A Time Outside This Time

by Amitava Kumar

  When I thanked him for allowing me to meet him, Ravi Shankar remained expressionless. He was telling me that it was not his job to make me feel welcome. Unsmiling, he asked me how I knew Professor Ghosh. I said I really didn’t know him. I told him the story of having watched in Patna the TV show, and how a journalist friend had mentioned that I should talk to Ghosh. Was I right to mention Naveen’s name? He was the next person Ravi Shankar asked me about. I gave him the name of my school in Patna. He had asked the questions in quick succession, his face still frozen.

  He said, “Do you know Vishal Kishore?” This time his voice had lost its hostile interrogative edge.

  “Yes,” I said. I remembered Vishal Kishore from my school days in Patna. I had once accidentally burnt a hole through his blazer in the chemistry lab. How old were we then? Fourteen? Fifteen?

  “He is coming today in a couple of hours. Vishal was my batchmate in the police service.”

  Ravi Shankar got up and I heard him making a call from the next room. He was being a good policeman, I thought, checking on my references.

  When he came back into the room, he said, “Why don’t you stay and have lunch? Vishal will join us.”

  You have gone on a safari and are hiding with a pair of binoculars near a watering hole. I’m describing a situation. You are sitting there and time crawls by slowly like an ant on the trunk of an old tree. And then, after a difficult wait, you see on the opposite bank a deer delicately climbing down close to the water’s surface, its nose now nuzzling its own reflection. Your attention is fully focused. Your wait has been rewarded. But then, surprising you but not—or not yet—the deer drinking water, you see, behind in the bushes, the striped head of a tiger that is perfectly still. Such luck! That is what I felt when Ravi Shankar took the name of my old classmate from my high school in Patna. I accepted his invitation to lunch, not suspecting, till some months had passed, that all along it was I who had been that thirsty, unsuspecting deer.

  * * *

  —

  “IT WAS A sort of an experiment,” I said to Ravi Shankar. And even as I used that word—experiment—I felt a tug in my heart. I thought of Vaani. This is how life pays tribute to love. You imitate your beloved. I was using her vocabulary, but I was at least being sincere. I told Ravi Shankar that with each passing year I felt more out of touch with my birthplace. I found this distance from India intolerable. And then, in recent days, after Trump’s election, I had discovered with a new force that I didn’t belong in the United States either. “I was watching you speaking from the shadows on the TV screen that day, I didn’t know it was you, of course, but I felt this great desire to learn from you. I thought to myself, Let me try and find out more about this event that took place. What really happened? Who was involved? Is there a way to take away the mystery and present the truth?”

  Ravi Shankar’s face remained expressionless. Then his finger went up to his throat. He asked, “You want to write about it? For whom?”

  I said I didn’t know. And then, “I would like to write it for myself first. If it felt like a story worth telling, I’d try to get it published.”

  I told him I had written ten books. Why was I telling him this? A man whom men and women in uniform all over Bengal had saluted when he appeared—why would he care about books? Especially by someone who no longer even lived in India. I was trying to tell him that if he talked to me, his time would not be wasted. His words would live on the page. How do you tell someone that the work you do matters? That is a part of the drama that plays out when two strangers meet. You are making space for the other’s humanity, and also for your own, when you crack a joke. And when you are asked about how you earn your living, you are saying this is how I have defined myself in this world. But even as I was telling Ravi Shankar about being a published writer, I secretly thought that I’d like to work hard at my reporting and write a piece for Granta. They had published the great Ryszard Kapuściński’s reportage from foreign lands. I was now a foreigner even in India.

  Ravi Shankar said, “Okay. What do you want to know?”

  I followed a formula I had picked up from a book by V. S. Naipaul about his experience in Iran. Ayatollah Khalkhali, the man that Naipaul was interviewing, had demanded that the writer note down his questions. Naipaul knelt down before him and used a piece of hotel stationery for his questions. “I could think of nothing extraordinary; I decided to be direct.” But it hadn’t worked for Naipaul. The ayatollah had been a disappointment. “He could be prodded into no narrative, no story of struggle or rise. He had simply lived; experience wasn’t something he had reflected on.” I had faith in Naipaul’s questions if only because they sketched a trajectory—and I loved the surprise at the end. In a prison once I had used the same questions with a prisoner convicted of selling a missile to an undercover policeman. I told Ravi Shankar that I had a few questions written out for him on the pad provided by the club where I was staying. Where were you born? What made you decide to become a police officer? What did your father do? Where did you study? What was your role in Avinash’s death? What was your happiest day?

  * * *

  —

  RAVI SHANKAR WAS born in Begusarai, in Bihar, into a family of prosperous landowners. That is what he said at the start. It was a part of his simplicity that he thought of his family as wealthy. From what he said it became clear that there were few luxuries in his boyhood. He had an aunt, his father’s sister, living in what was then called Calcutta; the aunt’s husband was a postal employee. They had brought him up. Ravi Shankar’s father was a farmer and after the boy had cleared high school it was decided that he could study in Kolkata—and not even Delhi, which would have been more expensive—where he spent his days in the college library and slept at night on a folding cot in his aunt’s small house. At the regional college in Kolkata, where he was then employed, Professor Ghosh was Ravi Shankar’s teacher. Ghosh taught English literature; Ravi Shankar’s own interest was in Hindi. Yet, he was drawn to Ghosh because Ravi Shankar saw himself as an artist and “the language of human expression is universal.” He began to name the novels in Hindi he had read by himself while staying at his aunt’s house. Dharamvir Bharati’s Gunahon Ka Devta, Ajneya’s Shekhar: Ek Jeevani, Vinod Kumar Shukla’s Deevar Mein Ek Khidki Rehti Thi, the list went on. It struck me that it was also a part of what I was thinking of as his simplicity that his reading of twenty novels gave him the sense that he had an affinity for the arts and that, at heart, he was an artist.

  In college, Ravi Shankar studied Political Science Honors. He knew of Professor Ghosh’s past, how his father had inspired workers and students to fight for the revolution. The movement swept up in its embrace a lot of people, young people had died on the streets of Kolkata, and in the villages, landless farmers had risen up in revolt and gone after moneylenders with swords and axes. In the end, though, what had stayed with Ravi Shankar was the knowledge that his professor’s mother had struggled to keep the household together. After the father’s arrest and death, it was Professor Ghosh’s mother who brought up the children single-handedly, selling insurance from house to house. Even as a young man, Ravi Shankar decided that he would always be honest but he would also hold legitimate power in his hands. He decided to become a police officer.

  * * *

  —

  I HAD GIVEN him the piece of stationery with my questions. Ravi Shankar looked up at me and said that before he went on to the next query he wanted to say something else. Some years ago, when he was the superintendent of police, he received a call concerning a close friend of his. The friend was the officer in charge of a district in Jharkhand. Earlier that day, the officer’s wife, Usha, had been caught shoplifting. She was stealing lingerie. In the afternoon, Ravi Shankar’s friend put Usha on a train to Meerut, where her parents lived. And then, when he was alone in his bungalow, he shot himself with his service revolver.

  Ravi Shankar said, “Look
around you. Everyone is stealing money. There is a scramble for wealth. My own top subordinate, competent in every other way, has bought property in Goa and sent his son to North Carolina for his undergraduate studies. Where did he get this money? When I got the news of my friend’s suicide, I sat in my home drinking for a long time. My friend was dead and I wished Usha had got a crooked businessman to give her a flat in exchange for an illegal building contract. No piece of lingerie was worth my friend’s life—and I wasn’t going to live, and certainly not die, for something small. I reached the conclusion that I’m so shameless that I could have been a thief. But I’m not. I’ve never wanted more of material things. I’m so utterly without shame that it has never occurred to me to be embarrassed about what I don’t have or to pretend to be what I’m not.”

  When he was saying these things, I felt that Ravi Shankar was telling me the truth and I was moved by his account. Would Vaani have said that Ravi Shankar was only confirming my bias? Perhaps yes. Vaani had greater faith in tests. Remote or electronic tests for personality traits or aptitude to eliminate in-person conscious or unconscious biases. Also, for more complicated assessments, what she called SJTs (for situational judgment tests), which meant that you would have to answer questions like the following:

  Choose the most accurate statement below.

  It is important for me to excel at everything I do.

  I am good at everything I do.

  If you want to be successful, you can’t always put others’ needs first.

  As a writer, I was biased in favor of a revealing expression of experience, an experience that was unique to the individual and delivered in an idiom particular to that person. I was happy to hear what Ravi Shankar had told me so far. He sat with his back straight, a finger on his throat, as if this were a custom of oath taking in some obscure tribe, a tribe in an old civilization that had a hundred words for war but had not as of yet needed a word for lies. I sat opposite him on the comfortable sofa taking notes, faithfully recording what he was saying, not interrupting him with questions. I understood that he was allowing me a glimpse into his soul and its solitude.

  * * *

  —

  A SLIM YOUNG man in a white cotton shirt and trousers brought tea and biscuits on a tray.

  Ravi Shankar said that Avinash’s killing was a routine police operation. It was not too different from so many other things that any police force does. What had helped in this case was a simple strategy that he had adopted ever since he was a junior officer. He said he didn’t care too much for ideological battles; his duty was to help everyone who was in need. In this particular case, he had received help from an informer.

  The informer was a young man whom he had met two or three years earlier. This youth had been beaten up by a ruling party politician during a village meeting. “When he complained to me during a routine visit to the village,” Ravi Shankar said, “I talked to the young man. I told him, ‘Forget for a moment what happened to you. Tell me what will make you a happier person.’ The youth said he was interested in opening a cycle repair shop. I got him enrolled in a government program that supports village employment schemes. He got help. But I also did something else. I gave him a cheap phone and a bit of cash from my officer’s fund. I said to him that he was my eyes and ears in the village. If there was any trouble, he was to just make a short call.”

  “What was this young man’s name?”

  “I don’t think you should use his name,” Ravi Shankar said. “Maybe you can change his name. His real name is Kundan.”

  While Ravi Shankar was speaking, I took notes. I was also recording his voice on my phone. Later, when I returned to New York, I heard his strange voice and the morning came alive for me again. There was a small feeling of dread but also the excitement of discovery. I was telling myself that it had been quite easy. I was getting the truth that had not been available to me before.

  “I didn’t see him again, but every couple of months,” Ravi Shankar said, “I would call Kundan on the phone I had given him. I would ask ordinary questions. Was he doing okay? Did his business need help? I had a whole roster of such people. In several thanas, I had started soccer clubs. The village teams got soccer balls and jerseys from us. I had distributed a few phones among those soccer enthusiasts too. I learned many things in this way. Anyway, one day Kundan told me that his business wasn’t going well. I told him I could increase his payment if he could help me with the problem we were having with the Naxal insurgency in the area. If he couldn’t help, he shouldn’t worry. We would look for another job opportunity for him.”

  Ravi Shankar was explaining his social strategy to me. For the first time, a question came to me. Would he say that he had turned an ordinary young man, poor and unemployed, into a collaborator? But I stayed silent. Ravi Shankar perhaps thought of himself as a farmer who had planted the seeds and I was now going to be told about the harvest.

  “Then, two months or so later,” he said, “I got a call from Kundan one night. He said he had joined the rebels.”

  What was Kundan saying to Ravi Shankar? He didn’t need to ask him this question. Kundan offered the answer himself, “It’s not like you think. Give me a year. I want to be of help to you.” And Ravi Shankar said, “No problem.”

  There were framed felicitations and award medals on the wall behind where Ravi Shankar was sitting. Ravi Shankar in uniform saluting the Indian president, with the latter holding a scroll in his hand. An award for gallantry. The story I was being told was really about how those medals and awards had come to him.

  Ravi Shankar said, “Avinash carried out attacks on us with impunity. He would then hold these surprise meetings with selected media in the forest and talk to them about class warfare. To be honest, I wondered if Kundan had been trapped by Avinash’s rhetoric. More than a year had passed, closer to two, in fact. Then Kundan called and said that we were to watch a rural railway station the following Tuesday. I posted a couple of plainclothesmen there and they saw a group get down from the train carrying two duffel bags that our men were certain held rifles. I told my team to simply observe and do nothing. A week or ten days later, Kundan called to say that the Naxalites had planned a big meeting the next night in the school in his own village. When I asked him to tell me who would be there, he mentioned Avinash. Are you sure? I asked. He said yes. I asked him if he could give me anything more because this news meant that I would need to mobilize more than my unit. Kundan was speaking in a hushed voice on the phone, but he also sounded very confident. To assure me, he said that he had top secret information because he was a member of the bodyguard squad appointed to protect Avinash.”

  “Okay, one last thing,” Ravi Shankar told Kundan, “If the operation is successful, I’ll make announcements on the loudspeaker asking for surrender. What color shirt will you be wearing?”

  “Red,” Kundan had replied. “And I have a brown cap with a picture of a yellow tractor on it.”

  * * *

  —

  WHEN VISHAL KISHORE arrived for lunch at Ravi Shankar’s house, he was as loud as I remembered him from school. Booming laughter at the door. The grand declaration that he had told his wife to give him an old jacket because he was going to meet a school friend from his childhood, one who had tried to maim him with sulfuric acid but only succeeded in burning a hole in his blazer. Vishal was full of such boisterous cheer that I wondered whether he had taken on this role after Ravi Shankar’s injury and retirement. He told me that Sushil, another classmate of ours, had died from a heart attack while sitting in the film theater he owned in Patna. Upamanyu had published a novel. Did I remember Tinku? Tirthanker Ray? Sure, I did. He was in a car that got stalled just as he tried to beat a train approaching a railway crossing. Vishal straightened his shoulders and said, “But all the others, as far as I can tell, are still around.”

  There was both chicken and fish at lunc
h. I found out that Ravi Shankar’s wife was a schoolteacher. She was away at work and we were served by the youth in white I had seen before. At one point, Ravi Shankar asked Vishal if he was busy the rest of the day. Why? Vishal wanted to know.

  Ravi Shankar pointed to me. “Perhaps you could take him to the Hatta Camp and show him around.”

  When lunch was over, I said to Ravi Shankar, “I was hoping you would tell me the rest of the story. What happened that night?”

  He pointed to Vishal and said, “He will tell you. He was there too.”

  “Oh,” I said, smiling at Vishal. The lack of curiosity on my old classmate’s face revealed that he knew what we were talking about.

  I thanked Ravi Shankar for lunch. We were standing near his front door. He shook my hand and pointed at the silver saber on the wall. He said, “As to your last question, my happiest day was the one when I was awarded the best cadet medal at the police academy.”

  * * *

  —

  VISHAL KISHORE TOOK me in his official car, sirens blaring, to the police headquarters. A colonial building with tall pillars, red-brick walls with white trimming. At least thirty police cars crammed next to each other. Tube lights with entrails of dusty cobwebs hung in the corridor and also ceiling fans with long stems. Inside his large office, and this was different from Ravi Shankar’s house, there were cricket and golf trophies displayed on the walls. A photograph of Vishal at a sports meet, a medal being put around his neck by an old personage flanked by ceremonial guards. I was asked whether I wanted tea or coffee.