The Lives of Others (31 page)

Prafullanath held no truck with such patriotic fools. ‘Khaddar and charka and cottage industries are not going to feed us,’ he said. ‘We’ll remain a nation of loincloth-clad, rib-showing beggars if we go down that route. The industries are controlled by the British and we should do business with them for our own good.’ In this he had been indoctrinated by what he had seen in his childhood during the swadeshi movement in the 1900s. Back then, Prafullanath had noted and remembered his father’s scornful words to a rich Bengali man; one of their customers, he supposed. ‘All these calls to shut my jewellery shop, to stop trading in British gold . . . Well, I ask them, what are we going to eat if I close my shop? What are my children going to eat? And you, Banerjee-babu, how are you going to marry your daughter without jewellery, hyan? Have you heard of a wedding without ornaments? Besides, all this jabber-jabber about the country’s economic development, how is the economy going to develop if we close down our small businesses?’ It was an argument Prafullanath was going to use himself, copiously, when confronted with a similar moral choice during the turbulent decades of freedom-fighting.

In Gyan Kundu’s death, Prafullanath, who had business in his genes, saw an opportunity. Within days he presented Kundu-babu’s widow with an impeccably worked-out proposal, designed to hit all the right notes with a grieving woman left to look after her two small children, nine and six at the time. He offered to buy out Kundu & Co. at a substantial premium over the market value and invest the money for her, if she wanted, locking a percentage of it in a trust fund for the children so that Nirmala-boüdi did not have to worry about their school and college education and the girl’s marriage; the children would even come into money when they turned twenty-one. A terrible bereavement such as this, and in such circumstances . . . surely she could not be asked to make difficult decisions requiring intricate financial and legal knowledge? If he could spare his best friend’s widow the anxiety – and here he let his eyes brim over – then he would count himself a happy man. Besides, his business was the same as her late husband’s; he understood this world, knew it as well as the back of his own hand. ‘Look at your children’s faces,’ he pleaded, ‘and do the right thing.’

He had pitched it perfectly. Nirmala Kundu agreed, partly in relief that someone was taking charge of the messier sphere, leaving her to get on with her grieving and bringing up her children, things to which she was more attuned than company finances. He had bribed the auditors of Kundu & Co. to undervalue the firm to a figure that he had set with the men, thus acquiring Kundu & Co. for something between 40 and 50 per cent of the company’s true value. Crucially, he had known from his now-dead friend that two enormous contracts were shortly coming the way of Kundu & Co.

Prafullanath’s own mills in Memari and Bali exclusively supplied the paper for these two contracts. With the financial muscle they brought him, he managed to stave off the worst of the recession. That year, in 1933, his youngest son Somnath was born.

VII

Scalp-splitting sun. It killed you. Darkness now came slowly, like a leisurely, majestic predator, unafraid of anything, swallowing the far things on the horizon first, then the near. You saw the line of trees in the forest in the distance go first, then the nearer trees, the palms and bamboos, then the fields became stretches of a featureless sea of black. After a while, you couldn’t see your toes.

The soil had the surface of stone, punctuated with the stubble from last year’s harvest. Kanu followed the plough hitched to the bullock – the plough was his, the bullock belonged to the man whose land Kanu was preparing for cultivation – and explained to me how I needed to keep the share steady in the soil and the bullock moving in a straight line. I was like a guttering candle turning to liquid. Kanu looked at me and asked – Are you suffering?

I was ashamed to be thinking of sunstroke when beside me Kanu, drenched, smelling awful, seemed indifferent to the sun. I looked at him and was struck again by how everything about him was wiry: his thin legs and arms, the veins on them bulging out like ribs; the dark, curly hair, like a dense pile of wire clippings. Where did this beaten physique, as if something carved in oily dark stone, come from, if all he and his kind got to eat was chhatu and rice and puffed rice once, maybe twice, a day? I couldn’t even bring myself to ask if the sun didn’t bother him. When I tried to do the third row myself, without his help, I thought I’d got it, until the bullock reached the edge of the plot and I had to turn it round and position the share so that the same line was furrowed again, but now in a different direction. I failed utterly. The bullock went off in a line at a thirty-degree angle to the one just ploughed.

By ten in the morning a nerve behind my left eye started jumping, I began to feel dizzy and, when I tried to get up, after sitting down to drink some water and catch my breath, I saw black and then some popping colours.

Samir and Dhiren were both working in plots to be used as seedbeds, but for a different landlord. We could barely talk at the end of the day after we had bathed in the pond and washed our clothes – we felt turned into something solid and inanimate with exhaustion. But even through that solidity something of the intricate nature of the timing of everything trickled through and amazed me. The plots that were right next to the landlord’s house were generally used as seedbeds so that they could be kept under constant guard. The plot that Kanu and I and two others were working was going to be used to transplant the paddy saplings from the seedbeds one month into the monsoon. Kanu had explained the timing to us. And it all turned on the arrival of the rains.

The land was a stretch of huge, upturned clods. If I thought harvesting was difficult, I changed my mind when I began ploughing. Now I changed my mind again during this process of halui – churning those enormous clods into looser, smaller pieces of soil. Kanu said – The large boulders of earth, they keep soaking up the rain . . .

Here he paused and looked up at the sky. Would it arrive this year? his eyes seemed to be asking; would it be late? would it be enough? There was both anxiety and resignation on his face.

Kanu continued – These large chunks, they soak up the rain, they are greedy, but however much they drink, they don’t seem to turn to clay easily. And we want this to be tight clay, so tight that the rainwater will stay on the surface. The plot must be underwater, here, see, this much water – he stretched his palm and marked off a point at the base; five or six inches, I reckoned – here, one hand of water, he said.

So the next ten days, twelve, passed in raking and beating and pounding the clods to dust. We kept ploughing the furrows over and over again, then the plough was replaced with a multi-toothed rake and we went through the same process again. The soil looked like red-black cottage cheese now. The June sun beat down upon us. The soil was hard and totally dry. When we brought out the sticks used to beat it to dust, it gave in and disintegrated. Then we needed to rake it up again to bring the bigger, more solid layers below up to the surface so that we could beat that to looseness.

Kanu has brought only his plough to the halui work. The bullocks belong to the landlord, as the seedlings, later, will too, so Kanu will get only
20
per cent of the crop produced. If he had been a bargadar, he would have got
40
per cent for the same work. I couldn’t make any sense of this logic, that the better off got more and those who had little got less. The world ran on this law, and only on this. Some magnetic field began to develop around those who had a little something – power or money or influence or friends, you name it – and the more these things accrued, the more that magnetism increased (it was as if the things that flowed to them had attracting properties themselves), drawing more inside its orbit and away from those whose funds were already depleted, making them even more impoverished, depriving them of even more. It was like gravity: everything flowed, and could only flow, in one direction. Or a type of circularity: the more you had, the more will come to you, the more you will have.

Sometimes when my body simply couldn’t move, when I was incapable of lifting even my little finger, incapacitated by the combined tyranny of the sun and the humidity, I forced myself to beat and rake and pulverise the clods of earth by thinking I was beating and raking and pulverising and eviscerating men like Bhaben Sinha, men like the Rays, who were smuggling rice at night, men like the police, who were standing guard over the operation, all the jotedaars and mahajans in this village. I wanted to stand outside the world, wielding a giant wooden stick, and use that to shatter the planet into tiny bits. I wanted to break the air, tear the wind, smash the water.

No nightly planning sessions during the sowing season; we were too exhausted to talk. I shall have to stop writing this and pick up at some point later when I have more time, more energy.

Kanu noticed my tiredness. He brought me a lipped, dented aluminium plate of chhatu kneaded with chillies and raw onions and some mustard oil, and asked – No more meetings for the city babus?

– No, Kanu, our bodies won’t take it. You’re talking to the others, as we asked you? They’ll come once the paddy growing begins?

– Yes, Babu, they will. Those other two babus, your friends, they’ll have a lot of work to do, just before the rains begin, to prepare the seedbeds. You’ll work with them?

– No, Kanu, I’ll be working with you wherever you get me work.

I knew what he was thinking: he was remembering closing his hand over the thirty rupees I had given him last time.

The monsoon didn’t break crashingly one day. First, there was a light drizzle that barely wetted the soil, but it released that loamy-fresh-rotting smell. When the drizzle stopped, Kanu’s face took on that constricted look.

– This little pissing, Babu, he said, it’s not a good sign. It means something is holding back the water in the sky. It can be held back throughout the season then.

He was wrong. Two more days of dark, rolling clouds and another half-day of drizzling, then the sky broke upon us. Even his dying father-in-law seemed to register it: his face had an expression different from its usual one of resigned blankness, not far from a smile. The baby too appeared to be crying less. I had to move inside now.

– You’ll get wet outside, Babu. And sometimes the water rises and floods everything around the hut and water comes into the room. No, no, Babu, you come inside now.

It was exactly as I remembered from childhood – sheets of water coming down for hours and hitting the ground with such force that you thought the road would dissolve – except that here the ground, which is earth, does dissolve.

The ploughed soil first turned dark with saturation, then became mud, a fractionally lighter shade than the wet soil. The mud started to retain water on its surface here and there. Then the watery stretches began to grow. Kanu said that the real work began now.

I laughed – What were we doing until now? Playing children’s games?

He laughed too. – Preparation, he said.

Samir and Dhiren had been calf-deep in mud in their seedbeds for the last week, trying to keep them flooded. It was my turn now in the growing plots. I missed out on the sowing. When I mentioned this to Kanu, he said that it required years of skill to get the throwing of the germinated seed-paddy right; Samir and Dhiren wouldn’t be sowing, only preparing the beds and perhaps guarding them.

I stepped into the mud, the mud that I’d avoided in the city all my life, that ever-present mud during the rainy season, which crept over the front edge of your sandals, seeped up between the toes, was lifted by the back of the slippers on every uplift of the feet and splattered all over the back of the legs of pyjamas and trousers; a thing that held only disgust, and a little bit of terror, for all Bengalis. So I had to leap over a mental barrier, erected through years of conditioning, to jump into a very sea of it. Silly petty-bourgeois things went through my head very briefly, such as how difficult it would be to get my mud-spattered clothes clean, get
myself
clean, in the pond at the end of the day, and would my clothes dry in the rain . . . Then I stepped in.

My feet immediately sank in to my ankles, then gradually to the bottom of my calf muscle. I clenched my toes. It was difficult to move: the mud embraced my feet and didn’t want to let go. It was a slight wrench every time I lifted them up, as the mud slucked itself into the mini-vacuums my feet were leaving behind. There was a small danger of slipping and unbalancing on the tread down, but my feet adjusted. The clay felt velvety, then there was a strange sensation of it gently tickling and caressing my feet. I almost giggled out loud. I was, for a moment, returned to an elementary, tactile pleasure from childhood: playing with mud. What, a moment before, had held a small charge of something to be avoided had now become so desirable that I wanted to roll about in it.

There were sacks of cow-dung fertiliser sitting on the aal bordering the plots. We brought them into the mud and each sack was emptied at intervals of about five to seven metres along the area. I had to clamp down my jaws and swallow a few times because the pungent smell made me want to retch, but even this I got used to after a few minutes. But my joy in the mud abated – walking calf-deep in rainwater and clayey soil was one thing, doing the same in soil freshly enriched with fertiliser was another. Once again we directed the bullock, now fitted with a huge horizontal stick in place of the ploughshare, to flatten out the clay and make the earth level throughout. After the fertiliser had been spread evenly, the stick was replaced with that many-tined rake and the earth was ploughed again to mix the cow-dung thoroughly, letting it reach the bottom layers. The rainwater rushed squelchingly into the gaps in the raked soil. The skies opened again.

Herons and cranes did their old man’s staccato walk through the fields, jerking their necks down to catch a worm or a fish, then resumed their odd gait – they seemed to lift their legs up a lot more than was necessary. They were intrepid, doing their thing cheek-by-jowl with our activities. As for the bullocks, they simply didn’t care about the presence of the birds, not even when they perched on their necks.