the lives of others by Neel Mukherjee

Times Literary Supplement 17 September 2014

Neel Mukherjee’s ambitious second novel, set in West Bengal in the latter half of the 1960s, opens with a horrifying sequence. A starving man, Nitai Das, begs for a cup of rice outside his landlord’s house. He is beaten for his pains by guards who joke to one another, “Where are you going to hit this dog? He is nothing but bones, we don’t even have to hit him. Blow on him and he’ll fall back”. In desperation, Das decides to kill his wife and children, one by one, rather than waiting for them to starve to death. He then kills himself by drinking acid.

The deaths are described in visceral detail – after Das attacks his wife with a short-handled sickle, her head “hangs by the still-uncut fibres of skin and muscle and arteries”. This scene alerts us to Mukherjee’s uncosy intentions but the novelist then turns his attentions to the relatively bourgeois Ghosh family. The link between the family’s seemingly petty concerns and this initial burst of violence is not immediately obvious. We have some sense, however, not least from the book’s title, of the level Mukherjee is working at and of his desire to make profound points about society.

The Ghoshes live together in a four-storey house and it takes time for the reader to become acquainted with all of the inhabitants and their complicated relationships – the author usefully provides both a family tree and a glossary of Bengali relational terms. Prafullanath, the elderly head of the family, has made his money from paper mills. His business is imploding, however, and the consequent change in the family’s fortunes means that even some of his wife’s jewellery has had to be sold.

The Ghoshes’ concerns are far removed from those of Nitai Das: they covet fancy pencil boxes, LPs and “expensive, dressy” saris. In fact, “death from hunger was such a remote possibility in their lives – no, impossible. It was not their situation, never would be; they were not in any danger, it was only a changeable backdrop to the drama of their lives”. The different members of the family are nonetheless not on an equal footing: most striking of all is Purba, the widow of Prafullanath’s youngest son, who lives cooped up in a junk room on the ground floor with her two children and subsists on leftovers sent down from upstairs.

Each of Prafullanath’s four sons marries but his only daughter, Chhaya, does not. She is cross-eyed, over-educated and most fatally of all, too dark-skinned. Perhaps unsurprisingly, her spite is directed at her younger, “lower-caste” sister-in-law, Purnima. Envious of the lavish new clothes lying on Purnima’s bed, Chhaya empties a bottle of nail polish over them. She then ensures that her niece Buli is blamed and punished for this act of sabotage, and also sees to it that Buli’s clandestine romance with a neighbour is exposed.

Most of the Ghosh family display a lack of self-awareness, and a lack of interest in the lives of others. It is only the eldest grandson, Supratik, who is sickened by the disparity between their material circumstances and those of others. He asks his bewildered mother, “Don’t you agree we eat too much?” but she insists that everyone eats as they do, oblivious to the plight of those (even those in her own house) poorer than her. She can only say to him “This is the way it is. It has always been like this”. Supratik leaves the family home, offering an explanation to his mother in a note, saying “I feel exhausted with consuming, with taking and grabbing and using”.

He joins the Maoist Naxalite guerrillas and the letters he writes to an unnamed correspondent during this period form one strand of the narrative. Almost uniquely in his family, he possesses self-knowledge and concedes that “there is a large gap between being an activist out of the idealism that comes from books, conversations, the fire of youth, and being one because you have lived through the depredations that life has thrown at you”.

Perhaps the novel’s most sympathetic character is Madan, the family cook, who has sacrificed time with his own family to help bring up many of the Ghosh children. He tells Supratik near the end of the novel “the world does not change, you destroy yourself trying to change it, but it remains as it is. The world is very big and we are very small. Why cause people who love you to go through such misery because of it?” Supratik resents “being given a lesson in political morality by the family’s cook”, unable – in spite of his political fervour – to transcend his prejudices about his own family’s servants.

This is an emphatically corporeal novel and sometimes this aspect of Mukherjee’s writing seems odd, even funny, as when one of the characters visits a prostitute and asks her to defecate on him. At times the unpalatability is overpowering, such as when the “black jam” of a murdered man’s brain is presented to us, or we are told about the “black jelly” left behind when someone’s toenail is removed. There is a long section describing the torture of a main character, written in careful detail. This is undeniably powerful writing and the descriptions are appropriately hard to read but at some point the pain and cruelty teeter dangerously towards the excessive and needlessly manipulative.

Mukherjee is dealing with a turbulent period of history and no one can doubt his ambition or the complexity of his storytelling. He marshals a large cast of mainly unlikeable and destructive people, for the most part deftly, in this difficult book: sprawling, ambitious and imperfect.

This review originally appeared in the Times Literary Supplement