Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

His mother had interrupted him, ‘Don’t shout like that, please don’t, your heart, your heart! Go inside now.’

‘What can I do if Bhola ruined the whole publishing venture by backing those unsellable poets and novelists, which was tantamount to standing on a street corner and giving money away?’ Adi bleated. The feeling of emasculation was intolerable: at the age of forty-seven he was being upbraided by his father for that quintessentially childhood thing — the faults of his younger siblings.

‘Giving money away,’ his father mimicked. ‘How old are you? Four? And how old is Bhola? Are you toddlers squabbling over who is taking whose sweeties away? Standing on a street corner and giving money away . . you stupid, ineffective eunuch!’

No one had heard his father like this, not in public.

‘Why are you shouting at me for Bhola’s failure?’ Adi had fought back. ‘He held soirées and adda sessions instead of working and gave money away to people he called “promising young talent”, basically, to anyone who came asking. Do you know how much he has frittered away like this? Do you know?’

A devil had possessed Adi; the streamer of retaliatory rage coming out of his mouth seemed unstoppable. ‘And what gives you the right to talk about eunuchs? You are responsible for driving Charu Paper into the ground. You, you,’ he had accused, stabbing the air, with his finger pointed at his father, with each ‘you’.

Charubala’s attempt to calm matters came out as highly pitched. ‘How dare you?’ she said to Adi. ‘Don’t shout at him, can’t you see he’s ill? Can’t you see he’s shaking? Something terrible will happen now.’

The hysteria had only encouraged Adi: ‘How long will he hide behind his illness? The illness was two, three years ago. We’re cleaning up his ’ — the pronoun spat out, like venom — ‘mess now, the mess he created with his project of modernising the factory at Memari. That was the beginning of our end. And he has the cheek to blame me and Bhola for it. How dare he?’

The new machines for the aged and nearly obsolete units arrived at Kidderpore Docks seventeen months after their order, in 1958: a turbo separator; a huge new drying section to replace the dying dinosaur that was holding everything back at Memari; a new press section that would supposedly create a seamless join between the mould and the Fourdrinier parts; and, finally, the drives arrangements to bind old and new together. They had reached the end with their standard practice of replicating parts for the cylinder-mould machine, and anything else that required replacement, in what they grandly called their ‘Research & Development Wing’, a large, corrugated iron-and-asbestos barn. For ten years, the head of R&D, Prajwal Sarkar, some kind of a wizard of make-do, had visited mills more modern than his own workplace to spy and copy their machines, or had prevailed on the Ghoshes to pay for information from people who worked in these factories. It didn’t take anyone of exceptional business nous to see that this method, while ingenious in the short term, could not be relied upon indefinitely. Prafullanath wanted to upgrade the technology of the smaller mill first and, depending on how things went, eventually turn his attention to the far bigger project of modernising Bali.

Quite apart from the enormous investment needed for this, there was the great labyrinth of regulation to negotiate first. The new foreign-trade laws of the country meant that a licence had to be obtained to import the machines and they could only be imported as prototypes to be used to construct, by imitation, similar models with home technology and home resources. ‘Licence’ was, of course, a euphemism for bribing a chain of employees in the bureaucracy juggernaut set up for issuing these permits. The cost of greasing the requisite number of palms was a not inconsiderable percentage of the expenditure in buying and importing the machines, and businessmen were beginning to get into the practice of factoring this into their informal accounting, for whatever licence it was they wanted, be it the import of foreign technology or sanction to run a transport or liquor or retail business.

But this bribe was a fluid, moving, protean creature: the number of people with their palms open to receive first and facilitate afterwards always increased, so that the figure factored in, even if it was thought to be overestimated, was found to be, in reality, always short. The Ghoshes had begun the conversation about technology in 1950 and then spent six years obtaining a permit to import, despite spending a fortune in bribes at every step during this period.

It had taken over a year to settle on two German machines from Nettlinger-Kilb in Hamburg, and two from W.H. Cottrall in England. The managers of the state-owned banks that the family used had long been friendly with the Ghoshes, but even they baulked at the sums involved in the purchase and shipping. Adi and Priyo had signed off on the relevant papers, but they were soon to find out exactly how the complex and huge loans had been secured. In this, their inattention to detail had allowed Prafullanath to circumvent any theoretical opposition from his sons.

The new machines had the power and design to stay ahead of the competition in the Indian market for the foreseeable future. Or so Prafullanath had said; otherwise, Adi would not have known a thing about it.

Those endless evenings at home over dinner, with their father droning on: ‘You know, this new turbo separator, the drill screen is between 1.8 and 2.8 milimetres. Ours belong to ancient times, we really need to get a new one to deal with all the new impurities. How long are we going to carry on with that relic? What do you say?’

Adi’s eyes had closed with boredom as he clamped down his jaws on a yawn. He had said something cursory, like ‘Yes, you’re right’, or some such.

The notification for the arrival of the imported machines at the docks came through. After more bribing, the machines were released; it took a year between their arrival at Kidderpore Docks and their transportation to Memari. From this point, Adi firmly believed, a particular alignment of planets and heavenly bodies occurred to cast maximal malign influence on the Ghoshes. It began with Prajwal-da informing them that a sectional drive had the wrong gearbox and helical parallel shaft, so the revolution systems of two of the units, instead of being synchronised, were slightly off. Work stalled at Memari for a year while this was fixed. The plant couldn’t carry on using its older machines and continue production, since they had been dismantled to allow the fitting of the new.

The foreign machines had been ordered in 1956, just before the family tragedy, a piece of timing that was to prove crucial in the undoing that followed. Prafullanath’s rapid deterioration in health following the tragedy meant that he was laid up in bed, having survived what the doctor’s called a ‘massive cardiac arrest’, and everyone was under strict orders to protect him from trouble, anxiety and stress. The whole mess was left to Adi and Priyo to sort out, a thing they did not succeed in doing with any degree of competence or even a thin, superficial professionalism.

Prafullanath, his sons discovered, had not done a rigorous, watertight and airtight costing for the upgrade to new technology, and the cost-benefit analysis, or what there was of it, was so far out, in both columns, that their heads reeled. Who would have thought that this had emerged from the head of someone who had been a successful businessman for thirty years? It did not, for example, take into account the substantial amount of money that had to be paid by way of bribes to acquire a permit. More critically, there was no accounting for the interest on the loans during the period of stasis, from the time of ordering to the beginning of enhanced production at Memari, a period of five years; the enhanced production still remained a mirage, having gone up by only 20 TPD. Why had Baba not thought of something as elementary as a risk calculation, assuming a fixed period of servicing the debt while the plant lay idle? How had he arrived at those hugely inflated production figures? Adi and Priyo would keep returning to those questions.