Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

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.