The spell is broken by a thin wail coming out of the bedridden Prafullanath’s room: ‘What’s going on? What is happening? Where’s everyone?’
The Inspector takes this as a kind of permission; he disengages himself roughly and bounds down the stairs.
His men have only just reached the ground floor with Supratik. That young widow is standing outside her room, weeping, her aanchol held to her mouth out of habit, or perhaps out of the usual sense of decorum. The Inspector is familiar with enough of the family’s history to know that she and her two children form a detached unit, a sort of dispensable parenthesis to the rest of the Ghoshes. It is odd for someone of her position to be standing outside her room, listening to the circus upstairs; much more normal for her to be inside, gripped by curiosity and yet hiding, unable to eavesdrop with any ease, because of fear. It is certainly unusual enough for the thought to occur to him at this time of such intense turbulence. Then he notices what it is that has made him pay any attention to yet another weeping woman in a home being raided – she is clawing the air around her waist with her free hand as if bidding him and his men to stop, but fear and inhibition have not allowed it to be expressed in its fullness. The aborted gesture has instead become diverted to a tic, the kind one would see in an old, ill man afflicted with some neurological problem. It gives him the strange impression that she has the edge of her sari clamped to her mouth to stop what she wants to say from getting out. A remarkably attractive woman, he notes, giving her the once-over with his eyes; she is at the apogee of her ripeness. How old could she be? Thirty, at the most? He files away the thought, of half a mind to return to it later perhaps; something has caught at the peripheries of his consciousness and he needs to bring it to the light. But this is not the time.
Then he and his men are out of the house. Sounds of climbing into vans; the brief burst of a conflicting set of instructions about which van to bundle Supratik into, quickly resolved; the police watching the possible exit points in the vicinity returning to the vehicles; van doors slamming shut. Not a single light has come on in any of the doors or windows of the houses on Basanta Bose Road, yet each has a covert and intense quality of watchfulness, of absorption, about it; eyes and ears, stretched to their maximum sensory capacity, seem to have transferred their biological qualities to the portals behind which they are hidden. The silence itself is suspect, too silent. Then, cutting through that tense quietness, the vans leave, with the knock-and-rattle of running engines, one after the other.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
1970
THE ROOM SUPRATIK is taken to is bare and ordinary: whitewashed walls, the white turned to a tallowy grey; a table with two chairs on either side; a naked bulb hanging down a dusty plait of red, green and white wires from the centre of the ceiling; a rusting steel almirah; no windows. It could be anywhere. Although he is handcuffed, this is not a prisoner’s cell; maybe an administrative room, someone’s office, a meeting chamber. The two policemen who have brought him in here leave without a word; he can hear the door being bolted and locked from the outside. He knows it will be a long while, maybe even a day, before anyone comes down, knows that this is the stage they call ‘pickling’, where they let a suspect sit in total isolation and silence so that the speculation of what awaits him can loosen the tight coil of what is a human mind or soul. Often it is easy, this undoing; knowledge helps nothing. Or, rather, the knowledge helps the other side in doing half its preparatory work for them, which is why Supratik decides not to allow his mind to stray into the territory of what he has heard of the ways people such as he are dealt with by the police; he is not going to make their work easier by presenting them with the unravelled weave of himself when they walk in.
But the mind is the most impossible thing to empty and Supratik runs up against the obstinately contrarian will of his the moment it thinks its strategy of resistance: he can think of nothing other than what lies in store for him. Quite aside from playing its treacherous, self-consuming game of dividing itself into two camps and pitching them in battle against each other, his mind – a different creature, really; embodied inside him but a separate presence – introduces yet another combat. He thinks of the recent ‘shoot to kill’ orders given to the police, the military and the Central Reserve Forces across seven states to deal with his kind. But, surely, if they take him not in action in the field, as it were, but from home, that diktat does not apply? Perhaps they will let him go, after roughing him up a bit to extract any information they think will be useful? From second to second the answer flicks between yes and no, yes and no, a mad, manic child playing with toy light-switches marked ‘Salvation’ and ‘Despair’. In some ways he is immaterial to this conflict. It is as if two abstract principles are locked in their gladiatorial confrontation in a morality play, and he is just the stage on which they perform their encounter.
The rattle of the bolt and lock outside returns him to the solidity of the room. The door opens. The man who is shown in by two uniformed flunkeys is not someone who answers Supratik’s mental image of an interrogator, or even a policeman. This short, shy-looking, middle-aged man, with his salt-and-pepper hair and moustache, his jowls beginning to sag, his eyes hidden and distorted behind the powerful bifocal lenses of his thick black-framed glasses, could be anything from a college lecturer to the manager of a local branch of the State Bank of India. The utter ordinariness of the object that he is carrying, and then sets down on the table, adds to this impression: a tired, much-used brown paper file. He moves the chair and sits down, facing Supratik, but somehow managing to keep his face in the penumbral region that the almirah creates on his side of the table. Throughout this meeting Supratik will never properly get to see his expression, the changeable meanings in his eyes.
The voice too, when it issues out of those grey lips, could be a bureaucrat’s: cultured, impassive, bored. No leading up gently, lullingly from the margins; it launches headlong into the middle with, ‘Achchha, besides Debdulal Maity, you, Samir Ray Chowdhury and Dhiren Chatterjee, can you tell me who else was at the meetings in Debdulal-babu’s home in Belpahari in March/April last year? I mean, ’69?’
Two immediate things strike Supratik, although he does not acknowledge the surprise to himself, let alone betray it by any visible signs: he is being addressed respectfully with the highest form of ‘you’; and, second, they have a lot more on him and his comrades, even ‘micro’ details, as he would have once put it, of their whereabouts and activities than he would ever have given them credit for. The surprise is at the galling admission that he will have to make, shedding his condescension, of their nous and perspicacity. Supercilious hatred is easy; hatred tempered with the beginnings of respect – but in no way denting the antagonism – is much more difficult, Supratik finds. Or is this called fear?
He has no idea how he is going to play this. After all, he has only a limited range available to him: lying, denial, inability to recall; and those are intersecting sets, too. Where is he going to begin? Denial of the meeting? Denial that he knows, or ever knew, any of the people named? A brazen feigned surprise and ignorance, even outrage, that he is being questioned? It is a crucial question, for the response to it will set the parameters for everything that is to follow. He has to be as careful as a stalking cat.
The reply from his long-unused voice comes out all catarrhal, weak and risibly unconvincing to his own ears: ‘I don’t remember.’
There. He has gone down one path of the several available to him and foreclosed all other possibilities. He is now doomed to stick unveeringly to it and follow to its particular end, and who knows if that is not a destination more baneful than the others would have led him to? Besides, those three simple words have opened up other exposed flanks: that the meetings took place and that the meetings took place between the people named, in the place and time mentioned. He has, after all, not specifically denied them.
The man does not seem interested in attacking those weaknesses. Instead he asks, ‘And the tactical line
of’ – pause – ‘of killing in small groups, “guerrilla action”, I think you call it? Who was the brain behind it in Jhargram and Belpahari? You?’
There is nothing that he can say to this. Is he expected to reply to every question? If so, is he allowed to ponder it as one would a chess move, expansively, with all the time in the world? Or would that be damning? Would swift, rat-a-tat replies be rewarded with a better conclusion?
Again his inquisitor does not prod, letting the silence lengthen and become the third voice in the play. The State Assembly has been dissolved and it is President’s Rule again in West Bengal, the second time in two years, but Supratik feels in his bones that this man must be someone high-ranking in the CPI(M) Politburo, the erstwhile Home Minister Jyoti Basu’s right-hand man, even.
‘What about the people you saw during the times that you returned to Calcutta’ – here he consults some papers in the open brown file on his lap – ‘let’s see, um, here, you visited Calcutta three times between February ’68 and January ’70? Or was it five? Before you returned . . . returned for good in March this year? Or are you thinking of going back to Medinipur again?’ The man’s voice remains steady and polite, even sympathetic, but this casual little question he has just lobbed freezes Supratik’s blood and liquefies it, all in one instant, so that he suddenly feels light-headed, about to levitate. It is one of those few things that he has refrained even from writing down in his diary to Purba. He knows they have not got hold of that – they cannot . . . But a few things become clear to him. Has Dipankar been caught and made to – here his thoughts buckle into performing an elision – made to give up some information or or or
‘You have always been the quiet one, haven’t you?’ the man says, not really asking a question, but giving voice to an idle, fleeting impression. Then something approaching intent shows itself in the next few words – ‘You know what they called you? Your nickname, because you are so silent most of the time?’ – before the refusal to reveal the answer leaches it away. Or perhaps that is the intent – the dangling question that will goad him to ask for an answer. But he is not going to oblige.
‘It’s not as if you have been conducting all your . . . er . . . your business in complete secrecy,’ the interrogator continues. ‘All these farmers, hundreds of them across dozens of villages . . . and then boasting about it in your papers, Liberation and Deshabrati, although those reports are slightly wishful, don’t you think? The vast numbers of people joining you, the enormous impact your group’s actions have, the great success of all this squad action and annihilations, the Red Party inexorably exercising its hold village by village – these claims were always a bit hopeful, a bit exaggerated in your reports, no?’ His voice is apologetic, as if he is slightly distraught at having to point out the gaps and the errors and the abridgement that ideology inevitably demands.
‘But very little reporting, I see, of your retreats and losses and setbacks. Those are dealt with’ – pause – ‘hurriedly. If at all,’ he adds as a coda. The tone remains regretful.
The greater part of Supratik’s mind is too busy whirring away elsewhere to heed these ant-bites. Could this man be from the Congress? If so, there is some hope of escaping lightly: did his grandfather not have some Congress connections, or even his father? Did they not know anyone high enough up the ladder to put a few words in the right ears?
This time the man reads Supratik as if his head has become transparent glass and the thoughts inside it a lean procession of simple, large words. ‘It must have occurred to you, once or twice, that you could have been arrested earlier had it not been for the, uh, police connections that your family has maintained for many years?’ he asks, but the interrogative tone at the close of the sentence is so attenuated as to be almost absent; he does not require an answer to this one, either. That vertiginous feeling revisits Supratik. Could that be why he has not been banged up with other prisoners in Ballygunje police station – so close to what he still thinks, perhaps with renewed intensity at this moment, as home – but instead held alone in a cell for three days, or was it four; not penned and beaten up with other political prisoners, which is, he knows, a matter of routine occurrence? Again, that near-instantaneous reversal: it could equally be because they have different plans for him; that specialness could only contain a terrible meaning.
‘We are just trying to establish,’ the questioner says, ‘how much of a linchpin you were. Or were you one of the members of the high command?’
Despite himself, Supratik is impelled towards an answer. ‘Since you know everything, why go through this drama of questioning?’ he asks. He had meant it to sting, a retaliation perhaps for the barbs his questioner has been aiming at him, but only manages a petulant tiredness.
‘We do know a lot of things,’ the man admits, somewhat disarmingly, then flicks the tone like someone tossing a coin. ‘Which is why it may not be such a good idea to remain silent. Or to lie.’
The silence seems to be emanating from the interrogator now, not imposed by Supratik on the proceedings. He controls its flow according to the rules of the game, which only he knows, then cuts it out with unusual garrulity: ‘The members who plan and give out the orders, that’s what that’s what, um, interests us. The fingers of your hand pick up something, but the command comes from the brain. The central nervous system. That’s the goal. Not the ideologues, mind you, those we know; not even the foot soldiers, but the generals. And you are one of them, am I right? The stealthy nights of planning in, here, let’s see’ – that show of consulting papers again – ‘oh, let’s choose any three from this long list, quite long, 23A Satgachhi 2nd Lane in Tiljala, 76/2 Dihi Entally Lane, 17/B/2 Bechu Chatterjee Street in Kalabagan . . . what? Am I right?’
Supratik makes fists of his hands under the table to steady himself. The sudden change in the man’s persona, from a mild, laconic nobody to this spitter of absolutely accurate facts, like your pot-bellied, rice-and-fish-eating next-door neighbour turning out to be a supreme assassin, getting his bullets unfailingly into the plumb centre of his target time after time, sends Supratik’s whole being careering. Yes, they know everything. There is no hope; and yet that great deceiver taunts him with the meagre residues – look, it says, they do not know about X or Y. And only X or Y it will be, since they have made it their business to know the entire alphabet bar those final two or three letters. Which they may very possibly know about, anyway.
The man now asks his first direct and pointed question: ‘Who are the city guys still in Medinipur?’
Silence. Do they really want to know, fill a gap in their knowledge, or are they trying to catch him out?
The man persists: ‘Did you not like the question? What about a different one: name me some villages that your groups, ah, penetrated. Not only in Bengal, but also Bihar and Orissa. I read in your papers how your spread is now over a hundred districts. The figure in that boast – is that wishful?’
‘I don’t know,’ Supratik replies; so lame even to his own ears. He has the sense that the man is looking at him fixedly, but he cannot be certain of it because of the combination of the thick glasses, the shadow in which he keeps his face and the cone of light under which Supratik sits directly. A worrying thought darts through his mind – how can he not see the face of a man sitting three or four feet opposite him? – and slips out again.
‘I have a different matter to sort out with you, it’s been worrying me for a while,’ the man now says. ‘Something private, something more about me than you. I want to understand something. A lot of these young Naxal men, both activists in Calcutta and in the rural districts, they come from poor families. I can see how they would want to . . . to to throw in their lot with a, ah, movement that promises to be of the poor, for the poor, by the poor.’
Supratik knows so well where this is going that he finds himself nodding as if to encourage the man.
‘But . . . but so many of you, the boys from the city, I mean, what your Charu-babu calls “the urban intelligentsia
”, so many of you come from well-off, middle-class homes, in your case an upper-middle-class home, am I right? You boys have been educated in good schools, you’ve had enough to eat, enough to wear, comfortable homes to live in, the benefit of college education, not a day’s want in your lives . . . What made you leave that that that comfort zone to risk your lives?’
How amazing the transformation is, Supratik thinks: you scratch the surface of a serious-seeming, important apparatchik, all silences and measured reserve, and out comes the loquacious Bengali soul; no less a performance, that incessant chattering, but a thinner mask, all too easy to come by, and easily wearable.
He is not done: ‘Putting yourselves in such danger . . . bombs, guns, knives, axes and whatnot?’
He makes it sound like sweeties that will give you a sore stomach, if you indulge too much.
The man continues, ‘And life in the villages could not have been a bed of roses, right? Especially for people from your kind of background? The rough food, the discomforts of daily life, no electricity, no sanitation. Did you boys get diarrhoea and stomach upsets a lot? Surely you must have.’
A swirl of amazement at this catalogue, absurd coming from such a source, injects itself into the stream of Supratik’s fear and anxiety. He was prepared to tackle the questions straight on, but now he feels he is being ridiculed, that their revolution is being attacked not only in the usual way, with the police and military and the machinery of state power, but also with comic derision. The immediate sting of this is more irritating.
The Lives of Others Page 57