This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar's Tale: Two Anti-Novels

This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar’s Tale

The last 2-3 years’ newspapers, letters, writing,

interview extracts, reportage … whatever I

thought whenever I thought, all of this,

everything, was used, fiercely, with

broken type, and me too

‘I don’t-want don’t-want don’t-want, dear

this measured out love of yours.’

Bedana Dasi (Bengali singer, 1905)

Here’s Ramayan Chamar’s tale

Much about the character remained unknown to me, and as I continued to read, with all of you, I became enthusiastic, yet I kept waiting. But nothing occurred according to rules, just the bare body and the perspiring face – even the dialogue got continuously jumbled up on the tongue, becoming loose and inert. It’s one in the morning now, the rotis have become dry and hard. The lights in the house next door were turned off long ago. The social context, the frame, suddenly becomes an adversary, a palimpsest, of him, the Character – and right then, a major part, which at the time of writing was unclear even to me, gradually emerged from the shadows. I was compelled to provide explanations: the promises, the ethic of never denying humanity – but I don’t refer merely to the Telangana or Tebhaga movements. Consequently, the wooden planks of the hanging-bridge catch fire, the chemicals for country-bombs illicitly bought from Allahabad at 40 rupees a kilo get sold for 400 rupees a kilo in the No. 3 Line basti in Jorabagan. Perhaps it’s because of this that he, Ramayan Chamar, had laughingly revealed to me: ‘Only if you wet all the seeds with water – do you follow? – only if you wet all the seeds in water…’

Dam, check-dam

Until now, man has not been able to make a firearm

Dam, check-dam

Until now, man has not been able to make

a firearm

which fires bullets only in a single direction

and avoids

other directions

Back in the village, we never had to buy food, only salt and kerosene were purchased. I used to visit Calcutta every now and then. I never knew what deprivation was. I liked Sarju, who lived next door, she was as pretty as a fairy, but I didn’t get married. The song, ‘With every wish, I swing in bliss’, had just started becoming popular then – Kanan Devi’s song, Sarju sang it beautifully. The wages for making bidis were six annas in those days, one got by well. Father died in 1950. I had begun to savour babudom. Frilled sleeves, cross-collared punjabis, and a fine-bordered Sengupta dhuti.

Panu Mullick, Pannalal, was a militant labourer of the Howrah Bidi Workers’ Union at one time, whom I first came to know even before I started wearing trousers – a red gamcha slung on his shoulder, puffing a bidi and walking briskly to the field of clumps across the railroad tracks to do his business, the crisp morning sunlight in every direction, the kind of light in which the Robi Thakurs sat by the window and wrote poetry. Every part of Pannalal was alive, his teeth, mouth, hair, genitals, all of it, and the yellowish brains in his head too. I hadn’t asked whether he had heard the name of Ramayan Chamar. Later I saw he had become that, wanted to become that. As I listened to him, I correctly surmised that by pinching handfuls of meat he was warming the meat – making it really warm.

‘Which party were you in?’

‘There were no leftists at that time, so it was to the Congress party that I paid subscription. There was a meeting once in Goila, in Barisal, I saw Netaji there. I had also seen Gandhiji in a public meeting at Madaripur. I did love Gandhiji. Who doesn’t love him? People had given over a lot of gold ornaments to him in the cause of the nation. He set up twenty-six cloth mills across the country with that money. Is that true, babu?’

‘Had the partition taken place?’

‘Yes. Once the refugee card was issued, I got seventy-five rupees for the land and five hundred rupees for the homestead from the government. Later the government gave another five hundred rupees for a small workshop.’

‘Which party do you like?’

‘Why – the communists. There’s no party other than them that thinks about us. I had been with the bidi workers’ movement. Surya, Nani and I – we used to collect donations. Harihar babu was the president. After him, it was Bishwanath babu. And after him, all of us together made Bimal babu president. I was the main organizer. Now Bimal babu is a minister – and I’m a pauper. Do you get it?’

‘Do you know that the National Security Act has been passed?’

‘To hell with national security – the black law has been passed.’

‘Do you receive pension?’

‘Pension? Earlier I used to get twenty-five rupees, now I get thirty rupees. Can you get two hundred grams of chira a day for that amount? Where am I to get the balance from?’

‘But you can go to the party office now, can’t you?’

‘Nobody gives a damn if we go now, babu. It’s Haran Sadhukhan and company who are there now. As soon as the smell of political position touches their body, all of them become veritable Hanumans – do you get that, Hanumans, all of them…’

Muscling his way in, Ramayan Chamar nods his head animatedly: ‘Whatever else I might be, at least I’m not Panu Mullick. Descendants of slaves, they are all slaves – each and every one of them. Sure, there’s no mark on their throats, but the vote-casting mark on the thumb remains. The mark of impermanent ink.’

Moonlight gleams on the rail tracks. On the railway over-bridge in Tikiapara, two groups of hoodlums fight for control over the locality, people from one platform cannot cross over to the other platform. The battle steadily spreads beyond the rail yard towards the No. 3 Line basti. Guns and bombs, from nine at night to seven in the morning. Our dream: a united and prosperous India.

BEWARE OF DANGER

An importunate request to the people at large, that without, first of all, solving the riddle elaborated below, no one can read the novel. Otherwise, there exists the calamitous possibility of inviting divine retribution. A progressive youth, a resident of Berhampore in Murshidabad district, flagrantly disregarded the riddle and began reading the tale studiously. Consequently, in the evening, when he was going home on his bicycle after attending an important party meeting, two country-bombs landed on his head and right there he attained dissolution into the five elements. About the bombs that were directed to finish him off, all that the police could say was that there was no evidence in their possession about who had thrown them. An independent gentleman, a clerk from the Kasba locality who always avoided every kind of party-politics, who was forever reciting shlokas as if he were baring his claws and fangs, exhibited laughing disregard for the said riddle and ran his eyes over the story. That afternoon, for not being able to give the puja donation demanded, he was thrashed under the papaya tree he himself had planted. He was admitted to hospital in a half-dead condition. Evidently he had received such punishment for going against God, or else why was no one arrested for the said incident? Considering the importance of the situation, there is only one direction to the fraternity of readers: Beware of danger!

THE RIDDLE

A monkey goes and attaches himself to the very end of a suspended rope. The rope hangs from the medium of a frictionless, standalone pulley. At the other end of the rope swings a bunch of full-sized martamaan bananas. The monkey now begins to climb the rope. Can you say when there will be no distance between the bunch of bananas and the monkey?

The scavengers poke the oven ash blows out on to them

The flames and the thick smoke

The smell of burning corpses in the air

Go about enraging

9:00 in the morning

The idea of Ramayan was coming into my head, bit by bit, then. As it happened, at the Rashbihari crossing, I ran into the editor¹ of a weekly that had a print run of about fifteen thousand. He wore a yellow punjabi.² He asked: ‘What happened … Where’s the story?’ A nice means to shut you up isn’t it? His wife stood to his right, craning her neck, staring – a lot of dirt around the cuffs of my pajamas. Two girls, chatting, passed by. They were headed for Dhakuria Lake: ‘Do you know how many editions there have been of Chowringhee?’ The high-heels of one of them slipped upon stepping on cow-dung, the other held her and arrested her fall: ‘What the heck! Don’t you look where you’re walking?’³

The writer … punjabi-pajama bought at a discount sale … a special price for Gandhiji’s birthday, it had cost Rs 38.75, I remember, after the 30 per cent rebate. A pair of second-hand binoculars in hand, he had gotten from somewhere … a shoe-polish box slung on his neck … he stands on the left, left of everyone.

In order to survive in the capitalist system, artists and litterateurs have to be amicable sometimes and sometimes they need to wrestle … he stands on the left side, left of everyone … I do not want my writing to be converted into capital, or be capable of being digested by the intestines of middle-class babus. I want to make my writing into a weapon against this repression-based civilization.

Just as the speech is coming to an end, Phantom comes rushing out of the pages of Indrajal comics, his fists ready for action, he pushes and fells his foe. The police too find a bucket full of bomb-making chemicals. Just then, mingling among the people, he begins to polish shoes; every now and then, he looks through the binoculars to see whether the heels are cracked or not, and how much. The bomb-making business reaches right up to the village.

A pencil-knife in hand, the man comes face to face with a band of half-wild, half-urban animals.⁴

He will be awakened again after eleven, twenty-two or thirty-three years.

12:45 in the afternoon

That day, at around a quarter to one in the afternoon, a lorry carrying scrap iron overturned and fell off the Howrah bridge, killing six labourers. Four persons popped it at the accident site itself, and two were admitted to the hospital. At that time, on that day, the democratic voting-festival in West Bengal was happening with gusto. The leftists were getting six out of ten votes. Telephoning Lalbazar to ascertain the names and particulars of the men who were crushed to death, the busy police officer had reacted testily: ‘It is not my duty to find out about all these coolies and labourers, I have other very important work to do – don’t you know, today is election day – phone the hospital!’ The sweet aroma of his 555 cigarette wafted even through the phone, a very pleasant aroma.

One of the distinctive features of capitalist art and literature is to push contemporaneity as far away as possible, and to make it seem as if all that is written is permanent – an eternal truth for all time that they alone have discovered, suitable for all classes of people.⁵

5:40 in the evening

Walking along, he reached the Ganga riverbank that evening. Many boats were crowded together at the riverbank. The scene suddenly appeared in his sight. A small coal-stove on the floorboards of a boat. Rice boiling-bubbling in a clay pot. The lid on the pot rattled. He saw it from afar. The aroma of cooking reached his nose – rice being cooked. Sitting on the prow, the boatman, clad in a checked lungi, puffed on a hookah. Another person sat near the awning, her ghomta drawn over her head. A deep-red sari. A pair of artistic earrings gleaming. Glass bangles on the wrist. Alta glowing on the feet. Putting down the hookah, the boatman advanced with small steps: ‘Wife, won’t you get up?’ In answer to the soft-voiced query, her haughty reply was heard: ‘I won’t get