Blood Island

by Deep Halder

  They get on a train without any tickets, and cross Bagna, Kumirmari, Kolagachiya river and the much smaller Punjali, before getting down at a station where land ends and sea begins. They breathe deeply, filling their lungs with the salty air. Marichjhapi is a boat ride away.

  But how will they hire boats? What will they eat in Marichjhapi? How will they build homes, till land and grow crops? Where will the money come from? Sukhchand decides that they will find work at their current stop, save money and then make their trip.

  They spread out into the villages like beggars.

  Sukhchand takes work as a tiller. He evens earth, removes pebbles and makes land fit to grow crops. The money is good. The landowner, Enamul Haq, pays him five rupees a day, which is enough to buy a full meal for the family. At the end of the day, he bends in gratitude as Enamul counts his pennies – it is important to show gratitude and keep the employer in good humour. There are too many hungry hands ready to snatch work from you!

  Ranga-bou finds work at the local bidi factory.

  With the little ones at her side, she leaves early in the morning and works till evening. The family meets below a big tree outside the station as the day ends. There is not even a tin shed for cover. This is not the time for luxury, however; they have to save every penny. There are other trees around them, and other families below those trees. All are refugees from East Pakistan, runaways from transit camps, waiting to relocate to Marichjhapi.

  Like locusts, the press follows them here too. They are making it to the front pages of Calcutta newspapers every day: ‘Refugee mother gets down from train. Dead child in arms. Not a tear on her face.’

  Another says: ‘A body has been found hanging from a tree in Hasnabad! Was she was raped before she was killed?’ It is Aaynamoti.

  One of the refugees, Upen, has been caught trying to steal money from his employer. He is sent to jail. His young wife has sold herself to her employer. Their little one has disappeared after that violent night at the rail station; will she ever find him? Yet, Upen is happy. When Sukhchand goes to see him in jail, he says this is a proper room after all, this lock up, and there is food. What more can he wish for? ‘But dada,’ he says, ‘take our people to Marichjhapi. I will join you when they let me out of here.’

  Sukhchand looks at the wide expanse of the Ichamati. From a distance, he looks like a bag of bones encased in blood and dirt. He had been crouching behind bushes, crawling on all fours like an animal evading its hunter. ‘Roopchand, Ranga-bou, Sachin, Paunder’s mother, Dholakaka,’ he whispers sharply. The bushes by the river bed move ever so slightly. A few heads suddenly appear from nowhere, more ghost than human.

  Boats float on Ichamati. The sky wraps them up in its night blanket. Up above, a few stars – too few – darken the sea some more. Suddenly, there’s a flash of light. Someone speaks into a mike: ‘Go back. Turn your boats. Go back or we will open fire.’ It’s the river police! ‘Section 144 has been imposed on this island. Turn back!’

  ‘Turn back and go where?’ Sukhchand screams. ‘Tell me. Where do we go?’

  ‘This is no time for argument. Go back or we will open fire.’

  ‘Where shall we go?’ Sukhchand shouts again.

  ‘Go back to Dandakaranya,’ replies the inspector. The police launch has come close to their boats; so close that Sukhchand can almost smell the inspector’s naked rage.

  ‘No, we won’t go back. We will go to Marichjhapi!’ Sukhchand jumps into the river and starts swimming.

  ‘Sukhchand was your father, wasn’t he?’ I ask.

  Mondal smiles.

  ‘So what happened after you reached Marichjhapi?’ I prod.

  Mondal looks out of the window into the darkness that has gathered outside his old house. I have known him most of my adult life, and have travelled with him to pockets of darkness I never knew existed. We have grown close with time, but he has never answered my queries about what happened in Marichjhapi; only how the band of 10,000 determined people reached there. What life held in store for them once they reached their dream island, he refuses to tell. Tonight is no different. His story stops where Marichjhapi begins.

  ‘Let that question be. Let Marichjhapi remain buried in my heart.’

  November 2017, Garfa Kata Pukur, Kolkata

  2

  Safal Halder

  I

  ask Gouranga Halder if his name became Safal (meaning ‘successful’) after he swam through the night to reach the shore and report the horrors of Marichjhapi to the clueless citizens of Calcutta. The newspapers had once hailed Halder as a hero of his people, undeterred by fate or fatigue. Today, the frail, asthma-afflicted, sixty-four-year-old can barely manage a smile between bone-rattling coughs and takes a pause before he can answer me.

  ‘No, I had the name from before.’ My question has triggered violent spasms in Halder. He spits out a mouthful of bile out of the window, sits down, lowers his head and parts his thinning hair with bony fingers. Two old scars criss-cross his pate like disputed boundary lines of neighbouring nations.

  ‘Did you get these scars when the police attacked you in Marichjhapi?’ I ask.

  ‘No, these are older ones,’ he says.

  ‘Tell me how you got them then.’

  Halder flares up. ‘How many times will I repeat my story? Nothing has happened for so many years. After the massacre at Marichjhapi, we hid from the Left Front government’s goons. We stayed right under their noses by learning to become invisible. All we dreamt of was this government to go away and a new one, one that doesn’t murder innocents, to replace it. But even the so-called people’s politician Mamata Banerjee has forgotten us. The Marichjhapi case has not been opened. Who will pay for all those deaths?’

  Dusk has settled outside Halder’s one-storeyed house at Purbo Palli, Kalikapur. The road outside leads to the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass that connects Ultadanga in the north to Kamalgazi, Rajpur and Sonarpur in the south, running a distance of twenty-one kilometres along the eastern rim of the city, along which high-rise buildings in glass and concrete have come up, transforming Kolkata’s skyline.

  But this is a lower-middle class locality in the south of the city with skinny allies and thinning slices of post-Partition history still trapped in the memories of residents who made a new country home after an arbitrary line was drawn up to create East Pakistan, now Bangladesh.

  Someone switches on a dim bulb, and tea is served with greasy sweets. I offer cigarettes to my photographer friend and Jyotirmoy Mondal, who have accompanied me to Halder’s house. We smoke in silence as we wait for Halder to collect himself and take us back in time.

  ‘I am from Lakhikhai village in Bangladesh’s Khulna zilla. I grew up amidst the growing tension between Hindus and Muslims. There was a riot in 1964. Hundreds left from my village. I must have been fifteen or sixteen at that time. We didn’t have birth certificates those days. I had lost my parents early and was staying with ageing relatives. They told me to leave while I could and start from scratch in the new land. I was already married and feared for the safety of my new bride. There were headless bodies on the road and limbless men and women hiding their horror inside dark rooms. But my matriculation examination was due. I waited to clear it before I crossed over to India, as it would be easier to get a job.

  ‘I got these scars when my wife and I were crossing the border on foot. A group of Muslim men attacked us with axes. I asked my wife to run as I tried to hold them back. I was staring death in the face but I wanted her to be safe. Two sharp blows fell on my head. I lost consciousness and dropped to the ground. They must have thought I was dead because they did not hit me anymore. Later, the group of men and women with whom we were travelling came back in search of me, found me still breathing and took me with them. My wife was in that group. I lost a lot of blood, but survived.

  ‘On this side of the border, near Calcutta, the golden words those days for people like us, homeless refugees from East Pakistan, were: “Daak ashbe”. This meant we would be
transported from the transit camps set up at various places in West Bengal to the permanent Mana Camp in Raipur, now in Chhattisgarh but then part of Madhya Pradesh.

  ‘Mana Camp was not a single camp. It was a cluster of 500 or more camps of varying sizes. I stayed in a camp called Kurud.

  ‘It would be wrong to say camp life was only hardship. There were good days and there were bad days. The government gave us dole. We worked on roads. We erected buildings. We got paid. Our temporary tents became pucca houses over time. Our people got married, had children and lived the remaining days of their lives dreaming of a lost home. But somewhere, in the midst of all this, we were losing our identity as Bengalis. There was a gnawing fear that if not our children, then their children after them would not speak our beautiful language.

  ‘The All India Udbastu Unnayansil Committee set up by us for the welfare of our people had been working tirelessly through the years, demanding more rights and better working conditions. The camps were scattered. The committee wanted to get people to stay together, to fight as a collective whenever there was any wrongdoing by the government babus in charge of the camps or the tribals who were very different from us.

  ‘Meanwhile, leaders from Jyoti Basu’s party, the CPI(M), had come to visit us at the camp a number of times. They assured us that as soon as they came to power in West Bengal, they would free us from the hills and forests of Dandakaranya and take us to the fertile plains of Bengal and give us a better life. We were naïve; we believed them.

  ‘Our camp leaders told us the refugee vote is important for the Left Front, so they would never desert us. But with no help from official quarters when the Leftists came to power in West Bengal, our people started fleeing Mana Camp in groups and headed towards Calcutta.

  ‘In 1978, around five to seven families hired lorries to Raipur station. From there, we took the train to Howrah and then to Sealdah. I had saved a modest sum of money, around Rs 10,000, from the years I had lived and worked in Mana Camp, 1965-1978. From Sealdah, we went to Hasnabad. At Hasnabad, our people took temporary residence in houses of relatives or found work in local fields. We stayed there aimlessly for two months, deciding our next course of action and waiting for All India Udbastu Unnayansil Committee leaders to guide us. Meanwhile, news broke of refugees from various other camps coming to Bengal in large numbers and facing hardship. I was lucky I had saved money to see me through in those two months.

  ‘We had misjudged the situation in West Bengal. We thought Left leaders would keep their promise and rehabilitate us in the state after they came to power. We thought there would be land for us to build homes and fertile fields to grow crops. We should have known these were empty promises. Our committee leaders went to Writer’s Building to remind the government of past promises, but nothing happened.

  ‘Around this time, committee leaders came to know of Marichjhapi, an uninhabited island in the heart of the Sundarbans. There was a rumor that some Leftist leaders had showed them the island as a possible habitat for the thousands of refugees deserting camps and reaching Bengal. Others say committee leaders themselves had discovered the island during their excursions to the Sundarbans. I don’t remember the exact day or month, but sometime in the middle of 1978, we hired boats and set off for Marichjhapi.

  ‘Our dream home was a mud island filled with shrubs. There was a thick forest of useless shrubs and, unlike the rest of the Sundarbans, there was no plantation in the island. So it was a bloody lie told by the Left Front government that we destroyed a reserve forest to set up home in Marichjhapi. There was nothing to destroy!

  ‘Around 200-300 boats had reached Marichjhapi that day. I was in the first lot that set foot on the island. I felt like an astronaut on a new planet after an arduous travel through space and time. Hundreds of boats would arrive here in the next few months. We cleared shrubs, evened land and began town planning in all earnest. The more intelligent amongst us made a site map for a village housing society; we called it Netaji Nagar.

  ‘Those were magical days. We slept in open fields under a sky full of stars. We lit fire around us to keep insects and animals away. During the day, we built huts from logs that we got from neighbouring islands. Golpata leaves were used to make thatched roofs. Residents of neighbouring villages got us food and other essentials, and we pooled in money we had saved during our Dandakaranya years. We learnt that Ramakrishna Mission and Bharat Sevashram Sangha wanted to help us but the government did not allow them. By this time, outsiders were becoming aware of our existence. We toiled night and day with limited resources and the will to make Marichjhapi our home. Social workers and public intellectuals like your father, Dilip Halder, visited us and gave us money to sustain ourselves.

  ‘We had our work cut out for us. I was not good at construction work, so I was made a messenger between mainland Calcutta and Marichjhapi. My job was to carry letters to our well-wishers in the big city with a list of things we needed for the island. I delivered those letters and brought back money and material. In the months that followed, we set up a school and appointed a teacher from amongst us. A refugee doctor set up a dispensary. I carried back medicines from Calcutta to stock up the dispensary.

  ‘In Calcutta, I used to stay at 136, Jodhpur Park, in the house of Subrata Chatterjee, a renowned engineer. This London-returned engineer travelled with me to the island many times, helped us in planning Netaji Nagar and encouraged us. He, and several others including poet Sunil Ganguly, held citizens’ meetings across West Bengal to highlight our struggle for existence.

  ‘Chatterjee told us not to trust the communists in power. “I hate these bastards,” he would say. “I have seen the ugly face of communism in soviet Russia. You should not rely on the government and build an island community on your own.”

  ‘And we did. Over time, the population of Marichjhapi swelled to 40,000 from the initial 10,000. It had become a functional village with three lanes, a bazaar, a school, a dispensary, a library, a boat manufacturing unit, and a fisheries department even! Who could have imagined that so much was possible in so little time? Maybe all those wasted years in Dandakaranya had given us superhuman will.

  ‘Obtaining drinking water was a big issue. Marichjhapi water was salty, so we had to travel to Kumirmari, the next island, by boats and bring water back in big pots. We had to ration water. When I told Chatterjee this, he came to the island, gave us money and told us how to build a deep tube well that would get us drinkable water from below the ground. This is the same tube well in which policemen would later drop a bottle of poison, killing many of us!

  ‘We were attacked thrice. Memory fails me now, but I do remember that the most horrific of the police actions on the island was the economic blockade when supply lines were cut off and we were left to starve without food, medicines and other essentials. Anandabazar Patrika journalist Sukharanjan Sengupta came to visit us a few times and heard our story. It was through his articles in Anandabazar Patrika that a wider population became aware of us, though that did not really help our cause. The government made every effort to stop NGOs and missionaries from reaching us. Only sympathetic private citizens escaped police patrol and came to us with money and essentials. That, too, stopped during the blockade.

  ‘My leaders told me I’d have to tell people in Calcutta how Marichjhapi has been turned into a police state. Letters were written for Chatterjee and others, folded, put inside plastic bags and handed to me. At night, I took out a boat and decided to try my luck. It was a crazy thing to do as police launches had surrounded the island. The idea was to slip through the launches as the policemen snored, and reach the shore. We had gone a little distance into the river when we came under the searchlight. There were three other boys with me. “Should we turn back?” they asked; I told them there was no turning back. Since the letters were in plastic bags tied to our waists, we deserted the boat, jumped into the river and started swimming.

  ‘I do not believe it myself when I think of what happened that night, but we actually sw
am the river and reached Kumirmari. However, we did not know there was police presence there as well. A policeman came and started questioning us. He slapped me hard and asked me if I was from Marichjhapi. I lied that I was from Kumirmari and had gone to Marichjhapi to see what was happening there. I also badmouthed the people of Marichjhapi, saying that they should be left to die. The policeman let us go.

  ‘We did not rest. Sleepless and tired from hours of swimming, we walked across Kumirmari and took a boat to Satjelia village. We stayed the rest of the night there, woke up early and walked all the way to Canning. The currency note I was carrying in my pocket had become soiled and useless, so all day I walked without food or water, and finally reached Canning. There, I had some food at a dhaba for free and boarded a train for Jodhpur Park without a ticket. In the evening, I knocked on Subrata Chatterjee’s door. It was 31 January 1979.

  ‘Chatterjee telephoned a journalist. I had no idea who was on the other side but I told the journalist everything. I told him I had letters from committee leaders with me, and that I would hand them over to him if he would publish our story. The man on the other side asked me to read out the letters to him. I did. I could barely keep my eyes open after that. Chatterjee asked me to rest and I fell into deep sleep. When I woke up next morning, I was a hero.

  ‘Chatterjee told me my story had been carried in the papers and that everyone knew of me and my people now. There would be pressure on the government to call off the economic blockade. That day, I went to several newspaper offices and showed the letters I was carrying with me. I also met Shakya Sen, a junior lawyer, on Chatterjee’s instruction and showed them to him. We stayed the night at Chatterjee’s house. Sen would later fight for us against the government in court.