The Lives of Others (77 page)

Then fear begins to eat at his soul: what if they think that he has lied and led them up the garden path, when they go to all the locations he has given them only to find out there is nothing or no one there? For the first time those rust-coloured splatters and drip marks that he has seen distributed sparsely on the walls, in corners and where the walls meet the floor, change their meaning from ‘paan stains’ to something else. The urge to piss is suddenly uncontrollable, but his bladder is dry. It is only then that he notices his pyjamas are damp and the faint whiff of ammonia is coming off him.

A square of black jelly marks where his toenail has been.

He has become clairvoyant: they come for him engorged with anger, not in the diffuse spirit of an idle reconnaissance that they had begun with on the previous occasion. There is the SP again, some of the lower-ranking policemen from earlier, but no Chubby Cheeks; instead a thin broomstick of a man in civilian clothes – seven men in total. The repetitious nature of it all, as if the ordinary sequential flow of life has become circular in his case, makes him feel dizzy; is he hallucinating it all? The five khaki-clad policeman fall on him in a riot, like a pack of starving dogs, the moment they enter; the dream-like feeling ends. The beating is accompanied by rousing shouts and abuses, all in a continuous stream, drowning out his pitiful mewling. He reacts in the usual human way, by curling up into a ball, but this time there are no niceties observed by the assailants; the blows land everywhere, back, rump, hip, arms, head, shoulders, legs, neck, thighs. He is an open receptacle.

The preamble over, they lift him up and throw him on his cot, then tie his arms and legs together, much as hunted animals or animals about to be sacrificed are bundled up for ease of carrying.

‘Stop shouting!’ the SP orders Supratik. ‘Stop your screaming right now. We’ll teach you how to scream, you lying motherfucker. So forward with the addresses, so helpful and willing. Now we know why: there’s no one fucking there. No one! The birds have all flown. And no bomb-masala either.’

Supratik begins to explain to the ceiling from his supine position – ‘Listen to me, please, listen’ – but a slap across his face shuts him up.

‘You will talk now. We’ll make you talk now. Every name that you know, including the names of your fourteen forefathers, will come fucking out from you.’

They untie his pyjamas and draw it down to his ankles. He cries out, ‘I’ll tell everything, don’t do this, please don’t, everything I know.’ His sobs are now racked by hiccups, so his words come out oddly syncopated. Still he tries: ‘They got news that I had been arrested, so they ran away. You would have found out if you had gone earlier, I’m telling you the truth . . .’

‘So it’s all our fault? Is that what you’re trying to say?’

‘No!’ he shouts.

The policeman holding him down at his knees, obstructing his view of what they are going to soon begin doing to the lower half of his body, says, ‘The fucker will sing, sing for his life. There will be a lot of noise. Shall we tie his mouth?’

‘How are we going to get things out of him if he can’t speak, you foolish arse?’ one of his colleagues notes with mirth.

A sudden silence descends in the room. In that stillness Supratik can discern something that he can only think of as the sounds of preparation – the rustle of clothing, a click, a suggestion of small, hard objects coming into brief contact with each other . . . His mouth and throat are completely dry. If he could only see what it is they are taking out, what it is they are planning to do . . .

The thin man in plain clothes says, ‘Hold him down really hard. He mustn’t move’ and sits down on the bed, next to Supratik’s naked thighs. He touches the inner left thigh and brushes it, as if smoothing down some paper before bringing his pen down on it. Supratik screams.

The SP says, ‘Now for some answers.’

Supratik cannot control the sounds coming out of him; they control him, not the other way around; the notion of agency has been inverted. He feels a prick on the skin where he has just been touched, like a hypodermic needle entering.

‘Nooooo! Noooo!’ Tides of screams break over him.

‘Don’t move. The more you move . . .’

Then he feels a series of those pricks, slow, methodical, closely spaced, along a long curve on the skin of his thigh. With each insertion of the needle, his whole body tries to jerk; after half a dozen of these pricks he begins to find the pain not totally intolerable. His mind begins its habitual trickery, starting with salvaging the memory of a childhood game he used to play with Suranjan: they used to spell out words, letter by letter, on each other’s backs, using the tip of one finger, and they had to guess what the word was.

‘Names,’ the SP says. ‘Every Naxal you know in the city, I want to know their names. We’ll impale all of you fuckers.’

Supratik cannot think of a single name. He feels yet another curve being tattooed into his skin, this one close to and following the first one. It hurts more.

‘What are you doing? What are they doing? What are they doing?’ he begs.

‘Shut up!’ the SP commands. ‘The questions are ours to ask, you son of a whore. Names, I want names.’

‘Ashu Chatterjee, Ramen Niyogi, Debashish Ray Chowdhury, Debdulal Maity, Ashish Mukherjee,’ the names come out, as if from a tap; Supratik has no idea if they are real, or fabricated, or semi-fictional hybrids where the surnames and forenames, both tethered in truth, have become mismatched.

The needle is now picking out a line that feels as if it is running perpendicular to the curves just executed. He has no idea what is happening and the ignorance corrodes him into nothing. It feels less painful than what he has already been subjected to, unless . . . Unless this is a throat-clearing before the real singing begins.

He lets out an involuntary cry, this one of fear, but it is indistinguishable from a cry of pain.

‘Again,’ the SP orders.

He recites a list, not congruent with the one he has given before.

‘Lies, lies!’ the SP shouts. ‘How did Ramen Niyogi become Ramen Mukherjee? How?’

The needle-artist has dotted out a pretty outline of a sickle and hammer over an area of nearly twenty square inches on Supratik’s thigh in pinpricks of blood. He pokes a sharp knife at one corner of the sickle and with a quick, sharp dig-and-twist movement loosens a little bit of skin, enough so that the pinch formed of his thumb and forefinger has a purchase on the flap.

Supratik howls as the pain reams his entire being.

‘Names and addresses and whereabouts,’ the SP demands.

How can he speak?

‘Names,’ comes the order again.

With one graceful movement of the point of the knife, the tattooist cuts along the dotted line of one curve of the sickle, then proceeds to do the same along the other arc. The craftsmanship is so fine that it takes a tiny fraction of time for the blood to bead along the bend of the line. He then begins to pull the skin, held by the corner that he has loosened, along the crescent of blood, bit by slow bit. An old-fashioned flaying is in progress.

‘Fucker’s screaming as if he’s being slaughtered!’

Another policeman suggests to the SP, ‘He could be gagged now and the questions could be asked after it’s over. He’ll know not to lie after this.’

As if to test the robustness of this hypothesis, the thin man pulls off the strip of skin that forms the metal blade of the representation of the sickle, in one quick tug. The sound from Supratik is indescribable. The peeled skin, a thin strip of wet, red rag, is attached to the bit where the joined-dots diagram of the sickle-handle begins.

The SP roars above this, ‘Taking out policeman, eh? Killing policemen. This’ll teach you, you son of a whore; this’ll teach you to stab and shoot and bomb the police.’ His delivery is a mixture of exultation and admonishment; he is delighted that policemen have been assassinated, otherwise how would this opportunity have come his way? ‘Cover up his mouth,’ he orders.

After silencing their subject, they continue with their exercise: the life-sized, live, tear-along-the-dotted-line game extends to the handle section of the sickle and, after that, the head of the hammer. Muzzled now, Supratik finds it difficult to breathe; respiration through his mouth has been made impossible – screaming in pain also doubles as a way of breathing, he understands now – and his nose has been given over to becoming predominantly a channel for leaking mucus. He will have to wrest away some of the energy in feeling pain to concentrating on the instinctive, unthought business of exhaling and inhaling.

Creating a distributary like this for his thoughts and senses, away from the main flow of the pain, however feeble this side-channel may be, brings him to a new understanding: that he can exercise a small amount of control over the pain, that it need not drown and erase him so completely.

The SP appears to be unaware that Supratik cannot answer his questions. He positions himself beside Supratik’s twisting, jerking head and keeps thundering, ‘Names, names of all the fuckers. We’ll eliminate them all, their family lines will end with them. We’ll show them exactly what fucking around with bombs leads to. Names, all the names, we’ll pull each and every letter out of you.’

Now that Supratik has learned to bifurcate his concentration, the referents behind the SP’s words once again begin to become legible and the relentless interrogation makes his mind, in its own peculiar state of fugue, wander into bizarre, aberrant territories. He thinks, for example, about that standard first question asked of a child by any stranger – ‘What is your name?’ Faced now with a different kind of query about names, his own disintegrates into nothing. Who is he? Is he his name? Could the two be uncoupled? What would he see in that gap?

Then there is a particularly grievous rip on his thigh. His constrained mouth, deprived of any freedom of movement, transmits the action of silent screaming into such a contortion that it is forced to bite down on his tongue. The cloth binding his mouth, already wet from leaking saliva, begins to turn pink, then red, as the salty, metallic taste in his mouth expresses itself visibly. The air curves in front of him. His mind, flirting with derangement, now brings to him, following its helter-skelter illogic, lines from the closing song he used to sing as a boy of eight in chorus in manimela: ‘Lift up this body of mine / Make me a burning lamp in your temple . . . / Touch my soul with the touchstone of fire / Sanctify my life with this burnt offering.’

They bundle him – he is not capable of much movement on his own – into a black police van in the dead of night.

‘We’re going to let you go,’ he was told; no reason was given, but he assumed it was because he had given them enough useful leads.

A dark shadow, of what lies in wait for him around the corner as a consequence of singing to the police, has briefly flitted through his mind, but immediate pain, and relief and incredulity at being released, have held that in abeyance.

He has no idea where they are taking him and he knows better than to ask. They are probably not giving him a lift back home, that much he can safely assume. The pain-induced hallucinatory darts-and-tumbles of his mind keep revisiting him. Now he has a gratuitous vision, no longer yoked to the dry words of propaganda, but something akin to a thing half-dreamed, half-experienced in the raggedy borders between sleep and waking – a vision of a near future, maybe fifty years, maybe seventy-five, a hundred, when the seeds that he and his kind have been busy sowing have grown, hidden from the human eye, or denied until unignorable, into forest cover for most of the country. It brings tears to his eyes and, for the first time in his life, he cries moved by the possibility of fulfilment; not tears of joy, but of a kind of proleptic hopefulness.

The van stops and he is ordered to get out. It is slow, painful going. Four policemen get out of the van too, as if concerned about his impaired ability to stand, move, walk. Again that playful deception of the mind: is the wood before him real or is he seeing things from the metaphors in his very recent thoughts fleshed out in the real world after a time-lag? Has he gone mad? Where is he?

‘Where is this?’ he asks.

‘Go. Walk. Go home,’ comes the answer.

What was it that his mother used to say about such situations?
Don’t spurn the goddess of wealth, waiting and ready at your hand, by pushing her away towards your feet.
The thought of his mother brings a sudden constriction in his throat – have they robbed him of any kind of self-control, of masculinity?

How will he ever find the words to ask her for forgiveness?

He hobbles, stops, limps a bit more; no, he really cannot move. The policemen are watching him in silence. Should he crawl on all fours? He would be much faster if he did that. He tries walking on the sides of his feet; it is impossible after two steps. An axis of pain has brought together, in one rod, the discrete epicentres of where he has been worked upon – the right big toe, the soles of both feet, his raw, bloody left thigh – and is driving that into his entire body, from toe to head. He takes another couple of steps.

‘Run,’ comes an order.

How can he run? He can hardly breathe.

A shot rings out, then another. The first bullet gets him in the back of his skull, the second in his back, under his left shoulder blade. He falls to the ground face-down.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

1970

A WEEK OF
mild, half-hearted beatings, followed by three months of being left alone in his cell with other criminals, then suddenly Madan is set free; no explanations, no threats, no reasons, only the mocking, harsh words from the minion who unlocks his cell and leads him to an officer on the ground floor: ‘Freedom. The effect of some good deed by your dead forefathers trickling down to you.’ He is given papers to sign and finds himself surprised at feeling insulted, after all that he has been through, when the officer barks at him, ‘Are you lettered or will it have to be a thumb impression?’ When his effects are returned to him, Madan discovers his watch is missing, and the twenty-rupee note he had taken out of his pocket before being ushered ungently into his cell. The loose change, assorted keys, two pieces of folded-up paper, the folded picture of Ma Kali, they are all there. He wants to ask about the watch, but stops himself; what if they use it as an excuse to keep him inside for longer?