The Lives of Others (57 page)

Dipankar and I whiled away the hours in the forest, talking about the route we were going to take to Majgeria. I didn’t know why I persisted with what I thought of as ‘one last visit’ to the village I had left behind. Part of it was, of course, the way the fates of Kanu and Bijli haunted me. But part of it was also because I couldn’t let a silence descend on us in the daylight, when I felt so naked and exposed, my face and expressions so visible.

I asked – How did you know to look for money and jewellery in mattresses and pillows?

Dipankar said – I saw a pillow leaking some cotton stuffing. Then something, I don’t know what, maybe I had felt the corner of something hard while I was tossing the pillows onto the floor, maybe I had noticed a rough line of stitching in the middle of the mattress, something made me feel the pillows again. Bundled paper, I thought. The rest you know.

Yes, the rest I knew. Suddenly, it was the word ‘rest’ that redistributed an unknown internal system of weights, hardly ever perceived, and brought an enormous heaviness to my chest that rose like a column and tried to escape through my throat and mouth, and I was sobbing like a beaten child, crying helplessly and without shame in front of someone else, my first time since the age of six or seven.

– What am I going to tell Samir’s mother? I said through my tears. How am I ever going to be able to show my face to her? We’ve left him on Nabin’s roof, there won’t even be a body to return to her.

Dipankar sat me against a tree and let me cry. He said – Be strong.

That was all he said and I was grateful to him for that.

Bir returned at night with food and water and news. The police had come to their corner of the village, rounded up about twenty men and taken them away to Jhargram. They said they were going to come back. Apparently nobody had opened his mouth, when asked about ‘some men from outside this village’.

– But the men they’ve taken away, what’s going to happen to them? Ashu asked.

Bir said – Lock-up for a few days, a little bit of beating to find out who was behind killing those dogs. The police are in their pay, so they’ll make an effort. If the dogs are all killed, who’ll pay them bribes?

– And if the men talk?

Bir laughed – No one will. Not a single one. They want to get rid of the police too. Let them come here, we’ll see to them. Not many policemen came. Before, there used to be more.

I had a sudden revelation. I said – They’re short of manpower because all these actions in dozens of villages all over Binpur have had them running from one place to another. They’re stretched thin. This is our moment.

And the moment arrived the very next day, heralded once again by the discordant and staggered chorus of conch-shells. Minutes passed, or it could have been hours, as we waited, spread out in a wide circle according to our formation plans. My pistol was with Dipankar – he was a far better marksman than I could ever be – and I felt a bit helpless without it. Then the unambiguous sound of humans walking on a dry forest floor: rustling, snapping, an occasional split-second crackle. I peeped from behind my tree with the utmost cautiousness. Nothing except sprays of green and brown vegetation. I was suddenly conscious of how denuded the forest was in winter, how much more cover it would have offered us in the summer and during the monsoon.

The dry rustling stopped. Or maybe it left my field of hearing. I couldn’t see any one of us to my left or right. I tried to visualise the path that the policemen – how many of them were there? did they have guns? – would take through our circumscribing circle, and the image of them as a moving diameter came into my head. It was absurd. But what if they were nearer one arc than another? And what if they were out of range for Dipankar? How could he take aim with the trees and bushes and branches in his way, intervening between him and his target? My heart was beating so loudly that I turned round again, stupidly, to check if anyone had heard it. I had a sudden desire to pass water, but I knew I didn’t have that luxury.

The noise began, a kind of distant susurration in the undergrowth. There was no breeze, so it could only have been the police. Why weren’t they talking or whispering? Were they moving in single file or spreading out? Did they have a plan?

Time trickled like something so viscous, almost solid, that I had to ask myself: was it even moving? Then the report of a gun, followed after the space of two speeded-up thumps of the heart by another. A cry, a burst of rustling followed by voices, then the sound of human chatter, the tone of panic and distress. I bent down, flattened myself against the ground and tried to move like a snake until I came to the next big tree behind which I could stand up. There was a closer, longer outbreak of rustling and movement, and then a brief blood-curdling cry that came to an abrupt stop with a thud. There was the sound of running; how many pairs of feet, I couldn’t tell, but they seemed to be coming from all directions. I stood up, forgetting all my training and caution, moved forward from one tree-trunk to another, stopped at an arbitrary one and peeped. I saw Babu and Ashu emerge from the thicket and run past me, tangis raised. I followed them. Soon there was Bir running after me too.

I heard another cry from deep within the thicket where Bir and I were headed, following Babu and Ashu, whom we couldn’t see any longer. At a small clearing a sight met my eyes that made my head swim. Debashish was trying to release his tangi, which was lodged in the back of a fallen policeman. Dipankar was removing the gun from yet another policeman, this one with half his head missing. Giri was holding two guns, one in each hand.

– There were six of them, Dipankar panted. One got away. Not into the village, but deeper into the forest. He has a gun.

– Where are the other three? What were the gunshots? Were they firing? I asked.

– No, I sniped two of them, one after the other. I saw their heads above the bushes and fired. I was lucky to get them, very lucky. Then they started running.

– Then? My heart was still hammering.

– Debashish and Giri moved closer to me after they heard me fire. We started chasing the policemen at the same time. They were fleeing us, they didn’t turn around to see that we had only one gun and there were only three of us chasing four of them. Giri got one with his tangi. The remaining three scattered. We followed the two that kept together and got them. The other one’s gone in that direction.

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.