The Lives of Others (53 page)

She found her voice and shouted down at the women, ‘Don’t you feel any shame, coming here and spouting these unspeakable lies? Who has put you up to this? I know my son, and I’m not going to stand here listening to all this sewage. Get out of here, get out now!’

She turned around, expecting to find succour from someone in the house, but realised that all the menfolk had left. There was no one she could ask to take charge of things except Madan.

‘Madan,’ she called, going back inside. ‘Madan. See to the women outside. Two maidservants. Get rid of them immediately.’

Charubala sat down on the edge of her bed, panting. Chhaya was in the room too; neither could bring herself to look at the other. United in humiliation, each felt as if she had done something wrong and was being silently judged by the other person. Aeons passed as Madan went down, spoke to the two women, clanged the front gate shut and came upstairs. They strained to hear what was going on. Sounds of vehicle horns; people passing, talking, calling out; more people; a utensil-seller calling out her wares; a man selling toy flutes made out of bamboo and palm-leaves.

Then the screaming began. Not every single word could be heard from indoors, partly because of the way sound travelled through a competing wall of other sounds, partly because of a willed underhearing to protect themselves, but what filtered through was enough.

‘. . . didn’t care much about filth when fucking maidservants . . . may be poor, but we don’t have to put up with . . . go around from street to street, telling everyone . . .’

The woman shouting was on the further side of Basanta Bose Road; she had clearly been asked by Madan not to hang around outside the house. She raised her voice as she progressed through her litany, the escalation in volume and the accusations feeding off each other. Within minutes a small crowd had gathered: what could be more interesting than other people’s lives?

Charubala sensed rather than saw the people – strangers, neighbours, acquaintances, passers-by – assembling in a wide, loose circle around that vile, shrieking woman and felt that whirling dizziness again, this time accompanied by a spreading heat in her ears, her face, neck and arms. Chhaya seemed to have turned into stone.

Purnima came to the front room and asked, ‘Ma, there are some women standing outside, shouting. Is there some problem?’

Charubala shrank. A fantasy of disappearance pressed urgently against her.

On the third floor the two little boys, Supratik and Suranjan, attracted by the noise outside, ran to the verandah to see what was happening.

‘Look!’ Supratik said to his younger brother, ‘people are gathering around in a circle. A monkey-dance. Or maybe travelling players. There’ll be a circus.’

‘Where are monkeys?’ Suranjan asked.

‘Ufff, wait, they’ll come. That woman is announcing their arrival,’ Supratik replied, impatient at his five-year-old brother’s obtuseness.

But, wait, something about the pitch, the tone . . . He felt something was not quite joyous and entertaining here. There weren’t going to be any monkeys, or madaris setting up a tightrope and swinging their toddlers in a sack in huge, heart-dropping arcs. There was also something of the forbidden going on down there. Some of those words . . .

‘. . . think we don’t know why she tried to kill herself’ – then some incomprehensible word – ‘that’s what the lot of you . . .’

Sandhya rushed out to the verandah, swooped down on her two sons and shooed them inside, barking, ‘Go inside, you two monkeys, go on, go inside, nothing doing standing out here, listening to that rubbish.’

‘. . . see to it that the son of a whore is sodomised on the streets and left bleeding . . .’

Before the two boys ran inside reluctantly, Supratik took one last look at the street below: the number of people seemed to have swelled and everyone was looking at their house.

Suranjan was about to start bawling. ‘No, no, I want to see monkey-dance, I want to go downstairs and see monkey-dance.’

Sandhya turned and smacked him. ‘Not one word from you,’ she said.

The wailing burst like a ripe cloud. Supratik felt intimidated; it was unusual for his mother to be so short-tempered. He had better slink away and sit with his books to mollify her by pretending to study.

Drifts from the theatre downstairs were still audible: ‘. . . don’t think we don’t know . . . know it all . . . son of a pig . . . the whole lot of you will . . .’

Supratik felt a guilty thrill at the term of abuse he could recognise, ‘son of a pig’, but also, simultaneously, a tense deflation – were they the target of all these bad words?

In the front room on the first floor Charubala had started shaking.

At last Chhaya spoke, her voice emerging in a croak, ‘We should go to the back of the house.’ She leaped up and called out, ‘Madan-da, Madan-da. Shut all the doors and windows on all the floors right now.’

But the damage had been done. The great, roaring world outside – against that, what match were these transient bits of straw?

XII

– The Baruis haven’t seen your faces, Kanu said, trying to allay our fears. Or his own.

Then Shankar threw the bombshell. He said – Those farmers there tonight, they’re all friends, they won’t blab.

– How do you know? I asked, beginning to suspect something.

– We told them to be ready with weapons. And hide nearby. What if we needed help?

I was stunned into silence.

– You . . . you . . . told others? Dhiren managed to get out.

All those meetings in the still heart of the night in which the need for absolute secrecy was every other sentence spoken – all that had come to naught.

Kanu read our dismay and said – They’re our people, they’re one of us, they won’t tell anyone.

This was not the time to get into an argument, so I accepted their reassurances on the surface. I said – You shouldn’t have done it. Maybe we got lucky this time. We’ll see. What are we going to do when the police arrive? Or the men of the landlords?

Kanu – Don’t go out of the house. Hide inside. We’ll protect you.

At any other time I would have laughed at his naïvety, but instead I said – These are the police, Kanu, they can come inside any time.

Kanu pondered this for a while, then said – You guys leave the village now.

– What will happen to you?

– Two or four thwacks from the police’s lathi are nothing to us. But you need to leave now, light will soon begin to show in the sky.

They gave us beaten rice and cane molasses wrapped in a cloth bundle.

– Go, go, go now, they urged.

We tried to run – impossible to do this through stretches of bamboo groves – but once we reached the fields, we took long strides towards the jungle, hurrying in the direction from where we knew the police from Jhargram were going to enter Majgeria. But we were miles away from the road, on a parallel outlier, protected by trees. I didn’t know if I imagined this, but just as we made the edge where the trees began to get denser I heard the distant sound of motor-cars. The sky was pink and orange and pale yellow.

As we moved deeper into the forest, Dhiren said – I think I’m going to collapse, and he did exactly that, bending down to the forest floor and stretching himself out fully. Before Samir and I could say anything he was asleep. Looking at him, we realised that this was what we wanted to do too, immediately.

I didn’t know what woke me up. I had no idea what time it was and I could not see the sun in the sky. Sunlight only made it down through the tree cover in patches. I was cold and itching all over, I had the beginnings of a headache and I was completely parched. We had no water to drink, it dawned on me. I turned to Samir and Dhiren – they were curled in on themselves, snoring away. Mosquitoes had formed a flying colony above each of them. There were insects in Samir’s hair – not ants; I had no idea what they were – and Dhiren, still asleep, brushed off something annoying him in his beard, then around his nose, then again his beard, followed now by his ear . . . until he awoke, red-eyed and thrashing, swearing at the disturbance – Shala, killing me, these bloody insects . . .

I waited for him to ask the inevitable question before giving him the bad news.

Dhiren – Ufff, my chest is cracking with thirst.

– No water. They forgot to give us some and we forgot to ask.

– What are we going to do?

– Unlikely we’ll find water in a forest.

– But . . . but we’ll die!

– Don’t be silly. No one dies of thirst in twenty-four hours. We’ll be at Debdulal-da’s at night. If we set out as soon as it gets dark, we’ll be there in six to eight hours, maximum.

– But . . . but . . . we can’t walk for that length of time without any water!

– Here, have some of this, it’ll make you feel better.

I gave him the cloth bundle in which Kanu had given us molasses and beaten rice.

– Don’t devour it all. It’ll have to last the three of us until we reach Belpahari. Which is twenty hours from now, or thereabouts.

He began to swear, but gave up. There was nothing to be done.

When Samir woke up we made a half-hearted plan to go looking for water. He said – I’m sure there’s some stream or fountain in the forest.

There wasn’t a trace of hope in his voice. He said it because he felt he had to say something. Nobody got up to go on the water-finding mission.

Samir tried again – Listen, trees need water to survive. How can there be a forest without water? Elementary biology.

Dhiren said – Trees have deep root systems to draw water from the ground. Elementary biology, level two.

My headache was like somebody poking around in the soft tissue behind my right eye with a hot knitting needle. Samir said that he too was getting a headache.

The heat increased. We sweated and scratched and slapped the insects sitting or trying to land on us. Then we sweated and scratched our itches some more. Seventeen months in a hole of a village, where we had spent at least half of that time simply waiting for time to budge, had evidently not been entirely successful.

I said – Listen, guns or tangis or bombs won’t kill us, this waiting will.

Dhiren – It’s only time. It kills everyone.

– Yes, but eventually. This is slow, concentrated time, a huge dose of the poison in one go. It’ll kill us all soon.

Before long all this aimless conversation petered out. We tried to talk about important things, chief of which was the big problem facing us now: how to work in Majgeria from Belpahari. To walk for eight to nine hours from Belpahari at night, hide in Majgeria for the day, do a guerrilla action at night, hide in the forest, walk back again under the cover of night through the forest to Belpahari – this hardly seemed a feasible way of going about it. It would put paid to both revolution and revolutionaries.

Samir punctuated the half-hearted discussion at regular intervals with – I think I’ll die without some water.

I didn’t have the energy to move a finger, but sitting here, sweating and getting eaten by insects and thinking obsessively about the impossibility of moving forward and failing to come up with any solutions would make me go mad, so I began the search for water.

Dhiren said – We have to be careful with directions. We don’t want to set out on the wrong route after we come out of the forest at night.

It was this that constrained our search; not that we would have found a stream here. The thirst was not helping us think clearly. At some point we sat down and ate some more jaggery and flattened rice. My mouth was so parched that I had trouble swallowing the dry mass of chewed stuff. Dhiren became fixated on direction, not allowing us to move in anything other than a straight line headed one way only.

He said – Too many turnings and we’ll lose track of where we have to exit the forest to get to the road that takes us to Belpahari. He kept repeating this like someone demented.

Samir stopped complaining. The dehydration had ground us down. The food was over too. We had no idea how long it was to nightfall. Then I added eight hours to it, eight hours at least. It seemed an unpassable piece of time. I wanted to scream. Knowing we were going to get to its end didn’t make the process of getting there any more bearable.

We got to Debdulal-da’s at around two in the morning. I noticed later that this was not the kind of tiredness that I felt after a day’s harvest or halui, but the effect was the same – I felt inanimate, a machine with moving parts. There were lessons to be learned in this, but I couldn’t think of any that didn’t include the image of a water container. We couldn’t eat much of the rice and dal that Debdulal-da gave us – halfway through the night’s walk I thought I could easily manage to eat every brick of his house – but we drank three kunjos of water between us before we fell into a sleep much like I imagine death must be.

When we woke up it was around noon. Yesterday seemed insubstantial, something that didn’t happen, but was only thought. With that was gone the feeling that all the things we had gone through – exhaustion, hunger, thirst, despair – were of any moment at all. It all felt so trivial that, if the same were expected of me on that new day, I would do it in so far as my body would allow.

The dissection and analysis began in the evening. There were people present whom I’d never met, four of them, all from the AICCCR. I was amazed to hear how far the struggle had advanced in Mushahari in Bihar – apparently, responding to the AICCCR’s call given on
15
th August last year, hundreds of peasants had seized the autumn harvest and fought pitched battles for days with the police and the landlords’ men. I asked about the ultimate outcome – who won? how? what was the casualty on the side of the peasants and their leaders? – but the talk moved on to the even greater success story of Lakhimpur in Uttar Pradesh and, of course, the beacon of our movement, Srikakulam: mass actions, creation of bases, dozens of landlords annihilated, land reclaimed, crops seized . . . my head reeled. They had managed to move on from isolated, small guerrilla incidents to full-blown peasant uprisings. How, how, how? I knew that some of the retelling was a bit optimistic; I’d done it myself when writing reports for
Liberation
and
Deshabrati
. I felt a flash of envy burn quickly thorough me.