Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

And yet Prafullanath couldn’t cavil with the real benefits that he and his family had cumulatively begun to enjoy: three cars, more money to spend on household expenses, servants to take care of the running of such a big house and the needs of the people who lived in it, frequent purchases of gold jewellery, a growing portfolio of land, swelling savings accounts and fixed deposits and life insurances. They were comfortable. Prafullanath hadn’t let the spectre of daily economies and cutting corners, always such a threat, ever materialise. Now that the domestic front had been secured, it was time to turn his attention to the consolidation that had long been his dream. He had laid a strong foundation and brought in his sons to the business. Now it was up to this family team to work together. What were they going to do with the profits?

While Adi, conservative to the core, asked his father to hold on to his gains, Prafullanath was all for using them to modernise the factory at Memari. ‘Money begets money,’ he had always maintained. ‘If you can’t make it work to breed, then you’ll end up consuming it. We can double the TPD of Memari with new, imported machines. Triple it, even.’

‘I think it may be best to sit on our war chest a bit longer,’ Adi suggested. ‘What’s the harm? The interest will not be inconsiderable. What if trying to step up production turns out to be the wrong strategy?’

Prafullanath said to his son, ‘Listen, I hear Nehru is going to announce the first five-year-plan next year. Where our sector is going to be in the scheme of things is anybody’s guess. I would imagine not very high up. Now is the time to modernise. There will be a whole new set of regulations to deal with then, a new regime of subsidies and taxation and duties. I have a feeling it’s not going to be rosy at all. Besides, we know all the middlemen in these deals, we know what they want, they know how reliable we are in keeping them happy, we know how reliable they are in expediting matters — why not take advantage of this comfortable set-up? Who knows when it’ll all be gone?’

‘All right then,’ Adi conceded. ‘But why not think of other interests? Not big ones, such as mines and minerals or the heavy industries — these would be state-owned, in any case — but what about something related to the line we’re already in, like publishing?’

‘Publishing?’ Prafullanath and Priyo asked in unison.

‘Yes, publishing. Why don’t we start a press? Under these five-year-plans education will emerge as an important sector, don’t you think? We already have a kind of “in”, being paper men.’

Prafullanath and Priyo absorbed the new idea in silence. A thought was forming in Priyo’s mind.

‘Yaaaairs,’ said Prafullanath slowly, mulling it over. ‘Not a bad idea, not bad at all.’

Priyo played his card tentatively. ‘Actually a good idea, I think. We solve two issues together — lateral expansion and. . and Bhola. He can look after the publishing house. I think it would be more his kind of thing than straightforward business.’

At the mention of Bhola’s name a fidgety embarrassment descended on the three. He remained the strand of hair that did not fall in to lie down with the rest, when oil and water and comb were rigorously applied. There was the periodic turning-on of the great fountain of words and fabulism, then there was that undimmable, slightly simple smile, the ever-present suggestion of imminent drool at the corners of his mouth, the spiky hair, the infinitesimally awry movements and physical awkwardness — they all added up to a person who gave the impression that he had not received enough nourishment in his mother’s womb and had come out semi-formed. And yet there was nothing medically or physically wrong with him, only a kind of off-centredness and a touch of the holy fool. All the Bengali terms used for him — ‘grinning idiot’, ‘not quite there’, ‘otherworldly’, ‘like Shiva’ (alluding, of course, to the god’s playfully child-like aspect) — were at once pejorative and not inaccurate. He was twenty-four and, now that Priyo was married, Prafullanath and Charubala would have to start thinking of finding a wife for him, but who was going to marry a simpleton? Prafullanath would never admit this, but Charubala knew that he looked upon his third son as a kind of personal failure, much in the way a poet knew, in the innermost cloister of his soul, that one poem in his collection did not quite deserve to be made public through the medium of print; it was a shame felt at his deficiency in the making, not at his son’s apparent defect.

Bhola, on the other hand, seemed oblivious to how he was perceived. A certain percentage of the shares of Charu Paper was in his name, but he did not bother about it, nor was exercised about the fact that, unlike Adi and Priyo, he did not have a fancy designation to go with his decidedly unfancy job in the family firm, a mere bookkeeper, a director only in name, not in practice. It could be said of him that while others chased the mirage of happiness, he was happy with being content. And it appeared this was not something that he had arrived at after strenuous meditation or struggle, or application of scrupulous moral principles; it was an ease and carelessness he had been born with. At times Charubala thought that it was Bhola’s armour against the world; if it was, it had not been donned consciously. But there he was — a creature who moved a few inches above the ground on which everyone else walked.

But this very unworldliness proved an impediment to the plans Prafullanath had for Charu Paper and the ancillary companies he hoped his sons were going to own and manage. Bhola was crippled by a blind trust in people. He smiled too much, too often, and told them things that should never have left the office. He worked well enough when he was set a task, but had no initiative and, worse, no capacity for thinking creatively about business. Initially Prafullanath had thought that Bhola could look after the company accounts and be guided by him and his older brothers in the more creative aspects of company accounting, but very quickly he realised that even that called for sharp thinking, the capacity for which Bhola lacked.

Last year Adi had discovered a one-lakh-sized hole in the company accounts. When he had asked Bhola, his brother had pretended not to know anything about it. After a day or two of ferreting, the truth had been revealed: Bhola had simply forgotten, in the beginning, to chase up invoices and then this matter of overlooking had become active avoidance, settling ultimately into a gelid lack of interest. When his initial reminders to the agents about outstanding payments were met with the usual ‘Yes-yes, we’ll pay you tomorrow’ and ‘Of course, next week, definitely’ and ‘The cheques just need signing’, the deferrals fitted in like cogs to the grooves of Bhola’s laziness, his endless capacity to put off until tomorrow what could effortlessly be done today. The agents, sensing a weak spot, delayed payments to see how much they could get away with; as it turned out, a lot. The three agents in question worked out that they could probably get their consignments of paper for free, certainly in the short term. In several instances, when invoicing, Bhola actually forgot how much was owed by whom and when.

Prafullanath had tried to console himself with the thought that a weak son did not seriously jeopardise his grand plans because he had three others; Bhola needed an eye kept on him, that was all. Now he was being presented with a graceful solution, a foolproof get-out clause.

He was instantly imagining complex scenarios: a publishing house kept deliberately small — small outlay, small educational books, small profits — with Bhola as its head. . But, wait, if it was an educational-books publisher, it would be taxed at a different rate, lower than the tax on paper, so a simple bit of transfer-pricing could shift most of the profits from Charu Paper onto the books of the publishing house, which would mean losing much less profit to tax. Or if the publishing house could be shown to be perpetually making a loss, which wouldn’t be difficult to do, since Bhola was going to make sure that was going to be the case. . he had it. It was going to be easy to effect; not so his bigger dream of modernising the plant at Memari.