The Lives of Others (49 page)

Dhiren – You tell me?

I – No . . . nothing . . . nothing that I can tell.

Dhiren – Maybe it’s to do with the rest of the Sorens then. They seem more . . . more daring, less cowed by the people who’ve been sucking their blood for centuries. I heard Bipul say, Now for a few more to send down Senapati’s way. So I said to him, We can do bigger things if we combine our forces, all of you, hundreds of you. They thought – I don’t know, this is all speculation on my part – they thought that we were going to egg them on and then disappear, leaving them to do the hard work and face the music afterwards. Now they see that’s not the case. And that’s what they’re talking about among themselves. What do you say?

I – Very possible. And if that’s true, we need to capitalise on this trust and sense of unity.

Samir – So all these months of talking Mao to them, it’s had some kind of an effect. That, combined with our guerrilla action.

I – So let’s make the most of it.

Dhiren, Samir and I, Kanu, Bipul, Shankar, Anupam: seven in total. Shankar said – We can bring more, many more. All the wage-labourers will come. You want?

I – Not now. We may need them later. But no one must know that we’re together, otherwise . . .

Kanu – Even if they hack us with tangis, we won’t talk, don’t fear.

We worked systematically, enjoining them to secrecy at every turn, pointing out the consequences if they opened their mouths even to their wives. First, we made a note of all the jotedaars in the village, where they lived and who their men were. I told them, again, that if even a whisper of this reached the ears of the jotedaars’ flunkies . . .

The web was deeply complex. Landlords were also moneylenders; flunkies doubled as pawnbrokers; middlemen and yes-men owned small parcels of land; anybody who owned more than two or three bighas called himself a farmer; on bad harvest years middle peasants rented out their labour, becoming munish for a season or two; big landowning families used the same families of wage-labourers whose earlier generations had been engaged to work for them by their grandfathers or great-grandfathers, making the connections of obligation more intricate, both formal and informal. The landlords had their fingers in other pies too – retail, cement, jute factories, clothing – and ran shops from which the villagers bought some of their basic things . . . All this scratched only the surface. And everyone knew everyone else, so the prospect of secrecy was not very likely. We had had more than a year to think about this, but in a theoretical kind of way. Now that it was crunch time, we found it impossible to draw clear lines of demarcation. A rule of thumb would have to do, so I suggested one, a simple one that everyone would understand and agree on: who was the most hated jotedaar in Majgeria, the one responsible for the maximum misery and injustice and anger? That was as good a metric as any.

Four names emerged: three jotedaars, one overeager toady. The jotedaars – Dwija Ghosh, Haradhan Ray, Kanai Sinha – we had known of before, as we had about the toady, Bankim Barui, himself a small landlord, owner of about seventy-five bighas, a not inconsiderable amount. Bankim had featured in our calculations from the moment we came to Majgeria – Nitai Das used to work for him. Then one day Nitai was dead. Who knows what happened on that last day of Nitai’s life? That was unknowable, but what was beyond doubt was the role Bankim must have played, directly and indirectly, in driving Nitai to his destiny.

The shortlist was deceptive. It lulled you into thinking that you had a manageable job ahead of you. We had been lucky with our first attack; that was certainly not going to be repeated.

Then there was the issue of weapons. Because Kanu, Anupam, Bipul and Shankar were adept with lathi, tangi, hashua, daa, spears and javelins, it was best to stick with those. The question no one was prepared to voice was this: what if the people on our list owned guns and were all too ready to use them?

Samir quoted Mao at length – All the guiding principles of military operations grew out of the one basic principle: to strive to the utmost to preserve one’s own strength and destroy that of the enemy. How then do we justify the encouragement of heroic sacrifice in war? Every war exacts a price, sometimes an extremely high one. Is this not in contradiction with ‘preserving oneself’? In fact, there is no contradiction at all; to put it more exactly, sacrifice and self-preservation are both opposite and complementary to each other. For such sacrifice is essential not only for destroying the enemy, but also for preserving oneself – partial and temporary ‘non-preservation’ (sacrifice, or paying the price) is necessary for the sake of general and permanent preservation.

Explaining these concentrated ideas in simpler words, I had to grasp that big thorn: what happened if one of us died in action?

Samir said – We knew what we were letting ourselves in for. If we wanted jobs, money, ease, power, influence, we could have stayed on in the CPI(M). When we decided to follow the Chairman and Comrade Charu Mazumdar, we knew we could pay with our lives, become martyrs.

Are you flinching reading this?

Our four new comrades pledged their lives. Anupam said – This is not life that we have. This is a kind of death. If we die fighting so that our children can have better lives, we will die fighting.

He was echoed by Kanu, Bipul, Shankar. There was no reaction that could measure up to this, so we let the silence fall. But not a total silence: there was the sound of bamboo leaves shivering in the occasional breeze.

But this guilelessness – I’ve wanted to tell you about it for some time. How easily these Santhals and Mahatos had made us one of them. They still fell into the bad old habit of addressing us as ‘Babu’, but if they had only one plate of rice between five of them, they made sure to share it with us. They seemed to be governed by a ‘what is mine is also yours’ principle, especially when it came to food and shelter. Selflessness and generosity – that’s what I’m trying to say. But also, beyond those, a kind of simplicity, a unity between what they said and what they felt and meant. There was no dissembling or contortion of feelings. I felt as if a kink inside me, one that I was born with, had been smoothed out. Now that it wasn’t there, I knew that the knot had bothered me and scrunched up my soul. Yes, these people had filthy mouths and they swore colourfully and imaginatively – I’ve been busy censoring their speech while reporting to you – but this was of a piece with the simplicity of their hearts.

We banged our heads against that old problem: how to go about mobilising hundreds of farmers without anyone on the other side becoming any the wiser?

Samir offered a line: each guerrilla attack would bring us ten or twenty farmers, so we needed to mount another two or three before word spread to the optimal number of people that we wanted to attract for a bigger squad action. They would come and offer to join us because it would be clear to them that we were doing something. That was Samir’s reasoning.

This sank in and seemed sensible. It would be foolish to fritter away time. The police were going to be here sooner rather than later, so why not take advantage of the lull?

Bipul said that the easiest home to raid would be of Bankim Barui because it was in the middle of Majgeria, whereas the really big landlords, the owners of hundreds of acres, didn’t live in the village proper. They had large, concrete homes in bigger villages or small towns in Binpur or elsewhere in the district, mostly in Jhargram. Those could be target projects for a later phase of the revolution, not now, Bipul added.

Crucially, there was his connection with Nitai. It was odd that although we didn’t speak about it, all of us knew that there was an inevitability about picking on Bankim. We went through so many planning sessions to settle on the most appropriate person to attack, but that choice had already been made for us by history.

So Bankim Barui it was. We knew he had about seventy-five bighas of land, most of which had been acquired by evicting farmers who had been poor tenants. He was up to all kinds of tricks: falsification of deeds of lease to facilitate his land-grab; being aggressive about letting the police loose on farmers who were protesting at his crimes and also slapping trumped-up charges against them . . . The usual, then.

Bankim’s house was two-storeyed, built of brick and cement. There was a courtyard at the back; unenclosed land to its west; another, smaller tract of land enclosed by a woven-cane barrier to the south of the garden; a front door set in a box of a balcony, and a back door leading to the courtyard; about six rooms in total on both floors, not including kitchen and bathroom. There was also an outhouse in the south garden and two golas for grain storage. It was surrounded by five similar houses and about half a dozen much smaller affairs. Kanu and Anupam provided us with other vital pieces of local knowledge: Bankim lived there with his elderly mother, his uncle (late father’s brother), his wife, their three children (all under twelve or ten), two servants and his uncle’s son, who had a job in another village, Barashal, and visited frequently but was away at the moment.

We decided to strike around
2
a.m.

Shankar, Samir and I, faces covered, broke down the front door with a spear and a tangi. It gave after about six to eight blows, then we rammed it, all three of us, with our shoulders, and got in. The other four were stationed at the back door (we were certain that Bankim was going to try to use that route to escape). We heard the terrified screaming even before we entered. What if the cries for help brought people running, armed and ready to defend Bankim? Villagers were known for the closeness of neighbourly ties, unlike cities. Too late, it was too late to worry about that.

No one in the front room. We moved to the next one. An old man in a vest and a lungi was trying to hide under the bed. This, we assumed, was the uncle. A punch would kill him. We dragged him out by his feet and pushed him into the dark kitchen, but just as we were about to lock him inside we noticed a boy, maybe fifteen or sixteen years old, the servant, probably, cowering in a corner but with a lathi gripped in his hand. The screaming from upstairs, a chorus of women and children, was now in full swing. They were standing on the front verandah upstairs, shouting – Help! Help! Robbers! Robbers!

The servant boy couldn’t decide between trembling like a leaf and attacking us. I decided for him: I brought my tangi to his neck and said – Sit quietly here, one word or one move from you, your head will be rolling on the floor – and pushed him to the corner. Then I got out of the kitchen and fastened the chain on top of the door to the hook on the lintel post. I felt I’d done all this in the space between one inhalation and one exhalation. And there was an odd sensation: my heart was beating so hard and so fast that it seemed it had actually slowed down to those few beats in between that knocked against my chest. The rest I could not feel, but I knew they must be there.

We rushed into every room downstairs – three in total – and scanned every possible place that could be used for hiding: behind an almirah, under another bed, under a divan. Then we stormed upstairs. This was what I had been waiting for. The screaming people had barricaded themselves inside the front room, the one connected to the verandah. I had a feeling Bankim was hiding there too. We needed to get in there to shut them up. What if Bankim managed to climb down and escape from the front while we had our comrades waiting at the rear? We forced open the door – the screaming had stopped – after hacking it with tangis, then pushing a spear through the crack to make out what it was that they had pushed against it. The big bed. How on earth did Bankim’s wife and children manage it? Bankim
must
be in there. It would take some time to push it away, so we splintered the door to pieces and stepped on the bed to enter the room. No Bankim, or not obviously, but a boy of ten or so, a younger girl, their fat mother and an old woman, all squatting or crouching in the furthest corner, some squeaking, some frozen.

Samir shouted at them, much the same words that I had used in the kitchen downstairs. Bankim’s wife gave out a shriek, which she had the good sense to cut short, knowing that more screaming was not going to be doing her any favours. We ransacked the room. When Bankim’s wife refused to hand over the keys to the big almirah, Samir grabbed hold of the girl (more shrieking, ear-splitting this time), pulled out the hashua he had had Kanu tie around his waist with a gamchha and held it against her neck. The keys were produced before we could blink.

At this point a huge commotion began outside. It came from the back of the house, drowning out the racket the stray dogs were making at the front. I ordered Shankar and Samir to search the room and the verandah and ran to the back through two rooms, both empty. I couldn’t see what was happening in the dark, but there were shouts of – Beat the ***! Beat the ***! (unspeakable abuse, not for your ears) and there were far too many people. I couldn’t make out how many, but many more than the four from our squad. Before I could understand how foolish it was to make myself known (they could be paid guards, neighbours trying to fight us, people otherwise in the pay of or obliged to Bankim, even the police), I shouted – What’s going on down there? What’s happening?

Dhiren answered – Come down. We’ve caught the ***.

My head reeled. Who were all these people then? If our squad was under attack, how come Dhiren was in any position to reply? Wouldn’t he be fighting, or running away, hiding?

The action was happening in the courtyard, spilling out into the adjoining land. Two brands had been lit and in the meagre, flickering light of these, I began to discern what was going on. A tight circle of fourteen or sixteen men, all holding some kind of weapon, had surrounded Bankim, who was now a corpse. He looked like a bulging sack of grain that had fallen out of the back of a truck. There were two spears through him, one through his neck, another through his shoulder and upper chest.

– Shala was trying to escape around the back; poor *** didn’t know we were waiting for him in the dark. Trying to escape leaving the women and children to face the music. Didn’t have a chance, the dog. We didn’t even let him finish his miserable begging – Forgive me, forgive me, I’ve done a great wrong, it’ll never happen again, forgive me, I’m falling at your feet – but beat him down to the ground and then whack, whack, two javelins straight into him. All over.