Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

The streamlining that had benefited him so greatly when he was an agent was also the central governing principle in his reform of the mills at Memari and Bali. One of the first things Prafullanath initiated was the trend in bleached paper. He remembered the Srirampur and Bali paper that he was occasionally forced to use as ‘rough paper’ for scrap work — a brownish, coarse off-white, as if it had sand in it. He had an instinctive dislike of that murky thing and used it only when he had to. Charu Paper Mill at Memari switched from the manufacture of several types of this ‘dirty’ paper to one variety of bleached writing paper. The factory at Bali had produced, before Prafullanath took over, four different kinds of duplex board and grey board and made losses on two of those. Prafullanath began by stopping production of the loss-making varieties. Bali was now going to manufacture only two types of paper: coated duplex and uncoated grey board.

The inevitable scaling back this resulted in throughout the rest of the 1920s brought focus and, with hindsight, it could be said that this retrenchment helped the Ghoshes to weather the global recession when it hit in 1930. They were saved, too, from the eventual financial ruin that reckless expansion would have brought. It was happening all around them: their friends, the Pals, for example, quickly consolidated their textile business, buying up factories, retail outlets, smaller businesses as if they were going to be asked to leave the planet tomorrow, and branched out into printing works, ink, a type foundry, only to be brought to their knees when the recession hit. They never recovered. It was only with Prafullanath’s help that his friend Jyotish Chandra Pal could hang on to their first store on Harrison Road. Prafullanath noted the lesson carefully and stored it away; he was to remember Jyotish crying for help — ‘I’m having to sell off my wife’s jewellery now; if you don’t help me, I won’t know what to do’ — for the rest of his life. Having to sell off the women’s jewellery: now that was unimaginable, Prafullanath had shuddered. He deferred his ideas about shareholdings and directorships in other companies, postponed too his ambition of regional branches, and concentrated on strengthening what he had.

The ’30s began with Gandhi’s non-violent salt satyagraha. In College Street, people sat on the road, selling white piles of salt heaped on sacks in front of them, openly defying the Salt Tax. But Bengalis also answered with terrorism and a string of assassinations of high-profile British officials — the looting of the Chattagram artillery, the killing of Inspector General Loman in Dhaka, Binay-Badal-Dinesh’s assassination of Simpson. Something was turning; the atmosphere, the very air, seemed cleft with fear and tension and something else. . expectation, was it? In 1931, the District Manager of Medinipur, Peddy, was killed. The British retribution was brutal.

In 1932, one of Prafullanath’s closest friends, Gyan Kundu, became the unintended victim of the second terrorist attack on Alfred Watson, the editor of The Statesman . The first one, only a couple of months before, had involved only one assassin; he had been stationed just outside the newspaper office in Chowringhee, waiting for the editor’s car to pull up. When it did, he stuck a pistol through the open window and fired; incredibly, he missed. The subsequent attempt was a more elaborate affair. A carload of men pulled up behind Watson’s car and showered it with bullets. Watson took two bullets, survived, but had to be retired because he was no longer capable of active work. Gyan Kundu, who was in the back, died instantly. Kundu-babu, as Prafullanath mischievously called him (they were peers), had been on his way to a meeting — an unprecedentedly rare one — with the board of the British-run Statesman as representative of the Paper Merchants’ Association; the newspaper was looking to establish new connections with local newsprint, paper and ink suppliers as a way of cutting costs during this period of depression. It was the first time that Gyan Kundu had been invited to a mostly British gathering, especially of that echelon of British quasi-officialdom. The more nationalist-minded of the Bengalis could not refrain from pointing out that a freedom-fighter’s bullet was the end that lay in store for Bengalis who colluded and cooperated with the enemy.

Prafullanath held no truck with such patriotic fools. ‘Khaddar and charka and cottage industries are not going to feed us,’ he said. ‘We’ll remain a nation of loincloth-clad, rib-showing beggars if we go down that route. The industries are controlled by the British and we should do business with them for our own good.’ In this he had been indoctrinated by what he had seen in his childhood during the swadeshi movement in the 1900s. Back then, Prafullanath had noted and remembered his father’s scornful words to a rich Bengali man; one of their customers, he supposed. ‘All these calls to shut my jewellery shop, to stop trading in British gold. . Well, I ask them, what are we going to eat if I close my shop? What are my children going to eat? And you, Banerjee-babu, how are you going to marry your daughter without jewellery, hyan? Have you heard of a wedding without ornaments? Besides, all this jabber-jabber about the country’s economic development, how is the economy going to develop if we close down our small businesses?’ It was an argument Prafullanath was going to use himself, copiously, when confronted with a similar moral choice during the turbulent decades of freedom-fighting.

In Gyan Kundu’s death, Prafullanath, who had business in his genes, saw an opportunity. Within days he presented Kundu-babu’s widow with an impeccably worked-out proposal, designed to hit all the right notes with a grieving woman left to look after her two small children, nine and six at the time. He offered to buy out Kundu & Co. at a substantial premium over the market value and invest the money for her, if she wanted, locking a percentage of it in a trust fund for the children so that Nirmala-boüdi did not have to worry about their school and college education and the girl’s marriage; the children would even come into money when they turned twenty-one. A terrible bereavement such as this, and in such circumstances. . surely she could not be asked to make difficult decisions requiring intricate financial and legal knowledge? If he could spare his best friend’s widow the anxiety — and here he let his eyes brim over — then he would count himself a happy man. Besides, his business was the same as her late husband’s; he understood this world, knew it as well as the back of his own hand. ‘Look at your children’s faces,’ he pleaded, ‘and do the right thing.’

He had pitched it perfectly. Nirmala Kundu agreed, partly in relief that someone was taking charge of the messier sphere, leaving her to get on with her grieving and bringing up her children, things to which she was more attuned than company finances. He had bribed the auditors of Kundu & Co. to undervalue the firm to a figure that he had set with the men, thus acquiring Kundu & Co. for something between 40 and 50 per cent of the company’s true value. Crucially, he had known from his now-dead friend that two enormous contracts were shortly coming the way of Kundu & Co.

Prafullanath’s own mills in Memari and Bali exclusively supplied the paper for these two contracts. With the financial muscle they brought him, he managed to stave off the worst of the recession. That year, in 1933, his youngest son Somnath was born.

Scalp-splitting sun. It killed you. Darkness now came slowly, like a leisurely, majestic predator, unafraid of anything, swallowing the far things on the horizon first, then the near. You saw the line of trees in the forest in the distance go first, then the nearer trees, the palms and bamboos, then the fields became stretches of a featureless sea of black. After a while, you couldn’t see your toes.