The Lives of Others (73 page)

‘Killing? Innocent people? Do you have any idea of how little you know about such things?’ Supratik says, trying to keep his voice level and low. All he wants to do is to repeat those words to the rhythm of banging Suranjan’s head against the wall.

‘Much more than you give me – or, for that matter, anyone – credit for.’

A sharp stab of anxiety goes through him: does Suranjan know about the stolen jewellery?

‘The word “revolution” should not pass the lips of an idle, parasitic, basket-case like you,’ Supratik begins, but is cut short by Suranjan, who becomes unrecognisable in the escalation of his rage.

‘Shut up!’ he shouts, ‘enough of your moralising. Enough! What you do is revolution, of course, what others do is idleness and wastage. This is the problem with fuckers like you – you are unable to understand anyone else unless they fit into the standard-issue mould you have made for them. Chairman Mao! My cock!’

Supratik leaps off his bed and slaps Suranjan with all the force he can bring to his assaulting right palm, once, twice, three times across his face. While delivering the blows he tenses his body, fully expecting to be hit by a retaliatory punch, but what happens wrong-foots him again: Suranjan folds over, almost daintily, like a decorative collapsible chair, and falls to the floor. Supratik watches, unable to move a finger, as Suranjan, lying down, begins to cry, slowly at first, snifflingly, then with huge sobs racking his body. Supratik loses all track of time, all ability to react, until god knows after how long their mother enters the room and panics. ‘What’s happened? What’s happened? Why are you lying on the floor? Have you been fighting? Aren’t you too old for this kind of thing?’ Then she turns to Supratik and berates him, ‘Don’t you have any shame, hitting your younger brother like this? Do you think you’re both still little children?’

No, he does not, but he feels as emasculated and powerless as one.

Suranjan goes out some time in the afternoon and does not return home that night. Supratik, his insides tense as a taut bow, lies awake, debating whether to tell their father the truth about his younger son. Supratik does not know much about heroin addiction – it has not been around for long – but all that he has heard has come wrapped in a fog of hush-voiced fear.
You can never recover from it, the addiction is so strong it’s irreversible. One hit hooks you for ever, and then your life as you and others around you know it is over. It sucks you out from the inside and finishes you
. Not for the first time he thinks of how the Bengali word for ‘suck’ and ‘exploitation’ is the same. How typical of an exemplary specimen of the petite bourgeoisie to get hooked on a destructive drug that is an import from the decadent, evil, capitalist West. The predictability and the perfection of the fit would have elicited a contemptuous chuckle from him at any other time, but this illustration is too close to home. He finds this business of the micro-depredations of capitalism, one where the effects are felt on the smallest units, such as the family, and not just perceived as giant historical phases and on the masses, an interesting new direction in which he can take his dialectical thinking. Or is that only an illusion? Could that too be subsumed under the paradigms that had already been set down in the key texts? How would Charu Mazumdar dissect this fashion of killer recreational drugs amongst the middle classes and link it to historical process?

But what is he going to tell his parents?
Would
he tell them?
Just a skirmish with words
, he had said tersely to his mother when she had demanded an explanation. Those few words had damned him into an impromptu collusion with his brother; they both knew, after he had spoken them, that he was not going to tell on Suranjan. It had not led to a truce, but it had bound them in an unspoken conspiracy, an adult variation of a children-united-against-parents kind of scenario. Again he returns to that sticking point about memory: did they have such affiliations and groupings when they were children, brothers protecting each other from the prying, censorious regard of parents instead of snitching on each other? Was this the usual situation in other families where there were two brothers? Did his father and his uncles close ranks against his grandparents?

How clean he thought he had kept his life, unblotted by the inevitable stain of private life; and now that too is traduced. He wants to eat his pillow whole, shred the bedsheet into thin ribbons. How did this come to pass, especially when he had been so assiduous in standing away from it all? First Purba, now Bhai. Then there is the ticking time-bomb of the jewellery theft. Why does he feel both snared and duped? He cannot put a name to what or who has tricked him; maybe, when he was still trapped in the old, pre-dialectical ways of thinking and knowledge, he would have called it heart or emotions, but he has seen through that bit of politics a long time ago, so there is nothing to fall back against. There is only a void and himself.

Over the next three nights, Supratik watches his brother travelling into the land where no man can be his companion, where he is alone with himself, or a version of himself, in a solitude magnified and distorted so extremely that that reality seems as impregnable as death itself. In that aloneness, Suranjan, his eyes closed, his chin nearly meeting his chest, cannot even bring himself to stretch out on his bed; he is arrested in the position he is in when he begins his journey, the unmistakable debris of burnt foil, thick straw made from rolled-up card, black, curled stubs of spent matches littered around him. Every day Supratik has enjoined himself,
I must catch him at it this evening
; every day he has missed it and failed, partly because Suranjan has mastered the self-protective stealth of the addict, but also because Supratik himself has been away – and, when not away, distracted – working out the great plans regarding an imminent action in the city.

Seeing Suranjan nearly unconscious in that awkward position, leaning at an impossible tilt and yet not falling, not jerking awake when his head has reached an excruciating angle with his neck and shoulder, fills Supratik with such a fury of protectiveness that he has to stop staring at his brother and force himself again to go over all the steps, written out in his head, as it were, in numbered points, leading to the big event planned for Monday night. It has the effect of counting backwards to induce sleep; it does not achieve the desired result, but it calms him somewhat so that when he looks at his narcotised brother he feels something slightly different, the same realisation one has of the limits of human understanding when faced with someone asleep, because one can never enter that insuperably private world of the sleeper, regardless of how intertwined the lives are of observer and observed. The melancholy is sharp and bitter; it makes him despair about being able to do anything about the hell Suranjan has got himself into. They have not managed to come out of the castles of their dented egos and wave a white flag since they fell out three days ago; they have stopped speaking, even looking at each other. Except for now, when Supratik allows himself to gaze unrestricted at Suranjan because he knows no one is looking. He cannot shoulder this burden himself, but he already knows what Purba, the only person he can think of confiding in, will say. He can hear her voice in his head this instant – ‘It’s not a good thing, this falling-out between brothers, and then this business of not being on speaking terms. He’s your younger brother, it is your duty to love, protect and forgive him, whatever he does.’

He makes up his mind. He will not tell Ma and Baba the truth, not now; he will act on it himself first. His initial port of call will be Suranjan’s friends, to attempt to establish the exact nature of his addiction. From there the subsequent course of action will follow. He will start the ball rolling the very day after the big event. He reads Chapter 23, ‘Street Tactics’, of Carlos Marighella’s mint-new mini-manual again:

When the police troops come wearing helmets to protect them against flying objects, we have to divide ourselves into two teams – one to attack the enemy from the front, the other to attack him in the rear – withdrawing one as the other goes into action to prevent the first from being struck by projectiles hurled by the second. By the same token, it is important to know how to respond to the police net. When the police designate certain of their men to go into the crowd and arrest a demonstrator, a larger group of urban guerrillas must surround the police group, disarming and beating them and at the same time allowing the prisoner to escape. This urban guerrilla operation is called ‘the net within a net’.

The opportunity to get to the bottom of his brother’s drug problems never arrives. At three o’clock in the morning on Tuesday, four black police vans enter Basanta Bose Road. About twenty policemen get out, break down the front door of 22/6 and enter the house. The noise of the wood splintering, the men shouting, ‘Police! Police! Open up!’, wakes everyone in the house. Purba, Sona and Kalyani are affected first; on the ground floor, they are nearest the breach. They lie frozen in the dark as the noise increases. Then their door is kicked in. Several policemen with torches almost fall into the room in a heap, the light is turned on, a voice commands, ‘Look everywhere. Under the bed, inside the almirah, everywhere.’ Another voice, now inside, raps out, ‘Get out of bed, all of you, get up and get off the bed, onto the floor. And don’t move.’ Before they have woken up properly, their room is turned into something on the route of a cyclone. The bed is partially lifted and set down on the floor with a crash. The almirah is opened, everything inside is flung out, then they kick its door and crack it. They knock and kick things over, trample on everything that is on the floor and exit.

They are everywhere at once. In the pantry on the ground floor they lift up the large glass jars, the utensils and earthenware, the pots, pans, tins, skillets, and fling everything down. In Purba’s dark cubbyhole of a kitchen next to the pantry they run their arms across every jar, bottle and tin standing – not many – and leave them broken or lying on the floor. They kick the small mud oven into small clods, leaving behind the heavy, worn disc of its iron grill. They enter the seldom-used living room on this floor, tear down the curtains, upend the coffee table and chairs, slit open the cushions, tear the stereo and the sound-boxes from their wires and hurl them, smash the impassive and inert terracotta Bankura horses and then do the same to the glass front of the bookshelf by throwing the two heavy ashtrays at it, pull out the books and hurl them too. A nearly empty bottle of whisky falls and smashes; the resinous smell of spirit from that small amount is surprisingly strong. No, they cannot find what they are looking for. ‘Not here, not here,’ someone shouts, ‘Will be upstairs, no doubt.’ They have smoked out Kamala and Malati from their room behind the pantry, down the short, narrow passage in the warren of outhouse-coops towards the garden. The women stand rigid with fear, speechless, as the police carry on their rampage. There are no more servants for them to flush out – the men and boys have already been hauled away.

But the ground floor is a picture of still-life compared with what is going on in the upper storeys. Heavy footsteps, an army of them, thudding up the stairs; men shouting, ‘Get out of our way, this is a police search’; the sound of things crashing, breaking, being kicked in. In the chaos, Chhaya’s hysterical, ‘What’s going on? What’s going on?’ is drowned out. The Ghoshes are all awake now, but the last few threads connecting them to the world of sleep are still not torn: they stand confused, terrified, their voices dead in their throats. A general questioning cry of ‘What is happening?’ rises and then that too dies. Jayanti tries to shield her daughter from the stampede, but their room too is vandalised. The words, ‘She’s a child, please leave her alone, why do you need to go into her room?’ resonate in her head, but fear prevents them from becoming sounds and emerging. A similar thing happens to Chhaya’s wail, ‘Priyo, Priyo, what’s going on? Someone tell me, please, please’, doomed to circulate only in the prison of her mind.

The police enter rooms simultaneously, in groups of three or four, and smash and break and ruin; they cannot find what they are looking for; they know they will, but none among the Ghoshes seems to know, or acknowledge in their souls, what it is. The police go into bathrooms, drag in chairs and stools, climb on them to reach the high cisterns, remove their heavy iron tops and fling them down, then run their hands through the water in the reservoir – nothing.

‘Not there, not there, how can you have a grown-up man in there?’ a policeman comments.

‘You can’t trust these fuckers,’ someone replies. ‘If not a person, then maybe explosives, bomb-making masala, guns – who knows?’

A scream comes from someone on the top floor; it is impossible to say who it is. There is a surge in the thudding and crashing; several voices scream in a hell’s chorus of atonality. Within that the shouted words, ‘Found him! Found the bastard! Here, here. Come, come quickly, we need a hand’ can be discerned in shreds, as Supratik is dragged out by his hair by two policemen from his bedroom.

‘Hold him tight, be careful! See that he doesn’t escape.’

‘Where’s he going to go? Every single lane and by-lane is blocked by our men outside.’

‘Hiding under the bed, he was. Fucking around with bombs outside, a mouse at home when the police come knocking – typical! Where’s all your Naxalite courage now, eh?’

Inspector Saha, who has been directing the raid, says to Supratik, ‘You think we’re so stupid that we don’t know who is the mastermind behind the bombing in Shyambazar tonight? You think, if you do your terrorism far away from home, we’ll not know who it is?’ He slaps Supratik across his face; Sandhya flinches and tries to cry out; Inspector Saha orders, ‘Take him away’, then, as a coda addressed to the assembled wax-dolls that the Ghoshes have turned into, ‘The game’s changing, these sister-fuckers are going to be hanging from every lamp-post in town.’

The disappearance of the ingratiating Inspector – three months ago, when he came to arrest Madan, he was bowing low and doing his ‘We are your servants, it is for you to command us’ patter, punctuated by the laugh that was both oleaginous and menacing – and his replacement by this obscenely swearing, disrespectful dog has been so swift that it is on this that the Ghoshes focus their attention. Their momentary outrage about superficial points of conduct offers a respite from the far greater upheaval playing out in front of them. Another thought briefly fans open in their minds: every single person in every house in the neighbourhood must be awake in their beds now, or peering from behind their windows, all ears pricked, the frisson of this undreamed of drama right outside their front doors galvanising their lives. The thought allows, yet again, the welcome postponement of the taste of ruin.