The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee Read Free Book Online Page A

happened and is happening. When you hear different voices chattering away afterwards, all with their shadows and half-truths and lies and fiction, you can come back to this and think that you and only you have the truth. That is all I can give you. But after you’ve read it, burn everything. On no account must a shred of these letters and journals be found on you or in the house. You will soon find out why I’m asking you to do this.
    Did you know that Calcutta was the capital of British India until 1912 ? The English built this city by bringing together mosquito-infested swamps and marshes and mud. Today, walking down Chowringhee, with its rows of palatial buildings and arcades and shops on one side, the huge Maidan on the other, the towering Monument off Mayo Road in Esplanade, can you tell that this was just a vast expanse of silt? The British left our country twenty years ago, but their handiwork will remain for ever.
    You may never get a chance to walk up and down Chowringhee, so let me try and put it into words for you. The grandeur of the Great Eastern Hotel alone would make you slack-jawed with awe. On the street level of this part of Chowringhee, it’s one long colonnade, sometimes interrupted by cross-streets: the paved footpath gives way to Chowringhee Road and Bentinck Street on one side; on the other you have shop after shop selling jewellery, fancy goods, liquor, clothes, luxury items, imported food, watches, shawls, carpets and rugs, chandeliers, lights and candelabra, carved wooden boxes, antiques . . . whatever money can buy you can get in these shops. An endless fountain of things. They can dazzle and blind you. Left off north Chowringhee, on the colonial splendour of Old Court House Street, sits the Great Eastern. The first floor of this blindingly white building is above the colonnade, as if to lift its elite guests and residents a few feet above the torrent of ordinary life outside.
    I have never been inside its rooms or to the restaurant, the ballroom, the bar, the shops that still display the sign of the British crown and the words ‘By appointment to HM the King Emperor and HM the Queen Empress’, the tearoom where waiters in full regalia – cinched waistband; high, pleated headgear; sash; brass buttons; cuffs; starched uniform – bow low and bring in tea that you and I will never drink. But you can walk around – if you’re properly dressed and do not attract the suspicion of the uniformed guards and staff – and see the gravelled drive, the blue swimming pool, the stone and marble and glass of the building, the gardens, the well-tended lawns, the flowers . . . even Nature seems to oblige the moneyed.
    But my concern is not with the inside. I have tried to give you the tiniest glimpse of it, so that you can better imagine the world that is my concern – the world beyond the walls of the Great Eastern Hotel, the world immediately outside, at its doorstep. If you walk down the colonnaded arcade below the hotel at dawn, just as the dawn chorus has started, long before the luxury shops have opened or the mad bustle of life in Chowringhee and BBD Bag has begun, you will see a very different view. Here, lying on their gamchha, a jute sack, a piece of tarpaulin or plastic or whatever scrap of cloth they can spare after wrapping their bodies, is a row of sleeping men curled up like foetuses. Those who have sandals use them as pillows, otherwise they will be stolen. Those who don’t, do without, resting their heads on the concrete. Their vests are full of holes, they wear dirty, threadbare lungis that ride up while they are asleep, exposing their shame to the world, the soles of their feet are so cracked that they look like parched land during a particularly bad drought, they have nothing to protect them from the morning drop in temperature. Extreme exhaustion clings to their faces and the shadows under their eyes, even when they’re sleeping the sleep of the near-dead. Only ten feet separate them