A Time Outside This Time

by Amitava Kumar

  CHAPTER 4

  THE FALL OF A SPARROW

  My South African artist-friend Bev announced to us that she and her husband were returning to Johannesburg. Her husband, she said, suffered from an immune deficiency disorder. It was risky for them to stick around any longer at the residency. I wondered whether I should be alarmed. Only one case had been reported in Washington State. In Davos, Trump told a reporter, “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s—going to be just fine.” Did I believe Trump? To be honest, I wanted to. I didn’t want to panic like Bev. Bev’s sister, a doctor in London, had said that the new flu-like virus from China was by now probably everywhere. She was saying that it was already too late. So far, nine people had died in China and the number of those the virus had sickened was around five hundred. The media had reported Trump’s statements, and not Bev’s sister’s, and I wanted to finish writing my stories. The rational part of me understood the danger, and I knew time was short. So, I cut down on my long, leisurely walks among the olive trees and on my sessions at the lake, and pushed on with my story about the time I caught a plane that took me from Kolkata to Siliguri.

  * * *

  —

  IN EARLY JANUARY 2018 I went to Kolkata for a literary festival.

  The previous week I had spent time with my father in our old home in Patna, where my younger brother runs a clothing and luggage business. There were new shops in my hometown: a spa had opened nearby, perhaps the first in the whole state, and I went for a massage except the man climbed on my back to knead me with his knees. It was painful. Politely, urgently, I had to ask him to step off. Change was visible everywhere, tall buildings, more cars, women driving scooters, but something in the heart of the town stayed the same: on the morning I left for Kolkata I read in the newspaper that when two young men were asked to pay for their haircut in a barbershop in Patna, one of them took out a gun and shot the barber in the stomach. The barber’s daughter came running out from a small room on the side and the young men pushed her into a car and drove away.

  In Kolkata I did a reading from a novel called The Lovers that I had recently published, and the next day I participated in a panel discussion on the role of criticism in literature. Only ten people came to the event, but all of them were educated and highly opinionated Bengalis. An angry debate ensued; I didn’t need to utter a word. Half an hour later, I was in a hired car headed to the airport: I was flying to Siliguri, a small town only an hour away in the mountains. The man I was going to meet was a professor of English literature at the regional college. He taught five days a week: eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English literature and also the plays and poems of William Shakespeare.

  The morning was chilly, and, leaving behind the busy road lined with wholesale shops selling tea leaves, I entered a lane near a Bata shoe store. The scatter and press of the traffic was now behind me. In the lane, there was a public urinal on the left and on the right a half-finished building with a green net hanging down from the roof. A man with a wooden cart crossed in front of me. I kept walking down the empty lane before I came to a two-story house with a jackfruit tree, grenade-shaped green fruit clinging to its branches and trunk. I climbed the stairs and rang the bell. The professor, Biplab Ghosh, middle-aged, bespectacled, opened the door. He had a goatee and wore a blue-and-white sleeveless sweater-vest. The vest gave him a bright air but his eyes conveyed reserve. We sat at a table inside. There were paperbacks packed into metal bookshelves around us and two posters for Brecht’s plays adapted into Bengali. Ghosh remained courteous and distant. I repeated the name of a friend, Naveen, who had also been his former student.

  “It was Naveen who asked me to meet you,” I said.

  The professor was puzzled. He could see I had traveled some distance to see him.

  “Why?” he asked.

  * * *

  —

  IN INDIA, FOR some reason people saw me as American: just before one of my readings at the lit fest in Kolkata, a writer from Bengaluru leaned over to show me what he was reading on his phone. It was an op-ed from The New York Times (January 7, 2018): “Mr. Trump’s self-absorption, impulsiveness, lack of empathy, obsessive focus on slights, tenuous grasp of facts and penchant for sometimes far-fetched conspiracy theories have generated endless op-ed columns, magazine articles, books, professional panel discussions and cable television speculation.” I read from my novel, but the questions from the audience were about the feeling among writers in America. I didn’t know many writers; I could only speak for myself. I said I felt that the rug of reality was being dragged out from under our feet. Twenty times a day, I see something and think, I don’t know if this is true. We are awash in fake images, false claims, all manner of deceptions, pointless misinformation, murderous fictions. Language acts are unsteady, surreal. You don’t know what you’re looking at. But there was also something I did not tell the audience. When I had been visiting my father in Patna, I watched on television a report about a famous insurgent killed by the police near Kolkata the previous year. The television report was sensational and repetitive, but it was also mysterious, the more informative parts revealed only by a man who appeared as a dark silhouette and whose voice had been disguised by the use of a mechanical device. As I listened to the man’s voice on the screen I wanted to know more.

  This story I now recounted to Professor Ghosh. I said to him that in the United States the news we were getting even during the run-up to the elections had been manufactured by unemployed youth in Macedonia and spread on Facebook. There were reports also of Russian interference. There was such radical uncertainty about every aspect of not just our polity but reality itself. (A reviewer had written in a magazine the previous month: “It’s a profound relief, these days, to press our collective feverish forehead against the cold steel of actual information.”) What was true of America was true of other places, too. All over India, malicious rumors were being shared on WhatsApp, on our TV screens loud rants competed with lurid accounts of nearly everything happening on the planet, and people everywhere unquestioningly embraced angry, wounding fictions.

  I repeated Ghosh’s question back to him. I told Ghosh that I wanted to see him because I had been watching the TV report that night in Patna and the thought had come to me: Why don’t I write a report on this incident? A well-researched story. Perhaps I could even reach out and find the man who appeared as a silhouette on my screen. I wanted to find the truth—to start with, about the man who had been killed. An insurgent in the wilderness, a guerrilla leader fighting for peasant rights. How had he managed to shake the confidence of the state? In what way had he survived, and under what conditions? How did he die? He was a rebel with a charismatic appeal, but, if we were to believe the man in the shadow on the screen, his death was the result of a popular, well-executed plan.

  I had imagined someone addressing a meeting in a forest and then turning up magically in a crowded room in a town late at night to speak to a group of radical students. Everywhere, his audience held spellbound by the look in his eyes and the conviction in his voice. At dawn, he put a towel over his head and melted into the crowd at the town’s bus depot. A young woman asleep in a bus, or pretending to sleep, with her head on the shoulder of this man, who looked like an old farmer returning from town with his purchase of new fertilizers. The young woman is the best shot in the entire squad and that is why a revolver is hidden in the jute bag in her lap. But what she doesn’t know, despite her intimacy with the man, and I know it only because I stand on the other side of the wall called the past, is that the man who is a leader to so many will soon have his jaw shattered by gunfire.

  Ghosh made no indication if my answer was sufficient. The window was open despite the cold. A car passed on the street outside, the engine rattling. I could hear quiet laughter somewhere close and the air carried a whiff of cigarette smoke. I imagined a few youth, maybe even Gh
osh’s students, sitting and chatting at a chai stall nearby.

  I continued and said to the professor, because I knew he taught Shakespeare, that I had listened to the account of how the small army of insurgents battled the state and my mind had gone back to a performance I had watched of Macbeth in Central Park. One of the villagers on the TV show had looked at the camera and said that the militia, the Naxalites, was active in the forests; his actual words were “You sometimes feel that the forests are moving.” It had reminded me of Macbeth’s undoing: his enemies using tree branches from Birnam Wood to camouflage their advance.

  Suddenly, Ghosh smiled and said when he thought of a death like that of the peasant leader, he was reminded not of Macbeth but of Hamlet. He had taught Hamlet often because it posed a question for his young students. Leaning back in his chair, he began to talk about Hamlet’s stepfather arranging for a fencing match between Hamlet and his friend Laertes. Laertes is sure to feel he has been wronged by Hamlet. Hamlet was responsible for the death of Laertes’s father, Polonius. And Ophelia, who went mad and drowned herself as a result of Hamlet’s actions, was Laertes’s sister. There must be a darker purpose behind the proposal for the fencing match. That is what Hamlet’s friend Horatio tells him. He suggests that if there is any suspicion or doubt in Hamlet’s mind, he will go ahead and call the whole thing off. He will use the excuse that Hamlet is not fit. And Hamlet’s response to this is—and here the professor raised his right hand to declaim, his gesture familiar from what one saw of statues—“Not a whit, we defy augury.” Do you understand? Hamlet goes on: “There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow.” He raised his eyebrows, paused, and then repeated that line. “There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow.” He said he had always liked those lines because they were loaded with fatality. Listen, he said, and then went on. “If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness is all. Since no man, of aught of what he leaves knows, what is’t to leave betimes?”

  “Hamlet,” the professor said, “claimed that he didn’t believe in omens. Especially for an Indian listener, Hamlet seemed to be asserting individual agency and rationalism. And yet, his whole response was a submission to fate.”

  The professor acted as if he were in class, pausing to allow me to take notes. He went on talking.

  “Surrender or a resolve to be prepared for anything? When I teach that passage,” he said, “I often discuss scenes from Hindi cinema. An angry young man is a figure of protest, but larger forces arrayed against him are far too powerful and, in the end, the hero dies a tragic death. His death is tragic but dignified. It’s almost as if the hero has willed it. I think that is what students are readily able to see in Hamlet.”

  When Ghosh mentioned the angry young man and Hindi cinema, I saw in my mind not the actor Amitabh Bachchan but the guerrilla leader whose killing had been reported on the television program I had watched. He must have foreseen his death, or not balked when it became inevitable, and when was it not inevitable? I said to Ghosh, perhaps a bit too eagerly, “I could write a long report that would be titled ‘The Fall of a Sparrow.’ ”

  “Oh,” the professor said, his spectacles shining. “You already have a theory? I thought you were first going to research the story.”

  We sat alone in silence. There were two bookshelves pushed against the wall on my left. Russian novels, histories of peasant revolt, the broken spine of a green leather volume of the collected works of Shakespeare, a few books of Bengali poetry.

  Professor Ghosh saw me looking at the books and asked me if I would like coffee.

  I looked at his books while he moved around in the small kitchen—unusual for a remote town in India, I thought, first grinding the coffee beans and then percolating the ground coffee in a hissy machine.

  The coffee was excellent. Ghosh asked me, “Did Naveen tell you why he sent you to me?”

  I tried to be honest. I told him Naveen had appeared busy when I asked—he had simply sent me the professor’s address on WhatsApp and told me to meet him.

  Professor Ghosh stayed quiet. I knew a little bit about him from before. His father had been a famous communist leader. He was underground during a long period that outlasted my youth; when I was already in the United States for my studies, I read a news report about the older Ghosh’s arrest. Was he tortured in prison? I can’t remember. He must have been. I had read about a radical poet from his cohort being picked up from a house in Kolkata and then, only hours later, found shot in the back under a mango tree. The detail that remained in my mind about the man who was sitting in front of me—he had been quite young, a schoolboy, when his father was arrested—was what he had said in an interview. At the time that he was taken to identify his father’s corpse he noticed that the soles of his father’s feet had turned black in police custody. This noticing on the youth’s part had moved me and filled me with tenderness. Professor Ghosh’s father had long suffered from asthma. The police had denied him his medicines. It was said that he died gasping for air.

  “The expert you saw on TV speaking about the well-executed plan,” Ghosh said presently, “was once my student. He was a police officer. His name is Ravi Shankar. He is retired now. I can put you in touch with him.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “Where does he live?”

  “Kolkata,” Professor Ghosh said.

  The professor said that he also knew the man who was killed and not just the man responsible for killing him. This was perhaps the reason that Naveen had asked me to meet him. When he said this, with his sense of practiced reserve, I stayed silent, hoping that my silence was what he expected or required of me.

  And again, after a lengthy pause, Professor Ghosh said, “The man who was killed was named Avinash. He was a great peasant leader. He is dead and you can’t ask him any questions but you can talk to the man who killed him. Ravi Shankar is also from Bihar. For three years, when I was teaching in Kolkata, he was my student. Later, he joined the police service. You can tell him that I gave his name to you, and you can hope that he will talk to you.”

  On the back of an envelope he copied down information from a small diary. But before giving me the piece of paper he said he wanted me to know something important.

  He said, “Did you notice that when you were watching the show on television in Patna, Ravi Shankar’s voice sounded different?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I noticed that it had been disguised.”

  “No,” he said quietly. “It is not a disguise.”

  Just months after Avinash was executed by the police, Ghosh told me, the Naxalites exploded two bombs under Ravi Shankar’s convoy. The attack was seen as an attempt to take revenge for Avinash’s death. Some people believed Avinash hadn’t been killed in the encounter, only injured, and afterward he was tortured brutally. Ghosh said he didn’t know the truth. But, in any case, during the bomb attack on the police convoy, the explosion sent shrapnel through Ravi Shankar’s jaw and throat. He was in hospital for some time and resigned from the service when he came out.

  “He cannot speak without the use of a prosthetic device,” Ghosh said. “I felt I should warn you.”

  * * *

  —

  RAVI SHANKAR’S HOME was in an upscale apartment building. At the entrance a security guard instructed me to enter my name in a register and then he called a phone number on the intercom. I was sent up. Earlier, from my hotel room, I had called the number that Professor Ghosh had given me. A woman had answered and then I heard the voice I had heard on TV, except on the phone, oddly enough, it sounded more grating, even garbled. I told him that I was a professor in the United States—it is always better than saying that I’m a journalist. When I mentioned Professor Ghosh’s name, he considered this for a second and then asked me where I was staying. My hotel was actually a posh, pretentious place called the Bengal Club, and the room had been arranged by a writer fr
iend of mine who was a member there. I think the name of the stuffy club with its colonial trappings struck the right chord with Ravi Shankar. He proceeded to give me directions to his house and now there I was.

  Ravi Shankar was a tall man, plain, rather ordinary-looking. The air of authority he nevertheless possessed could simply be a result of the fact that I was in his home. Just inside the door, a gleaming silver saber embossed with a police insignia rested in a satin-and-glass box hanging from the wall. There were photographs of Ravi Shankar and a woman. On the coffee table, I saw a book on cricket, and under that, lying facedown, its pages open, was another book, this one by the sociologist Ashis Nandy. When Ravi Shankar spoke, he pressed a finger on an opening at his throat. It wasn’t difficult to understand him, but I have to admit that I was unused to this form of communication, and, perhaps because I couldn’t escape the thought that I was intruding, I felt ill at ease and nervous.