Kolkata 2001 – After the Revolution
In this blistering season, when men hardened by suffering release molten
fire from their smooth dark skins, Sukhiram lies upon the wooden cot embracing
his middle-aged wife. Defying every law of summer heat, their two bodies remain
strangely cold—cold like ice itself. As if not a single fragment of the
millions of thoughts in this vast universe could find shelter in their brains.
Even the hostile forces that normally prowl in the crevices of life never surge
here. Such is their peaceful and simple coexistence—like two sin-weary children
asleep beside each other.
And truly, those who in shape are children were lying too—around the back of Sukhiram’s beloved wife, Kunti. Just beneath the cot, separated from the earth by a thin quilt. Three in number. Between nine and one and a half years of age. In their thin skeletal bodies the bellies bulged monstrously forward. The youngest still clung to his mother’s breast. Apart from feeding and sleep, he did nothing but cry. But now, all their bodies possessed the still, icy tranquility of the Himalayas. Cruel, mercilessly lifeless. Only an unknown wind kept circling, whirling, around the five motionless bodies.
And yet—only a little while ago, when darkness fell like a sudden avalanche into their tiny shack, Sukhiram’s wife had clasped her youngest child tight against her chest. With every desperate pull of the infant’s parched lips, a sharp cutting sensation pierced her withered breasts. Nothing there. A hollow unity like the boundless darkness of space. The framework of ribs stood out grotesquely on her chest. Her throat caught tight. Her teeth clenched. Her tongue existed, yet became mute to all needs of life. One by one, all the unwanted burdens of the world invaded their hut. Sukhiram, sinking deeper into liquor like an unlettered fool, mistook the satisfaction of his physical lust for survival itself. With eyes clouded in suspicion he gazed upon his offspring. Then suddenly, as if disgusted, he renounced hunger and thirst—the earthly urges.
From his pocket Sukhiram drew a matchbox, lit a bidi. The frail flame seemed cold to Kunti. She saw her once-truthful, self-restrained husband step in from the outer world into this infernal chamber of despair.
From her throat she cried, —Light the lamp.
Clutching the burning splinter, Sukhiram moved forward to search some hidden path to the lamp. In the northeast corner, digging where once the final bamboo of the five-rafter roof had been planted, there lay the dull earthen lamp. Sukhiram shook it. Empty. Only an infinite oil-lessness remained. The match singed his thumb as it died. He struck another. Kunti repeated her daily chant of comfort,
—Pour in a little water.
The workers have nothing to lose, yet they have the whole world to win—perhaps remembering that thought, the water-filled lamp burst into flame. The sharp blaze seized a little portion of the room, spreading its dominion of light. And in that hesitant glow, the greatest sin of life stood revealed—yet light itself is a fraud. Who can say whether it is genuine or false? The man who has already left this household, this world, wandered alone, battling secretly with his hidden sins.
He dropped the small bundles from his hands and flung his drunken body into a corner. Small wrongs and petty wickednesses merge together until they forge a hardened scoundrel. With liquor and foul blood, nothing else remains inside. He cannot speak truth—only concoct lies and spin them into armor. Thus he becomes a cheat. Fear stalks both his waking and dreaming hours. Passersby, the self-proclaimed wise men of the city, fail to recognize his real nature. He is merely one manufactured item in the city’s grand factory: a thug, a deceiver, a hustler.
Such is the shape of Sukhiram’s downfall. And his ruin is not merely one of food or clothing—it is more deeply the ruin of his mind. For the history of millennia of poverty and humiliation had taught him one lesson: revolution and change. The scientific path to alter society. From the womb of revolution had been promised a world free from poverty, exploitation, and filth. The nation born from the great upheaval of ’71. The flag of the trade union was red like blood, and in the smoke of the factories, a net of dreams was woven. But by the time Sukhiram recognized the color of that revolution, the net of dreams had already torn. He dangled, suspended in a void from the heavens. The world appeared even more untimely than before. Sorrow became his only permanent inheritance. The train kept moving, clattering through the corpses of closed factories. From afar, the hammer-and-sickle, the red flag, fluttered and vanished.
With each jolt of the train, Sukhiram’s voice cracked and faltered. His throat wrapped in a rough disguise, he sang: Nah janam sahite e e e Nah param kahite e e e
This song was no trickery. It was his solitary monologue to God, a fatigued lament.
His tiny, recessed eyes shriveled, the veins of his throat bulging on one side, while on the other the clink of coins fell into a tin can. His hoarse voice had not grown familiar to the ears of daily habit, yet the emotion he extracted from it—by hook or crook—was the emotion of deceiving men. That too must be practiced with labor. Just as the voice of the union leader had been. Just as Jyotibabu, clad in shining leather, once aroused emotion on the Brigade grounds.
It was within the syllables of that song that Sukhiram woke in the middle of nights. This trickster’s song did not let him sleep. The flame of the match would flare, light would return. He held the cracked mirror, spider-veined, before his face and wondered: why do people give him alms? Is it because his misery can fool them? Do they mistake his look for that of a true sufferer? Why do they confuse his deceit with genuine torment? He would gaze into the faces of those who threw him coins. The nation’s people were still so merciful that they mistook naked lies for truth. The masses had no power to discern the false. They worshipped the swindler as though he were divine.
Centuries ago, at least, exploiters could be recognized. Now the mask had grown so thick that no one could identify them.
Sukhiram did not believe in God.
The leaders of the trade union had taught him long ago: there is no God—only the worker’s hands are his God, and the enemies are the world’s masters. “Piglets,” he would curse, thinking of those leaders. They had declared, “We sell our hands to live. They devour human lives instead.” Sukhiram, lost in his thoughts, would bare his teeth in laughter.
He told Kunti once, in a voice heavy with hopelessness:
I sell my throat, pretending to be blind, because unlike those piglets of workers, I have no hands.
When drunk, his face grew hideous. For Sukhiram’s disguise was blindness. He sold not blindness, but his own misery.
These priceless miseries were the true cause of all sins.
Kunti would reply: —So great a storm, so much upheaval—and what came of it? This is the fruit of sins in our past life.
And her fears—strange enough—always came true.
But Sukhiram had no faith in sin or virtue. In his lament, there was no truth—only contempt for reality itself. Poor Kunti, faithful in honesty’s trial, could not remain close. Her body had turned poisonous. For she lived only in the present. Only for today. She never thought of tomorrow. She was not brave enough to scorn God.
The Naiyāyikas once said: all men have problems, some more, some less. If all could be solved, then war, violence, lies, selfishness, unrest, evil, poverty—all could vanish. Wise men who thought much, who knew much, had given many such paths—paths which led only to their disciples’ wealth, nothing more. Did that mean nothing at all could ever change? Would this world forever remain helpless, abandoned, sprawled atop mountains of sin? Would no civilization rise to lift its head, radiant with greatness?
—I do not feel sorrow anymore. I do not even lament, said Kunti, rummaging through the bundles for food. I only ask myself—what gain is there in living this way? Truly, there is no future. No will left. Life is naked now. As if locked—like the gate of the closed factory.
The worker Sukhiram had become workless, twenty years after the revolution.
Back then, Kunti’s body was not so worn. The youngest son had not yet come into her womb. She had not been prepared to accept misfortune. At first, they tried to survive by breaking their savings for the future to buy each day of the present. Side by side with Sukhiram, Kunti entered the battle of life. A battle whose outcome was already too well known—one-sided and dreadful. Thus, step by step, from half-starvation to starvation’s path, their desire to live was driven.
In this land, no light of hope was left. Every provision for survival had been burned to ashes in the fire of revolution.
The straight road now descended into the plague’s path. Pain thinned out slowly. Life itself became not merely an occasion, but an excuse. Around them rose, layer upon layer, the immovable boulder of stagnation. For the future, no hand remained to march toward production. In this city, no rain fell. Thus, like a desert, emptiness reigned, and only beggars inhabited it.
The privileged ones—those so-called satiated creatures of the city’s life—spread across Kunti’s body like cactus thorns, once they found the chance. After quenching themselves to satisfaction, they hurled her back into the wilderness of jungle-life. Such was the perfect drainage system of survival, a system devised for cleansing their own filth. And their well-groomed babu-comrade—after raping the maid on his Dunlop pillow as on any other day—was getting up to leave.
As he put on his clothes, Kunti said, —Babu, I have never asked too much from you. But what will happen to my children? I mean—to the child that is already in my womb.
Her voice cracked into a feigned cry.
The man froze for a moment, as though this woman had placed before him an astonishing subject. As if he had never known before that women, if all goes correctly, might become pregnant.
In an unfamiliar voice, he said, —When? What are you talking about? Whose child is this!
—Babu, your child, said Kunti, showing him her swollen belly.
—You have commanded me every time, and I have obeyed. Even when I wanted to stop, your wife did not allow me. My husband lives drowned in intoxication—he has noticed nothing. Will your child live begging for alms?
—You wretched whore, snarled the man, seizing her arm and shaking her.
—Who knows how many men you’ve slept with? Your husband sends you to others as he pleases. And now you dare say it’s mine?
Not every lie triumphs. Kunti realized that truth. In fact, she herself did not know whose child this was. She only knew that if she could thrust the burden onto some benevolent babu, her aim would be achieved. She would secure provisions to live a little longer.
Kunti said weakly, —But my remaining payment…
At that, the master side felt reassured.
—Ah, so that’s it. You just want a little more money. Here—take it. Have I ever refused? Have I ever failed to pay?
He flung two crisp hundred-rupee notes at her. Kunti’s greedy eyes softened in their crispness. This, truly, is what capitalist economy means.
By then Sukhiram had already been scheming with ease.
In Bengali, Hindi, and English, he had leaflets typed—petitions, or rather offerings. They read: “My name is Sri Sukhiram Pal. I have a wife and two children. I was once a worker in such-and-such place, employed in labor. Today I am jobless. Out of kindness, may generous souls please extend their help.”
When he rode the bus to Howrah, the name of his factory became “Guest Keen.”
When on the Jadavpur bus, he became a dismissed worker of “Usha Factory” or “Sulekha.” Or perhaps of “Bengal Lamps.”
Everywhere—so many, countless closed factories.
Thus Sukhiram’s falsehoods matched, word for word, the city’s reality.
Comrades of lofty ideals—riding buses, trams, or trudging pavements—failed to catch his trickery. Instead they grew thoughtful, debating the changes sweeping Bengal under the weight of central power and American imperialism.
Another leaflet read: “My name is Sri Sukhiram Pal. I have a wife and two children. None of the four of us can hear or speak. Out of kindness, may you extend your helping hand. May God bless you.”
Those who received the leaflet on trains, buses, trams—two-thirds of them muttered,
—Why don’t you work for your bread instead of begging? Don’t you want to labor?
The other third thought inwardly: begging is sin, giving alms is sin too. As the saying goes—wrong is done not only by the doer, but by the one who suffers it.
Strong logic. Perfect logic. Logic without heart.
Sukhiram gathered back the slips into his own hands while stepping off the bus, face sour. “Bastards, do you have work to offer? Look and see—I am eager to labor!”
At high noon, at the burning stand of the bus, his lone soliloquy dripped like molten tar from his mouth.
The people of this city live on shamelessly in smoldering fire. No shame. No hatred.
No call to revolt in their disobedient stares. How long can a mask be worn?
Day by day, rules change. With each new rule, the people are deceived anew.
In trams, trains, buses, and streets, Sukhiram wove ever-new tales of misery. To five people he would narrate them. Hard hearts, slowly, began to crack. His gaunt body stood as proof, a portrait of suffering’s war.
Perhaps a wise man could see through it. Could know that alms dropped into Sukhiram’s tin would only feed the dens of country liquor. His face was like the other reflection of the devil.
And yet, the merciful did not summon the Naiyāyika’s cold logic. They let two or four coins fall into Sukhiram’s can.
One day Sukhiram resolved— “Today no deception. No fakery. I will place truth before society.”
He dressed in his best shirt and trousers and boarded a bus.
It was not crowded. He walked to the very back, planted his feet, and, in a heavy voice like Ajitesh on stage, he thundered: —Respected friends! My fellow citizens of this city!
Startled, the passengers turned their heads.
—My name is Sukhiram Pal. I am a B.A. graduate. Like any other Bengali youth, I was devoted to class struggle since my college days. I made revolution. I agitated. I labored in the factory. In the Victoria Jute Mill of Telinipara, shoulder to shoulder with my worker-brothers.
—I have now been unemployed for four years. I will not go into details—you all know them. Like you, I too have a wife and children at home.
—You must be thinking I am here to beg. Yes, for long I did beg in many guises. I deceived people. Many will ask—why did you not seek work? But I have. Tell me honestly, with your hand on your chest—does this city have work for its unemployed sons and daughters?
—Can any of you here offer me a job? I am not begging. Not for alms. I am begging for work. Any kind of work. I have not stolen, not picked pockets, not wielded a knife. There is still some shred of humanity alive within me. Friends, I too have a household. My children too feel hunger. If any among you, with kindness, can give me work…
Sukhiram stopped. He looked, eye to eye, into whomever he could reach.
But none could return his gaze. Everyone’s life seemed steeped in the same insufficiency of joy.
Then Sukhiram softened his throat, lowered his voice: —No one can give work, gentlemen. This is my fate. But if anyone has two or four coins lying loose in your pocket—then, think of me as your younger brother and…
Thus the days pass, the nights drift. Sukhiram grows torn into shreds, into strips.
And like some unwanted, unnecessary child, another newborn enters the darkness.
Excessive exhaustion and childbirth weaken the woman’s body.
Kunti’s youth suddenly collapses, crumbles—wrecked by malnutrition.
As if her long-suffering existence has been torn across its breadth.
From nothingness, the infant sucks her blood, drains her marrow, exhausts her flesh.
The child, whose fathers Kunti longs to return to—yet whether she can, she does not know.
Motherhood has stripped her of fat, of flesh, of bone-marrow. Kunti is now always weary, with a ceaseless fatigue in her limbs. So much weariness in living itself.
Even hunger, after many days of fasting, becomes tired too.
But she—she is only blood and flesh, a human form.
Within this hunger-ridden life, she too searched for joy, for purpose.
For even stripped of all historical human qualities, the woman was not entirely bereft.
Nor was the man.
The truth: in such a time, men and women are not recognized as human at all.
How can their humanity shine?
Then, the sound of weeping rises through the room. The sound of hunger.
Kunti’s three children awaken.
And they hurl the geography of their hunger against the history of human compassion.
At that moment, Sukhiram stumbles home, singing. Tonight, he seems drunker than ever. First, he sits frozen for a while— As if locked in battle with some invisible force.
Then suddenly some buried impulse flares up into strength.
He drags from his pocket a bottle of liquor.
He says to Kunti: —Here, whore. Drink. Quench your hunger.
Kunti raises her eyes and stares into his eyes once.
Just then the eldest daughter begins to cry: —What? You are all drinking without me? I too want. I too am hungry.
Kunti can bear no longer. She lifts the bottle, tilts it to her throat.
The venomous liquid runs down her gullet, into her stomach, spreads into every pore.
The nine-year-old snatches the bottle from her mother’s hand.
She too drinks, to calm her hunger.
By now Kunti’s body has spread its wings—sinking, drowned in mute exhaustion.
Sukhiram stares, stunned. As though no more time is left.
Slowly, with illicit paternal tenderness, he raises the nectar of hunger-quenching poison to the lips of each child.
One by one, they drink. And soon, they lie in peace, asleep in eternal comfort. Only Sukhiram remains awake. Even the task of lecturing the world is finished for him now.
Hunger—such a trivial thing to cross beyond. So easy.
The sages said so long ago—daubed in ashes, wrapped in dust.
He arranges their bodies neatly on the bed—his kin, his dear ones—laid out as though for a beautiful sleep of dreams.
Then, holding the bottle to his own mouth, Sukhiram pauses. He wonders—does he truly have nothing more to think of?
All thoughts of the future have disappeared. All misery has set into sunset. No complaint remains against poverty or deprivation. Never again will he raise his clenched fist to demand his rights.
Much later, the neighbors open the door and enter. They find the weary family asleep. Like sons and daughters of nectar, their bodies have turned blue.
Through the crowd of poverty, filth, and death, we have been walking for thousands of years. For thousands of years we have witnessed history—the history of poverty, the history of deprivation, the history of exploitation.
We step outside. Darkness. Only darkness. Infinite darkness.
It feels as though from this shame, this insult, from the depths of this death—some language rises, groaning, writhing. A protest, demanding its justification.
“How long? How long more?”
On the cinema screen, in the language of protest crafted by a Marxist director, the audience’s skin bristles. The foolish public, thrilled, take oaths of change, of revolution, of a world turned new.
And truly, those who in shape are children were lying too—around the back of Sukhiram’s beloved wife, Kunti. Just beneath the cot, separated from the earth by a thin quilt. Three in number. Between nine and one and a half years of age. In their thin skeletal bodies the bellies bulged monstrously forward. The youngest still clung to his mother’s breast. Apart from feeding and sleep, he did nothing but cry. But now, all their bodies possessed the still, icy tranquility of the Himalayas. Cruel, mercilessly lifeless. Only an unknown wind kept circling, whirling, around the five motionless bodies.
And yet—only a little while ago, when darkness fell like a sudden avalanche into their tiny shack, Sukhiram’s wife had clasped her youngest child tight against her chest. With every desperate pull of the infant’s parched lips, a sharp cutting sensation pierced her withered breasts. Nothing there. A hollow unity like the boundless darkness of space. The framework of ribs stood out grotesquely on her chest. Her throat caught tight. Her teeth clenched. Her tongue existed, yet became mute to all needs of life. One by one, all the unwanted burdens of the world invaded their hut. Sukhiram, sinking deeper into liquor like an unlettered fool, mistook the satisfaction of his physical lust for survival itself. With eyes clouded in suspicion he gazed upon his offspring. Then suddenly, as if disgusted, he renounced hunger and thirst—the earthly urges.
From his pocket Sukhiram drew a matchbox, lit a bidi. The frail flame seemed cold to Kunti. She saw her once-truthful, self-restrained husband step in from the outer world into this infernal chamber of despair.
From her throat she cried, —Light the lamp.
Clutching the burning splinter, Sukhiram moved forward to search some hidden path to the lamp. In the northeast corner, digging where once the final bamboo of the five-rafter roof had been planted, there lay the dull earthen lamp. Sukhiram shook it. Empty. Only an infinite oil-lessness remained. The match singed his thumb as it died. He struck another. Kunti repeated her daily chant of comfort,
—Pour in a little water.
The workers have nothing to lose, yet they have the whole world to win—perhaps remembering that thought, the water-filled lamp burst into flame. The sharp blaze seized a little portion of the room, spreading its dominion of light. And in that hesitant glow, the greatest sin of life stood revealed—yet light itself is a fraud. Who can say whether it is genuine or false? The man who has already left this household, this world, wandered alone, battling secretly with his hidden sins.
He dropped the small bundles from his hands and flung his drunken body into a corner. Small wrongs and petty wickednesses merge together until they forge a hardened scoundrel. With liquor and foul blood, nothing else remains inside. He cannot speak truth—only concoct lies and spin them into armor. Thus he becomes a cheat. Fear stalks both his waking and dreaming hours. Passersby, the self-proclaimed wise men of the city, fail to recognize his real nature. He is merely one manufactured item in the city’s grand factory: a thug, a deceiver, a hustler.
Such is the shape of Sukhiram’s downfall. And his ruin is not merely one of food or clothing—it is more deeply the ruin of his mind. For the history of millennia of poverty and humiliation had taught him one lesson: revolution and change. The scientific path to alter society. From the womb of revolution had been promised a world free from poverty, exploitation, and filth. The nation born from the great upheaval of ’71. The flag of the trade union was red like blood, and in the smoke of the factories, a net of dreams was woven. But by the time Sukhiram recognized the color of that revolution, the net of dreams had already torn. He dangled, suspended in a void from the heavens. The world appeared even more untimely than before. Sorrow became his only permanent inheritance. The train kept moving, clattering through the corpses of closed factories. From afar, the hammer-and-sickle, the red flag, fluttered and vanished.
With each jolt of the train, Sukhiram’s voice cracked and faltered. His throat wrapped in a rough disguise, he sang: Nah janam sahite e e e Nah param kahite e e e
This song was no trickery. It was his solitary monologue to God, a fatigued lament.
His tiny, recessed eyes shriveled, the veins of his throat bulging on one side, while on the other the clink of coins fell into a tin can. His hoarse voice had not grown familiar to the ears of daily habit, yet the emotion he extracted from it—by hook or crook—was the emotion of deceiving men. That too must be practiced with labor. Just as the voice of the union leader had been. Just as Jyotibabu, clad in shining leather, once aroused emotion on the Brigade grounds.
It was within the syllables of that song that Sukhiram woke in the middle of nights. This trickster’s song did not let him sleep. The flame of the match would flare, light would return. He held the cracked mirror, spider-veined, before his face and wondered: why do people give him alms? Is it because his misery can fool them? Do they mistake his look for that of a true sufferer? Why do they confuse his deceit with genuine torment? He would gaze into the faces of those who threw him coins. The nation’s people were still so merciful that they mistook naked lies for truth. The masses had no power to discern the false. They worshipped the swindler as though he were divine.
Centuries ago, at least, exploiters could be recognized. Now the mask had grown so thick that no one could identify them.
Sukhiram did not believe in God.
The leaders of the trade union had taught him long ago: there is no God—only the worker’s hands are his God, and the enemies are the world’s masters. “Piglets,” he would curse, thinking of those leaders. They had declared, “We sell our hands to live. They devour human lives instead.” Sukhiram, lost in his thoughts, would bare his teeth in laughter.
He told Kunti once, in a voice heavy with hopelessness:
I sell my throat, pretending to be blind, because unlike those piglets of workers, I have no hands.
When drunk, his face grew hideous. For Sukhiram’s disguise was blindness. He sold not blindness, but his own misery.
These priceless miseries were the true cause of all sins.
Kunti would reply: —So great a storm, so much upheaval—and what came of it? This is the fruit of sins in our past life.
And her fears—strange enough—always came true.
But Sukhiram had no faith in sin or virtue. In his lament, there was no truth—only contempt for reality itself. Poor Kunti, faithful in honesty’s trial, could not remain close. Her body had turned poisonous. For she lived only in the present. Only for today. She never thought of tomorrow. She was not brave enough to scorn God.
The Naiyāyikas once said: all men have problems, some more, some less. If all could be solved, then war, violence, lies, selfishness, unrest, evil, poverty—all could vanish. Wise men who thought much, who knew much, had given many such paths—paths which led only to their disciples’ wealth, nothing more. Did that mean nothing at all could ever change? Would this world forever remain helpless, abandoned, sprawled atop mountains of sin? Would no civilization rise to lift its head, radiant with greatness?
—I do not feel sorrow anymore. I do not even lament, said Kunti, rummaging through the bundles for food. I only ask myself—what gain is there in living this way? Truly, there is no future. No will left. Life is naked now. As if locked—like the gate of the closed factory.
The worker Sukhiram had become workless, twenty years after the revolution.
Back then, Kunti’s body was not so worn. The youngest son had not yet come into her womb. She had not been prepared to accept misfortune. At first, they tried to survive by breaking their savings for the future to buy each day of the present. Side by side with Sukhiram, Kunti entered the battle of life. A battle whose outcome was already too well known—one-sided and dreadful. Thus, step by step, from half-starvation to starvation’s path, their desire to live was driven.
In this land, no light of hope was left. Every provision for survival had been burned to ashes in the fire of revolution.
The straight road now descended into the plague’s path. Pain thinned out slowly. Life itself became not merely an occasion, but an excuse. Around them rose, layer upon layer, the immovable boulder of stagnation. For the future, no hand remained to march toward production. In this city, no rain fell. Thus, like a desert, emptiness reigned, and only beggars inhabited it.
The privileged ones—those so-called satiated creatures of the city’s life—spread across Kunti’s body like cactus thorns, once they found the chance. After quenching themselves to satisfaction, they hurled her back into the wilderness of jungle-life. Such was the perfect drainage system of survival, a system devised for cleansing their own filth. And their well-groomed babu-comrade—after raping the maid on his Dunlop pillow as on any other day—was getting up to leave.
As he put on his clothes, Kunti said, —Babu, I have never asked too much from you. But what will happen to my children? I mean—to the child that is already in my womb.
Her voice cracked into a feigned cry.
The man froze for a moment, as though this woman had placed before him an astonishing subject. As if he had never known before that women, if all goes correctly, might become pregnant.
In an unfamiliar voice, he said, —When? What are you talking about? Whose child is this!
—Babu, your child, said Kunti, showing him her swollen belly.
—You have commanded me every time, and I have obeyed. Even when I wanted to stop, your wife did not allow me. My husband lives drowned in intoxication—he has noticed nothing. Will your child live begging for alms?
—You wretched whore, snarled the man, seizing her arm and shaking her.
—Who knows how many men you’ve slept with? Your husband sends you to others as he pleases. And now you dare say it’s mine?
Not every lie triumphs. Kunti realized that truth. In fact, she herself did not know whose child this was. She only knew that if she could thrust the burden onto some benevolent babu, her aim would be achieved. She would secure provisions to live a little longer.
Kunti said weakly, —But my remaining payment…
At that, the master side felt reassured.
—Ah, so that’s it. You just want a little more money. Here—take it. Have I ever refused? Have I ever failed to pay?
He flung two crisp hundred-rupee notes at her. Kunti’s greedy eyes softened in their crispness. This, truly, is what capitalist economy means.
By then Sukhiram had already been scheming with ease.
In Bengali, Hindi, and English, he had leaflets typed—petitions, or rather offerings. They read: “My name is Sri Sukhiram Pal. I have a wife and two children. I was once a worker in such-and-such place, employed in labor. Today I am jobless. Out of kindness, may generous souls please extend their help.”
When he rode the bus to Howrah, the name of his factory became “Guest Keen.”
When on the Jadavpur bus, he became a dismissed worker of “Usha Factory” or “Sulekha.” Or perhaps of “Bengal Lamps.”
Everywhere—so many, countless closed factories.
Thus Sukhiram’s falsehoods matched, word for word, the city’s reality.
Comrades of lofty ideals—riding buses, trams, or trudging pavements—failed to catch his trickery. Instead they grew thoughtful, debating the changes sweeping Bengal under the weight of central power and American imperialism.
Another leaflet read: “My name is Sri Sukhiram Pal. I have a wife and two children. None of the four of us can hear or speak. Out of kindness, may you extend your helping hand. May God bless you.”
Those who received the leaflet on trains, buses, trams—two-thirds of them muttered,
—Why don’t you work for your bread instead of begging? Don’t you want to labor?
The other third thought inwardly: begging is sin, giving alms is sin too. As the saying goes—wrong is done not only by the doer, but by the one who suffers it.
Strong logic. Perfect logic. Logic without heart.
Sukhiram gathered back the slips into his own hands while stepping off the bus, face sour. “Bastards, do you have work to offer? Look and see—I am eager to labor!”
At high noon, at the burning stand of the bus, his lone soliloquy dripped like molten tar from his mouth.
The people of this city live on shamelessly in smoldering fire. No shame. No hatred.
No call to revolt in their disobedient stares. How long can a mask be worn?
Day by day, rules change. With each new rule, the people are deceived anew.
In trams, trains, buses, and streets, Sukhiram wove ever-new tales of misery. To five people he would narrate them. Hard hearts, slowly, began to crack. His gaunt body stood as proof, a portrait of suffering’s war.
Perhaps a wise man could see through it. Could know that alms dropped into Sukhiram’s tin would only feed the dens of country liquor. His face was like the other reflection of the devil.
And yet, the merciful did not summon the Naiyāyika’s cold logic. They let two or four coins fall into Sukhiram’s can.
One day Sukhiram resolved— “Today no deception. No fakery. I will place truth before society.”
He dressed in his best shirt and trousers and boarded a bus.
It was not crowded. He walked to the very back, planted his feet, and, in a heavy voice like Ajitesh on stage, he thundered: —Respected friends! My fellow citizens of this city!
Startled, the passengers turned their heads.
—My name is Sukhiram Pal. I am a B.A. graduate. Like any other Bengali youth, I was devoted to class struggle since my college days. I made revolution. I agitated. I labored in the factory. In the Victoria Jute Mill of Telinipara, shoulder to shoulder with my worker-brothers.
—I have now been unemployed for four years. I will not go into details—you all know them. Like you, I too have a wife and children at home.
—You must be thinking I am here to beg. Yes, for long I did beg in many guises. I deceived people. Many will ask—why did you not seek work? But I have. Tell me honestly, with your hand on your chest—does this city have work for its unemployed sons and daughters?
—Can any of you here offer me a job? I am not begging. Not for alms. I am begging for work. Any kind of work. I have not stolen, not picked pockets, not wielded a knife. There is still some shred of humanity alive within me. Friends, I too have a household. My children too feel hunger. If any among you, with kindness, can give me work…
Sukhiram stopped. He looked, eye to eye, into whomever he could reach.
But none could return his gaze. Everyone’s life seemed steeped in the same insufficiency of joy.
Then Sukhiram softened his throat, lowered his voice: —No one can give work, gentlemen. This is my fate. But if anyone has two or four coins lying loose in your pocket—then, think of me as your younger brother and…
Thus the days pass, the nights drift. Sukhiram grows torn into shreds, into strips.
And like some unwanted, unnecessary child, another newborn enters the darkness.
Excessive exhaustion and childbirth weaken the woman’s body.
Kunti’s youth suddenly collapses, crumbles—wrecked by malnutrition.
As if her long-suffering existence has been torn across its breadth.
From nothingness, the infant sucks her blood, drains her marrow, exhausts her flesh.
The child, whose fathers Kunti longs to return to—yet whether she can, she does not know.
Motherhood has stripped her of fat, of flesh, of bone-marrow. Kunti is now always weary, with a ceaseless fatigue in her limbs. So much weariness in living itself.
Even hunger, after many days of fasting, becomes tired too.
But she—she is only blood and flesh, a human form.
Within this hunger-ridden life, she too searched for joy, for purpose.
For even stripped of all historical human qualities, the woman was not entirely bereft.
Nor was the man.
The truth: in such a time, men and women are not recognized as human at all.
How can their humanity shine?
Then, the sound of weeping rises through the room. The sound of hunger.
Kunti’s three children awaken.
And they hurl the geography of their hunger against the history of human compassion.
At that moment, Sukhiram stumbles home, singing. Tonight, he seems drunker than ever. First, he sits frozen for a while— As if locked in battle with some invisible force.
Then suddenly some buried impulse flares up into strength.
He drags from his pocket a bottle of liquor.
He says to Kunti: —Here, whore. Drink. Quench your hunger.
Kunti raises her eyes and stares into his eyes once.
Just then the eldest daughter begins to cry: —What? You are all drinking without me? I too want. I too am hungry.
Kunti can bear no longer. She lifts the bottle, tilts it to her throat.
The venomous liquid runs down her gullet, into her stomach, spreads into every pore.
The nine-year-old snatches the bottle from her mother’s hand.
She too drinks, to calm her hunger.
By now Kunti’s body has spread its wings—sinking, drowned in mute exhaustion.
Sukhiram stares, stunned. As though no more time is left.
Slowly, with illicit paternal tenderness, he raises the nectar of hunger-quenching poison to the lips of each child.
One by one, they drink. And soon, they lie in peace, asleep in eternal comfort. Only Sukhiram remains awake. Even the task of lecturing the world is finished for him now.
Hunger—such a trivial thing to cross beyond. So easy.
The sages said so long ago—daubed in ashes, wrapped in dust.
He arranges their bodies neatly on the bed—his kin, his dear ones—laid out as though for a beautiful sleep of dreams.
Then, holding the bottle to his own mouth, Sukhiram pauses. He wonders—does he truly have nothing more to think of?
All thoughts of the future have disappeared. All misery has set into sunset. No complaint remains against poverty or deprivation. Never again will he raise his clenched fist to demand his rights.
Much later, the neighbors open the door and enter. They find the weary family asleep. Like sons and daughters of nectar, their bodies have turned blue.
Through the crowd of poverty, filth, and death, we have been walking for thousands of years. For thousands of years we have witnessed history—the history of poverty, the history of deprivation, the history of exploitation.
We step outside. Darkness. Only darkness. Infinite darkness.
It feels as though from this shame, this insult, from the depths of this death—some language rises, groaning, writhing. A protest, demanding its justification.
“How long? How long more?”
On the cinema screen, in the language of protest crafted by a Marxist director, the audience’s skin bristles. The foolish public, thrilled, take oaths of change, of revolution, of a world turned new.
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