THE MYSTIC: PART I - THE SEEKER (Part 1 - THE SEEKER)

by Arindam Bhattacharjee

Chapter 4

  The Creation of Memory

  4.1: The story of Raghav’s Childhood and Upbringing

  Raghav was born in a middle class family in a suburb of Kolkata. His father was a very popular homeopathic practitioner in a town in North 24 parganas district. He was also well known for revamping the old science of homeopathy. He was patronized by both rich and poor patients. During the time of the emergence of the Naxalite movement and the turmoil that followed in West Bengal Raghav was sent to his uncle who was staying in New Delhi so that his education was not affected.

  Raghav completed his secondary and higher secondary education from Delhi Public School and then joined IIT Kharagpur for a degree in mechanical engineering. He was unlike his father. While staying and growing up in the posh localities of Delhi he never thought about the plight of the poor and the destitute. He was however fascinated with the Naxalite movement where he saw many young and affluent students from Xavier's and Presidency College joining the movement. But his father insisted that he focus on his education.

  During his days in IIT-Kharagpur, Raghav joined the NSS program with a selfish motive. He hoped that this would improve his resume. Little did he know that working for the NSS and the poor would give him a perspective that would mould his future! A particular day brought him close to the philosophies of the Maoists and this sucked him into the turmoil.

  He was with his friends going around Mayurbhanj area near Kharagpur working with an NGO for the education of the kids in the village. One day few cadres from the CPI Maoists holding a red flag visited the village. They shot dead a lone police constable and broke the glasses of the government school in the locality. Then they went on a rampage and brought all the youth to stand in a line.

  Raghav and his friends were also caught and taken to one of the rooms in the school and tied to the cots. They were threatened and warned that they should never come to the region again; if they did they would not leave the place alive. Their IIT identity cards saved them that day from any harm coming to them. The Maoists picked up few of the tribal kids and took them away in their jeeps.

  One of the Maoists with his face covered told Raghav,

  “We are recruiting them in our army. This way they will be of a lot of help to the society – much more useful than toeing the line of government programmes.”

  This event shook Raghav to the core and left a psychological scar. During the rest of his engineering years Raghav was too scared to venture into the villages again. On his father's insistence Raghav applied for a PhD program in the field of nanotechnology at Yale. After completing his PhD he went and later worked in Bell Labs. But that one event in Mayurbhanj continued to haunt his mind. He thought of going back to India after finishing two years working at Bell Labs.

  After returning from US, he went back to his alma mater of IIT Kharagpur and mustered enough strength to go back to the Mayurbhanj village where he had been traumatized by the Naxalites. He saw a lot of suffering in the village and while talking to the villagers he could not believe their plight, sandwiched between the Maoists and the government forces.

  He could not understand how the situation could become so bad in the past ten years. With his new born inquisitiveness and sharp engineering acumen Raghav wanted to know more about the problem.

  During his work in the finest engineering labs of the world he was instrumental in solving very tough engineering problems. He thought to take this up as a challenge and with a help of friend from Sloan Business School he started his own microfinance firm in India. A firm supporter of the market economy Raghav thought that microfinance held a promise to fight the inadequacies of the government and the Maoists to mitigate the conditions of the poor.

  Those days the success of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh had shown some promising results in eradicating poverty from the country. First he spent some time learning about the model and then started his own firm from the city of Hyderabad in Andhra Pradesh. The group also started a small unit to get involved in social work to give a holistic view of the sustainable development.

  They also had a political wing that made people aware of the rights of the poor in a democracy and the power the Constitution of India bestowed upon them. They took part in various rights to information initiatives but such activities were detrimental to the growth of the company. The company had strong ethics and the units in many states went into direct confrontation with the State governments.

  The nexus between the states and the industries upset Raghav a lot. He could not handle the whims and fancies of the bureaucrats and as was the company policy he was never involved in paying bribes to the bureaucrats to get his work done. In the course of his work Raghav came to know from his employees about the many wrong practices of the policy makers.

  He kept writing blogs using the pseudonym Simon where without taking names or attacking politicians, he would write stories expressing his views about the subject. The blog was hosted from US but it was this that eventually led to Raghav's fall.

  4.2: Raghav in self imposed exile

  Raghav spends his first few days getting oriented with the new life. His body was slowly adapting to the physical reality of being in the ambulatory stage. Getting used to the daily chores of life style was itself very difficult but Raghav tackled these difficulties one step at a time. His appetite was low and his sleep cycles were erratic. During the first few days he suffered severe bouts of fever while getting adjusting to the food and environment.

  His fever shot up so high that he had to be on antibiotics for a week, as his immunity was very low. What amazed Raghav was that this same region of Mayurbhanj was still in the same condition as it was ten years back but the citizens displayed neither anger nor resentment. The new generation did not have any political ambitions. The fear of the state machinery had replaced the Maoist fear.

  Debashish tried to inform Raghav about whatever he knew had happened in Mayurbhanj during the last ten years in Mayurbhanj but he didn’t have a holistic view of the drama unfolding in the state. Raghav thought both of them had endured in the same state of exile for the last ten years.

  Raghav could not convince himself that whatever Debashish was telling was the entire truth although Debashish had provided him with all the related newspapers he had stored for so long. Debashish had maintained complete lists of key-words from these newspapers – dated and formatted. This was a very important work that Debashish had completed. It would be of great help to Raghav in his quest.

  At first Debashish explained to Raghav how the keyword arrangement worked. He would sort out appropriate keywords for a following day from a set of newspapers. Then he would select them out on the basis of popularity of the newspaper and the region where it belonged to. After going through each Debashish would present his own theory to Raghav.

  Raghav who was still struggling with the bouts of fever could hardly make any sense out of Debashish’s thesis on any subject. After perusing a list of exhaustive topics Raghav’s patience ran off. Raghav said, “I don’t follow anything what you are saying. In most of the cases I find your analogy inaccurate because I do not see any parity between the two illustrations – one that you are suggesting what might have happened and one that what the newspapers are reporting.”

  Debashish replied, “Most of these papers are being controlled by the State so I was trying to tell what might be the possibilities.“

  Raghav replied, “But it seems you are also way off the truth. As you have been staying in exile for so long, I don’t blame you for not knowing what actually was happening.” Debashish replied, “I can’t help that.”

  Raghav quipped, “But it seems you have lost your edge and interest in the whole segment of politics and are just a florist now.” Debashish answered, “Things are not the same as it used to be before. People have changed and so has the country. I would say you were lucky that you were not part of that change.”

  Trying to take the conversation to a different path, Raghav asked Debashish to show the
news about his wife; was there any slight hint of her present whereabouts? Hunting through the newspapers about the events that led to Raghav’s wife's disappearance did not produce any results. Getting frustrated he went through the articles describing his death.

  To his horror Raghav saw how a complete defamation of his character was carried out in most newspapers. Even his company was said to have black money assets in different parts of the world and to top it all they also wrote how Raghav had illicit relationships with foreign woman based on pictures showing him drinking with them; most of them were investors of his company.

  Disappointed about the whole event and not being able to understand any of the comrades’ description of the past, Raghav planned to become a recluse and to perform an exercise routine to build up his memory. He refused to see any living soul other than sometimes Debashish. Sometimes Raghav sitting the small hut in exile felt claustrophobic when ambush memories began to haunt him.

  At those times he would run out sweating profusely to get some fresh air. Even then he would not spend time with any of the other comrades who rushed forward every time Raghav came out of the tent. Raghav went through an intensive search process to first find out the fate of most of the people he had known. To his disgust he found that even the names of these individuals had been defamed by the notorious Indian media.

  Christina’s growing interest in Raghav was driving her to take the matter more seriously. While going through the drone images from the facility in Manipur, Christina had discovered that Raghav was actually one of the inmates in the facility. She sent this information about Raghav to the think tank in US to figure out a way to track him down. Christina thought that if Raghav could have escaped from the facility, then he must have gone searching for his friends in Kolkata’s mall.

  Someone of his stature will not make a mistake of showing himself up in the government radar if he had known about the technology. She also saw the news of the death of the other guy over the bridge. To confirm if the government was hiding Raghav’s death, she went back to the site to get the eyewitness’ account of the accident using a pretext of vacation. Most of the people told her that only one person died and the other had escaped. Christina was sure that Raghav had survived the ordeal and now she wanted to track him down.

  Sagarika later came to know that Christina had gone to Kolkata without informing her. This time Sagarika thought that Christina was following up her old story and confronted her by asking her to explain as to why she went to Kolkata. Christina was surprised to know that Sagarika was spying on her and said,

  “I think I live in a free country and can go anywhere for vacation.”

  This angered Sagarika

  “Your evasive answer convinces me that you are withholding some important information. Are you again chasing the old story that you were working on when I told that we don’t have the funding for the same project? You will not find your answers over there.”

  Christina revolted

  “It is not possible that a fellowship program could be stopped in the middle of the year. At least this does not happen anywhere in the States.”

  Sagarika replied,

  “Well this is India! I told you this activity would be good for your career and see how happy most people are with your work. It seems that by working in the Middle East your mind has become cluttered with extraneous trivia; now you cannot concentrate on the essentials.” Sagarika looked angrily on Christina and said,

  “I have read your reviews from your previous bosses and it seems your opinions are considered to be fickle; it seems to change from one country to another. You objected when we tried to teach you about Indian culture.”

  Christina knew that this conversation was going nowhere and she was inviting more trouble to herself. It was very obvious that Sagarika was trying to impose her authority by playing around with politics.

  Christina replied,

  “See at the end of the fellowship period I have to submit what work I have done on my topic. I cannot shed my responsibility to BBC.”

  Sagarika started laughing and asked,

  “Have you seen anyone else working on such a topic like you are doing?”

  Christina was shocked at Sagarika’s response. She was thinking how could she become a CEO with such an attitude towards other’s work. Sagarika continued,

  “Christina don’t be foolhardy. Get the advice of experienced people before getting into any venture. We won’t give you wrong advice.”

  Christina wondered what advice Sagarika could give her. She lacked the vast experience of Christina. From the day she joined Christina had seen Sagarika sitting only at her desk – poking her nose into other people’s work. Never had she heard Sagarika saying or doing something that could prove that she had some brains. But Christina thought herself lucky considering that she didn’t have to undertake demeaning spying and trailing jobs like most of the others.

  Only a person with very little self esteem and in dire need for money could actually work in such an undignified environment. She did not understand why Sagarika stayed on late and yet did not do anything fruitful for the company. It was very obvious that the organization survived on political patronage.

  Many of the people in the organization would say, Sagarika could not apply herself to any task and frittered away her time on unnecessary activities, but her closeness to her boss made her reach this position. Christina had no option but to keep quiet.

  Later that week Christina was provided with the possible locations by the agency suggesting where Raghav might have gone to from Kolkata. The name of Mayurbhanj was included among the top ten most probable places. Christina knew that she had to find Raghav.

  4.3: Building up Memory Maps

  Raghav was disappointed. He could gather no knowledge about the whereabouts of his wife. He thought about her all the time – her cheerful smile and rosy cheeks. Raghav remembered his wife as someone who would make the environment vibrant whenever she was with him. Raghav, while going through the materials provided by Debashish, thought that the comrades had done their best in compiling this huge collection of newsprints, magazines (both local and national) and e-papers within such a short time.

  But Raghav thought that even with superhuman abilities of going through this exhaustive list, he would eventually fail. He reasoned that he had to build up a systematic approach to figure out happened in the last ten years of his life. The stories about him on the newspapers as to why he was brought down made him think of the possibilities that most of the stories might actually be fabricated. Raghav thought that what was necessary was to figure out a technique to understand and memorize what happened in the past. So he experimented with some techniques to figure out why he was targeted.

  Raghav used many mnemonic tricks to get a grip over the happenings of the period when he was in coma. He started with cards to memorize the thesis of each event on a particular date but later realized that most newspaper reports were full of inconsistencies; singular events don’t make any sense. He needed to bridge the connection between the events so that this way he could be able to filter out the wrong information.

  So he introduced schematic diagrams of events to build up a sequential map of events in a tree type structure. His tree type structure was built on a spatial map of India which also provided him with idea of the underlying political agenda in the region. He used advanced techniques spending hours cogitating over a situation trying to build up scenarios and maps; but he was seldom satisfied.

  Raghav felt that the moral decadence of the people was reflected in the lewd literature of the period; the standard had gone down in astronomically. The more he read the articles the more he felt that these articles were tendentious to what the government propaganda was at that period. The reports on accounts of conflicts, riots, disasters and elections were distorted and exaggerated to such proportions that no two newspaper accounts of figures matched. Raghav sorted the papers that were jam packed with statements against the Naxalit
e movement and those that exaggerated the government victories; it meant artificial tapering with the information. Raghav was actually building up his memory maps of the last ten years only through his imagination.

  During this entire process he started having difficulty collecting his vagrant thoughts. The notoriety of government operations would bring in bad thoughts about his wife. Raghav went back to the days when she had stood behind him during his troubled days and gave him support. Many times Raghav had got burnt out while dealing with the bureaucrats and each time she had come to his support. The only report about his wife was from the mission of defamation carried out against Raghav.

  Raghav came to know that his wife took umbrage at the remarks made by few political leaders against him. Actually it was not a report about her but focused more on the political leader; Raghav could figure out that the woman described in the article that it was his wife. He based his theory on the location and the timing of the event.

  The report suggested that she had called on a press conference to explain her husband’s innocence but stormed away from it in a huff. The newspaper reported that the woman actually was a spy and she took asylum in some foreign country. Raghav knew that there was a possibility that his wife was either killed or taken to any military facility like the one in Manipur. After realizing the fact that his wife was targeted in the same fashion and probably killed, Raghav bounced out of his hut into fits of anger. Five comrades had to work really hard to restrain him after he ran amok thinking about the gruesome technique that might have been used to neutralize her. He could not forgive himself for indulging in such a misadventure that affected his family.