The Lives of Others (7 page)

As for the twenty-two recalcitrant strikers who took to sleeping on the college lawn – yes, I attended to them, sat with them, spent hours in their company, as hundreds of others did, but from the beginning it was clear that it wouldn’t do for me to be part of them. An invisible shadow separated me from the rest. I had severe misgivings about it, as did several others, who taunted me about how safe I had kept myself, how unbloodied my hands were, how full my stomach when they were having to eat their six-anna meal in the slums of Kalabagan, or in Bagbazar, where the beggars of North Calcutta paid thirteen paise to eat bread, vegetables, onion and pickle. Some of these criticisms were spoken to my face; most of the murmuring was behind my back. Trained as an economist as I was, I held on to the lifeline of pragmatism and efficiency: would you, I asked them, damage your head or your fingers? In a war, as this clearly was, would you sacrifice a pawn or the king? How would you find your way in the densest of forests if you lost your compass?

I didn’t think of myself as the king or the compass, but I knew I couldn’t extinguish myself in the fray of student politics. This was a side-show, a diversion. It was one of the biggest lessons I learned; the inevitable end of innocence, you could call it, so necessary to growing up. All these strikes – student strike, tram strike, bus strike – all this great ferment to close down all of Bengal, to search for alternatives . . . with what immense hope we began, that we could change the world, not one little thing at a time, but in one great unstoppable propulsion, as if we could stand outside the whole planet, put a giant lever under it and set it rolling in a different direction altogether. Throughout my two years in CPI(M) student activism (embarrassing now, in hindsight, and amateurish), one thought became steadily inescapable: we could only poke the government into a kind of low-grade irritability, but never scale that up to something life-changing, something that would bring the system crashing down. All this hurling of bombs, burning of trams, headlines in newspapers – to what avail? The condition of the people remained unchanged. Life carried on as before, restored to its status quo, like the skin of water after the ripples from a thrown pebble have died away, as if the surface retained no memory of it.

And what drove home that lesson? The short answer is: the impossibility of staying within the fold of the CPI(M). When the general election was called in
1967
, the Party tried to rein in the more militant and idealistic amongst us, for fear of losing the chance to be part of a power-sharing government. Orders arrived from the Party head office that we had to call off these strikes; it was of greater importance to win the elections, to wage our war softly-softly and by the rulebook written by the Establishment, by the powerful. So it boiled down to that dirty thing – power. To be part of government, of the established order of things, on the side of institutions, those very ones we thought we were taking a giant wrecking-ball to.

But things have their own momentum: union leaders who tried to follow orders and call off the strikes were beaten up by their supporters. Those of us who didn’t want to be designated as traitors, as unthinking servants of the Communist Party, which was rapidly becoming every bit as power-hungry, as establishmentarian, as compromised and complicit as the rest, decided to continue with our sit-ins, our roadblocks and bus-burnings.

I spoke little, and silence is always taken to be a sign of strength. As my fellow revolutionaries raged and shouted and talked blood and fire, my coldness seemed somehow more solid, more reliable than banging on tables, burning trams on the streets, lobbing bombs, shouting slogans.

Where to source the raw materials for our bombs, where to buy the cheap pipe-guns that were beginning to appear on the market after the war with China, in which warehouse or garage or back room of which house in a tiny alley to assemble explosives without anyone becoming suspicious, where to lob them at CP activists and at what time and at what stage of the clash, where to hide in any given area once the police vans came speeding . . . I became very good at these details, so good that it was decided I should not be visible. This was as much protectiveness on the part of the breakaway, truly left movement as clear, strategic thinking. I was valuable to them, therefore I couldn’t be exposed to the dangers of the frontline. (All this makes it sound as though we sat around in a circle in College Street Coffee House or some tea-shack in Potuatola Lane and worked it out over endless discussions. No, it wasn’t like that. It just came about. Events fall into a pattern that we can only discern retrospectively. We credit ourselves with far more agency than we actually possess. Things happen because they happen.)

I have come to think of all this ferment as boring and inconsequential compared with what I really had in mind – armed peasant rebellion, an entire and comprehensive rehauling of everything, of land reform, food production, wealth distribution, of realising the full meaning of ‘The crop belongs to those who cultivate it’. Placed beside this aim, all this student unrest was like flies buzzing around a horse: the irritation caused was so ephemeral, it could be dispersed with one lazy swish of the tail.

It became clear to me that the last thing the CPI(M) was interested in was radical change. I tested how much dissent against this sell-out would be tolerated by articulating my unease as innocent questions. None, it emerged. They even quoted Chairman Mao to justify their betrayal: ‘Battles are waged one by one and enemy battalions are destroyed one at a time. Factories are built one at a time. Farmers cultivate one plot after another. We serve ourselves the total amount of food that we can consume, but we eat it spoonful by spoonful; to eat it in one go would be impossible. This is known as the “piecemeal solution”.’ Their argument went something like this: a small presence of the leftist parties in government may appear to be insignificant, but this will give the opportunity to manoeuvre for more power and that, in turn, for more, until the nation will be run by a government that is wholly communist. India will become Vietnam.

Towards the end, hearing these words and arguments, especially quotations from Chairman Mao, issuing from the blind mouths of these self-interested, power-hungry, corrupt Communist Party flunkies set fire to my blood. Not a single one of them was truly interested in the revolution to which they paid such assiduous lip-service. All they wanted was power, the rest of the nation could go to hell.

While the spectre of erstwhile revolutionaries becoming Establishment figures within the folds of that great betrayer, the CPI(M), was painful and intolerable, something else was taking shape, something that was going to explode like a thousand suns in an unsuspecting sky – Naxalbari. For those of us who had been reading Charu Mazumdar’s electric writing in
Liberation
ever since we joined university, the events of May
1967
themselves were not a surprise so much as the fact that they happened.

Being a Bengali, one is surprised when all the endless spume and froth of talk suddenly reveals itself to be the front of a gigantic wave of action.

CHAPTER TWO

1967

THE AUTUMN MILDNESS
is just beginning to set in. The blue sky is dotted sparsely with cottony white clouds. Children are on holiday and the skeleton of the puja pandal – a wondrous structure made of bamboo and planks and coir ropes and coloured cloth, stretched and ruched and concertinaed across the bones of bamboo, covering them decoratively in furls and drapes – has already been constructed in the piece of land that abuts the Durga temple of 23 Pally. This cathedral of fabric will house the goddess Durga and her four children, Lakshmi, Saraswati, Kartik and Ganesh, two on either side of her, for nearly five days. On the final evening, the clay effigies of the goddess and her children will be immersed in Tolly’s Nala or the Hooghly at Outram Ghat, marking the end of the biggest festival in the Bengali calendar.

For the last six weeks volunteers organised under the banner of ‘23 Pally Sharbojonin Puja Committee’, consisting mostly of teenagers and young men of the neighbourhood, have gone from door to door, collecting donations for the festival. The intricate, sometimes baroque, light displays have started going up along the street, on trees, on the water tank on the roof of number 11/A/2. This year, the most numerous of them, along the whole length of Basanta Bose Road, all the way to Jogamaya College, are in the form of a fountain tree: a tall column of yellow fairy lights exploding in a six-veined fountain, three on each side, parted in the middle like a child’s drawing of a palm tree. The coloured lights of the cascading head, green, blue and red, blink on and off, as do the yellow lights of the column, and the whole thing gives the magical impression of an upward-flowing capital of water spewing into a polite fountain at the head. This is the
pièce de résistance
of the lighting display. These displays are competitive affairs between neighbourhoods, but this year everyone in Basanta Bose Road looks smug in the knowledge that they have the edge over their rivals’ parsimonious offerings of coloured fluorescent tubes and strings of fairy lights hung on trees and across balconies. The lighting will be turned on in three days’ time.

A welcoming arch at the entrance to the pandal spells out in lights ‘Sharodiya shubhechha’, autumn good wishes, and the fixture, again made out of lights only, on the water tank on the top of the Dasgupta house features an animated boy kicking a football. The football appears in staccato stasis in three different points of its parabolic trajectory, then reappears, in a slightly Sisyphean manner, at the foot of the kicking boy, for him to start all over again. There is also the light-installation marking the twentieth anniversary of Independence: the Indian tricolour, flanked by one freedom-fighter, Netaji Shubhas Chandra Bose, and one poet, Rabindranath Tagore, has been made to do an impression of stop–start fluttering. Gandhi is, of course, pointedly left out and the light-manufacturers have not tried to simulate a breeze waving Tagore’s long beard. Words of light on top say ‘Twenty Years of Independence 1947–1967’. But everyone agrees that although this has its novelty value, it is nothing compared to those flowing palm trees of light.

In the brimming light of the early morning a gauzy mist lies on the ground in shreds and patches, a mist so thin that you have to look away and then quickly back to perceive it; gazed at for too long, it disappears. The garden at the back of the Ghosh house is full of fragrant shiuli, some flowers having fallen on the grass in the night, making that small section of the garden look like a green shawl flecked with white in one corner. If you look minutely, you can pick out the orange stalks of the flowers; a subtler, more delicately patterned shawl.

There is the smell of puja in the air: a crisp, cool, weightless sensation. In the collective Bengali imagination, fields of kaash phul, with their enormous plumes of satiny cream flowers, bowing gracefully to the clement autumn breeze, are easily visualised, although there are no patches of pampas grass to be seen anywhere, not in this part of the city anyway. And to the collective ear the sound of the dhaak, beaten to a whole complex repertoire of rhythms and syncopations by the dhaaki, is already veering on the air, phrasing a sudden sentence in the mind of someone here, a group of words spoken by someone there, to follow the beat and curve of its percussive line. With one voice, the choir made up of the grass, the drum, the sky, the dew sings out, ‘Holiday, holiday, holiday’.

Knowing well that there will be a possessive rush to grab the puja special autumn issue of
Ultorath
between Ma, Pishi, Boro-kaki and herself, Baishakhi picks up the family copy, which has arrived that very morning along with bumper issues of
Nabokallol
,
Anandamela
(for the children, she thinks derisively) and
Ananda Bazar Patrika
, and smuggles it to her room. She has a quick flick through it – novels by Ashapurna Devi, Bimal Kar, Bimal Mitra, Shankar. Two years earlier the serialised novels in
Ultorath
and
Nabokallol
would have been forbidden reading for her, on the grounds that they were for adults, and she would have been asked to stick to
Anandamela
, but those rules have now been relaxed somewhat, although she is not wholly confident that her mother or Pishi will not tell her off if she is caught with her head buried in either of these magazines. She hides the copy under her pillows and decides to avoid any possible impediment to her reading by taking it up to the roof terrace after lunch and reading it there, away from the traffic of people in the house, while sitting with her back to the sun, drying her long hair. Possibly with a bowl of mango pickle by her side. Thrilled at the prospect of the treat she has just planned to give herself, she skips to her parents’ room to consolidate her joy by going through the new clothes she has received for Puja, which is only ten days away.

A similar thought may have occurred to Chhaya, for she decides to take out her new Puja clothes from her almirah and arrange them in order of the five days of the festival. But what should have been gloating joy quickly topples over into a restless bitterness as she contemplates the saris laid out on her bed: two pure silks, one tangail, one tashar, one kota, one for each of the five days of Puja. Last year she had had seven, the year before that, eight. She does not take into account the two she has bought herself: those do not count; only the things given one as presents truly matter.

This year her brother Priyo has given her one sari. One only. The tangail. Admittedly it is from Adi Dhakeshwari Bastralaya on Rashbehari Avenue, but Purnima, his wife, has been given four saris. That is four times what Chhaya has received from him. And it is only by guesswork, with a bit of judicious snooping, that she has arrived at that figure. There are only four that she has been able to ascertain; in reality it could well be more, say, seven or eight. The truth will be discovered only over the five days of Puja. She will be watching her sister-in-law’s outfits like a hungry vulture.