Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

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. .