Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

Two things with the power to scrunch Prafullanath’s plans into a shapeless paper bag had not occurred to his myopic mind. First, there was a thriving market in second-hand parts and units for existing technology — they did the job — so importing the latest machines at such cost seemed criminally profligate. Second, the well-established paper manufacturers in the country — the competition, that is — had played the game with older machines for so long that there appeared to be no clear advantage to what Prafullanath was setting out to do. The projected benefits column alone was a staggering piece of wishful thinking, on a par with fairytales and children’s stories. In it, Prafullanath had fantasised that a loan of the size they had taken out could be repaid in seven years.

Seven! Adi had gaped at the number; it wouldn’t be possible to dent appreciably the compound interest alone in that time. The returns should have been realistically projected so far into the future that they wouldn’t begin to break even in Baba’s lifetime, perhaps not even in his and Priyo’s. Besides, Charu Paper was too small, almost a cottage industry, to have the capacity or the capability to manufacture replacement sections for those machines. Who was going to do it? Prajwal Sarkar was a man of the past; manufacturing parts belonging to machines he had dealt with for three decades was an activity that belonged to the backward past. How could he bring that same inventiveness to the latest technology from Germany and England, to the objects of the future, in what he affectionately called his ‘machine kitchen’?

Adi and Priyo on their own would have been unable to parse the situation in its full complexity, but in a year when their only income was from the Bali factory, they were compelled to sit down at separate meetings with Samik Mitra, the head of the eastern region of the State Bank of India, and Barun Chatterjee, his counterpart at United Bank. It was only when the directors of the bank gradually elucidated the details of the structure and the fine print on the loans that the sky fell on the brothers’ heads: Prafullanath had offered up Bali as collateral, concentrating risk on one factory. It became ever more imperative that Bali shouldn’t fall behind, otherwise the Ghoshes would be unable to honour their debts. Four years into living with this dangling terror, the sword fell on their heads: Bali closed down.

This is how it all ends, Adi thinks; a slow erosion, beginning with lethargy, then. . then what? Nothing except the hoeing of the same row by a yoked man over and over again, until the attrition of days eats into you and you are just a bit of chaff, obedient to the wind. He doubts even the wind will be able to lift him off. A scrap of elementary physics flits in and out of his head — what if the force of gravity brought about by his inertia is so great that the force of the wind is unable to lift him? One weighty husk, that. The bladder presses. His mouth is sweet-sour-furry with the whisky. From Johnnie Walker Black Label to Diplomat; what a fall. With unionisation going the way it was, and the communists flexing their muscles and grabbing key portfolios in the state government, things had become so bad that they had had to close down the Bali factory indefinitely. It had produced, at its peak functioning capacity, before all the troubles hit, 125 TPD and had formed three-fifths of the Ghoshes’ business. If it didn’t start functioning soon, the last one standing, at Memari, would have to be sold to pay off the debts. Then fragments from the other bit of arithmetic, still elementary, that has built a permanent residence in his head (he can almost feel it, as a tumour): a mill with a production capacity of 100 tonnes of paper a day costs eighteen crore rupees, give or take, to set up; desirable annual production capacity of a mill if it is not to go under = 30,000 tonnes; at the current rate of government tax on paper, which is 35 per cent, plus the freeze on the retention price of paper since 1962, while the government allowed the increase of prices of vital items such as iron, coal, cement, etc., this means that for every 300 working days a year (with closures, strikes, holidays, walk-outs, union activity all factored in, in the conservative remainder of sixty-five days), the factory would have to produce. . Other variables present themselves now — the retail price of paper produced by the said factory, the interest on the bank loan for setting up the same factory — and increase the pressure, oddly enough, not in his head but inside his bladder.

At this point Adinath topples over into superstitious territory: if he can solve the equations mentally, it will signify that he will be saved, that the Ghoshes will not be ruined; if he cannot do it before he has to go to the toilet, well. . defeat. That is the sign he signifies for himself. The bet taken, something else instantly breaches his attentiveness to the self-imposed arithmetic problem. A wave ripples through his insides. It is caused by a sudden image of Supratik flashing through his synapses: a little boy, concern and curiosity battling to take control of his face, looking up at him, asking, ‘But what if the orange pip I’ve just swallowed grows into a tree inside me? Will I die?’ At that remembered word — he will not repeat it to himself — something breaks; his mouth contorts and he feels a heat in his eyes. Only by concentrating on his urgent need to piss does he return himself to some semblance of control. And yet, the exhaustion will not let him get up to go to the toilet.

By the time he gets there he has already let out a small dribble. He contracts all his pelvic-floor muscles; the effort could be defeated in a breath. He pushes the bathroom door; it is locked.

Swapan Adhikari recalls, with great deliberation, every detail of the events over the last month, to savour them almost, before he sits down to write the letter to his friend Ayan Basu.

It was an ordinary day in school: the usual boredom, the usual predictability. He was introducing cosine curves to Class Seven. Half the class was numb with boredom, some switched-off, some insulated by stupidity from what he was trying to teach. The borderline delinquents, sitting right at the back of the class, had begun to show signs of their usual restlessness. Two of them, sitting on the same bench, were nearly choking with the effort of suppressing their giggles. He was certain they were cracking up over dirty pictures that one of them was drawing. Not for the first time an intense sense of waste gripped him briefly and then let him go, but not before it had managed to make him feel reduced.

He had been one of the prize pupils in Ashish Roy’s stable at Presidency, all set to go to ISI, at the very least, for a PhD in number theory, maybe even Cambridge or MIT or Stanford. . but his father’s untimely death had meant that he, as the eldest son, had to shelve all those lofty ambitions instantly and find a job to support his mother, and his two younger brothers and one sister, all three of whom were at school. It had been impossible to find a job for which he was not overqualified; shocking, a starred first-class Mathematics (Hons) degree from Presidency and no employment after seventeen months of application and job searches. Without his friend Samiran’s help this humiliating position of mathematics teacher at St Lawrence — a school — would also have been a mirage.

‘Take it,’ Samiran had advised. ‘In this current climate, how are you going to hold out for what you call a “proper job”? Did I tell you that last week I got an interview letter from the Geological Survey of India? They were interviewing applicants for the post of assistant field researcher. One post, a single one. Guess how many applicants? Four hundred. I’m not joking. They were giving two minutes to each candidate. Eight hundred minutes, so over thirteen hours. Which meant that they were not going to be done in one day: the babus doing the interview needed their breaks, of course, tea break and snack break and lunch break. There were candidates from parts of West Bengal you have never heard of. You think they were going to give the job based on those two-minute interviews? They had picked the person beforehand, someone’s nephew or son; this was just a show. And you’re still chasing a “proper job”, you crazy fool.’