Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

And what news of Sona? Yes, he does look like Chhoto-kaka, but that’s where the similarity ends. How detached he is from everything! Occasionally I used to think that there was something not quite right with him, but most of the time I was envious. That resilience to the outside world, that capacity of not being damaged, even lightly scratched, by it — what wouldn’t I give to be blessed with that? Although you’ve often complained that I am like that, indifferent to the world, hard, stony. Did you mean that seriously? You know that I’m not. Not to you.

We were in the middle of harvest when Dhiren informed us that Bipul’s brother, Shankar Soren, whom we had assumed was slightly better off than Bipul because he had a tiny plot, had had to give up his entire harvest to Senapati Nayek, a small landlord who owns about twenty-five to thirty bighas.

This was the story. There was a drought in ’65, then a mini-famine in ’66, and Shankar’s plot lay empty for those two years. Then his wife fell ill and he had to borrow money from Senapati — it was an informal side-business that most landlords had, to earn a little extra something, or to manoeuvre themselves into ever more powerful, ever more advantageous positions — for buying food and for his wife’s treatment. Senapati, instead of asking Shankar to mortgage his little piece of land, which was the usual practice, gave him 400 rupees; Shankar would have to pay him back nearly 600 rupees by the end of the year. It was impossible for Shankar to do this because his plot had produced nothing for two years running. If he could grow something there and sell it (instead of consuming it, as he normally did), he thought, perhaps he could pay some of the loan back, so he borrowed more money from Senapati to buy a bag of seeds to sow in his plot. The repayment of this loan was to be the amount of paddy cultivated that would theoretically pay off the loan and the interest, but Senapati had done something wilier than that straightforwardly exploitative arithmetic. He bought up Shankar’s harvest at half the market rate, thus alienating the poor man of his entire produce while giving him the illusion that he was repaying the whole sum he had borrowed.

Senapati then reminded him that there was still the interest on the loan of seed-grains to be serviced; his harvest had only paid off part of the loan, not to mention the principal, plus the accruing interest on the previous loan for food and medical bills for his wife’s illness. .

This year Shankar woke up to the fact that while the interest on the loans, both money and seed, would go on increasing, his crop yield and his labour were both finite and would never be enough to clear his debts. He would be nibbling away at it for his whole life, then one day he would die, the size of the debt greater after a lifetime of trying to bring it down to zero and free himself.

The realisation led him to vent his anger and frustration on the nearest person — his wife. He beat her regularly, blaming her and her illness for landing him in this situation, with this mountain of debt on his shoulders, until things got out of hand and Shankar’s wife threw herself into the well in the Muslim neighbourhood and killed herself.

The story was common and universal. The Bengali novel had played its part in making it a matter of common and universal knowledge to the literate middle classes. So no surprises there. But the twist appeared at this point.

Dhiren said — A dry-as-stick figure, this Shankar, you know. He looks like a shrivelled broom. You realise he doesn’t get enough to eat the moment you set eyes on him. Do you know what I did when I heard the story, when I saw that all the grain he was standing in, literally, was not going to feed him, or get him money, and the wages from his work too were not going to come to him, but be deducted by Senapati, do you know what I did?

Even through our exhaustion the tale had filtered through, I didn’t quite know why: there was something in the way the story had been told, in the sixth sense we had that Dhiren was withholding something that he would spring on us towards the end. . We were sitting up, quiet as children being told a ghost-story, almost unable to breathe, with Dhiren asking repeatedly — Do you know what I did?

He answered himself — I moved close to Shankar; there were so many people around, I moved close to him, brought my mouth near his ear and whispered: What if we finish off this Senapati man?

We were still holding our breath.

— It took a long time to get the real meaning of this through to Shankar. He began by saying: If I could, I’d tear out his windpipe. . But he said this as part of the twist-and-turn of conversation, responding in kind to what he thought was just a way of speaking. .

I couldn’t bear it any longer. I leaped up and asked — What next? What next?

— I said to him: We can tear out his windpipe, truly truly, it can be arranged. Shankar then started to put two and two together and asked: You are the men from the city who our people have been talking to? Saying that we can have our land back? Not be slaves any more? Eat two full-stomach meals every day? So I said yes, and I told him that we were going to plan this seriously, he needn’t fear, no one would know. .

SURANJAN SLUMPS SLOWLY sideways like a timber pillar showing the first gentle sign of collapse. His chin almost touches his chest. The crumpled rectangle of the silver foil, blackened now, from the Wills Filter packet, the short straw made out of rolled-up card, the match burned to a long black curl with a tiny pale end, a minute ago all bound to him in such a fierce concentration of unison, now fall from his loosened hold; the cohering force keeping human and object together has been suddenly dissipated. His eyes too have shut. The brown sugar will keep him in this trance for a good couple of hours, but this calibration of time means nothing to him in this state; it could be two minutes or two years. In the beginning he would have marvelled at identifying the perfect fit between the act and the term, ‘chasing’; at how the tiny heap of brown powder placed on the flattened-out piece of foil and heated from below with a match became a smoking trickle of liquid running down the length of the silver or gold paper and how you had to ‘chase’ the smoke down the course of that miniature rivulet on its silver lawn; he would have wondered with awe at the inherent poetry of heroin, at the deep wisdom of those who were the drug’s acolytes and servers.

But those days of child-like wonder are behind him now. The poetry has been parsed, the mythologising has become a bit passé; they had been shiny sweeties to lure the child in. Now he has come of age. The first few times he had taken smack, all in the company of Bappa-da and his friends, he had been sick; not the racked-with-convulsions kind of vomiting, but a really easy sort, as easy and natural as breathing or seeing or hearing; just lean over sideways and throw up, then let the opiates suck you into their vortex. He had also felt his face itch agonisingly.

‘It’s the impurities in the smack,’ Bappa-da had said. ‘Don’t worry, it’ll go soon. Soon you won’t feel anything but perfect, unending bliss.’

He had been right, certainly about the ‘perfect’, though not the ‘unending’. The bliss is becoming increasingly mortal, its life-expectancy inside him decreasing with a frightening exponentiality. Time is such an assassin. How fugitive all the pleasures of the world are; so much to hold on to, so much transience, he had begun to think a while ago, but had never managed to get to the end of that philosophising. That was the other thing about smack — it did not allow you to finish things. Everything kept hanging, his days and hours and thoughts all an agglomeration of loose ends like an amateurish piece of knitting unravelling.