The Lives of Others (24 page)

In my first hour of doing this, I kept interrupting my work to pick up bundles of spent sheaves to check if all the grains had really come off. I had heard that Nitai Das, and others in his situation, used to secrete some of these grainless stalks in their clothes, or steal them later, in the middle of the night, as the sheaves lay outside, drying, before being tied up into cylinders of hay. He would boil and eat them in the hope that a fleck or two of tenacious grain had clung on to the stalk-tips here and there. This is what they did in times of famine. This is what Nitai did here last year.

The paddy was taken away to be threshed. I could hardly move my arms and shoulders when I woke up the next morning.

Kanu took me with him wherever he was engaged to work this season: two sharecropping plots, and two where he worked as wage-labourer in the plots of the two big jotedaars here, the Rays and the Sinhas, part of the upper-caste inner-core neighbourhoods of Majgeria. He told me that it was less than half the work he did during harvesting time in a good year; now it had dwindled to this. From sharecropping he got, as his wages, one eighth of the husked weight of rice from each of the fields that he had worked. From the daily work in the absentee landlords’ bigger plots, he got money.

In the wealthier parts of the village, the inner core that is, there were sumptuous harvest festivals with mass feasting and giving of gifts. Here, we gave the first new grains to crows, which were believed to be the reincarnations of the farmers’ ancestors.

It was a breathless time of the year. These were part of the ninety or so days of guaranteed work that Kanu and others like him had, and they passed in consciousness-obliterating labour. Rice left overnight in water was eaten in the morning with a couple of green chillies and salt, before we set out for the fields; coarse-grained rice and a vegetable or dal given at the end of a day’s work by the stewards of the farms where we harvested or threshed, then the walk back to Kanu’s hut – that was it. In the evenings, no serious talk of land reform, of putting Mao’s policies into practice in this particular context of a small Medinipur village with a population of
400
people, of debate on the relative virtues of ‘economism’ versus militancy, of rhetoric and corresponding action, of planning and consolidation and uniting the actions of various regional cells . . . none of that intense conversation that brought the foam to our mouths. No small meetings with the farmers who lived on the outer edges of the village, that is, the lower-caste and Santhal landless labourers. (I’m going to spare you the contents of past meetings. They’ll bore you; they bore
me
sometimes. You’ll say, ‘Ufff, that same old chewing of the cud of politics.’ Quite.)

Tonight the exhaustion has crossed a barrier – I feel I’m
too
tired to sleep, if that makes any sense to you.

Until now it has been all right sleeping on what I can only call their verandah, the narrow raised space between their threshold and the two steps leading to the general earth. The weather was cool, and it was getting colder, but it hadn’t started biting yet. When we first came to Majgeria, Kanu said that I could share their one twelve-foot by ten-foot room, sleep in a corner, with him and his wife and their little child (six months old) and his wife’s old father, but something in me could not assent to that arrangement. The room was spick and span – washed with red mud; what few possessions they had were in their places, the little dung-cake-burning oven in a corner, one dented aluminium rice pot, the jointed tongs, two plates, one terracotta vessel for drinking water . . . not much, as you can tell. But everything was neat, there was no mess. The low coir-and-wood pallet was for the old man, who lay or sat on it all day and all night long, wheezing but otherwise silent. Beautiful drawings, done with quicklime, of gods and goddesses, rising from the floor to nearly three or four feet up the walls on all four sides. The straw and palm-leaf thatch on the roof came down low and protected my ‘verandah’ from the sun and the rain.

The thatch was compact but sometimes, when I lay awake at night, or when something had woken me up, I didn’t know what, and there was a breeze, I imagined I could hear the loose ends at the edges stir up in the barest whisper of a rustle, as if it was trying to say something secret to me. It was at those moments, when there was nothing between me and the secret sounds of the inanimate world, that I asked myself – Why didn’t I accept their offer of sharing their tiny space inside? I had a ready answer: because one more person in that tiny space, bringing the number up to five, would have been difficult for them, yet they wouldn’t have been able to say no. It was a true answer; I didn’t want to add yet another small difficulty to their already hard-bitten lives. But at this hour of the night, with a silence only deepened by the occasional rustle in the thatch, I wondered if it was the entire truth or even the only truth. Could it be that
I
was going to be more inconvenienced than they by sharing their small space? This ‘verandah’, after all, was bigger in the sense of person-to-space ratio. And it was all my own. I had come here with my comrades, inspired by Charu Mazumdar’s words, to become one with the lowest, the neediest of rural people, to eat with them, to live with them, to live
as
them. ‘Like a fish with the other fish in the sea.’ Then why did I pick the ‘verandah’ over the room? Did it not, by emphasising, even making literal my apartness, give the lie to our most basic principle, the very soul of our movement: oneness with those who had nothing?

The doubt was like a breach in a dam. Other thoughts rushed in, all to do with the awareness of my separation from those with whom I wanted to be at one. Quite often, for example, I had some difficulty understanding the dialect of the Santhal people. One day Kanu said something about how sleeping on the ‘verandah’ now, in winter, might be all right, but once summer, and especially monsoon, came along, I might like to rethink because – then he said something short, two words or three, that I couldn’t quite decipher. After some questioning, he mimed it for me with his hands: the palm cupped and held upright, the inside facing me, then a swift movement of that cupped palm coming down.

Ah. Snake. Snake-bite.

Some more details emerged – in the monsoon the rains brought out a lot of snakes, not all of them poisonous, not the ones that lived in the flooded rice fields, but some certainly. Sleeping outside then was not such a great idea. I nodded. I was about to say that moving inside was hardly going to protect me since their room was not exactly insulated from the entry of snakes, but I bit my tongue.

Kanu said – A lot of snake action around these parts in the rainy season, lots of cases of snake-bites.

Something else made sense to me then. Throughout the village we had noticed tiny shrines housing amateurish clay figures of many-headed snakes, all poised to strike, sometimes accompanied by a figurine of Manasha, the goddess of snakes. Now I understood why the propitiation of this particular minor goddess was so universal here.

Much later Samir pointed out to me that the more numerous of these shrines did not hold either snakes or the goddess of snakes. They were to Shitala, the goddess of smallpox, chickenpox and other fatal and contagious diseases. The reason? In my naïvety I had thought this was the usual rural overdependence on religion and superstition, but Samir corrected me. He pointed out that this was the district that had been struck hardest during the
1943
famine, the very district from which hundreds and thousands of people had fled to Calcutta in large exoduses, only to die on the streets in the capital. And they had thought that appeasing the goddess of epidemics would spare them, so the shrines to Shitala had proliferated everywhere.

The picture kept getting muddier. From the convoluted measures Kanu gave me, I did a swift calculation to work out what his share from sharecropping each plot, one of
1
.
5
bighas, the other slightly over three, should be. Kanu received eight ser of rice from the first plot and twelve ser from the second, a total of half a mon of rice. Under several rules, not a single one enforced or enforceable in this country, he
should
have received slightly more than double the amount, just over one mon. Half-mon rice will feed him and his family one square meal a day for two months. The two plots where we worked as wage-labourers earned us five rupees a day for each plot. We should have ended up with a hundred rupees each, but the manager of the bigger piece of land decreed that because of an unusually low yield this year, only six mon per bigha on average, the labourers would get only three rupees a day. Thirty rupees for working a ten-hour day for ten days in which even breathing seems a luxury.

Kanu said that when the midday meal was given while harvesting this plot, they discovered that the portion of rice served to each labourer had been halved. Four other workers confirmed this. There were murmurs. Then there was an answer from the masters – How could you have the cheek to ask for more food in a straitened year such as this, when the effects of the past years’ drought was not quite over and when it had depleted previous years’ yields so drastically? Where was the extra food going to come from? From the air? They should be thankful for what they were getting; the alternative might well be no work and, therefore, starvation. Wasn’t half a plate better than nothing on the plate?

I told Kanu that I was going to deal with them. He looked ill with fear and said – Babu, then what we are getting is going to go too. Don’t make that mistake. Half-stomach is better than an empty stomach, they’re right. If you cause trouble, you’ll be marked out and then you’ll never get work again.

His calculation, however destroying, was shrewder than mine. Besides, despite being called ‘Babu’, I was here to be one of them, not to tell them what to do. Except for our ultimate business when the time came.

I hear Bijli shout at Kanu – What are you going to eat? Why did you give him only your money? Why not give him your rice as well? Take it, go on, take it and give it to him.

Then her anger ends in her voice breaking into choked sobs. From what I can piece together, she’s aghast that Kanu’s entire earnings had to be given away to the moneylender to repay a fraction of the interest on the loans they had taken out.

The next day I give Kanu my thirty rupees. He says no, but he can’t look me in the eye. His gaze is fixed on the notes in my outstretched hand.

– Take it, I say, I eat your food, I stay in your home, take it as my contribution to your family expenses. Your brother or your son would have done the same, no? Wouldn’t you have taken it from them?

He takes the money from my hand and closes his fist around it, not to secure it in his grasp, but as if he’s hiding something shameful and dirty.

At night, the muffled sound of sobbing again from inside . . .

I retold the story of ‘The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains’ from
The Little Red Book
to Kanu and Bijli one evening, but stumbled when it came to the ending, with god sending angels and all that rubbish, so I had to improvise quickly. Any reference to god would only have fed their natural fatalistic bent, so while explaining the story I laid special emphasis on the real meaning of god, repeating over and over the Chairman’s sentence, slightly tweaked, ‘Our god is none other than the masses of Indian farmers.’ I changed the two mountains of imperialism and feudalism to the two mountains of poverty and feudalism, then I explained, yet again, the evil that was feudalism in plain, simple language, referring constantly to their present situation in this village.

I felt the session had gone well when Kanu said to me – Babu . . .

I flinched.

– Babu, you will have to come inside, it’s getting colder, it’s winter now . . .

I said – If you keep calling me Babu . . . Then I tried to laugh to make light of the barter I was trying to reach with him.

Kanu gave a shy and embarrassed smile, lowered his eyes and said nothing.

I pushed it – Go on, say Pratik.
PRA-TIK
.

He shook his head and cringed with shyness.

– Pra-tik, Pra-tik, I kept repeating.

– Per-tik, he said, at last – Per-tik babu.

Maybe I heard it because I was outside, sleepless and anxious with unbegun business. The sound was unmistakable, especially in a tiny village that saw a big motor vehicle only rarely and that too during peak times, such as harvest, which had just ended. Then, I don’t know how, I put everything together. Of course, how obvious. I got up, wrapped the two pieces of chador around my head and body and ran to Anupam Haati’s hut, where Samir was, and from there, three huts away, to Bipul Soren’s, to rouse Dhiren, who, when we got there, was already waiting for us. The identical thought had gone through his head, for he greeted us with a whisper – Did you hear it?

A lorry, maybe two, maybe more, shaking noisily on their way through the dirt tracks, the sound progressing nearer and nearer, too loud in the silence of the cold night, then cutting out, followed by the slamming of the doors of the vehicles.

The night was as chinklessly dark as hell.

Samir whispered – We must separate, each of us follow the sound on his own.

This was the man, who, in ordinary circumstances, was afraid to visit the outhouse in the dark. I told you, didn’t I, that he had steel in him, deep down?

There were trees and bushes and groves all around us and we could slip behind these at any time. There were proper brick houses in this neighbourhood, walls behind which we could crouch or against which we could flatten ourselves.

Sticking my head out from behind a huge tree near a pond, I observed what was going on less than a hundred metres away. The proceedings were illuminated only occasionally by hurricane lamps and torches, but what I could pick out in the dark was this: from the granary of the Ray house, the biggest house in Majgeria, as befitted the absentee landlord of more than
250
acres of land in the area, a string of three or four men came out, bearing sacks on their shoulders, and began walking in the direction of the eastern flank of the village. There were three, four, maybe five men holding up hurricane lamps to light the way. Others were walking around, pacing or standing still. These men, I could just about discern in the darkness only fleetingly and partially dispelled by the light of the lamps, were in police uniform.