While trying to deconstruct the many layers of meaning that Neel Mukherjee has invested in his second novel, it might be prudent to first examine the relevance of the book’s title. The Lives of Others helps conjure the obvious connotation of empathy, the ability to place oneself in another’s shoes, imagining thereby the dreams and horrors which propel the lives of those outside the confines of one’s self. A more sinister curiosity in ‘the lives of others’ helps fuel idle chatter and neighbourhood gossip, stirring desires that can only be satisfied by a sense of overwhelming Schadenfreude. It is between these realms of empathy and prying curiosity that Mukherjee’s novel operates. But most crucially, it is the book’s interest in the lives of marginalised Others that gives it its punch, and helps place it on that much-coveted Booker longlist.
The prologue to The Lives of Others makes clear that we are in for a ride which is menacing, if not unforgiving. Farmer Nitai Das, who under the burden of loans and extortionate interest rates is reduced to beggary, decides to kill his entire family in order to solve their perennial problem of hunger. Food, though, has never been a concern for the college-going Supratik Ghosh. Even as he returns home at odd hours, he finds his mother waiting with an assortment of meat, fish and vegetables. “Don’t you agree we eat too much,” he asks his baffled mother. In that question, in that disdainful ‘we’, lies a hint. Dissatisfied with the apathy that a status quo so readily enforces, Supratik has left behind his days of amateurish communist revolt. The late 1960s have brought him opportunities far more substantive than before. Armed with Mao’s Little Red Book and the tenets of Naxalism, Supratik leaves his home and city for a small village in West Bengal’s Medinipur.
Bringing revolution to rural Bengal doesn’t prove too straightforward a task. Supratik keeps a journal, effectively writing a long letter to an unnamed recipient. With its descriptions of excruciating hardship and exploitation, his entries aren’t always easy reading. One can only feel glad that Mukherjee regularly shifts our attention to 22/6 Basanta Bose Road, the four-storeyed house Supratik has left behind. A joint family of 16 members, the Ghoshes give the author ample opportunity to build a large cast of players, each with a set of private fears, each with a predilection for one or more of those seven deadly sins. While Mukherjee delves into the psyche of his characters with precision, at times he scripts a melodrama a pitch too high.
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With each passing page, that sacred institution of family is reassessed. Militant politics, alcohol, drugs, prostitutes, mathematics, even a muted desire for incest are seen as routes of escape from a structure that is inevitably dismissed as claustrophobic. As one of the book’s cameos observes, “The family is the first and primary unit of oppression and exploitation.” Forever caught in the darkness of their own failures and pettiness, it is hard for most members of the Ghosh family to understand each other, to comprehend the stifling repression that surrounds them. Even though Supratik tries to shine a lone torch of empathy, he too is constrained by the limits of his ideology. Eventually, silence provides that respite. Despite existing on the periphery of this novel, the servant Madan, the widowed Purba and her two children, all help renew hope for a world that could be simpler.
Naxalite revolution, 1960s Calcutta, Bengali families — The Lowland familiarised us with these themes last year. But even if Jhumpa Lahiri couldn’t get past the Booker shortlist, there is reason to hope that Mukherjee’s fate may well be different. The historicity of his book is more evocative, and if an eight-page glossary of terms is anything to go by, The Lives of Others is more quintessentially Bengali. Be it the disdain that north Calcuttans reserve for their counterparts in the south or the spectre of Tagore which looms large over everyday life, Mukherjee touches on varied aspects of Bengali life with a flourish that is charming. That said, however, it would only be fair to add that while Mukherjee seems to finish many of Lahiri’s sentences, The Lowland, in ways, starts where Lives of Others concludes.
The Booker jury might find it hard to shake off that sense of déjà vu, but it is only chronology that makes Mukherjee’s offering read like an addendum. Without the antecedent, the book deserves a more independent appraisal.
( Shreevatsa Nevatia is a Kolkata-based writer )