Memories of 1967

Mashima was inconsolable. Bela di held her by her wrists fighting hard against nature’s most tenacious and uncompromising force: a mother’s love for her child. Mesho cut a pathetic figure. He reminded one of a schoolboy too scared to make eye contact with his headmaster, but attempting to reason with him nevertheless. Halfheartedly, as is the case when you know that your fate has been decided. Except in this case, he wasn’t trying to prevail on the school headmaster but the Calcutta Police. I looked on as any ten-year-old would. Curiously. Of course, no one, then, cared to answer the many questions I hurled at them. Being a child, my queries were obviously dismissed.
I had known Paritosh da ever since I began living with my father’s friend, Robi kaka, in Golpark in South Calcutta. My parents didn’t think much of the schools in Tezpur and, so, at the age of six, my bags were packed and I was shipped to Bengal from Assam. I hated the city at first. I still do, at times. Sometimes I feel I have as strong an aversion to Calcutta as Rabindranath Tagore did. And he made no secret of the odium he felt for the sketch that was Calcutta. Ugly factories, ugly smoke, ugly river. A blackness devoid of colour. Which is why I was immensely thankful for that one bright spot of colour and sunshine in my life when it made its presence felt. Her name was Bijaya and she was my age. Bijaya was Paritosh da and Bela di’s youngest sibling and the cause of all the din in the Mukherjee household.
As neighbours we would find each other in our respective homes practically every evening after school. Come to think of it, I’d visit the Mukherjees far more than Bijaya would frequent Robi kaka’s house. May be it was the toy train that formed the centrepiece of her toy collection or Mashima’s seemingly inexhaustible love for me, which more than substituted for my mother’s absence in the big city, the lure of Bijaya’s home was overwhelming. Then there was Paritosh da. I have never known another quite like him. Paritosh da had just begun his BA in history at Jadavpur when we first met. From the outset, he disregarded the many years between us and treated me like an individual capable of thought. Our very first conversation centred on Viet Nam and the war being waged on its poor peasants by the troops of the imperialist Americans. “Listen, every right thinking person in the world today has to throw his lot behind the fearless and indomitable population of Indochina. I was about your age when the Vietnamese gave the French a fine hammering at Dien Bien Phu. You don’t mess with such hardy folks.”
Viet Nam was just the beginning. Paritosh da would over the course of many afternoons and evenings spent at the Mukherjees lecture me on subjects as diverse and absorbing as the inherent racism of the founding fathers of the United States, the Nazification of a section of the Muslim political elite in the British Raj, the Kamba Ramayanam, the near-total extinction of the Tasmanian Aborigines, the griots of West Africa, and, of course, Tebhaga. His formidable intelligence and immeasurable knowledge never ceased to amaze me.
Given his inclinations, now that I think of it, his entry into the ranks of the urban Naxalites in Calcutta was not something that could not be anticipated. Like many young Bengalis of the period, Paritosh da embarked on his career in left-wing extremism as a vocal sympathiser of the Naxal movement but soon enough took the plunge into violence. With that, he disappeared underground only to reappear, not very often, at his home or ours on late evenings to eat, bathe, and put on a fresh pair of clothes before quietly slipping away before daybreak.
I distinctly remember the afternoon his Jadavpur classmate and fellow Naxalite, Anjan da, rushed home to inform Mashima that Paritosh da had been badly injured in a street battle with the police and was spending time at Santoshpur convalescing after the bloody episode. Mashima wanted to rush to see her son but Mesho appropriately stopped her.
Then, it happened. Paritosh da knocked on our door after midnight one evening. Robi kaka answered and, on seeing dada, immediately pulled him inside. I had been up studying for my examinations and was elated to see him. Before I could convey my excitement to dada, kaka intervened. “Look at you, Paritosh”, he said, feeling instant pity. “You cannot stay here for the night. My brother-in-law, Dipankar, is spending the weekend with us. You know he works for Jyoti babu and there is no one in Calcutta who hates you lot more than Deputy Chief Minister Jyoti Basu”, he said. “Dada must go to his house. In any case, his mother would like to see him”, Robi kaka, turning towards me, said. Paritosh da smiled at me and flashed a V sign as he left. Like so many of his generation, he was convinced of collective victory even in the face of individual defeat. I sensed that he knew his time was up. For how long can a 21-year-old be on the run?
Our sleep was interrupted early next morning by the sound of crude explosives. Paritosh da was being led away by the constabulary forces. All the while he had two revolvers obscenely placed against either temple. Someone had obviously tipped off the police. Noted sympathisers and fellow Naxalites had enough gumption and audacity to set off a few unsophisticated bombs as he was being escorted out of that most loving home belonging to the Mukherjees. Then, that scene. The police, on the one hand, and Mashima, Mesho, Bela di, and Bijaya, pitted against them, on the other. Bijaya and I looked at each other for a moment. Thanks to the education she and I had received from Paritosh da, we knew why he was being apprehended. Still, we raised questions like dada had taught us to. I asked Robi kaka and all around me for an explanation. None answered. Bijaya tugged at Bela di’s sari and was screaming things at her. Things in the form of questions, I was sure. I saw Dipankar kaka smiling slyly at me. He knew I loved Paritosh da. I wanted to tear him apart that very instant.
Paritosh da was killed in an encounter the following day which in Naxal-ridden Bengal entailed policemen asking a captive to run from them. It was a ruse. A ruse that the hostage was expected and even obliged to fall for. Paritosh da knew this but, like hundreds of others before and after him, had little choice. He took the bait. He scrammed. Twenty metres later he was shot dead.
