Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

Som watched them lap up the gruel. The sound it made was subtly different from sipping or slurping.

‘Come inside,’ Charubala ordered and tried to move him physically by force.

The boy, not used to having his will opposed, refused to budge, but his mother, bigger than he, tried again, this time nearly lifting him up in her arms. Som fought back, throwing about his arms and legs. In the tussle, he kicked the half-empty aluminium bowl, which one of the little girls had set down for a minute to watch the struggle, and sent the gruel spilling in first a swift then a slow, broad lick across the top of the stairs where the woman and her girls were sitting.

A short, sharp cry came out of the woman’s mouth, then silence. The older-looking of the two girls went down on all fours, prostrated herself on the floor and started to lick up the spill. Transfixed, Somnath and his mother looked on. Charubala returned to life quicker; as if they had witnessed something unspeakable, she and Somnath, now more pliant, left for the interior of the house swiftly, silently.

The incident, played out for, it seemed, a few infinitely elastic seconds, caused a certain calculation to go through the boy’s head. When another set of starving beggars turned up at their door, two or three days after this, Somnath was ready. He knew that he was not supposed to be around, staring at them, so he waited until Madan-da had gone into the kitchen, then sneaked downstairs, ran stealthily to the man — a shadow of a man, really — and his stick-thin daughter, snatched the bowl out of her hands and dripped the remainder of the cloudy liquid onto the rags the girl was wearing. Then he stepped back and said, ‘Wring your clothes and drink what comes out.’

Father and daughter stared at Somnath, their breathing seemingly suspended. What meekness and subordination differences of class and wealth had hard-wired in them were consolidated by hunger and debility. They got up from their sitting positions slowly. The man pulled his daughter close to him, as if wishing to protect her and, without turning their backs to Somnath, they climbed down the four steps and reached the front gate backwards, the entire while keeping Somnath pinned with their eyes. At the iron gate they turned their backs to him, facing the street at last, but then the father spun very slowly around to look at Somnath one final time and said, ‘May god keep you well’, and shuffled away with his daughter.

Around the time Somnath turned twenty, his childhood mischief had become the stuff of local anecdotes, recounted over and over, as if in celebration, by Charubala mostly, but certain incidents had either been forgotten or were never mentioned. The story that was retold frequently was the one involving a cat.

It was a white animal with an orange tail and an orange sock on three of its paws, the right front leg missing out on the droll detail. Madan-da used to say that the creature had used that paw to swipe so much food, stealing into the kitchens of the neighbourhood, that the sock had fallen off. The explanation was not entirely without merit: in the year of famine, when the corpses of emaciated cats and dogs and humans could be seen lying around the city, this cat seemed to have miraculously avoided that end. It was notorious in Basanta Bose Road — a fish head, waiting to be cooked, would go missing; cooked fish, left uncovered and unsupervised in the kitchen while the cook had her back turned for only a few minutes, would be attacked brazenly, the cook returning to find a piece gone or fish bones sticking out from the bowl. The cat clearly knew where fish was being cooked and when; it lay in wait nearby, endlessly patient, for it knew an opportunity would come along soon. Its reputation had reached such a height that it was shooed off energetically whenever anyone saw it loitering with intent, and children threw stones at it or hid behind doors, their breaths held, a big stick in their hands, waiting for the cat to enter so that they could bring the stick crashing down onto their unsuspecting adversary’s back. Somnath, now nearly eleven, loved this game of guerrilla attack, but the cat proved wilier after a couple of occasions of being taken by nasty surprise. When the animal got swifter in its evasion of or escape from Somnath wielding a lathi, the boy became more determined to do it real damage; his blood was up.

He had a foolproof idea. He stole a couple of his father’s Valium pills from the medicine box in his parents’ room, crushed them to powder, mixed them in warm milk in a shallow bowl, left this by the steps to the back garden and waited, this time not armed with the stick, but watching only. Soon enough he was rewarded with the sight of the cat lapping up the milk in one go. The question now was this: would the cat oblige by falling into a stupor right in front of him or would the pills take some time to work, during which period it would lope off goodness-knows-where and sleep off the effects of the drug? Somnath was faced with a dilemma; he did not know which would give him more pleasure — the drug-induced death of the cat or beating it to a pulp with the lathi, once the tranquillisers had kicked in and it was incapable of escaping.

As it turned out, the cat sat down to wash itself after the milk, then began to have trouble getting up. It tried, failed, tried again, and stumbled after the first couple of steps. Then it stood still, swayed for a few seconds, tried to move forward, now in a kind of drunken uncoordination, and toppled over sideways. It stood up again and shook its head, as if trying physically to shed the veil of confusion and sleepiness that had descended, suddenly and heavily, upon it. Its normal gait now became a loopy, erratic curve for a while, then it fell again, unable to keep its head up. Som, his heart hammering, watched with joy. Now that the cat was so obviously powerless to run away, he emerged from his hiding place. The cat took no notice. It did not try to raise its heavy head to look at him. Som took the lathi, moved towards the cat and brought it down on the nearly comatose animal with all the force in his body, but the lathi was bigger than he and he had misjudged how close he needed to be to the animal to maximise the force of the long stick, so the blow came as an anti-climax, at least to him. The cat tried to yelp and move, neither of which it could achieve. Som remembered someone mentioning that the best way to kill a cat was to hit it hard on its head. He moved back a few steps so that he could have optimal leverage.

Before he could raise his arms a second time, Madan-da appeared from the house and called out, ‘What are you doing with that lathi, what are you doing?’

By coincidence, Charubala too appeared on the scene. She repeated Madan’s cry, took in the scene and added, ‘What’s happened to the cat? Why is it lying down like that?’

‘I gave it Valium mixed in milk. Now I’m going to beat it to death. Look, it can’t move. What fun! No more stolen fish.’

‘Where did you get your hands on Valium? How?’ she demanded, panic making her voice rise.

‘Where else? From Baba’s medicine box,’ he said, contemptuous that she did not know something so obvious. ‘I know where it’s kept. Baba told me he takes those tablets at night to help him go to sleep, so I gave two to the cat. Then I can beat him and beat him and beat him.’ The contempt modulated to pride; he was clearly expecting to be praised for his cleverness.

Charubala reacted quite differently. She flew into a rage.

‘What nerves, taking Baba’s medicines! Don’t you know you’re not supposed to touch that box? Those medicines are strictly forbidden to children. What if you had taken some by mistake? Valium is poison, don’t you know, poison,’ she screamed. ‘What if you had come to some harm? My hands and feet are turning numb at the very thought. You need to be taught a lesson. You were sent into the world to turn my flesh and bones black. .’