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

from the world of extreme wealth. Inside-outside: the world forever and always divides into those two categories. Inside, the amount of water used daily to keep the lawns and gardens so lush could provide drinking water to each of these men for a month. Outside, these men have to walk miles sometimes to get to a public hand-pump. On the way, if they collapse of thirst, even dogs won’t piss into their mouths to slake their dried tongues and throats. These men piss on the road, shit behind a bush or by a railway track, eat one meal of muri or chhatu a day, if they are lucky, rummage in the footpaths and drains surrounding New Market to see if someone has left a stub of banana in its peel or a corner of a shingara in a sal-leaf plate. They fight off the swarm of beggars who are also looking for food thrown away by the sated rich, they wash in the muddy brown water gushing out of broken standpipes. Do you remember that poem I read out to you? ‘Poetry, I bid you goodbye today. / The world is prosey with hunger / The full moon is like a piece of singed bread.’ You might see the pale bronze-coloured full moon, but they see, in its round shape, something to eat.
    Who do you think they are? They are not beggars, and they are certainly not the worst-off in our country – they have the clothes on their backs and the physical ability to work, at least for now. They haven’t yet found a foothold in a slum, but the lucky ones among them will. A slum will offer them a roof made of sheet plastic, maybe of bundles of hay held together by wooden stakes to form a tent. They won’t always have to sleep in the open like this. But, in a few years, most of them will contract a disease – TB, cholera, dysentery, malaria – and die like animals. Do you know what happens to their dead? To take them to a crematorium would mean paying the cremation fee, registering the death. That means a death certificate and money; in fact, more money than they earn in a week. It means a name, an address, a next of kin, a date of birth. They have nothing. So they are slipped into the Hooghly in the dead of the night. There the corpses rot and bleach and bloat, wash up ashore, get half-eaten by dogs and foxes, rot on land for a while, then get pulled back into the water during high tide . . . even in death their blighted lives won’t let go of them.
    They come from the suburbs, the villages, the mofussils, to look for work in the big city. From Uluberia, Bansdroni, Ghutiarishwari, Medinipur, Birbhum, Lakshmikantapur, Canning. The lucky among them will become rickshaw-pullers, balloonwallas, streetside snack-sellers. The less lucky will dig ditches, carry bricks, sand, cement, stone chips on their heads on construction sites. Some will be reduced to begging. You may ask: why don’t they go back to where they came from, if this is what the city holds for them? I will answer with another question: do you know what life holds for them back home? We don’t see them, so we don’t think about them. But I have seen their lives, I have lived with them. For a while. I will tell you all about it.
    But a small digression before that. You come from a lower-middle-class family from a small town. You’ve told me about the overstretched resources, the pinched lives, the relentless calculation of making ends meet going through your parents’ heads, the need to think long and hard, say, before you could be given five paise to spend on jhalmuri. You’ve talked about the look of fear in your parents’ faces when you came down with a cough or fever: where was the extra money for a doctor, to buy medicines, going to come from?
    What did I know of such lives, sheltered, bourgeois boy that I was, living in the cushioned vacuum created by my grandfather’s temporary boom of minor-mode prosperity – four-storeyed house, cars, many servants? Nothing. Yes, I was a communist activist from my very first year in Presidency College, but there is a large gap between being an