The Lowland Page 3

  At night, after listening to the radio, Subhash and Udayan talked about what was unfolding. Secretly smoking after their parents had gone to bed, sitting at the study table, with an ashtray between them.

  Do you think it was worth it? Subhash asked. What the peasants did?

  Of course it was worth it. They rose up. They risked everything. People with nothing. People those in power do nothing to protect.

  But will it make a difference? What good are bows and arrows against a modern state?

  Udayan pressed his fingertips together, as if to clasp a few grains of rice. If you were born into that life, what would you do?

  Like so many, Udayan blamed the United Front, the left-wing coalition led by Ajoy Mukherjee that was now running West Bengal. Earlier in the year both he and Subhash had celebrated its victory. It had put communists into the cabinet. It had promised to establish a government based on workers and peasants. It had pledged to abolish large-scale landholdings. In West Bengal, it had brought nearly two decades of Congress leadership to an end.

  But the United Front hadn’t backed the rebellion. Instead, in the face of dissent, Jyoti Basu, the home minister, had called in the police. And now Ajoy Mukherjee had blood on his hands.

  The Peking People’s Daily accused the West Bengal government of bloody suppression of revolutionary peasants. Spring Thunder Over India, its headline read. In Calcutta all the papers carried the story. On the streets, on college campuses, demonstrations broke out, defending the peasants, protesting the killings. At Presidency College, and at Jadavpur, Subhash and Udayan saw banners hanging from the windows of certain buildings, in support of Naxalbari. They heard speeches calling for state officials to resign.

  In Naxalbari the conflict only intensified. There were reports of banditry and looting. Peasants setting up parallel administrations. Landowners being abducted and killed.

  In July the Central Government banned the carrying of bows and arrows in Naxalbari. The same week, authorized by the West Bengal cabinet, five hundred officers and men raided the region. They searched the mud huts of the poorest villagers. They captured unarmed insurgents, killing them if they refused to surrender. Ruthlessly, systematically, they brought the rebellion to its heels.

  Udayan sprang up from the chair where he’d been sitting, pushing a pile of books and papers away from him in disgust. He switched off the radio. He started to pace the room, looking down at the floor, running his fingers through his hair.

  Are you all right? Subhash asked him.

  Udayan stood still. Shaking his head, resting a hand on his hip. For a moment he was speechless. The report had shocked them both, but Udayan was reacting as if it were a personal affront, a physical blow.

  People are starving, and this is their solution, he eventually said. They turn victims into criminals. They aim guns at people who can’t shoot back.

  He unlatched the door of their bedroom.

  Where are you going?

  I don’t know. I need to take a walk. How could it have come to this?

  Sounds like it’s over in any case, Subhash said.

  Udayan paused before leaving. This could only be the beginning, he said.

  The beginning of what?

  Something bigger. Something else.

  Udayan quoted what the Chinese press had predicted: The spark in Darjeeling will start a prairie fire and will certainly set the vast expanses of India ablaze.

  By autumn Sanyal and Majumdar had both gone into hiding. It was the same autumn Che Guevara was executed in Bolivia, his hands cut off to prove his death.

  In India journalists started publishing their own periodicals. Liberation in English, Deshabrati in Bengali. They reproduced articles from Chinese Communist magazines. Udayan began bringing them home.

  This rhetoric is nothing new, their father said, leafing through a copy. Our generation read Marx, too.

  Your generation didn’t solve anything, Udayan said.

  We built a nation. We’re independent. The country is ours.

  It’s not enough. Where did it get us? Who has it helped?

  These things take time.

  Their father dismissed Naxalbari. He said young people were getting excited over nothing. That the whole thing had been a matter of fifty-two days.

  No, Baba. The United Front thinks it’s won, but it’s failed. Look at what’s happening.

  What is happening?

  People are reacting. Naxalbari is an inspiration. It’s an impetus for change.

  I’ve already lived through change in this country, their father said. I know what it takes for one system to replace another. Not you.

  But Udayan persisted. He started challenging their father the way he used to challenge their teachers at school. If he was so proud that India was independent, why hadn’t he protested the British at the time? Why had he never joined a labor union? Given that he voted communist in elections, why had he never taken a stand?

  Both Subhash and Udayan knew the answer. Because their father was a government employee, he was barred from joining any party or union. During Independence he was forbidden to speak out; those were the terms of his job. Though some ignored the rules, their father had never taken such risks.

  It was for our sake. He was being responsible, Subhash said.

  But Udayan didn’t see it that way.

  Among Udayan’s physics texts there were now other books he was studying. They were marked up with little scraps of paper. The Wretched of the Earth. What Is to Be Done? A book sheathed in a red plastic cover, hardly larger than a deck of cards, containing aphorisms of Mao.

  When Subhash asked where he was getting the money to buy these materials, Udayan said they were common property, circulated among a group of boys at Presidency with whom he’d been growing friendly.

  Under the mattress Udayan stored some pamphlets he’d obtained, written by Charu Majumdar. Most of them had been written before the Naxalbari uprising, while Majumdar was in prison. Our Tasks in the Present Situation. Take This Opportunity. What Possibility the Year 1965 Is Indicating?

  One day, needing a break from his studies, Subhash reached under the mattress. The essays were brief, bombastic. Majumdar said India had turned into a nation of beggars and foreigners. The reactionary government of India has adopted the tactics of killing the masses; they are killing them through starvation, with bullets.

  He accused India of turning to the United States to solve its problems. He accused the United States of turning India into its pawn. He accused the Soviet Union of supporting India’s ruling class.

  He called for the building of a secret party. He called for cadres in the villages. He compared the method of active resistance to the fight for civil rights in the United States.

  Throughout the essays, he invoked the example of China. If we can realize the truth that the Indian revolution will invariably take the form of civil war, the tactic of area-wise seizure of power can be the only tactic.

  You think it can work? Subhash asked Udayan one day. What Majumdar is proposing?

  They’d both just finished sitting for the last of their college exams. They were cutting through the neighborhood, going to play football with some of their old school friends.

  Before heading toward the field they’d gone to the corner, so that Udayan could buy a newspaper. He’d folded it to an article pertaining to Naxalbari, absorbed by it as they walked.

  They proceeded down the curving walled-off lanes, passing people who’d watched them grow up. The two ponds were calm and green. The lowland was still flooded, so they had to skirt around it instead of across.

  At one point Udayan stopped, taking in the ramshackle huts that surrounded the lowland, the bright water hyacinth that teemed on its surface.

  It’s already worked, he replied. Mao changed China.

  India isn’t China.

  No. But it could be, Udayan said.

  Now if they happened to pass the Tolly Club together on their way to or from the tram depot,
Udayan called it an affront. People still filled slums all over the city, children were born and raised on the streets. Why were a hundred acres walled off for the enjoyment of a few?

  Subhash remembered the imported trees, the jackals, the bird cries. The golf balls heavy in their pockets, the undulating green of the course. He remembered Udayan going over the wall first, challenging him to follow. Crouching on the ground the last evening they were there, trying to shield him.

  But Udayan said that golf was the pastime of the comprador bourgeoisie. He said the Tolly Club was proof that India was still a semicolonial country, behaving as if the British had never left.

  He pointed out that Che, who had worked as a caddy on a golf course in Argentina, had come to the same conclusion. That after the Cuban revolution getting rid of the golf courses was one of the first things Castro had done.

  Chapter 5

  By early 1968, in the face of increasing opposition, the United Front government collapsed, and West Bengal was placed under President’s Rule.

  The education system was also in crisis. It was an outdated pedagogy, at odds with India’s reality. It taught the young to ignore the needs of common people. This was the message radical students started to spread.

  Echoing Paris, echoing Berkeley, exams were boycotted throughout Calcutta, diplomas torn up. Students called out during convocation addresses, disrupting the speakers. They said campus administrations were corrupt. They barricaded vice-chancellors in their offices, refusing them food and water until their demands were met.

  In spite of the unrest, encouraged by professors, both brothers began postgraduate studies, Udayan at Calcutta University, Subhash continuing on at Jadavpur. They were expected to fulfill their potential, to support their parents one day.

  Udayan’s schedule turned more erratic. One night when he did not return for dinner, their mother kept his food waiting in the corner of the kitchen, under a plate. When she asked, in the morning, why he hadn’t eaten what she’d set aside, he told her he’d eaten at the home of a friend.

  When he was gone, there was no talk during mealtimes of how the Naxalbari movement was spreading to other parts of West Bengal, also to some other parts of India. No discussion about the guerillas active in Bihar, in Andhra Pradesh. Subhash gathered that Udayan turned to others now, with whom he could talk freely about these things.

  Without Udayan they ate in silence, without strife, as their father preferred. Though Subhash missed his brother’s company, at times it came as a relief to sit down at the study table by himself.

  When Udayan was at home, odd hours, he turned on the short-wave. Dissatisfied by official reports, he found secret broadcasts from stations in Darjeeling, in Siliguri. He listened to broadcasts from Radio Peking. Once, just as the sun was rising, he succeeded in transporting Mao’s distorted voice, interrupted by bursts of static, addressing the people of China, to Tollygunge.

  Because Udayan invited him, because he was curious, Subhash went with him one evening to a meeting, in a neighborhood in North Calcutta. The small smoky room was filled mostly with students. There was a portrait of Lenin, wrapped in plastic, hanging on a mint-green plaster wall. But the mood in the room was anti-Moscow, pro-Peking.

  Subhash had pictured a raucous debate. But the meeting was orderly, run like a study session. A wispy-haired medical student named Sinha assumed the role of professor. The others were taking notes. One by one they were called upon to prove their familiarity with events in Chinese history, tenets of Mao.

  They distributed the latest copies of Deshabrati and Liberation. There was an update on the insurgency at Srikakulam. One hundred villages across two hundred mountainous miles, falling under Marxist sway.

  Peasant rebels were creating strongholds where no policeman dared enter. Landowners were fleeing. There were reports of families burned to death in their sleep, their heads displayed on stakes. Vengeful slogans painted in blood.

  Sinha spoke quietly. Sitting at a table, ruminating, his fingers clasped.

  A year has passed since Naxalbari, and the CPI(M) continues to betray us. They have disgraced the red banner. They have flaunted the good name of Marx.

  The CPI(M), the policies of the Soviet Union, the reactionary government of India, all amount to the same thing. They are lackeys of the United States. These are the four mountains we must seek to overthrow.

  The objective of the CPI(M) is maintaining power. But our objective is the formation of a just society. The creation of a new party is essential. If history is to take a step forward, the parlor game of parliamentary politics must end.

  The room was silent. Subhash saw Udayan hanging on Sinha’s words. Riveted, just as he used to look listening to a football match on the radio.

  Though Subhash was also present, though he sat beside Udayan, he felt invisible. He wasn’t convinced that an imported ideology could solve India’s problems. Though a spark had been lit a year ago, he didn’t think a revolution would necessarily follow.

  He wondered if it was a lack of courage, or of imagination, that prevented him from believing in it. If the deficits he’d always been conscious of were what prevented him from sharing his brother’s political faith.

  He remembered the silly signals he and Udayan used to send to one another, pressing the buzzer, making each other laugh. He didn’t know how to respond to the message Sinha was transmitting, which Udayan so readily received.

  Under their bed, against the wall, there was a can of red paint and a brush that had not been there before. Beneath their mattress Subhash found a folded piece of paper containing a list of slogans, copied out in Udayan’s hand. China’s Chairman is our Chairman! Down with elections! Our path is the path of Naxalbari!

  The walls of the city were turning thick with them now. The walls of campus buildings, the high walls of the film studios. The lower walls flanking the lanes of their enclave.

  One night, Subhash heard Udayan come into the house and go straight to the bathroom. He heard the sound of water hitting the floor. Subhash was sitting at the study table. Udayan pushed the can of paint beneath their bed.

  Subhash closed his notebook, replaced the cap on his pen. What were you doing just now?

  Rinsing off.

  Udayan crossed the room and sat in a chair by the window. He was wearing white cotton pajamas. His skin was damp, the hair dark on his chest. He put a cigarette to his lips and slid open a matchbox. It took him a few strikes to light the match.

  You were painting slogans? Subhash asked him.

  The ruling class puts its propaganda everywhere. Why should they be allowed to influence people and no one else?

  What happens if the police catch you?

  They won’t.

  He turned on the radio. If we don’t stand up to a problem, we contribute to it, Subhash.

  After a pause he added, Come with me tomorrow, if you want.

  Again Subhash was the lookout. Again alert to every sound.

  They crossed a wooden bridge that spanned a narrow section of Tolly’s Nullah. It was a neighborhood considered remote when they were younger, where they’d been told not to wander.

  Subhash held the flashlight. He illuminated a section of the wall. It was close to midnight. They’d told their parents that they were going to a late show of a film.

  He stood close. He held his breath. The pond frogs were calling, monotonous, insistent.

  He watched as Udayan dipped the paintbrush into the can. He was writing, in English, Long live Naxalbari!

  Quickly Udayan formed the letters of the slogan. But his hand was unsteady, adding to the challenge. Subhash had noticed this previously, in recent weeks—an occasional tremor as his brother adjusted the radio dial, or framed the air in front of his face in the course of saying something, or turned the pages of the newspaper.

  Subhash remembered climbing over the wall of the Tolly Club. This time, Subhash wasn’t afraid of being caught. Perhaps it was foolish of him, but something told him that such a thing co
uld happen only once. And he was right, no one noticed what they did, no one punished them for it, and a few minutes later they were crossing the bridge again, quickly, smoking cigarettes to calm themselves down.

  This time it was only Udayan who was giddy. Only Udayan who was proud of what they’d done.

  Subhash was angry with himself for going along with it. For still needing to prove he could.

  He was sick of the fear that always rose up in him: that he would cease to exist, and that he and Udayan would cease to be brothers, were Subhash to resist him.

  After their studies ended, the brothers were among so many others in their generation, overqualified and unemployed. They began tutoring to bring in money, contributing their earnings to the household. Udayan found a job teaching science at a technical high school close to Tollygunge. He seemed satisfied with an ordinary occupation. He was indifferent to building up a career.

  Subhash decided to apply to a few Ph.D. programs in the United States. Immigration laws had changed, making it easier for Indian students to enter. In graduate school he’d begun to focus his research on chemistry and the environment. The effects of petroleum and nitrogen on oceans and streams and lakes.

  He thought it was better to broach it with Udayan first, before telling his parents. He hoped his brother would understand. He suggested that Udayan should go abroad, too, where there were more jobs, where it might be easier for both of them.

  He mentioned the famous universities that supported the world’s most gifted scientists. MIT. Princeton, where Einstein had been.

  But none of this impressed Udayan. How can you walk away from what’s happening? There, of all places?

  It’s a degree program. It’s only a matter of a few years.

  Udayan shook his head. If you go, you won’t come back.