The Lowland (3 page)

They were admitted to two of the city’s best colleges. Udayan would go to Presidency to study physics. Subhash, for chemical engineering, to Jadavpur. They were the only boys in their neighborhood, the only students from their unremarkable high school, to have done so well.

To celebrate, their father went to the market, bringing back cashews and rosewater for pulao, half a kilo of the most expensive prawns. Their father had started working at nineteen to help support his family. Not having a college degree was his sole regret. He had a clerical position with the Indian Railways. As word spread of his sons’ success, he said he could no longer step outside the house without being stopped and congratulated.

It had had nothing to do with him, he told these people. His sons had worked hard, they’d distinguished themselves. What they’d accomplished, they’d accomplished on their own.

Asked what they wanted as a gift, Subhash suggested a marble chess set to replace the worn wooden pieces they’d always had. But Udayan wanted a shortwave radio. He wanted more news of the world than what came through their parents’ old valve radio, encased in its wooden cabinet, or what was printed in the daily Bengali paper, rolled slim as a twig, thrown over the courtyard wall in the mornings.

They put it together themselves, searching in New Market, in junk shops, finding parts from Indian Army surplus. They followed a set of complicated instructions, a worn-out circuit diagram. They laid out the pieces on the bed: the chassis, the capacitors, the various resistors, the speaker. Soldering the wires, working together on the task. When it was finally assembled, it looked like a little suitcase, with a squared-off handle. Made of metal, bound in black.

The reception was often better in winter than in summer. Generally better at night. This was when the sun’s photons weren’t breaking
up molecules in the ionosphere. When positive and negative particles in the air quickly recombined.

They took turns sitting by the window, holding the receiver in their hands, in various positions, adjusting the antenna, manipulating two controls at once. Rotating the tuning dial as slowly as possible, they grew familiar with the frequency bands.

They searched for any foreign signal. News bulletins from Radio Moscow, Voice of America, Radio Peking, the BBC. They heard arbitrary information, snippets from thousands of miles away, emerging from great thickets of interference that tossed like an ocean, that wavered like a wind. Weather conditions over Central Europe, folk songs from Athens, a speech by Abdel Nasser. Reports in languages they could only guess at: Finnish, Turkish, Korean, Portuguese.

It was 1964. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution authorized America to use military force against North Vietnam. There was a military coup in Brazil.

In Calcutta
Charulata
was released in cinema halls. Another wave of riots between Muslims and Hindus killed over one hundred people after a relic was stolen from a mosque in Srinagar. Among the communists in India there was dissent over the border war with China two years before. A breakaway group, sympathetic to China, called itself the Communist Party of India, Marxist: the CPI(M).

Congress was still running the central government in Delhi. After Nehru died of a heart attack that spring his daughter, Indira, entered the cabinet. Within two years, she would become the Prime Minister.

In the mornings, now that Subhash and Udayan were beginning to shave, they held up a hand mirror and a pan of warm water for one another in the courtyard. After plates of steaming rice and dal and matchstick potatoes they walked to the mosque at the corner, leaving their enclave behind. They continued together down the busy main road, as far as the tram depot, then boarded different busses to their colleges.

On separate sides of the city, they made different friends, mixing with boys who’d gone to English medium schools. Though some of their science courses were similar, they took exams on different schedules,
studying with different professors, running different experiments in their labs.

Because Udayan’s campus was farther away, it took him longer to get home. Because he started to befriend students from North Calcutta, the chessboard stood neglected on the study table, so that Subhash started to play against himself. Still, each day of his life began and ended with Udayan beside him.

One evening in the summer of 1966, on the shortwave, they listened to England play Germany in the World Cup at Wembley. It was the famous final, the ghost goal that was to be disputed for years. They took notes as the lineup was announced, diagramming the formation on a sheet of paper. They trailed their index fingers to mimic the moves being relayed, as if the bed were the playing field.

Germany scored first; in the eighteenth minute came Geoff Hurst’s equalizer. Toward the end of the second half, with England leading two to one, Udayan turned off the radio.

What are you doing?

Improving the reception.

It’s good enough. We’re missing the end of the match.

It’s not over.

Udayan reached under the mattress, which was where they stashed their odds and ends. Notebooks, compasses and rulers, razor blades to sharpen their pencils, sports magazines. The instructions for putting the radio together. Some spare nuts and bolts, the screwdriver and pliers they’d needed for the task.

Using the screwdriver, he started taking the radio apart again.

The wiring to one of the coils or switches must be loose, he said.

You need to fix that now?

He didn’t stop to answer. He’d already removed the cover, his nimble fingers unthreading the screws.

It took us days to put that together, Subhash said.

I know what I’m doing.

Udayan isolated the chassis, realigning some wires. Then he put the receiver back together again.

The game was still going on, the crackle less distracting. While Udayan had been fiddling with the radio, Germany had scored late in the second half, to force overtime.

Then they heard Hurst score again for England. The ball had hit the underside of the crossbar, and bounced down over the line. When the referee gave him the goal, the German team immediately contested. Everything came to a halt as the referee consulted with a Soviet linesman. The goal stood.

England’s won it, Udayan said.

There were still some minutes left, Germany desperate to tie. But Udayan was right, Hurst even scored a fourth goal at the end of the match. And by then the English spectators, triumphant before the final whistle, were already spilling onto the field.

Chapter 4

In 1967, in the papers and on All India Radio, they started hearing about Naxalbari. It was a place they’d never heard of before.

It was one of a string of villages in the Darjeeling District, a narrow corridor at the northern tip of West Bengal. Tucked into the foothills of the Himalayas, nearly four hundred miles from Calcutta, closer to Tibet than to Tollygunge.

Most of the villagers were tribal peasants who worked on tea plantations and large estates. For generations they’d lived under a feudal system that hadn’t substantially changed.

They were manipulated by wealthy landowners. They were pushed off fields they’d cultivated, denied revenue from crops they’d grown. They were preyed upon by moneylenders. Deprived of subsistence wages, some died from lack of food.

That March, when a sharecropper in Naxalbari tried to plough land from which he’d been illegally evicted, his landlord sent thugs to beat him. They took away his plough and bullock. The police had refused to intervene.

After this, groups of sharecroppers began retaliating. They started burning deeds and records that cheated them. Forcibly occupying land.

It wasn’t the first instance of peasants in the Darjeeling District revolting. But this time their tactics were militant. Armed with primitive weapons, carrying red flags, shouting
Long Live Mao Tse-tung
.

Two Bengali communists, Charu Majumdar and Kanu Sanyal, were helping to organize what was happening. They’d been raised in towns close to Naxalbari. They’d met in prison. They were younger than most of the communist leadership in India—men who’d been born in the late 1800s. Majumdar and Sanyal were contemptuous of those leaders. They were dissidents of the CPI(M).

They were demanding ownership rights for sharecroppers. They were telling peasants to till for themselves.

Charu Majumdar was a college dropout from a landowning family,
a lawyer’s son. In the papers there were pictures of a frail man with a bony face, a hooked nose, bushy hair. He was an asthmatic, a Marxist-Leninist theoretician. Some of the senior communists called him a madman. At the time of the uprising, though not yet fifty, he was suffering a heart ailment, confined to his bed.

Kanu Sanyal was a disciple of Majumdar’s, in his thirties. He was a Brahmin who’d learned the tribal dialects. He refused to own property. He was devoted to the rural poor.

As the rebellion spread, the police started patrolling the area. Imposing undeclared curfews, making arbitrary arrests.

The state government in Calcutta appealed to Sanyal. They were hoping he’d get the peasants to surrender. At first, assured that he wouldn’t be arrested, he met with the land revenue minister. He promised a negotiation. At the last minute he backed out.

In May it was reported that a group of peasants, male and female, attacked a police inspector with bows and arrows, killing him. The next day the local police force encountered a rioting crowd on the road. An arrow struck one of the sergeants in the arm, and the crowd was told to disband. When it didn’t, the police fired. Eleven people were killed. Eight of them were women.

At night, after listening to the radio, Subhash and Udayan talked about what was unfolding. Secretly smoking after their parents had gone to bed, sitting at the study table, with an ashtray between them.

Do you think it was worth it? Subhash asked. What the peasants did?

Of course it was worth it. They rose up. They risked everything. People with nothing. People those in power do nothing to protect.

But will it make a difference? What good are bows and arrows against a modern state?

Udayan pressed his fingertips together, as if to clasp a few grains of rice. If you were born into that life, what would you do?

Like so many, Udayan blamed the United Front, the left-wing coalition led by Ajoy Mukherjee that was now running West Bengal. Earlier in the year both he and Subhash had celebrated its victory. It had put communists into the cabinet. It had promised to establish a
government based on workers and peasants. It had pledged to abolish large-scale landholdings. In West Bengal, it had brought nearly two decades of Congress leadership to an end.

But the United Front hadn’t backed the rebellion. Instead, in the face of dissent, Jyoti Basu, the home minister, had called in the police. And now Ajoy Mukherjee had blood on his hands.

The Peking
People’s Daily
accused the West Bengal government of bloody suppression of revolutionary peasants.
Spring Thunder Over India
, its headline read. In Calcutta all the papers carried the story. On the streets, on college campuses, demonstrations broke out, defending the peasants, protesting the killings. At Presidency College, and at Jadavpur, Subhash and Udayan saw banners hanging from the windows of certain buildings, in support of Naxalbari. They heard speeches calling for state officials to resign.

In Naxalbari the conflict only intensified. There were reports of banditry and looting. Peasants setting up parallel administrations. Landowners being abducted and killed.

In July the Central Government banned the carrying of bows and arrows in Naxalbari. The same week, authorized by the West Bengal cabinet, five hundred officers and men raided the region. They searched the mud huts of the poorest villagers. They captured unarmed insurgents, killing them if they refused to surrender. Ruthlessly, systematically, they brought the rebellion to its heels.

Udayan sprang up from the chair where he’d been sitting, pushing a pile of books and papers away from him in disgust. He switched off the radio. He started to pace the room, looking down at the floor, running his fingers through his hair.

Are you all right? Subhash asked him.

Udayan stood still. Shaking his head, resting a hand on his hip. For a moment he was speechless. The report had shocked them both, but Udayan was reacting as if it were a personal affront, a physical blow.

People are starving, and this is their solution, he eventually said. They turn victims into criminals. They aim guns at people who can’t shoot back.

He unlatched the door of their bedroom.

Where are you going?

I don’t know. I need to take a walk. How could it have come to this?

Sounds like it’s over in any case, Subhash said.

Udayan paused before leaving. This could only be the beginning, he said.

The beginning of what?

Something bigger. Something else.

Udayan quoted what the Chinese press had predicted:
The spark in Darjeeling will start a prairie fire and will certainly set the vast expanses of India ablaze
.

By autumn Sanyal and Majumdar had both gone into hiding. It was the same autumn Che Guevara was executed in Bolivia, his hands cut off to prove his death.

In India journalists started publishing their own periodicals.
Liberation
in English,
Deshabrati
in Bengali. They reproduced articles from Chinese Communist magazines. Udayan began bringing them home.

This rhetoric is nothing new, their father said, leafing through a copy. Our generation read Marx, too.

Your generation didn’t solve anything, Udayan said.

We built a nation. We’re independent. The country is ours.

It’s not enough. Where did it get us? Who has it helped?

These things take time.

Their father dismissed Naxalbari. He said young people were getting excited over nothing. That the whole thing had been a matter of fifty-two days.

No, Baba. The United Front thinks it’s won, but it’s failed. Look at what’s happening.