Through a prism of self and society

Lives of Others is an angry book. It’s dark, brooding and unforgiving. Neel Mukherjee’s second book, though set in the City of Joy, is joyless. His rendering of a Calcutta of the 60s and the dysfunctional Ghosh family is gripping in its starkness. The book, a worthy sequel to his debut novel A Life Apart, marks out Mukherjee for his masterful rendition of post colonial human angst-ridden India.

Ripped of any redeeming humane spark, the characters fascinate you with their dark machinations and petty jealousies. There, did I hide a guilty blush somewhere? Yes, that is the effect of the book. You read on in horrified silence as in Mukherjee hands human foibles take on a dark sinister shape. The red nail polish sprinkled on new clothes of Purnima and daughter by her jealous spinster sister-in-law Chhaya, the dismembering of the tiny insects by a curious Som, Priyo and Chhaya’s ragging of Som—the carefully delineated acts of the main characters—take on a cruelty that is damning for the reader. These are incidents that many of us may have experienced as children. But in Neel’s hands the half innocent, half jesting childhood misdemeanours become manifestations of psychological and societal maladies.

It seems that the shadow of Prafullanath Ghosh’s own complexes have found a DNA imprint in his extended family of three generations. On a macrocosmic level, Ghosh, the patriarch is symbolic of India’s complex society in transition. The goings on within the urban upper middle class family exposes its total lack of civility. The same way as outside the family’s four floor house, the city and the nation burns through the decades shorn of humanity. Through India’s struggle for Independence, Partition, civil wars, famine and floods, the Ghosh family is only concerned with self, power and pelf. This selfcentered humanity at its worst level is depicted through Som’s depraved acts with the beggars who come for rice water, the beggar girl who licks it off the floor, Priyo the incestuous coprophiliac’s cravings, Charubala’s niggardliness and mistreatment of her widowed daughter-in-law, among other things.

Supratik’s inquisitions of his mother leave her shaken and the reader with a view into the smoldering class wars that would lead to the dreaded Naxalite movement, the Maoist repercussions with which the states are still grappling. The struggle for finite resources, the impunity with which the privileged classes appropriate the larger share of it is brought out as an interlocutory leitmotif.

Mukherjee’s focus is not so much on the uprising of the peasants. It is rather on upper middle class disenchanted youth, the so called ‘intelligentsia’ who joined movements like the Naxalbari, and fomented and supported it. Through Supratik’s self analytical letters, Neel tries to establish the psychological divide separating these youth from their families and society. Born with a golden or a silver spoon in their mouths, as they grow up, they become acutely conscious of the invisible line dividing them from the servants who cohabit with them. They are the few sensitive souls, perhaps the silver lining in society’s dark clouds—the conscience keepers of a world gone awry.

Along with Sandhya, you question your own role in society’s dysfunctions. Supratik represents that dark and ugly underbelly that for those of us sitting in our plush drawing rooms are mere statistics in breaking news items—forgotten with the next sip of Earl Grey tea. The Prologue itself, set in the draught of 1966, sows the seeds of ‘fissures and cracks’ in society that Neel portrays so pictorially through the eyes of marginal farmer Nitai Das. Das’s extreme act of familicide followed by suicide after he returns empty handed from the landlord’s place to his starving family, sets the tone for the larger design of the book. The contrast throughout the book is stark.

The juxtaposition of Supratik’s epistle expositions of a bigger, darker reality running parallel in the interiors of India’s countryside with this disintegrating, dysfunctional, at the edge of ruin Ghosh family, so oblivious to their own ominous ruin. Epilogue: An unputdownable book.