Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

And with fear. You could feel it in the air, a sort of invisible mantle that had come down over everything. The place seemed even more deserted in the evenings. People stayed in because they thought they might be next. A strange sensation had us in its grip — not quite ennui, or quite inertia, but the lull that sets in after you think you’ve achieved what you had set out to do. I realised how dangerous this feeling was: we had removed one tiny, very minor class enemy, a little minnow in a sea of sharks. Our warfare had only just begun. If we slackened now, we were going to be extinguished in no time at all.

In the bamboo forest at night, Dhiren asked — Have you noticed any change in Kanu or Anupam?

Samir — What sort of a change?

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.