Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

They have been trained in what they are about to do. They have maintained their individual jobs and other responsibilities within the Party, coming together only for the purpose of training for tonight’s action. They have been selected not merely on the basis of their military abilities, but also according to their political level and discipline. Tonight’s squad is under the leadership of Sabita Kumari.

Sabita Kumari, twenty-eight, a graduate from a tiny college in Daltongunj, has never dreamed of this role. Her parents expected her to become a school teacher. But that seems to her a half-remembered page from a book of someone else’s story. Her two younger sisters were killed eight years ago — the sixteen-year-old beheaded with a machete while her parents, tied to the bed, were forced to watch; the youngest sister, fourteen, gang-raped, her eyes gouged out, her tongue cut out and then her neck stabbed. Their crime? The family had tried to resist the moneylenders’ attempts to take over their land in the village of Pabira. The police at the nearest station, in Ranchi, refused to issue an FIR in response to Sabita’s complaint unless she fellated the duty officer; more action would be taken according to the escalation in services she provided. That, too, seems so long ago, from a different life.

People talk of rage as something fluid; it boils, flows, spills over, scalds. For her, it is not any of these things. Instead it is a vast, frozen sea, solid as rock, unthawable. She has never seen the sea, but she knows it wraps around three-quarters of the world. All her anger is that and more. When she joined the Maoists she was twenty. Within two years she had killed five officers at Ranchi police station, all those who had leered and asked for sex when she had gone to complain. When the little of her life had been reduced to nothing, the Party had held and rocked her in its iron cradle, told her that the nothing of her life could become a path, a straight, narrow, but tough one, at the end of which was a destination worth reaching.

She has repeated the same words, almost without change, to her comrades who are silently marching with her now to their business of the night. She has picked them with great thought and care. Underlying her choice had been one immutable principle: they must be people who are nothing too, whose lives are nothing, who have nothing. No recourse to any form of redress or justice. Revenge was their last roar. And what was justice but revenge tricked out in a gentleman’s clothes, speaking English? She knows the relevant section of the recruits’ histories like she knows the back of her hand.

From Simdega district have come two tribal brothers and their sister, Subir Majhi, Deb Majhi and Champa Majhi. The Majhis, members of a tribe who lived along the edge of Saranda forest, had been told that the land where their ancestors had lived from as far back in the past as the human mind could see is no longer theirs, but the state’s to do with as it wanted. They did not have a patta to prove ownership; the state did. Soon afterwards, policemen, contractors, officials spread out over it; their land was going to be mined; the earth there contained metals. A group of people from the city came and told them they would get compensation. But the forest was their home; what compensation would return that to them? Would they give them another forest somewhere? The compensation turned out to be 5,000 rupees per head, not exceeding 25,000 rupees for each family. The CRPF forces, with their AK-47s and metal breastplates, posted in the forest to deal with the Maoists, got 4,000 rupees a month. The tribal people knew what fate awaited them outside their land — daily wage-labourer in the city, maidservant in someone’s home, prostitute.

When the Majhis joined forces with the hundreds of forest-dwellers who were also being driven out, their land no longer theirs, the state deployed the military police. The police were protecting the lawful property of the mining companies, the property that had been the tribal peoples’ last year or the year before; they had a right to use force against the tribals, for they were trespassers and outlaws now. The campaign of intimidation began: a house looted and then razed to the ground; someone maimed for life after being hauled off to prison on the flimsiest of excuses and beaten in lock-up; a girl raped; a well poisoned; a man shot; food shops destroyed and supplies cut off, so that the jungle-dwellers could be starved into submission.

This had all happened before, their father said to them; it had happened in neighbouring districts, in Chiria, in Gua, when he had been a young man. The same story — forest-tribes banished after their land was sold by the state to mining companies; those meant to protect you turned into your attackers. Imagine coming home one day to find that your parents were waiting with knives to slaughter you. That is what the Maoists said when the tribes escaped into the forests to protect themselves from the military police. They had a choice: to be snuffed out overnight by the world or take on the world and wrest something from it; not very much, just a little, just to survive and live like a human, not an animal. This is the hope the Maoists offered, the hope of dark clouds gathering over parched, fractured soil; it could rain or it could not, but they brought something new into their lives: possibility.

Sabita has planted IEDs in the forest and blown up military vehicles, she has raided outposts of the Indian Reserve Battalion and blown up their buildings, she has burned security vehicles sent to protect the Prime Minister’s village road-building programme, the Gram Sadak Yojana, in Belpahari in West Medinipur; she is itinerant, like the rest of her kind, through several districts in several abutting states: two nights in Saranda forest, three nights in Dandakaranya, a week in Karampada, constantly on the move, bringing to the country their promise of a mobile war. But the end of tonight’s action is unknown. None of them is going to be there to witness it. Were her thoughts in the past, before doing something terribly beautiful like an action for the first time, was her mind then like it is now, all a-whirl? They would all die one day — and it will come a lot sooner in their lives than in others’ — but it was better to die fighting, like a cornered wildcat, than crushed underfoot like an unseen worm. You kick a dog, it will run away, but you keep kicking it and kicking it, it will have no option but to bite you back just to stop being kicked. How could you want to live a life that makes you yearn for one thing only — its end? Every human being in this world wants, strives for, a better life, but they are deemed to be below that wanting and striving. Their lives are nothing, less than nothing. They are lower than animals. How has this come to pass? Is it true of everywhere in the world that some people are just fodder? Or has their country taken a wrong turning? She does not know.

Her subgroup of four reaches the point near Hehegara Halt while the rest carry on towards Mangra. Not a whisper is exchanged. Even their breathing is cautious. A torch is produced, its light covered with a thin cloth before being switched on. They bend and squat and go down on all fours on the railway track, shining the torch close to the ground, until they find what they are looking for: the fishplate joining the ends of two rails to form the track. They are careful about not stepping on the stone chips between the rails; the crunching sound it produces is too loud. Sabita stands guard with her AK-47 removed from her shoulder to her hands, turning 360 degrees every eight minutes in four slow ninety-degree sweeps of two minutes each, with clockwork precision; the human equivalent of the swivelling turret on a tank. The night needs watching; she knows that the darkness skitters and slides between being a friend and an enemy with alarming unpredictability.