A Time Outside This Time

by Amitava Kumar

  I asked him the question. “How was Avinash killed?”

  “You will soon find out,” Vishal said. “I’m taking you to a camp. You will meet an interesting person there.”

  I was given two hefty albums. Inside were photographs of police sports events and medal ceremonies—it occurred to me that I could have been visiting a school, and perhaps Vishal had never really left that place where we had been students together—and then suddenly I was looking at mangled corpses. These were photographs of dead insurgents. Which is to say that, from the opening page to the end, the album displayed trophies. When I was near the end of the album, Vishal came near me and put his finger on a photograph. He said, “That is Avinash. Well, that was Avinash.” Curly black hair on a head that seemed to be resting on a brick on the ground. Mangled face and blood everywhere.

  The camp was a two-hour drive outside the city. We went in two cars. Vishal’s official car in the lead followed by a truck that contained constables with the barrels of submachine guns pointing out the windows and back. After we had left behind the suburban homes and even the farms, there were stretches of teak forest. And here and there small tea gardens with a solitary shade tree in the middle. Vishal was only interested in the past, in the memories of school, and he told me how, in recent years, he had gone and presented gifts to our old teachers. Our math teacher had a wife who was an invalid. Vishal had made calls at the local hospital so that the doctors there knew about the teacher. Our lovely English teacher was a widow and she had a son who had run into trouble, and Vishal had given him a stern lecture. He had left some money for the kind lady. The Hindi teacher who had once upon a time readily slipped his hand inside a boy’s shorts was now an old man and Vishal had been kind to him too, talking to the old man’s landlord and getting him moved to an apartment on the ground floor.

  The drive through the countryside filled me with elation. This was what I had come to find. I saw the countryside taking on the characteristics of the city. On gaudily painted signboards the names for new eating places, the mixed-up language of signs for photocopying stores and car repair garages, huge advertisements on the sides of buildings for everything from underwear to cement. Our journey had introduced us to the changes transforming the country. I said as much to Vishal and he embarked on a discourse comparing the delights of train travel with the demands made on us on the road. He favored trains over cars or buses. They took him back to our young days in college, when we took the train from Patna to Delhi. Vishal became lyrical. “To travel on Magadh Express across the broad chest of my motherland is to pick up the thread of a magical story, our daily Ramayana, which binds all our lives together. The train has left Magadh at dusk. Lights vanish in the night’s vast darkness. Ram-Sita going into exile, disappearing into the forest. The bride that you see on the platform in Mughalsarai is a young mother in the field by the time the train reaches Etawah. The peacock you saw chained to a tree in Allahabad on the winter evening has, when you get off the train to buy a chai and a sweet bun at Aligarh station, already turned into a splendid adornment for an idol of Saraswati on this lovely day in early spring.”

  Vishal’s orderly turned back in his seat, smiling, to look at us. He was cheering his superior’s performance. “Wah-wah, sir,” he said, wobbling his head from side to side. I wondered aloud if trapped in the heart of every Indian bureaucrat was a struggling poet, and Vishal pointed outside at the guards standing in pairs on the side of the highway. He said, “We are approaching the camp.”

  The police we could see by the road, each one armed with a rifle, were standing atop the culverts. This armed presence was the result of a new policy after the explosion that had resulted in Ravi Shankar’s injury. These culverts were favored by the rebels, Vishal told me, because they could very easily plant an IED under the brick structures and when the police convoy passed over them, the rebels detonated the high-powered bombs using hacked cellphones.

  We entered the camp, which had at its gate the image of a black cobra covered with sequins. Lines of barbed wire all around. Inside, in one corner, officers were playing tennis, their white sneakers covered with red dust. On high watchtowers around us soldiers with rifles resting on turrets. Three uniformed men stood waiting for Vishal’s car and they saluted when the car stopped in front of them. We were taken inside. A large, dark room with portraits of political leaders on the wall and regimental colors. Biscuits arrived with tea.

  Vishal said, “Do you want beer instead? This camp has everything.”

  The men standing at attention around us greeted this with laughter as if Vishal had said the funniest thing.

  “Call Kundan here,” he ordered.

  After a few minutes, a young man came meekly through the door. He was in civilian clothes. He was short; he appeared freshly bathed, his hair oiled. Standing in front of Vishal, he bowed low with folded hands and then, turning toward me, he repeated the gesture.

  Vishal said, “This is Kundan. He was Avinash’s bodyguard. You can ask him anything you want.”

  I had not been prepared for this. This was the informer that Ravi Shankar had spoken about. They had placed him in police protection by keeping him in the camp. For the second time during the day I thought of the following questions: Where were you born? What made you decide to become a police informer? What did your father do? Where did you study? What was your role in Avinash’s death? What was your happiest day?

  But this time I decided to take another tack.

  * * *

  —

  “WHEN I WAS living in the forest, we had to be very alert. We didn’t want to walk into a police trap. A lot of our training was about this—how to pick up signs of an ambush, what to do in the event of an ambush, how to operate during an encounter, the steps to take to avoid arrest when visiting the town. And how to be prepared to die fighting.”

  Kundan was responding to my question about an ordinary day in the forest.

  “What do I remember of that time? I remember the seven or eight times I felt I had narrow escapes. I remember the one time I nearly got killed. I remember my rare visits home. I feel what I remember the most is how little sleep we got. We had to keep moving. If we walked, it was possible we could be walking into the mouth of death, but if we stayed in any place too long, we risked certain death.”

  When Kundan said this, the policemen ringed around us gave nods of satisfaction. I wished to be alone with him but didn’t think I could make this request. At the same time, it didn’t appear that Kundan was particularly self-conscious or inhibited.

  “This possibility of death,” he said, “I don’t know how else to say it, it was like a hot barrel pointed at us. We saw fire leaping from it, even in our sleep. But, to be honest, my dreams were often quite odd and unconnected to the main dangers of the life I was living.”

  He stopped and I asked him to go on with his story.

  Kundan said, “The most recurrent dream I had in those days was that I was squatting in a room, a pile of fresh shit under me, and my father or mother would appear from nowhere. I would feel alarm, and of course shame, but they did not seem at all surprised.”

  What an odd thing to say. I wanted to hear more but Vishal spoke up. He said, “You get a chance to read here in the camp. Tell him that.”

  “Yes,” Kundan said. “I’m reading books in the camp library. I’m also writing poetry.”

  “Poetry?” I must have looked curious. “Can you recite a poem?”

  He began to recite in a mournful, singsong voice. The poem was in Bengali and I didn’t understand much of it. I understood that the poem was a call for peace and a new life. Dull stuff. While his recitation proceeded, I quickly checked my notes. Hadn’t Ravi Shankar told me that Kundan had joined the Naxals only two years before Avinash was killed?

  “How long have you written poetry? And when did you go underground?”

  “I was very young
when I started writing poetry. Maybe ten or twelve. I joined the movement when I was fourteen.”

  “How old are you now?”

  “Nineteen.”

  I didn’t have any reason to doubt this account; perhaps there had been a mistake in Ravi Shankar’s understanding.

  I next asked him why he had joined the movement.

  Kundan was only twelve when the police first came to his house. They surrounded the hut in which his family lived and came in with flashlights, which they pointed at his face. (He used the word searchlight but Vishal corrected him.) The men were asking him questions which he didn’t even understand. He said to them that he couldn’t see anything. In response, the policeman standing closest to him slapped him. Kundan’s mother cried out and stepped out of the darkness to cover the boy with her arms. She was hit on her shoulder with a rifle. When a cousin who was six years older than he was grabbed by one of the policemen, she screamed like an animal. He remembered her crying out, “Leave me alone, why are you doing this to me?”

  None of the policemen said anything, not even Vishal. I asked Kundan what the policemen wanted.

  He said that they were rounding up everyone who was opposing the ruling party candidate in the elections. His father was one of them.

  Vishal spoke up now. He said, “They must have been making trouble. Elections are excuses for extortion.”

  “No, sir,” Kundan insisted.

  The politician that Kundan’s father had opposed was the reason the villagers, many of them illiterate, were losing their land to mining companies. He was a big supporter of a corporation in Mumbai.

  I didn’t want a debate. I asked Kundan how they got arms in the countryside. “How much did guns cost?”

  “A nine-millimeter pistol,” he said, “could be acquired for around twenty thousand rupees. Arms were always in plentiful supply, but they were expensive.”

  “How expensive?” I asked.

  “Even a single bullet for an AK47 cost around eight hundred rupees.”

  “Where did you get money?”

  He smiled. “We requested shop owners and traders to give us some of their cash.”

  The policemen snickered.

  Vishal said to me, “He looks like a boy to you. But he was very dangerous. His writ ran over this whole area. More than three hundred villages. Everything was very well organized. The underground party had a political organization, an armed squad in which he was the leader, and a cadre of quiet sympathizers in every village.”

  I wanted to ask Kundan more about finances but he said that in the past six months, while he had been in this camp, he had written nearly two hundred poems. I didn’t want to discuss poetry.

  I said, “Were there any qualities you admired in Avinash?”

  “Yes,” he said, without hesitation. “He was kind and attentive to us. He was also full of energy. If we made a halt and he was sleeping, if you just brushed his foot he would be awake in an instant. He was much older than us but he was quicker and stronger. He also taught us history.”

  “History?”

  Here Kundan slipped into mythology. He said, “If you asked him what happened on any day, like June fifth, 1985, he would tell you. This was many years before I was even born.”

  We talked for about half an hour. It was an awkward conversation with so many others standing around us. Kundan said that what he missed when he was with the insurgents was his mother’s cooking. Rice and duck curry. What did he like to eat when he was on the run with Avinash? He said his favorite food in the forest was hot rotis cooked on a makeshift chulha and then eaten with the sour red ants found inside rotten trees.

  I said that I was going to ask him a delicate question. “Did you feel that you had betrayed the trust that Avinash had put in you?”

  I was surprised that tears sprang into his eyes. I saw that Kundan had a plain and direct mind. It occurred to me that this sense of honesty must have persuaded Avinash to recruit him as a bodyguard.

  Kundan said, “Yes. He treated me like a son. But I thought also of my own parents. And of Ravi Shankar sir, who is like a father to me.”

  When he spoke Ravi Shankar’s name the air shifted in the room. The discussion of Avinash’s death hadn’t posed a threat or a danger; it had been a triumph for the police and a sign that they were going to win the war. But that feeling vanished the moment Ravi Shankar’s name was mentioned. The men around us were suddenly conscious of what had happened to their superior in the bomb blast. Their expressions changed. Perhaps they felt a renewed threat. Or there was a feeling of guilt, of having failed. Someone standing behind the sofa made a sound, a sad clicking with his tongue.

  * * *

  —

  WE RETURNED TO Kolkata and drank beer at the Bengal Club. Vishal wanted to smoke a cigarillo and we sat outside at a table surrounded by Christmas lights. Ravi Shankar called Vishal and they talked for a while on the phone. I heard Kundan’s name being mentioned. Once or twice, Vishal said, “I’ll tell you later.” I wondered what they were talking about. Then, a large area to our left suddenly went dark. Power outage. Vishal embarked on another one of his lectures. “In foreign countries,” he said, “the cherished landscape lies revealed when there is a snowfall on the mountains, and the world is white with nothing but matchstick-like trees stuck to the mountainside. I’m only describing a photograph; I’ve never gone abroad. In another place, it might be hot-air balloons hanging in the vast open-air vault called the sky. Or colorful boats in narrow canals, the boatmen wearing striped T-shirts and silly hats. Or cherry blossoms. Streets lined with pink petals fallen from cherry trees. But where I have my home”—and he waved his hand in a circle around his head—“the true essence of the land is only revealed during load shedding. The sudden loss of electricity at night and everything that was living and dead disappears into darkness. But only for a while. Life returns here and there. And for me, it is like the return of truth. A match flares in the darkness, someone holds up the light from their phone, a smoky lamp is lit near a window. The sound of a generator comes from a nearby hotel. A policeman holds close a flashlight in front of someone’s face. Headlights burn into your retina. Your mother appears with a candle. A neighbor does some voodoo with his car battery and hangs a bright light over the badminton net. Suddenly, the game can resume. Do you understand what I’m saying? The darkness is very real, and you don’t know how long it will last, but you are never without hope.”

  Vishal turned his face skyward and blew smoke into the air above him. When I applauded, he laughed loudly and for a long time. I asked him about Kundan and his future, and Vishal grew unusually somber and meditative. He said, “We are conducting some inquiries. We are in the process of finding out more.”

  I asked him to elaborate but he just shrugged his shoulders. When he spoke again he said that Ravi Shankar was fond of Kundan. Both men, Vishal said, assuming again his pedantic air, had gone against their immediate mentors. Ravi Shankar had become a police officer, acting against the leftist ideals of Professor Ghosh, whom he had worshipped in his youth. And Kundan, having been given responsibilities and prominence by the guerrilla leader Avinash, was the direct cause of the man’s death.

  A plate of kebabs arrived. I said to Vishal that fate had brought us together again. I was going to write a piece, I said, entitled “The Fall of the Sparrow.” He asked me to explain the title. I did and, in an echo of what I had heard Ravi Shankar say on TV, Vishal said that it was not fate, it was planning that led to Avinash’s killing.

  Ravi Shankar had called Vishal immediately after getting a call from Kundan. At that time, both men were the top police officers in charge of adjoining districts. As had been decided previously, if Avinash or other members of the party were meeting in the vicinity, Kundan was to say “There is water in the canal now.” That is what he had done, and, as I heard Vishal say this, I imagined water floodin
g a canal in my grandfather’s village during my childhood. Dark water, cool, life-giving, glinting in the moonlight like mercury. But now Vishal was saying something else. If the police needed to retreat for any reason, Kundan was to call and say “Chowdhury’s nephew has been bitten by a snake. Please call the doctor.” The police plan had been kept secret even during the mobilization of units. By 3:00 a.m., Ravi Shankar and Vishal had moved their forces into the area from two different directions and, in the silence of the night, with the engines of the vehicles cut and lights doused two miles away, they began to cordon the area off on foot.

  “How were you yourself armed?” I asked.

  “I had my service revolver and a 7.62 Belgian light machine gun. I was wearing a bulletproof vest and a helmet. Our boys were very well armed. We had AK47s, of course, but we also had several carbine machines, half a dozen grenade launchers. My own unit had two fifty-one-millimeter mortar guns.”

  Vishal’s narration was detailed and precise. I was recording the conversation. While he was speaking, I wondered whether he would have been so generous if I wasn’t a former classmate of his. I had asked Kundan if he felt he had betrayed Avinash, and now, taking my notes, I asked myself if I was doing the right thing in writing about my friends. Later, when I made other discoveries about the case, it troubled me to think that Ravi Shankar and Vishal probably regretted allowing me entry into their stories. But I had told them I was a journalist interested in finding out what really happened. I had hidden nothing. What is the truth but the story we tell about it? So, this is my story. My friend was talking and a question came to me, a moral question, about truth and betrayal. What would Vaani think about what I was doing? Once she had told me that children as young as two or three tell themselves stories in order to make sense of the real world. All the imaginary friends that young children always have are means to an end: children learn how to interpret and understand the real world and real people by interacting with these invisible friends. Autistic children, Vaani had said, have no imaginary friends and are unable to engage in pretend play. On the tape you can hear Vishal talking and there is no evidence there of my own thoughts, but I was thinking that I was using my real friend to imagine or understand what had been so far invisible or utterly imaginary to me.