Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

Drifts from the theatre downstairs were still audible: ‘. . don’t think we don’t know. . know it all. . son of a pig. . the whole lot of you will. .’

Supratik felt a guilty thrill at the term of abuse he could recognise, ‘son of a pig’, but also, simultaneously, a tense deflation — were they the target of all these bad words?

In the front room on the first floor Charubala had started shaking.

At last Chhaya spoke, her voice emerging in a croak, ‘We should go to the back of the house.’ She leaped up and called out, ‘Madan-da, Madan-da. Shut all the doors and windows on all the floors right now.’

But the damage had been done. The great, roaring world outside — against that, what match were these transient bits of straw?

— The Baruis haven’t seen your faces, Kanu said, trying to allay our fears. Or his own.

Then Shankar threw the bombshell. He said — Those farmers there tonight, they’re all friends, they won’t blab.

— How do you know? I asked, beginning to suspect something.

— We told them to be ready with weapons. And hide nearby. What if we needed help?

I was stunned into silence.

— You. . you. . told others? Dhiren managed to get out.

All those meetings in the still heart of the night in which the need for absolute secrecy was every other sentence spoken — all that had come to naught.

Kanu read our dismay and said — They’re our people, they’re one of us, they won’t tell anyone.

This was not the time to get into an argument, so I accepted their reassurances on the surface. I said — You shouldn’t have done it. Maybe we got lucky this time. We’ll see. What are we going to do when the police arrive? Or the men of the landlords?

Kanu — Don’t go out of the house. Hide inside. We’ll protect you.

At any other time I would have laughed at his naïvety, but instead I said — These are the police, Kanu, they can come inside any time.

Kanu pondered this for a while, then said — You guys leave the village now.

— What will happen to you?

— Two or four thwacks from the police’s lathi are nothing to us. But you need to leave now, light will soon begin to show in the sky.

They gave us beaten rice and cane molasses wrapped in a cloth bundle.

— Go, go, go now, they urged.

We tried to run — impossible to do this through stretches of bamboo groves — but once we reached the fields, we took long strides towards the jungle, hurrying in the direction from where we knew the police from Jhargram were going to enter Majgeria. But we were miles away from the road, on a parallel outlier, protected by trees. I didn’t know if I imagined this, but just as we made the edge where the trees began to get denser I heard the distant sound of motor-cars. The sky was pink and orange and pale yellow.

As we moved deeper into the forest, Dhiren said — I think I’m going to collapse, and he did exactly that, bending down to the forest floor and stretching himself out fully. Before Samir and I could say anything he was asleep. Looking at him, we realised that this was what we wanted to do too, immediately.

I didn’t know what woke me up. I had no idea what time it was and I could not see the sun in the sky. Sunlight only made it down through the tree cover in patches. I was cold and itching all over, I had the beginnings of a headache and I was completely parched. We had no water to drink, it dawned on me. I turned to Samir and Dhiren — they were curled in on themselves, snoring away. Mosquitoes had formed a flying colony above each of them. There were insects in Samir’s hair — not ants; I had no idea what they were — and Dhiren, still asleep, brushed off something annoying him in his beard, then around his nose, then again his beard, followed now by his ear. . until he awoke, red-eyed and thrashing, swearing at the disturbance — Shala, killing me, these bloody insects. .

I waited for him to ask the inevitable question before giving him the bad news.

Dhiren — Ufff, my chest is cracking with thirst.

— No water. They forgot to give us some and we forgot to ask.

— What are we going to do?

— Unlikely we’ll find water in a forest.

— But. . but we’ll die!

— Don’t be silly. No one dies of thirst in twenty-four hours. We’ll be at Debdulal-da’s at night. If we set out as soon as it gets dark, we’ll be there in six to eight hours, maximum.

— But. . but. . we can’t walk for that length of time without any water!

— Here, have some of this, it’ll make you feel better.

I gave him the cloth bundle in which Kanu had given us molasses and beaten rice.

— Don’t devour it all. It’ll have to last the three of us until we reach Belpahari. Which is twenty hours from now, or thereabouts.

He began to swear, but gave up. There was nothing to be done.

When Samir woke up we made a half-hearted plan to go looking for water. He said — I’m sure there’s some stream or fountain in the forest.

There wasn’t a trace of hope in his voice. He said it because he felt he had to say something. Nobody got up to go on the water-finding mission.

Samir tried again — Listen, trees need water to survive. How can there be a forest without water? Elementary biology.

Dhiren said — Trees have deep root systems to draw water from the ground. Elementary biology, level two.

My headache was like somebody poking around in the soft tissue behind my right eye with a hot knitting needle. Samir said that he too was getting a headache.

The heat increased. We sweated and scratched and slapped the insects sitting or trying to land on us. Then we sweated and scratched our itches some more. Seventeen months in a hole of a village, where we had spent at least half of that time simply waiting for time to budge, had evidently not been entirely successful.

I said — Listen, guns or tangis or bombs won’t kill us, this waiting will.

Dhiren — It’s only time. It kills everyone.

— Yes, but eventually. This is slow, concentrated time, a huge dose of the poison in one go. It’ll kill us all soon.

Before long all this aimless conversation petered out. We tried to talk about important things, chief of which was the big problem facing us now: how to work in Majgeria from Belpahari. To walk for eight to nine hours from Belpahari at night, hide in Majgeria for the day, do a guerrilla action at night, hide in the forest, walk back again under the cover of night through the forest to Belpahari — this hardly seemed a feasible way of going about it. It would put paid to both revolution and revolutionaries.

Samir punctuated the half-hearted discussion at regular intervals with — I think I’ll die without some water.

I didn’t have the energy to move a finger, but sitting here, sweating and getting eaten by insects and thinking obsessively about the impossibility of moving forward and failing to come up with any solutions would make me go mad, so I began the search for water.

Dhiren said — We have to be careful with directions. We don’t want to set out on the wrong route after we come out of the forest at night.

It was this that constrained our search; not that we would have found a stream here. The thirst was not helping us think clearly. At some point we sat down and ate some more jaggery and flattened rice. My mouth was so parched that I had trouble swallowing the dry mass of chewed stuff. Dhiren became fixated on direction, not allowing us to move in anything other than a straight line headed one way only.

He said — Too many turnings and we’ll lose track of where we have to exit the forest to get to the road that takes us to Belpahari. He kept repeating this like someone demented.