Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

A new kind of knowledge surprised him as he looked at the dark hair, oiled down, combed and parted on the left, on his son’s head. Did they all become their own persons, these creatures you gave birth to, these children whom you thought were an extension of your own self, endowed with your features, with aspects of your own personality and character, but who in the end came asunder and floated away from you, no longer like your arm or your leg, doing what you willed them to do, but puppets that suddenly became animated, only to rebel and set off on their own? Prafullanath felt a mild dizziness at the realisation; this was a parent’s separation anxiety, the melancholy at the inevitable parting of ways. Why had he not foreseen this? Did one ever know the mind and soul and personality of one’s child, even little segments of them?

The meditation only served to stiffen Prafullanath’s spine. He said, firmly and with finality, ‘No, I will have none of this newfangled college-going business. You will start coming to the office immediately.’

Adi’s head remained bowed, as if receiving a sentence.

Adi never perceived when his indifference to taking over the reins at Charu Paper had begun to develop. But there it was, the apathy, like a tree one has uncertainly seen in a dream and in the morning it is there right outside, its branches brushing the window, impatient to get in. Adinath went through the motions on the six days of the week that he attended the offices of Charu Paper in Old China Bazaar Street. He listened respectfully to his father, in silence, talking about the advantages of the kraft process over the sulphite, the difference between internal sizing and surface sizing, how to avoid excessive rush or drag on the wire. . Meanwhile, his mind wandered and took off from the occasional word of his father that would enter through his ears to spin elaborate, playful traceries of equations about the strength of materials or the number of beams required to hold together a room of dimensions x X y X z, when the other variables consisted of p = weight of roof, q = thickness of walls. .

Khoka-babu, Prafullanath’s factotum in the office and a kind of manager, always gave the impression of bowing low to Adinath during these occasional visits. He ordered tea and sweets from the nearby Annapurna Mishtanna Bhandar, made a fuss of the teenager, whom he called ‘Chhoto-babu’, partly as a joke, but partly also in earnest ingratiation because he knew that he would have to work under this boy one day. Adi smiled tightly, ignored him and waited for the whole thing to be over. That dream-tree gripped him tight in the embrace of its branches as he sat in a room on the ground floor of the building on Old China Bazaar Street and tried to focus his mind on files, papers, receipts, bills, challans, tenders, all of which filled him with a disaffection bordering on vague nausea.

Had he felt like this when his father had dragged him to Bardhaman and Hooghly ten, twelve years earlier, to ignite his interest in the business? Father and son had set out to visit the family mills in trains that moved slowly through the lush green countryside. Adi remembered the rice fields as parcels of bright emerald during the monsoon, and the flat land in late autumn all gold and green as far as the horizon, with patches of white cotton-clouds in the low blue sky, and the stubble brown in the red soil after the harvest in winter. He remembered his father pointing out to him the fountain-like banana trees, with their enormous, clattery leaves and their bizarre flower, a large inverted teardrop-shaped growth, maroon-black in colour, hanging solidly at the bottom of a long stalk. How could that be a flower? he remembered asking his father. The land had seemed so remote and uninhabited, full of trees and copses, the tight cover of vegetation everywhere. At the station, a car would be waiting to take them through dirt roads to a Charu Paper Mill. Prafullanath would point out to his son the various elements of the work-in-progress in response to the boy’s questions.

‘Why are there flowers on this machine?’

‘The labourers have just done Bishwakarma puja. It’s to consecrate the machine so that no harm comes to the production.’

‘What harm?’

‘Oh, just inauspicious things.’

‘Why is that man loading rubbish onto that slope?’

‘That’s what is going to be turned into pulp.’

‘What is pulp?’

‘The stuff that becomes paper.’

‘Why do you need so many machines to make paper into paper? Why can’t you ask the men to stick the rubbish paper together?’

‘Because we need to get rid of the impurities.’

‘What is impurities?’

Thinking of those afternoons now, all the different occasions spliced together, the images appeared like mounted photographs in an album. The forceful gush of brown water into the open maws of huge drums and cylinders and churners, creating almighty whirlpools. The innumerable vats of dirty greyish-white chyme that floated up to the top as the raw material was subjected to dozens of chemical processes and churning and beating and swirling and sieving. The mounds of wet rubbish — plastic, buttons, bits of metal, straw, clips, particles of rags, unidentifiable coloured solids — left behind in the meshes. The tall, narrow, cylindrical cages of iron rods sticking out of the water at regular intervals, like the carpals of a futuristic skeleton. Shreds and scraps of wastepaper everywhere, in the walkways connecting the different units and on the ground, as if after a battle fought entirely with paper. A heart-pumping climb on a rickety ladder, supported firmly by one of the managers from below and his father from above, to the lip of yet another enormous drum; held in his father’s arms, he had looked down on its contents of a kind of fleecy off-white foam circulated slowly by two huge rotating arms half-submerged in the substance, moving closer and closer towards him until he had cried out in fear. And pipes, pipes everywhere, in all styles of ribbing and all kinds of colours, straight and curved and curled and looped: the site was an eviscerated mythical beast and they its entrails. And that pervasive, wet, slightly suffocating reek of the forty chemicals — the figure had been proudly proclaimed by his father — that went into the making of an ordinary thing such as paper.

Where was he in all that excessive effort to produce something so common, so disappointing, after the massiveness of the process involved? Adi remembered being told off by his father for chucking stone chips, one after another, into the bore-well tank from which the mill drew its water, trying to make a bigger splash than the one that preceded it, or perhaps even trying out his recently learned trick of ‘tadpole’ — making one stone skim the surface of the water one, two, three, four times before it sank; the challenge here was to make it work in the severely confined space of the tank. Had he done all that out of boredom? He could not remember. And now, surrounded by the building blocks and tricky manoeuvres for making money, not bridges or roads or theatres, he could not map this more urgent boredom onto the lost memory of the probable one from his boyhood.

They were not all innocent of what we had to teach them. When we began with our small evening meetings nearly five months ago, there were perhaps three or four farmers in attendance, the numbers almost totally made up of men from the three homes that had received the three of us. Then harvest was quickly upon us, and we hardly had the time even to breathe, and no energy at the end of the day either to explicate or to listen to Mao’s theories. This was no bad thing: the situation at the end of the harvesting made it easier for us to spread our word. Then the numbers went up — six, ten, twelve, seventeen, at one time, even twenty-three, our high point.