Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

— You should be hiding, she said, softening a bit. Not walking around in the open like this. Their people are everywhere, they’re watching us. They’ll come again, they said. You go now.

I asked her for only one thing: water to take into the jungle. She went away and came back after a few minutes, with a clay pot and a small cloth bundle.

— There’s nothing at home to eat, she said, except for some puffed rice. No molasses to go with it. I’ve given you some salt and chillies. That’s all I have.

I kept my head bowed as I took the water and the food.

We hadn’t progressed much. According to our plans, which had seemed so smooth and free-flowing during the talking stage, our next step would have been to seize the lands of the killed jotedaars and their toadies and hold the hundreds of bighas long enough to claim the next harvest on them. If things had gone according to plan we would have done that with the ’68 winter harvest, but we were only just beginning to get into the groove then. But now, with all our friends herded into jail like cattle, what were we going to do with just two people? I remembered that we referred to our groups as ‘cells’, and one of us as ‘commander’, and now those words, applied to two thin, ragged, hungry, dirty, cold men, almost turned to stone with exhaustion, made me want to laugh at their absurd bid for a kind of glamour. What were we going to do now? Hide in the forest, come out at night and take down one or two minor people — a manager walking past, a flunky on his way home?

Samir was as clueless as I.

— I think we should join the cell in Gidighati and strengthen our numbers there, he suggested. That was the line given to us in Belpahari, we mustn’t forget that.

Line, cell: I could tell that the old fearfulness in him was stirring and the use of those words was a way of trying to keep it at bay.

I asked — And leave these poor villagers here to be tortured?

— Well, that’s a problem. . What’s going to happen to them?

— The police will press charges against whoever they feel like harassing. Or whoever their paymasters ask them to victimise. They’ll torment them until they fall into line. Kanu and Bipul and others don’t have the money or the connections to fight their cases in court.

I felt that old simmering in my blood again as I tried to outline what lay in store for the farmers. I couldn’t bear to think of the conclusion to that story. I said — Didn’t you hear how Bijli was blaming us for their situation? To abandon them now means that we’d never be able to show our faces here again. And that’s the least of the problem. It means we’re letting this village go, creating a chink in our area-wise seizure of power. Remember the Chairman’s words? This will become the gap in our armour.

— No, no, I understand, but I can’t think of any way to move forward.

It hit me then: the beginning of the recognition of the holes in our strategies, the insufficient manpower, the lack of planning for the worst ‘what if’ scenarios, the medieval networks of communication (if any). It was the first of many such waves to hit me.

We set out for Gidighati. Because we tried to cleave to the cover of the forest, the route became two long, angled sides of a triangle — going up only to come down — instead of the easier, shorter straight line.

Gidighati was a bigger village than the one we had just left, but not by much. It wasn’t difficult to find the Santhal neighbourhood — as always, on the periphery and, here, almost within the forest. There was a main road on the affluent side, which made our work that much more dangerous. I longed for the relative seclusion and inaccessibility of Majgeria.

Babu Mandi’s hut was not difficult to find. We stood out so conspicuously that people came to us, asking who or what we wanted, effectively doing our work for us. The questioning was touched with suspicion and aggressiveness: how could they tell that we weren’t working for the landlords or the police? The city guys, our comrade counterparts in this village, came out from their huts and everything was settled. Samir was going to stay at Babu Mandi’s, and I in the hut of Bir Mandi, his cousin, three doors down, a new-looking hut, the last one before the forest took over. The others, Ashu, Debashish and Dipankar, were none of them more than two or three huts away. Five of us here — I began to take comfort in this increase in our ranks.

We were led into the jungle by Ashu, Debashish and Dipankar. (Dipankar was slightly older than us, just over thirty, I’d say. He had read Mechanical Engineering in Jadavpur University, then briefly joined a private firm before giving up. Of the three of them, I got closest to him.) I was entranced, suddenly, by the forest. It was indistinguishable from the one we had hidden in before going to Belpahari, but now, I didn’t know why, it absorbed all my attention, so much so that Samir quipped — You’re getting a bit besotted by it. Could it be that the innate poet in you, dormant for so long, is waking up at last?

Maybe there was a little bit of an aesthetic awakening. Maybe it was because we were almost within the jungle in Gidighati, whereas in Majgeria we had had to walk a mile or two to enter it properly. But most of all it was to do with another kind of growing revelation: how well it could serve our purposes. Our comrades here had worked it out: Ashu and Dipankar said, for example, that it was possible to walk to the nearby villages, even most of the distance to Belpahari, without leaving the forest. A whole green corridor that could afford us safety.

The jungle could be our shelter, but in this arid corner of Binpur, far away from rivers, how were guerrillas going to survive in the forest without ready access to food and water?

I said — If we begin to live in the forest instead of a village, the poor villagers won’t be at the receiving end of police repression.

This had been weighing on my mind a lot. I had had a glimpse of the kind of hell that the police had unleashed over powerless people.

Ashu spoke my unsaid thoughts — Where are we going to get food and drink? What are we going to do in the monsoon?

— Couldn’t we visit the villages periodically and stock up?

— That would still leave them open to police brutality. They would be terrorised by the state into not cooperating with us. At least if we stay in the villages, our presence there keeps them militant.

And so it went, round and round and round. In any case, a mass action was deferred until just after harvest, so Samir and I were grounded here for the next seven months at least.

Ashu, Dipankar and Debashish had already undertaken two guerrilla actions in Gidighati in as many months. One was a standard stabbing, they said and, by the sound of it, it didn’t seem to be very different from our job on Senapati: waylaying first in the dark, then the quick business with a hashua (they cut his throat). The second one was more interesting. I’ll write down Ashu’s words as closely as I can reproduce them from memory. (Full of swearing, which I’ve cleaned up. If you heard him speak, you wouldn’t be able to tell that he used to be a medical student. You’d mistake him for one of those wastrels who stands in a small gang at paan-bidi shops on street corners in South Calcutta and makes catcalls to every passing woman.) Here is his account.

— Name: Harekrishna Das. Walks around as if his father’s bought the whole place for him. We’ve had our eye on him ever since we came here after the Chadak Mela last year. He’s got his filthy pig’s snout in every trough of shit: moneylending, pawnbroking, smuggling. . everything you can think of. A week after we send Haren Patra over to the other side in two halves, head first, body later, this Harekrishna begins to walk everywhere with a guard next to him. Our eyes pop out on stalks. Can you believe, a personal bodyguard in tow, going wherever he goes, sitting when he sits, running when he runs? What if we attacked Harekrishna while he was shitting, eh? The bodyguard would be there too? Anyway. The fat, greasy fool goes around twirling his umbrella and saying smugly, No one can touch me, I have a guard to protect me, look, he’s following me. That expression on his face alone would make you want to relieve mankind of his existence. Anyway. So we hide behind a bush and leap out one evening. The guard, who’s armed only with a lathi, tries to put up some sort of a fight, but we can tell that his heart is not in it. He sees we have knives and axes, so all he wants is to run away and save his own life. We say to him, Aren’t you ashamed to be in the pay of a dog like this? This dog is your class enemy, generations and generations of these dogs have exploited generations and generations of your people, and will carry on doing so eternally, so why would you want to serve him? We snatch his lathi off him and say, We’ll let you go because you are a poor man and we’re fighting for people like you, we’re on your side, but don’t let us catch you working for dogs like this again. Then we give him a few blows with his own lathi and he runs off over the fields so fast you’d think he was late for his own funeral. Harekrishna, meanwhile, is pinned to the ground by Dipankar and this Santhal lad, Babu’s nephew. We have him well and truly in our clutches now, there’s no way that fat corpse of his can move, he knows this too, so he starts begging for mercy. What sweet music. We know we’re going to slit his bloated stomach, pull out his guts and stuff his open mouth with it, but we let him sing for a while. He believes that if he pleads and begs we’re going to relent and let him go after a few slaps. We let him believe that — it was hilarious. The usual, you know: I have a wife and three small children, an ill ageing mother, they’re going to land in deep water if something happens to me, who’s going to look after them? We remind him, Did you think of the little children and ill ageing mothers of the destitute men, broken by your torture, their blood sucked dry by you? His stomach was so fat that the hashua sprang back when I tried to stick it in. Then I thought it would be more fun to slit his belly open only a little bit, like surgeons do during an operation. He was squealing like a sacrificial goat, so we couldn’t carry on with our games for very long, people would come running. How I wish we could have let him squeal for longer after I made that big, curved cut on his pot-belly. It looked like a smiley face. Then Dipankar says, Okay, we need to finish this and go. I think of slitting one of the veins in his neck and letting him bleed slowly to death, as they do in Muslim abattoirs, but in the end I show him mercy, find his jugular and, sataak! He really looked like a slaughtered fattened-goat.