Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

Dhiren laughed when I mentioned it to him — This sounds a bit like the camel theory of eating. Camels can store water in their humps, they’re desert creatures, they don’t know where or when their next drink is coming from. You think the same is true for farmers and rice? It’s a nice, romantic kind of theory for someone so. . so tough as you.

But how much waxed gourd and ridged gourd and bottle gourd can you eat? I have tried it, and I can tell you that it doesn’t fill you up for long; in a couple of hours, even less, you are hungry again.

A thought keeps me awake. It’s like a stubborn, delicate fish-bone stuck in your throat — it doesn’t cause you any harm, but every time you swallow you know it’s there, so you keep swallowing, hoping that it’s suddenly going to happen cleanly, without that prickle. Nights when I can’t sleep because of hunger, I wonder what Debdulal-da must have said or done to make these destitute Santhals and Mahatos, Kanu and Bipul and Anupam, agree that we could stay in their homes — after all, we were extra mouths to feed, one extra per household, even if we were extra hands during sowing and harvesting and, therefore, additional income. Did the two columns tally and balance each other? What was going through their heads when they said yes? Could it have been, besides all the calculation involved, also that our idealism about trying to be one with them sparked off a kind of responsive idealism, so that they thought — Yes, here was a chance to. .

Chance to do what? Hard as I try, I can’t answer their side of the issue, can’t imagine myself into it. Instead of all this idealism of unity, did they not think — They’ve come from Calcutta, they have more money than we do, they live in brick and cement buildings, they get three meals a day (not true of Dhiren), they ride in buses and trams, they wear different kinds of clothes, so why are they going to bed with their stomachs half-empty nearly every night by choice? Which fool chooses to go hungry? Or could it be that they are eating secretly, meals they’re buying elsewhere with their money? And if they’re doing that, then why are they not doing that for us, buying us some food? They can see that we’re getting barely enough to keep body and soul together, why aren’t they doing anything about the burning in our bellies?

The logical progression of the thoughts I imagined for them, if indeed they progressed along that line, brings me to a disturbing conclusion: could it be that that particular endpoint of their thoughts, why are they not ending our misery with their city money? could it be that it would become the cause of another resentment?

Now that I’ve thought that, I can’t get it out of my head. Were we too going to be seen to be on the side of their class enemies, unable to cross a crucial dividing line? Would we too become yet another justified target of their hatred?

I don’t want to think like this, but I find myself helpless to put a stop to it. Every little thing lifts the lid. Take, for example, Bijli sowing the seeds of various gourds and pumpkin in the tiny patch of dirt next to her hut. Who brought the seeds? Did she save them herself, taking them out and putting them carefully away when she cut the vegetables before cooking? Did she buy them somewhere? I asked Kanu. He said that his wife saved the seeds, everyone did it, so that they could grow a little something for their own use; the wealthier farmers grew cash crops, such as paan or sugar cane, because they had the land to do it, while people like Kanu grew edible stuff for their own use in a scrap of vegetable garden. In itself this fact was yet another of those little things that added to my growing knowledge of a new world. But it disturbed me because I hadn’t noticed the process of retaining the seeds and drying them out and saving them. Did it happen while I was away in Chhurimara or Munirgram? Or did I simply overlook it? Whatever the answer, what stares me in the face is this: I’m failing to become one of them. A distance still separates us.

On some nights, I lie awake, trying to imagine being someone else, someone who has crossed my path that day, say, the man who was selling fritters at the mela in Munirgram, or the one selling hot gram, or the labourer whom I had noticed once, squishing all the fiery, tiny purple chillies into his rice first before beginning to eat, a thing that caught my eye for no reason at all. . I imagine anyone, really, anyone who happens to fall into my mind as I wait for sleep to arrive. First, I concentrate to bring into sharp focus every detail of his face and clothes and bearing. When I get that, I move one step further and try to imagine his life in as much detail and minuteness as I can. Sometimes I arrange it on a time-axis: When did he wake up? What did he do then? What after that? I try to string out his day in hours and minutes.

Sometimes I use a different approach. I concentrate on one probable experience in his life and try to become him and live that experience in every single sensation and feeling. That wage-labourer mashing those blackish-purple scud chilles into his rice, for example — why was he doing that? It was obvious that he loved his food very hot, but when did he acquire the taste? Was he given chillies to eat from early childhood? Did his mother make very hot dishes? Could it be that in situations where there isn’t much to eat, or not much variety in what there is, people eat more chillies as a way of adding some kind of zing to their dull food? Do they burn his mouth and make his. . my eyes and nose water? Does the burn spread to my ears? Does it upset my stomach? What did I do when I couldn’t get hold of chillies? The questions come thick and fast, each spawning five more, and those five, five each. . until I find that I have squeezed my eyes so tightly closed that I see floating coloured shapes, like rotting fragments of dead leaves underwater.

I open my eyes. The centre of my head feels heated. And yet I’m no closer to that man. Most importantly, I haven’t been able to answer that big question: what idea did he have of the story of his life, not only of the past and the present, but also of what was to come?

There seem to be fewer stars; it must be getting close to dawn. No sign of your face or your name in the sky tonight. What is going to happen to the two of us? Doesn’t that question haunt you, too, and keep you awake? It’s eating me slowly from the inside. It’s all impossible, everything between us, every possibility, imaginable or unimaginable, is impossible.

MANY YEARS LATER, as he faced his own dissolution, Prafullanath was to remember a distant afternoon when his father took him to see the Elphinstone Bioscope in an enormous tent on the Maidan. That same book of memories seemed to contain an infinite number of self-renewing pages; a well-visited one was the time when he had gone with his father to watch the IFA Shield match, which Mohanbagan had won. It was a book that Prafullanath forced himself to think he had erased successfully, but it was as if scraps of imperfectly rubbed-out writing, half a line here, a quarter-page there, still bearing the tiny worms of rubber-shavings and the impress of the letters wiped out, had cunningly revivified themselves and presented their taunting, undead selves to him, mocking, mocking his failure to annihilate them for ever.

Five years after Mohanbagan’s IFA Shield victory, his father was dead. It was 1916 and the war in Europe had temporarily disrupted the passage of the ships that brought the medicines for his father’s diabetes into India from the country of their manufacture. No amount of money, in which the Ghoshes were not lacking, could open this particular door.

When he was four, Prafulla had seen his brother, Braja, older than him by twelve years, celebrating British victory in the Boer War, and had joined him in running up and down the stairs, parroting his dada’s ‘The English have won! The English have won!’ They were all supporters of the English then; victory for the English meant their victory. Who would have thought that a dozen years down the line the distant thunder of another war in which the English were again involved would descend so crashingly on their little lives? He had not, then or later, linked up the British with his father’s death, stringing out the beads of cause and effect, in part because the rise in anti-British nationalism hardly touched the Ghosh family in North Calcutta. Four or five years after the child’s jubilation at British victory in the Boer War, when the nationalist movement in Bengal was in full swing, the Ghoshes in their enormous family mansion in Garpar Road had not boycotted English goods, or given up their jewellery, like most patriotic families, to fund the nationalist cause, nor had they consigned their foreign silks and fabrics to the regular bonfires that the swadeshi revolutionaries organised.