Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

We whispered about the possibilities that could throw us off-course. What if Senapati did not return to the village, but went off somewhere else? What if we lost him in the dark? Or on the long walk back? What if he realised he was being shadowed? What if he was accompanied all the way to the village, all the way to his home? We drove ourselves mad with the chatter of doubts and possibilities.

But luck or chance — same thing — dealt us one good hand after another. First, Senapati left early. He didn’t seem drunk: he hadn’t forgotten the set of bow-and-arrows he had bought for his children or the other assorted things that we had noticed throughout the day: glass bangles, a big aluminium pot, paper bags of snacks, a disc of solid molasses. He would normally have brought a servant along to carry everything, but he appeared to be on his own. Had he sent for a cart or a rickshaw?

I was now certain that we would lose him on the way back, or be discovered ourselves. As we walked over aals and through fields, I noticed that we were not the only people headed towards Majgeria. It was impossible to determine how many, but I knew there was a group of four between us and Senapati, and a few people behind us. There might well have been several ahead of Senapati too. The cold began to bite in the open country through which we made our way. What if Senapati recognised friends and fell in with them? Our heads and most of our faces were covered with chadors. I found myself thinking random thoughts, skittering about from one worry to another.

Then luck handed us our next two breaks, one after the other. Samir and I noticed that everyone else appeared to have peeled off somewhere, absorbed by the dark. Maybe they were somewhere out there, but we could neither see nor hear any of them. We could not make out Senapati, either. He too had disappeared into the night. My big fear was that if we tailed him too closely he might turn round and notice us or want to talk to us, since it would be apparent to him that we were all headed for Majgeria together and he would want to be friendly and would want to know where we were going and whom we knew and what we did. . he would probably recognise one of us. But the flip-side of maintaining a safe distance was losing sight of him. I felt I had made one error after another and I was thinking that the whole plan should be aborted, and how best to get the message to Dhiren, waiting back at the village with Shankar for our arrival, when the second piece of good luck presented itself: the unmistakable sound of a man pissing and humming to himself.

If that was Senapati, we were still on track. Yes, it was. My ears picked out the sound of objects being handled — all the stuff that he had bought at the fair and had had to set down to relieve himself. Not a minute passed after I thought this before I negated it: it could be anyone. I knew Samir was even jumpier than I was because he hadn’t had a single bidi in this endless walk in the dark.

We were close to the bat tree, near what everybody thought of as the mouth of the village — it was here that a path forked, the left one going to the lower-caste, poorer section of the hamlet, the right to the landlords’ and upper-caste neighbourhoods. I counted fifty paces, then ten more, then another ten — he was in front of us, there was no mistaking that now — then I nudged Samir and we broke into the song that one of our comrades back in Calcutta had devised out of the story, in The Little Red Book, of the foolish old man who tried to remove mountains. This was our signal to Dhiren and Shankar.

We were loud, as we had agreed to be, and the words — Boka buro, o you foolish old man / What a cretin you are! / With two mountains in your way / How are you going to go far? — rang out clean and clear in the quiet, cold night. Senapati wheeled round and took a step or two towards us, calling out — Who is it?

Then we were lifted up by the wave I had always thought was the shape of this kind of event and it happened very quickly, all the actions fitting into a portion of time that had itself become compressed into a hair-thin sheet. Senapati turned and started to walk towards us. He could not make us out in the dark. Samir handed me his chador and stepped further away so that Senapati wouldn’t be able to see his exposed face.

I had only one chance at this. Only one.

I replied to Senapati — No one. No one you know.

I could tell that he was suspicious — it gave off like an odour, or maybe it was my self-consciousness — because he could instantly tell by my accent that I did not belong here. I moved closer and furled Samir’s chador over his head and clamped my hand onto his mouth with all the force in my body and soul and nerves, and whispered in his ear — One little sound from you and you’re finished.

The aluminium pot containing the wheel of winter jaggery, the bow-and-arrows, the paper bags of nuts and sweets, all hit the ground and I sensed more than saw everything spill out. Dhiren and Shankar leaped out from where they had been stationed, in the bushes behind the tree, just beyond the fork in the path. They held a tangi each in their hands. Only their eyes were exposed. I didn’t know who drove the tangi into Senapati’s chest first, but I heard it — felt it more — as a thud with the hint of a crack somewhere in it. It transmitted itself through the mass of Senapati’s body that I was holding so tightly around the mouth and neck. He bucked once, twice, and I had trouble holding onto him. He was trying to lift his legs off the ground to shake me off and ward off his attacker at the same time. Even through the clamp of my hands, an ‘aaak’ sound leaked out; it did not originate in his throat or mouth, it seemed to issue from where the tangi was buried in him.

Then the second tangi — I didn’t know, again, who wielded that one — was lodged in his fat, springy stomach. I was wet with a warm liquid. There was a metallic, peculiar smell that I would only later understand was the smell of blood. I wanted to let him go, but I couldn’t. He seemed cemented to me. I tried to push, but it felt as if I’d forgotten how to execute that basic little thing. The more I tried, the more I grasped him to me. We had become one. Then I physically sensed a slackness in his body. I simply lifted my hand from his mouth and loosened my arm around his neck, and he fell to the ground in a sacky heap. He didn’t move. It was over for him. My knees gave and I too fell down. Dhiren and Sankar were nowhere to be seen.

Samir whispered very close to my ear — Move!

He put his hands under my armpits and tried to get me to stand. I could discern something in the dark, something on the earth. It felt like a long time before I could identify the toy bow-and-arrows Senapati had purchased a few hours ago at the fair.

This was a beginning.

Later, I didn’t know how much later, Samir led me to the pond so that I could wash the blood off my clothes and myself. As I lowered myself into the freezing water, my teeth chattering, my heart beating so fast because of the shock of the cold water that it hurt, Samir recited from memory:

— All men must die, but death can vary in its significance. The ancient Chinese writer Szuma Chien said, ‘Though death befalls all men alike, it may be weightier than Mount Tai or lighter than a feather.’ To die for the people is weightier than Mount Tai, but to work for the fascists and die for the exploiters and oppressors is lighter than a feather.

A half-moon, slipping closer to the horizon, blackened the trees in front of it.

ONCE THE COMPLAINTS began, Charubala found herself facing a flood of them from boys and parents she did not know, had not heard of, did not know where they lived. A bespectacled woman, accompanied by a thin, fair boy who seemed to want to hide behind her, knocked on the door of 22/6 one afternoon and asked to speak to ‘Somu’s mother’. Standing outside the threshold, the lady, clearly belonging to a different order from Charubala in the way she spoke, the kind of words she used, some of which were English, which left in no doubt that she was one of those educated ‘mod’ women that Chhaya spoke about — who otherwise would have had the nerve to defy social rules and call on a stranger? — this intimidating woman very politely but sternly pointed out that her son had been coming home lately covered with bruises and nicks and scratches, and on being asked their cause had reluctantly admitted that an older boy called Somu had been bullying the younger boys, hitting and terrorising them. Charubala, cowed somewhat, hardly took in what she said. So great was her relief after the woman had gone and she had shut the door that the substantives of the complaint were forgotten and the accidentals that remained — something blurry about Somu being a rowdy boy — did not deserve to be made a big deal of, so she neither told her husband nor questioned Somnath; it was hardly an important matter.