Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

That shut him up.

There was a breathing space after the transplanting. After the burst of intense physical labour, we were back once more in the old, eddying whirlpool of talk, going round and round in circles.

I worried that so much thought — and so much talk — was making the action become insurmountable. Perhaps the first step, the first stroke, that was what was difficult.

Dhiren asked — Do we have the movements of everyone on the list? We have to get that absolutely right: their movements during every day and every evening of every season of the year. Where they go, whom they see, their habits, the places they visit, the roads they take. .

I said impatiently — Not everything in that calculation will be perfect. There will be variations and changes and interruptions. Do you do the same thing every day, or every hour of the day, or every, say, 12th August?

— No, no, but there are patterns.

— Yes, patterns. We have to get the patterns of their movements correct. But we can never eliminate chance. Your moneylender, Nirmal Maity, for example, does not go to Medinipur Town or Garhbeta every ninth day of the month, setting out of his home at midday, then returning at eight in the evening. You have to accept that if we lie in wait for him when he’s alone, based on previous instances, we may well be disappointed. He may not be going to Medinipur Town that day, say.

— I understand, but the opposite strategy, attacking on the spur of the moment, seems riskier. What if we’re not prepared? What if he’s prepared instead?

— The guerrilla should always be prepared, because he doesn’t know when an opportunity is going to present itself.

Samir intervened — What about a median way?

— That would mean being armed all the time?

— Exactly my position: being prepared all the time, I said.

Samir said — No, I meant something slightly different, something more spur-of-the-moment, something that happens as the consequence of a flashpoint. . We take advantage of a heated moment and push things forward. Once one action is under our belt, the second one will be easier, the third easier still. And we’ll be able to increase our numbers, if the munish see that we mean business, that our hands are already bright with blood, like a true communist revolutionary’s. I have the Chairman’s words to support me.

True, he did.

The paddy plants will grow, bear flowers and then the grain, the grain will ripen, finally they will be harvested. It rained and rained and rained. Mosquitoes, dense clouds of them, kept us awake with their biting; their whining was even worse. Kanu’s child slept badly and cried a lot. It kept Bijli and me awake for a large part of the night.

The weeding began. I leaped towards it greedily: it was something to do for a small period until time froze again and we went back to the endless waiting. Large groups of munish, we among them, spread out over the aals, about twenty to twenty-five munish per bigha of land. We wore a toka on our heads and carried a small, sharp sickle, niraani, in our hands and went about uprooting weeds and the different types of grass — durbamukho, moina, shyam, an old Mahato man told me as I worked alongside him — that had sprung up on the aals and were creeping along, extending their long, tenacious roots into the green felt of the paddy fields they bordered.

We squatted and moved forwards and sideways slowly. It was impossible to do this job standing up and bending down; I felt my back and neck were going to break if I did that. The squatting motion was better, but only marginally, I soon discovered. At least I should be able to sleep better at nights. In the intervals between the rains, the cooling effect disappeared instantly and the land seemed to exhale its warm breath in the form of an invisible vapour. . It was impossible to do anything more than breathe, and even that seemed strenuous, so you can imagine what the weeding did to me. No amount of gritting my teeth and murmuring the Chairman’s words about discipline was going to lessen the immediate pain of this work. Would I come out of the other side, stronger? Would it make me steelier, more disciplined, the ideal guerrilla? I didn’t know. There were frequent days when the answer was a very straightforward ‘No’.

WHO WOULD HAVE thought that when the toddler Somnath had been inconsolable after the brown mynah had snatched a dragonfly out of his fingers’ grip he had been reacting not to loss, or to the knowledge of the mercilessness of Nature, but had really been giving vent to frustration at an impulse thwarted? That inclination found its full flowering as Somnath grew older. He became adept at catching alive all kinds of flying insects — mosquitoes, flies, butterflies, moths, cockroaches — without squashing them, tore off their wings or legs with the utmost delicacy so that their bodies were not damaged in the traction produced by the pulling, and then set them free and watched them unblinkingly. He took immense delight in their limbless writhing, short-lived sometimes, but not always. At other times he left on a couple of their legs and watched them hobble and skitter. That sent him into fits of clapping and hopping about; joy was such an easily attainable thing. After a heavy rain-shower, when the big, black ants came out, he dripped hot wax from a burning candle on them and achieved a kind of instant embalming; this was a special thrill.

‘O ma, how clever of you to think up this one,’ his mother said.

‘But it’s so cruel!’ Chhaya protested.

‘What’s cruel about it? He’s doing us a favour by getting rid of these pests.’

At the apex of this pyramid of pleasures was the setting of larger insects on fire. Stealing a matchbox was not difficult. It was tougher to go about the business of immolating insects without anyone discovering it; the house was full of people and he could be spied all too easily. His favourite creatures for this purpose were the shiny, rust-brown centipedes, which were quite common, especially on the ground floor, during the monsoon. Somnath loved the way they curled up into a tight spiral as soon as they were touched. He spent hours trying to stretch them out to their natural length, once they had rolled into themselves, by impaling them with safety pins or needles to isolate their two ends and then pulling on both simultaneously. Without being formed in so many words, the thought went through his head that if the touch of any object was so inimical to their uncoiling, what would happen if they were exposed to another kind of stimulus, one that would force them to unfurl? The answer appeared almost instantly to his budding pyrophile’s brain.

It was in this act that he was caught by Charubala one afternoon: the inert coil of the centipede first doused in a few drops of kerosene filched from the kitchen, then a lit match held to it, causing instant ignition, the flames hardly visible in the strong sunlight, and the insect leaking a yellow-orangish fluid. He was given a resounding slap to his face, the first ever in his life. Uproar followed. Madan and the servants were rounded up and scolded for neglecting to catch the child getting his hands on something as forbidden and dangerous as kerosene (‘What if he had mistakenly set something bigger, or even himself, on fire?’), then reprimanded again for leaving matches lying around. Somnath went into a sulk that kept the whole family dancing for two days. And yet it was clear to Charubala, torn between chagrin and pique, that she had slapped Som not to discipline him and deter him from unhealthily cruel activities, but out of protectiveness, so that he did not injure himself playing with fire. It was not a lesson in morality, but in self-preservation.

Nineteen forty-three offered Somnath’s particular brand of creativity a broader array of opportunities. Madan began to save the starch-water from the drained cooked rice for the skin-and-bones beggars who had gradually proliferated all over the city in an attempt to escape the famine in the countryside. They came begging throughout the day, these cages of bone covered in loose folds of skin. They could not bring themselves to ask for rice, begging for the cooking water instead. Ten-year-old Som, standing at the front door, fascinated, watched them drinking the lukewarm starch-water from dented aluminium bowls. His mother called from inside, ‘Come in, come in right now’, an angry panic in her voice. She could tell by the clothes they wore and the way they spoke that this shrivelled mother and her two little daughters who had come begging were not the indigent poor, but came possibly from the rural lower-middle classes.