The Lives of Others (76 page)

Madan-da had come running to pick up the bawling child in his arms and had put Mercurochrome on his skinned knees and elbows.

‘Eeeesh, eeeesh, poor little baby’ – Supratik can hear Madan-da’s voice in his head – ‘it’ll be all right, all fine. Here, look, here’s the magic red medicine, I’ll put it here, and here, and there, look; I can see it healing as we speak, the red medicine is spreading its goodness all over the little cuts, eeesh, eeesh . . .’

Red medicine. At the age of nine or ten, Supratik had discovered that Madan-da couldn’t get his tongue round the complicated name, Mercurochrome, so he called it ‘red medicine’ instead. He had tried to teach Madan-da, but the hilarious attempts had come out repeatedly as ‘Mar-coo-kom’.

He feels as if a careless hand has swiped through a shelf of delicate china in his chest. The sobs emerge from him as a series of retches.

The man mocks him, ‘What? Feeling uncomfortable? Did part of the jewellery you stole fund the Shyambazar bombing?’ he asks.

From the strangely sliding territory of the irrefutable accusations of a few minutes ago, these straightforward questions return Supratik to more comfortable land; he begins to feel steady, solidity under his feet again. He does not have it in him to put on a drama of denial – ‘What on earth are you talking about? I don’t understand at all’ kind of rubbish – so he suffers the questions in silence again. That is a kind of answer, he knows, but it is the best he can do; he does not hold many cards in his hand.

‘And what will it finance, the loot?’ His voice has the serrations of a knife in it. ‘Home-made bombs and pipe-bombs, maybe a gun or two? But those you’d rather steal from the police or from others, given that stealing and looting form such pillars of your Charu Mazumdar’s politics lectures, right? How long will it sustain your revolution, this petty thieving?’

With that, he suddenly gets up and leaves the room, unusually quickly for a person like him, before Supratik has had time to process what is happening. He will never see him again, never find out who it was that subjected him to such an oddly formal two hours.

Three more days in solitary confinement with his handcuffs removed and then the regime changes. Two khaki-clad policemen enter his cell, start to taunt and abuse him – the terms deployed are standard currency among the lower classes – and, when he does not rise to this, beat him with their regulation sticks with a kind of mindful randomness, letting the blows fall anywhere except on his head or neck, then depart, still swearing. Supratik uncurls himself and, through the blanket of pain, finds himself thinking that if this is going to be the level of mistreatment involved before they let him go, he will take it in his stride; this much is endurable.

But he is wrong.

The following day four policemen enter his room. One holds him down by his hands, one by his knees, the third one keeps his feet straightened, while the fourth man beats the soles of his feet with such concentrated energy and vigour that he can hear his screams punctuated by the policeman’s panting. He thinks, in so far as the pain has left him any capacity for thought, that he will never walk again. Later, much later, after the sharp but localised agony has become dully pervasive, creeping up from his feet to his knees and, oddly, his testicles, his lower abdomen and head, he will remember from somewhere that they beat you on the soles so as to leave no bruising on you.

No less than the Senior Superintendent is sent to look in on him the next day; Supratik has long known how to tell their rank by reading the insignia on their shoulder-flashes.

He launches directly into business. ‘What? Do you think you will talk now?’ he asks Supratik.

Supratik, lying down in the cartoon shape of a lightning bolt, turns his head and looks at him, then goes back to his original position, head bowed and nestled against one side in the crook of his arms.

‘These are not good signs,’ the SSP says opaquely. ‘We have ways to make you talk.’

It seems to Supratik that they forget about him for days, he is not sure how many. In that time he can only think and dream about the purple-bordering-on-black butt-end of one of his comrade’s fingers.

When they come next they are prepared; and they come as if sent by a malignant god who gives the heft of physical reality to dreams and thoughts. The panting man who beat him is there along with one, maybe two, of the posse attending on him that day; he cannot clearly tell. Their ranks are swelled to six now, but, it is obvious from the moment they enter, that this Superintendent – only one metal star this time, as if he, Supratik, has been demoted in their consideration – will not be participating; he sets himself slightly apart. The reason for this emerges soon enough. A policeman grasps his right wrist, another his left, two hold down his legs, one each; all of them grip like a vice winched to breaking point.

The remaining man, kind-looking, almost fatherly, with chubby cheeks and a luxuriant ink-black moustache, turns to the SP and makes a querying motion with his head; the SP nods, once, calmly, then moves to stand behind Supratik’s head, from where he cannot see him. Chubby Cheeks takes out a short length of what looks like a nylon rope and a pair of pliers from the pocket of his voluminous khaki trousers and advances towards Supratik. It takes a while for Supratik to extract the meaning from what he sees; there is no space or time between that comprehension and his involuntary, hoarse cry, ‘No!’ It comes out so low that he could have been mistaken for expressing disbelief in a session of gossipy chit-chat.

But the SP has heard him all right. His voice says, ‘Who planned the bombing in Shyambazar?’

‘No,’ Supratik says again, this time in a whisper. Chubby Cheeks looks beyond him for a signal, asks the policeman holding his left wrist, ‘You’re sure you have it all right?’, then brings the pliers near his fingers.

Supratik closes his hand into a fist, as much as the grip will allow; his bladder gives at the same time. Chubby Cheeks taps sharply on the knuckles with the pliers; he instantly unclenches his hand for a moment; in that brief second, his longest finger, the one next to his index finger, is held in the jaws of the pliers. Gently.

There is a question again, but Supratik does not hear it, so he does not answer. The pressure on his finger increases infinitesimally; maybe he imagines it. His eyes are wide, unblinking.

‘Where are Tapan Mukherjee and Ashim Mondol? Where are they hiding after the bombing?’

Chubby Cheeks presses down on the short curved handles of the pliers, the blunt jaws bite obediently, Supratik screams and screams and his body tries to buck up and out, but he cannot, he is being held down at exactly the points they know he is going to rear. The jaws unclamp. His screams turn, with a will of their own, into a whimpering. He sounds like a dog.

‘Do you now remember where your friends are?’

The whimpering continues, but it is not a response to the question; that was inserted as if aimlessly into the flow of the sound coming out of Supratik. It is posed again. Supratik does not even try to shape into intelligible words the unmanning, acoustic flux he is producing; he has no will. This time he imagines the sound of the crack of bone; it is the crack of a pistol shot giving the ‘Go!’ signal to the run of his animal scream as the pliers press down and press down and press down, wishing to obliterate the obstruction of the tip of his finger standing between the perfect union of the two metal jaws. His screams end in billowing sobs, one after the other, unstoppable.

There is an amused, avuncular twinkle in Chubby Cheeks’s eyes. One of the restraining policemen says, ‘A squealer, this one. He’ll drive us crazy, the fucker.’

‘And this is just the beginning,’ another policeman observes.

Chubby Cheeks gives a resigned smile.

The voice from behind Supratik’s head is terrier-like with its query. ‘Tapan Mukherjee and Ashim Mondol?’ it echoes itself.

There is no available cell or nerve inside Supratik’s head to deploy in conjuring up a lie or a diversion; everything has been conquered by the sensation of pain – it fills his entire being. But he finds that he cannot utter the simple words required of him, or bring himself to lift his head and look at his hand, which they have now released, although he is still held down by the other hand and at his knees and legs. If he says something, anything, there will be an end to this; all he wants to do is buy his reprieve with a few words, but he has lost the capacity to form them. At last, when he can, they come out as a sobbing croak, which he has to repeat three times in order to hear it himself – ‘Don’t know, they’ve run away. Don’t know where.’ How could he ever have imagined that ideology, revolution, the needs of others, abstraction, all these, combined or individually, could have been weightier than the simple business of self-preservation, of the sheer physicality of pain?

‘Lies, all lies,’ comes that voice.

‘No! No!’ he says with as much strength as he can gather, because if he fails to convince them . . . His mind refuses to go there.

Chubby Cheeks speaks for the first time. ‘Get on with number two?’ he asks. His voice matches his face: it is kind, purring, the sort of thing one imagines as part of the arsenal of the ideal doctor’s perfect bedside manner.

The voice from behind says, ‘Where are they? We want to know, before the trail goes cold. Then there are other questions. Such as the addresses of all the places where you make your fireworks.’ Supratik takes a while to work out that the question is addressing him and not replying to the short question Chubby Cheeks asked.

The answers tumble out of Supratik without a whit of thought. ‘Don’t know where they’ve gone, I swear, this is the truth, I’m telling you the truth,’ he manages to say, haltingly, in a groan. ‘Bombs – in Kankurgachhi, Motilal Basak Lane, right after the jute mill, number seventy-six, you have to go through it to the back, there’s a tiny alley. Then in the Kasai slum, off Potopara Lane in Narkeldanga, 15/1, between the Canal Road and a lane in the slum. It’s not easy to find.’

The pain stops him there. He feels hot, malleable rods shooting up his arm, in his armpit and elbow.

Another question: ‘The numbers again?’

Supratik obliges.

‘That can’t be all. Where are the others? What are the names of the people in these places?’

‘Can I sit up?’ he entreats.

There is a short pause. The policemen holding him down let go of him. He lifts himself up from his neck and shoulders, then tries to sit up; all he wants to do is see what they have done to his finger. But the sight of it – the nib of a strange pen, dipped in dry blue-black ink – draws a howl from him. It sets him sobbing again, tears, snot, saliva, all running down his face and chin; the time for dignity or maintaining a hard, impervious front is long over. He trots out the names, matching them with the addresses; gives them more names, more locations; pain is everything. They ask him to repeat; he obeys like a good little child. Suddenly, without any warning, they grab hold of him again, but leave him sitting up. He cannot feel the grip restraining his left hand. Chubby Cheeks draws a different pair of pliers, one with thinner, more pointed pincers, much like tweezers.

Supratik screams and sobs simultaneously, ‘No! No! NO! I’ve told you everything, everything, all true, every single word, let me go now, please, let me go, I’ve told you all that you wanted to know.’

Matching the decibels of his plea, the policemen enter into a chorus of yowling:

‘Squealing before anything’s done! A precious prince, do you see?’

‘Put something in his mouth, stuff something in.’

‘Gag the foolish fucker!’

‘Hold him tight, hold him tight!’

They unleash a pandemonium of noise, as if the auditory energy will galvanise them into executing their task; they shout themselves into action. Chubby Cheeks grabs hold of the overgrown nail of Supratik’s big toe with the thin pliers while Supratik, prevented from writhing, screams himself hoarse, so that when the toenail is first twisted and then uprooted, like a fish-scale, and before he passes out, the sound from his vocal cords comes out as long arcs of a breathy, grating rasp.

The SP says, ‘That’ll teach him to go around killing policemen.’

Chubby Cheeks laughs and says, ‘Did you see how I got it in one go?’

‘No wonder they call you Doctor-babu. You should preface all this with, “It won’t hurt at all, trust me, I’m a doctor, I’ve been doing this for decades, just trust me.” What about it, eh?’

They burst out laughing. The SP adds, ‘He’ll think twice about lying when we come back next. The beginning of a meal should always be memorable, don’t you think?’

When Supratik comes to, he is alone; he has no idea how much time has elapsed. All day and all night, for an ungraduated period, he flickers on and off like a light with a faulty connection. In his lucid moments, his thoughts appear like weak, wiggly stripes on the black matrix of pain. They will not find anything in most of those addresses; they have left it too late. Had they extracted the information from him hours after he was brought in, yes, then they could have turned up people and things in their trawl, but now? The news of the raid on his home and his arrest would have spread immediately; they will have known to vacate and go into hiding.

He looks, desultorily, first, then with more intent, for his ripped-out toenail, but cannot find it. In any case, he is hardly mobile enough to search for it properly. He pities himself for ever having harboured ideas of what police torture entailed; they have all been proved wildly incorrect. He does not have any sharp memory of it, the real having supplanted the imagined, and so recently too, but he had thought it involved beatings with sticks, a broken rib or two, punches to the face, broken teeth, a black eye . . . The imagination mostly deals with the permissible. He had imagined the pain all those relatively large-scale, crude things, such as mass beatings, assault with sticks, could cause, but who knew that this miniaturist’s art, concentrating on tiny areas, working with instruments finer and more delicate than the stick or the fist, could make all the unsubtle, old-school acts that he had contemplated seem like children’s games – amateurish mimicking of the real things, endearing in their predictability and harmlessness, ultimately preferable.