21
" Where is this?’ he asks. ‘Go. Walk. Go home,’ comes the answer. What was it that his mother used to say about such situations? Don’t spurn the goddess of wealth, waiting and ready at your hand, by pushing her away towards your feet. The thought of his mother brings a sudden constriction in his throat – have they robbed him of any kind of self-control, of masculinity? How will he ever find the words to ask her for forgiveness? He hobbles, stops, limps a bit more; no, he really cannot move. The policemen are watching him in silence. Should he crawl on all fours? He would be much faster if he did that. He tries walking on the sides of his feet; it is impossible after two steps. An axis of pain has brought together, in one rod, the discrete epicentres of where he has been worked upon – the right big toe, the soles of both feet, his raw, bloody left thigh – and is driving that into his entire body, from toe to head. He takes another couple of steps. ‘Run,’ comes an order. How can he run? He can hardly breathe. A shot rings out, then another. The first bullet gets him in the back of his skull, the second in his back, under his left shoulder blade. He falls to the ground face-down. "
― Neel Mukherjee , The Lives of Others
30
" From all the things he has bothered to find out about the way the Ghoshes ran their business - planting lumpens within unions to spark off violence so that all the union workers could be sacked; an old story of buying off a business from a friend's widow, who did not know any better, for a fraction of its real value; using the Hindu-Muslim riots the year before Independence, the year he was born, to shut down mills, regardless of how many workers were deprived of their livelihoods, and buying up factories in areas emptied by the migration - all this immorality and opportunism, this was what characterised them, not altruism, as the stories they had spun would have you believe. But then, this is a world whose running fuel is anecdotes and stories, he reminds himself. The anecdotes need not be first-hand; in fact, better if they are not, better if they are repeated across several degrees of separation, because that proves how potent and pervasive they are, bringing everyone together in one huge, collusive matrix. A legendary lecture given by so-and-so in Presidency College in 1926, its iconic status relayed by a nineteen-year-old in 1965 with the words "You needed to be there to feel the goosebumps". The memory of a martinet kept alive by stories recounting his disciplinary measures from fifty years ago, handed down a dendritic chain of people across the generations. This is the way this world runs: self-mythologising through anecdotes proliferating like a particularly virulent strain of virus. Chatter chatter chatter, always the chatter of what others did and others said in a golden age of an unrecoverable past. "
― Neel Mukherjee , The Lives of Others
31
" The van stops and he is ordered to get out. It is slow, painful going. Four policemen get out of the van too, as if concerned about his impaired ability to stand, move, walk. Again that playful deception of the mind: is the wood before him real or is he seeing things from the metaphors in his very recent thoughts fleshed out in the real world after a time-lag? Has he gone mad? Where is he? ‘Where is this?’ he asks. ‘Go. Walk. Go home,’ comes the answer. What was it that his mother used to say about such situations? Don’t spurn the goddess of wealth, waiting and ready at your hand, by pushing her away towards your feet. The thought of his mother brings a sudden constriction in his throat – have they robbed him of any kind of self-control, of masculinity? How will he ever find the words to ask her for forgiveness? He hobbles, stops, limps a bit more; no, he really cannot move. The policemen are watching him in silence. Should he crawl on all fours? He would be much faster if he did that. He tries walking on the sides of his feet; it is impossible after two steps. An axis of pain has brought together, in one rod, the discrete epicentres of where he has been worked upon – the right big toe, the soles of both feet, his raw, bloody left thigh – and is driving that into his entire body, from toe to head. "
― Neel Mukherjee , The Lives of Others
