The Lives of Others (58 page)

Before we left, Babu handed me a bundle of chhatu and what looked like a cloth side-bag.

Babu said – That friend of yours, that babu who . . . who didn’t return, it’s his. I’m giving it back to you.

I didn’t know why I took so long to recognise Samir’s bag. His meagre belongings were in it: a short-sleeved shirt, musky with his odour; a pair of pyjamas; a box of
777
matches; a copy of
The Little Red Book
, almost every single line underscored in pencil and dot-pen, with notes written in the margins. There was a
Collected Poems
of Jibanananda Das, with lines from some poems marked. The book fell open at the poem ‘Wristwatch’; I noticed he had glossed a difficult word in it – he had underlined it and written ‘lust’ in the margin. I too hadn’t known the meaning of that word. There was a notebook too. My hands were shaking as I swiftly thumbed through the pages: drafts of poems that blurred and then became illegible because of my tears.

Dipankar and I stopped to eat from our bundle of chhatu. It was late afternoon. I felt tired and my eyes kept closing. From far away came the sound of the whistle, long and melancholy and pleading, of a train. I didn’t know why, but the lonely sound had sleepiness associated with it, and the promise of an untethering, as if the sleep it induced would liberate me from the here and now and set me afloat on some infinite ocean of peace and silence and calm.

My eyelids grew heavier. Dipankar must have seen me nodding off, so he tried to engage me in conversation. He too had heard the train’s whistle. He asked – What train do you think that is?

– Don’t know, I mumbled.

– How far do you think the nearest railway track is?

– No idea.

– Near Gidhni or Tatanagar and Jamshedpur, no? Do you think the sound’s coming from that far away? Impossible.

– Who knows?

– I should know, I think it’s the train route I used to go down as a child to visit a distant uncle in Giridih every year during the puja holidays. The uncle’s still alive, but we haven’t been for so many years . . .

He seemed almost to be talking to himself. I felt unmoored from the ground I was sitting on, about to levitate.

Suddenly Dipankar’s momentary lull of introspection snapped and he turned his attention to me – You’re almost asleep. We need to get going. Come on, come on.

It wouldn’t do to nod off now, so I forced myself to make conversation.

– I’ve heard Giridih is a nice place.

He said – Yes, it is. Clean, and a nice dryness to the air. I loved it as a child. There are little hills dotted around the place. The city boy in me found that exciting. There are waterfalls and little streams and forests. It’s very pretty. And quiet. Do you want to come with me one day?

– That would be nice, but when?

– I would say as a holiday from all this, but maybe it’s more likely that we’ll need to go there to hide. Kharagpur, Jhargram, all the Calcutta stations, they’re bristling with policemen. They’re watching the trains and the stations in this area like hawks.

The thought of hiding in a calm, pretty corner of Bihar, away from all this action, was so appealing that my eyes began to droop again. A brown kite was wheeling above us, its squealing whinny working on me like the far-away train whistle.

Dipankar noticed and gamely made another attempt to engage my interest. He said – Let me tell you an interesting thing about railway tracks. Did you know about fishplates? They’re metal bars that are bolted to the ends of tracks to make them one and continuous.

Only an engineer would think he could keep someone awake by talking about engineering. Silly, innocent man.

All I wanted to do was find out about Kanu and Bijli, but I couldn’t risk being seen walking around in the familiar village even though the gapless dark of the rural night had long fallen. It was Dipankar who would have to be my eyes and ears in Majgeria. I had been repeating to him the detailed directions to identify Kanu’s hut so often that he asked me to shut up. He could tell I was on edge; I was behaving like a nervous mother seeing her son off to battle.

I paced the jungle while he was gone, possessed of a fiendish energy that I had been lacking all these days. Mind you, the energy didn’t seem to affect the slothful nature of time; that ticked on slower than ever. I convinced myself that Dipankar had been gone for hours. Over and over again I did the calculation for the time to walk there + time to investigate + time to walk back, and under different conditions imposed on each of those variables, so that the numbers themselves started getting distorted.

By the time he returned, I was standing as much outside the jungle as I dared, reduced to what felt like a state of instant combustibility.

– Put on the police uniform, he said. Come with me. Very, very quietly.

Dressed in a khaki outfit we had taken off one of the executed policemen in Gidighati, I followed him but, surprisingly, deeper into the jungle, eastwards.

– What’s up? I asked.

– The sound of our feet on these fallen leaves is very loud. I’m always scared that people outside will know there’s someone moving around in here.

We were speaking in whispers.

I said – It sounds loud to us, but no one outside can hear it, don’t worry.

– Listen, bad news. I think they’re deploying the military police here. A group has set up camp in a building on the other side. It’ll be impossible to go through the village, that’s why we’re doing it the long way.

Thunder fell on my head. So the ordinary district police couldn’t cope with the number of actions erupting around the place and were stretched so thin that the military and the reserve police forces had had to be called in. Did we ever factor this into our equations?

Dipankar didn’t remember discussing it with anyone. Neither did I. How could one fight the army with a toybox-worth of axes and spears?

He spoke the words of the man who knew his side had lost everything – Listen, I may be wrong. Another pair of eyes is always a good idea.

In any case, it was a bit futile to try and spy on them at night, at least from that distance. We could see nothing for a long time as we stood behind the trees. Then we moved out of the cover of the forest and advanced closer, across open fields, towards the building that was the village school. A dog barked. It could have been any of the strays in the village, but to me it sounded more aristocratic, the sound of the military’s guard dog. We edged back into the protective cover of the trees, rewarded only with the silhouette of a man who crossed the dimly lit square of the window a few times. Did I imagine an odd outline humping his shoulders into a strange shape, something added to the human form and sticking out above the side? Did I will myself to see a rifle strapped to his back?

A tuneless snatch of melody reached us. One of them was singing. It sounded as if the singer was Bihari.

It was only the next morning, in daylight, that we were able to establish more. A uniformed military policeman was sitting on a chair in a patch of sun outside the entrance to the school, rubbing tobacco on the palm of one hand with the thumb of the other. Like the seven other men we could count, he indeed had a rifle strapped to his back and a belt of live rounds around his waist. Dipankar was correct in all his assumptions: they really had set up base in the school.

The two of us would be routed in a matter of minutes if we took them on. My own death I could be stoical about, after much training, but I did not have the stomach to see yet another friend killed. We debated, but very briefly, the possibility of a guerrilla attack at night. There was no hope for it. We had to leave Majgeria, perhaps to return in the near future with reinforcements, but for now it looked hopeless.

To have shared what Kanu and Bijli were most probably going through now, the hell of police-beatings and incarceration, would have been better than this limbo of darkness and ignorance and amateurish planning and laughable resources.

It’s not possible to tell, once inside a forest, how far from or how close to your destination you are; everything looks the same. Only the time elapsed is a marker. As agreed, we were going to sing well-known revolutionary songs as we got close to our comrades’ encampment so that they could tell we were approaching, not strangers or enemies; Comrade Subbarao Panigrahi’s composition ‘Tell me, can you prevent the sun from shining with your tiny hand?’ and ‘We advance towards the edge of life to pluck light from the stalk of darkness’. I say ‘encampment’ but it was no such thing, of course. Besides, there was the very real possibility of our comrades having moved on to another patch of the forest for reasons of security. There was no spirit in us to sing the songs with any degree of interest or tunefulness, so they came out like badly recited poetry.

Ashu and Debashish came out of the jungle, one by one, from behind trees and bushes, to meet us. For a few seconds I couldn’t recognise them, I was so shocked by their appearance – thin, reedy, dark men in dirty clothes, unwashed, unkempt, puffy eyes with dark circles under them, looking like a bunch of beggars afflicted by chronic starvation . . . Then I thought that they must be thinking the same about me.

Then, making my heart come out of my mouth, Dhiren emerged from the jungle: they had been hiding him so that I could be given a surprise. I embraced him.

– At least starvation and all this vagabondage have brought out your tender side, he quipped, returning my embrace.

It was as if we had never parted. We went to a clearing marked by a little black patch on the ground where they had clearly burned wood and leaves to keep themselves warm. I noticed that they had been careful to leave the fire small and contained.

After the beautiful surprise came the nasty shock: troops from the Eastern Frontier Rifles had set up camp in Gidighati. Dhiren, who had been out in the wider world, brought us news that was both dispiriting and blood-boiling. The Home Minister, Jyoti Basu, apparently at the request of the Chief Superintendents of the police forces of the ‘districts afflicted by terrorism’, had given orders for the EFR and military police to be deployed. The big landlords of the area, who had the police in their pockets, and most of the politicians too, had got together, both in public and in private, and used their combined power to pull the levers at the topmost level. None of the process and reasoning behind it was surprising, only the fact of the outcome. But we were beginning to get used to that, too.

When I asked where Babu and Bir were, they looked away. Ashu said, after a bit of hesitation, that they had returned to the village, worried by what their families were facing during the crackdown, and hadn’t come back.

– What are you eating then? I asked.

– We can’t stay here any longer, Ashu said, we’ll have to go back to Belpahari and rethink.

– And the military camps are everywhere here? I asked.

Dhiren confirmed – In all the villages that have seen action. If not all, then soon it will be all.

I could tell that a strange battle was playing out inside all of us, a conflict between despair and anger. Which would win? The endpoint of a course of action (or inaction) led by either was unclear, but if we could do something, anything, to dent some of the might of these EFR bases, then they would know at least that we meant business, we were not going to slink off like frightened dogs. Besides, we had pledged our lives to the revolution.

I said as much, but failed to ignite any spark, only distracted murmurs from averted faces. Everyone seemed to have fallen into a small, private pit of blackness.

We went back to Belpahari and returned, one day before a new-moon-night, to Gidighati, all five of us, armed with home-made grenades. Not everyone returned for further action willingly. Someone suggested that one way of staying on in the forests was to force the villagers to provide us with food and drink and other necessities, using the same method that the police were using to discourage them from supporting us. There was some indecision initially about which of the military camps to attack, the one at Majgeria or the one at Gidighati. Ultimately the decision came to hang on the most important factor: which one was closer to the forest so that we would be least on open ground, fully exposed and in the line of fire? Gidighati, therefore, it was, although I still tried to push for Majgeria even while I knew that it was a lost cause. It was a place close to my heart, since I had spent over two years there. But Party always before individual . . .

It all went horribly wrong.

Because the policeman on guard was dozing in his chair we thought we’d creep up on him and get him first: either finish him off or use him as a hostage. Ashu, Dipankar and I were moving very carefully for a frontal attack – Dhiren and Debashish, both in police uniform, were approaching the back of the school from the village for a rear attack – but we knew that we couldn’t nab him. There was too much open ground to cover and we would be exposed on all sides. I was surprised that no one was looking out of the first-floor windows at regular intervals. I hoped we were not visible if they did decide to scrutinise the surrounding darkness periodically. There was a bad feeling looping inside me, something coiled and heavy, taking in my heart and stomach. It was not the mixture of fear, exhilaration and anger that I had felt during the earlier actions. This one was dull, blunted, something that weighed me down and pushed me towards a kind of lethargy.

A dog, which had been asleep and making tiny squealing noises in its dream, woke up and started sniffing the air. Then everything happened together, so that writing it down as a string of events, one after the other, somehow falsifies the reality and the experience of it. The dog stood up and began to bark. The man started, woke up and, in the time that he took to work out that the dog had reason to be barking, all three of us were upon him. Ashu drove the tangi straight through his chest and I shot the dog, both at the same time. There was an explosion – clearly either Dhiren or Debashish had lobbed a grenade into the building – then another, followed rapidly by the sound of shots and men shouting. We crouched low and waited for someone to come out of the front.