unexplored kingdom for him, with his didi. Most of the times Charubala said no firmly: ‘You’ll fall off if you go near the parapet’, or ‘Not in this heat, no; you’ll get sunstroke’. Occasionally, if Chhaya added her voice to Som’s, she relented, but with numerous riders — ‘Only for fifteen minutes, no more’; ‘Keep a sharp eye that he goes nowhere near the edge’; ‘Don’t let him sit or play in the sun’; ‘Don’t let him play with dirt’ — and, only after Chhaya had given assurances, would he be allowed to accompany her.