Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

‘Don’t go near the guava tree after dark. You see those big branches’ — here he pointed out the limbs of the tree — ‘those are actually the legs of the she-ghost who lives there. At night the branches move in the wind, but they are really her legs and hands that are moving, beckoning naughty children, so that she can wring their necks and drink their blood.’

The children’s eyes widened with terror. Chhaya was too scared to cry out. They huddled closer and avoided the garden after dark. They sat at the windows at the back of the house and willed themselves to see the she-ghost’s dangling limbs. Charubala’s wish that the children stayed indoors after nightfall was effected in one neat stroke.

At other times Madan got carried away by the momentum of his tales. One autumn afternoon, when the six-year-old Chhaya was picking shiuli flowers fallen on the grass to use the saffron stalks to dye the clothes of her dolls, Madan said, ‘Don’t pick those flowers. Don’t you know why the plant sheds them? L-o-n-g before you were born, a little girl used to live in this house. When she was six she died of the pox. Her family buried her in the garden and planted the shiuli on her grave. In autumn, which was when she died, the flowers are shed on her grave as an offering.’

For a few minutes Chhaya remained transfixed. Then her lips quivered, her chin wobbled; a bout of weeping followed. Madan, who always brought a bag full of toys for the children when he returned from the annual visit to his village — tin whistles; little figurines made out of sal-leaves, fragile and ephemeral in the hands of the children; apple-seed necklaces; gaudy plastic objects such as toy maces, rattles, dolls — came back with extra toys for Chhaya later that month: a pair of clay dolls, Radha and Krishna, with their features and clothes and ornaments painted on them in garish colours; a bheesti with eyes drawn in black ink and lips in the deepest shade of red.

Imitating their parents, Adi, Priyo, Bhola and Chhaya had all begun by calling Madan by his first name, but Charubala had firmly seen to it that they always addressed him as Madan-da. She never ceased telling her neighbours, ‘Our Madan is part of the family’ or ‘He is like our eldest son.’ But despite all this apparent oneness between servant and master’s children, an invisible membrane separating the two worlds never got breached. It was as if a supra-surveillant intelligence, invisible itself but ordering all and keeping everything within the design of things, which was meant to remain unchanging, ever so, was ceaselessly invigilating a flexible barrier that could be moved only so far and no further. Without ever being instructed on what he should call his master and mistress’s children, Madan fell to addressing the boys as ‘Bor’-da’, ‘Mej’-da’, ‘Shej’-da’ and Chhaya as ‘Didi-moni’ from their infancy, breaking a lesser law, of chronology and seniority, in order to honour a superior, overarching one of social hierarchy. While singing to them, when they were still babies, a traditional children’s rhyme, ‘Come, come, o long-tailed bird / Come and play with —’, in that blank space where he should have inserted the name of the child he was singing to or distracting, Madan invariably inserted the relational status.

And this man now, his son older than he, the father, was when he came to work for the Ghoshes and stayed on for a period longer than any of her offspring, except Adi, has been part of Charubala’s life, has brought himself to ask her for a favour, possibly for the first time.

She smiled and said, ‘But there are no factories or mills in the city itself. It’ll have to be in a town elsewhere. Then we’ve lost two or three factories to East Pakistan recently. . On top of that, there is this wave of refugees swamping us. All of them want jobs in the city. From what I hear from your baba and Adi and others, there are really no jobs to be had. But let me ask. Will a small town do? The Calcutta jobs are all in offices. . he’ll have to be a peon somewhere.’

‘Yes, Ma, small town will do very well. It’s just that the villages in our place. . there’s nothing there. If you don’t have land to farm, then the prospects are really nothing.’

‘All right, I’ll talk to your baba and let you know.’

She was true to her word. Prafullanath put the matter to Adi and Priyo.

‘Well, there’s always the need for another pair of hands in a mill,’ Priyo said.

‘We can find him something in Bali,’ said Adi.

‘Yes, that’s what I was thinking,’ said their father. The mill at Bali was their biggest possession. In a depressed post-war market, the Ghoshes had not done too badly. From Prafullanath’s export-market contacts they had picked up rumours of an imminent shortage of grey board and had hoarded it. Then, through the war years, they had released it very cautiously — they did not want the King’s government to requisition their entire production and their private properties too — but with the condition that for every unit of grey board purchased, a stipulated number of units of paper would also have to be bought. This paper was supplied, of course, by the Ghoshes’ mill at Memari. So when the recession of ’46 began the Ghoshes were better placed than most. While the mills at Ilam Bazar and Nalhati continued to lie shut, the loss of Meherpur and Chalna in ’47 was at least offset.

‘Let Dulal work in Bali for a while. We’re stepping up production there, so we’ll need to hire more workers. Depending on how he does, he could keep an eye on the labour situation for us,’ Prafullanath said. ‘I trust you know what I’m trying to say.’

‘Yes, he could be our inside man, as long as no one else finds out how he came by the job,’ Priyo said. ‘We’ll have to ask him to keep his mouth shut.’

‘All right, it’s agreed then. Madan will be happy,’ Prafullanath said.

So it was that Dulal, Madan’s sixteen-year-old son, joined the Ghoshes’ paper mill at Bali as one of the several labourers who worked ‘on the floor’, drawing water to feed the pulping pits, stirring the vats, laying out the pulp in frames. Later, because he had the advantage of literacy and numeracy over most of the other workmen at his level, he was put in charge of the electrical equipment. In two years he had moved up to the rank of unofficial head of the workforce of 250 that kept the mill operating, then, in another year, to de facto manager of the Bali outfit; still under a formal manager, appointed by Priyo on one of his visits to oversee the company’s production units. It was becoming a matter of tacit knowledge that Dulal was the man who, at twenty, understood every nut and every bolt of the actual work done at a paper-manufacturing factory.

In the thirty years since Prafullanath had set up Charu Paper, a kind of moderate success had come his way, although he would have been the last person to see it like this. Caught in the daily battle of making his two factories cleave as closely as possible to their maximum yields, he had only just let the niggle of continuing to produce on average 180–200 TPD, instead of the perfect 250, become consciously negligible. Still, it was a 45–60 per cent increase on what he had started out with; not to be sniffed at, although it had taken the best part of seventeen years to get to this point. In moments of self-doubt and anxiety, however, the debit column seemed to be endless. Two factories, albeit fallow, lost to East Pakistan, the money written off. Two more factories yet to be repaired, refitted and reopened; the investment required was too huge to contemplate. The fluctuating nature of the output at Memari and Bali, never a steady average of 200 TPD every year: issues of quality control, a late delivery of some chemical, a roller malfunction, a mistake with the metered amount of lacquer entering the Fourdrinier machine, minor accidents with careless and unskilled labourers who didn’t understand the basic functioning of electrical equipment. . the list was dizzyingly proliferating. After all these years Prafullanath was still occasionally thrown by an error he hadn’t encountered before. At least the appointment of Dulal could theoretically troubleshoot some of those minor problems that had such a disproportionate effect on production.