The Lives of Others (27 page)

‘This was not the plan, this Engineering College business,’ he said to Adi.

Adi, head bowed, replied with some trepidation, ‘No, but, yes, but . . .’

‘Stop but-but-ing – spit it out!’ his father demanded.

‘No, erm, you’ve known it, that I want to be an engineer . . .’

How could he not have known? Adi thought; his father had been the one who had ignited the flame, then held his cupped palms to nest it against anything that could extinguish it. All those drawings, those pencils and plans, interior and exterior – had he forgotten it all now? Now that his attention had moved elsewhere? Adi did not think about it in those terms, choosing instead to tell himself that in the effort and energies needed by his father to make a business thrive, this murmuring little dream, a secret between the two of them, really, first became inaudible, then, over time, as it no longer made its presence felt, was forgotten. Now that he had impulsively framed the answer to his father’s demands in such a way that there was a possibility of Prafullanath being reminded of that forgotten secret and, worse, beginning to acknowledge a kind of abandonment, Adi felt panic creeping up on him. All he wanted was for the conversation to skirr off in another direction; he could not bear to have his father put form and substance in words to the one particular, vital loosening that had happened to their bond.

‘Who’s going to look after the business then?’ asked Prafullanath. ‘You are my eldest son, it’s part of the order of things that you should take over from me.’

‘I can do that as soon as I’ve qualified. It’s only four years.’ He felt a momentary reprieve, but also a shadowy disappointment, that the conversation had not gone down the feared path.

‘No, you are going to start coming to the office with me regularly, not the two-days-a-week we’ve done so far. You’ve got to start learning the ropes. In business experience is everything.’

Adi bravely tried another argument. ‘I thought engineering would provide a solid foundation for the manufacturing side of things,’ he lied. But the relief had won out and he could not bring them both to the brink of a reckoning again by divulging that he was actually going to read mechanical engineering. In order to spare his father, he elaborated on the lie, ‘It would be good to know how paper is made, how to improve its quality, the science and mechanics of it . . .’

Again he was cut short.

‘We know how paper is made. There are machines to do it, people to run the machines. It’s made the way it has been made all these years. Not much use, all this science and engineering and mechanics. No education can be a substitute for experience. What good is book-learning going to do? It’s like teaching parrots to speak. Look at me: what harm has lack of education done to me? I left home at the age of nineteen, a year after my father’s death. I worked my way up, beginning as a shop assistant, bundling paper, filling and emptying carriages, as an errand-boy. We did not have the luxuries of education and universities like your lot. We worked so hard that the sweat from our heads dropped onto our feet. Engineering was no help then . . .’

Adi’s attention cut out at this point. He had heard the narrative many, many times before, the story of Prafullanath Ghosh, self-made man: his escape from his parental home; his rise from rags to riches; his resilience against the cruelties and injustices the world threw at him; his ultimate ascendancy; the shaky beginnings to the current solidity of his construction business, which he had started from scratch . . . not for the first time it struck Adi that clichés were clichés because they were truths that had been lived out by generation after generation of people before him. By the time those lived truths were inherited by him, they had become foxed, crumpled, brown and brittle with age. Through the entire discourse, however, Adinath remained still, his head respectfully lowered; he did not know anything else. It also served as a way of hiding the imprint on his face of the knowledge that he had just acquired: his father has forgotten that anything special had ever existed between them. He need not have feared, after all.

It may be said, not unfairly, that Prafullanath, having missed out on the experience of higher education himself and, therefore, to some extent, partly unsympathetic to it and partly unable to enter its potential imaginatively, had stumbled upon the business of educating his sons and daughter as an afterthought, extemporising on the basis of whim, or the chatter of other people, or the prevailing fashion in circles more elevated than the one to which he belonged, a familiar variant of the aspirational urge. So when the issue presented itself, the matter of convenience overruled all other considerations: Adi and Priyo were sent to Ballygunge Government High School on Beltala Road, a bare one and a half miles north-east from their home and, later, Bhola, to whom his parents gave the least attention, to the even nearer Mitra Institution. An unusual thing happened when it came to his daughter. It was only by a stroke of chance that the imminence of sending Chhaya to school coincided with one of Prafullanath’s acquaintances remarking on the vital necessity of English education. The idea caught. In an uncharacteristic and momentary fit of daring, he had Chhaya admitted to an English-medium school, St John’s Diocesan on Elgin Road. As if to atone for it, there was a throwback with Bhola, then again a reaching for the heights when it came to the jewel of his life, Somnath, who was sent to the highly reputed missionary school, St Xavier’s, on Park Street.

In the twelve years between Adi and Somu, Prafullanath had felt, in every pore of his body, the toil involved in making a business stand on its feet, so he had banished, with wry casualness, the grand ambitions for several varied businesses that he had harboured for himself and his sons; in that sense, Adi was correct that his father had forgotten what it was that lay between them. While unable to acknowledge that the vastness of his earlier designs was linked in a straightforward if intricate causality to the life he had had before the great rupture happened, Prafullanath was steadfast in his aim of handing over the captaincy of Charu Paper in the future.

A new kind of knowledge surprised him as he looked at the dark hair, oiled down, combed and parted on the left, on his son’s head. Did they all become their own persons, these creatures you gave birth to, these children whom you thought were an extension of your own self, endowed with your features, with aspects of your own personality and character, but who in the end came asunder and floated away from you, no longer like your arm or your leg, doing what you willed them to do, but puppets that suddenly became animated, only to rebel and set off on their own? Prafullanath felt a mild dizziness at the realisation; this was a parent’s separation anxiety, the melancholy at the inevitable parting of ways. Why had he not foreseen this? Did one ever know the mind and soul and personality of one’s child, even little segments of them?

The meditation only served to stiffen Prafullanath’s spine. He said, firmly and with finality, ‘No, I will have none of this newfangled college-going business. You will start coming to the office immediately.’

Adi’s head remained bowed, as if receiving a sentence.

Adi never perceived when his indifference to taking over the reins at Charu Paper had begun to develop. But there it was, the apathy, like a tree one has uncertainly seen in a dream and in the morning it is there right outside, its branches brushing the window, impatient to get in. Adinath went through the motions on the six days of the week that he attended the offices of Charu Paper in Old China Bazaar Street. He listened respectfully to his father, in silence, talking about the advantages of the kraft process over the sulphite, the difference between internal sizing and surface sizing, how to avoid excessive rush or drag on the wire . . . Meanwhile, his mind wandered and took off from the occasional word of his father that would enter through his ears to spin elaborate, playful traceries of equations about the strength of materials or the number of beams required to hold together a room of dimensions x X y X z, when the other variables consisted of p = weight of roof, q = thickness of walls . . .

Khoka-babu, Prafullanath’s factotum in the office and a kind of manager, always gave the impression of bowing low to Adinath during these occasional visits. He ordered tea and sweets from the nearby Annapurna Mishtanna Bhandar, made a fuss of the teenager, whom he called ‘Chhoto-babu’, partly as a joke, but partly also in earnest ingratiation because he knew that he would have to work under this boy one day. Adi smiled tightly, ignored him and waited for the whole thing to be over. That dream-tree gripped him tight in the embrace of its branches as he sat in a room on the ground floor of the building on Old China Bazaar Street and tried to focus his mind on files, papers, receipts, bills, challans, tenders, all of which filled him with a disaffection bordering on vague nausea.

Had he felt like this when his father had dragged him to Bardhaman and Hooghly ten, twelve years earlier, to ignite his interest in the business? Father and son had set out to visit the family mills in trains that moved slowly through the lush green countryside. Adi remembered the rice fields as parcels of bright emerald during the monsoon, and the flat land in late autumn all gold and green as far as the horizon, with patches of white cotton-clouds in the low blue sky, and the stubble brown in the red soil after the harvest in winter. He remembered his father pointing out to him the fountain-like banana trees, with their enormous, clattery leaves and their bizarre flower, a large inverted teardrop-shaped growth, maroon-black in colour, hanging solidly at the bottom of a long stalk. How could that be a flower? he remembered asking his father. The land had seemed so remote and uninhabited, full of trees and copses, the tight cover of vegetation everywhere. At the station, a car would be waiting to take them through dirt roads to a Charu Paper Mill. Prafullanath would point out to his son the various elements of the work-in-progress in response to the boy’s questions.

‘Why are there flowers on this machine?’

‘The labourers have just done Bishwakarma puja. It’s to consecrate the machine so that no harm comes to the production.’

‘What harm?’

‘Oh, just inauspicious things.’

‘Why is that man loading rubbish onto that slope?’

‘That’s what is going to be turned into pulp.’

‘What is pulp?’

‘The stuff that becomes paper.’

‘Why do you need so many machines to make paper into paper? Why can’t you ask the men to stick the rubbish paper together?’

‘Because we need to get rid of the impurities.’

‘What is impurities?’

Thinking of those afternoons now, all the different occasions spliced together, the images appeared like mounted photographs in an album. The forceful gush of brown water into the open maws of huge drums and cylinders and churners, creating almighty whirlpools. The innumerable vats of dirty greyish-white chyme that floated up to the top as the raw material was subjected to dozens of chemical processes and churning and beating and swirling and sieving. The mounds of wet rubbish – plastic, buttons, bits of metal, straw, clips, particles of rags, unidentifiable coloured solids – left behind in the meshes. The tall, narrow, cylindrical cages of iron rods sticking out of the water at regular intervals, like the carpals of a futuristic skeleton. Shreds and scraps of wastepaper everywhere, in the walkways connecting the different units and on the ground, as if after a battle fought entirely with paper. A heart-pumping climb on a rickety ladder, supported firmly by one of the managers from below and his father from above, to the lip of yet another enormous drum; held in his father’s arms, he had looked down on its contents of a kind of fleecy off-white foam circulated slowly by two huge rotating arms half-submerged in the substance, moving closer and closer towards him until he had cried out in fear. And pipes, pipes everywhere, in all styles of ribbing and all kinds of colours, straight and curved and curled and looped: the site was an eviscerated mythical beast and they its entrails. And that pervasive, wet, slightly suffocating reek of the forty chemicals – the figure had been proudly proclaimed by his father – that went into the making of an ordinary thing such as paper.

Where was he in all that excessive effort to produce something so common, so disappointing, after the massiveness of the process involved? Adi remembered being told off by his father for chucking stone chips, one after another, into the bore-well tank from which the mill drew its water, trying to make a bigger splash than the one that preceded it, or perhaps even trying out his recently learned trick of ‘tadpole’ – making one stone skim the surface of the water one, two, three, four times before it sank; the challenge here was to make it work in the severely confined space of the tank. Had he done all that out of boredom? He could not remember. And now, surrounded by the building blocks and tricky manoeuvres for making money, not bridges or roads or theatres, he could not map this more urgent boredom onto the lost memory of the probable one from his boyhood.

VI

They were not all innocent of what we had to teach them. When we began with our small evening meetings nearly five months ago, there were perhaps three or four farmers in attendance, the numbers almost totally made up of men from the three homes that had received the three of us. Then harvest was quickly upon us, and we hardly had the time even to breathe, and no energy at the end of the day either to explicate or to listen to Mao’s theories. This was no bad thing: the situation at the end of the harvesting made it easier for us to spread our word. Then the numbers went up – six, ten, twelve, seventeen, at one time, even twenty-three, our high point.

At these meetings there were farmers who had no money to buy seeds for the next season, but without planting they would die, so they got deeper into debt. A few of them grew vegetables by the side of their huts; this was all the food they had in some months of the year. And when the season for waxed gourd and ridged gourd and bottle gourd was over, they would starve.

We told them that sacks of rice had been smuggled out at two in the morning.