Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

I did something that I wished I had thought of in the first place. But in this imitation of the words and action of a friend there was more admiration than envy, and also a kind of invoking of his presence, a wish that he would materialise in front of us. I leaned forward and uttered a variation of the words that Dhiren had said to Shankar — Bir, tell me, what if we remove the village official and Nabin Sarkar? Silently. No one will know a thing. And we’ll burn the sale deed that has your thumb impression on it. .

Thirty of us raided Nabin Sarkar’s home on a late November night. Harvest was just in, so we got Babu to organise twenty men as backup, to wait, with sacks and whatever they had to hand, to empty his granaries as soon as it was safe to do so.

On Dipankar’s suggestion, we did a pincer-movement on the house: fifteen men entering from the front, fifteen men leading the rear action.

We broke down the doors and the noise alerted the men inside. They got their act together fast, so that when we entered they were waiting. We were at close range and they charged at us with axes and knives and sticks and spears. I heard a cry of pain: one of the Santhal men had been hit. I thought we were facing sure death. At no such action in the past had we encountered fully prepared men waiting to engage us in pitched battle. I was right at the front, abreast with three other men, one of whom, I thought, had been struck. Were the dozen men behind me still there? Had they turned tail and run off?

Nabin Sarkar’s men were shouting, baying for our blood in the filthiest language imaginable. I had no idea whether to advance or retreat when the decision was made for me. Our rear flank had entered the house from the back and, swinging their tangis, spears and lathis, the men were hacking their way through Nabin Sarkar’s men, now caught in the middle between our two groups. The man who had got one of ours with his tangi turned to see what was going on. I seized my opportunity: I aimed my axe, with all the force in my body, at the back of his head, missed, and got his neck and shoulders instead. He fell. At that very moment the men behind me surged forward, shouting too, expressions of pure hatred and rage.

It was a messy battle, our most difficult so far. They were not that many in number — I initially thought about five; it turned out to be eight — but they fought back instead of taking fright and escaping. When we thought they were running away, we discovered shortly that they were trying to fool us into dropping our vigilance. They were fleeing the immediate fray, yes, but they were doing this to hide behind doors, in other rooms, under the stairs, and catch us by surprise and hack or stab us.

We had caught them on a night when four guests were staying overnight. We put this together much later, only when we asked ourselves why there were so many of them, and especially what two village officials, one of them the man who had duped Bir, were doing there. Someone got that evil official in the back with a tangi. (When Bir discovered this, he ran to the fallen, dying man and decapitated him.)

I took out a man as he was tiptoeing out of the pantry to escape into the courtyard. It took me two attempts. The first blow caught him in the shoulder. He fell, screaming. I moved closer and finished him off. He didn’t even get a chance to plead for his life.

The search of the house began. Ashu had already given the green light for the redistribution of grain to proceed. The farmers, who had come prepared for this, were waiting outside.

Nabin Sarkar’s men had all turned, unknown to themselves, into guerrillas, but they had got a very fundamental principle of that kind of warfare wrong: you didn’t turn to the guerrilla mode in an enclosed space with an enemy who was more numerous than you. We won ultimately only because they were outnumbered.

With much misgiving (and dread), I was the first to enter each of the rooms. We got one more of theirs: he had positioned himself behind a door off the landing on the first floor, tangi poised to get one of us the moment we entered, but we rushed in, more than eight or nine of us, in such a fast torrent that he missed and the blow landed on the floor, unbalancing him. A farmer sent a spear through his chest. The force sent him across the landing and halfway down the staircase. The skewer held him at a strange angle to the stairs so that he looked like a piece of bad workmanship, a rejected clay effigy with one oversized bar of his framework showing.

We found four others, hiding, armed, dotted around various places in the house. We rounded them up as we went about searching for money, jewellery and documents. Apart from the walls and other concrete structures, we took everything apart; no Nabin. He had fled. I looked down from the first floor at our ring of men outside and said — No sign. He’s gone.

Babu shouted back — We haven’t seen him. He can’t avoid us. They smuggled him out before we arrived.

— Send a few out to scour the gardens and grounds around us.

But I had little hope: burning torches and hurricane lamps only dazzled the eyes of the person holding them, making the larger surrounding darkness much darker; they didn’t shed any useful light. Who knew in which of the neighbours’ houses he was hiding, or to which nearby village he was running, as we picked apart his home?

Dipankar discovered money and jewellery stuffed inside pillows and in mattresses, some also in the main almirah. We took what we could use, burning the documents as usual.

As we were getting ready to leave, I managed to put a name to the anxiety that had been tightening around me: I hadn’t seen Samir for a while.

After three-quarters of an hour of frenzied searching, Dipankar and I found him on the roof. A tangi driven through his left shoulder and neck was making his half-lopped head lean at a strange angle, a branch of a tree both attached and loosened from the trunk. His eyes were still open to the world, but now they saw nothing.

‘HE MUST BE married off immediately,’ Charubala said.

‘Yes, that much is obvious,’ her husband replied. ‘But who will marry him? He’s brought our name so low, to dust, which sensible father is going to want his daughter married into a family like ours?’

Charubala heard the rare note of resignation in his voice; she had temporarily lost the will to rally him.

‘True, all too true. Was this written in our fate? Who would have thought? Chhee, chhee. . what humiliation!’ The memory of it brought on a strange kind of nausea, one that seemed to come from the neck, not from the pit of her stomach. That blood-pressure business again, she thought; the doctor had asked her to be careful and avoid situations of stress and anxiety. He might as well have asked a fish to avoid water.

‘One cannot discipline a man of twenty-one,’ Prafullanath said. ‘In any case, he has gone beyond the reach of any kind of control or punishment we can impose on him. You stop eating for three days and sulk, I become like a storm cloud for a week. . do you think these things have any purchase on him? I used to think that putting him to work in the office would do him some good, since he was never going to finish school or go to college. At least he would have to account for his time there; he’d be out of mischief for seven to eight hours a day. He used to show up late, spend an hour adjusting his clothes and hair, then pull rank over the rest of the workers, shout at a few, crack jokes with others, chat, disturb others’ work, sing, then leave around two and not show up for the rest of the day. Then he wouldn’t turn up for the next two days and would show his face briefly again on the third. To tell you the truth, we reached a point where we were relieved that he didn’t come to the office. Six, seven months of this and we discover that he has been taking company money from Ashim-babu, the head clerk, then from Bhola, from the publishing house. Do you know what he does with the money, do you know?’ Prafullanath’s voice rose dramatically.