Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

‘Business wasn’t going too badly, then the famine came and now the riots. . I blame everything on my burnt forehead,’ he said.

‘But, Baba, worse could be in store for us,’ Adi pointed out. ‘Think what will happen if the mills in the Muslim-majority areas go to Pakistan after the division. What are we going to do then?’

‘Yes, say all this,’ Prafullanath hissed with irritation, ‘and make it easier for fate to bring it to pass! I weathered the recession in the Twenties, even made a profit in the last recession in ’36. But this. . this’ — he was at a loss for words — ‘this will bring us to our knees.’

‘I don’t understand all this ree-shey-shaan thi-shey-shaan,’ Charubala hit back. ‘I want to see all of you safe from harm and I’m going to keep on praying for that. Is it too much to ask?’

A frenetic accounting of acquaintances, friends and relatives in Muslim-dominated areas of the city began. Chhaya pointed out that her erstwhile music teacher, Shipra-di, lived in Moulali. Somnath, on the other hand, could only wish the rioting would continue so that he would not have to go to school — close enough to Muslim-heavy Park Circus to be out of bounds now — for the foreseeable future.

The foreman in the mill at distant Chalna, a Muslim man, was killed by rioting Hindus: his head was bashed to a pulp. His relatives had to identify him by a birthmark on his back. The Ghoshes sat at home and wrung their hands. They feared that all their factories were going to be set ablaze; the news from the countryside left them in little doubt that the nation had turned into an abattoir: Noakhali, Bihar, United Provinces, Delhi. . an endless cycle of revenge, a snake swallowing its tail.

Shipra-di’s son turned up at Basanta Bose Road, unclothed to the waist, unshod, unshaven; his father, missing for nine days at the height of the carnage in the city, had been discovered, both his arms hacked off, blocking a drain off Muchipara Road. The son had come to invite them to his father’s sraddha.

‘I know people who’ve lost everything — family, home, the roof above their heads — in these riots. They only have the clothes on their backs to call their own. But I keep thinking: buildings, property, savings, all these one can accumulate again. . but you can’t get back the people you’ve lost’ — his voice came out stifled — ‘especially in. . in this way.’ Then he whispered, ‘I’ll remember that corpse forever.’

Chhaya and her mother wept silently. The men in the house were horrified into silence. Prafullanath knew that the man was going to ask for money sooner or later.

Fretting about the mills kept him awake at night. When he thought how much money he was losing, his heart started hammering. How was it all going to end? He fingered the rings on his hands — sapphire to avoid the wrath of Saturn, coral to appease Mars, topaz for Jupiter — and wondered, not for the first time, about the astrologer’s warning that a tricky phase involving Saturn was about to begin, but prescribing the wearing of sapphire was a decision that he could not take lightly. So what did these bad times tell him: that the phase of the destructive reign of Saturn over his life had begun, or that wearing the sapphire to mitigate the planet’s malign influence had been ill advised in the first place? His heart thumped away faster and faster.

When the Ghoshes started venturing out again, elaborate plans had to be made to share one car; the other two had to be kept in the garage because of the petrol shortage. Avoiding Muslim-dominated areas necessitated convoluted detours. So in order to drop off Prafullanath, Adi and Priyo on Old China Bazaar Street, Niranjan-da, the driver, had to avoid the area north of St Andrew’s Church; most of the route was straightforward and safe, but after Old Court House Street it got tricky; the Muslim spread south of Harrison Road began. Chhaya was not allowed out of the house for months. Bhola, who had to negotiate the most perilous route from Bhabanipur to north of Pataldanga, talked to a couple of his Muslim peers at City College who, appalled at what was happening, had decided to speak up for unity; these Muslim students banded together and began to accompany their Hindu friends and colleagues along the dangerous stretch from Old Ballygunge to Wellesley Street on journeys both to and from the college. Bhola did not breathe a word of this arrangement to anyone at home.

With news of the ways in which the subcontinent was going to be carved up between Hindus and Muslims coming in on a regular basis, of the squabbling and negotiations and fiats between their British overlords, the Congress and the Muslim League, Prafullanath’s worries now came to rest wholly on how the manufacturing plants he owned would be distributed along the dividing line. Would Calcutta at least remain a part of India? Anything else seemed inconceivable to him. And not only to him — in an echo of the slogan that had ignited the riots last year, there were now processions shouting ‘ Ladke lenge Calcutta .’

The Boundary Commission’s decision just before Independence came as a shock: the Ghoshes were to lose the mills at Chalna and Meherpur to the new country, East Pakistan.

Charubala said, ‘Arrey, Baba, at least Calcutta will remain ours. We won’t have to move with our belongings or become refugees. So what if a couple of mills have gone? Buy another two here.’

Prafullanath said, ‘It’s a bit too late in the day to explain business to you. We’ve been running well below optimal output for over two years. Then for one year the mills have been closed because of all this rioting. Now two of them have gone to another country overnight. If I had known this was going to happen, I would have sold them years ago, like all these East Bengali families who have been selling all their possessions and land and houses for decades and decades now.’

Charubala fell back on her old reasoning. ‘I don’t understand all this output-foutput. That we are all alive and safe in these times is enough for me.’

‘There’ll be riots again, you mark my words. Otherwise why would Gandhi come to the city again? Precious little he could do last year, wearing his loincloth and walking barefoot — all this unbearable rubbish! — and talking to villagers. The riots and killings went on erupting here and there: Calcutta today, Noakhali tomorrow, Bihar the following. Ashes and cinders he could achieve! I hear he’s going to set up camp in Rash Bagan with the Muslims. This sucking-up to the Muslims will be the end of the Congress. At every stage, sitting up, standing down, they are appeased. Could the Congress do anything to Jinnah, who is about to take away half the country for the bloody Muslims?’

Charubala muttered, ‘Ufff, all this politics. . it’s eaten your head.’

Listening to Nehru’s speech on the radiogram at midnight of the 14th August, with the set turned up loud, all of them stoked up, for once, in the patriotic blaze sweeping the country, Charubala came up against the limits of her understanding again.

At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake. .

Charubala, who had sat through the Vande Mataram and the speeches of Chaudhry Khaliquzzaman and Dr Radhakrishnan grumblingly — ‘Ufff, why they decide to do all this so late at night, don’t these people need to sleep?’ etc. — could no longer check herself.

. . A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new. .

‘Oh, I can’t bear this prattling in English any longer! Why isn’t anyone speaking in Bengali?’

‘Will you be quiet for just a second?’ Prafullanath cried.

At this point Somnath piped up, ‘But the whole world is not asleep! He’s wrong. Everyone in Japan is awake because it is morning there, and everyone in Britain and America too, because it’s evening and afternoon there. We were taught this in our Geography class, time zones and time differences.’