Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

In the beginning brown sugar offered him the cushioniest, velvetiest ocean of support; instant relief from the multiplying anxieties of his life in the form of oblivion. And there were so many. He had felt lost in a labyrinth of those jagged edges of reality — a missing brother; a father sinking into alcoholic inertia every day; a mother who had checked out of life; escalating squabbling between his aunt and his grandmother. Then there was the diminishment of the family’s source of prosperity (now firmly erstwhile): the destruction of Charu Paper in slow degrees, for which his grandfather and his father and uncles blamed each other. He had known only this falling-off, an inexorable downward slide, each year of his advancing life measured by shrinkage, by more bitterness amongst the family members, more economising, more tension.

Bappa-da had once explained Marx to him. ‘All superstructures, including the family, rest on the base of one thing, and one thing only — economics. The family is the first and the primary unit of oppression and exploitation. Freud too agrees with this, although his take on it is different. From what you’ve told me about what’s going on in your home, we have living proof of Marx’s theories. You take away economic security and the whole pack of cards collapses. Everyone is at each other’s throats. All these vaunted bourgeois values that prop up society — love, duty, honour, respect — all rest on power-relations lubricated by economics. They are the gloss people put on the naked truth: self-interest. Hypocrites, the lot of them, fucking hypocrites! Here, have a toke, you’ll feel better.’

And he did. But, of late, that ocean of comfort had shrunk from a sea to a river to a shallow brook; a stream of piss seemed not so unlikely in the near future. The only way back to keeping afloat in that ocean he had experienced in the beginning was through more and more frequent hits. So here he is, slumped on the bathroom floor, his back against the wall opposite the tap. His temporary, small ocean. Not brown sugar, not only that, but disappointing sugar, betraying sugar.

He has no idea how long the sound has been going, but it hauls him up to the shore ultimately, a dull banging first, then, quickly, not so dull; someone is hammering on the bathroom door. Is he imagining it? His eyes close again and there is such a forceful tug away from where he has been beached back to the shallows. But the banging will not go away.

Now he hears a vocal accompaniment too. It is his father, he identifies eventually, shouting outside the bathroom, ‘Open the door! Open up immediately!’

There are several stages beyond exhaustion, beyond complete, meltdown fatigue, for which there are no words. Or at least not any known to Adinath. Contrary to the images and vocabulary of dullness and extinguishing, he feels it as a malignant incandescence. The click inside that whisky brings him, the click that presages the eventual falling into a feather bed, has become elusive; it is deferred further and further to a shifting point that Adinath fears he will not reach any longer. The journey to that click has become fearsome because of the uncertainty in ever reaching that destination.

He can even pinpoint the turning point in that journey: ever since Superintendent Dhar from Bhabanipur police station had informed him that they had evidence Supratik was a Naxalite, and that he was somewhere in Medinipur, engaged in terrorism — that was the word the Superintendent had used, ‘terrorism’, that and ‘extremist’ — and things were going to move outside the Superintendent’s control soon.

‘I shall no longer be able to. . how should I put it. . keep an eye on him, Ghosh-babu,’ SP Dhar had said, exuding a novel mixture of power, arrogance and ingratiation. ‘You can see how tottering the United Front government is. The last one survived less than a year. God knows who’s going to come after Ajay-babu. He’s back again after President’s Rule, but for how long, do you think? The communists are the ones pulling all the strings now. And in power. . What I’m saying is this: it’s going to be difficult to. . to. . er. . shield your son. Playing with fireworks on College Street, shouting slogans, that’s one thing, but going on a killing spree, taking out policemen and landlords in the villages. . well, that’s a big boy’s game, wouldn’t you agree? A completely different thing.

‘And we, the police, seem to be the targets in the city too. Not a day passes when there isn’t a bomb thrown at us by these good middle-class, fish-and-rice-fed boys who have turned terrorist,’ he had said with a different tone to his voice, as if through clenched teeth. ‘We won’t tolerate this state of affairs for too long. Something’s got to give, and give soon.’

Over the years, the Ghoshes had tried to cultivate and maintain a good relationship with the police; gifts, not all nominal or token, sweeteners, things to keep them happy and on their side. It was Prafullanath’s old advice: ‘It is important to be on good terms with them, because you don’t know when they’re going to come in handy. They say, “Eighteen sores when touched by a tiger, but fifty-eight if by the police.” Don’t forget that.’ They started with their local police station and made their way up to Lalbazar and the CID. At no time had that piece of wisdom seemed more pertinent than in the last few years. What would they have done without friendly policemen in the first gherao at their factory? One manager, Ashoke Ganguly at Bali, had had to leave. It was only the arrival of the police that had broken the gherao and saved Ashoke-babu’s life.

Now SP Dhar, a significant portion of his oily jowls and distended belly caused by the Ghoshes’ contribution to them, had told Adinath — and there was no reason to doubt his words — that his eldest son, the scion of the family, was a Naxalite. Or had he been asking for his palm to be crossed with more silver? The policeman had tiny eyes, the eyes of a hippopotamus, eyes that looked minuscule in the animal’s leaking-out-of-its-frame build. They were eyes that even his own shadow could not trust.

The tricky business had been to keep the news from the women and children in the house. Priyo could be trusted to keep it to himself, but Bhola was the loose cannon. No information was safe with him. What Adi could count on was the power of denial: the word ‘Naxalite’ was like leprosy; it turned you into an untouchable instantly; no one would want to come anywhere near it.

The whisky has begun to give him sour eructations. It burns slightly as it goes down and sits, tingling, somewhere behind his sternum. A Naxalite son. There is no recovery from that. The shame. . they will have to move from Bhabanipur to a place where no one knows them, where rumours and whispers cannot reach their new neighbours. It feels like he is standing at the edge of an ocean and must swim across, beyond the horizon, to the other side that cannot be seen.

How can he bring himself to tell his parents of SP Dhar’s visit? The last time Adi had to confront his father with something unpalatable, it had all blown up in Adi’s face.

Adi will never forget the evening, just under a year ago, when everyone had heard his frail father berating him viciously after the closure of Basanta, the spin-off publishing house that Bhola, useless as the finance director of Charu Paper, the parent company, had been entrusted to look after.

‘It took me twenty-five years to build, twenty-five years of every drop of my blood and sweat to set this up, and from the moment you joined the company you let things slide. I should’ve known better. I should’ve trusted my instinct that you were useless, totally worthless. Not an ounce of business nous, not a whit of interest. This was all written on my forehead.’