This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar's Tale

by Subimal Misra

  ‘When did the police receive the information, and when did the police go to the spot?’

  ‘As soon as we could go, you know…’

  ‘Was the incident purely communal – how did it start?’

  ‘I’m unable to tell you about that, the big babu can tell you…’

  ‘People say the trouble was over cutting railway cables. About who’ll cut cables from which area, that was how it began. Apparently, some Muslim youths had forcibly entered a Hindu area and were cutting the railway cables. After all, ordinary peaceful people can’t do all this. It seems mastaans with the power of their gangs are behind such activities. It’s about occupying territory. What does the police station’s report say about this?’

  ‘I don’t know anything about that, the big babu knows…’

  ‘When will the big babu be back?’

  ‘How would I know that, only the big babu knows.’

  THE BODY – WHERE’S THE BODY?

  On Saturday morning, Tararani Bhuiyan, Manasi Dasi, Tarubala and five children were killed while foraging coal from the garbage hillock in Dhapa. They were buried under a thirty-foot high heap of garbage. Like every day, on this day too at around nine in the morning, small children and women-folk went to the garbage hillock on the Dhapa dumping ground to forage coal. The group dug a hole and burrowed their way in. Suddenly, there was a loud noise and the garbage hillock collapsed. Only one woman, Angurbala Dasi, survived, as most of her body lay outside. Seven of those who died were from Pagladanga, Tararani alone was from Mathpukur. One can see a bulldozer searching for the dead bodies under the thirty-foot-high garbage hillock. Three or four squads of police arrived, and skilfully cordoned off the entire area. A few thousand people from the bastis of Mathpukur and the surrounding areas – emaciated, naked, half-naked, curious and agitated – stood outside the police cordon. The news reached the fire department around noon. They rushed to the accident site and, using hoes to move the earth, began the rescue work. But it wasn’t possible to move a thirty- or thirty-two-foot-high hillock of earth using spades and hoes. The Municipal Corporation then arranged for a bulldozer to be sent from Palmer Bazar. Now the Corporation workers’ eyes were trained on the jaws of the bulldozer. As it dug into the earth, tiny baskets emerged now and then. It was with just such baskets that early in the morning, a group of living humans dug a hole like rats and entered it to forage pieces of coal. Suddenly the public shouts. A leg emerges from the earthen hillock and then disappears. The bulldozer is then moved away and they begin digging the earth with spades. After about five minutes, the body of a girl of about twenty emerges, a crumpled lump wrapped in torn rags. The officers keep saying: ‘There, we’ve found a body!’ The public races towards the spot to identify it. On the other side, across the mud road, sitting beside another crumpled lump of a body wrapped in rags, is her father, an eighty-year-old man with shining white hair. The name of the body is Tarubala. Mother of five children. She had left in the morning, like every day, to forage coal. If they sold the coal, they would get about three rupees in the evening. With that she could feed her children. Someone said that Tarubala had told the daughter on her bosom that, for the coming Puja, she would buy her a toy. The girl sits on a pile of dirt and puts handfuls of earth into her mouth. Earth – yes, earth. With astonished eyes, she gazes fixedly at the crows flying around chaotically. All around her are many crows, and a couple of sparrows. After searching continuously until eight in the evening, the fire brigade personnel and the officer-in-charge of Tiljala police station are drenched with perspiration: There are no more bodies buried under the earth. If there are, we’ll look into that later. A police picket is posted in front of the garbage hillock. The basti-dwellers frequently come to the garbage hillock to forage coal. Someone says: ‘They are prepared to take any kind of risk for just two handfuls of rice.’ ‘This dangerous garbage hillock causes accidents but it also provides a handful to eat once a day,’ says the white-haired eighty-year-old man, sitting beside his dead daughter’s body. He knows that this kind of accident has occurred several times at the garbage hillock near Dunlop Bridge, and that many people have died, everyone in the locality knows about it. He says: ‘What will we people do – what will we eat? Would anyone willingly go to do such work, babu, only to die?’

  THE RULE OF PEASANTS SHALL BE ESTABLISHED

  THE RIGHTS OF DESTITUTE FOLK SHALL BE PROCLAIMED

  The inauguration ceremony of the new building of the Itanagar Gram Panchayat’s office, in Gorubathan No. 2 Block, was to take place today. The date had been fixed after consulting the almanac. Boys, old men, women and men, everybody had been crowding there since morning. The panchayat office building had been beautifully decorated with red and blue paper garlands. An elevated dais had been made in the field in front. A massive pandal had been erected. The gram pradhan was running around busily in a punjabi with exquisite embroidery of coloured threads, holding the end of the pleat of his fine dhuti, fan-like in his hand, and calling out loudly to people. He issued instructions, one after another. His chelas and subordinates were running around busily. Some bare-bodied men with gamchas on their shoulders stood in front, rubbing their hands. They wanted to catch the pradhan’s attention. Furrowing his brow, he indifferently issued a few instructions and bits of advice to them too. Two people ran to lay out the tarpaulin sheet, it was covered in dust. The peasants and other non-entities of the village would sit there. Some others went to arrange chairs and benches. The former zamindar, Roychoudhary babu, would come, the teachers of the high school too, and many more influential persons as well. The chairs and benches were for them. The chairman of the panchayat samiti arrived then, accompanied by the administrator of the panchayat. Avoiding the crowd of poor village folk, he led the chairman and moved ahead to show him the panchayat office and the dais erected for the programme. The gram pradhan was rubbing his hands, enquiring whether all the arrangements were in order and requesting a careful scrutiny. The chairman went around and saw everything. He pointed out a couple of flaws in the decoration of the stage. Hearing the loud noise of static on the mic, he issued the order: ‘That won’t do, hey, change that just now!’ After that, he went directly to check the food arrangements. If this was not handled well … nobody would be satisfied. The time for the inauguration steadily neared. Government officers had started arriving in ones and twos. Jeeps and cars formed a line on the village’s mud road. Everyone held handkerchiefs to their noses because of the dust being kicked up everywhere. It would definitely lead to dust allergy. The block development officer and the sub-divisional officer arrived one after another. But there was no sign of him, the one who would inaugurate, the great sabhadhipati of the zilla parishad. The officials had begun muttering quite a while back. The auspicious time-window was passing. The officers looked at their watches every once in a while. About four hours after the scheduled time, the sabhadhipati’s car was spotted. A jeep in front, and another one behind. The tricolour fluttered at the tip of the car’s nose. As soon as he neared, the masses shouted out the victory chant: Sabhadhipati Govardhan Purkait Ki Jai! Hundreds of voices chanted back in reply: Jai! The girls in red-bordered saris blew conch shells with full gusto. The whole place resounded with the victory chant and the poan-poan of the conch shells. The BDO sahib assisted the sabhadhipati in getting out of the car. The officers came forward with smiling faces. The programme dais was adjacent to the road. A printed silk sari had been laid out for the sabhadhipati to walk on. The colourful sari had been bought and kept for the purpose a long while back, on the advice of the panchayat officials. The volunteers stood next to one another and formed a chain by joining their hands to control the bursting crowd of village folk. The sabhadhipati slowly made his way to the dais. The SDO, BDO, pradhan and chairman of the panchayat samiti ascended the dais after him. A girl wearing a Love Story frock planted a dot of sandalwood paste on the sabhadhipati’s forehead, and after that began the ritual of garlanding him on behalf of various organizations. There was jostl
ing over who would garland him first. The officials of the oldest youth club of the locality asserted that they should be asked to garland him first. The panchayat members protested this vociferously. That could simply not be permitted. It was the turn of the panchayat samiti before anyone else, before anything else. After one or two exchanges it got physical. Finally, after the BDO’s intervention, both sides restrained themselves. After this, the name of each of the organizations was announced and the organization’s representative came and placed a garland on the neck of the sabhadhipati. He was adorned with twenty-seven garlands, one after another. After that began the sabhadhipati’s real task. The speech:

  ‘Friends, on the auspicious occasion of the inauguration of the new building, we have come up with a special plan…

  We shall paint these new panchayat offices with the colour that’s on the walls of Writers’ Building in Calcutta because each one of these is a Writers’ Building for the administration and management of village government…’ Applause erupted from all quarters. From the SDO and BDO to the pradhan, everyone clapped their hands loudly and for a long time. In a corner under the dais, an emaciated man with a dirty gamcha on his shoulder was spitting on the earth then and expressing his opinion through gnashed teeth: ‘Swindlers, the whole lot of them…’ In all the noise of clapping his voice did not even reach the ears of the man beside him.

  ADDITION

  FROM A DIARY NOTE

  I’ve seen from my own experience that, irrespective of party, 90 per cent of the elected representatives of the gram panchayat, panchayat samiti or zilla parishad are of a feudal mentality and from a particular opportunistic class – school and college teachers, quacks, brief-less lawyers, contractors, bus-owners, retired government employees, and quite a few influential persons, such as members of the managing committee of organizations like cooperative banks. The people of the whole area may be uneducated and illiterate, but most of these people belong to the educated class. After receiving the panchayati raj training, all these people understand everything about laws and their ramifications within two days, they are unwilling to think of any of the village folk as equal to them. Just like the erstwhile zamindars and landlords, they too have status – senior officers and officials, from the officers-in-charge of police stations to the ministers in Writers’ Building, dwell in their charmed circle. Whenever the opportunity arises, full of the pride of their own power, they will recite from memory Article 40 of the Constitution of India: The State shall take steps to organize village panchayats and to endow them with such powers as may be necessary to enable them to function as units of self-government. ‘I am a full-fledged, constitutionally empowered, elected representative of village government, a legally authorized controller. Every person of the region will be bound to act according to my instructions – there’s no scope for getting out of hand here – do you understand?’

  CAVE PAINTING

  The colour in the picture was once deep red, but has now faded and become pink in some places and in some places brown. On the other hand, even if the sheen of white has faded, it can be identified. If one looks patiently, one can discern all the images of wild animals in the pictures that have faded and become greenish. In some pictures there are axes, staffs and fierce bows and arrows in people’s hands. They are assembling in the Bengal, Bihar and Orissa border region. A nilgai can be spotted in one place. One can see a herd of buffaloes racing ahead. There are a few people standing in the distance, with hands on their hips. Their appearance is stick-like, moustaches and beards on their faces, a striped pattern on their chests, and a red sign and a rope net in their hands. Why a rope net? What do these people want to trap? There, one can see the two birds of the Mundaka Upanishad, independent yet conjoined, companions on a peepal tree. One of them keeps pecking at the sweet and sour fruits of earthly life, the other is still.

  THIS DIARY NOTE HAD BEEN WRITTEN EARLIER WITHIN A NEWS-CLIPPING, IMPORTANT

  Towards the beginning of his life as an artist, Rodin had made a human statue. It was so immaculate and realistic that people who saw it did not want to accept that it was his own work. They said: This is definitely modelled from a living man. He heard them, but he was indifferent. He did not say anything. After that, whenever he made any statue, he made it either larger or smaller than human size. That was Rodin.

  QUESTION

  A hunter went out from his shelter and after walking five kilometres due south, he killed a bear. Then, walking three kilometres in a westerly direction, he saw that the distance between the place where he killed the bear and his shelter still remained the same. What was the colour of the bear?

  THE BEAR’S COLOUR

  The atom bomb is pre-historic now. Human violence is no longer limited to cobalt bombs or neutron bombs. Using nuclear power to melt the ice in the polar regions and inundate an enemy country, creating earthquakes, causing sea storms, changing the course of rivers to stop them from flowing towards an enemy country, driving away clouds from the sky and stopping rainfall to create famine-like conditions, destroying the ozone layer and initiating a gigantic mass murder through the release of the sun’s ultraviolet rays … the capability to attack using laser and death rays has now come into human hands and people are searching for pretexts to use these on enemy countries.

  PASCAL, FROM BEHIND THE SCENES

  Man is just a trivial creature, the weakest creature in all of nature. However, although trivial, he is a conscious creature. Nature does not have to prepare to engage in warfare in order to destroy him. He can be destroyed in a breath. Yet, even while standing at the edge of death, man is greater than nature, because man has known death through his awareness.

  I’M READING A PAGE FROM MY DIARY OF 1970

  I was sleeping peacefully in my room at night. Suddenly there was loud screaming and weeping. I woke up. I furtively went and stood on the veranda. There had been no lights on the street for a long time. Nevertheless, one could clearly make out that about five people had surrounded a youth. The lane was desolate. The boy was plaintively trying to prove his innocence. The others were repeatedly accusing him in muted tones. Looking at my watch, I saw it was half past one. Could I do something? I called the gentleman in the adjacent flat. He was a senior government officer. Although it was cold, I was perspiring profusely. He stared at me with sleepy eyes. And then he told me slowly: ‘Go to sleep. Shut the doors and windows properly before you go to sleep.’ He shut and latched his door noisily. Just after that, the silence of the dark night effaced the boy’s voice. The shadows on all sides moved away swiftly. For some time, a tear-drenched melancholy tone hovered over the road. And then there was silence. All the doors and windows of the large apartment block were shut. The entire housing complex was still. After staying up for a long while, I went to sleep at some point. It was very late when I woke up in the morning. Stepping out, I heard a lot of talk. Two mechanic boys slept at night in a garage across the road. They peeped through the slit between the doors and saw everything. They did not come out either, in fear. Sometime after the people disappeared, they ventured out bravely and took the wounded boy to hospital, carrying him in their arms. The boy’s life was saved because he received treatment in time. Hearing about it, I wanted to have another cup of tea. I heaved a sigh of relief. I lit another cigarette. As I sipped the tea, I told the person beside me: ‘Do you know, I saw everything clearly last night.’ In an indifferent tone, the unshaven man beside said: ‘Everyone saw it. Turning off the lights … from a narrow slit of the window shutter … everyone. The murderers knew well that none of the babus from the apartment blocks would come out. Not even after a thousand screams. They picked the place well.’

  Democracy doesn’t fill the belly, that’s why democraticsocialism came to our country – hooray for democraticsocialism.

  At first, a drop of rain fell exactly in the middle of his forehead and it was cold – at this sudden assault he looked once at the sky and advanced straight towards the rawk ahead – there, the rawk is vis
ible – don’t you know the rawk … he advances.

  ‘In your first book, you wrote that even if you believed in Marxism, you couldn’t believe in civilization – what do you think about the conflict between Marxism and civilization?’

  The matter, at least to me, is about disbelieving the entire value system of this bourgeois society. A civilization in which the relation between one man and another rests only on the commodity market, competitive exploitation and oppression – I shit on the face of this civilization.

  After that, one evening, when he had crossed the age of forty and was touching forty-five, he saw he was standing atop an enormous wooden platform, the waiting masses from all sides advanced, he was brought in front of the stocks – and at such a time, quite suddenly, the heroine of this story, in tight jeans and round-necked T-shirt, appears hurriedly on the question-and-answer page and begins to sway her body. Yes, sexy. This saves him from the impending stocks. She, the heroine, jumps up and climbs on to a high branch and our hero, No.1, begins to pull at her leg from below. After this, the two of them somersault and begin to wander on the grass and then start singing a full-throated duet. This is not the end of the incident – in the mood of the song, the hero takes off his shirt and the heroine hops on to the bonnet of a moving jeep and begins to deliver a speech on women’s freedom. The spectators watch, they watch and nod their heads and are rapt. The stocks are forgotten for the time being.

  A narrow crack like this and, in the silence, the sound of something collapsing. It is dawn, from the tap comes the sound of the landlord cleaning his tongue. He gets up between a quarter to five and five, he does sit-ups on the roof wearing a red loin cloth, eats gram left to soak overnight in water with slivers of ginger, and then chewing it elaborately, he says: ‘You are a nocturnal creature, mister, when people go to sleep at eleven at night, you sit down with a book. Pay attention to your health, mister, let my electric bill be less, isn’t it written in the scriptures, shariram adyam? What, am I not right?’ The man’s sister, dark-skinned, has recently bought a new pair of go-go goggles. She’s an MA student in history at Rabindra Bharati University. She punctiliously performs Shiv Puja – ‘I’ll get my sister married with thirty tolas of gold, why don’t you find me a good groom, a gold merchant, but the horoscopes must match.’ He was satisfied with milk-less tea. As he sips tea, he hears: ‘There’s no water even to wash after going to the toilet – please leave the tap now, maharani…’ People can keep running away from themselves, but until when, and for how long? … There’s Soviet Russia … planning to send the spacecraft Vega into outer space, fitted with the most modern instruments. The Vega project is designed to collect all the relevant data regarding planet Venus and Hailey’s comet. Monetary offerings are religiously made and pilfered at the Sitala shrine. He never likes the chatter in cities about the purity of village life. The bastis and huge buildings in the cities are not the last word, the peculiarity and multi-dimensionality of thinking is also a part of it. Sipping the last of the tea, he lights a cigarette. Just opposite the lane are the tin and tile roofs of the basti. Beside the petty store and telebhaja shops, a two-arm-lengths-wide mud road enters the basti , after a few houses one finds a tin-sheet workshop, noise emanates from there, day and night. When it rains, capsized paper boats and heaps of excreta float by together from the basti to the main road. Yes, he cannot plough the farmland and harvest the crop, but for sure he can plough the inertness of the mind and harvest the light of freedom – as much as is possible for him … It’s great, carry on … and who doesn’t know that once inertness enters the mind, that same inertness continues to bring darkness in the social, economic and political spheres too.