The Lives of Others (28 page)

We began by taking small steps: the reversal of ‘the crop belongs to the owner of the land’ to ‘the land belongs to the cultivator of the crop’; the
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rule of harvest grain distribution. At night, Samir, Dhiren and I again and again debated the relative merits of economism versus militancy. We told the farmers about the uprising in Naxalbari last year. Without putting it in so many words, we knew we were moving towards militancy. The business of living with them, learning to be them, was not an end in itself, as we now began to understand. It had always been a stepping stone towards more radical action.

I knew from the moment that Dhiren brought out
The Little Red Book
, pointed to it and said – This man has freed eighty crore people from the noose around their necks, the kind of halter you have around your necks now – and I saw every pair of eyes in the room turn to look at the book, that we had crossed the line. Our work had begun. From the dissemination of the words of Chairman Mao and Comrade Charu Mazumdar, we will soon move on to squad formation and, from there, to ‘action’.

As I was saying, the farmers were not totally innocent: Anupam Haati told the meeting – The city people who came here when we were sowing, they showed us a small red book too, they said the book will show you how to punish jotedaars.

Before coming here I had often wondered how difficult it would be to convince and mobilise villagers. I had made myself exhausted thinking about the months of talks and meetings, posters and expounding. It had felt, in my imagination, like the effort that would be required to move a giant crag by pushing at its base. Within a few days of our arrival, however, that sense of impossibility had become its opposite: an easy, achievable optimism.

Do you know why?

Because I saw the kind of lives they led: going to bed on an empty stomach for over half the year; drowned in debt without any hope of ever surfacing; their unborn generations bonded to service those debts; their blood sucked dry (talking of which, the Bengali word for ‘sucking’ and ‘exploitation’ is the same, have you ever noticed?); their children bony but with swollen bellies, arms and legs like reeds, hair bleached to brown with malnutrition; their lives shrivelled by worry. Because their lives were like this, I thought they would be simmering with anger and all we needed to do was a bit of stoking and there would be a giant conflagration that would bring down the blood-suckers and burn them to cinders. How hopeful it all seemed.

Then that hopefulness curdled: what I hadn’t reckoned with was that decades and decades of this slow-burning flame of resentment and deprivation had burned
them
, not the perpetrators. The embers of anger we had thought of fanning had burned down into the ashes of despair. They were already dead within their lives. They had no hope, no sense of a future, just an endless playing out of this illness of the present tense until its culmination in an early death. In other words, we had to kindle a fire with ashes. Have you ever tried doing that?

Once again, the three of us by the pond near the bamboo grove at night. The cry of an animal in the distance is picked up, briefly, by more cries, all identical, then they stop.

– Jackals, Dhiren says.

– Nocturnal, like us, says Samir.

– Not quite. We work in the daytime too, we don’t sleep it away.

– Tomorrow we have to walk thirteen miles in the dark.

We were going with eight farmers from Majgeria to Munirgram for a huge poster exhibition and mass assemblies organised by the Medinipur Coordination Committee. It was going to be a big day. Farmers and activists were coming from villages all over the western Medinipur region. Our aim was to educate them in class dynamics, arouse hatred in them against their class enemies, explain the events of Naxalbari and Telengana to let them know that they were not alone, that class uprisings were happening throughout the country, peasants were snatching their land and crops back from landowners, shaking off the yokes of their slavery. We were going to explain to them in simple, direct language that their lot would never be improved by the corrupt, slow process of parliamentary democracy and elections, that their freedom could only come about through armed rebellions of the kind that were erupting everywhere around them.

In Munirgram, endless prattle. Endless. Sometimes I felt I was chewing on sand. Should we work with ex-hooligans who had been the domestic pets of the Congress, but now wanted to join us? Were they motivated by ideology, as we were, or did they only want to settle scores, or an easy path to quick material gains? What if, under pressure, they betrayed us? For that matter, the exhibition and assembly were teeming with card-carrying CPI(M) cadres: we didn’t know if they had made their break from the Party, or had been expelled, or were drifting towards the ideology being outlined by Charu Mazumdar and others. They were as dangerous as the paid ex-Congress criminals, if not more so. What if
they
betrayed us?

Jaw, jaw, jaw . . . my temples began to throb. I stuck to my line and quoted Chairman Mao: ‘If you set a ball rolling, it will reach its target at some point. But if you keep being hesitant, and stop to discuss matters at every point in the trajectory, it means slowing down the ball. It may then never reach its destination.’

While writing all this I found myself hesitating at one point, the bit where I mentioned going to bed on an empty stomach. I saw your calm face suddenly worried by such a disarmingly predictable question – Did I too eat half-stomach?

I won’t – I can’t – lie to you. Yes, I did. Most days.

On some days there was nothing to eat, only water to drink, drawn from the well shared between this neighbourhood and the Maheshwar colony next to it. Most of the time it was not a fast, but a fraction of a meal: a plate of cooked gourd and mashed yam, once a day, not enough to fill your stomach, but just enough to see you from one day to the next. Nobody will die eating only this, because you’re getting
something
to eat, but nobody will live either on this, only subsist. The picture of starvation here, the picture that we city-dwellers carried around in our heads when we thought of rural poverty, of bony, half-naked people withering to death, was wrong – that was what happened during times of famine. In ordinary times, like now, the truth was different: the boniness remained, but it was no longer day after day of fasting; instead, weeks and months of hunger, of not having enough to eat, of meagreness and undernourishment and weakness.

I remembered Mejo-kaki once commenting on the food eaten by the servants, Gagan-da and Kamala-di and Malati-di, and especially the temporary daytime staff – Look, just look at the amount of rice on their plates. It’s a hillock.

The comment was mocking: it was a matter of amused condescension for her. I was too young then to read the observation for what it was; I too had giggled.

It is true that rural people eat a lot of rice, but not for the reasons she had assumed. They eat rice because there isn’t much else to eat: the vegetables they grow; the roots and leaves they forage; the occasional fish from the ponds and canals; the even rarer duck, which sometimes appears on the flooded rice fields during the early part of the growing season. But that is the ideal, almost aspired-for, scenario. The truth is more naked: they eat so much rice because they are filling themselves up against the time they know will come when they won’t even have this staple to fill their stomachs.

Dhiren laughed when I mentioned it to him – This sounds a bit like the camel theory of eating. Camels can store water in their humps, they’re desert creatures, they don’t know where or when their next drink is coming from. You think the same is true for farmers and rice? It’s a nice, romantic kind of theory for someone so . . . so tough as you.

But how much waxed gourd and ridged gourd and bottle gourd can you eat? I have tried it, and I can tell you that it doesn’t fill you up for long; in a couple of hours, even less, you are hungry again.

A thought keeps me awake. It’s like a stubborn, delicate fish-bone stuck in your throat – it doesn’t cause you any harm, but every time you swallow you know it’s there, so you keep swallowing, hoping that it’s suddenly going to happen cleanly, without that prickle. Nights when I can’t sleep because of hunger, I wonder what Debdulal-da must have said or done to make these destitute Santhals and Mahatos, Kanu and Bipul and Anupam, agree that we could stay in their homes – after all, we were extra mouths to feed, one extra per household, even if we were extra hands during sowing and harvesting and, therefore, additional income. Did the two columns tally and balance each other? What was going through their heads when they said yes? Could it have been, besides all the calculation involved, also that our idealism about trying to be one with them sparked off a kind of responsive idealism, so that they thought – Yes, here was a chance to . . .

Chance to do what? Hard as I try, I can’t answer their side of the issue, can’t imagine myself into it. Instead of all this idealism of unity, did they not think – They’ve come from Calcutta, they have more money than we do, they live in brick and cement buildings, they get three meals a day (not true of Dhiren), they ride in buses and trams, they wear different kinds of clothes, so why are they going to bed with their stomachs half-empty nearly every night by choice? Which fool
chooses
to go hungry? Or could it be that they are eating secretly, meals they’re buying elsewhere with their money? And if they’re doing that, then why are they not doing that for us, buying
us
some food? They can see that we’re getting barely enough to keep body and soul together, why aren’t they doing anything about the burning in our bellies?

The logical progression of the thoughts I imagined for them, if indeed they progressed along that line, brings me to a disturbing conclusion: could it be that that particular endpoint of their thoughts,
why are they not ending our misery with their city money?
, could it be that it would become the cause of another resentment?

Now that I’ve thought that, I can’t get it out of my head. Were we too going to be seen to be on the side of their class enemies, unable to cross a crucial dividing line? Would we too become yet another justified target of their hatred?

I don’t want to think like this, but I find myself helpless to put a stop to it. Every little thing lifts the lid. Take, for example, Bijli sowing the seeds of various gourds and pumpkin in the tiny patch of dirt next to her hut. Who brought the seeds? Did she save them herself, taking them out and putting them carefully away when she cut the vegetables before cooking? Did she buy them somewhere? I asked Kanu. He said that his wife saved the seeds, everyone did it, so that they could grow a little something for their own use; the wealthier farmers grew cash crops, such as paan or sugar cane, because they had the land to do it, while people like Kanu grew edible stuff for their own use in a scrap of vegetable garden. In itself this fact was yet another of those little things that added to my growing knowledge of a new world. But it disturbed me because I hadn’t noticed the process of retaining the seeds and drying them out and saving them. Did it happen while I was away in Chhurimara or Munirgram? Or did I simply overlook it? Whatever the answer, what stares me in the face is this: I’m failing to become one of them. A distance still separates us.

On some nights, I lie awake, trying to imagine being someone else, someone who has crossed my path that day, say, the man who was selling fritters at the mela in Munirgram, or the one selling hot gram, or the labourer whom I had noticed once, squishing all the fiery, tiny purple chillies into his rice first before beginning to eat, a thing that caught my eye for no reason at all . . . I imagine anyone, really, anyone who happens to fall into my mind as I wait for sleep to arrive. First, I concentrate to bring into sharp focus every detail of his face and clothes and bearing. When I get that, I move one step further and try to imagine his life in as much detail and minuteness as I can. Sometimes I arrange it on a time-axis: When did he wake up? What did he do then? What after that? I try to string out his day in hours and minutes.

Sometimes I use a different approach. I concentrate on one probable experience in his life and try to
become
him and live that experience in every single sensation and feeling. That wage-labourer mashing those blackish-purple scud chilles into his rice, for example – why was he doing that? It was obvious that he loved his food very hot, but when did he acquire the taste? Was he given chillies to eat from early childhood? Did his mother make very hot dishes? Could it be that in situations where there isn’t much to eat, or not much variety in what there is, people eat more chillies as a way of adding some kind of zing to their dull food? Do they burn his mouth and make his . . . my eyes and nose water? Does the burn spread to my ears? Does it upset my stomach? What did I do when I couldn’t get hold of chillies? The questions come thick and fast, each spawning five more, and those five, five each . . . until I find that I have squeezed my eyes so tightly closed that I see floating coloured shapes, like rotting fragments of dead leaves underwater.

I open my eyes. The centre of my head feels heated. And yet I’m no closer to that man. Most importantly, I haven’t been able to answer that big question: what idea did he have of the story of his life, not only of the past and the present, but also of what was to come?

There seem to be fewer stars; it must be getting close to dawn. No sign of your face or your name in the sky tonight. What is going to happen to the two of us? Doesn’t that question haunt you, too, and keep you awake? It’s eating me slowly from the inside. It’s all impossible, everything between us, every possibility, imaginable or unimaginable, is impossible.

CHAPTER SEVEN

MANY YEARS LATER,
as he faced his own dissolution, Prafullanath was to remember a distant afternoon when his father took him to see the Elphinstone Bioscope in an enormous tent on the Maidan. That same book of memories seemed to contain an infinite number of self-renewing pages; a well-visited one was the time when he had gone with his father to watch the IFA Shield match, which Mohanbagan had won. It was a book that Prafullanath forced himself to think he had erased successfully, but it was as if scraps of imperfectly rubbed-out writing, half a line here, a quarter-page there, still bearing the tiny worms of rubber-shavings and the impress of the letters wiped out, had cunningly revivified themselves and presented their taunting, undead selves to him, mocking, mocking his failure to annihilate them for ever.