We are earth-diggers, we dig earth … we have to pay a commission to the contractors, middleman and village headman … Babu, we can't survive and toil with what's left … After working all day, man and woman together get three rupees…
Hey, wouldn't it be nice to catch a few ministers and make them sit under a tree in the village and sell paan and cigarettes? The unending flip-flop of rubber slippers on feet. It's been cloudy all evening, it was windy just a while ago, with fleeting eddies of dust spreading across the fields. Malabika whispered: Keep quiet about the affair with Sitesh – if some people hear about it, there'll be all kinds of talk. But even if they did hear about it, what the hell – tell me, who doesn't have a bit of friendship and love before marriage these days? A crow sat in the village bakul tree, the crowd of sparrows grew. Whether it was a whore's pimp or the editor-cum-literary chief of Baghbazar, if one tried to speak out about their disposition, the police would definitely arrive to protect law and order. 'First and foremost, middle-class careerism has to be destroyed' – having written this, Subimal wondered where he'd publish this article, and in which paper. It was unfortunate that he hadn't yet become a Mahasweta, weaving leftist tales of rural Bengal that could simultaneously be published in the Sunday supplements and in little magazines. One could have become a revolutionary writer from a very safe position – there would have been money as well as fame. But how much could one tolerate this petty bourgeoisie abusiveness in the name of literature? Not much. Just a few days in the lock-up, strung up; and beaten on the soles of his feet (causing merely a minor problem of the spinal cord), all the revolutionary talk reeking of middle-class values will be finished off for good. He too had protested, just for the consolation of standing with a few hundred prisoners, holding the bars and gazing at a slice of the starry sky. Peddlers of tooth powders in the Maidan now organized interesting magic shows, bending thick iron bracelets through the force of their strength, and performing tales from Kathmandu. People crowded around to watch. The heroines of Bengali novels became evermore progressive. The heroines tell their mothers, without inhibition, about all that they did with their boyfriends in the evening at the lake-side. The road to the District Board was metalled. During harvest, if the peasants failed to deliver the harvest of their labour at the landlord's house, police jeeps arrived in a flash, raising clouds of dust – law and order was a very strange thing indeed. Radhu Mandal bit his hand, this road had been built by them under a food-for-work or some such state programme. Radhanath's grief was that his matriculate son hadn't found a job and had become a lorry driver's assistant, an unsalaried cleaner. He could be found in the garage day and night, he had learnt to use intoxicants, although he was only fourteen years old, and he didn't want to return home. But what a fine boy he was, babu, the teachers used to say that if he got just a little guidance he would get a distinction in the exam – he never even raised his head and looked you in the eye … How had things come to such a pass, Radhanath sighed. Along with his family members, Radhanath was a beedi-worker. And it wasn't just he and his wife. Although it had been thirty or thirty-two years since independence, even his little children had to stay home and make beedis instead of going to school, not to earn money for their studies but for the family's survival. Backbreaking labour, sitting and working day and night, tobacco dust – in the process of erecting the owner's mountain of wealth, the lungs of eight to ten-year-old children were damaged. These perpetually beedi-making children of Radhanath would never get the opportunity to hear about the International Year of the Child. There was talk of a chest clinic being opened here very soon. A site was acquired near the station. Donations amounting to about two-and-a-half thousand rupees were collected. With this money, only the foundation stone was laid. And one day, the labour minister came and ceremonially inaugurated the foundation stone, sipped a cool drink and left. That's it, game over.
The sun grew hotter, some people dried clothes and some dried fish.
Just two people, face to face, waited a lifetime to recognize each other…
Would you like to act in a play, Malabika? The role would really suit you, a sad-faced, sari-clad daughter-in-law from a poor household – I'm serious, it's not a joke.
In the late afternoon sunlight, putting down their rag-picking sacks, two weary-faced boys played 'tiger-captive' beside the tram track. One was bare-bodied and wore just underpants, with about a month's grime on him. The other had slipped something resembling a torn punjabi over his body, it reached his ankles. Behind them, the shadow of Grand Hotel grew longer. That did not bother them in the least, they were rapt in playing 'tiger-captive'.
Ti-… ger! … Cap-… tive! …
The pot-bellied landlord, just a few strands of hair on his head, his eyes like a swine's – who until a few days ago had been afraid to step out of his house – was now fearlessly health conscious. In order to stimulate his appetite, he was going for his daily walk along the riverside, a silver encrusted walking stick in hand. Mrs Malabika now busied herself with the complex subject of which colour of paint to use at home that would go with the furniture and please both the eye and the mind. In the jungles of the Terai, some impossibly tall people now wanted to light a fire with shrubs and twigs collected from the area between the jungle and the settlement, they crouched low and blew into the fire before them, their eyes turning red with the smoke. Hey, the drum's playing – the monkey-man had arrived in the neighbourhood corner – boys and girls raced up to him as if their very lives depended on it. The mentality of the people of the country had reached the point where even if it was a collection drive for flood relief, a cricket match with film stars had to be organized, or else people did not want to make donations. A tomcat sat crouched on the wall, its eyes fixed unwaveringly on the householder's room. A swarm of brown grasshoppers hovered over a date palm. Wearing brown silk punjabis and tulsi necklaces, the head-shaved sahib vaishnavs beat drums and cymbals and drew the chariot down Chowringhee. Pretty birds flew around beside the lake in Ballygunge. As the night advanced, the neon lights on Park Street turned fiercer, pop music played to a lusty beat, music to warm the blood. The mother of the boy in the hammer-and-sickle party went to see a girl for her son. The boy worked in a bank, the girl had to be extremely beautiful and belong to the right gotra. The little boy sat in the verandah and ate muri; scattering it on the floor, he called out to the crows and fed them. How would he know that even if there was a record output of food grain, three-fourths of the people in our country went through each day with half-empty stomachs.
Trams and buses were laden with returning football fans – victory flags of Mohun Bagan or East Bengal burst forth here and there. Shutting the door to his room, the honourable minister furtively opened a book on palmistry and studied the fate and sun lines on his palm. In the slum, a man beat his wife mercilessly for ruining her character by going to work as a maidservant in a babu's house. 'In this education system, the more one studies the bigger the idiot he becomes' – the boy who had written this on wall after wall was now a teacher, he was concerned about whether he could get into university by doing a PhD. All the neon lights were suddenly going off. The policeman lurking about blew his whistle loudly. A burning piece of lead pierced the left breast of the comrade from Medinipur. The blind lunatic woman began to scream from the central tower. The rapid pace of the melody of the 'International' floated out past the bars of Behrampur jail. Krishnan Chetty was hanged silently. Babu revolutionaries – big fellows, the belly most of all – chewed the moshla-muri of socialism and looked on, they pursued and savoured Marxism–Leninism. It was winter now, the old kaviraj heated chawanprash in a large griddle. A swarm of brown grasshoppers hovered over the date palm. The girls in the circus, clad in sparkling satin bikinis, were about to begin tiger tricks, having completed cycling on wire, trapeze acts, the death well, etc. The traffic on Lenin Sarani was increasingly snared in ugly jams. Krishnan Chetty's hanging was today – a thin boy, completely dried up, walked down the road grimly, absent-minde
dly twisting his left thumb with the right thumb.
Serpentine Lane and its darkness dissolved before his eyes. It dissolved, and now it was like the mysterious winding stairs painted by Gaganendranath Tagore, as of now … at this moment …
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Sojney Phuler Bhalo Chochchori Hoy, 1979
Secret Vrindavan
1. THE KING'S SHIP
Standing in front of the station's shiny, freshly painted, silver-coloured bridge, Sulu Majhi from Hatpukuriya finished spreading the wet red sari over the platform – she was wearing only a knee-length petticoat and blouse – and fixed her eyes on the magic machine: the bioscope. She saw the city of Bombay, saw Howrah bridge, saw a secret Vrindavan. How beautiful and colourful everything was. In exchange for ten paise, she looked into the bioscope and took it all in. A dark-skinned five-year-old girl wearing only a red string-band on her waist chewed on a raw guava and tried to press close to the glass window of the colourful box. Beneath the huge clock, which had been frozen for ages at 11:55, squatted the man, as if timelessly, puffing a beedi, gazing ahead vacantly. Just a while ago, so much argument and counterargument had taken place between them about this pleasure worth ten paise. A baby boy, about a month old, was sleeping beside him on a sheet of plastic-coated paper. A swarm of bluebottle flies hovered around him; some had descended to his lips, as if they were about to enter his mouth. They were going to Calcutta to find work. They waited, the train hadn't arrived as yet. There was a green clump of bougainvillea on the brown walls of the railway quarters. New houses were coming up next to the railway station. Men and women clambered up and down the scaffolding, bearing trays full of cement mortar. The mortar was being prepared in a noisy machine. Strung at the top of a long bamboo pole were a broken basket, a torn shoe and a straw broom. They had eaten a short while ago, wetting at the hand-pump the roasted rice that they had brought with them, wrapped in a gamchha.
This was the screenplay of a ten-minute colour film in which there was no dialogue. Throughout the film a drum would thunder, sometimes to a gentle beat, sometimes to a rapid one. The matter of holding up a sari spread over the platform belonged to another dimension, which could never be brought into writing. That old nine-yard was the only and most precious sari of the girl, which she wore to go to the city. The colour was a bit faded, if one looked closely one would see that it was quite frayed, although not yet torn. This had to be captured clearly by the camera. The camera would chase the sari from afar, slowly, so that after a while it would occupy the entire screen. The close-up of a faded, worn-out sari. That was essential for this film. The bioscope, a magical cinema box made of colourful tin, whose gleaming lid the girl would pull open to place her eye and watch a film: this needed to be extremely colourful, an eye-catching colour whose red, blue and green would dazzle. The boy laid out on the sheet of plastic-coated paper and the blue flies would be presented from a different angle. No flashback would be employed, for that was too cheap. Past and future would appear in the present itself, they would merge. The torn shoe, the broken basket and the straw broom were symbols of a specific belief, of the building masons. If kept this way, atop a bamboo pole, they would not fall down from above while working. They knew about this special rite, it would flash before their eyes, just the sight, a ritual to protect them from falling, under the influence of some evil spirit's powers.
2. THE PINK PLASTIC SLIPPER
A pink plastic slipper lay about ten yards away, the other was still on the foot. On a dawn in September '82, she lay beside a metro rail construction pit, her breasts exposed, the red blouse ripped apart. Thrown to the ground, face turned a bit, diagonally, between the rusted iron beam and the green grass. Blood had trickled down the left side of the mouth and dried up, blackish, the mouth agape. There was blood on the lips too. A single hairpin, made of aluminium, lay on the green grass, covered in dew. A few broken pieces of colourful glass bangles lay scattered here and there. She had come to this city to dig earth for the metro rail. A straw-coloured grasshopper scampered over the torn, red, knee-length petticoat. I saw all this that September dawn when I went for a stroll in the Maidan. Jogging along Red Road in the light mist was a fattish man wearing a white vest, trying to reduce his paunch. And piercing through the mist, Mao Tse Tung's red sun was about to rise. Oh, how wonderful! Assailed by a fart the cot breaks, startling the zamindar!
A short, paunchy man, Lalji, entered the room. He was financing the film. A diamond ring on his finger, larger than a pigeon's egg – a patron of literature and the arts, especially nude art. The exact significance of the pink plastic slipper had to be explained to him.
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Guptobrindabon, 1982
Babbi
Who's come to see the patient in bed number nineteen? The patient died at dawn. Do you see the red building on the right? The one with the rusted collapsible gate? That's the morgue, that's where the body has been sent. All of you can go there and see it, but one person at a time. All around was a cold blue haze of rotting corpses. In the darkness of that haze, a fat, paunchy lump of flesh dressed in a finely pressed dhuti– punjabi descended weightily from the vehicle. He came near, put his hand on the shoulder of another and whispered: Got matches? That was code language. After that the two of them disappeared into the darkness. A hunched man, leaning on a staff, crossed the road. At that moment, the earth seemed to turn still. The man crossed the road slowly, knocking his staff on the ground as he supported himself with it. He kept crossing the road. The story now takes a turn towards the night fairies. As the night advances, they pluck out all the feathers from their wings. In the burial ground hammers hit nails, gallows are being erected. Drawn by the sound, a few hazy, shadowy figures leave the settlement and go towards the factory, now overgrown by jungle, lanterns swinging in their hands.
All these disjointed narratives, coming in succession, produce a reaction in the readers' minds. To extend their influence onto feeling and then go beyond that – to poison. This is what shock treatment is all about. Their mental balance wilts. The insensitive calculus of reason is shaken. Everything animate and inanimate, here and now, is mired in blood.
The old man says, laughingly: I chew and eat flowers raw. Then, halting his laughter, he informs everyone that his entire right arm was in fact not his own. For a long time, he didn't have a right arm. He had found this arm in the garbage vat near his lodging, and later stitched it to his body. But, Sir, where did your right arm go? Oh, I lost it when I was a child. At that time, my father … not for anything in particular, you know, but just like that, you know… the thing happened … And one didn't have a choice regarding what happened. When my father's dead body was being cremated, all of a sudden, swelling up, he broke out in loud laughter. He was compelled to leave the crematorium quickly. Naturally he was in considerable distress, but even then there was no let-up to his hysterical laughter. Father was everything … all this … taught me everything. Yes, he loved his father dearly. The old bloke's teeth were marvellous. He said he chewed and ate flowers raw. He started laughing the moment he spoke. And laughing, he argued: So what if I chew and eat them? Do you have an objection?
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