A Time Outside This Time

by Amitava Kumar

  “We encircled the school and the row of huts around it. Our men were also positioned in a wider circle. We sent up flares and Ravi Shankar made an announcement on the megaphone asking the rebels to surrender. My heart was in my mouth. What if the information was wrong? Nothing happened for a few minutes. And then six figures filed out of the school, led by a woman. Kundan was not among them. And of course, no Avinash. We separated the six who had come out. They were all handcuffed and taken away. These were villagers who had been sleeping in the school when the armed cadre had arrived. Ravi Shankar interrogated them briefly and he was now certain that Avinash was indeed inside.”

  While Vishal was talking about the darkness, power returned to the area to our left. A cheer went up. A giant neon billboard showed a blue fish swimming in the dark night. Vishal went on with his narration.

  “Ravi Shankar made further announcements. More flares. We decided to wait till daybreak but, in the meantime, we used the grenade launcher to send a couple of grenades clattering against the wall of the school. We didn’t want any bloodshed; yet we wanted them to know that we would use force. Our men opened fire when they saw or heard movement behind the school. We shouted for the militants to stop resisting. We sent up a flare, and a white flag appeared at a window. Three figures came out. Kundan and two others. We learned that they had been sent out by Avinash to see if an escape was possible under the cover of darkness. They were to make birdcalls if they saw any chance of escape. Kundan saw this as an opportunity. It gave him an excuse to surrender.”

  Avinash had kept an AK47 with him. He didn’t want to surrender. The police had found this out from Kundan, who also told them that there was no food or water in the school. Ravi Shankar and Vishal had to wait a long time, maybe three hours, because they didn’t want any of their men to die. Their men kept firing. Their grenade launchers could send in grenades from great distances. Only seventy or eighty meters of barren land separated the school from the shrubs and trees behind which the police were hiding. They launched a dozen grenades. After three hours, they used the mortar gun to knock down a whole wall.

  Vishal said, “There was a fighter called Suchitra, who was with Avinash. She was younger than him, but in a town studio we had found a photograph of the two of them; the owner of the studio had brought it to us. In the photograph, Avinash had his arm around Suchitra’s shoulder.

  “At one point, a rag was raised on a stick and then Suchitra’s head appeared over the remains of a wall. She said Avinash had been injured and she wanted us to help him. Ravi Shankar asked her to come out with her arms up. She was herself injured but not seriously; she is now at the same camp as Kundan. Her desire is to be a constable. Anyway, she stepped out and came to us, arms raised. She told us that shrapnel had hurt Avinash in his left thigh and stomach. We asked about his AK47 and she said he still had it. Now, you must understand that our men are from families as poor as those of the men or women they were shooting at. Avinash spoke publicly about inequality in our society. He would say that the police were there not to protect people but to protect property. It is natural for our men to occasionally have doubts about what they are doing. They wouldn’t mention it to Ravi Shankar, but he saw it in their eyes and in their actions. Only the idea of death worked. You had to tell them that the old woman they had earlier passed in the village had given shelter, perhaps only the previous night, to a man who wouldn’t hesitate even for a second when planting bombs that would blow up the police barracks. That the young woman they were looking at lustily had received training and would know how to point a rifle at their groins and blow their dicks off. The chicken near the pond, the goat tied to the door, the cow at the back, they were our enemies too. Avinash was the leader of their enemies. I’m not exaggerating. Once they understand this, the brutality unleashed by our men, their passion born partly out of self-loathing, is incredible and even frightening.”

  After a pause, Vishal told me that when he tries to remember that morning he can hear a cow nearby calling for its calf. He was irritable. What are they doing in the village? Bring the bloody calf to its mother. “Until about three days earlier, I had been suffering from the flu. I wasn’t myself yet,” Vishal said. He then quickly concluded his story: “Over the next half hour or so, more announcements were made asking for his surrender but no word or gesture from Avinash. We didn’t want to wait any longer. Direct mortar fire and we had destroyed the school. He was hiding behind a mound of rubble, we could see him and we asked our sniper to take aim. The first shot blew his face away. It was a great day.”

  I noted all this down while Vishal smiled, and neither he nor I had any reason to suspect that this would be our last conversation.

  * * *

  —

  THE PIECE IN Granta is available on the web. Here at the villa, it appears that only Nikki has read it. I don’t mind; everyone is starting to become obsessed with just one thing. The novel coronavirus. In Wuhan, more than 11 million people are under strict lockdown. Fifteen people have died in China, but they must be anticipating a real crisis because a time-lapse video of a hospital appeared on my Twitter feed yesterday: a hospital near Wuhan with hundreds of beds has been built in just ten days. I mentioned this to a fellow here, Jimi Adeola, who is a doctor in Nigeria. He smiled and said, “Yes, that is Huoshenshan Hospital. An even bigger one, with sixteen hundred beds, has just been built close by too. This one took twelve days.” India has one confirmed case. No deaths. The president of the Hindu Mahasabha has said that cow dung and cow urine can be used to treat this virus. How real is the danger? We didn’t know whom to trust. The most meaningful discussions here at the villa only happen in intimate conversations involving two or three people. In larger groups, it is better to avoid that topic because we tend to just go in circles.

  At dinner, we are usually divided into groups of five or six fellows. On the night I was in the same group as Nikki, she presented the people around our table an elegant outline of my Granta piece and said she had enjoyed reading it. The outline was so precise, and even fresh, that I was certain Nikki had Googled my name and read the piece over the last day or two. When she was done, a Canadian man, another musician and a friend of Nikki’s but whose name I didn’t remember, asked politely, “How was your piece received?”

  I had finished my salad and was waiting for the main course. I looked at the faces around me and said, “There is an interesting coda to that story and I still have to write it.”

  I told them that when “The Fall of a Sparrow” was published in Granta, readers liked the portraits I had presented of both Kundan and Avinash’s lover, Suchitra. I had interviewed them over two further visits that week. During my private meeting with him, Kundan pointed at my notebook and said that he wanted to add something. In the course of our very first conversation I had asked him what he had liked to eat most, and now he wanted to tell me about what he never liked eating in the forest. “We often ate a raw egg in the morning, and I didn’t like it, I couldn’t get used to it. But it was always dangerous to light a fire. On more than one occasion, shells came from a clear sky.” He also wanted to tell me something else. After a village had been destroyed by the police or the army, if people didn’t run away they were put into makeshift refugee camps near the bases. Strangers came to the camps, pretending to be relatives, and took away boys or girls that they turned into servants or sold to pimps.

  Suchitra closed her eyes and said she does this often. She closes her eyes and imagines herself back in the jungle, freer and happier than in any house she has ever lived in. The forest was a place where mosquito bites, bad food, and impure water made her sick, and yet it was home to her. She spoke Hindi with the same lilt as Kundan. I asked her about her family. She said she had once had a younger sister who was mentally disabled. Once, when her sister was bathing in the river, she slipped and was about to drown. Suchitra’s mother jumped in but couldn’t save the child. After her sister’s death,
Suchitra’s father lost his grip on life and began to drink heavily. One night he didn’t return from the railroad construction site where he was working. Her mother now tilled their small piece of land and sometimes took small jobs as a laborer. Both Suchitra and Kundan had become part of the underground to help transform their living conditions. Both had a desire for time to take shape in a way that was different from everything they had experienced so far. Both of them wanted me to understand that they had hoped to change not only their own lives but also the lives of others around them. It hadn’t worked out; they had lost loved ones. They had both made peace with the present: they wanted jobs in the police. Had life been hard? I asked Suchitra. She smiled a sad smile. Suchitra said that she had a comrade named Malati, who had been captured by the paramilitary forces. She wasn’t killed. She was returned to them covered head to toe in cigarette burns.

  I told my dinner companions that each day at the residency I was reading ten or twelve pages of 1984. The protagonist, Winston Smith, has written in his secret diary this singular line: “If there is hope it lies in the proles.” He is talking about the vast majority of the population, “the swarming, disregarded masses.” And yet, when he tries to speak to one of them, an old codger who Smith knows had to have been born before the revolution, he can get nothing. The old man’s memory is “nothing more than a rubbish heap of details.” As I had only read one-third of the book so far, I couldn’t say whether Smith’s faith in the proles is justified. (No spoilers, please!) But what I had tried to do in the pages of Granta was present the proles in the form of Kundan and Suchitra. I hadn’t made them heroes; I had been scrupulous, however, about making it clear just how overwhelming were the odds against them.

  No one sitting around me at dinner, maybe with the exception of Nikki, knew much about Ravi Shankar and Vishal. So I didn’t add that both of them saw themselves as benefactors; they seemed to regard Suchitra and Kundan with benevolence. They had assured me that the two would find employment on the police force. On those remaining two days I had spent in Kolkata, I played tennis with Vishal and then had breakfast with Ravi Shankar. The conversations with Ravi Shankar had become easier. He showed me the president’s medal for gallantry that he was awarded after the explosion that nearly killed him. He also spoke fondly of his old teacher Ghosh, whom he hadn’t seen since the days he was a student. He said he thought of Ghosh often and of Ghosh’s father, who had advocated violence against the police. His thoughts about Ghosh were not without tenderness. After becoming an officer, Ravi Shankar had looked at the confidential reports. Ghosh and his mother—Ghosh was only a boy then—would be followed when they took a boat across the Hooghly. The police had kept record of a doctor sympathetic to the Naxal cause: this doctor would take the mother and the child in his car to meetings with underground activists who gave them news of the elder Ghosh. The police records also mentioned a morning when Ghosh’s father joined the boy and his mother and took the boy to the zoo.

  Our dinner had arrived.

  I looked at the Canadian composer and said, “My piece for Granta was a detailed report on the police operation that ended in the killing of the guerrilla leader Avinash. The piece started with my meeting with the survivors, Kundan and Suchitra. It was read and shared widely on social media. Longreads also linked the story on their website. But then things took a turn that called everything into question.”

  While my colleagues ate their dinner, I stuck to my drink and recounted for everyone at my table the following story about the two surrendered militants I had met in Hatta Camp. It is a story that has haunted me and is one of the reasons I’m writing Enemies of the People. And, as I offered this account, I felt in the focused attention of my colleagues a desire to find a path to terra firma. Or that is what I felt but didn’t seek to confirm because I knew I would only disappoint.

  * * *

  —

  SIX MONTHS AFTER the publication of my Granta piece, in the spring of 2019, a habeas corpus petition was filed by a human rights lawyer on behalf of Kundan’s father. Suchitra was also mentioned in the petition. The petitioner demanded that his son as well as Suchitra (the petition claimed that they had got married to each other in the police camp) be produced in court. I learned of this only because Professor Ghosh sent me a message on WhatsApp and having informed me in one sentence about the petition urged me to phone the lawyer. I wrote to the lawyer and asked her if I could call her from the town where I live in America. Yes, she said, and gave me the time for the call.

  “I don’t understand, what has happened?” I asked.

  The lawyer’s voice didn’t have any warmth in it. She asked if it was true that Vishal Sinha was my friend. I said yes, he was a schoolmate of mine from Patna. But something in her voice made me declare that Vishal and I hadn’t been close. Then she asked if Ravi Shankar was my friend too. I said that I met him when I was doing the story.

  She said that there had been a tip-off. Recently, an internal police investigation had combed all the electronic surveillance data from the day of the explosion more than a year ago that had injured Ravi Shankar. The data revealed that a call had been made from inside Hatta when Ravi Shankar’s convoy had gone out from there on a patrol. The phone used had the same number as the phone that Ravi Shankar had given to Kundan. The police analysts had concluded that Kundan had given advance information to the Naxals about the movement of the convoy and this had given them time to set up the IED just in time before the advance patrol arrived to guard the road and the culverts.

  Kundan’s father had learned about his son’s interrogation from Suchitra; she had called someone else in the village who had a phone. When Kundan’s father came to the Hatta Camp, he was told that there was no Kundan there and also no one named Suchitra. A few villagers had then contacted Professor Ghosh. He hadn’t believed that he could call his former student; instead, he had contacted a human rights lawyer who had filed a habeas corpus petition. The lawyer’s name was Madhabi Chatterji. It was Chatterji that I was now talking to and she informed me that the police had told the court they had no knowledge of Kundan or Suchitra.

  The state had shown itself to be a far more powerful writer of fiction than I can ever be. But the lawyer had used my article as part of the evidence she had submitted in court. These individuals were real and I had met them at Hatta Camp. Chatterji asked if I was willing to testify. I told her yes, and that it was the least I could do. Her voice didn’t change. “It will be dangerous, if you come here, but they will not harm you, I think, because you will be traveling from the United States. Do you carry a U.S. passport?”

  I stopped her. I said, “Let me call you back in ten minutes.”

  After hanging up, I called Vishal’s number. There was no response. Then I called the number I had for Ravi Shankar’s home. There too the phone rang for a long time. I called again and again for the next two hours. And then at a different time the next day and then again the day after that. Still, no response. At last I had to call the lawyer and say that I had wanted to talk to her after I had contacted Vishal Sinha or Ravi Shankar but I had failed. They were not answering my calls. She said she wanted me to know that Kundan’s father had been very clear about something—his son had indeed called him, on more than one occasion, when Ravi Shankar would come on visits to their village or other adjoining villages. He was a great believer, Ravi Shankar was, in outreach programs. He had organized the Jal Mahal sports tournament. Kundan would ask his parents to give Ravi Shankar’s staff, his driver, for instance, the items that he needed back in Hatta Camp. He would ask for clothes or, on more than one occasion, a specific cassette of Bengali songs, and even food prepared by his mother. Why was this one call taken as evidence of anything?

  I asked the lawyer what I could do. She said that Kundan and Suchitra had vanished from the surface of the earth. Would I want to write about it? What was the truth of the case? A piece that would make people ask questions or give
support.

  I wanted to say yes but didn’t know what I could really say. In the silence, the lawyer said that Kundan’s father had visited her that morning. The father had told her that when Kundan was a boy, right up till he was eleven or twelve, he used to sleep beside him in the hut. The boy would get scared in his sleep, unable to come out of his bad dreams, and the father would need to comfort him. He was a very sweet boy, with a good heart, and with a sensitivity toward others. Still, the father had been surprised when Kundan showed the courage to become a rebel. The father himself, while politically active, had never taken up arms. He wanted to know what the police had done to his boy. Did they cut him into pieces to force him to say something? He had said to the lawyer that if the police had killed him, even if they had eaten his flesh, they should at least give him his bones so that he could perform his funeral properly. The father had traveled by bus to see the lawyer in Kolkata that morning because Kundan would come to him in his dreams. He was standing outside their hut in the rain asking his parents to open the door.

  CHAPTER 5