Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

How many boys of his age — twelve? thirteen? fourteen? — have enough number-theory to even know that theorem, leave alone want to prove it? But, wait, if he doesn’t know it is a theorem, how has he arrived at it? Could he — here Professor Roy’s hairs stand on end — could he have worked it out by intuition, or as a by-product to something he is toying with? No school in Calcutta teaches this kind of mathematics. Does he have an exceptional teacher who explores these topics alongside the dead and boring school syllabus? It all comes down to that crucial question: which school does he go to? He looks. . looks. . grimy, meagre, except for those large, slow eyes lit up with curiosity and a special kind of intelligence. I have to find him, I have to find him. . This boy could. . could. . could. .

He has reached the end of the clearing. Beyond it waits the hulking blackness, forever present. It crackles, shifts and leaps on him, obliterating his whole being. He falls down from his bed on to the floor, thrashing and thrashing, as the darkness inside lays its claim on him once more.

The sound of rain on straw-and-coconut-leaf roofs all night long. And, drowning that, the non-stop croaking of hundreds of frogs, calling out across fields and ponds and the dirt lanes that have all dissolved into runnels of water the colour of milky tea. If you woke up in the middle of the night for some reason, you wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep again because of their varied cacophony. The intervals, rhythms, identification of different types of croaks, perhaps even going so far as to imagine individual frogs each emitting a particular and recurrent line in this mad music — all these sounds and pauses would enter your head and you would be anticipating it, and it would drive you mad.

And it was not just water coming down from the sky. It seemed there was a rain of insects too. I didn’t know the names of half of them. You had your common centipede and millipede and black ants and flying ants that you get in the city, but there were armies of other kinds. When I was small, Mejo-kaka once told me that centipedes could enter your ears while you were sleeping, then they made their way through the ear canal into your brain, where they nested and bred and created a huge colony, which then proceeded to eat up everything inside and then you died, thousands of the creatures leaking out of your nose and ears and eyes. I knew what that typically colourful story by Mejo-kaka was worth now, but it had made a deep impression on me when I was a child. I believed it for a long time and it created a tiny corner of horror mixed with repulsion in my soul. I found that I hadn’t managed to wash it out of myself completely; a mark still remained. Sleeping on the damp floor of Kanu’s hut — I called it a floor, but with rain coming in through the gaps in the thatch it was becoming more mud than floor — the sight of a centipede sent that shudder through me before my rational mind took over.

In this poorest of all the sections of Majgeria the collection of twenty or so huts arranged in a tight huddle with only narrow spaces of dirt and earth separating them seemed ready to dissolve into the water and mud that now filled the spaces in between. I tried to think of my instinctive distaste as the last vestiges of my reactionary upbringing, something almost counter-revolutionary.

Samir, meanwhile, revelled in it. He pointed out — Look! The whole picture has changed. It was all brown and grey and white in the summer, and red earth, with only a little bit of green. Now the entire canvas is like a study in hundreds of different shades of green.

I said — Yes, only if you forget the mud-brown and mud-grey of the bottom of the canvas.

He laughed and said — You, mairi, will remain an urban soul for ever.

— Urban guerrilla, if you don’t mind.

— You really don’t like this eye-soothing, eye-filling riot of green all around you? It’s what Bengali poets and singers have gone on and on about for centuries.

— Perhaps that’s the reason.

— Now listen to this: I have seen the face of Bengal, that is why / I do not want to see the beauty of the world.

I cut him short — All this Jibanananda and Rabindranath will be the end of the Bengalis. I expect you to break out, any minute now, into Again the month of ashad has come, filling the sky .

Kanu and Bijli’s son got a bad cough. They gave him a paste of tulsi leaves, but this did not have much of an effect. The old man and the baby were now a hacking duet at nights.

Three weeks after this I saw the paddy saplings and I felt an exaltation take hold of me. That green! How could the chemistry of brown seeds and grey-red-black mud have produced this green, which seemed almost boiling up out of the earth? I too felt like reciting the lines that had Samir’s heart, but I restrained myself. It was enough that I knew that my soul sang, I didn’t have to break into minstrelsy.

I noticed two kinds of clouds. The first was the obvious one — dark rain clouds. These brooded sometimes; sometimes they slid along slowly. Behind them, the backdrop to their stately movement, was not the sky, but the matrix of another kind of cloud — a uniform, dull expanse of a bright grey you could be fooled into thinking was white.

I watched the transplanting process, hypnotised. Kanu told me that I should study it carefully. It was not something I could be taught hands-on because there was no margin for error here, as there was in ploughing the soil. It was mostly women who did the transplanting. The uprooted saplings, all about four to six inches high — Kanu said ‘one-hand tall’ — and bundled into bunches of a dozen or so, were dotted all over the plots that we had prepared. Then it began. The women, their short saris hitched up nearly to their calves, stood ankle-deep in the mud in the inundated plots, bent low from their waist, leaned down, picked up a bundle, separated it into individual saplings, then fixed each in the mud, making sure the roots remained underwater. The next one was planted about four inches away. The women worked with speed, precision and what I could only call a kind of choreography — the whole thing looked like a disciplined dance. And then it struck me that it was probably as physically trying; bending down so that your top half made, at the waist, a variable angle between forty-five and sixty degrees with your bottom half and maintaining that for hours without interruption was a visual illustration of the process that had given us the term ‘back-breaking labour’.

The world outside had changed subtly. Where there was the ugly monotony of mangled mud before, now that wet, grey broth was transforming itself into a lush, velvety green carpet, patch by patch. This was a green I’d never come across in my life before. You could look and look at it, thinking it would satiate the hunger of your eyes, but the more you looked, the more that desire increased at the same time as soothing you. How could this be?

Two weeks later Samir was still quoting lines from Beautiful Bengal. Dhiren joined him now. Seeing an insect poised on the edge of a leaf, he quoted — On a leaf in Bengal, the glass-insect has gone to sleep .

So I said — That’s not a glass-insect, you fool, it’s a dung beetle.

He said — Really, you have no soul, no. . no finer juices in you.

— The first requisite of revolution: evaporate your finer juices.

— What about soul then?

I quoted Mao — That is for the ‘concrete analysis of concrete conditions’, the very soul of Marxism, according to Lenin. Not for empty and superficial aesthetic pleasures. This beautiful green in front of you is an instrument of the oppression of the masses.