Kolkata 1977

The ragged bundle of clothes stirred. A dirty face appeared underneath. He woke up staring at the tin shade. The bitter taste of the drying insides of his empty stomach foul in his mouth, creeping up the nostrils. He opened his eyes wider. Flies buzzed over his face in dull monotony. A mongrel bitch trotted past, stopping only to sniff at his stiff toes. A flurry of hurrying feet rushed past him every second. A string of officious gibberish blared out from a speaker overhead. Pigeons fluttered high up. He was lying on a cold hard floor. The stench of human waste was suffocating. The bright yellow hoarding read in the distance: Howrah Junction.

Yatrigan kripya dhyan de, gadi sankhya....

He sat upright and looked around himself. Families, men, women, naked children, living, eating, sleeping, defecating on the grimy concrete amidst cholera, flies, dogs, mice and lice. Victims of cholera laid exhausted on their vomit. Women cradled suckling infants, deloused children and squabbled over inches of concrete on which to light their stove and lay out their pitiful rags. Beggars begged. Some sang. They lived like animals of street, like them, eating from garbage, drinking off the gutter, sleeping by the curb.

Having dug up his dented begging bowl, he hobbled along the platform. And then, he stopped. Perhaps it was a vaguely familiar face in the crowd of hundreds. A voice he heard in this cacophonous confusion. A smell from the life he had left behind.

He looked at the face of the startled man in front of him, in impeccably white kurta and dhoti, it caused an uneasy churn in the memory. A sidestep into the surreal. A fraction of the Howrah station standing transfixed in his mind. Forever.

It came back to him in a flash. It has been eight years. Eight years since the time of turmoil, when the air of Kolkata smelt of gunpowder.

* * *

Kolkata 1969

A glowing cigarette stub fell down the pavement. A slipper clad foot crushed it in the dark with slow deliberation. A shadowy silhouette, muffler over face, shoulders hunched, hands in pocket walked through a guttery alley. Smell of the putrid wastes of the city foul in the night wind, raw within the nostril.

“Father, I can’t sing… in the Church of my heart the choir is on fire…” A drunk sang in the distance. Unsteady footsteps, clumsy with liquor melted away in the dark.

As he bounded up the stairs, Sharat looked at the loose plaster spilling out in clumps from the decaying walls, grim with stoic dignity. He spotted the Bengali graffiti in red. Tomar naam amar naam Vietnam Vietnam! (Your name, my name, Vietnam Vietnam!)

The rickety rotting mansion smelled of age. Even of wisdom. The wall had damp stains. The paint peeled and dropped like dead leaves. The brick red wounds of the wall gaped. These warts opened up as if to tell a story.

As Charles Dickens would have said, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

The world was pirouetting a dance of tumult and turbulence. French universities were paralyzed by student strikes. The US marines were burning villages in Vietnam. Yet the CIA backed banana republics of South America were beginning to crumble one by one, like a clumsy castle of cards. Castro had shown the way in Cuba. Others were following.

Last July, after wearily stepping down from the rungs of Apollo II, Neil Armstrong took his first step on the moon and uttered those immortal words, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” The grandeur of the universe humbled the man. Lost within the unfathomable eternity and immensity of it is the tiny, even petty world, like a single grain of moist dust floating in the air. The sky was calling.

It is a time of wide eyed wonder. Of the most courageous imaginations. It is the time of Jazz. Bob Dylan. Pink Floyd. Blues and the Beatles. Political seduction tantalized, anarchic hedonism challenged, the future beckoned, the past haunted.

Yet Bengal would see much tumult in this feisty decade. As the political turmoil snared the state in its despairing claws, tottering coalitions collapsed in quick succession, chief ministers walked in and out of the state secretariat at the Writers’ Building and the guillotine of President’s Rule cast an ever hanging shadow over the neck of the incumbent government. Each passing day seemed to whisper, Bengal was on the verge of something.

It was 1967 when the tiny village of Naxalbari in the district of Darjeeling started coming up in the radio. The peasants of tea estates were revolting. This time it was an armed insurrection. The police showed neither mercy nor hesitation in their crackdown. In May a shootout was reported. Eleven villagers lost their lives, of whom eight were women. From then the movement took off as if on wings, from Naxalbari in Bengal to Srikakulam in Andhra Pradesh.

Sharat Chatterjee, a shy studious lad, was in his first year of college, pursuing mechanical engineering in Jadavpur University. His father had always warned him about this city. Young boys, still fresh from the cocoon of provincial naivety like himself, were always falling prey to the vices of this city. Alcoholism claimed many as did company of ill-repute. And college politics was almost as bad.

Sharat had listened to his father’s advice and warnings in respectful silence.

But could he help it?

From the day he had stepped into Howrah station, Calcutta had taken him by storm.

This city, flawed in body and mind, was so much like Suzanne in Leonard Cohen’s poem. Suzanne never leaves you cold. Nor does Calcutta. Suzanne’s mysterious, yet destructive allure is hard to resist. So is this city’s. Calcutta tantalizes. Its dark recesses, its cacophony of music, its passionate intimacy with radical politics, the attractive power of its aesthetics, architecture and art, deep down a stirring nostalgic tug for a glorious history in tragic decay. One cannot turn their back on this city. And no matter how much his father wanted otherwise, neither could Sharat. Slowly the city devoured him, bit by bit. It began with the iconic Coffee House, filled with the acrid haze of smoke swirling from the glowing ends of the unfiltered cigarettes hanging from the lips of artists, students, actors and poets. Then came the theaters. The museums. The exhibitions and libraries, the streets, effervescent rallies and screaming Bandhs, all this muddle, this hopeless tangle consumed him till the city and its throbbing vitality had seeped into the very fibers of his being.

Breathlessly swimming these political currents Sharat found his place amidst a new coterie of students and youth who had started conspiring the fall of the bourgeoisie dispensation of India who had given themselves a new name in the memory of their valiant peasant comrades - Naxal.

And this tiny, grimy pigeon coop in Jadavpur was one of the operational cells of the Naxalite. It was a week since Soumen-da had started his own radical newsletter Mutiny. The editorial session of the Mutiny had been in progress when Sharat walked in. Soumen-da pushed away the chair and hugged him warmly. The naked filament bulb hanging from the ceiling cast eerie shadows which crept down the wall. The air was damp and heavy with the hint of tobacco. Sharat sat there amidst his comrades, his family, breathing in the tobacco, oiled machinery and ink of newsprint, the grease that dropped from the wheels in motion of the Indian Revolution.

Soumen-da lit his cigarette. The pallor on his face, testimonial of sleepless nights, as was the deep exhaustion in his sunken eyes.

“Sharat, you know your job. The agenda is to cobble together a broad leftist platform amongst the student body with all indirect means, sports, literature, art, theater. The cultural clubs of Jadavpur University must be your target. Right now our operations will have to go undercover and normal campaign methods like screaming rallies, pamphlet distribution, and wall writing will get us unwanted attention. We have lost too many comrades to the police.”

Sharat smiled. “Soumen-da, sports club boys will laugh at me if they see my physique.”

“Arrey Sharat, you are a well-read scholarly boy. Reel out a few lines of Rabindranath. You will make a fine impression.”

This time Sharat laughed. “Soumen-da you know my tastes. In Kafka, Campus, Tolstoy lies my forte, not Bengali literature.”

At that moment suddenly a lot of things happened simultaneously. The door swung open violently. Hoarse voices. Uniformed men stumbled in. Swinging flashlights. Heavy boots. Sharat sprang to his feet. The chair crashed behind him. The policemen barked. Sharat toppled the table behind him. It crashed, bringing down the tome of Marxist literature. Even before he could bolt for the window the uniformed bodies swarmed around him, barking him to stay still. and grabbing his arms, pinning him down.

They did not touch Soumen-da. Sharat could not believe, or rather refused to believe the monstrosity that stood before him.

His friend, mentor, guide, Soumen-da, was a traitor, a police informant. Bitter bile rose up in Sharat’s throat, overflowing through clenched teeth. His ears felt hot. Sharat, still calm, said with deliberate malice, “How much is the police paying you to betray us, Soumen-da?” The older man turned to him. He said to the two burly patrolmen, “Hold him.” Sharat felt his arms pinned to his sides. He saw the Soumen-da’s massive fist arching toward his face. He tried to jerk away but the fist caught him high on the cheekbone. A grenade exploded inside his skull. His mouth filled with blood and small hard bones that he realized were his teeth. He could feel the side of his head puff up as if it were filling with air. His legs were weightless and he would have fallen if the two policemen had not held him up. Through a red haze Sharat saw more uniformed men stride in.

He was aware of the delicious icy chilliness, that wintry arctic gust of hatred that pervaded his heart. Then he felt himself being carried into a jeep and then his eyes rolled over and he collapsed into the seat. Next morning he woke up staring at the grimy ceiling of the prison cell.

* * *

The slow ceiling fan was creaking overhead. Sharat’s cell was full of shadows. Hanging naked from a wire in the corridor outside, a dim bulb cast light cut by cold bars into thin strips that snaked along the concrete floor and up the back wall. Sharat squatted alone inside.

“Just because he is your son, I won't be putting chandan paste all over him, will I?” The Police

Commissioner grunted. He brought his face close to the weary face of the elderly man on the chair.

“Do you understand the gravity?” Sharat looked at his father. He had aged. His eyes were sunken. Yet his face was cold with majestic contempt.

“Make your son see reason Shankar babu. You are a pragmatic man. You understand very well what is going on.” Shankar Chatterjee slowly got up, clutching the end of his dhoti in one hand and walked to the cell and stood before his son, leaning on his cane, almost as if he were to physically admonish his son.

Sharat braced himself. But to his surprise his father slowly sank down to his feet, dropping the cane with a clatter. Then suddenly his face crumpled. He buried his face in his palms and wept his eyes out, his body shaking in the despairing convulsions of sobs racking his insides. Sharat was left stunned. Speechless.

“Babu,” His father gasped between choking sobs, “Babu, tell them everything. I beg you. I plead you. Tell where is Charu Mazoomdar. Listen to me once. Think about your mother.” Sharat looked at his feet.

“It’s not your politics, not your naxalism that makes me weep, Babu. It’s the betrayal. I mean, I will fight tooth and nail to keep you out of the courts, and prison, because you’re my son, the most important person in the world to me. For you I will let justice, money, reputation, law and everything else go to hell. I would commit a wrong for you, without a moment’s hesitation. I would commit a wrong a hundred times. For me, you come above all principles, all morals and values, everything. That’s how it is between father and son. What hurts me so much is that you will not do the same for me. Will you?” Sharat wanted desperately to say yes. “Will you be loyal to me, for all that I may be in the wrong, just because I am your father? I have fed and clothed you, not Marx, not Mao.”

Sharat stared at his feet through a teary haze, tongue-tied. Finally his father got up, stooped over his cane, his frame somehow irreparably broken. “Baba?” The elderly man turned back. “Don’t come again. Now neither can you stop this, nor can I.” The footsteps retreated back into the shadows.

* * *

The key turned in the lock late at night. An inky shadow melts in from the dark, carrying a pen, a bottle of ink and some paper. He sets them down on the table and barks: “Write the names of all the naxalites you know.” Sharat sat down and wrote: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Mao Zedong, Chau-en-lai, Peter Kropotkin, Leo Tolstoy— The shadowy silhouette snatched away the paper, spat on the floor and stomped out.

Two hefty guards strode in. They hammered at him till morning, but Sharat sat mute. He uttered not one word The torture went on all night. He gritted his teeth and stubbornly kept shut as they dunked his face in icy water. But when they pulled out his fingernails, he began to give them made-up names and addresses, but they told him they knew they were false. When they burned the skin of the soles of his feet with a candle flame, he named all his student friends in Jadavpur and Calcutta University, but still they said he was lying. It must have been around dusk that he passed out for the last time.

When he came round he was lying on the bed. There were bandages on his feet and hands. He was in agony. He wanted to kill himself, but he was too weak to move. He bit his lips and cried through shut eyes.

After four months he stopped keeping track of dates. As the years passed he began mixing into the prison floor and the prison floor into him, and before it was too long one could not say one from the other.

Last week it had come to Sharat’s knowledge that Charu Mazoomdar died under custody.

Whatever will that had remained to resist deserted Sharat. He was sent back to his solitary cell for what seemed many more months. Once a week he would be escorted to the grimy side-room and interrogated by the seven men in what he came to realize was a purely routine procedure.

There was no way for Sharat to know that during these months the Emergency had ended and the nation had gone to polls along with the states.

1977. All India Radio haltingly announces the results of the momentous general elections. Indira Gandhi, former Congress prime minister and architect of the Emergency, was finally out. Jyoti Basu took his oath in the Writers Building as the first Communist Chief Minister. He promised to run the state from the dusty rundown villages of Bengal and not chain himself to the cushion like the Congress predecessors. As a sign of goodwill the ruling dispensation chose to release all political prisoners. By then Sharat’s sanity was as fragile as it was capricious. Turned loose, with no home to walk back to, meandering along the graying lanes of this decaying city, Sharat found a new home on the cold hard concrete of Howrah station.

This was it. Here ended his story, his revolution, amidst the fecal waste of the society it had so naively pledged to overturn.

* * *

Soumen Banerjee stood stunned in disbelief.

He scanned the dirty face, in a faint trace of awe.

May I have your attention please.... train number 798438 Siliguri Patna Express is shortly arriving on platform number six.... thank you

The begging bowl dropped on the concrete platform with a clang.

As their eyes held each other, a shadow seemed to pass across their faces— a shadow of doubt, fear, anger, insecurity, was it one or all of these, or just a play of light and shade?

The platform beneath their feet shuddered as the train entered the platform. Sharat’s impromptu shout was drowned by the shrieking whistle of the train as it entered the platform. Sharat lunged at the man in front of him and both tumbled down, jostling and struggling on the gleaming railway tracks.

Comrade Sharat Chatterjee pinned his erstwhile friend, guide and mentor on the iron track and looked up at the train barreling down the railway lines and closed his eyes.

A woman screamed and looked away. The shrill shriek of the pneumatic brakes pierced the air. The train shuddered as the bloodied wheels rolled to a stop.

.    .    .