The Lives of Others (74 page)

Sandhya whispers, almost to herself, ‘Please leave him, please let him go.’ This is ignored; it is not even clear that anyone has heard it. She turns to her husband and implores, ‘Why are you standing there? Why aren’t you doing anything?’

Adinath remains impassive, frozen. Three months ago, during another search-and-arrest scenario at home, the Ghoshes had been aghast, but not so much that they had not been able to point out, with the confident arrogance that comes so easily to people of their kind, that the police had been mistaken in their arrest of Madan. Now fear has devoured them; it is only their shadows who stand and watch. It is one of their own who is in trouble now, not an adopted servant. Angry remonstrances, their easeful way with giving out orders, could make the situation irredeemable, with consequences they cannot bring themselves to think about, but know on a level deeper than thought, in their cells and blood. The only performance they can put on is one of placatory, undignified begging.

But something gives and the person who has most to lose by not playing it cautiously liberates herself from this mummery of fear and calculation: Sandhya repeats her earlier whisper, but this time it lets itself loose as a scream, ‘Please leave him, please let him go! Why do you have to hold him like this? Can’t you see you’re hurting him?’

In response, two of the four policemen manhandling Supratik twist his arms, already pinned to his back, to the very edge of dislodging them from their sockets at the elbow and shoulders.

Supratik cries out in pain, the sound more animal than human.

Bhola, rooted halfway up the stairs, watching the proceedings like a child peering over the height of a wall at something terrifying and forbidden, tries to intervene with ‘Stop it! This is cruel’, but it emerges as a phlegmy clatter. The string of his blue-and-dirty-white-striped pyjama is hanging down the front of his flies to his knees. A segment of his hairy pot-belly, displaying the navel, is visible between the bottom of his vest and the crinkled circumference of the top of his pyjama. An officer dawdles up to him, as if this were a picnic and he is moving with dozy contentment to the basket that holds the oranges, and kicks him down the stairs. Chhaya and Charubala gasp audibly. From this point on, what little decorum there had been in the proceedings evaporates completely.

‘Shut up!’ growls the Inspector. ‘One more word or sound from you and I’ll have all of you arrested. You’ll see what it feels like to breathe the air in the lock-up.’ He turns to his men and says, ‘Take him to the van.’

Supratik tries to stand up from his kneeling position. Immediately the four officers surrounding him pounce and, before further orders can be given, drag him by his overgrown hair down the stairs as they would the carcass of a huge, butchered creature. Supratik roars in pain again and lets out an unearthly elongated call for his mother – ‘Maaaa!’ Or so it sounds to Sandhya. She has turned insane. She runs to the Inspector and entreats, ‘Take me away instead of him. I’ll answer for him. Take me away.’ At every iteration of the word ‘I’ or ‘me’ she brings down her clenched fist on her chest with a thump so loud that everyone shudders each time it occurs. She falls down to her knees and grasps the Inspector’s legs, sobbing, ‘Please let him go, I’m falling at your feet, please let him go.’ She has transformed everyone into stone figures in a tableau.

The spell is broken by a thin wail coming out of the bedridden Prafullanath’s room: ‘What’s going on? What is happening? Where’s everyone?’

The Inspector takes this as a kind of permission; he disengages himself roughly and bounds down the stairs.

His men have only just reached the ground floor with Supratik. That young widow is standing outside her room, weeping, her aanchol held to her mouth out of habit, or perhaps out of the usual sense of decorum. The Inspector is familiar with enough of the family’s history to know that she and her two children form a detached unit, a sort of dispensable parenthesis to the rest of the Ghoshes. It is odd for someone of her position to be standing outside her room, listening to the circus upstairs; much more normal for her to be inside, gripped by curiosity and yet hiding, unable to eavesdrop with any ease, because of fear. It is certainly unusual enough for the thought to occur to him at this time of such intense turbulence. Then he notices what it is that has made him pay any attention to yet another weeping woman in a home being raided – she is clawing the air around her waist with her free hand as if bidding him and his men to stop, but fear and inhibition have not allowed it to be expressed in its fullness. The aborted gesture has instead become diverted to a tic, the kind one would see in an old, ill man afflicted with some neurological problem. It gives him the strange impression that she has the edge of her sari clamped to her mouth to stop what she wants to say from getting out. A remarkably attractive woman, he notes, giving her the once-over with his eyes; she is at the apogee of her ripeness. How old could she be? Thirty, at the most? He files away the thought, of half a mind to return to it later perhaps; something has caught at the peripheries of his consciousness and he needs to bring it to the light. But this is not the time.

Then he and his men are out of the house. Sounds of climbing into vans; the brief burst of a conflicting set of instructions about which van to bundle Supratik into, quickly resolved; the police watching the possible exit points in the vicinity returning to the vehicles; van doors slamming shut. Not a single light has come on in any of the doors or windows of the houses on Basanta Bose Road, yet each has a covert and intense quality of watchfulness, of absorption, about it; eyes and ears, stretched to their maximum sensory capacity, seem to have transferred their biological qualities to the portals behind which they are hidden. The silence itself is suspect, too silent. Then, cutting through that tense quietness, the vans leave, with the knock-and-rattle of running engines, one after the other.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

1970

THE ROOM SUPRATIK
is taken to is bare and ordinary: whitewashed walls, the white turned to a tallowy grey; a table with two chairs on either side; a naked bulb hanging down a dusty plait of red, green and white wires from the centre of the ceiling; a rusting steel almirah; no windows. It could be anywhere. Although he is handcuffed, this is not a prisoner’s cell; maybe an administrative room, someone’s office, a meeting chamber. The two policemen who have brought him in here leave without a word; he can hear the door being bolted and locked from the outside. He knows it will be a long while, maybe even a day, before anyone comes down, knows that this is the stage they call ‘pickling’, where they let a suspect sit in total isolation and silence so that the speculation of what awaits him can loosen the tight coil of what is a human mind or soul. Often it is easy, this undoing; knowledge helps nothing. Or, rather, the knowledge helps the other side in doing half its preparatory work for them, which is why Supratik decides not to allow his mind to stray into the territory of what he has heard of the ways people such as he are dealt with by the police; he is not going to make their work easier by presenting them with the unravelled weave of himself when they walk in.

But the mind is the most impossible thing to empty and Supratik runs up against the obstinately contrarian will of his the moment it thinks its strategy of resistance: he can think of nothing other than what lies in store for him. Quite aside from playing its treacherous, self-consuming game of dividing itself into two camps and pitching them in battle against each other, his mind – a different creature, really; embodied inside him but a separate presence – introduces yet another combat. He thinks of the recent ‘shoot to kill’ orders given to the police, the military and the Central Reserve Forces across seven states to deal with his kind. But, surely, if they take him not in action in the field, as it were, but from home, that diktat does not apply? Perhaps they will let him go, after roughing him up a bit to extract any information they think will be useful? From second to second the answer flicks between yes and no, yes and no, a mad, manic child playing with toy light-switches marked ‘Salvation’ and ‘Despair’. In some ways he is immaterial to this conflict. It is as if two abstract principles are locked in their gladiatorial confrontation in a morality play, and he is just the stage on which they perform their encounter.

The rattle of the bolt and lock outside returns him to the solidity of the room. The door opens. The man who is shown in by two uniformed flunkeys is not someone who answers Supratik’s mental image of an interrogator, or even a policeman. This short, shy-looking, middle-aged man, with his salt-and-pepper hair and moustache, his jowls beginning to sag, his eyes hidden and distorted behind the powerful bifocal lenses of his thick black-framed glasses, could be anything from a college lecturer to the manager of a local branch of the State Bank of India. The utter ordinariness of the object that he is carrying, and then sets down on the table, adds to this impression: a tired, much-used brown paper file. He moves the chair and sits down, facing Supratik, but somehow managing to keep his face in the penumbral region that the almirah creates on his side of the table. Throughout this meeting Supratik will never properly get to see his expression, the changeable meanings in his eyes.

The voice too, when it issues out of those grey lips, could be a bureaucrat’s: cultured, impassive, bored. No leading up gently, lullingly from the margins; it launches headlong into the middle with, ‘Achchha, besides Debdulal Maity, you, Samir Ray Chowdhury and Dhiren Chatterjee, can you tell me who else was at the meetings in Debdulal-babu’s home in Belpahari in March/April last year? I mean, ’69?’

Two immediate things strike Supratik, although he does not acknowledge the surprise to himself, let alone betray it by any visible signs: he is being addressed respectfully with the highest form of ‘you’; and, second, they have a lot more on him and his comrades, even ‘micro’ details, as he would have once put it, of their whereabouts and activities than he would ever have given them credit for. The surprise is at the galling admission that he will have to make, shedding his condescension, of their nous and perspicacity. Supercilious hatred is easy; hatred tempered with the beginnings of respect – but in no way denting the antagonism – is much more difficult, Supratik finds. Or is this called fear?

He has no idea how he is going to play this. After all, he has only a limited range available to him: lying, denial, inability to recall; and those are intersecting sets, too. Where is he going to begin? Denial of the meeting? Denial that he knows, or ever knew, any of the people named? A brazen feigned surprise and ignorance, even outrage, that he is being questioned? It is a crucial question, for the response to it will set the parameters for everything that is to follow. He has to be as careful as a stalking cat.

The reply from his long-unused voice comes out all catarrhal, weak and risibly unconvincing to his own ears: ‘I don’t remember.’

There. He has gone down one path of the several available to him and foreclosed all other possibilities. He is now doomed to stick unveeringly to it and follow to its particular end, and who knows if that is not a destination more baneful than the others would have led him to? Besides, those three simple words have opened up other exposed flanks: that the meetings took place and that the meetings took place between the people named, in the place and time mentioned. He has, after all, not specifically denied them.

The man does not seem interested in attacking those weaknesses. Instead he asks, ‘And the tactical line of’ – pause – ‘of killing in small groups, “guerrilla action”, I think you call it? Who was the brain behind it in Jhargram and Belpahari? You?’

There is nothing that he can say to this. Is he expected to reply to every question? If so, is he allowed to ponder it as one would a chess move, expansively, with all the time in the world? Or would that be damning? Would swift, rat-a-tat replies be rewarded with a better conclusion?

Again his inquisitor does not prod, letting the silence lengthen and become the third voice in the play. The State Assembly has been dissolved and it is President’s Rule again in West Bengal, the second time in two years, but Supratik feels in his bones that this man must be someone high-ranking in the CPI(M) Politburo, the erstwhile Home Minister Jyoti Basu’s right-hand man, even.

‘What about the people you saw during the times that you returned to Calcutta’ – here he consults some papers in the open brown file on his lap – ‘let’s see, um, here, you visited Calcutta three times between February ’68 and January ’70? Or was it five? Before you returned . . . returned for good in March this year? Or are you thinking of going back to Medinipur again?’ The man’s voice remains steady and polite, even sympathetic, but this casual little question he has just lobbed freezes Supratik’s blood and liquefies it, all in one instant, so that he suddenly feels light-headed, about to levitate. It is one of those few things that he has refrained even from writing down in his diary to Purba. He knows they have not got hold of that – they cannot . . . But a few things become clear to him. Has Dipankar been caught and made to – here his thoughts buckle into performing an elision – made to give up some information or or or

‘You have always been the quiet one, haven’t you?’ the man says, not really asking a question, but giving voice to an idle, fleeting impression. Then something approaching intent shows itself in the next few words – ‘You know what they called you? Your nickname, because you are so silent most of the time?’ – before the refusal to reveal the answer leaches it away. Or perhaps that is the intent – the dangling question that will goad him to ask for an answer. But he is not going to oblige.

‘It’s not as if you have been conducting all your . . . er . . . your business in complete secrecy,’ the interrogator continues. ‘All these farmers, hundreds of them across dozens of villages . . . and then boasting about it in your papers,
Liberation
and
Deshabrati
, although those reports are slightly wishful, don’t you think? The
vast
numbers of people joining you, the
enormous
impact your group’s actions have, the great success of all this squad action and annihilations, the Red Party inexorably exercising its hold village by village – these claims were always a bit hopeful, a bit exaggerated in your reports, no?’ His voice is apologetic, as if he is slightly distraught at having to point out the gaps and the errors and the abridgement that ideology inevitably demands.