The Lives of Others (14 page)

Madan’s son, Dulal, had been a rickety teenager from the darkest depths of Orissa when he had been brought over by his father to Calcutta to be given a job by Madan’s employers, the Ghoshes, at their factory in Bali in ’51. When Priyo first met him over fifteen years ago he was a boy who kept searching out corners and shadows and walls so that he could hide. It had given him a little tingle of pride that Madan-da’s son had since done so well. Dulal had a peasant’s capacity for physical labour, so unexpected from the frame that generated it, and, it soon emerged, an even more surprising gift: an inherent talent for working with tools and machines and understanding them. Crowning these two abilities was the trickiest art, a knack for getting on well with people across all manner of divides. He was friendly, warm, caring, and everyone on the factory floor looked up to him as a kind of protective leader, a man of their own, someone who would take care of their interests. Those interests rarely clashed with those of their paymasters, as they did elsewhere in West Bengal.

When 20 per cent of the unskilled workforce in Bali had to be laid off only five or six years after Dulal’s arrival, because of integrating the factory and bringing the pulp- and paper-making together under one roof, it was Dulal who had defused the potentially explosive confrontation with the union, which could otherwise have resulted, all too easily, in an indefinite shutting down of the factory. The management called him a safe pair of hands; the workers, their banyan tree. One less thing to worry about, the Ghoshes had thought and moved their attention to problems that needed fixing.

Then one day Ashoke Ganguly, the manager at Bali, had come in to see Priyo to deliver some astonishing news. Behind the scenes Dulal had been working as a CPI(M) stooge; he was the de facto union leader. He was rallying the workers in preparation for a strike.

‘What are you saying?’ Priyo asked. ‘Are you sure about this?’

Ashoke-babu nodded vigorously, ingratiation and emphasis compressed into that one movement.

‘I’m not lying, sir. You can visit and make your own enquiries,’ he said. ‘This is how the Party expands its supporter base and vote-bank. They send their cadres out to villages and small towns, to factories, mills, fields, farms, everywhere, and get them to join, promising them all kinds of things. Do you know, in the ’54 floods, I saw this with my own eyes. The Party cadres in Bangaon, they went around in boats, doing relief-work, distributing sacks of rice and lentils, but they would give them only to people who had voted for them, not to Congress supporters. One of their biggest power bases is the unions in factories, shops, offices – every workplace you can imagine.’

‘Yes, yes, I know all this,’ Priyo said dismissively. What did it matter to him, this
modus operandi
of the Communist Party, as long as they were in a world far removed from his? Even then, he had trouble adding it all up and reading correctly that sum – that it
had
reached his world already.

Dulal had approached Ashoke Ganguly, demanding to know if a significant percentage of the workforce was going to be slashed because of the grim financial outlook; if yes, things might get troublesome at the factory. Things were not looking great, and because Dulal had saved them once did not mean that he could do it again.

Was Dulal threatening him?

No, not at all, but it was wise to be aware of consequences before embarking on any course of action.

Well, Ashoke-babu was going to ask for Dulal’s advice when he needed it. Meanwhile, where had he picked up all these baseless rumours of redundancies?

No, he, Dulal, was just mindful of that possibility, given that times were bad. Besides, the integration and the new machines had cost people their jobs. Everything was getting mechanised nowadays, which surely meant that manpower would be less in demand. Or so people said.

Which people?

No answer.

‘And are you sure he wasn’t threatening you?’ Priyo had asked Ashoke-babu. ‘We were all under the impression that he was a force for good, you know, holding everything together. So competent and so amiable. You’ve brought really disturbing news.’

‘No, his tone was not threatening at all. But the content . . . I decided to come to you straight away because, if there is anything the matter, then it should be nipped in the bud.’

‘You’ve done the right thing. Definitely. And, as you know, we may soon have to discuss some reduction of the labour force there. Not just because of mechanisation, but because of . . . of other problems. It won’t be possible to keep all the mills running at full capacity. But how do you think he knows? What is he going around
doing
?’

‘How else but from Party HQ?’ Ashoke-babu had answered. ‘They know that you’ve had to close one of your mills’ – the words had come out of an unthought momentum and he had visibly and audibly regretted them immediately afterwards – ‘er . . . I mean . . . times are bad, we know . . . What can one do?’

Priyo had flinched inwardly at the correction, but had not allowed it to mark his face. The gist had been this: the CPI(M) were combing the countryside, recruiting, canvassing, and one of their policies seemed to be to target potentially troubled outfits under the same ownership. It stood to reason that if the Ghoshes had had to shut down one mill, others could be in similar danger, so the CPI(M) fanned across the provinces, looking to stir up trouble and add to their numbers. And trouble, as even a child knew, was the vivarium of politics.

A picture was coming into focus for Priyo. All the praise and endorsement and support for Dulal, which had slowly built up after he had been given a job at the mill, was turning out to be that old trick Nature used to hide poison or danger – camouflaging it in beauty; the more virulent the toxin, the more captivating its vessel.

Who could have known that behind the pleasant, reliable surface a different drama had been churning away? The soothing pictures from the past were slowly revealing themselves as optical tricks. The annual celebration of Bishwakarma Puja every September at the factory was not really the joyous congregation of factory workers and their friends and families come together in kite-flying, ceremonies, distribution of blessed offering and public feasting, but the amassing of foes for a future strike, a mobilisation of forces. That thin, pitiful face of Dulal, in which they had read, no doubt encouraged by their regard for Madan-da, a story of deprivation and blight, was, in truth, the lean and hungry look of the ever-resentful poor, trying to wring more from the people they considered infinitely rich and, if that was obstructed, then to bring them down. With the milk they gave him the Ghoshes had reared a snake.

‘But does Baba know?’ Priyo had asked Ashoke-babu. Prafullanath had started coming to work again, although on a part-time basis. The old man was not innocent of the knowledge of union activity in his mills, but the Ghoshes had always managed to avoid the worst of it, partly through luck, partly through Prafullanath’s canny and far-seeing management policies. This new piece of information spelled setback in more than one area.

‘No, not yet,’ said Ashoke-babu, ‘I thought I should tell you first.’

‘You’ve done the right thing. Sit on it for a while. Baba is a bit . . . fragile still, as you know. His health . . . We don’t want anything to upset him again.’

‘No, sir. Yes, sir. Absolutely, sir.’

A different line of thought opened up in Priyo’s head. If union trouble did rear its head in Bali, then Ashoke-babu, as manager, had the most to fear since he would be directly in the line of fire, even physically so. Workers rarely had access to their employers, if at all; the conducting wire between labour and capital was the manager. This implied that Ashoke-babu could well be looking to sow, for whatever reason, the seeds of suspicion between Dulal and the Ghoshes. His motive remained opaque to Priyo. To protect himself? Yes, that seemed axiomatic, but only in the case of friction with the union. He was back to where he and Ashoke-babu had begun. And the futile nature of that circularity had made him decide to forget about it for the time being and watch what developed. What else could they do? Confront Dulal? On what evidence?

Barely two years after this meeting there had been some kind of a blockage at the pulp-feeding end of the Fourdrinier machine and the foreman of the factory, Sujan Hazra, had inserted his hand inside the funnel to clear it. Another worker, who had not known that this operation was in progress, had seen the machine switched off and had taken it upon himself to rectify that oversight. Sujan Hazra’s right hand had been first chewed, then sliced off. The trouble, at least for Ashoke-babu, and, by extension, the owners of the factory, had not been the incident, which had been only a mishap that had befallen a stranger. The Ghoshes had paid for Sujan’s initial hospital care and had assiduously circulated, in tones of great regret, the hard-nosed consolation of the doctors’ supposed words – ‘Only god can sew back a severed hand.’ The trouble had begun a few months later, when Ashoke-babu, with the consent of his paymasters, had decided to let go of Sujan Hazra and hire someone else to replace him. Without his working hand, Sujan was not very useful; his salary was an unnecessary waste.

What unfolded next followed so exactly Ashoke-babu’s forewarning that in his more deranged moments – and there were several in the months that followed – Priyo thought that the manager had somehow scripted the whole thing and then willed it into being. Or had known about it all along because, cunning schemer, he really belonged to the other side. The union, led informally by Dulal, had reacted to the foreman’s dismissal with unbending recalcitrance. The strikes began: at first, one working day of the week, but when that did not make Ashoke-babu or the ownership relent, Dulal instigated a gherao of Ashoke Ganguly in his office adjoining the mill. More than thirty workers surrounded the room, with Ashoke-babu inside, and refused to let him leave, even to go to the toilet. They chanted slogans: ‘Our demands
must
be heeded,
must
be heeded’ and ‘Crush and grind the black hand of the owners,
crush
,
grind
’. They wanted the fired foreman reinstated, otherwise the entire factory would go on strike indefinitely. Nothing – threats, incentives, reasoning – could shake them from their position.

Ashoke-babu remained imprisoned by this human cordon for fifty-eight hours; his captors clearly worked on a shift-and-rota basis. At the end of the ordeal, when Ashoke-babu collapsed, the men were still unwithered, shouting out their mantras with undiminished vigour. When Dulal showed no inclination to call off his men after twenty-four hours, Adinath stepped in and requested Police Superintendent Dhar, a family friend of nearly twenty years’ standing, to talk to his colleagues at Bali and have the local police deployed to break up the gherao. The arrival of the police and the crumpling of Ashoke-babu almost coincided. It was later said that if the police had not arrived, the factory workers would have happily continued until Ashoke-babu died.

The police presence was deemed intolerable by the workers, the breaking of an adamantine contractual code, something sacrilegious. Before Adi and Priyo, on the brink of firing the entire fleet with the explicit consent of their father, could make any move, Dulal ratcheted up the conflict by sanctioning a complete lockout of the mill. The long stalemate began. Posters went up everywhere, signed ‘Charu Paper Mill Workers’ Union’, abbreviated to CPMWU. Every available external wall space was covered with angry slogans. In the bristling thicket of painted signs, all screaming imperatives, the letters CPI(M) were easily smuggled in. Priyo noticed it and knew that Ashoke-babu had been prescient. A new set of workers could be hired, theoretically, but how would they cross the picket lines that had been set up? This time the police dragged their feet about intervening because, presumably, orders had come from above, from a power higher than the informal networks of string-pulling that was the motor of Bengali life. The Ghoshes knew this or that minister, or could grease so-and-so’s palms, but this economy of personal favours was less than nothing compared with the infinitely more potent arithmetic of consolidating vote-banks. Would a tiger be distracted by a toy-replica of its prey when it was following the smell of the real thing?

So the striking workers, feeling intrepid, and confident of remaining undisturbed by further police action, stayed on, beginning as a furiously boiling mass and then, over time, under the assault of the seasons and their self-willed impoverishment, simmering down until, all their heat leached, they were nothing but a thin, raggedy slum, their posters and placards faded and feeble, their numbers reduced to single figures, the huge locks on the factory gates and the threatening words on the walls mocking them as much as the evil capitalists who had brought them to such a pass.

The Ghoshes knew that bypassing them to hire a new set of workers to resume production in the mill was not a possibility, because the lockout men had the might of the CPI(M) behind them. Their visibly waning presence on the outskirts of the factory was an illusion. They might look like a tiny handful of people on the brink of beggary, but their numbers could be swelled instantly if provoked or offended; the Party would see to that. The Ghoshes’ most productive factory – an output of seventy tonnes per day, down from 130 TPD in its heyday – lay fallow, an impasse so intolerable that Prafullanath swallowed his rage and humiliation and decided to confront Dulal in a private capacity and work out some kind of compromise.