Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

He looked like a puppy who expected to be patted on the head for mastering a new trick.

The achievement we celebrate today is but a step, an opening of opportunity, to the greater triumphs and achievements. .

There was news of the outside world occasionally. (Look, look, how odd that I used the words ‘outside world’. When I used to live at home, I considered the villages, deep in the heart of rural Bengal, the ‘outside world’, or even, the ‘real world’. But away from home, the city and everything elsewhere, even other villages or another part of rural Bengal, became the ‘outside world’. Does that mean that the world is wherever one is? Is that not the most accurate and strictest of all definitions of self-centredness? Does that mean that there is no escape from the self? After chanting to ourselves millions of times, Change yourself, change the world, is this the outcome — failure?)

Yes, people from Calcutta showed up sometimes, bringing copies of Deshabrati, Liberation; we pounced upon them. It was only on reading those papers that we realised that our people had fanned out into the rural heartlands of at least three states: West Bengal, Bihar, Orissa. I had no idea that the spread was so extensive, that we had so many in our team. My spirits lifted.

The news items obviously did not report setbacks, such as our people not being allowed to work in a village and being chased out, or comrades going to hamlets and not being able to last the race because of the hardships that such a life entailed.

I can hear you asking if it was truly so hard. Yes, it was. Rats bit us — some of them could be as big as kittens — while we were asleep; the rice fields were full of them. In desperate times, I was told, the Santhals caught and ate them. Snakes came into the huts during the monsoon. Upset stomachs and a mild dysentery were our doggedly faithful companions — we knew they would go away, but also that they would be back before we could fully appreciate their absence. Then there was the business of eating once a day, if you were lucky (rice, a watery dal, a little bit of fried greens of some kind); of days of eating puffed rice only, or water-rice with chillies and salt; or not eating, days of fast followed by a half-meal, that instantly set you running into the bushes. There was the lack of bathrooms or any kind of sanitation. Above all, there was the slow pace of life, with nothing happening and nothing to do for enormous chunks of time, nowhere to go, nothing to read, no one to speak to.

I try not to write about these because I can hear you taunting — Aha re, my cream-doll! Besides, I feel ashamed to admit to feeling the bite of those hardships; really, a middle-class cream-doll, that’s what I am. It hurts to acknowledge this.

I worried about how swiftly this catalogue of difficulties and woes could descend into an easy horrorism; I have always wanted to avoid that. What use did it serve to emphasise the unbridgeable gap between the lives of these people and people of our kind? It only consoled and comforted the middle classes that their lot was better. They will tell you that they want to know the details of the daily hardships of rural life in order to be aware, in order to be moral, but the appetite really was for propping up their idea of themselves as people with sympathetic souls and sensitive social consciences. It was not awareness they were after, it was the reinforcement of the separation between ‘us’ and ‘them’.

Did you see how easily I fell into ranting again? I must stop.

But one aspect of the hardship of life in the villages I must truthfully confess to you — the thing I found most difficult to bear, much more than going hungry or the absence of toilets, was the solid weight of time. That had the potential to crack me. The books we had brought with us had been read over and over again. We could recite The Little Red Book backwards. We talked until our tongues felt loosened from inside our mouths. We instilled Mao’s words into the farmers and wage-labourers like teaching a parrot. Yet we didn’t manage to budge that solid sphere of time even a little; it was always there. There were long evenings and nights when there was nothing to do except listen to the din of crickets. Sometimes I thought people in these parts went to sleep early not because of their days of bone-breaking work, but because there was nothing to do. Sleeping was an activity. If you could manage it, it made you forget the stasis of time, its sheer, pressing weight on a life. Much like work did.

The measure of time too was different. I asked Kanu how far it was to Titapani. He said — Far, quite far; then — Very far. I persisted in nudging him to be more accurate, expecting an answer in terms of hours and minutes. He finally came up with — About six bidis can be smoked easily on that walk.

Later, I began to notice this subjective, if picturesque way of measuring cropping up everywhere: short distances by the number of paces, length by the number of hands, even growth of paddy by the number of fingers. You had to get a feel for it otherwise a lot of basic communication was doomed.

And when you let yourself down into this different stream of time, you had no choice but to align yourself to its flow. In the lull between weeding, removing snails from the fields and the ripening of the paddy, I followed Kanu and the other Santhals and Mahatos as they went about other jobs that brought them a little bit of money or food — erecting woven-cane barriers, catching fish in the ponds (but not in the private ponds of the jotedaars, or the ones in the upper-caste sections towards the interior of the village; they were not allowed to do this; if caught, they’d be beaten mercilessly), growing vegetables next to their huts, repairing straw roofs.

Dhiren said that a group of a dozen or fourteen had set out with their ploughs to look for potato cultivations in places as far-flung as Nadia and Murshidabad and Bankura because they couldn’t find enough work locally to feed themselves and their families.

At least they were not migrating to cities. I had seen for myself how the migrant workers were slowly extinguished, crushed to death by the jaws of the city; working, yes, but in such jobs that we would have to find a word other than ‘life’ for what they had. Very few of them got lucky and found a better life.

Madan-da would be one such fortunate one. Ma and Thakuma were not exactly forthcoming or clear with details about Madan-da’s life before he came to us, and I had never asked Madan-da myself, but from what I could piece together, he was from a tiny village in a particularly impoverished district in Orissa. The same story: drought, famine, death, failure of crops year after year, no hope, nothing. The lucky ones were those who escaped this, found a better kind of job in a city, sent money home, moved their families into a brick house. In that scheme of things, Madan-da had been the luckiest; or, if you prefer, he sat right on top of the ladder of people who sought a livelihood in cities.

But nine out of ten of those leaving their villages in the hope of making a better life for themselves faced exactly the opposite fate. After having lived in Majgeria for a while, I was no longer sure if migrating to urban areas was such a terrible thing.

The tufty fronds of the grain-heads had begun to show. We were being steam-cooked in the humid heat of late September.

The weaver-birds were beginning their plunder again. Harvest soon. This time I hoped to be less of an embarrassment to myself and to others.

It’s been a year since I left home. You are a constant presence in me, so I won’t ask after you — it feels like I’m talking to you inside my head all the time — but I also think of Ma, Sona and Kalyani. I dreamed of Ma the other night. In the dream I was famished, craving food, and she was serving me dinner, but when I looked down at the plate and the bowls I found only ashes, heaps of black, burnt scraps. I looked at her with confusion and I saw her laughing, as if in contempt. I was seized by a great anger then, my heart was hammering away, and I began to shout at her, and the more I shouted, the more defiantly amused and uncaring she became. She was laughing at me. I wanted to be violent, to do some harm to her. . and then the mad thumping in my chest woke me up. I could hear the beats in the first sweaty moments of wakefulness. Above that thudding rose the billows of my anger still. And then shame, deep shame and confusion at the content of such a stealthy revelation: did I really harbour such resentment towards someone who loved me so vastly and unconditionally?