Shining Hero

Meena was horrified, and when she met her eldest daughter would scold, ‘Once more you are stirring up trouble where no trouble was before. You should be at home, in the Hatibari helping with the preparations for your sister’s wedding, not rampaging round the countryside and hobnobbing with all these dirty villagers.’

As the day of her younger sister’s wedding grew closer a letter from her mother persuaded Shivarani to return to Hatipur.

‘Although I have never known you give way to envy, anyone might think you are jealous of your sister now, in her time of joy,’ wrote Meena. ‘The Kaurava family are already commenting on your absence. Please come back at once, Shivarani. The wedding takes place in two weeks and there is much to be done before that.’

Shivarani felt ashamed as she reluctantly made her arrangements to go home. She hoped she would be able to look at her sister, wearing the red sari of the bride, without her feelings showing.

She arrived in the village to find the whole place a buzz of action and expectation. All along the main street, silk, chiffon, gold zaree and shadow appliqué poured from the needles of the squatting darjees’ ancient Singer sewing machines. The air steamed with the breath of garlic, chillies and palm tree jaggery as ingredients for the wedding feast arrived on lorries. The rickshaw wallah, who usually was unable to stand the sight of Shivarani walking, no matter how often she refused him, now trotted past her, his face hidden under banana fronds, his carriage laden with the potted trees purchased from Dattapukur that were to decorate the wedding pandal. He did not even notice the towering, striding figure of Shivarani Gupta in her dusty sari and her hacked-off hair. The pandal itself was arriving too, a lorryload of acres of gaudy cotton stitched with mirrors and fringed with little silver bells and fifteen-foot bamboo poles to form the frame. The great wedding tent, when erected, would tower above the Hatibari, be more brightly coloured than the cinema posters of Dattapukur. It was going to look more realistically like a glittering palace than the most voluptuous set from a Bollywood movie.

As Shivarani passed the Hatibari on her way to her parents’ house, Pandu’s brother’s wife and Boodi Ayah were crouching on the verandah floor, arranging presentations for the bride. Gadhari looked up at Shivarani’s greeting. ‘I hope your sister is going to like these things, though in all the years that I have known her I have never seen her with a handbag once, let alone with fifty-three.’ She told Shivarani bitterly that their task was to artistically arrange a matching set of blouse, petticoat, slippers and handbag onto each of fifty-three plastic trays. ‘With no sides,’ complained Gadhari. ‘And the weather so hot that the sellotape will not stick.’

Shivarani stayed and helped for a while, struggling with the slippery plastic and the unruly silk and leather, while Gadhari muttered things like, ‘They never gave anything like this to me when I was married.’ And ‘What woman can make use of fifty-three pairs of chappals?’ And, ‘Wait till she gets pregnant, then what use will these little blouses be to her? To me it is a perfect waste but Kuru Dadoo has insisted.’

Outside, Gadhari’s sons shouted and laughed as they pedalled new trikes among the rose beds, while from an upstairs balcony their grandfather, Kuru Dadoo, watched them with pleasure. ‘He gave them the trikes yesterday, but he is going to regret it when all his precious rose bushes have been destroyed,’ said Gadhari.

When Shivarani left at last, Kuru Dadoo called out from his balcony, ‘Good afternoon Shivarani, we have a great day to look forward to, have we not? And when are you getting married, my dear girl?’ Shivarani felt her face grow hot as she hurried on.

Meena came running out. ‘At least you are come at last. One would think that the unknown peasant women are more important to you than your own sister. And don’t tell me you walked all the way here from the station.’

‘Where is Koonty? She must be feeling terribly excited. Only a week to go,’ said Shivarani.

‘She’s in her room. Go and see her. She’s been a bit mopey lately.’

Shivarani found Koonty sitting, listless and pasty, on the edge of her bed. The wall was tattered with the remnants of ripped paper, as though the cinema posters had been dragged off wildly. ‘I don’t like the cinema any more,’ said Koonty dully. Her hair was lank as though she had not brushed it. She did not get up. And Shivarani, instead of feeling pleased that her sister had grown out of the frivolous stage and might now be about to take an interest in more serious things, felt worried.

‘What is wrong with her?’ she asked Meena later. ‘Has she been ill, or something?’

‘There is nothing wrong at all,’ said Meena. ‘Koonty is, as is to be expected, feeling somewhat apprehensive about the coming ceremony, which is due to be quite the biggest event this village has seen since the marriage of the old zamindar and at which very much will be required of her. I myself was rendered unconscious several times over during my own wedding and I was only marrying into a middle-income family, though of unfortunately large genes. So you may imagine how it must be for your sister. Also she is behaving, at last, with the dignity of a woman who is about to become the bride of the zamindar though you, with your cavortings round the villages, would not know anything about proper behaviour.’

‘Ma must be right,’ thought Shivarani, but all the same could not get from her mind that there was something more wrong with Koonty than dignity or apprehension.

After a while Meena admitted that Koonty had been depressed ever since the day she lost the golden jewel that Pandu had given her. ‘Even after I told her, don’t worry about that, for at the wedding she will be given a hundred times as much gold and that I am sure the young zamindar will not be angry but will give her another if he comes to know of the loss, she has not been made happy.’

‘Koonty is forever losing things. The last time I was here she had mislaid the sovereign piece that the zamindar had given her and she didn’t seem to mind a bit. You were the one who was furious,’ protested Shivarani.

‘Then there was the episode at the river,’ went on Meena. ‘When you were away she tried to rescue a kitten, or so we think, though she will not talk about it. However, it seems that the creature was carried away by the current and it is from that time that Koonty seems to have suffered from a lowering of the spirits. Perhaps you can talk to her and see if you can find the source of the trouble.’

Shivarani managed to persuade Koonty to come out of her room and be measured for a blouse to go with her wedding sari. Koonty emerged unsteadily and stood passive while Shivarani wound the tape measure round her body. ‘I think it’s stupid to be making more blouses,’ she said. ‘Considering how you told me they are sending me fifty-three new ones, stuck to trays with sellotape, from the Hatibari.’

‘Keep still,’ said Shivarani, her mouth full of pins. ‘Are you looking forward to the wedding?’

‘Yes,’ said Koonty in a voice that made it sound like ‘no’. Her thoughts seemed far away.

‘Why do you keep staring at the river? Can you see something there?’

‘No reason,’ said Koonty and looked down at her feet as though the question frightened her.

‘Do you know what happens on the wedding night?’ she asked. Koonty said nothing, but something wet touched Shivarani’s bowed-over neck and when she looked up she saw that there were tears falling from Koonty’s eyes.

Shivarani asked, ‘Do you want me to tell you?’ wondering how to phrase it if Koonty said yes.

‘No,’ said the girl. ‘I do know. You needn’t tell me.’

As the day of the wedding approached the activity of Hatipur reached fever pitch. From every side came the sound of hammering, as decorations were erected, the pandal completed, the ovens for cooking the feast erected. Meena had to take to her bed twice in the course of that last week, overcome by nervous exhaustion. Every man and woman and child in the village was occupied in some way with the preparations for the ceremony itself or purchasing or manufacturing gifts and overseeing the stitching of their own new outfits. The wedding was to last two weeks, and the richer people of the village planned to wear different clothes on every day. Goats, chickens and sheep were being fattened for slaughter and the flour for ten thousand chupatties purchased, for two thousand people would have been fed by the time this wedding was over.

These days every conversation in the village would sooner or later come to the subject of the wedding gifts. People tended to panic on hearing what someone else was giving, and would rush away and exchange what they had already bought for something more expensive. The widows were sewing a pair of three-foot-high dolls, dressed in UK bridal outfits, for their gift. Laxshmi was giving the bridal couple her best mother hen, who, when broody, had not left her eggs during the loudest fireworks of Diwali and had fought off a water buffalo that had come too near her chicks.

The misti wallah was creating a vast shandesh fish, big enough for five hundred people, and decorated with leaf of gold and pearls from Hyderabad. The rickshaw wallah, whose rickshaw had been painted gold, was going to transport guests free of charge.

A special tent was erected for the viewing of the bride and groom and on the day row upon row of guests poured into it, their eyes fixed on the two empty thrones which were soon to be occupied by the bridal couple. As they waited silver trays of sandal paste were circulated for the guests to ornament their foreheads, some Europeans among them eating this, mistaking it for a ritual snack.

There came gasps of delight when, at last, the bridegroom arrived. He had ridden from the Hatibari on a white Marwari horse, and had to be led to his chair, because the strings of jasmine flowers hanging from his pith helmet obscured his sight. Now all eyes were on the entrance for a first sight of the bride.

But she did not come. She could not be found. Though she had been kept inside her room and constantly surrounded by female relatives, when the moment arrived for her to be taken to the pandal in the golden rickshaw, she was not there. ‘I left her for a moment to get a glass of water,’ said an aunt. ‘She was there two minutes ago. I dashed off to get a safety pin, in case she pulled out the sari folds,’ said a cousin. The family wasted precious time beating on the locked door of Koonty’s room and begging her to let them in.

The guests waited and wondered what was happening.

Eventually a carpenter was called, and managed to break the door lock. The room was empty. Koonty’s wedding outfit that had taken such hours to arrange, was flung over the floor and the window was open.

Meena began to wail and accuse her husband, saying, ‘I told you we should have bars put on her window. My friends from the Calcutta Club will be filled with malicious pleasure when they discover.’

They must find her quickly, the family knew, before the guests discovered that the bride, moments before her wedding, had ripped off all her clothes, climbed out of the window and run away.

The guests were growing restless and the bridegroom kept looking towards the pandal entrance like someone waiting for a bus. The Calcutta Club ladies began to whisper delightedly to each other, suspecting and hoping for a scandal. Meena, overwhelmed with self-pity, shame and fury, wanted to go to bed and lie in the dark with an iced sponge over her forehead but instead ran this way and that like a hen who had lost her chicks.

It was Shivarani who finally found Koonty. The girl, wearing only her petticoat and blouse, was sitting on the river bank, staring into the water as though she had lost something. Shivarani sat down beside her and putting an arm round her, said, ‘Tell me what the matter is.’

Koonty stared into the water and was silent for ages. Then she said, ‘Didi, if someone put a newborn baby onto a floating goddess’ hand, how long do you think it would stay alive?’

‘That’s silly. Come back. All the guests are waiting, and Pandu is feeling very sad.’

‘And do you think that if someone saw a hand of Durga floating by, with a little newborn baby lying in it, that they would rescue the baby? Do you think that, Didi?’

Shivarani sat silent, as something totally impossible and terrible began to seem possible. ‘Tell me what happened,’ she whispered, though she did not want to hear.

When Koonty had finished Shivarani tried to speak but words would not come.

‘It was very dark and I do not know if it was a boy or a girl even though I held it in my arms for so long,’ Koonty whispered at last. ‘But I feel sure, from its gentle little movements, that it was a girl.’

‘I see,’ said Shivarani, and her mouth felt dry as though she had a fever.

‘It is because of this I cannot face these wedding guests.’

‘Why not?’ asked Shivarani.

‘Can’t you see, can’t you see?’ cried Koonty. ‘There are all those children coming to the feast and one of them might be mine, rescued from the hand of Durga. Suppose I saw my child, what should I do?’

‘If anyone had found that floating baby, the whole village would have talked about it by now,’ said Shivarani and thought to herself that the baby was surely dead.

‘But anyway, I cannot marry Pandu,’ said Koonty.

‘Why can’t you?’

‘As soon as I have told him he will not want me,’ said Koonty.

‘Then don’t tell him.’

‘But how can I not? And even if I say nothing, he will find out tonight. My body will let him know.’

‘Our young Indian men are so innocent that I think he will not know and you must never tell him,’ said Shivarani.

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.