The Lives of Others (39 page)

Dhiren said that a group of a dozen or fourteen had set out with their ploughs to look for potato cultivations in places as far-flung as Nadia and Murshidabad and Bankura because they couldn’t find enough work locally to feed themselves and their families.

At least they were not migrating to cities. I had seen for myself how the migrant workers were slowly extinguished, crushed to death by the jaws of the city; working, yes, but in such jobs that we would have to find a word other than ‘life’ for what they had. Very few of them got lucky and found a better life.

Madan-da would be one such fortunate one. Ma and Thakuma were not exactly forthcoming or clear with details about Madan-da’s life before he came to us, and I had never asked Madan-da myself, but from what I could piece together, he was from a tiny village in a particularly impoverished district in Orissa. The same story: drought, famine, death, failure of crops year after year, no hope, nothing. The lucky ones were those who escaped this, found a better kind of job in a city, sent money home, moved their families into a brick house. In that scheme of things, Madan-da had been the luckiest; or, if you prefer, he sat right on top of the ladder of people who sought a livelihood in cities.

But nine out of ten of those leaving their villages in the hope of making a better life for themselves faced exactly the opposite fate. After having lived in Majgeria for a while, I was no longer sure if migrating to urban areas was such a terrible thing.

The tufty fronds of the grain-heads had begun to show. We were being steam-cooked in the humid heat of late September.

The weaver-birds were beginning their plunder again. Harvest soon. This time I hoped to be less of an embarrassment to myself and to others.

It’s been a year since I left home. You are a constant presence in me, so I won’t ask after you – it feels like I’m talking to you inside my head all the time – but I also think of Ma, Sona and Kalyani. I dreamed of Ma the other night. In the dream I was famished, craving food, and she was serving me dinner, but when I looked down at the plate and the bowls I found only ashes, heaps of black, burnt scraps. I looked at her with confusion and I saw her laughing, as if in contempt. I was seized by a great anger then, my heart was hammering away, and I began to shout at her, and the more I shouted, the more defiantly amused and uncaring she became. She was laughing at me. I wanted to be violent, to do some harm to her . . . and then the mad thumping in my chest woke me up. I could hear the beats in the first sweaty moments of wakefulness. Above that thudding rose the billows of my anger still. And then shame, deep shame and confusion at the content of such a stealthy revelation: did I really harbour such resentment towards someone who loved me so vastly and unconditionally?

And what news of Sona? Yes, he does look like Chhoto-kaka, but that’s where the similarity ends. How detached he is from everything! Occasionally I used to think that there was something not quite right with him, but most of the time I was envious. That resilience to the outside world, that capacity of not being damaged, even lightly scratched, by it – what wouldn’t I give to be blessed with that? Although you’ve often complained that I
am
like that, indifferent to the world, hard, stony. Did you mean that seriously? You know that I’m not. Not to you.

We were in the middle of harvest when Dhiren informed us that Bipul’s brother, Shankar Soren, whom we had assumed was slightly better off than Bipul because he had a tiny plot, had had to give up his entire harvest to Senapati Nayek, a small landlord who owns about twenty-five to thirty bighas.

This was the story. There was a drought in ’
65
, then a mini-famine in ’
66
, and Shankar’s plot lay empty for those two years. Then his wife fell ill and he had to borrow money from Senapati – it was an informal side-business that most landlords had, to earn a little extra something, or to manoeuvre themselves into ever more powerful, ever more advantageous positions – for buying food and for his wife’s treatment. Senapati, instead of asking Shankar to mortgage his little piece of land, which was the usual practice, gave him
400
rupees; Shankar would have to pay him back nearly
600
rupees by the end of the year. It was impossible for Shankar to do this because his plot had produced nothing for two years running. If he could grow something there and sell it (instead of consuming it, as he normally did), he thought, perhaps he could pay some of the loan back, so he borrowed more money from Senapati to buy a bag of seeds to sow in his plot. The repayment of this loan was to be the amount of paddy cultivated that would theoretically pay off the loan
and
the interest, but Senapati had done something wilier than that straightforwardly exploitative arithmetic. He bought up Shankar’s harvest at half the market rate, thus alienating the poor man of his entire produce while giving him the illusion that he was repaying the whole sum he had borrowed.

Senapati then reminded him that there was still the interest on the loan of seed-grains to be serviced; his harvest had only paid off
part
of the loan, not to mention the principal, plus the accruing interest on the previous loan for food and medical bills for his wife’s illness . . .

This year Shankar woke up to the fact that while the interest on the loans, both money and seed, would go on increasing, his crop yield and his labour were both finite and would never be enough to clear his debts. He would be nibbling away at it for his whole life, then one day he would die, the size of the debt
greater
after a lifetime of trying to bring it down to zero and free himself.

The realisation led him to vent his anger and frustration on the nearest person – his wife. He beat her regularly, blaming her and her illness for landing him in this situation, with this mountain of debt on his shoulders, until things got out of hand and Shankar’s wife threw herself into the well in the Muslim neighbourhood and killed herself.

The story was common and universal. The Bengali novel had played its part in making it a matter of common and universal knowledge to the literate middle classes. So no surprises there. But the twist appeared at this point.

Dhiren said – A dry-as-stick figure, this Shankar, you know. He looks like a shrivelled broom. You realise he doesn’t get enough to eat the moment you set eyes on him. Do you know what I did when I heard the story, when I saw that all the grain he was standing in, literally, was not going to feed him, or get him money, and the wages from his work too were not going to come to him, but be deducted by Senapati, do you know what I did?

Even through our exhaustion the tale had filtered through, I didn’t quite know why: there was something in the way the story had been told, in the sixth sense we had that Dhiren was withholding something that he would spring on us towards the end . . . We were sitting up, quiet as children being told a ghost-story, almost unable to breathe, with Dhiren asking repeatedly – Do you know what I did?

He answered himself – I moved close to Shankar; there were so many people around, I moved close to him, brought my mouth near his ear and whispered: What if we finish off this Senapati man?

We were still holding our breath.

– It took a long time to get the real meaning of this through to Shankar. He began by saying: If I could, I’d tear out his windpipe . . . But he said this as part of the twist-and-turn of conversation, responding in kind to what he thought was just a way of speaking . . .

I couldn’t bear it any longer. I leaped up and asked – What next? What next?

– I said to him: We can tear out his windpipe, truly truly, it can be arranged. Shankar then started to put two and two together and asked: You are the men from the city who our people have been talking to? Saying that we can have our land back? Not be slaves any more? Eat two full-stomach meals every day? So I said yes, and I told him that we were going to plan this seriously, he needn’t fear, no one would know . . .

CHAPTER TEN

1969

SURANJAN SLUMPS SLOWLY
sideways like a timber pillar showing the first gentle sign of collapse. His chin almost touches his chest. The crumpled rectangle of the silver foil, blackened now, from the Wills Filter packet, the short straw made out of rolled-up card, the match burned to a long black curl with a tiny pale end, a minute ago all bound to him in such a fierce concentration of unison, now fall from his loosened hold; the cohering force keeping human and object together has been suddenly dissipated. His eyes too have shut. The brown sugar will keep him in this trance for a good couple of hours, but this calibration of time means nothing to him in this state; it could be two minutes or two years. In the beginning he would have marvelled at identifying the perfect fit between the act and the term, ‘chasing’; at how the tiny heap of brown powder placed on the flattened-out piece of foil and heated from below with a match became a smoking trickle of liquid running down the length of the silver or gold paper and how you had to ‘chase’ the smoke down the course of that miniature rivulet on its silver lawn; he would have wondered with awe at the inherent poetry of heroin, at the deep wisdom of those who were the drug’s acolytes and servers.

But those days of child-like wonder are behind him now. The poetry has been parsed, the mythologising has become a bit passé; they had been shiny sweeties to lure the child in. Now he has come of age. The first few times he had taken smack, all in the company of Bappa-da and his friends, he had been sick; not the racked-with-convulsions kind of vomiting, but a really easy sort, as easy and natural as breathing or seeing or hearing; just lean over sideways and throw up, then let the opiates suck you into their vortex. He had also felt his face itch agonisingly.

‘It’s the impurities in the smack,’ Bappa-da had said. ‘Don’t worry, it’ll go soon. Soon you won’t feel anything but perfect, unending bliss.’

He had been right, certainly about the ‘perfect’, though not the ‘unending’. The bliss is becoming increasingly mortal, its life-expectancy inside him decreasing with a frightening exponentiality. Time is such an assassin. How fugitive all the pleasures of the world are; so much to hold on to, so much transience, he had begun to think a while ago, but had never managed to get to the end of that philosophising. That was the other thing about smack – it did not allow you to finish things. Everything kept hanging, his days and hours and thoughts all an agglomeration of loose ends like an amateurish piece of knitting unravelling.

In the beginning brown sugar offered him the cushioniest, velvetiest ocean of support; instant relief from the multiplying anxieties of his life in the form of oblivion. And there were so many. He had felt lost in a labyrinth of those jagged edges of reality – a missing brother; a father sinking into alcoholic inertia every day; a mother who had checked out of life; escalating squabbling between his aunt and his grandmother. Then there was the diminishment of the family’s source of prosperity (now firmly erstwhile): the destruction of Charu Paper in slow degrees, for which his grandfather and his father and uncles blamed each other. He had known only this falling-off, an inexorable downward slide, each year of his advancing life measured by shrinkage, by more bitterness amongst the family members, more economising, more tension.

Bappa-da had once explained Marx to him. ‘All superstructures, including the family, rest on the base of one thing, and one thing only – economics. The family is the first and the primary unit of oppression and exploitation. Freud too agrees with this, although his take on it is different. From what you’ve told me about what’s going on in your home, we have living proof of Marx’s theories. You take away economic security and the whole pack of cards collapses. Everyone is at each other’s throats. All these vaunted bourgeois values that prop up society – love, duty, honour, respect – all rest on power-relations lubricated by economics. They are the gloss people put on the naked truth: self-interest. Hypocrites, the lot of them, fucking hypocrites! Here, have a toke, you’ll feel better.’

And he did. But, of late, that ocean of comfort had shrunk from a sea to a river to a shallow brook; a stream of piss seemed not so unlikely in the near future. The only way back to keeping afloat in that ocean he had experienced in the beginning was through more and more frequent hits. So here he is, slumped on the bathroom floor, his back against the wall opposite the tap. His temporary, small ocean. Not brown sugar, not only that, but disappointing sugar, betraying sugar.

He has no idea how long the sound has been going, but it hauls him up to the shore ultimately, a dull banging first, then, quickly, not so dull; someone is hammering on the bathroom door. Is he imagining it? His eyes close again and there is such a forceful tug away from where he has been beached back to the shallows. But the banging will not go away.

Now he hears a vocal accompaniment too. It is his father, he identifies eventually, shouting outside the bathroom, ‘Open the door! Open up immediately!’

There are several stages beyond exhaustion, beyond complete, meltdown fatigue, for which there are no words. Or at least not any known to Adinath. Contrary to the images and vocabulary of dullness and extinguishing, he feels it as a malignant incandescence. The click inside that whisky brings him, the click that presages the eventual falling into a feather bed, has become elusive; it is deferred further and further to a shifting point that Adinath fears he will not reach any longer. The journey to that click has become fearsome because of the uncertainty in ever reaching that destination.

He can even pinpoint the turning point in that journey: ever since Superintendent Dhar from Bhabanipur police station had informed him that they had evidence Supratik was a Naxalite, and that he was somewhere in Medinipur, engaged in terrorism – that was the word the Superintendent had used, ‘terrorism’, that and ‘extremist’ – and things were going to move outside the Superintendent’s control soon.