The heat increased. We sweated and scratched and slapped the insects sitting or trying to land on us. Then we sweated and scratched our itches some more. Seventeen months in a hole of a village, where we had spent at least half of that time simply waiting for time to budge, had evidently not been entirely successful.
I said – Listen, guns or tangis or bombs won’t kill us, this waiting will.
Dhiren – It’s only time. It kills everyone.
– Yes, but eventually. This is slow, concentrated time, a huge dose of the poison in one go. It’ll kill us all soon.
Before long all this aimless conversation petered out. We tried to talk about important things, chief of which was the big problem facing us now: how to work in Majgeria from Belpahari. To walk for eight to nine hours from Belpahari at night, hide in Majgeria for the day, do a guerrilla action at night, hide in the forest, walk back again under the cover of night through the forest to Belpahari – this hardly seemed a feasible way of going about it. It would put paid to both revolution and revolutionaries.
Samir punctuated the half-hearted discussion at regular intervals with – I think I’ll die without some water.
I didn’t have the energy to move a finger, but sitting here, sweating and getting eaten by insects and thinking obsessively about the impossibility of moving forward and failing to come up with any solutions would make me go mad, so I began the search for water.
Dhiren said – We have to be careful with directions. We don’t want to set out on the wrong route after we come out of the forest at night.
It was this that constrained our search; not that we would have found a stream here. The thirst was not helping us think clearly. At some point we sat down and ate some more jaggery and flattened rice. My mouth was so parched that I had trouble swallowing the dry mass of chewed stuff. Dhiren became fixated on direction, not allowing us to move in anything other than a straight line headed one way only.
He said – Too many turnings and we’ll lose track of where we have to exit the forest to get to the road that takes us to Belpahari. He kept repeating this like someone demented.
Samir stopped complaining. The dehydration had ground us down. The food was over too. We had no idea how long it was to nightfall. Then I added eight hours to it, eight hours at least. It seemed an unpassable piece of time. I wanted to scream. Knowing we were going to get to its end didn’t make the process of getting there any more bearable.
We got to Debdulal-da’s at around two in the morning. I noticed later that this was not the kind of tiredness that I felt after a day’s harvest or halui, but the effect was the same – I felt inanimate, a machine with moving parts. There were lessons to be learned in this, but I couldn’t think of any that didn’t include the image of a water container. We couldn’t eat much of the rice and dal that Debdulal-da gave us – halfway through the night’s walk I thought I could easily manage to eat every brick of his house – but we drank three kunjos of water between us before we fell into a sleep much like I imagine death must be.
When we woke up it was around noon. Yesterday seemed insubstantial, something that didn’t happen, but was only thought. With that was gone the feeling that all the things we had gone through – exhaustion, hunger, thirst, despair – were of any moment at all. It all felt so trivial that, if the same were expected of me on that new day, I would do it in so far as my body would allow.
The dissection and analysis began in the evening. There were people present whom I’d never met, four of them, all from the AICCCR. I was amazed to hear how far the struggle had advanced in Mushahari in Bihar – apparently, responding to the AICCCR’s call given on 15th August last year, hundreds of peasants had seized the autumn harvest and fought pitched battles for days with the police and the landlords’ men. I asked about the ultimate outcome – who won? how? what was the casualty on the side of the peasants and their leaders? – but the talk moved on to the even greater success story of Lakhimpur in Uttar Pradesh and, of course, the beacon of our movement, Srikakulam: mass actions, creation of bases, dozens of landlords annihilated, land reclaimed, crops seized . . . my head reeled. They had managed to move on from isolated, small guerrilla incidents to full-blown peasant uprisings. How, how, how? I knew that some of the retelling was a bit optimistic; I’d done it myself when writing reports for Liberation and Deshabrati. I felt a flash of envy burn quickly thorough me.
Then I pricked up my ears: rumblings amongst the ranks of the AICCCR. They would have been easy to dismiss as ideological jaw-jaw about the Lin Biao line and Soviet revisionism and the usual topics, but this time I heard something else. There seemed to be serious dissension in the AICCCR, and the talk of a new party was not all chatter. I listened for a while. There was an argument about what our movement should be: the Charu Mazumdar line was that it should be centrally an uprising by the peasantry to eradicate feudalism, while the Nagi Reddy line was that it should aim to be a broader, more inclusive workers’ anti-imperialist struggle against the two imperialisms trying to dominate the world currently: US imperialism and Soviet social imperialism. This led naturally to the difference in the tactical lines: while Charu Mazumdar held that we should keep it as an underground movement, the trade-union leader Parimal Dasgupta thought that was just a kind of ‘Che Guevaraism’ and favoured a bigger mass movement, involving not only farmers but trade-union activists too, opening up the revolution to the whole population of people who could be described as workers.
I said a word here or there, but mostly absorbed in silence. There was much talk of who would leave the AICCCR to join the new party, but everything was under a cloak of speculation and secrecy, lending our normally secret meetings an even sharper edge. After a while I switched off. That envy was still there, or its embers. What was it about Bengalis that made them want to talk and talk and talk until their ghosts came out of their mouths? Was it a way we had found of never having to do anything?
A small man – Anjan Roy Chowdhury – with a round head and radically receding hairline, although he could not be more than five or seven years older than me, said – Why did you come all the way to Belpahari? Didn’t you know that we have over twenty villages in that corner of Binpur covered by our people? You could’ve hidden in any one of those?
Samir sounded as surprised as I was – No one told us.
Anjan-da said – Squad action has begun in those villages too. A courier sent to one of them would have prevented all this hiding in the forests and coming all the way here. But all this is necessary training. I think one of the three of you should become a courier between these villages; the closer ones, certainly.
I was afraid of this. We formed a good unit of three and I would feel the loss of either of them, or become the isolated courier myself, a vagabond. I’d held my tongue so far, and now I found that someone else had exposed me to those possibilities. I couldn’t object; individuals were nothing compared with the movement. Charu Mazumdar had written in Liberation: ‘At the present time we have a great need for petty-bourgeois comrades who come from the intelligentsia. But we must remember that not all of them will remain revolutionaries to the end.’ That possibility, that shadow of doubt that would come over everyone, were I to acknowledge my reluctance for the three of us to be split up – I wouldn’t be able to live with that. I wanted to remain a revolutionary to the very end.
Debdulal-da added his voice to Anjan-da’s – Yes, which one among you?
Dhiren volunteered.
I kept looking at the floor. A wrench went through my heart.
Over the next few days we talked strategy endlessly. It was a badminton of book-learned wisdom. Or parrot-learning, as you would no doubt call it; and rightly. My heart wasn’t in it – I kept wanting to know what exactly was going on in Majgeria. We had left the village before we had had the time to organise protection squads, groups of informers who would give advance warning of a police raid; a mass mobilisation, in short. I thought of Kanu lifting up his perennially ailing son, and instead of
the delight and playfulness that should have been his expression, I saw his creased brows, and worried eyes, dark with the clouds of anxiety and helplessness. Was he even around to do that?
Majgeria was like a crematorium. The story Bijli told us turned my blood to ice. An army of policemen had raided the village. She said they had come in droves, ransacked their homes, charged at them with batons, hitting whoever they could find – men, women, children, old people, they hadn’t discriminated – and then taken almost everyone from this neighbourhood and the next one away to jail.
– But . . . but . . . that’s over a hundred people, I said.
– All of them, she said, everyone. Said they’d leave us as corpses if we stepped out of our homes.
It took me a while to get any sense out of Bijli’s story. She fell into weeping intermittently and scrambled up the sequence of events, so that I had to ask frequent questions to make a straight line of it. Often she blazed with anger, cursed . . . Her anger was directed at me. She left me in no doubt that I was partly to blame for the current state of affairs. There was no reasoning with her.
– And the child’s sick too. Who’ll take him to the doctor?
I tried to offer to help, but she gave me an earful: what was going to happen if I got caught by the police on my way to hospital with the child, because they were looking for us, looking for ‘outside men’, as they had said, ‘outside men’ who had come to the village to cause trouble.
I felt guilty and ashamed, my face was burning, but my distress was a luxury compared with the seriousness of the situation, now that the police had moved their repression up several notches.
– You should be hiding, she said, softening a bit. Not walking around in the open like this. Their people are everywhere, they’re watching us. They’ll come again, they said. You go now.
I asked her for only one thing: water to take into the jungle. She went away and came back after a few minutes, with a clay pot and a small cloth bundle.
– There’s nothing at home to eat, she said, except for some puffed rice. No molasses to go with it. I’ve given you some salt and chillies. That’s all I have.
I kept my head bowed as I took the water and the food.
We hadn’t progressed much. According to our plans, which had seemed so smooth and free-flowing during the talking stage, our next step would have been to seize the lands of the killed jotedaars and their toadies and hold the hundreds of bighas long enough to claim the next harvest on them. If things had gone according to plan we would have done that with the ’68 winter harvest, but we were only just beginning to get into the groove then. But now, with all our friends herded into jail like cattle, what were we going to do with just two people? I remembered that we referred to our groups as ‘cells’, and one of us as ‘commander’, and now those words, applied to two thin, ragged, hungry, dirty, cold men, almost turned to stone with exhaustion, made me want to laugh at their absurd bid for a kind of glamour. What were we going to do now? Hide in the forest, come out at night and take down one or two minor people – a manager walking past, a flunky on his way home?
Samir was as clueless as I.
– I think we should join the cell in Gidighati and strengthen our numbers there, he suggested. That was the line given to us in Belpahari, we mustn’t forget that.
Line, cell: I could tell that the old fearfulness in him was stirring and the use of those words was a way of trying to keep it at bay.
I asked – And leave these poor villagers here to be tortured?
– Well, that’s a problem . . . What’s going to happen to them?
– The police will press charges against whoever they feel like harassing. Or whoever their paymasters ask them to victimise. They’ll torment them until they fall into line. Kanu and Bipul and others don’t have the money or the connections to fight their cases in court.
I felt that old simmering in my blood again as I tried to outline what lay in store for the farmers. I couldn’t bear to think of the conclusion to that story. I said – Didn’t you hear how Bijli was blaming us for their situation? To abandon them now means that we’d never be able to show our faces here again. And that’s the least of the problem. It means we’re letting this village go, creating a chink in our area-wise seizure of power. Remember the Chairman’s words? This will become the gap in our armour.
– No, no, I understand, but I can’t think of any way to move forward.
It hit me then: the beginning of the recognition of the holes in our strategies, the insufficient manpower, the lack of planning for the worst ‘what if’ scenarios, the medieval networks of communication (if any). It was the first of many such waves to hit me.
We set out for Gidighati. Because we tried to cleave to the cover of the forest, the route became two long, angled sides of a triangle – going up only to come down – instead of the easier, shorter straight line.
Gidighati was a bigger village than the one we had just left, but not by much. It wasn’t difficult to find the Santhal neighbourhood – as always, on the periphery and, here, almost within the forest. There was a main road on the affluent side, which made our work that much more dangerous. I longed for the relative seclusion and inaccessibility of Majgeria.
Babu Mandi’s hut was not difficult to find. We stood out so conspicuously that people came to us, asking who or what we wanted, effectively doing our work for us. The questioning was touched with suspicion and aggressiveness: how could they tell that we weren’t working for the landlords or the police? The city guys, our comrade counterparts in this village, came out from their huts and everything was settled. Samir was going to stay at Babu Mandi’s, and I in the hut of Bir Mandi, his cousin, three doors down, a new-looking hut, the last one before the forest took over. The others, Ashu, Debashish and Dipankar, were none of them more than two or three huts away. Five of us here – I began to take comfort in this increase in our ranks.
We were led into the jungle by Ashu, Debashish and Dipankar. (Dipankar was slightly older than us, just over thirty, I’d say. He had read Mechanical Engineering in Jadavpur University, then briefly joined a private firm before giving up. Of the three of them, I got closest to him.) I was entranced, suddenly, by the forest. It was indistinguishable from the one we had hidden in before going to Belpahari, but now, I didn’t know why, it absorbed all my attention, so much so that Samir quipped – You’re getting a bit besotted by it. Could it be that the innate poet in you, dormant for so long, is waking up at last?
Maybe there was a little bit of an aesthetic awakening. Maybe it was because we were almost within the jungle in Gidighati, whereas in Majgeria we had had to walk a mile or two to enter it properly. But most of all it was to do with another kind of growing revelation: how well it could serve our purposes. Our comrades here had worked it out: Ashu and Dipankar said, for example, that it was possible to walk to the nearby villages, even most of the distance to Belpahari, without leaving the forest. A whole green corridor that could afford us safety.
The jungle could be our shelter, but in this arid corner of Binpur, far away from rivers, how were guerrillas going to survive in the forest without ready access to food and water?
I said – If we begin to live in the forest instead of a village, the poor villagers won’t be at the receiving end of police repression.
This had been weighing on my mind a lot. I had had a glimpse of the kind of hell that the police had unleashed over powerless people.
Ashu spoke my unsaid thoughts – Where are we going to get food and drink? What are we going to do in the monsoon?
– Couldn’t we visit the villages periodically and stock up?
– That would still leave them open to police brutality. They would be terrorised by the state into not cooperating with us. At least if we stay in the villages, our presence there keeps them militant.
And so it went, round and round and round. In any case, a mass action was deferred until just after harvest, so Samir and I were grounded here for the next seven
months at least.
Ashu, Dipankar and Debashish had already undertaken two guerrilla actions in Gidighati in as many months. One was a standard stabbing, they said and, by the sound of it, it didn’t seem to be very different from our job on Senapati: waylaying first in the dark, then the quick business with a hashua (they cut his throat). The second one was more interesting. I’ll write down Ashu’s words as closely as I can reproduce them from memory. (Full of swearing, which I’ve cleaned up. If you heard him speak, you wouldn’t be able to tell that he used to be a medical student. You’d mistake him for one of those wastrels who stands in a small gang at paan-bidi shops on street corners in South Calcutta and makes catcalls to every passing woman.) Here is his account.
– Name: Harekrishna Das. Walks around as if his father’s bought the whole place for him. We’ve had our eye on him ever since we came here after the Chadak Mela last year. He’s got his filthy pig’s snout in every trough of shit: moneylending, pawnbroking, smuggling . . . everything you can think of. A week after we send Haren Patra over to the other side in two halves, head first, body later, this Harekrishna begins to walk everywhere with a guard next to him. Our eyes pop out on stalks. Can you believe, a personal bodyguard in tow, going wherever he goes, sitting when he sits, running when he runs? What if we attacked Harekrishna while he was shitting, eh? The bodyguard would be there too? Anyway. The fat, greasy fool goes around twirling his umbrella and saying smugly, No one can touch me, I have a guard to protect me, look, he’s following me. That expression on his face alone would make you want to relieve mankind of his existence. Anyway. So we hide behind a bush and leap out one evening. The guard, who’s armed only with a lathi, tries to put up some sort of a fight, but we can tell that his heart is not in it. He sees we have knives and axes, so all he wants is to run away and save his own life. We say to him, Aren’t you ashamed to be in the pay of a dog like this? This dog is your class enemy, generations and generations of these dogs have exploited generations and generations of your people, and will carry on doing so eternally, so why would you want to serve him? We snatch his lathi off him and say, We’ll let you go because you are a poor man and we’re fighting for people like you, we’re on your side, but don’t let us catch you working for dogs like this again. Then we give him a few blows with his own lathi and he runs off over the fields so fast you’d think he was late for his own funeral. Harekrishna, meanwhile, is pinned to the ground by Dipankar and this Santhal lad, Babu’s nephew. We have him well and truly in our clutches now, there’s no way that fat corpse of his can move, he knows this too, so he starts begging for mercy. What sweet music. We know we’re going to slit his bloated stomach, pull out his guts and stuff his open mouth with it, but we let him sing for a while. He believes that if he pleads and begs we’re going to relent and let him go after a few slaps. We let him believe that – it was hilarious. The usual, you know: I have a wife and three small children, an ill ageing mother, they’re going to land in deep water if something happens to me, who’s going to look after them? We remind him, Did you think of the little children and ill ageing mothers of the destitute men, broken by your torture, their blood sucked dry by you? His stomach was so fat that the hashua sprang back when I tried to stick it in. Then I thought it would be more fun to slit his belly open only a little bit, like surgeons do during an operation. He was squealing like a sacrificial goat, so we couldn’t carry on with our games for very long, people would come running. How I wish we could have let him squeal for longer after I made that big, curved cut on his pot-belly. It looked like a smiley face. Then Dipankar says, Okay, we need to finish this and go. I think of slitting one of the veins in his neck and letting him bleed slowly to death, as they do in Muslim abattoirs, but in the end I show him mercy, find his jugular and, sataak! He really looked like a slaughtered fattened-goat.
The Lives of Others Page 41