He pointed with his hand somewhere to the west of where I was standing.
– But we have five rifles now, he said. And also their clothes, it’ll help camouflage.
– We’ll have to take them to the village to wash off the blood, Babu said. Some will be ruined, anyway.
– Let’s see what we can salvage, Dipankar said. Then to Babu – Wash and dry them stealthily, see that no one notices you have police uniforms with you.
We located the fallen policemen in reverse order of their killing. There were flies buzzing above them already, some clustered in the centre of their fresh, wet wounds. Of the two Dipankar had shot, one wasn’t dead and had dragged himself into the bushes, leaving his rifle behind. We saw to him with his own gun, there seemed to be some kind of poetic justice in that. Then we set about disposing of the bodies.
Babu and Bir and Giri kept us supplied with food and water. We were anxious about the inevitable, terrible repercussions that this execution of policemen would have. There was no turning back from this point. But we didn’t hear cars or vans, so we assumed . . . well, we assumed a number of things, each as theoretical as the other: they didn’t know about their dead comrades yet; they were in the planning stages of an all-out revenge attack; they were still trying to work out what exactly had happened; they were trying to lull us into a false sense of security so that we would emerge from the forest and then they’d strike.
Meanwhile, our three Santhal friends brought us something that was situated somewhere between news and speculation. The police had not been to the village, or to their neighbourhood, and there was talk that even armed members of the force were refusing to enter the forest to flush out the ‘police killers’.
Could this be true? We debated this for hours, turned it this way and that to see if we could extract any hidden meaning from it. Was it a good thing that they were afraid? Did it mean we could have a clean run at our revolution? Was this going to be the pattern everywhere: the police taking fright and ceding the ground to us, leading to our victory? No obstacles, no warfare, no bloodshed, no toil . . . No, no, it sounded too good to be true.
The debate changed direction at this point. We fell over each other trying to point out the legion instances of the police always acting against the people and for the state. They were the guard dogs of government: they were let loose on a state’s own people every time there was a move towards greater equality or fairness or justice, and they obliged without fail. Every time. They had no morality, no principles; only a slavish obedience to whoever paid them any money. (There is a precise word for this profession, but I won’t offend your ears with it.) Throughout history, in every single nation in the world, this class of paid servant of the state has turned against its own people, terrorised them, beaten and tortured them, unleashed untold misery and repression, like those illnesses where the body’s own immune cells have gone so horribly wrong that they whip around and attack the harbouring body itself.
Our Santhal comrades kept us alive and hidden. They taught us to read the direction of the wind; the nature of tracks in the forest when none seemed visible to our urban eyes; under which trees we shouldn’t sleep in the night; which insects were poisonous; how to identify holes where rodents and snakes could be living; which dried leaves to use and how to layer and line them in order to make a kind of ‘bed’ at night, so that the moisture from the earth didn’t make us cold or damp; the leaves of which small bush to squish into a paste and apply to cuts and insect bites; what it signified when the red soil paled into a browner shade; which wood didn’t smoke when burned; how to use a line of trees to orientate yourself; how to leave a track of markers for someone in the group who might get lost; the way to weave a zigzag track among the trees, avoiding hitting them, as someone chased you with a bow-and-arrow . . . I focused on each lesson with a concentration that sometimes made me feel that the soft bits behind my eyes had been brought to a point of white heat. It kept my mind off other things.
All this talk of Santhals – I suppose I keep skirting around the issue that’s uppermost in both our minds. Does the word ‘Santhal’ make you quail? Still? Every time I use the word I hesitate, thinking of what kind of reaction it’ll spark in you, reading it. And I’m also conscious of the fact that I’m not very far from the Chhotanagpur Plateau area, where Chhoto-kaka died: it’s only a short hop away across the border into Bihar. Our Santhal friends, while they cannot possibly be related to the Santhals Chhoto-kaka and his friends encountered all those years ago, must be part of the lateral spread of the same people. I remember a story from childhood in which they were referred to as ‘people of the red soil’. The image stayed with me, dormant, until it germinated when I first came to these parts and saw those words in my memory given life and reality in the world.
Is it fanciful of me, do you think, to imagine the reason for the colour of the earth of this region – that it is red with the blood of its exploited people? Do you remember a story you told me when I was little (‘prancing around in silk dhoti and silk panjabi’, as you put it, on the day of your wedding)? Chhoto-kaka had just died and you had had to give up eating meat and fish and eggs, when I noticed one day that there seemed to be a sanction on eating mushur dal, red split lentils, as well? (I’ve never asked you this before, but I must now: all these intricate and punishing sumptuary laws, were they imposed on you by my grandmother? Or did you invite them upon yourself?) Yes, the innocent, obviously and purely vegetarian red split lentils – what wrong had they done? You explained that a god had once fought an evil demon above a plantation of pulses, and the god had slain the demon and the demon’s blood had stained the grain indelibly. This was the origin of red split lentils, in bloodshed, and so it was not as strictly vegetarian as I had assumed it to be, you said; there were things that a boy, regardless of his knowledge of stories about the Buddha, didn’t know, so there.
I was eleven years old at the time and you were eighteen.
The night was very cold. I could see torn scraps of the black night sky, almost smoky and milky with the dense scatter of stars, through the gaps in the tops of the trees, but no longer your face or your name; I couldn’t see a stretch of the sky big enough for that. When it wasn’t the cold that kept me awake, it was the continual sounds of the forest, the rustling and scraping and murmuring, as if a furiously busy world, unseen by the human eye, was going about its stealthy activity. Often, when the sounds got a bit louder or more sustained, I thought it was the escaped policeman who had come to look for us, to slaughter us in our sleep. And whenever I shut my eyes I could see Samir’s in death, open, unseeing, the whites disproportionately larger than the pupils.
Before I fell asleep I had this thought: forests, wherever available, could be profitably used for the purposes of our revolution. Our armies – no longer two or three or five guerrillas – could hide there; food, water and other supplies, including an advance warning system, could be provided by the inhabitants of whichever villages the forest skirted; the forests could be taken over completely and become no-go zones for the state and its organs of repression . . . Very quickly, in my mind, the dream became swollen to something almost real. To deal with our future armies they would have to cut down entire forests, and how were they going to do that? I fell asleep to the imagining of an imminent new dawn.
Next day, Dipankar and I set out for Majgeria. We took the pistol with us. It was just a precaution – Dipankar swore blind that the journey was going to be entirely through the forests, so we were never going to be in a position to be discovered.
Before we left, Babu handed me a bundle of chhatu and what looked like a cloth side-bag.
Babu said – That friend of yours, that babu who . . . who didn’t return, it’s his. I’m giving it back to you.
I didn’t know why I took so long to recognise Samir’s bag. His meagre belongings were in it: a short-sleeved shirt, musky with his odour; a pair of pyjamas; a box of 777 matches; a copy of The Little Red Book, almost every single line un
derscored in pencil and dot-pen, with notes written in the margins. There was a Collected Poems of Jibanananda Das, with lines from some poems marked. The book fell open at the poem ‘Wristwatch’; I noticed he had glossed a difficult word in it – he had underlined it and written ‘lust’ in the margin. I too hadn’t known the meaning of that word. There was a notebook too. My hands were shaking as I swiftly thumbed through the pages: drafts of poems that blurred and then became illegible because of my tears.
Dipankar and I stopped to eat from our bundle of chhatu. It was late afternoon. I felt tired and my eyes kept closing. From far away came the sound of the whistle, long and melancholy and pleading, of a train. I didn’t know why, but the lonely sound had sleepiness associated with it, and the promise of an untethering, as if the sleep it induced would liberate me from the here and now and set me afloat on some infinite ocean of peace and silence and calm.
My eyelids grew heavier. Dipankar must have seen me nodding off, so he tried to engage me in conversation. He too had heard the train’s whistle. He asked – What train do you think that is?
– Don’t know, I mumbled.
– How far do you think the nearest railway track is?
– No idea.
– Near Gidhni or Tatanagar and Jamshedpur, no? Do you think the sound’s coming from that far away? Impossible.
– Who knows?
– I should know, I think it’s the train route I used to go down as a child to visit a distant uncle in Giridih every year during the puja holidays. The uncle’s still alive, but we haven’t been for so many years . . .
He seemed almost to be talking to himself. I felt unmoored from the ground I was sitting on, about to levitate.
Suddenly Dipankar’s momentary lull of introspection snapped and he turned his attention to me – You’re almost asleep. We need to get going. Come on, come on.
It wouldn’t do to nod off now, so I forced myself to make conversation.
– I’ve heard Giridih is a nice place.
He said – Yes, it is. Clean, and a nice dryness to the air. I loved it as a child. There are little hills dotted around the place. The city boy in me found that exciting. There are waterfalls and little streams and forests. It’s very pretty. And quiet. Do you want to come with me one day?
– That would be nice, but when?
– I would say as a holiday from all this, but maybe it’s more likely that we’ll need to go there to hide. Kharagpur, Jhargram, all the Calcutta stations, they’re bristling with policemen. They’re watching the trains and the stations in this area like hawks.
The thought of hiding in a calm, pretty corner of Bihar, away from all this action, was so appealing that my eyes began to droop again. A brown kite was wheeling above us, its squealing whinny working on me like the far-away train whistle.
Dipankar noticed and gamely made another attempt to engage my interest. He said – Let me tell you an interesting thing about railway tracks. Did you know about fishplates? They’re metal bars that are bolted to the ends of tracks to make them one and continuous.
Only an engineer would think he could keep someone awake by talking about engineering. Silly, innocent man.
All I wanted to do was find out about Kanu and Bijli, but I couldn’t risk being seen walking around in the familiar village even though the gapless dark of the rural night had long fallen. It was Dipankar who would have to be my eyes and ears in Majgeria. I had been repeating to him the detailed directions to identify Kanu’s hut so often that he asked me to shut up. He could tell I was on edge; I was behaving like a nervous mother seeing her son off to battle.
I paced the jungle while he was gone, possessed of a fiendish energy that I had been lacking all these days. Mind you, the energy didn’t seem to affect the slothful nature of time; that ticked on slower than ever. I convinced myself that Dipankar had been gone for hours. Over and over again I did the calculation for the time to walk there + time to investigate + time to walk back, and under different conditions imposed on each of those variables, so that the numbers themselves started getting distorted.
By the time he returned, I was standing as much outside the jungle as I dared, reduced to what felt like a state of instant combustibility.
– Put on the police uniform, he said. Come with me. Very, very quietly.
Dressed in a khaki outfit we had taken off one of the executed policemen in Gidighati, I followed him but, surprisingly, deeper into the jungle, eastwards.
– What’s up? I asked.
– The sound of our feet on these fallen leaves is very loud. I’m always scared that people outside will know there’s someone moving around in here.
We were speaking in whispers.
I said – It sounds loud to us, but no one outside can hear it, don’t worry.
– Listen, bad news. I think they’re deploying the military police here. A group has set up camp in a building on the other side. It’ll be impossible to go through the village, that’s why we’re doing it the long way.
Thunder fell on my head. So the ordinary district police couldn’t cope with the number of actions erupting around the place and were stretched so thin that the military and the reserve police forces had had to be called in. Did we ever factor this into our equations?
Dipankar didn’t remember discussing it with anyone. Neither did I. How could one fight the army with a toybox-worth of axes and spears?
He spoke the words of the man who knew his side had lost everything – Listen, I may be wrong. Another pair of eyes is always a good idea.
In any case, it was a bit futile to try and spy on them at night, at least from that distance. We could see nothing for a long time as we stood behind the trees. Then we moved out of the cover of the forest and advanced closer, across open fields, towards the building that was the village school. A dog barked. It could have been any of the strays in the village, but to me it sounded more aristocratic, the sound of the military’s guard dog. We edged back into the protective cover of the trees, rewarded only with the silhouette of a man who crossed the dimly lit square of the window a few times. Did I imagine an odd outline humping his shoulders into a strange shape, something added to the human form and sticking out above the side? Did I will myself to see a rifle strapped to his back?
A tuneless snatch of melody reached us. One of them was singing. It sounded as if the singer was Bihari.
It was only the next morning, in daylight, that we were able to establish more. A uniformed military policeman was sitting on a chair in a patch of sun outside the entrance to the school, rubbing tobacco on the palm of one hand with the thumb of the other. Like the seven other men we could count, he indeed had a rifle strapped to his back and a belt of live rounds around his waist. Dipankar was correct in all his assumptions: they really had set up base in the school.
The two of us would be routed in a matter of minutes if we took them on. My own death I could be stoical about, after much training, but I did not have the stomach to see yet another friend killed. We debated, but very briefly, the possibility of a guerrilla attack at night. There was no hope for it. We had to leave Majgeria, perhaps to return in the near future with reinforcements, but for now it looked hopeless.
To have shared what Kanu and Bijli were most probably going through now, the hell of police-beatings and incarceration, would have been better than this limbo of darkness and ignorance and amateurish planning and laughable resources.
It’s not possible to tell, once inside a forest, how far from or how close to your destination you are; everything looks the same. Only the time elapsed is a marker. As agreed, we were going to sing well-known revolutionary songs as we got close to our comrades’ encampment so that they could tell we were approaching, not strangers or enemies; Comrade Subbarao Panigrahi’s composition ‘Tell me, can you prevent the sun from shining with your tiny hand?’ and ‘We advance towards the edge of life to pluck light from the stalk of darkness’. I say ‘encampment’ but it was no such thing, of course. Besides, th
ere was the very real possibility of our comrades having moved on to another patch of the forest for reasons of security. There was no spirit in us to sing the songs with any degree of interest or tunefulness, so they came out like badly recited poetry.
Ashu and Debashish came out of the jungle, one by one, from behind trees and bushes, to meet us. For a few seconds I couldn’t recognise them, I was so shocked by their appearance – thin, reedy, dark men in dirty clothes, unwashed, unkempt, puffy eyes with dark circles under them, looking like a bunch of beggars afflicted by chronic starvation . . . Then I thought that they must be thinking the same about me.
Then, making my heart come out of my mouth, Dhiren emerged from the jungle: they had been hiding him so that I could be given a surprise. I embraced him.
– At least starvation and all this vagabondage have brought out your tender side, he quipped, returning my embrace.
It was as if we had never parted. We went to a clearing marked by a little black patch on the ground where they had clearly burned wood and leaves to keep themselves warm. I noticed that they had been careful to leave the fire small and contained.
After the beautiful surprise came the nasty shock: troops from the Eastern Frontier Rifles had set up camp in Gidighati. Dhiren, who had been out in the wider world, brought us news that was both dispiriting and blood-boiling. The Home Minister, Jyoti Basu, apparently at the request of the Chief Superintendents of the police forces of the ‘districts afflicted by terrorism’, had given orders for the EFR and military police to be deployed. The big landlords of the area, who had the police in their pockets, and most of the politicians too, had got together, both in public and in private, and used their combined power to pull the levers at the topmost level. None of the process and reasoning behind it was surprising, only the fact of the outcome. But we were beginning to get used to that, too.
When I asked where Babu and Bir were, they looked away. Ashu said, after a bit of hesitation, that they had returned to the village, worried by what their families were facing during the crackdown, and hadn’t come back.
The Lives of Others Page 44