Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

We had decided early on to avoid the villages that had seen this kind of state-sanctioned land-grabs. Admittedly we would have had an advantage if we’d gone there — we would have had far less work mobilising, because farmers would already have been organised and militised (up to a point). But there were disadvantages too: 1) we were the erstwhile radical wing of the CPI(M), some of whom had been expelled from the Party in June last year, so any CPI(M)-led farmers’ movement to redistribute land and kill landlords, however much our aims coincided (again, up to a point), would not have been sympathetic to our invitation to move even further to the left towards guerrilla action; 2) we worked in units of three to seven in each village, so we were nothing against the might of the bigger, better and more centrally organised CPI(M) cadres; 3) landlords were not stupid people. Wherever the CPI(M) had organised peasant-led forcible land redistribution, the landlords had quickly sworn allegiance to the CPI(M), paying protection money to the Party’s local leaders, so that the land they held far in excess of the ceiling wouldn’t be grabbed by the landless peasants marching against them. Classic CPI(M) politics, it has to be said; petty-bourgeois revolution-mongering.

There wasn’t enough space in one farmer’s hut to put up the three of us together so we went to different places — I was billeted in Kanu Mahato’s, Samir at Anupam Haati’s, Dhiren at Bipul Soren’s.

Early winter afternoon: green and brown everywhere under a white-blue sky. And much cooler than in the city. There was a constant breeze that was very enjoyable in the sun, then it gave us goosepimples after the sun went down. Flocks of chirruping birds flitted above. The fields were parcels of straw-coloured gold where the paddy was almost ripe. Occasionally, tiny pairs of frantically gesticulating hands emerged from the top of this uniform gold sea, their position in it changing rapidly. I realised that there were children, entirely hidden by the crop, running around inside.

— They’re chasing off babui pakhi, Dhiren said.

So this was the weaver bird.

Something happened to me when I saw the children going about this job as if they were playing. Well, they were playing; they were running across the fields and wheeling their arms about and shouting at the birds and waving them away. They used a scarecrow as a post that marked either a beginning or an end to their game. Something happened to me and I wanted to run into the fields and join them, waving my arms over my head, copying the children. What looked graceful when they did it, in me, I was sure, was going to appear ungainly, making me resemble some kind of lunatic on the run. I would explain to them that I was a scarecrow, a live scarecrow, as big as the rag-and-stick-and-earthenware-pot one they had in the corner. Soon we would all be shouting and running about in the golden paddy, the flocks of birds above us dispersed.

The fantasy too flitted away like the birds.

I asked Samir and Dhiren to accompany me in two reconnoitres of our hamlet, once while there was still daylight and the other in the total darkness that was the village night. Some of the plots were tiny, say, about four or five times the size of our garden. How much rice would each yield? Not enough to feed one person for a couple of months. My head spun when I tried to think what the peasants ate for the remainder of the year. The breeze set the paddy swaying. It gave out a sound somewhere between rustling and rattling.

Dhiren said — We’ll have to learn how to use the sickle soon.

A meaningful look passed between the three of us. We had our eye on three huge acreages on the other side of the village, beyond the outer edge. Three enormous fields belonging to the three big jotedaars of the village — Haradhan Ray, Kanai Lal Kuiti, Bhaben Sinha.

At our end of the village, the Mahato and Santhal end, there were banana and palm trees all around us. I pointed out possible exits and escape routes. The crop-filled fields might shelter us now, but after the harvest they would be open stretches of pure danger where we would be completely exposed.

Samir said — We’d never make it.

Nervousness was something all too easy to activate in him. I said — Look around you. Don’t you see the forests?

— But they’re some distance away. We’d have to cross these bare fields to get to them.

Dhiren said — It’ll all appear different at night. They won’t be able to make out one person, dressed in black clothes, running across these fields in the dark.

Samir wasn’t convinced. He said — But there’ll be many of them and only three of us. And they’ll be armed to their teeth: sticks, axes, knives. . They’ll hunt us down.

He had that familiar wobble in his voice that made Dhiren and me erupt into laughter each time we heard it. But not this time. This time we were in the field of action, not in the safe luxury of imagining it while sitting in Calcutta.

Dhiren said — You know the line, no more than three to five people in a squad.

The words were meant to instil determination, but they came out hollow.

Everyone went to sleep around seven or seven-thirty. It was the rhythm of life in the hamlet. During the growing and harvesting season, the farmers were too exhausted after a day’s toil in the fields to stay up for longer. Besides, kerosene, or any other oil, was in short supply and to stay awake would mean burning already-tiny rations.

Being on the outskirts of the village, we weren’t far from the jungle: bamboo groves, a pond, little copses, fields, another small pond, the burial grounds of the Santhals, then forests of sal, mahua, kendu. The effect of moonlight on the trees and fields, with no sound or other light to dilute the experience, was startling and pure. I’d never seen anything like it, or rather, what I’d seen so far now struck me as having been a very adulterated version of the real thing. It silenced us. There was only the sound of the breeze. The night was cold, and clear as glass. We had many things to talk about — where to hide our weapons, which route to take when walking all night to the next village, how to go about getting together small groups of farmers without arousing anyone’s suspicions — but this bath of silvery light made those discussions appear as small violations.

Dhiren broke the silence by starting to hum a tune under his breath, very gently and with feeling. It sounded so familiar that for a second or two I was fooled into thinking that it was a revolutionary anthem, until I got it. It was as far away from revolution as that moon was from this hamlet. ‘The smile of the moon has spilled over its banks’. . that was the song. I knew it because I’d heard Pishi sing it on moonlit summer evenings on the terrace. I was filled with — with what? An affectionate contempt? A sense of ridicule? Shock that Dhiren, the earthy, self-styled tough guy, had any truck with the kind of music he’d consider effeminate? Tagore seemed to be carried inside all Bengalis, regardless of class or social background, like some inheritable disease, silent, unknown, until it manifested itself at the unlikeliest of times. How irredeemably middle-class all this was: The Little Red Book and On Practice on the one hand; on the other hand, the poetry of Jibanananda Das in his cloth sidebag and a coy, cloying Tagore song almost involuntarily on his lips. There really was no hope of escape for us.

I wondered if I should say something about the absurdity of this. Could I get it across with humour and warmth and lightness? I decided to hold my tongue. Then, all of a sudden, I was blurting out — For god’s sake, Mao by day and Tagore by moonlight?

Dhiren didn’t miss a beat. He put his right arm around my shoulders and said — That’s the quintessential Bengali soul for you. Did you think that because I come from a poor, lower-middle-class set-up, my kind wouldn’t have been touched by culture?