The Lives of Others (40 page)

‘I shall no longer be able to . . . how should I put it . . . keep an eye on him, Ghosh-babu,’ SP Dhar had said, exuding a novel mixture of power, arrogance and ingratiation. ‘You can see how tottering the United Front government is. The last one survived less than a year. God knows who’s going to come after Ajay-babu. He’s back again after President’s Rule, but for how long, do you think? The communists are the ones pulling all the strings now. And in power . . . What I’m saying is this: it’s going to be difficult to . . . to . . . er . . . shield your son. Playing with fireworks on College Street, shouting slogans, that’s one thing, but going on a killing spree, taking out policemen and landlords in the villages . . . well, that’s a big boy’s game, wouldn’t you agree? A completely different thing.

‘And we, the police, seem to be the targets in the city too. Not a day passes when there isn’t a bomb thrown at us by these good middle-class, fish-and-rice-fed boys who have turned terrorist,’ he had said with a different tone to his voice, as if through clenched teeth. ‘We won’t tolerate this state of affairs for too long. Something’s got to give, and give soon.’

Over the years, the Ghoshes had tried to cultivate and maintain a good relationship with the police; gifts, not all nominal or token, sweeteners, things to keep them happy and on their side. It was Prafullanath’s old advice: ‘It is important to be on good terms with them, because you don’t know when they’re going to come in handy. They say, “Eighteen sores when touched by a tiger, but fifty-eight if by the police.” Don’t forget that.’ They started with their local police station and made their way up to Lalbazar and the CID. At no time had that piece of wisdom seemed more pertinent than in the last few years. What would they have done without friendly policemen in the first gherao at their factory? One manager, Ashoke Ganguly at Bali, had had to leave. It was only the arrival of the police that had broken the gherao and saved Ashoke-babu’s life.

Now SP Dhar, a significant portion of his oily jowls and distended belly caused by the Ghoshes’ contribution to them, had told Adinath – and there was no reason to doubt his words – that his eldest son, the scion of the family, was a Naxalite. Or had he been asking for his palm to be crossed with more silver? The policeman had tiny eyes, the eyes of a hippopotamus, eyes that looked minuscule in the animal’s leaking-out-of-its-frame build. They were eyes that even his own shadow could not trust.

The tricky business had been to keep the news from the women and children in the house. Priyo could be trusted to keep it to himself, but Bhola was the loose cannon. No information was safe with him. What Adi could count on was the power of denial: the word ‘Naxalite’ was like leprosy; it turned you into an untouchable instantly; no one would want to come anywhere near it.

The whisky has begun to give him sour eructations. It burns slightly as it goes down and sits, tingling, somewhere behind his sternum. A Naxalite son. There is no recovery from that. The shame . . . they will have to move from Bhabanipur to a place where no one knows them, where rumours and whispers cannot reach their new neighbours. It feels like he is standing at the edge of an ocean and must swim across, beyond the horizon, to the other side that cannot be seen.

How can he bring himself to tell his parents of SP Dhar’s visit? The last time Adi had to confront his father with something unpalatable, it had all blown up in Adi’s face.

Adi will never forget the evening, just under a year ago, when everyone had heard his frail father berating him viciously after the closure of Basanta, the spin-off publishing house that Bhola, useless as the finance director of Charu Paper, the parent company, had been entrusted to look after.

‘It took me twenty-five years to build, twenty-five years of every drop of my blood and sweat to set this up, and from the moment you joined the company you let things slide. I should’ve known better. I should’ve trusted my instinct that you were useless, totally worthless. Not an ounce of business nous, not a whit of interest. This was all written on my forehead.’

His mother had interrupted him, ‘Don’t shout like that, please don’t, your heart, your heart! Go inside now.’

‘What can I do if Bhola ruined the whole publishing venture by backing those unsellable poets and novelists, which was tantamount to standing on a street corner and giving money away?’ Adi bleated. The feeling of emasculation was intolerable: at the age of forty-seven he was being upbraided by his father for that quintessentially childhood thing – the faults of his younger siblings.

‘Giving money away,’ his father mimicked. ‘How old are you? Four? And how old is Bhola? Are you toddlers squabbling over who is taking whose sweeties away?
Standing on a street corner and giving money away
. . . you stupid, ineffective eunuch!’

No one had heard his father like this, not in public.

‘Why are you shouting at me for Bhola’s failure?’ Adi had fought back. ‘He held soirées and adda sessions instead of working and gave money away to people he called “promising young talent”, basically, to anyone who came asking. Do you know how much he has frittered away like this? Do you know?’

A devil had possessed Adi; the streamer of retaliatory rage coming out of his mouth seemed unstoppable. ‘And what gives you the right to talk about eunuchs? You are responsible for driving Charu Paper into the ground. You, you,’ he had accused, stabbing the air, with his finger pointed at his father, with each ‘you’.

Charubala’s attempt to calm matters came out as highly pitched. ‘How dare you?’ she said to Adi. ‘Don’t shout at him, can’t you see he’s ill? Can’t you see he’s shaking? Something terrible will happen now.’

The hysteria had only encouraged Adi: ‘How long will he hide behind his illness? The illness was two, three years ago. We’re cleaning up
his
’ – the pronoun spat out, like venom – ‘mess now, the mess
he
created with
his
project of modernising the factory at Memari. That was the beginning of our end. And he has the cheek to blame me and Bhola for it. How dare he?’

The new machines for the aged and nearly obsolete units arrived at Kidderpore Docks seventeen months after their order, in 1958: a turbo separator; a huge new drying section to replace the dying dinosaur that was holding everything back at Memari; a new press section that would supposedly create a seamless join between the mould and the Fourdrinier parts; and, finally, the drives arrangements to bind old and new together. They had reached the end with their standard practice of replicating parts for the cylinder-mould machine, and anything else that required replacement, in what they grandly called their ‘Research & Development Wing’, a large, corrugated iron-and-asbestos barn. For ten years, the head of R&D, Prajwal Sarkar, some kind of a wizard of make-do, had visited mills more modern than his own workplace to spy and copy their machines, or had prevailed on the Ghoshes to pay for information from people who worked in these factories. It didn’t take anyone of exceptional business nous to see that this method, while ingenious in the short term, could not be relied upon indefinitely. Prafullanath wanted to upgrade the technology of the smaller mill first and, depending on how things went, eventually turn his attention to the far bigger project of modernising Bali.

Quite apart from the enormous investment needed for this, there was the great labyrinth of regulation to negotiate first. The new foreign-trade laws of the country meant that a licence had to be obtained to import the machines and they could only be imported as prototypes to be used to construct, by imitation, similar models with home technology and home resources. ‘Licence’ was, of course, a euphemism for bribing a chain of employees in the bureaucracy juggernaut set up for issuing these permits. The cost of greasing the requisite number of palms was a not inconsiderable percentage of the expenditure in buying and importing the machines, and businessmen were beginning to get into the practice of factoring this into their informal accounting, for whatever licence it was they wanted, be it the import of foreign technology or sanction to run a transport or liquor or retail business.

But this bribe was a fluid, moving, protean creature: the number of people with their palms open to receive first and facilitate afterwards always increased, so that the figure factored in, even if it was thought to be overestimated, was found to be, in reality, always short. The Ghoshes had begun the conversation about technology in 1950 and then spent six years obtaining a permit to import, despite spending a fortune in bribes at every step during this period.

It had taken over a year to settle on two German machines from Nettlinger-Kilb in Hamburg, and two from W.H. Cottrall in England. The managers of the state-owned banks that the family used had long been friendly with the Ghoshes, but even they baulked at the sums involved in the purchase and shipping. Adi and Priyo had signed off on the relevant papers, but they were soon to find out exactly how the complex and huge loans had been secured. In this, their inattention to detail had allowed Prafullanath to circumvent any theoretical opposition from his sons.

The new machines had the power and design to stay ahead of the competition in the Indian market for the foreseeable future. Or so Prafullanath had said; otherwise, Adi would not have known a thing about it.

Those endless evenings at home over dinner, with their father droning on: ‘You know, this new turbo separator, the drill screen is between 1.8 and 2.8 milimetres. Ours belong to ancient times, we really need to get a new one to deal with all the new impurities. How long are we going to carry on with that relic? What do you say?’

Adi’s eyes had closed with boredom as he clamped down his jaws on a yawn. He had said something cursory, like ‘Yes, you’re right’, or some such.

The notification for the arrival of the imported machines at the docks came through. After more bribing, the machines were released; it took a year between their arrival at Kidderpore Docks and their transportation to Memari. From this point, Adi firmly believed, a particular alignment of planets and heavenly bodies occurred to cast maximal malign influence on the Ghoshes. It began with Prajwal-da informing them that a sectional drive had the wrong gearbox and helical parallel shaft, so the revolution systems of two of the units, instead of being synchronised, were slightly off. Work stalled at Memari for a year while this was fixed. The plant couldn’t carry on using its older machines and continue production, since they had been dismantled to allow the fitting of the new.

The foreign machines had been ordered in 1956, just before the family tragedy, a piece of timing that was to prove crucial in the undoing that followed. Prafullanath’s rapid deterioration in health following the tragedy meant that he was laid up in bed, having survived what the doctor’s called a ‘massive cardiac arrest’, and everyone was under strict orders to protect him from trouble, anxiety and stress. The whole mess was left to Adi and Priyo to sort out, a thing they did not succeed in doing with any degree of competence or even a thin, superficial professionalism.

Prafullanath, his sons discovered, had not done a rigorous, watertight and airtight costing for the upgrade to new technology, and the cost-benefit analysis, or what there was of it, was so far out, in both columns, that their heads reeled. Who would have thought that this had emerged from the head of someone who had been a successful businessman for thirty years? It did not, for example, take into account the substantial amount of money that had to be paid by way of bribes to acquire a permit. More critically, there was no accounting for the interest on the loans during the period of stasis, from the time of ordering to the beginning of enhanced production at Memari, a period of five years; the enhanced production still remained a mirage, having gone up by only 20 TPD. Why had Baba not thought of something as elementary as a risk calculation, assuming a fixed period of servicing the debt while the plant lay idle? How had he arrived at those hugely inflated production figures? Adi and Priyo would keep returning to those questions.

Two things with the power to scrunch Prafullanath’s plans into a shapeless paper bag had not occurred to his myopic mind. First, there was a thriving market in second-hand parts and units for existing technology – they did the job – so importing the latest machines at such cost seemed criminally profligate. Second, the well-established paper manufacturers in the country – the competition, that is – had played the game with older machines for so long that there appeared to be no clear advantage to what Prafullanath was setting out to do. The projected benefits column alone was a staggering piece of wishful thinking, on a par with fairytales and children’s stories. In it, Prafullanath had fantasised that a loan of the size they had taken out could be repaid in seven years.

Seven! Adi had gaped at the number; it wouldn’t be possible to dent appreciably the compound interest alone in that time. The returns should have been realistically projected so far into the future that they wouldn’t begin to break even in Baba’s lifetime, perhaps not even in his and Priyo’s. Besides, Charu Paper was too small, almost a cottage industry, to have the capacity or the capability to manufacture replacement sections for those machines. Who was going to do it? Prajwal Sarkar was a man of the past; manufacturing parts belonging to machines he had dealt with for three decades was an activity that belonged to the backward past. How could he bring that same inventiveness to the latest technology from Germany and England, to the objects of the future, in what he affectionately called his ‘machine kitchen’?