She remembered standing in the heat on May Day, under the Monument. Watching Kanu Sanyal at the rostrum, set free.
She and Udayan had been among thousands on the Maidan, listening to his speech. She remembered the sea of bodies, the fluted white column, with its two balconies at the top, rising into the sky. The rostrum, decorated with a life-sized portrait of Mao.
She remembered Kanu Sanyal’s voice, emitted through the loudspeaker. A young man with glasses, ordinary-looking, charismatic nevertheless. Comrades and friends! she still heard him calling out, greeting them. She remembered the single emotion she’d felt a part of. She remembered being thrilled by the things he’d said.
Her impressions were flickering, from a lifetime ago. But they were vivid inside Dipankar. All the names, the events of those years, were at his fingertips. He could quote from the writings of Charu Majumdar. He knew about the rift, toward the end, between Majumdar and Sanyal, Sanyal objecting to the annihilation line.
Dipankar had studied the movement’s self-defeating tactics, its lack of coordination, its unrealistic ideology. He’d understood, without ever having been a part of things, far better than Gauri, why it had surged and failed.
My uncle was still there when Sanyal got arrested again, in 1970. He was sent away to London soon after.
This, too, she remembered. His followers had begun rioting. It was after Sanyal’s arrest, a year after the party’s declaration, that the worst violence in Calcutta had begun.
I was married that year.
And your husband? Was he affected?
He was in America, studying, she said. He had nothing to do with it. She was grateful that the second reality could paper over the first.
I’m planning to do some fieldwork in Calcutta, he said. Is there anyone you still know, people I might want to talk to?
I’m afraid not. I’m sorry.
I’d like to get up to Naxalbari if I can. I’d like to see the village where Sanyal lived, after he was released from prison.
She nodded. You should.
It fascinates me, the turn his life took.
What do you mean?
The way he was chastened but remained a hero. Still cycling through villages in Naxalbari years later, mobilizing support. I would have liked to speak to him.
Why don’t you?
He’s dead. You hadn’t heard?
It had happened nearly a year ago. His health was in decline. His kidneys and eyesight failing. He’d been suffering from depression. A stroke in 2008 had left him partly paralyzed. He’d refused to be treated in a government hospital. He’d refused to approach the state while he was still fighting it.
He died of kidney failure?
Dipankar shook his head. He killed himself.
She went home, to her desk, and switched on the computer. She typed Kanu Sanyal’s name into the search box. The hits appeared, one after the next, in a series of Indian sites she’d never looked at before.
She began clicking them open, reading details of his biography. One of the founding members of the movement, along with Majumdar. A movement that still threatened the Indian state.
Born in 1932. Employed early on as a clerk in a Siliguri court.
He’d worked as a CPI(M) organizer in Darjeeling, then broken with the party after the Naxalbari uprising. He’d gone to China to meet with Mao. He’d spent close to a decade in jail. He’d been the chairman of the Communist Party of India, Marxist-Leninist. Following his release, he’d renounced violent revolution.
He’d remained a communist, dedicating his life to the concerns of tea plantation workers, rickshaw drivers. He’d never married. He’d concluded that India was not a nation. He supported the independence of Kashmir, of Nagaland.
He owned a few books, clothes, cooking utensils. Framed pictures of Marx and Lenin. He’d died a pauper. I was popular once, I have lost my popularity, he’d said in one of his final interviews. I am unwell.
Many of the articles celebrated his life, his commitment to India’s poor, his tragic passing. They referred to him as a hero, a legend. His critics condemned him, saying that a terrorist had died.
It was the same set of information, repeated in various ways. She opened the links anyway, unable to stop.
One of them led to a video. A television news segment from March 23, 2010. A female newscaster’s voice was summarizing the details. There was some black-and-white footage of Calcutta streets in the late sixties, banners and graffiti, a few seconds of a protest march.
It cut to a shot of weeping villagers, their faces in their hands. People gathered at the doorway of a house, the thatched mud hut that had served as Sanyal’s home, his party office. His cook was being interviewed. She was agitated, nervous in front of the camera. Speaking in the particular accent of the village.
She’d come to check on him after his lunch, she explained to the reporter. She looked through the window but didn’t see him resting in his bedroom. The door wasn’t latched. She checked again. Then she saw him in another part of the room.
Gauri saw him, too. On the screen of her computer, on her desk, in her darkened study in California, she saw what the cook had seen.
A seventy-eight-year-old man, wearing an undershirt and cotton pajamas, hanging from a nylon rope. The chair he’d used to secure the rope still stood in front of him. It had not been knocked over. No spasm, no final reaction, had kicked it away.
His head was cocked to the right, the back of his neck exposed above the undershirt. The sides of his feet were touching the floor. As if he were still supported by the earth’s gravity. As if all he had to do was straighten his shoulders and move on.
For a few days she was unable to rid her mind of the image. She could not stop thinking about the final passivity of a man who’d refused, until the moment his life ended, to bow his head.
She could not rid herself of the emotion it churned up in her. She felt a terrible weight, combined with a void.
The following week, stepping off a staircase outside a campus building, not paying attention, she lost her footing and fell. She reached out, broke the fall with her hand. The skin had split from its contact with the pathway. She looked and saw blood beading across it, highlighting the etched lines of her palm.
Someone rushed over, asking if she was all right. She was able to stand, to take a few steps. The greater pain was in her wrist. Her head was spinning, and there was a throbbing on one side.
A university ambulance took her to the hospital. The wrist was badly sprained, and because the pain in her head had not subsided, because it had spread to the other side also, she would need to get some scans, some tests.
She was given forms to fill out and asked to name her next of kin. All her life, on such forms, having no other choice, she’d put Subhash’s name. But there had never been an emergency, never a need to contact him.
Weakly she formed the letters with her left hand. The address in Rhode Island, and the phone number she still remembered. She used to dial it sometimes when the receiver was still on its hook, when thinking of Bela. When she was appalled by her transgression, overtaken by regret.
She had not been a patient in a hospital since Bela was born. Even now the memory was intact. A rainy evening in summer. Twenty-four years old. A typed bracelet around her wrist. Everyone congratulating Subhash when it was over, flowers coming from his department at the university.
Again she was given a bracelet, entered into the hospital’s system. She gave them the information they needed about her medical history, the insurance card. There was no one to help her this time. She was dependent on the nurses, the doctors, when they came.
A few X-rays were taken, a CT scan. Her right hand was bound up, just as Udayan’s had been after his accident. They told her she was a bit dehydrated. They put fluids into her veins.
She was kept there until evening. The scans showed no bleeding on the brain. She went home with nothing more than a prescription for painkillers and a referral to a physical thera
pist. She had to call a colleague, for she was told that she would be unable to drive for a few weeks, unable to negotiate the simple town, with its short grassy blocks, where she had lived for so many years.
The colleague, Edwin, drove her to the pharmacy to pick up her prescriptions. He invited her to stay with him and his wife for a few days, offering her their guest room, saying it would be no trouble. But Gauri told him there was no need. She returned to her own home, sat at the desk in her office, pulled out a pair of scissors, and managed to clip away the typed bracelet around her wrist.
She switched on the computer, then lit the burner on the stove to make tea. She struggled to remove the tea bag from its wrapper, to raise the boiling kettle over the cup. Everything done slowly, everything feeling clumsy in the hand she was not accustomed to using.
The refrigerator was empty, the carton of milk nearly finished. Only then did she remember that she’d intended to buy groceries as she was walking to her car, when she’d fallen. She would have to call Edwin later, and ask him if he minded picking up a few things.
It was eleven o’clock on a Friday morning. She had no classes to teach, no plans for the evening. She poured herself a glass of water, spilling some of it on the counter. Somehow she managed to open the bottle of pills. She left the cap off, so that she would not have to do it again.
Not wanting to burden anyone, but unable to manage alone, she went away, a weekend’s journey that had nothing to do with work. With one hand she packed a small suitcase. She left her laptop at home. She called a car service and checked into a hotel that some of her colleagues liked, in a desert town. A place where she could walk in the mountains and soak her body in a spring, where she would not have to cook for a few days.
On the roof of the hotel, at the pool surrounded by steep hills, she observed an elderly, wealthy-looking Indian couple taking care of a little boy. They were trying to teach the boy not to fear the water, showing him how little plastic figures floated, the grandfather swimming a few strokes to demonstrate. The husband and wife lightly quarreled, in Hindi, about how much sunscreen to put on the child, whether or not his head should be protected by a hat.
The husband was nearly bald but still vigorous. What hair was left wreathed the lower portion of his head. The wife seemed younger, her hair tinted with henna, her toenails polished, pretty sandals on her feet. At breakfast Gauri watched them feeding the boy yogurt and cereal from a spoon.
They asked Gauri, in English, where she was from, saying they came to America every summer, that this was where both their sons lived and that they liked it very much. One son lived in Sacramento, the other in Atlanta.
Since becoming grandparents, they took each of their grandchildren on a separate vacation, to get to know them on their own terms, and to give their sons and daughters-in-law some time to themselves.
At our age, what else is there to live for? the man asked Gauri, the child tucked into his elbow. And yet they preferred India, not wanting to retire here.
Do you go back often? the wife asked.
It’s been a while.
Are you a grandmother?
Gauri shook her head, then added, wanting suddenly to align herself with this couple, I’m still waiting.
How many children do you have?
One. A daughter.
Normally she told people she did not have any children. And people backed away politely from this revelation, not wanting to press.
But today Gauri could not deny Bela her existence. And the woman merely laughed, nodding, saying that children these days had minds of their own.
In time her wrist grew stronger. In her therapy sessions they wrapped it in warmed wax. Again she was able to grasp her toothbrush and clean her teeth, to sign a check, or turn the knob of a door. Then she was able to drive again, to seize the gearshift and make a turn, to edit drafts and correct student papers with her dominant hand.
The semester went on, she taught her last classes, turned in her grades. She would be on leave the coming fall. One afternoon, after finishing up at her desk, she walked across the parking lot of her apartment complex and opened her mailbox. With some effort she twisted the key.
She returned to her apartment and pushed back the sliding glass door that was off the living room, leading to her patio. She set the mail on the teak table and sat down to go through it.
Among the bills, the catalogues that had come to her that day, there was a personal letter. Subhash’s handwriting was on the envelope, the return address of the house in Rhode Island, close to the bay. He had boiled down to the proof of his penmanship, the dried saliva on the back of a stamp.
He’d sent it care of her department. The secretary had done the courtesy of forwarding it to her home.
Inside was a short letter written in Bengali, on two sides of a sheet of office stationery. She had not read Bengali penmanship in decades; her communication with Manash was by e-mail, in English.
Gauri,
The Internet tells me this is your address, but please confirm that this has reached you. As you see, I am in the same place. I am in decent health. I hope you are, too. But I will be seventy before too long, and we are entering a phase of life when anything might happen. Whatever lies ahead, I would like to begin to simplify things, given that, legally, we remain tied. If you have no objection, I am going to sell the house in Tollygunge, to which you still have a claim. I also think it’s time to remove your name as joint owner of the house in Rhode Island. I will leave it to Bela, of course.
She paused, warming her hand against the surface of the table before continuing. The hand had turned vulnerable while it was bound up. Now her veins protruded, so that they resembled a piece of coral rooted to her wrist.
He told her he didn’t want to drag her back to Rhode Island in the event of an emergency, not wanting to burden her in case he were to go first.
I don’t mean to rush you, but I’d like to resolve things by the end of the year. I don’t know if there’s anything else we have to say to one another. Though I cannot pardon what you did to Bela, it was I who benefited, and continue to benefit, from your actions, however wrong they were. She remains a part of my life, but I know she is not a part of yours. If it were easier I’d be open to our meeting in person, and concluding things face-to-face. I bear you no ill will. Then again it’s just a matter of some signatures, and of course the mail will do.
She had to read the letter a second time to realize the point of it. That after all this time, he was asking her for a divorce.
Chapter 2
Telling no one in their families, not even Manash, they’d married each other. It was January 1970. A registrar came to a house in Chetla. It belonged to one of Udayan’s comrades, a senior party member who was also a professor of literature. A gentle man, mild of manner, a poet. They called him Tarun-da.
A few other comrades had been there. They asked her questions, and told her how to conduct herself from now on. Udayan placed his hand over a copy of the Red Book before they signed the papers. His sleeves rolled back as they always were, his forearms exposed. A beard and moustache by then. When they’d finished, and both of them were perched on the edge of a sofa, leaning together over the low table where the papers had been spread, he turned to look at her, grinning, taking a moment to convey to her, only to her, how happy he was.
She did not care what her aunts and uncles, her sisters, would think of what she was doing. This would serve to put them behind her. The only one in her family she cared about was Manash.
Some cutlets and fish fries were brought in and distributed, a few boxes of sweets. This was the extent of the celebration. They spent their first week as husband and wife together in the house in Chetla, in a room the professor had to spare.
It was there, at night, after their many shared conversations, that they began to communicate in a different way. There that she first felt his hand exploring the surface of her body. There, as he slept next to her, that she felt the cool of his bare should
er nestled in her armpit. The warmth of his knees against the backs of her legs.
The entrance to the house was at the side, off a long alley, hidden from the street. The staircase turned sharply, once and then again, leading to rooms organized tightly around the balcony. The floors were cracked here and there, brownish red.
The rooms were filled with Tarun-da’s books, piled in stacks as tall as children. Housed in cabinets and on shelves. The sitting room, at the front of the building, had a narrow balcony overlooking the street. They were told not to stand there, not to draw attention to themselves.
A few days later she wrote to Manash, saying she had not, after all, gone on a trip to Santiniketan with her friends. She told him that she had married Udayan, and that she would not be returning home.
Then Udayan went to Tollygunge, to tell his parents what they had done. He told his parents that they were prepared to live elsewhere. They were stunned. But his brother was in America, and they wanted their remaining son home. Secretly Gauri had hoped that his parents would not take them in. In that cluttered but cheerful house in Chetla, hiding with Udayan, she’d felt at once brazen and protected. Free.
Udayan talked about their living on their own one day. He didn’t believe in a joint family. And yet, for the time being, because they could not go on staying at the professor’s home, because the home was a safe house and the room they’d been given was needed to harbor someone, because he did not make enough money for them to rent a flat elsewhere, he took her to Tollygunge.
It was only a few miles away. Still, traveling toward it, after Hazra Road, Gauri perceived a difference. The city she knew at her back. The light brighter in her eyes, the trees more plentiful, casting a dappled shade.
His parents stood in the courtyard, waiting to receive her. The house was spacious but utilitarian, plain. She understood immediately the circumstances from which Udayan had come, the conventions he’d rejected.
The end of her sari was draped over her head in a gesture of propriety. His mother’s head was draped also. This woman was now her mother-in-law. She was wearing a sari of crisp cream-colored cotton, checked with golden threads. Her father-in-law was tall and lean, like Udayan, with a moustache, a placid expression, swept-back graying hair.