Monthly Story (December '23): Mr. Mukerjee
fiction
Mr. Manik Mukerjee’s emails hailed me nearly every morning when I opened the office. They’d begin with “Greeting from the Halls of Universal Wisdom” or “My Most Humble Salutations from the Palace of Art” or any number of other sarcastic characterizations of the engineering firm he worked for in Delhi. After a paragraph or two in this vein, catching me up on his latest frustrations with his bosses and co-workers, Mr. Mukerjee became warm and confiding, veteran author to long-time editor.
“You will be pleased to learn that I have at last begun work on the article I promised about the shop keepers of Pahar Ganj. I dare say that no scholar has delved into the subject with quite fresher eyes. The work goes well, my dear Samuel. The work goes well.”
He signed each missive “Mr. M. Mukerjee.”
I certainly took bemused pleasure in these greetings and in his grand promises of another piece for our journal, but what I especially enjoyed were Mr. Mukerjee’s long digressions into his very own brand of philosophy—what he called his “Unified Theory of Everything.” He claimed to be carrying on the work that Albert Einstein had left unfinished.
He was a good morning’s chuckle, a tidbit to be shared among my colleagues, but I’d long since learned not to expect another publishable piece from him. Now and then I took the time to write a brief—very brief—friendly note to Mr. Mukerjee, and when finally he submitted a piece for publication, I gave it an honest read. By which I mean that I tried to make sense of it, then wrote a brief, friendly rejection, always encouraging him to keep trying. I knew he had it in him somewhere.
I was then the editor of a college “literary journal,” meaning we made no money, lived on the loose change that fell out of the department head’s pants in the men’s room. At that point I had not yet made tenure and was given the job because nobody else wanted it. “It’s a better gig than a lot of the committee assignments you’ll run into in your career,” my friend and mentor Tony told me. Nearing emeritus status, Tony was one of the department’s old beards. He’d headed all the committees, gotten drunk with every famous and infamous author to visit campus, and knew everyone’s secrets. “Use it,” he told me, “to build yourself an empire. Make it into something so they can’t get rid of you.”
Which is what I had to do to make tenure anyway. That and publish. My dissertation on the Emerson-Thoreau friendship sat on half a dozen editor’s desks, and I was busy spinning out a handful of articles on it for the juried publications, so, along with teaching a couple sections of freshman comp and Intro to American Lit, I was a busy guy. The literary journal pretty much topped me out. Nevertheless, I took it on, intending to totally transform it.
The Eye on the Hill, as it was then known, had been entirely student run and written. Editor-and-Chief had simply been a gloried name for Faculty Advisor. I intended to change all of that and open it up to serious writing. Tony approved of the idea and guided me through the bureaucratic process and the academic politics of making it happen. If you know anything about academia, you know that the viciousness of faculty infighting is inversely proportional to the pettiness of the stakes. But that’s a different story. Tony helped me get through it, and I renamed the journal The Bearded Owl, an in-joke with Tony, and put it online. The submissions flowed in.
Most of them, let’s be honest, were badly written rot. It didn’t take long to become weary of all the bad writing, especially after having to read and mark up sixty or so freshman essays every week. Every now and then, though, I found a gem. It was like going through a junk shop and finding a perfectly preserved, hand-made edition of a Roycrofters Rubaiyat, introduced by Clarence Darrow and signed by Elbert Hubbard, who went down with the Titanic. That’s what Mr. Mukerjee’s first submission, “Chairman Mao Meets Jessie James,” was like finding. I read it and I couldn’t look away.
He told the story of his school friend Arjun, a middle class Brahmin kid like himself, who became a Naxalite, a Maoist revolutionary. Arjun hid out in city slums and among low caste farmers in West Bengal. After he led a bank robbery in Bihar, the police launched a massive manhunt for him, questioning all his family and friends and raiding homes looking to intimidate anyone who might hide him. Mr. Mukerjee was followed for days as he came and went from his classes at university in Delhi, far away from the site of the robbery. He himself had no politics. He aspired to be a poet, though his family insisted that he study engineering. “My grandfather was an engineer, my father was an engineer, and so the stage was set for me to be an engineer, no matter what I dreamed. It was my karma. They found me a wife and I studied engineering. Sadly, I would not be a poet.”
He worried for Arjun. “My only political view,” he wrote, “was friendship.”
And then one night as Mr. Mukerjee and his young wife embraced in bed, they were startled by a strange sound at their open window. “Bloody monkeys,” he thought. “What now?”
Arjun, of course.
“I never found out how he knew which window was ours, but there he appeared, crouching along the wall inside the bedroom of our apartment. I put my hand over my wife’s mouth to prevent her scream from waking the building.”
They hid him for a week. Mr. Mukerjee was questioned at his school and followed in the market. Six months after Arjun had gone, the police found him hiding with another school friend in Meerut. Both were arrested and tried, but Arjun never gave Mr. Mukerjee up.
It was a fine, gripping piece of writing, perfect for The Bearded Owl. I wrote back immediately. His happiness at my praise felt like a reward for all the hours I’d subjected myself to the horrible writing of the slush pile. I forwarded him my department chair’s praise for his memoir.
And so began our correspondence.
The relationship we’d struck up promised great things. Surely at some point the great talent I’d discovered would set The Bearded Owl apart. We just needed a couple more pieces like his first memoir. I’d nominate one for a Pushcart Prize or some other national award. We’d win. He was that good. A feather in my cap toward a full tenure headdress. But, because I hadn’t thought of it in time and the awards deadlines had passed for Chairman Mao, I needed something new for the next round.
At first, I made sure to write a thoughtful reply to each of his emails. I even wrote second and third drafts to be sure I’d sharpened my points just so. I worked and reworked each simile, realizing finally that I wanted badly to impress him with my wit and erudition. After a time, though, this effort began crowding out my energy for the work the college paid me for. After polishing off a learned message to Mr. Mukerjee, I had no creative energy left for my real work and no taste for reading another stack of terrible writing. I needed to take a walk across campus on an invented errand or wander down the hall to strike up a conversation with a colleague.
I waited for an actual submission, not just the friendly philosophical musings he churned out nearly every day. My responses became less thoughtful, more perfunctory. Maybe even a tad sloppy. Polite in a manner that suggested I had other work to do. It didn’t seem to faze him. My email in-box continued to fill with Mr. Mukerjee’s correspondence. Some days, two or three messages arrived. Every few days I took a minute to delete nine or ten of them so I could actually find the messages I needed not to miss in the weed-choked yard he’d made of my inbox.
And then, months later, his second actual submission arrived. I closed my office door. Hall noises could not disturb this moment. I opened the file.
It began with a small boy growing up in an affluent Bengali family, the boy teasing a snake in the back garden, an hysterical servant discovering this danger, and setting the snake alight with “petrol.” But then a long, metaphoric description of sitar and tabla, trains racing across a green agricultural landscape, rivers converging, holy men praying on their banks, the laws of physics, American electoral politics, Freudian psychology, cricket, climate change, ping pong, and Tom Hanks rom-coms. Beauty melted into incoherence. In my rejection, I praised the beauty and disguised the incoherence as “mystery,” counseling him not to be discouraged, to please keep writing. “We wish you luck placing this piece elsewhere and will be delighted to see your next effort,” I wrote. Diplomatic boilerplate.
But we, the editorial we that means I, were not so pleased with the next effort—or the ones after. Mr. Mukerjee had been less encouraged by the word “beauty” than by my use of “mystery.” If it were possible, each new piece was somehow less coherent than its predecessor. I was beginning to understand that his Unified Theory of Everything was far beyond my intellectual capabilities. In my disappointment, my rejections became curt. I actually took refuge in my freshmen essays.
I stopped doing more than glancing at Mr. Mukerjee’s daily missives to harvest a morning chuckle for Tony. They still began with mildly amusing sarcasm. “Hello from Dante’s Eighth Circle of Hell” is one I remember. I answered with “Hope you are doing well” or some such nothing from time to time. Not more than that certainly. The requirements of tenure drew my attention elsewhere. I had a piece on the Transcendentalist’s bookseller Elizabeth Palmer Peabody in a scholarly journal. In my editorial we, I found a few decent poets and story writers for The Bearded Owl. My wife and I were expecting. And then—nothing more from Mr. Mukerjee. A chapter had closed without an ending.
Nothing I’d published in The Bearded Owl struck me as Pushcart quality as the next deadline approached. Then, oddly, I received an email from one of the year’s judge for a different national prize, the Mark Hill Foundation Award, which gave a $25,000 grant for short fiction annually. Did I know that a story I’d published the previous year, this judge asked me, had since then appeared in several other journals? Under a slightly different title and with small changes to the introduction? “Young Lenin in the Peasant’s Shirt,” “The Maoist Robin Hood,” to name just two.
No, I told her, I’d not known that.
Interestingly enough, three or four editors had nominated my Mr. Mukerjee for that year’s Hill Foundation prize. Until the committee realized what was going on, they considered the story a fine example of what they look for. Each of the journals our man in India had engineered himself into, though, had clearly stated “No Simultaneous Submissions” and “Not Previously Published.”
I fell back into my desk chair. In the fussy academic and literary world, this constituted high crimes and misdemeanors. The editors were furious, shaking angry, red-faced fists in their outrage.
The next email from Hill had another surprise for me. “Do the attached documents look familiar to you?” she asked. She had already collected a number of them from several journal editors.
I opened it and read “A Warm Welcome from the Burning Building of My Ambition” and then a paragraph indicting his employer for numerous logical fallacies and transgressions of good taste. “A man who walks from here to there and back with his hands in his pockets is unfit to lead a serious organization,” he sniffed to his editor/interlocutor.
Yes, yes, and yes. This indeed was familiar. Though my name was not on this copy, I, just one year past, had received that very email. And my enthusiastic response to it—working and reworking my figures of speech, showing off my so-called erudition, parading out scholarly references to Emerson and Thoreau—had been fuel to the fire in Mr. Mukerjee’s brain. I laughed—at myself, at him, at my brother and sister editors who’d also found refuge from their slush piles in Mr. Mukerjee’s wit, in the wonderful jumble of his Unitary Theory of Everything. Yes, I did recognize that document. I hurried down the hall to find Tony. Mr. Mukerjee had outdone himself.