India (51 page)

There was a big bed in one corner. There was also a cane-bottomed settee; bookcases full of books and papers in apparent disorder; and some red box files in another corner. The apartment had another room, for the children; and there was also a space – it was the word Dipanjan used: he didn’t say ‘room’ – with the kitchen at one end and the bathroom and W.C. at the other end.

The two children had been waiting to see their father’s guest. The elder was a girl of nineteen, who was studying to be an engineer at the university of Jadavpur, not far away. She was smiling, open, handsome, with glasses; there was an outgoing quality about her which I had not seen so far in her father. She said mischievously of her plump brother, who was thirteen and was clearly going to be physically bigger than his father: ‘He wants to go to America.’ It must have been partly true, partly teasing; but the brother took it well. And then they were both off, into the little verandah, and then a few steps down into the lane.

Dipanjan had moved into the apartment in 1980. They were quite cramped there now; but they didn’t think so in 1980. The children felt cramped, though. The little apartment cost 600 rupees a month, £24. There were some neatly kept houses around. There was a nice small house next door, with a hibiscus shrub against the ochre-coloured wall, really quite close to the windows of the room in which we were. That house belonged to an ayurvedic doctor, someone practising traditional Hindu medicine.

They had nice neighbours in the lane; they couldn’t complain about that; but the house was terribly dusty. That was why Dipanjan was so particular about getting me to take off my shoes: to keep out the dust which my shoes might have brought in. Trucks often went down the narrow lane; when they did, dust blew straight into the house. And there were mosquitoes.

Dipanjan said, ‘That reminds me. I should put on a coil.’

He went to the inner ‘space’ – his long dhoti was brown or beige, with a plaid or check pattern – and he came out after a while not with the green mosquito coil I was expecting, but with a plastic
blue Japanese ‘gadget’ – Dipanjan’s word – that had to be plugged into a power point. The chemical in the plastic container was released by heat.

A sweeping woman, speaking no word, looking at no one, bending down low from the waist, her legs quite straight, passed through the front room, flicking her little broom at those small areas of the terrazzo floor that were not covered by furniture or the red box files.

Dipanjan’s wife came in. Her name was Arati. She was of Dipanjan’s age. She wore a dark-coloured sari with a small pattern, and a black bodice. She, too, was a teacher: her classes started very early in the morning, and finished at 10.

She wanted to know about lunch. She said that Dipanjan couldn’t eat wheat. ‘Rice, rice, rice – that’s what he wants, three times a day, as often as I give him. He can’t digest wheat.’ That was an aspect of Dipanjan’s ‘post-political’ life. It had been brought about by Dipanjan’s illnesses during his life underground in the villages, and by the badness of water in the delta.

‘Amoebiasis,’ Arati said. ‘It’s a chronic condition. Does it occur in your place? It’s in most of the third world.’

It was the first time, since I had been talking to Dipanjan, that reference had been made to his life as a guerrilla. And it was unexpected that it should have come in this direct, unheroic way, with this emphasis on his personal frailty – the tormenting things he had known before the dust and mosquitoes of the lane.

Dipanjan sat on the bed. The three small windows of the room, with iron bars and green shutters, lit him from different angles. There were three old photographs on the blue walls, and one small portrait in colour. The photographs were of Dipanjan’s father and mother, his father’s father, and his father’s maternal uncle, in whose rent-controlled apartment Dipanjan’s father and then Dipanjan had lived until 1969. This relative had been a nationalist and a journalist; he had edited a proscribed Gandhian journal and had gone to jail in 1942. He was a man of culture, a Brahmo, a man of the Bengal Renaissance. But Dipanjan’s greatest admiration was for his father’s father, who was an orthodox Hindu. He had gone into the Accountant-General’s Department because there had been no money for his higher education, and he had devoted nearly all his working life to looking after his brothers and sisters – which wasn’t easy, especially after the calamities of 1947.

The photograph of this grandfather was big. Dipanjan had had it made from a damaged original. Other prints of lesser intensity had been made, but he liked the one he had on the wall.

‘He had penetrating and dazzling eyes. I prefer this print because of the eyes. We have all inherited our preoccupation with ethics from him. He was a man of principle. People say he never did a wrong thing in his life.’

The other photograph, in colour, quite small, was of the young Mao.

Dipanjan said, ‘You don’t recognize him. It was presented by a Dr Bose, who was sent by Nehru to Chiang Kai-Shek in 1939, and ended up with Mao. The photograph is there because it was a gift. You mustn’t read too much into it, though I have a strong and healthy respect for the man.’

Among the newspapers on the bed was a financial paper. Dipanjan liked to follow the economic news. The Indian economy was fragile, and he said there could be another depression like the one in 1965, which had led to food riots and given an impetus to the peasant movement.

Arati brought out tea. Dipanjan poured a cup for the driver of the car that had brought me, and took it out to him; he was parked in the yard next door.

Arati said, ‘Are you staying for the summer?’ She hardly waited for my reply. ‘The heat is unbearable. There are so few trees now.’

I said, ‘Why do they cut them down?’

‘It’s because of the people. There are too many people. You can’t have people and trees. They’ve cut down so many trees, the weather is changing. We have colder winters and hotter summers.’

A woman neighbour called conversationally, across the short distance from the lane, ‘Arati?’ and almost immediately came in. At the same time a cycle-rickshaw went by in the lane, with many young children sitting on two facing benches below a little roof – young children going home from school in a toy-like contraption, reminding me of the baker’s cycle-vans I used to see as a child in Port of Spain.

Arati and her neighbour talked in the kitchen space at the back of the front room. Their words were very clear through the open door.

Dipanjan, when he came back from looking after the car-driver,
settled himself on the bed, among the newspapers, and began to talk.

‘When I went to Presidency College I was not politically active. I sided with the left because of my upbringing, but the political activity in the college at that time was at a low level. Towards the end of my second year, when I was driving myself very hard academically, and it was becoming quite a strain, I began to wonder why I was doing it. I was also dabbling in poetry. My father never read my poems – I didn’t show them to him. My mother wasn’t interested. They thought it was perhaps a harmful diversion. They never encouraged me. I began to question why I was writing. Quite a few of us at college were assailed with similar problems and doubts, both boys and girls.

‘From this time I suddenly became aware of the poverty and misery around me. Until then I hadn’t been aware. I saw things and I accepted it as part of the scenery. I will tell you a little story. One day – I still remember – we were going, a friend and I, to see a showing of a picture made from a play of Bernard Shaw. I was about to go there. I had just left my house. And I saw this person – I wouldn’t say he was a beggar: he was in no position to beg.

‘He was lying on the curb. He was about to die, and fully conscious and silent. He was lying in front of a pathological laboratory. I asked the lab people to phone for an ambulance. The ambulance came, and I found that nobody was willing to accompany the person to hospital. So I had to accompany him. I wasn’t very eager to do it, but I accompanied him. He was indifferent. Absolutely. He didn’t talk.

‘We drove to a hospital. Doctors examined him and on his ticket they wrote that he should be admitted, and they stamped the ticket with a prepared seal: “There is no accommodation in this hospital. Try somewhere else.” The driver had to take him back in the ambulance. The driver asked me whether I knew this person. When I said I didn’t, the driver said, “We can take him to another hospital, but the same thing will happen there.” ’

I asked Dipanjan, ‘What did the man look like? You haven’t mentioned that.’

‘He was in rags, caked with dirt. The most striking thing about him was that he had hydrocel, an inflammation of the scrotum, caused usually by filariasis, a tropical parasitical disease. And when
he walked he had to carry his scrotum in his hands, it was so heavy.

‘I asked the ambulance-driver how often this kind of thing happened, and the driver said often. He said that when they were asked to pick up people like that, they did, without making a fuss. But no one accompanied the person, so their practice was to deposit him on some other street, because they knew that no hospital would accept them.

‘Seeing that I felt in some way responsible for the man, the driver said, “There is one place I know where he might be accepted. I’m not sure, but let’s go.” He drove to this place near the temple of Kali, and there was this little space – just a long dark corridor, with perhaps just a tiled roof, and on both sides destitute people lying on beds waiting for death. So we left him there, and we placed the medical ticket near his head, and we came out.

‘This place was the beginning of the place Mother Teresa was building up for such people, and she was quite unknown at the time. I should make it quite clear that I am not making any comment on the utility or validity of Mother Teresa’s outlook or work. But I must say that even today there is no other place in Calcutta where a dying destitute will be accepted.’

At this point the electricity failed, as it often failed in Calcutta. Dipanjan’s first thought was for the Japanese mosquito-repellent, which depended on heat. Without that repellent, he said, we simply wouldn’t be able to sit and talk. He got up and got an oil lamp, lit it, and placed the blue gadget on top of the glass chimney. Almost at once the power came back, so he turned the oil lamp off. We also changed places. I sat on the bed; he sat on the cane-bottomed settee.

He said, ‘It was a Sunday morning. A fine day, but it rained in the afternoon, after we had placed the man at Kalighat. I missed the cinema show. I spent about three to four hours ferrying that man around.

This is just an example. Don’t think this is my road to Damascus. It stands out in my mind, but it didn’t mark my conversion. It was one of a host of things which were happening around me to which my eye was being opened for the first time. And I began to wander about the streets of Calcutta, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends.’

Sitting on the cane-bottomed settee, thinking of the past, his
eyes unfocussed, he raised his slender bare arms against the blue-washed wall.

‘From 1964, 1965, onwards, the way I was leading my life started appearing futile and meaningless. I retained a strong attachment to physics and poetry, but began to devote less time to it.’

In 1964 Dipanjan took his first degree from Presidency College, and began to do post-graduate work at Calcutta University Science College. At the same time there was a development in his personal life. He had met and proposed to Arati, and there was opposition from her family. Arati came from a distinguished brahmin family. Dipanjan was of the
kayastha
caste. Of this caste Dipanjan said, ‘The kayastha caste is technically a shudra, but in West Bengal and elsewhere their possession of land had effectively Sanskritized them. They are a clerkly caste, scribes since the Mogul times or even before.’

Parallel with this turbulence, there was the economic crisis he had spoken about at the start of the morning.

‘Since 1965 prices of rice and other foodstuffs had soared to unheard-of heights. Kerosene disappeared. Factories closed. Retrenched workers committed suicide. Even qualified engineers and doctors couldn’t find jobs. In West Bengal there was a great uprising. This movement of the people between 1965 and 1966 completely changed the outlook of our generation.

‘The people started off by confronting retailers in markets and insisting that they take their prices down. In places they looted godowns where grain was being hoarded illegally. When the government used the police against them, there was resistance by the demonstrators. From stone-throwing to setting public places and transport on fire – this has been a hallowed tradition of protest since British times. When someone sets a bus on fire, you know that now he means business.’

‘Was your family affected by the rise in prices?’

‘We personally – my family – could afford it. People were always talking about it – the prices, the crisis, the food riots, the failure of the government, the police firing. The movement was always called the Food Movement.’

It was organized by the ordinary political workers of a communist faction, and not by any of the big men of the party. Then in 1966 the students of Presidency College, Dipanjan’s old college, formed a pro-communist movement for the first time. The leaders
of this movement were expelled, and there was a six-month student agitation against their expulsion.

One night Dipanjan was coming back from South Calcutta by bus. He saw a crowd in the grounds of Presidency College. He got off the bus to see what it was about. He didn’t find anyone he knew, but the next day, when he went back, he discovered that the leaders of the student movement, and others, were his friends. He began to spend more and more time with those friends, in Presidency College, in the coffee house opposite, and in the college hostel.

He began to do political work among those students who were not committed. ‘There was a vocal minority who felt they had come to the college to study and build their careers. And we had to persuade them.’ There was a feeling that the activists organizing the students and the Food Movement were Chinese agents. Dipanjan had to do a lot of reading to deal with these accusations. He started reading Marxist literature.