Authors: Sara Banerji
Half an hour later Meena, nearly weeping with relief and fury, saw Shivarani returning with Koonty, who was walking stiffly as though she was ill. Shivarani’s face was grim.
The wedding went smoothly after that. Koonty was put on display at last and sat silent and wilting under the weight of silk, gold and jewels. The villagers who thronged to see her were most impressed with the way this previously undignified girl had been rendered quiet and pale by the honour being done to her by the family of the zamindar.
Among the wedding guests were two Hatipur lads who, having returned from university, were unable to find jobs. Dressed in their best starched outfits they sat cross-legged on the ground to eat the splendid feast and said to all who would listen, ‘Why should these zamindars have so much, when we have so little? At our weddings will we have a thousand guests? In fact will we have any wedding at all, for we may never find a job, and no parents will allow their daughter to marry a man who is unemployed. And if we did manage to marry, would we receive so many wedding gifts that they had to be brought in a bullock cart? We would be lucky to even receive some pots and pans and two saris for the bride. Is this Pandu any cleverer or better-looking than we are? It is by no effort of his that he is sitting up there, well fed and dressed in jewels. We would look just as good if we had the money.’
The older men and women shook their heads. ‘Your problems are the consequence of your karma. Next time, if you do enough puja to Durga you will be zamindars yourselves and villagers will cook your food, plough your fields and clean your houses.’ As they mopped up mango chutney with their fingers they told the youths, ‘If you perform your dharma with regard to the zamindars, next time round it will be you who are living in a palace and driving through the countryside in petrol-driven vehicles.’
But the boys were not impressed. ‘This is old-fashioned thinking,’ they said. ‘We have become Marxists and we want these things now.’ Nitai Mandel, the village Communist leader, said, ‘Equality does not come from making envious statements and the people of India will not become equal with the zamindars by such complaining.’
‘You are saying we should sit in a small hut of mud, watching these rich people dining off maach and paish while we have only dhall with rice? I say that we should fight to destroy this corrupt and greedy society, so that a better, fairer one can be created. We should take away from the rich and redistribute to the poor and if they try to prevent us we should take violent action. That is the only way.’
‘You are right to say that we must fight for justice,’ said Nitai. ‘But your battles must be fought at the polls and this talk of killing and robbing is not the way to go about it.’
One of the boys said scornfully, ‘You say you are the leader of the local Communists and yet you continue to own half a hectare of paddy land with only a pair of baby bulls to plough it, while these zamindars own a thousand hectares. Your politics lack conviction.’ And as the boys walked away they muttered to each other, ‘Nitai Mandel is a dinosaur and people stopped thinking like him ten years ago. Now the Communist Party belongs to us who are young, disillusioned and determined.’
The younger boys of the village listened, thrilled and scared by the young Marxists. Ravi, the misti wallah’s nine-year-old son, said, ‘I am going to go up to Pandu Zamindar, while he is sitting there on his big gold chair and I am going to tell him that he’s got a silly face.’ The two older boys laughed kindly at the bravado.
Shivarani’s college friend, Malti, said, ‘What they say is true. The
rich have too much and the poor too little and some of us from college are planning to do something positive about this.’ Apparently the students had heard Mao Tse-tung on Radio Peking and had become inspired to start a revolution in a village in North Bengal where landlords had seized the crop of one of the sharecropper peasants leaving the man and his family without even food to eat. ‘We have heard that this kind of thing is going on all the time,’ Malti told Shivarani. ‘Now several of us from college are going to Naxalbari to help the villagers get their due. Why don’t you come too?’
There was so much food during the zamindar’s wedding that even the pye-dogs thrived and hardly ever needed to be kicked. The village cows were garlanded with marigolds and for three weeks grazed from each other’s necks and gave marigold-flavoured milk. During the day joss sticks were pierced into the trunks of the banana trees, where they smouldered and perfumed the air with sandalwood and musk and each night a thousand oil lamps were lit and sent bobbing down the river, till the water sparkled with just as much light as the firefly-glittering trees.
For years after, people measured time by that grand occasion. ‘I was born in the year of the zamindar wedding.’ ‘My child ate his first rice in the month of the zamindar wedding.’ ‘My tube well was drilled the week after the zamindar wedding.’
Shivarani and Malti travelled by third-class train and even Shivarani, who was well used to squalor, gave a little shudder as they came into Naxalbari. Her first impression was of greyness. Everything, from the sore-ridden pye-dogs, the squatting children, to the rickety huts was filmed with a layer of dead grey dust. The place smelled of human faeces. There was only one adult in sight, a man so still and old that he looked dead already, sitting with his shrivelled legs stretched before him, leaning against a tree that had been robbed of all its branches
and now consisted of only a single trunk pointing into the sky like a finger of accusation.
‘The other students are in the fields teaching the local people how to use hand grenades,’ the man told them. He had no teeth and his words were blurred. ‘There, that is them returning now.’ He pointed a wavering finger to the furthest horizon, and Shivarani made out through air that wobbled with heat, a group approaching, dark against the brightness of the fields. For a moment she thought she saw a man that was darker and taller than the rest but it was only a trick of the light. He was not among them.
Local men carrying bows and arrows, and a few with modern rifles accompanied the students as they arrived in the village at last. ‘You look half starved and what has happened to your faces?’ asked Shivarani, shocked.
The young men and women smiled mournfully. ‘Wait till you’ve been here a week. Once you’ve had three goes of dysentery and been bitten all over at night by mosquitoes and in the day by lice you will be looking just like us.’
‘For two months we have been helping the peasants seize cattle and rice from the jotedars and grab land for redistribution,’ they told Shivarani and Malti as they led them through the village. ‘We have raided the jotedars’ homes and offices, threatened them into giving up the title deeds to the land. At last justice is being done. The rich are being forced to be fair to the landless.’
‘And the police have done nothing to stop you?’ asked Shivarani.
‘Not till this morning,’ she was told.
The police had been in a quandary. Whereas they were sympathetic to the cause of the peasants, indeed many of them had families in the village of Naxalbari, the jotedars were rich and ruthless and the law was being broken. So on the previous day the police had been forced into action and a jeep was sent into Naxalbari to put down the violence.
‘There was a battle and we won,’ the students cried jubilantly.
‘You mean the police just gave in and went away?’
‘We killed one of the policemen and then they realised that they were beaten.’ The students laughed, punched each other triumphantly and danced about, mimicking the events of the day before.
That night Shivarani lay awake for ages and it was not only because of the iron-hard of the mud floor or the endless buzz and bite of insects. The killing of the policeman had been, she felt sure, a terrible turning point. Police attitudes always changed in an instant once one of their own was killed.
She woke next morning before the sun had risen. The others lay sprawled around her. What fools, she thought, to be sleeping so calmly as if that was the end of the matter. She rose and with the heavy cloud of anxiety still pressing on her, walked through the still dark village to the small scummy doba at the further end. The sun was rising as she reached there and a blue mist of early-morning fires hung like a pashmina shawl over the fields. A man was walking, visible from the waist up, through an invisible field. A koel called. Macaque monkeys woke, yawning and scratching, on the roofs of huts and lower branches. She walked slowly towards the pond, glad that the grey dust was hidden, relieved to be away from the others. Perhaps after all they were right, and nothing more would happen.
She was bending over the green water when a voice behind her said, ‘Shivarani?’ She straightened, water dripping from her face and there stood Bhima. He wore a check lungi and a vest. She could see the dark hair under his armpits. He had not shaved and the newly risen sun glowed in the short black stubble. She stared at him for a long moment before the realisation came to her that she was only half dressed. Her petticoat was crumpled because she had slept in it, and her hair had not been combed since yesterday. Hastily she covered her breast which was only barely hidden by her blouse. He stood gazing at her, his lips twitching as though he was about to smile. Or worse, laugh …
‘You’ve caught me at a bad moment,’ she said, her voice chilled from shame. ‘I’m a terrible mess.’
‘Oh, no, I don’t think so,’ he laughed. ‘I think you look beautiful.’
When the two returned to the hut and food was doled out, Shivarani hardly noticed the gritty rice and the hard floor because sitting opposite her was Bhima.
It was May, getting very hot. The students, used to fans and air conditioning, panted and sweated in the only shade, the airless hut. They lay inert and sweating, telling each other that there was now no doubt they had won. More than thirty hours had passed since the raid by the police and the killing of Inspector Soman Wangdi, and nothing more had happened. ‘Your worries were for nothing,’ they said to Shivarani.
At midday a lad rushed in and said the police were coming. The students were energised in a moment. Hotness and tummy upsets forgotten, they ran out to join the villagers who were already waiting with their bows and arrows. There was an air of excitement and expectation, as though having won once they could not fail to do so a second time.
‘Let them come,’ cried the villagers. ‘This time we will not kill just one but twenty.’
For the first time the students became a little alarmed, and urged, ‘No killing. Definitely no more killing.’ But the men were eager, like hunters who had sighted a plump herd of sambar. They pranced around, arrows at the string, waiting, ready, fearless. They were expert bowmen for the only meat they could afford to eat was what they shot, the occasional deer or monkey. Usually wild birds and even mongeese.
In the midday silence the sound of the approaching police cars grew and soon even the hopeful hunters realised that this was not just a jeep and a handful of constables, but a whole retinue of armoured vehicles. Even they realised that bows and arrows would not work this time. ‘Bring out the cows. Block the road with them,’ went round the call. ‘The policemen are Hindus. They will not hurt the cows.’ Now the police procession could be seen as a cloud of dust approaching like a slow grey ball. Putting their bows aside, men went running to the stalls and byres. Women dashed for their milking cows. Children emerged from huts hauling little calves. Field workers unhitched their bullocks
and by the time the police arrived the road to Naxalbari was blocked with cattle.
The police rounded the corner. The first vehicle, a large armoured lorry, paused briefly. The villagers, watching from behind their cattle herd, began to feel smug and look triumphant. There came a shouted order from the rear of the police column and with a clatter of rifle fire, the first vehicle plunged into the cattle herd. There followed dull thuds as the jeeps and lorries banged against cows. The cows began rushing, swerving, falling, howling, galloping tail high, squirting shit, until they burst the thorn fences and escaped into the surrounding paddy fields and stands of maize.
There fell a small shocked silence from the watching villagers then the cry went up, ‘The women then. They will never dare to shoot women.’ Wives, mothers, daughters, grannies, urged by the men, came rushing to fill the gap left by the fleeing cattle. Shivarani thrust her way through the women till she got to the front and stood there. The sight of her, tall and fearless at their head, filled the women with greater courage and determination. They pressed around Shivarani, defying the oncoming police lorries that rumbled towards them. When the first lorry halted, policemen leant from it and pointed weapons at the women. ‘Stop this,’ yelled Shivarani. ‘Don’t kill women. What are you thinking of?’
There came the crack of a shot and Shivarani staggered as she felt pain pierce her shoulder. There followed a hail of bullets. In agony, Shivarani ducked and dodged as behind her she heard people screaming. She felt her strength going but forced herself to stay standing so that she could shield the bodies of the smaller women at her back. The pain was terrible but she forced her body to stay upright. She could hear a young girl crying. The women were scrambling to get away, and the police were still firing.
Then something came between Shivarani and the steady and menacing approach of the police. Behind, above, ahead she could hear the sound of shooting and screaming, could feel the desperate struggling of people trying to escape as Bhima put himself between her and the bullets. His body gave a heave as a bullet struck it, and then he crashed
backwards, knocking her to the ground and falling on top of her. She felt warm fluid – Bhima’s blood – pour between her thighs.