Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

I laughed — What were we doing until now? Playing children’s games?

He laughed too. — Preparation, he said.

Samir and Dhiren had been calf-deep in mud in their seedbeds for the last week, trying to keep them flooded. It was my turn now in the growing plots. I missed out on the sowing. When I mentioned this to Kanu, he said that it required years of skill to get the throwing of the germinated seed-paddy right; Samir and Dhiren wouldn’t be sowing, only preparing the beds and perhaps guarding them.

I stepped into the mud, the mud that I’d avoided in the city all my life, that ever-present mud during the rainy season, which crept over the front edge of your sandals, seeped up between the toes, was lifted by the back of the slippers on every uplift of the feet and splattered all over the back of the legs of pyjamas and trousers; a thing that held only disgust, and a little bit of terror, for all Bengalis. So I had to leap over a mental barrier, erected through years of conditioning, to jump into a very sea of it. Silly petty-bourgeois things went through my head very briefly, such as how difficult it would be to get my mud-spattered clothes clean, get myself clean, in the pond at the end of the day, and would my clothes dry in the rain. . Then I stepped in.

My feet immediately sank in to my ankles, then gradually to the bottom of my calf muscle. I clenched my toes. It was difficult to move: the mud embraced my feet and didn’t want to let go. It was a slight wrench every time I lifted them up, as the mud slucked itself into the mini-vacuums my feet were leaving behind. There was a small danger of slipping and unbalancing on the tread down, but my feet adjusted. The clay felt velvety, then there was a strange sensation of it gently tickling and caressing my feet. I almost giggled out loud. I was, for a moment, returned to an elementary, tactile pleasure from childhood: playing with mud. What, a moment before, had held a small charge of something to be avoided had now become so desirable that I wanted to roll about in it.

There were sacks of cow-dung fertiliser sitting on the aal bordering the plots. We brought them into the mud and each sack was emptied at intervals of about five to seven metres along the area. I had to clamp down my jaws and swallow a few times because the pungent smell made me want to retch, but even this I got used to after a few minutes. But my joy in the mud abated — walking calf-deep in rainwater and clayey soil was one thing, doing the same in soil freshly enriched with fertiliser was another. Once again we directed the bullock, now fitted with a huge horizontal stick in place of the ploughshare, to flatten out the clay and make the earth level throughout. After the fertiliser had been spread evenly, the stick was replaced with that many-tined rake and the earth was ploughed again to mix the cow-dung thoroughly, letting it reach the bottom layers. The rainwater rushed squelchingly into the gaps in the raked soil. The skies opened again.

Herons and cranes did their old man’s staccato walk through the fields, jerking their necks down to catch a worm or a fish, then resumed their odd gait — they seemed to lift their legs up a lot more than was necessary. They were intrepid, doing their thing cheek-by-jowl with our activities. As for the bullocks, they simply didn’t care about the presence of the birds, not even when they perched on their necks.

The pond where we bathed and washed our clothes was full to the brim. That afternoon, during a small interval in the pelting rain, while we splashed about in the pond and beat our clothes vigorously against a stone ledge, Samir and Dhiren entertained me with their experiences of sowing that morning.

— They do a little ceremony before the sowing, did you know? Dhiren said.

— The usual stuff with new grass and blowing a conch-shell? I asked.

Samir said — No, different. The farmers’ wives do it. They put on new clothes, it looked like. They carry a little quilt with germinated seeds on it, and a small plate with oil, and salt and sindoor. The farmers stand back, each holding little sacks of seeds. But the women have to consecrate the whole business first. They bend down, pick up a tiny bit of soil, touch it to forehead and then to tongue. Then they walk over the aal, along the full perimeter of the seedbed, singing a song and throwing a small handful of the seed grain mixed with oil and salt and sindoor at each corner. Do you remember the song, Dhiren?

— Not all of it, only snatches here and there.

— Sing it, I said.

— It’s very elementary, there’s no complicated melody or anything to it, it’s more like a children’s rhyme or a panchali, he said, and sang in a monotone:

Where are you, Mother Lakshmi?

Rise and show your face.

Our men are cultivating paddy

But there’s no rice in the store-room.

What are we going to live on?

How are we going to get through the year?

I smiled, but a bracing thought went through my head: these lives had never been easy. From the very beginning, their core had consisted of a constant wrestling with dearth and want and, above all, hunger. All the so-called reforms brought in by the government in the twenty-one years of Independence, the Zamindari Abolition Act, the Land Ceiling Act, the Bargadar Act, they had not improved the condition of the munish one whit. The actors had changed; the play remained the same. That great magnetism was still at work: power spoke to and connected only with power; the government and its laws were for the benefit of the landlords, the powerful and the wealthy. Their interests were aligned: they looked out for each other, therefore they would always be looking after each other. That great circularity again.

It started raining, big, fat drops, slowly first, then faster, bigger drops, then a proper downpour. Samir raised his voice above the din of the water and said — Have you ever been underwater when it’s raining? It’s a beautiful thing.

He submerged his whole body, including his head, under the rain-strafed skin of the pond. I followed him. It was strange and unearthly. In the grey-green watery light just under the surface the sound was neither the ‘tip-tip-tip’ of raindrops hitting water nor the usual downpour sound that was like a large collection of little, dry seeds shaken inside a hollow rattle. This came muffled, and so changed by the intervening membrane of water that it sounded like the kind of percussion angels would use in their music, distant and dreamy.

I stayed under as long as I could, then I gasped out of the surface for air.

BECAUSE HE IS so lost in imagining the intervals between primes, and visualising their distribution to the extent of the furthest number that his mind, using a rough-and-ready kind of modular arithmetic, will allow him, his heart nearly leaps out of his mouth when his wrist is grabbed by a grasping hand, accompanied by the words, ‘There, caught you!’

He looks up to see the crazed smile of the neighbourhood’s resident madman, nicknamed ‘Mad Ashu’, who lives somewhere on Rupchand Mukherjee Lane and is supposed to roam the streets at dusk, Sona had been told when he was little, and to catch hold of little boys and girls who were not safely inside their homes by then. What he did with those children after he put them in his sack was left to the imagination. At nearly thirteen, Sona is not quite a child, but he feels some of the residual thrill of fear from the stories that had so stubbornly rooted themselves in some cobwebbed corner of his mind all those years ago. Besides, the man, whose real name is Ashish Roy, does look menacing — staring eyes magnified to distortion by thick lenses, the earpiece of the spectacles broken and held together by filthy loops of red string; unshaven face, bristling with silver hairs halfway between stubble and short quill; drool at the corners of his slack, mobile mouth, now grinning, now grimacing; grubby, frayed fatua that comes down to just below his waist, and even dirtier pyjama, enormous, almost ballooning, with the drawstring hanging down the front, drawing attention to the unmistakable stain of dribbled piss on the area around the crotch. Sona shudders inwardly and notices the veined hand still clutching his arm; the nails of the man’s hand are hard and have a yellowish tinge.