Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

Even Baba had mentioned then, on hearing it reported to him by his wife, that he too had heard rumours of such deaths in the eastern districts of Chittagong and Noakhali. ‘Yes, the people in the mills there. . The manager had heard,’ he said; he was vague. ‘But we should be more worried about cholera doing the rounds. This heat has sparked it off, I tell you,’ he observed, suddenly alert. ‘Careful, we have to be very careful. People like us don’t die of starvation, but no one is immune to cholera.’

Charubala, easily panicked, harped on disaster, always imminent for her. ‘Do you know, Madan was saying that he had heard of people dying like flies in the countryside?’

‘Hang Madan! I can’t figure out how long I’ll be able to evade all this government requisitioning, and you talk to me about deaths in the countryside. Tell me when the deaths come to the city.’

Prafullanath had not exactly laughed it off, as he had laughed derisively at Gandhi’s twenty-one-day fast around Saraswati Puja that year — the Mahatma had sipped sweetened lemonade throughout the hunger strike — but he was not far off from his usual snorting contempt. This time it had been tempered by the sure knowledge of cholera.

But, really, death from hunger was such a remote possibility in their lives — no, impossible. It was not their situation, never would be; they were not in any danger; it was only a changeable backdrop to the drama of their lives. Later, they would collectively complain about how useless Sir Azizul Haque was, sitting in Viceroy Lord Linlithgow’s Executive Council, in charge of food — more crucially, a Bengali in charge of food in a state ravaged by famine. And they would murmur about how stealthily the famine had come, like the sound of dewfall, like the sound of evening descending at the end of the day. And that would be all.

Maane Na Mana was one of the last films Chhaya saw with Priyo before his work at Charu Paper became too demanding for him to carry on playing truant. To cut lectures was one thing; to disappear from work in the middle of the day, right under the noses of his Baba and Dada, would be quite another. As if he had foreknowledge of the end of his film-going days with his sister, Priyo bought Chhaya a maane na mana sari, a fashion trend inspired by the film; it was a souvenir to mark the close of a giddy time, of a secret in more ways than one. Or perhaps that was the way it appeared to her in hindsight, after Priyo stopped accompanying her regularly to the cinema.

For a few years Chhaya went with her college friends, sometimes in groups of three or four, occasionally larger. To Naukadubi; Neel Kamal , the first Raj Kapoor — Madhubala film; Raamer Sumati; Suhaag Raat , with its captivating Geeta Dutt songs. With two Raj Kapoor — Nargis films in two consecutive years, Aag and Barsaat , Chhaya discovered something else: even without Priyo sitting by her in the balcony high above the mass of the common audience, that familiar smell of his skin — something she felt she had known since birth, the smell slightly similar to gunpowder or the combustible material they packed inside fireworks — arriving to her nose in legible wisps, even without that physical proximity Chhaya found that she could insert herself and Priyo into the silver screen, superimpose his and her faces onto the protagonists’ and become them, become the two points of the romance; it was their story the film told. Her whole body thrilled so to this fantasy of substitution that at every musical love-sequence she felt a delicious wringing-out of her insides.

The holiday from life did not continue for too long. Prafullanath sounded the warning at home one evening in late 1946.

‘The Muslims are getting ready to riot,’ he announced. ‘The Muslim League is busy stoking the fire. We’ll all burn. Ghosts have possessed them, the Congress is powerless in front of their might. The ghosts are not going to leave them until their demands are met. The country will have to be divided, there’s no avoiding that. Look where Jinnah’s “direct action” is going to take us. To hell, to hell!’

When the idea of partition had bedded in, Prafullanath did not seem to be too unhappy about it. ‘Everyone here seems to want this partition,’ he said. ‘Well, we’ll be shot of the bloody Muslims for ever. Good riddance, I say. They can leave for wherever they want, as long as they leave us Calcutta.’

Bhola, who was studying Commerce in Ripon College, provided daily bulletins on how the large Muslim population in Sealdah and Entally and Beliaghata was getting restive; you could smell the gathering storm in the air. There were frequent strikes in college. Bhola was not very interested in his degree and moreover found the dense, suffocating ‘cattle-market’ atmosphere of Ripon College enervating, and so was relieved at these increasingly regular halts. One hundred and fifty students in each class; seething crowds of students on the balconies, in class, on the staircases; the jostling and pushing to enter the classroom, then the jostling and pushing to exit again, this time five minutes before the bell rang to announce the end of class, otherwise the tide of incoming students for the next one would clash with the flow of the egress; the unbreaking tide of sound from traffic on Harrison Road and Baithakkhana Market, above which you could not hear a word that the professor was droning — Bhola sometimes felt like a riverbank being eroded by forces rubbing against him continuously; strikes were heaven-sent. By the time the college closed for the summer, streets and roads had begun to resonate to the slogan ‘ Ladke lenge Pakistan ’ — ‘We’ll go to war to get our own country’.

Processions of hatred and anger along Harrison Road, Mirzapur Street, Amherst Street became a daily occurrence; college was not going to reopen anytime soon. Then, as soon as the monsoons were over, the Hindu — Muslim riots and killings began. For days in August no one left home. Charubala sent up hourly prayers of thanks that they lived in a Hindu neighbourhood. Prafullanath, Adi and Priyo, who had recently joined Charu Paper full-time, sat at home, relaying news, gossip, rumour and statistics to each other and everyone else who cared to listen. Hordes of Muslim men, armed with sticks, shovels, spears, knives, axes, kerosene and matches, were slaughtering Hindus on sight, entering Hindu homes to kill, loot and burn. The city became a warren of no-go zones. People said, ‘Rivers of blood are flowing in our streets.’

Prafullanath paced about and complained bitterly.

‘Four of our mills in the countryside have had to be shut down, Ilam Bazar, Chalna, Meherpur, Nalhati, because of the riots. Apparently the Muslims are beheading Hindu men like you cut the heads off fish,’ he said to his wife, ‘and all you can think of is petty rubbish like not leaving home.’

Prafullanath himself was half-frozen with fear at the killings — he had expressly forbidden anyone to leave home — but he had other fears to contend with too. They made him tetchy. His wife’s nagging gave him an excuse to vent his irritation.

‘There’s a war on, in case you’d forgotten. Everything is in short supply — food, kerosene, newsprint, paper — and the price of everything has touched the sky. The government is requisitioning whatever it can get its hands on. I thought if we could keep production going at slightly over our usual output we could sell it elsewhere and make a neat profit, but sand has fallen on that bit of molasses.’

He meant, of course, the plan that he and Adi had hatched of hoarding paper and selling it on the black market, an idea sparked off by the hoarding of rice three years ago during the famine.