The Lives of Others (65 page)

Ajit said, ‘It’s like daytime. So much light! You don’t get to see this in the city.’

‘On a full-moon night during a power outage, if you walk the streets of your neighbourhood in Kankurgachhi, you will get the same effect,’ Shekhar quipped.

Ajit replied by breaking full-throatedly into a Tagore song: ‘On this full-moon night, everyone has gone to the forest . . .’ The bottle of rum they were sharing in the garden of their guesthouse had not yet begun to tell in the melody. Whatever his friends made of Ajit’s aesthetic impulses, they always fell respectfully silent when he sang; he had a beautiful voice and had had singing lessons throughout his childhood.

Faint drumbeats, sometimes near, at others distant, carried over in the air in a way that confused the men about their source and direction. When the percussion became more pronounced, it created such a rhythmic dissonance with the song that Ajit stopped before reaching its end.

‘What do you think they are celebrating?’ he asked.

‘Who knows?’ Shekhar said. ‘Do you think this is a regular thing with them?’

‘No idea,’ Ajit said.

Were they dancing? Was that woman part of the carousing? That was Somnath’s only thought. The caramelly taste of the rum turned to a sourish sugar in his mouth.

‘I know you’re going to disagree with me,’ Ajit now said, ‘but I find these tribal people really innocent and pure. Qualities we city-dwellers have lost.’

‘No, mairi, you’re totally right,’ Shekhar said. ‘They have no money, no jobs, no solid houses, yet look how happy they are. They sing, dance, laugh all the time, drink alcohol, all as if they didn’t have a single care in the world.’

‘And we, who have everything, are weighed down with anxiety, illness, tension, worry, from cradle to grave,’ Ajit finished his friend’s thought.

Shekhar asked, ‘Really, you have everything?
Everything
?’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘But
everything
?’ Shekhar persisted.

‘Ah, I keep telling you, it was a way of putting things. Stop harping on that one note.’

Shekhar would not be budged. He had caught something between his teeth and he would not let go now. ‘But
everything
?’ he repeated. ‘Do you have a girlfriend?’

Ajit tried to ignore this; best not to encourage Shekhar, who was probably well on his way to getting sozzled, which would explain this resurgence of the bullying. ‘The less one owns in life,’ he said, ‘the happier one is. Santhals = few worldly possessions = happiness. Ajit & Shekhar & Somnath = family and friends and home and expectations and responsibility = sorrow. Straightforward equation.’

‘Don’t forget Santhal women = beauty,’ Somnath interjected.

‘Do you have a huge family house like Somnath does?’ Shekhar asked. ‘Three cars? A fleet of servants?’

Ajit clenched his teeth. ‘Has the rum gone to your head?’

‘A wife? A son?’ Shekhar continued, following his own train of thought as if the aimless convivial chit-chat had turned into a monologue; his interlocutor had disappeared.

Ajit returned to his old tack. ‘Innocence belongs to these tribal people,’ he said. ‘They are closer to the pure state of mankind than we are, less corrupted, more noble.’

Somnath had only a small part of his mind on the increasingly drunken conversation of his two friends, participating absent-mindedly. He heard the splattering stream of one of them pissing against a bush, so loud in the surrounding stillness that it felt slightly obscene. He wanted to concentrate solely on the sound, which was no longer dispersed in the night air in intermittent shreds and patches, but was continuing louder, he felt, in his pumping heart.

The air was mazed again with that very rhythm the following afternoon. In the market place there was a sizeable crowd – where did so many people come from? – that seemed to swell as the afternoon deepened from white to gold. In a clearing at the edge of a field, where the human habitations gave way to open space, a circle of Santhal men and women, linked to each other with their arms across their neighbours on either side, expanded and contracted to the unerring rhythm of a drum, with the grace of a dream. On the red soil they formed at one moment a small ring, then, at another moment, obeying the syncopations of the drummer, a larger one. Somnath thought of a bud blooming into a day-long flower, then collapsing into a shrivelled prepuce at the beginning of nightfall. Expanding and contracting, expanding and contracting. The men and women bowed as they moved inward, then lifted their heads up on the outward move. The effect, unfurling to the repetitive drumbeats, was hypnotic.

He wrenched his eyes off the collective harmony of the dance to search for his Santhal girl, but had trouble picking her out – all the women were wearing flowers in their hair. And then he saw her, an ebony figure of perfect grace and form, her skin strangely luminous in its contrast with the dark-red cloth that she had wrapped around herself, leaving so much of her legs and body unencumbered. The thuds in his heart outpaced the drumbeats. He followed the circumference of the dancing circle until he stood diagonally behind his girl at a distance of a few feet, part of a looser circle of the audience gathered to watch. Then, suddenly, the mesmeric hold broke, the harmonic duet between the drum and his heart snapped. An immense hunger seemed to be devouring him, a hunger exacerbated by all this nibbling away at the scene in front of him with only his eyes; he wanted a different kind of assuaging.

Someone was shaking him by his shoulder, offering him something. He turned around. It was Shekhar, holding out what looked like a pint-bottle.

‘They’re selling mahua,’ he said. ‘Have some. It’s killer stuff, not what I was expecting it to be.’

Somnath took a swig, swallowed and nearly choked. The liquor had a burning, laboratorial quality to it. It tasted of putrefaction. He grimaced and asked, ‘What were you expecting?’

‘Well, doesn’t the name lead you to believe it will be something fragrant and honeyed?’

‘
Fragrant and honeyed
,’ Somnath mimicked. ‘Man, you’ve been infected by Ajit’s poetry bug. Come on, give us another swig.’ It was a desperate attempt to swagger and fall into the comfortable macho camaraderie of their usual intercourse; he felt he had to keep his distracting, consuming hunger sheltered from the gaze of his friends.

The drumbeats stopped; the dance had ended. There were hundreds of people jostling and milling around. A man was selling tin whistles, another one pinwheels, yet another gaudily painted bamboo baskets. Somnath noticed at least two groups gambling. Ajit seemed to have been swallowed by the crowd. Somnath turned to Shekhar and said, ‘Do you think you can get me another bottle of mahua?’

‘Yes, no problem. They’re selling it in that shack over there.’

‘Why don’t you give me this bottle and you go get a new one? I’ll be right here. Here, take some money,’ Somnath said, pulling a few crumpled notes out of the pocket of his trousers. ‘Will you be able to find me? It’s so bloody crowded, people are eating each other’s heads . . .’

‘Of course. But don’t you move from here, otherwise I’ll lose you,’ Shekhar said, handing Somnath the pint-bottle, still nearly half-full of the fiery liquid.

As soon as Shekhar’s back was turned Somnath wheeled round and lost himself in the crowd. He had to find her; this was not even a village, more like a hamlet; he could find her without any difficulty; she would still be with her tribespeople, for the dance had ended only a few minutes earlier. After a few restless minutes of pushing through the press of people, he discovered her, sitting with other Santhals. It took him some time to work out that they were getting drunk in a silent and focused way. That aimless mirth, the inexplicable, fluid joy, were all gone, yet the concentration seemed desultory. There was a core of hopelessness to it, even perhaps of despair.

Somnath stood beside her and said, ‘Ei, ei, are you listening?’ to draw her attention; he did not know her name and it embarrassed him.

She looked up, smiled sleepily and turned away, her attention engaged more by the bottle doing the rounds. In the final blaze of twilight the flower in her hair glowed. Soon it would be dark; he found the thought oddly comforting. Run through with that thought, indivisible from it, were the words he spoke next, almost in a whisper, to her, ‘Come with me, I’ve got more of the stuff with me, you don’t have to share with anyone.’

The man and the woman on either side of her turned round along with her. This time her smile had a little bit more interest in it. She tried to stand up, failed, leaned against the man, who continued to stare at Somnath. Somnath knelt down to be level with her.

She giggled and asked, ‘You give me liquor? Where is it? Show me!’

Somnath brandished the bottle and said, ‘There’s more.’

The staring man now said to Somnath, ‘You bring the liquor here, she won’t go with you.’

Somnath looked at him with contempt and said to the girl again, ‘Come.’

The man answered, ‘No, she won’t.’

Showing some spark for the first time, the girl let loose a shower of incomprehensible words to the man. He retorted with equal eloquence. This resulted in a veritable fusillade from her. Somnath watched with bemusement; even the seemingly heated exchange appeared to him to be oddly dotted with their habitual languor. Or was that the effect of the stuff they were drinking? A fair few of them seemed to be half-asleep, some swaying gently, others with their drooping heads nearly touching the earth. No one seemed to be paying much attention to this corner where a sudden display of energy was playing out. Except for the woman who was sitting on the other side of the girl. She called out to someone and said something that led to another woman, on the opposite arc of the circle, letting out a titter, then a few slurred words, and finally a giggle, before she fell back into the doziness that had taken over the group.

Then, surprising Somnath, the girl got up, teetered for a bit, steadied herself and said to him, ‘Let’s go. You buy me some liquor.’

Somnath leaped up and handed her his half-empty bottle. She took a swig, two swigs, passed the bottle back to him and in the same forward motion her upper body keeled towards him and fell against his chest. His free hand instinctively reached out to steady her. He held her elbow first, then her arm. Her warm skin was like an electric shock through his fingers. She disengaged herself, or maybe he foolishly encouraged her to do it; the contact was all over in a few seconds, but Somnath felt feverish from it. Was that moment of unbalanced lungeing a calculated move or was the unsteadiness an effect of the drinking? He would never know. She kept drifting in and out of a mild trance, not far removed from her slow, wakeful manner. This made it easy, even imperative, for Somnath to keep touching her so that she would not fall.

He finished off the remnants of the mahua in one big draw from the bottle and winced; it was not as bad as the first time. The thought of touching his lips to the rim of the bottle that had just been in her mouth mitigated some of the rotting taste. He felt a momentary quickening that was at odds with her swaying lethargy. He was trying to lead her to the forest he had walked in yesterday.

Suddenly the dark came down, swift as the falling of a mantle. Somnath had a brief sense of being caught in a wildly erratic flow of time, scrambled into sudden, unpredictable elongations and compressions, then that feeling left him too; he fell into a warp. How long had she been saying to him, ‘Ei, babu, the forest is in that direction, you said you give me liquor. That is in the other direction’? Then he was almost dragging her to the sheltering dark of the trees. Was he? Was he not simply supporting her in her inebriated condition? If she did not want to go with him, why was she not resisting? Why did
he
feel pulled along? How pliant she seemed. There was a moon now, low in the sky, again an enormous orange coin with a tiny, tiny bit from one side pared off. Was it waxing or waning? He felt puissant like a nocturnal predator. And then he sensed that the forest was around them. When had they entered it? How much time had elapsed? He thought of the mahua – his first time ever on that strong stuff, no wonder it had so gone to his head.

She said, ‘Ei, babu, you take me to Calcutta, give me a job?’

‘A job? I’ll make you my queen!’

She giggled and asked, ‘You speak truly?’ Then, again, ‘Where is the liquor? You said you give me some.’

He would never tire of the meandering lines of her speech, the way she elided Bengali and Hindi together.

‘Babu, the forest is dark. You come back with me.’

‘No, let’s stay here. My eyes have got used to the dark.’ He pulled her close to him. He felt her resist him, first weakly, then with increasing force. She was no meek, wilting flower, she was a tribal woman; these people had the strength of wild animals. It excited him, this promise of a tussle first.

The forest floor was crackly under their feet. They had entered a new world, where a wholly different order of sonic smudges brought it into its eerie being. It had the temporary effect of diverting his focus away from the demands of his pounding blood. A small creature went scurrying, setting off a series of rustling noises as if it were moving under an armour of dry leaves worn over its body. There was what he took to be the call of a night-bird, a long whirring ending with a
tick-tick-tick
, an unnerving sound. Its very unearthliness underscored the immediate matter; he was returned to the business at hand again. He had his hand on her arm like the grip of a feral beast’s jaw. Some atavistic instinct had perhaps warned him that she knew the forest much better than he, was its denizen and, if released, could run away, never to appear within his orbit again. His dark-adapted eyes could make out the trunks of trees, as darker pillars embedded in the matrix of the dark of night, then understood there was enough diffuse moonlight breaking through the cover of the forest to enable a form of night-vision.

The girl had stopped speaking. He had heard that these promiscuous tribal women had insatiable desires; they were at it all the time, with whoever approached them. The moment was now. As if on cue, a night-bird, a different one this time, emitted a loud, metallic
chaunk, chaunk, chaunk
in an unstoppable run and startled him out of his skin. He tried to ease her to the ground, but she was having none of it.