Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

The soil had the surface of stone, punctuated with the stubble from last year’s harvest. Kanu followed the plough hitched to the bullock — the plough was his, the bullock belonged to the man whose land Kanu was preparing for cultivation — and explained to me how I needed to keep the share steady in the soil and the bullock moving in a straight line. I was like a guttering candle turning to liquid. Kanu looked at me and asked — Are you suffering?

I was ashamed to be thinking of sunstroke when beside me Kanu, drenched, smelling awful, seemed indifferent to the sun. I looked at him and was struck again by how everything about him was wiry: his thin legs and arms, the veins on them bulging out like ribs; the dark, curly hair, like a dense pile of wire clippings. Where did this beaten physique, as if something carved in oily dark stone, come from, if all he and his kind got to eat was chhatu and rice and puffed rice once, maybe twice, a day? I couldn’t even bring myself to ask if the sun didn’t bother him. When I tried to do the third row myself, without his help, I thought I’d got it, until the bullock reached the edge of the plot and I had to turn it round and position the share so that the same line was furrowed again, but now in a different direction. I failed utterly. The bullock went off in a line at a thirty-degree angle to the one just ploughed.

By ten in the morning a nerve behind my left eye started jumping, I began to feel dizzy and, when I tried to get up, after sitting down to drink some water and catch my breath, I saw black and then some popping colours.

Samir and Dhiren were both working in plots to be used as seedbeds, but for a different landlord. We could barely talk at the end of the day after we had bathed in the pond and washed our clothes — we felt turned into something solid and inanimate with exhaustion. But even through that solidity something of the intricate nature of the timing of everything trickled through and amazed me. The plots that were right next to the landlord’s house were generally used as seedbeds so that they could be kept under constant guard. The plot that Kanu and I and two others were working was going to be used to transplant the paddy saplings from the seedbeds one month into the monsoon. Kanu had explained the timing to us. And it all turned on the arrival of the rains.

The land was a stretch of huge, upturned clods. If I thought harvesting was difficult, I changed my mind when I began ploughing. Now I changed my mind again during this process of halui — churning those enormous clods into looser, smaller pieces of soil. Kanu said — The large boulders of earth, they keep soaking up the rain. .

Here he paused and looked up at the sky. Would it arrive this year? his eyes seemed to be asking; would it be late? would it be enough? There was both anxiety and resignation on his face.

Kanu continued — These large chunks, they soak up the rain, they are greedy, but however much they drink, they don’t seem to turn to clay easily. And we want this to be tight clay, so tight that the rainwater will stay on the surface. The plot must be underwater, here, see, this much water — he stretched his palm and marked off a point at the base; five or six inches, I reckoned — here, one hand of water, he said.

So the next ten days, twelve, passed in raking and beating and pounding the clods to dust. We kept ploughing the furrows over and over again, then the plough was replaced with a multi-toothed rake and we went through the same process again. The soil looked like red-black cottage cheese now. The June sun beat down upon us. The soil was hard and totally dry. When we brought out the sticks used to beat it to dust, it gave in and disintegrated. Then we needed to rake it up again to bring the bigger, more solid layers below up to the surface so that we could beat that to looseness.

Kanu has brought only his plough to the halui work. The bullocks belong to the landlord, as the seedlings, later, will too, so Kanu will get only 20 per cent of the crop produced. If he had been a bargadar, he would have got 40 per cent for the same work. I couldn’t make any sense of this logic, that the better off got more and those who had little got less. The world ran on this law, and only on this. Some magnetic field began to develop around those who had a little something — power or money or influence or friends, you name it — and the more these things accrued, the more that magnetism increased (it was as if the things that flowed to them had attracting properties themselves), drawing more inside its orbit and away from those whose funds were already depleted, making them even more impoverished, depriving them of even more. It was like gravity: everything flowed, and could only flow, in one direction. Or a type of circularity: the more you had, the more will come to you, the more you will have.

Sometimes when my body simply couldn’t move, when I was incapable of lifting even my little finger, incapacitated by the combined tyranny of the sun and the humidity, I forced myself to beat and rake and pulverise the clods of earth by thinking I was beating and raking and pulverising and eviscerating men like Bhaben Sinha, men like the Rays, who were smuggling rice at night, men like the police, who were standing guard over the operation, all the jotedaars and mahajans in this village. I wanted to stand outside the world, wielding a giant wooden stick, and use that to shatter the planet into tiny bits. I wanted to break the air, tear the wind, smash the water.

No nightly planning sessions during the sowing season; we were too exhausted to talk. I shall have to stop writing this and pick up at some point later when I have more time, more energy.

Kanu noticed my tiredness. He brought me a lipped, dented aluminium plate of chhatu kneaded with chillies and raw onions and some mustard oil, and asked — No more meetings for the city babus?

— No, Kanu, our bodies won’t take it. You’re talking to the others, as we asked you? They’ll come once the paddy growing begins?

— Yes, Babu, they will. Those other two babus, your friends, they’ll have a lot of work to do, just before the rains begin, to prepare the seedbeds. You’ll work with them?

— No, Kanu, I’ll be working with you wherever you get me work.

I knew what he was thinking: he was remembering closing his hand over the thirty rupees I had given him last time.

The monsoon didn’t break crashingly one day. First, there was a light drizzle that barely wetted the soil, but it released that loamy-fresh-rotting smell. When the drizzle stopped, Kanu’s face took on that constricted look.

— This little pissing, Babu, he said, it’s not a good sign. It means something is holding back the water in the sky. It can be held back throughout the season then.

He was wrong. Two more days of dark, rolling clouds and another half-day of drizzling, then the sky broke upon us. Even his dying father-in-law seemed to register it: his face had an expression different from its usual one of resigned blankness, not far from a smile. The baby too appeared to be crying less. I had to move inside now.

— You’ll get wet outside, Babu. And sometimes the water rises and floods everything around the hut and water comes into the room. No, no, Babu, you come inside now.

It was exactly as I remembered from childhood — sheets of water coming down for hours and hitting the ground with such force that you thought the road would dissolve — except that here the ground, which is earth, does dissolve.

The ploughed soil first turned dark with saturation, then became mud, a fractionally lighter shade than the wet soil. The mud started to retain water on its surface here and there. Then the watery stretches began to grow. Kanu said that the real work began now.