Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

‘I don’t like this one bit. How can you live with your life in your hands all the time like this? What if we get bombed? The whole city is empty, everyone has escaped to the country. Why are we still here?’ She whined at no one in particular, but it was obvious that her husband was the target of her complaint. ‘This maddening sound of sirens and all-clear and the drone of planes overhead — I feel these are going to finish me off well before a bomb. Why have we not left the city?’

Somnath, meanwhile, was so beside himself with excitement that on blackout nights he invariably threw a tantrum about not being allowed to go up to the roof to watch Japanese aircraft dropping bombs onto the city; nothing could be more spectacular in his imagination: bombs! explosion! fire! Forced to stay in the sitting room with everyone else, he ran about singing the playground doggerel he had recently picked up: ‘Bombs, bombs, bombs / The Japs have dropped bombs, / In the bombs there is a cobra, / The snake-charmer says “Abracadabra”.’ Charubala thought she would go mad.

In the middle of all this Priyo and Chhaya sat, usually sharing a large duvet, breathing noiselessly in rhythm, reduced to such a concentrated stillness that the charge around them somehow kept everyone at bay. Their minds emptied and in this eternal present tense everything fell away except the perceiving pores of their skins, intensely alive, intensely open. Even the sense of touch of their linked hands seemed unphysical, almost spectral, compared with this communion. They heard each other’s blinks, the sound of blood pumping in and out of their hearts, they heard the strangely lit darkness shift and change shape; that was all. The controlled chaos of the stir-craziness in this imposed house arrest glanced off the surface of the sphere that sealed them from the rest of the room. Only when the ‘All Clear’ sounded and the shades were removed were they discovered sitting like inanimate objects on the sofa, their sides glued to each other.

At the next raid Charubala saw to it that it was she who shared the big duvet with her daughter.

By the end of the month it was evident that the air raids were decisively over. Somnath had switched allegiance by then and was zipping around chanting the name of Maurice Pring, the British pilot who brought down three Japanese bombers in as many minutes in the mid-January raid.

Priyo and Chhaya saw Bahen in Chitra in North Calcutta slightly over a year and a half after it was released. This was a turning point that they did not understand as such, but this film, about a possessive brother plotting to have his sister remain dependent on him for her entire life, entered the dark of their souls. The grief of the brother at her eventual marriage, his machinations to prevent her from going away — the themes seemed to leap out in an invisible lasso from the screen and bind them tightly together, sitting in two balcony seats high above, in an unknown complicity. It was like the first diffusion of a drug through their blood; in years to come they would seek out all films that centrally featured the adoring relationship between a brother and a sister. A little more than a year after this they were rewarded with Meri Bahen , in Chitra again.

Other films brightened their lives for the space of the two-and-a-half hours of their running; the afterglow, which lasted much longer, offered them a more bittersweet pleasure because they knew it too would diminish, but more slowly, over time. They went through a Kanan Devi phase: Parichay in Rupabani, Shesh Uttar in Uttara, Jogajog in Sree. Then a Chhabi Biswas period: Garmil and Samadhan , both in Chhabighar. They had to keep it very quiet, particularly Chhaya; Charubala would have had a fit if she discovered that her daughter was going to the cinema. She suspected the medium and was convinced that it corrupted, even going so far as to proclaim that ‘Hindi films ruin your character’. Only films on devotional themes, or centred on characters from the epics or legend and mythology, passed muster, but not without some initial reluctance.

It was a strange time for the city. For months it felt like the deserted simulacrum of Calcutta; so many people had fled in fear of Japanese air raids that streets, buildings, shops, houses were all like something in a filmset before the crew and actors entered to populate it. Then, in no time, it seemed to them, military vehicles were everywhere. A traffic block one afternoon in Chowringhee made them late for Shahar Theke Dure in Chhabighar on Harrison Road. The roads were suddenly full of white soldiers. American troops, Priyo pointed out to Chhaya; not English soldiers, as she had thought. They saw Chinese troops, as well and men who were the black of ablush wood, who looked as if they had been carved out of coal, then had had life breathed into them.

‘They’re from Africa,’ Priyo said.

‘Look at their fleshy lips!’ an amazed Chhaya said. ‘Ufff, I feel scared just looking at them. Think what would happen if you ran into one of them in the dead of night! I’d immediately get heart-fail.’

Although the city remained mostly intact, they saw a couple of devastated buildings on the southern end of Harrison Road where the Japanese bombs had fallen at the beginning of the year — carcasses of houses standing amidst rubble, not unlike a construction site, but at the other end of its destiny.

‘Just think if these bombs fell on us in South Calcutta,’ Chhaya shivered.

Priyo soothed her, ‘No more raids, I think. It’s been over three months and there’s been nothing.’

Bombed-out buildings and Africans were not the only frightening sights. Thick clusters of famine-struck people sat or lay on the roads, dying like insects. She could not tell from looking at them whether the prostrate people were dead or still through starvation-induced weakness. From the middle of August, the stench of rotting corpses, or a stiffness in the odd angles at which a woman or a child lay on the side of the streets, gave them a more certain clue. On Amherst Row one afternoon, as they were taking a shortcut to Maniktala Road, they saw a dead woman — mouth open, the body all vertices and angles like a collapsible contraption — whose eyes were being pecked out by a crow.

Chhaya lifted the aanchol of her sari to her mouth, but too late; she turned away and stooped forward to throw up. She had seen the gelid opaque-grey custard quivering out of the eye socket that the shiny black beak of the crow was worrying over and over with staccato pecks. She was never going to forget the image.

A boy, maybe six years old, maybe ten, it was difficult to tell, for extreme malnourishment had simultaneously added to and subtracted from the real number of years, leaned against a wall eight or ten feet away from the scavenged woman, a stone in his hand, perhaps in the process of aiming it at the bird, but the arc of the action had been frozen at its starting point; he had no energy to fling the stone. He sat there, a fossil within his own life, helpless in the face of the intrepid crow’s desecration of his mother.

They backed away on to Upper Circular Road, shortcut abandoned.

There had been talk, of course; where would this world of theirs be without it? There was talk of the price of rice rising like the wind — from seven rupees eight annas per mon to twelve rupees eight annas in two months, then through twenty rupees to over thirty in another six. They vaguely remembered worried conversations between their mother and Madan-da about last year’s killer cyclone in Medinipur right after Durga Puja; about the rice shortage and corresponding inflation in rice prices beginning from the winter of the year; about hoarding and government confiscation of rice stocks. . All these excerpts from conversations seemed to float up like murky and slippery remnants of obscure dreams and then got submerged again. Chhaya remembered a maid-of-all-work who serviced four or five houses in their neighbourhood, telling her mother about starvation deaths in her village not that long ago; maybe a month, or less?