Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

Samir stopped complaining. The dehydration had ground us down. The food was over too. We had no idea how long it was to nightfall. Then I added eight hours to it, eight hours at least. It seemed an unpassable piece of time. I wanted to scream. Knowing we were going to get to its end didn’t make the process of getting there any more bearable.

We got to Debdulal-da’s at around two in the morning. I noticed later that this was not the kind of tiredness that I felt after a day’s harvest or halui, but the effect was the same — I felt inanimate, a machine with moving parts. There were lessons to be learned in this, but I couldn’t think of any that didn’t include the image of a water container. We couldn’t eat much of the rice and dal that Debdulal-da gave us — halfway through the night’s walk I thought I could easily manage to eat every brick of his house — but we drank three kunjos of water between us before we fell into a sleep much like I imagine death must be.

When we woke up it was around noon. Yesterday seemed insubstantial, something that didn’t happen, but was only thought. With that was gone the feeling that all the things we had gone through — exhaustion, hunger, thirst, despair — were of any moment at all. It all felt so trivial that, if the same were expected of me on that new day, I would do it in so far as my body would allow.

The dissection and analysis began in the evening. There were people present whom I’d never met, four of them, all from the AICCCR. I was amazed to hear how far the struggle had advanced in Mushahari in Bihar — apparently, responding to the AICCCR’s call given on 15th August last year, hundreds of peasants had seized the autumn harvest and fought pitched battles for days with the police and the landlords’ men. I asked about the ultimate outcome — who won? how? what was the casualty on the side of the peasants and their leaders? — but the talk moved on to the even greater success story of Lakhimpur in Uttar Pradesh and, of course, the beacon of our movement, Srikakulam: mass actions, creation of bases, dozens of landlords annihilated, land reclaimed, crops seized. . my head reeled. They had managed to move on from isolated, small guerrilla incidents to full-blown peasant uprisings. How, how, how? I knew that some of the retelling was a bit optimistic; I’d done it myself when writing reports for Liberation and Deshabrati. I felt a flash of envy burn quickly thorough me.

Then I pricked up my ears: rumblings amongst the ranks of the AICCCR. They would have been easy to dismiss as ideological jaw-jaw about the Lin Biao line and Soviet revisionism and the usual topics, but this time I heard something else. There seemed to be serious dissension in the AICCCR, and the talk of a new party was not all chatter. I listened for a while. There was an argument about what our movement should be: the Charu Mazumdar line was that it should be centrally an uprising by the peasantry to eradicate feudalism, while the Nagi Reddy line was that it should aim to be a broader, more inclusive workers’ anti-imperialist struggle against the two imperialisms trying to dominate the world currently: US imperialism and Soviet social imperialism. This led naturally to the difference in the tactical lines: while Charu Mazumdar held that we should keep it as an underground movement, the trade-union leader Parimal Dasgupta thought that was just a kind of ‘Che Guevaraism’ and favoured a bigger mass movement, involving not only farmers but trade-union activists too, opening up the revolution to the whole population of people who could be described as workers.

I said a word here or there, but mostly absorbed in silence. There was much talk of who would leave the AICCCR to join the new party, but everything was under a cloak of speculation and secrecy, lending our normally secret meetings an even sharper edge. After a while I switched off. That envy was still there, or its embers. What was it about Bengalis that made them want to talk and talk and talk until their ghosts came out of their mouths? Was it a way we had found of never having to do anything?

A small man — Anjan Roy Chowdhury — with a round head and radically receding hairline, although he could not be more than five or seven years older than me, said — Why did you come all the way to Belpahari? Didn’t you know that we have over twenty villages in that corner of Binpur covered by our people? You could’ve hidden in any one of those?

Samir sounded as surprised as I was — No one told us.

Anjan-da said — Squad action has begun in those villages too. A courier sent to one of them would have prevented all this hiding in the forests and coming all the way here. But all this is necessary training. I think one of the three of you should become a courier between these villages; the closer ones, certainly.

I was afraid of this. We formed a good unit of three and I would feel the loss of either of them, or become the isolated courier myself, a vagabond. I’d held my tongue so far, and now I found that someone else had exposed me to those possibilities. I couldn’t object; individuals were nothing compared with the movement. Charu Mazumdar had written in Liberation: ‘At the present time we have a great need for petty-bourgeois comrades who come from the intelligentsia. But we must remember that not all of them will remain revolutionaries to the end.’ That possibility, that shadow of doubt that would come over everyone, were I to acknowledge my reluctance for the three of us to be split up — I wouldn’t be able to live with that. I wanted to remain a revolutionary to the very end.

Debdulal-da added his voice to Anjan-da’s — Yes, which one among you?

Dhiren volunteered.

I kept looking at the floor. A wrench went through my heart.

Over the next few days we talked strategy endlessly. It was a badminton of book-learned wisdom. Or parrot-learning, as you would no doubt call it; and rightly. My heart wasn’t in it — I kept wanting to know what exactly was going on in Majgeria. We had left the village before we had had the time to organise protection squads, groups of informers who would give advance warning of a police raid; a mass mobilisation, in short. I thought of Kanu lifting up his perennially ailing son, and instead of the delight and playfulness that should have been his expression, I saw his creased brows, and worried eyes, dark with the clouds of anxiety and helplessness. Was he even around to do that?

Majgeria was like a crematorium. The story Bijli told us turned my blood to ice. An army of policemen had raided the village. She said they had come in droves, ransacked their homes, charged at them with batons, hitting whoever they could find — men, women, children, old people, they hadn’t discriminated — and then taken almost everyone from this neighbourhood and the next one away to jail.

— But. . but. . that’s over a hundred people, I said.

— All of them, she said, everyone. Said they’d leave us as corpses if we stepped out of our homes.

It took me a while to get any sense out of Bijli’s story. She fell into weeping intermittently and scrambled up the sequence of events, so that I had to ask frequent questions to make a straight line of it. Often she blazed with anger, cursed. . Her anger was directed at me. She left me in no doubt that I was partly to blame for the current state of affairs. There was no reasoning with her.

— And the child’s sick too. Who’ll take him to the doctor?

I tried to offer to help, but she gave me an earful: what was going to happen if I got caught by the police on my way to hospital with the child, because they were looking for us, looking for ‘outside men’, as they had said, ‘outside men’ who had come to the village to cause trouble.

I felt guilty and ashamed, my face was burning, but my distress was a luxury compared with the seriousness of the situation, now that the police had moved their repression up several notches.