The Lives of Others

by Neel Mukherjee

  They come from the suburbs, the villages, the mofussils, to look for work in the big city. From Uluberia, Bansdroni, Ghutiarishwari, Medinipur, Birbhum, Lakshmikantapur, Canning. The lucky among them will become rickshaw-pullers, balloonwallas, streetside snack-sellers. The less lucky will dig ditches, carry bricks, sand, cement, stone chips on their heads on construction sites. Some will be reduced to begging. You may ask: why don’t they go back to where they came from, if this is what the city holds for them? I will answer with another question: do you know what life holds for them back home? We don’t see them, so we don’t think about them. But I have seen their lives, I have lived with them. For a while. I will tell you all about it.

  But a small digression before that. You come from a lower-middle-class family from a small town. You’ve told me about the overstretched resources, the pinched lives, the relentless calculation of making ends meet going through your parents’ heads, the need to think long and hard, say, before you could be given five paise to spend on jhalmuri. You’ve talked about the look of fear in your parents’ faces when you came down with a cough or fever: where was the extra money for a doctor, to buy medicines, going to come from?

  What did I know of such lives, sheltered, bourgeois boy that I was, living in the cushioned vacuum created by my grandfather’s temporary boom of minor-mode prosperity – four-storeyed house, cars, many servants? Nothing. Yes, I was a communist activist from my very first year in Presidency College, but there is a large gap between being an activist out of the idealism that comes from books, conversations, the fire of youth, and being one because you have lived through the depredations that life has thrown at you.

  Last year, I witnessed riots outside a ration shop on Beniatola Lane on my way to college. Had you heard of food riots erupting everywhere in the city? Food prices rising like a baneful wind, no jobs, no prospects, no future – how could we not have heard the pervasive murmur outside our walls? And when the murmurs turned to shouts and slogans and angry processions and bus-burnings and violent demonstrations, did they impinge on our world at all? Yes, but as other people’s stories, as gossip, as tales told to fill the time.

  One day on my way to college I had to get off the bus near Pataldanga Street because a huge procession was making its way down Harrison Road. ‘We want jobs, not diplomas!’ they shouted. Trying to avoid the big road where that giant, angry river in spate, a river of black heads, was inching its way, taking up all space, I started walking down side-streets. On Beniatola Lane there was another angry crowd, more shouting, furious tussling and stampeding. Occasionally, from that jostling clot, a man carrying a huge jute sack peeled off and tried to run away, hampered by the weight of his load. It took me a while to realise that a ration shop was being raided. The line between spectators and participants had been totally erased: anyone entering the street would have taken me, in the first few seconds, as part of the angry crowd too. Apparently the ration-shop owner had opened the shop, only to announce to the restive queue outside that he had no rice, kerosene or wheat to sell, only jaggery. Someone had shouted out that the shopkeeper was stockpiling staples to sell on the black market, and the idea had caught like a burr to soft wool. The people who had been waiting for hours every Thursday and Friday for over a month, only to go back home empty-handed, their food supplies depleted to practically nothing, had reached the end of their patience. A couple of local mastaans had leaped over the low gate in the front and started ransacking the shop. Others had joined in, distrustful of the mastaans, suspecting them of making off with the grains themselves to sell on the black market.

  Ordinary, middle-class people, like you and me, scrabbling like dogs over food. How did we get to this?

  Yes, as a student in Presidency College, I was ‘doing politics’, as the slightly shaming, slightly dirty expression would have it. I was, briefly, a member of the Students’ Federation, the student wing of the CPI(M), the Communist Party of India (the Marxist wing, as they like to think of themselves), and while I was their bright, short-lived star, I cut my teeth doing the usual. If posters had to be put up, if slogans had to be painted on walls, I provided copy (‘Exploited peoples all over the world are waking up today’, ‘Change the world, change yourself’, ‘Today is the day to burn like fire, to repay the debt of blood with blood’, ‘Poor, landless peasants have given their lives and blood to build this country. It’s our duty to repay that debt’). I decided who among us was going to work in which segment of the college or the city, I worked out the most favourable time to do it, safe from a possible crackdown by the police or Congress foot soldiers. If a procession or a sit-in needed to be organised, or a road-blockade or a bus-burning, I planned the route and logistics and exact manner of its execution, complete with fallback options, working out the possible weak points and allowing for those eventualities. There were class boycotts, and marches to the American Embassy to protest against the war in Vietnam, chanting, ‘Break and crush the black hand of American imperialism’ or ‘Your name, my name / Viet-nam, Viet-nam’. Another popular one was ‘Blood-bright Vietnam is Bengal’s other name’.

  Coinciding with these standard issues of student politics there erupted the troubles in Presidency College over the expulsion of students from the Hindu Hostel. I was an active participant in the movement that rocked Presidency and genteel Bengali society in those six months in ’66 and ’67. Chucking a few young men out of the Hindu Hostel seems like such a small stone to have caused such endless ripples. The Food Revolution agitations in the city in ‘66 morphed seamlessly into this front of our war: the gherao of the college Principal, the subsequent lathi-charge by the police against the students standing guard at the gate of the college (since the police had no right to enter), the arrest of 150 of them, the angry ransacking of the science laboratory by the agitating students. Yes, I was part of the group that shut down all of Calcutta University for one and a half months and Presidency College for four. Unprecedented, this. All of these events, or their telling as stories, seem just a spark now, a tiny one; in time that spark will appear even tinier, dimmer. The blaze it lit, however, will far outlive the originary ignition.

  I played a similar role here too, but with a difference, as you’ll see. All our actions, initially, were under the aegis of the CPI(M). I devised plans to get around Section 144, under which all of College Street had been placed during that period, meaning that the police could arrest you if they didn’t like your face. How to avoid them during processions? If they were stationed on Harrison Road and near the Medical College, I decided that going down College Street in one big crowd wouldn’t do. So the marchers were divided into two groups: one would start from the gate of Hare School, the other from College Square. If one set was obstructed by the police on this side, then the other could proceed past Eden Hostel towards Colutolla.

  It’ll become clear shortly why I wasn’t part of that group of twenty-two, including ‘names’ such as Kaka and Biman Basu and Ashoke Sengupta, who picketed the college, sitting at the gate on mats for a month. Members of the Chhatra Parishad (CP), the student wing of the Congress Party, a synonym for the Establishment, threw a bomb at them from the roof of the Coffee House to scare them away. In the early days of our agitation, when it became a badge of honour to be arrested and beaten up in a police cell in Sovabazaar, a thought struck the less volatile among those of us who were planning strategy on a daily basis: if everyone is arrested, especially everyone in the leadership, who is going to continue the movement? On the day of the gherao, at 10 p.m., seven hours after it had begun, three of us were smuggled out of the police cordon surrounding the college. We knew its nooks and crannies, the porous bits of its boundaries, better than they did. It was done before the lathi-charging began, so we escaped untouched.

  As for the twenty-two recalcitrant strikers who took to sleeping on the college lawn – yes, I attended to them, sat with them, spent hours in their company, as hundreds of others did, but from the beginning it was clear that it wouldn’t do for m
e to be part of them. An invisible shadow separated me from the rest. I had severe misgivings about it, as did several others, who taunted me about how safe I had kept myself, how unbloodied my hands were, how full my stomach when they were having to eat their six-anna meal in the slums of Kalabagan, or in Bagbazar, where the beggars of North Calcutta paid thirteen paise to eat bread, vegetables, onion and pickle. Some of these criticisms were spoken to my face; most of the murmuring was behind my back. Trained as an economist as I was, I held on to the lifeline of pragmatism and efficiency: would you, I asked them, damage your head or your fingers? In a war, as this clearly was, would you sacrifice a pawn or the king? How would you find your way in the densest of forests if you lost your compass?

  I didn’t think of myself as the king or the compass, but I knew I couldn’t extinguish myself in the fray of student politics. This was a side-show, a diversion. It was one of the biggest lessons I learned; the inevitable end of innocence, you could call it, so necessary to growing up. All these strikes – student strike, tram strike, bus strike – all this great ferment to close down all of Bengal, to search for alternatives . . . with what immense hope we began, that we could change the world, not one little thing at a time, but in one great unstoppable propulsion, as if we could stand outside the whole planet, put a giant lever under it and set it rolling in a different direction altogether. Throughout my two years in CPI(M) student activism (embarrassing now, in hindsight, and amateurish), one thought became steadily inescapable: we could only poke the government into a kind of low-grade irritability, but never scale that up to something life-changing, something that would bring the system crashing down. All this hurling of bombs, burning of trams, headlines in newspapers – to what avail? The condition of the people remained unchanged. Life carried on as before, restored to its status quo, like the skin of water after the ripples from a thrown pebble have died away, as if the surface retained no memory of it.

  And what drove home that lesson? The short answer is: the impossibility of staying within the fold of the CPI(M). When the general election was called in 1967, the Party tried to rein in the more militant and idealistic amongst us, for fear of losing the chance to be part of a power-sharing government. Orders arrived from the Party head office that we had to call off these strikes; it was of greater importance to win the elections, to wage our war softly-softly and by the rulebook written by the Establishment, by the powerful. So it boiled down to that dirty thing – power. To be part of government, of the established order of things, on the side of institutions, those very ones we thought we were taking a giant wrecking-ball to.

  But things have their own momentum: union leaders who tried to follow orders and call off the strikes were beaten up by their supporters. Those of us who didn’t want to be designated as traitors, as unthinking servants of the Communist Party, which was rapidly becoming every bit as power-hungry, as establishmentarian, as compromised and complicit as the rest, decided to continue with our sit-ins, our roadblocks and bus-burnings.

  I spoke little, and silence is always taken to be a sign of strength. As my fellow revolutionaries raged and shouted and talked blood and fire, my coldness seemed somehow more solid, more reliable than banging on tables, burning trams on the streets, lobbing bombs, shouting slogans.

  Where to source the raw materials for our bombs, where to buy the cheap pipe-guns that were beginning to appear on the market after the war with China, in which warehouse or garage or back room of which house in a tiny alley to assemble explosives without anyone becoming suspicious, where to lob them at CP activists and at what time and at what stage of the clash, where to hide in any given area once the police vans came speeding . . . I became very good at these details, so good that it was decided I should not be visible. This was as much protectiveness on the part of the breakaway, truly left movement as clear, strategic thinking. I was valuable to them, therefore I couldn’t be exposed to the dangers of the frontline. (All this makes it sound as though we sat around in a circle in College Street Coffee House or some tea-shack in Potuatola Lane and worked it out over endless discussions. No, it wasn’t like that. It just came about. Events fall into a pattern that we can only discern retrospectively. We credit ourselves with far more agency than we actually possess. Things happen because they happen.)

  I have come to think of all this ferment as boring and inconsequential compared with what I really had in mind – armed peasant rebellion, an entire and comprehensive rehauling of everything, of land reform, food production, wealth distribution, of realising the full meaning of ‘The crop belongs to those who cultivate it’. Placed beside this aim, all this student unrest was like flies buzzing around a horse: the irritation caused was so ephemeral, it could be dispersed with one lazy swish of the tail.

  It became clear to me that the last thing the CPI(M) was interested in was radical change. I tested how much dissent against this sell-out would be tolerated by articulating my unease as innocent questions. None, it emerged. They even quoted Chairman Mao to justify their betrayal: ‘Battles are waged one by one and enemy battalions are destroyed one at a time. Factories are built one at a time. Farmers cultivate one plot after another. We serve ourselves the total amount of food that we can consume, but we eat it spoonful by spoonful; to eat it in one go would be impossible. This is known as the “piecemeal solution”.’ Their argument went something like this: a small presence of the leftist parties in government may appear to be insignificant, but this will give the opportunity to manoeuvre for more power and that, in turn, for more, until the nation will be run by a government that is wholly communist. India will become Vietnam.

  Towards the end, hearing these words and arguments, especially quotations from Chairman Mao, issuing from the blind mouths of these self-interested, power-hungry, corrupt Communist Party flunkies set fire to my blood. Not a single one of them was truly interested in the revolution to which they paid such assiduous lip-service. All they wanted was power, the rest of the nation could go to hell.

  While the spectre of erstwhile revolutionaries becoming Establishment figures within the folds of that great betrayer, the CPI(M), was painful and intolerable, something else was taking shape, something that was going to explode like a thousand suns in an unsuspecting sky – Naxalbari. For those of us who had been reading Charu Mazumdar’s electric writing in Liberation ever since we joined university, the events of May 1967 themselves were not a surprise so much as the fact that they happened.

  Being a Bengali, one is surprised when all the endless spume and froth of talk suddenly reveals itself to be the front of a gigantic wave of action.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1967

  THE AUTUMN MILDNESS is just beginning to set in. The blue sky is dotted sparsely with cottony white clouds. Children are on holiday and the skeleton of the puja pandal – a wondrous structure made of bamboo and planks and coir ropes and coloured cloth, stretched and ruched and concertinaed across the bones of bamboo, covering them decoratively in furls and drapes – has already been constructed in the piece of land that abuts the Durga temple of 23 Pally. This cathedral of fabric will house the goddess Durga and her four children, Lakshmi, Saraswati, Kartik and Ganesh, two on either side of her, for nearly five days. On the final evening, the clay effigies of the goddess and her children will be immersed in Tolly’s Nala or the Hooghly at Outram Ghat, marking the end of the biggest festival in the Bengali calendar.

  For the last six weeks volunteers organised under the banner of ‘23 Pally Sharbojonin Puja Committee’, consisting mostly of teenagers and young men of the neighbourhood, have gone from door to door, collecting donations for the festival. The intricate, sometimes baroque, light displays have started going up along the street, on trees, on the water tank on the roof of number 11/A/2. This year, the most numerous of them, along the whole length of Basanta Bose Road, all the way to Jogamaya College, are in the form of a fountain tree: a tall column of yellow fairy lights exploding in a six-veined fountain, three on each side, parted i
n the middle like a child’s drawing of a palm tree. The coloured lights of the cascading head, green, blue and red, blink on and off, as do the yellow lights of the column, and the whole thing gives the magical impression of an upward-flowing capital of water spewing into a polite fountain at the head. This is the pièce de résistance of the lighting display. These displays are competitive affairs between neighbourhoods, but this year everyone in Basanta Bose Road looks smug in the knowledge that they have the edge over their rivals’ parsimonious offerings of coloured fluorescent tubes and strings of fairy lights hung on trees and across balconies. The lighting will be turned on in three days’ time.

  A welcoming arch at the entrance to the pandal spells out in lights ‘Sharodiya shubhechha’, autumn good wishes, and the fixture, again made out of lights only, on the water tank on the top of the Dasgupta house features an animated boy kicking a football. The football appears in staccato stasis in three different points of its parabolic trajectory, then reappears, in a slightly Sisyphean manner, at the foot of the kicking boy, for him to start all over again. There is also the light-installation marking the twentieth anniversary of Independence: the Indian tricolour, flanked by one freedom-fighter, Netaji Shubhas Chandra Bose, and one poet, Rabindranath Tagore, has been made to do an impression of stop–start fluttering. Gandhi is, of course, pointedly left out and the light-manufacturers have not tried to simulate a breeze waving Tagore’s long beard. Words of light on top say ‘Twenty Years of Independence 1947–1967’. But everyone agrees that although this has its novelty value, it is nothing compared to those flowing palm trees of light.