THE CROSSING

FROM THE NOTE BOOK (2)

This name I have not forgotten till today. Mir Hussein. Those were the days of 1948-49. Many a night he rowed me across Surma. From Baithakhali side of the river to Mallikpur. Deep in the night in some one’s boat stolen for a few hours. My crossing over, he would with care and secrecy take the boat to its proper place. He was not that capable to manage the theft of a boat. Of course, he was given to stealing. Small thefts. Driven by poverty and hunger he stole paddy or some such things from the houses of rich peasants. He did not own any land. He worked in other people’s land on daily payment basis. Payment was mostly in kind, paddy. In those days cash transactions were very scarce. So, naturally, ploughing, transplanting, watering (in Buro paddy growing plots), harvesting, winnowing, drying and storing the paddy in mud plastered bamboo storages, these kept him honestly occupied. These over, people like Mir Hussein had no work, therefore, no earning.

Mir Hussein is probably not alive now. Probably, he was a little older than I. Ebony black, wiry and well-muscled man. This was the first living thief in my life, who was telling me stories of small thefts, while rowing across flooded Surma on a dark heavily clouded night.

Later in life I had seen hundreds if not thousands of thieves, dacoits and convicted armed robbers. One rape accused was transferred to district jail along with me under an escort of three armed policemen. Same escort for two means a sort of cost-cutting. This man had been committed to district session’s court for the seriousness of his offence. If the court decided against him he would have to serve a minimum term of five years of rigorous imprisonment. It was an upstream long steamer journey. Any company, a policeman or even some one accused of an offence was welcome. For a long while the rape accused was trying to convince me that he was in a frame-up. Who knew? It could be that he was telling the truth. In an abject rural ambience more than half a century ago such things used to happen. Being in a family of lawyers I heard bits of conspiratorial talks among the clients. If other things did not stand, a rape or a molestation charge could be slapped. We grew up a little precocious naturally. Women were even available to testify. In those days standard they were handsomely paid. No stigma sticks permanently. A few of them, if they had wished, could be rehabilitated, married even, and, could raise a family. Time is the greatest healer. And the people who engaged them were quite powerful, socially and economically.

To the district jail were brought political prisoners from other smaller custodies. There used to be a period of one month’s isolation, jokingly described by us as baptism. I was kept in one of the thirteen cells, which were called hospital cells because these were in the jail hospital compound. Ten of these were occupied by hopeless and dangerous mentally deranged patients, quite a few of them with a history of manslaughter. Only three of us, two dacoits and me were normal people, who were kept in other three cells. Other ten cells were always locked up except when the occupants were given some food and washed. Nights in the cells enclosure were horrible with nonstop yelling, shouting and other noises pouring out from cells containing the insane. As a matter of fact, they were continuously making terrific din. We three were allowed to be out for a few hours, once in the morning, once in the afternoon. We three non-lunatics were otherwise friendly, used to talk among ourselves about our lives and various things.

These dacoits were quite professional people and if occasion demanded they could become fiercely cruel. One from Barisal district was the senior. One day he showed his trick. He took his right palm near his mouth and threw out from an artificially created cavity in his throat a few pieces of gold and precious stones, smiled, and swallowed back again. These jail birds used these to bribe warders and even officials for various advantages, even in procuring help for escape. I do not know whether nowadays these throat cavity treasuries are still prevalent because political and financial connections make quite a few criminals inside jails very powerful. Often a comfortable prison life for a period serves for them the purpose of a perfect refuge.

Another character I perfectly remember -- an extremely cruel and powerfully built convict hailing from the Chakma tribe of Chittagong Hill Tract who had been assigned with the task of washing the deranged occupants with the aid of a high-pressure hose pipe. His favourite pastime was to press the nozzle of the hose into the mouths or noses of those poor insane to the point of suffocating them to death. The popular idea was that a mad man never caught cold; if one could be made to catch a cold, he would be sane once again. This was a revoltingly cruel sight and there happened to be quite a few spectators, a number of warders among them. One day I spontaneously protested and from the look of that Chakma convict I was perfectly convinced that if at any time he could lay his hands on me it would be my bloody end!

The aggregate of these fragments of experiences led me over from usual ordinariness to the vast open meadow of unusual extraordinariness.

RICH BLEND

FROM THE NOTE BOOK
Bangladesh Rifles headquarters is at Pilkhana, Dhaka, where the recent mutiny and gruesome killings took place. It is also close to Dhanmandi. Whole of Eastern Bengal, now Bangladesh, together with a part of Indian state of Assam , whole of present day West Bengal, Orissa and a part of present day Bihar constituted Sube Bangla of the Mughal Empire. Roughly , a suba was like a later day British administrative province. Mughals initially placed a subedar in these subas for administration, military affairs and revenue collection. Subedars generally were from the army. In the time of Mughal’s decay these administrators were described as Nawabs and Sube Bangla’s capital was at Murshidabad. These Nawabs started betraying increasing independence when they realized that the Delhi emperor’s grip is weakening. Another Nawabi domain sprang up in Dhaka after Murshidabad started declining after the Battle of Plassey, 1757.

Notwithstanding all these political events, landmarks within the region with their Farsi, and in a reduced scale, Arabic nomenclatures stayed throughout centuries, through British imperial days and even today. So, the Pilkhana, the parking place of war elephants, Topkhana, the parking place of batteries of cannons, Baroodkhana, the magazine lingered on till today.

Thus , I used to wake up in a vacant shop at Kazir Bazaar, get out for toilet in a masonry rubble called Baroodkhana and take my showers under spilled water of a very big water supply tank at topkhana, little bothering about Barood or Top of bygone days. Then once again back to Mamu’s snacks-cum-tea stall for my daily chow of very greasy paratha and equally greasy khasi gosht, cooked last evening. Very stale and delicious. Then take out my rickety bicycle and out thanking the Kazi of some centuries back for ordering erection of this cluster of shops, one of which was providing shelter to an anti-state commie, marked prominently in police records. Neighbourhood people took me for a police spy and left me unbothered. Then I would be through Zindabazar via Bandarbazaar, leave the cycle somewhere and board a bus of pre-Second World War vintage of Chevrolet or Dodge make. This would clutter along and stop for half a minute before the Dargah of Peer Shah Zalal, and Muslims or Hindu drivers alike uttered their silent prayers. Then I would get down somewhere and get in on a gashti country boat tied to a pole at a river bank and row out for some place. Many years afterwards it dawned upon me gasht in Farsi meant patrols. Those boats were designed for police patrols in the riverine countryside.

I had no idea of Farsi but my grandfather had. He was a renowned mokhtar in that part of our district with a fairly good grip over Farsi. This was the language used abundantly blended with local languages or dialects in law courts and Hindu lawyers were quite familiar with Farsi, even its script. Life at that time surely had been a grandeur of rich blend.

ON BEING JUDGEMENTAL

While I was trying to understand the following something written by Arthur Miller somewhere sometime—“…He was disintegrating. You seem to be alive in those days was to feel certain communal passions which everybody on the left and all the artists felt….that the country had come to a halt, .so to speak. The powers that be are morally bankrupt. The only alternative was to the explosion of authority in the outside classes, the lower middle classes and the working class. They were going to restore honour to the human race. Odet’s career starts fundamentally in1935 it’s over by 1940---the years of the depression outcry. As soon as life got more ambiguous, which soon happened, his style seemed to be inappropriate……….” (Arthur Miller talking or writing about Gifford Odet), Dr. Rudrangshu Mukherjee popped up in his essay on Victor Kiernan in the Telegraph of 22nd February, 09. Beside Dr. Mukherjee’s elegant, rotund and pedantic English Arthur Miller appeared disheveled, rustic and scratchy. Most probably Arthur Miller was speaking. I could not form a fuller idea about Gifford Odet try as I might. It could be that Odet was an eminent actor in films in those days. I only vaguely remember certain comments on Odet by Satyajit Roy in a small book of his titled probably Our Cinema Their Cinema. It was written after his visit to US and Hollywood.

Gifford Odet is not the point. The point is why an impressive section of the generation under consideration became left or got attracted towards Marxism. That is what Arthur Miller tells us while discussing Gifford Odet. And that is what Dr. Mukherjee misses or glosses over. While discussing the life of Kiernan he seems to be discussing the activities of a few complicits in a folly. That is why inspire of his halting way of speaking Arthur Miller touches a cord in our hearts, hearts of foot soldiers dreaming about a revolution.

More significant is Arthur Miller’s use of the word ambiguous without wasting time to describe his own version about the situation. The temptation to describe a situation which, some people feel, in a straightforward manner sometimes make a description clumsier instead. There are certain events which become more eloquent when contradictions are displayed. Today, confronted with a bigger depression than 1929-30 certain assessments demand a reappraisal. My personal feeling was that this hunky dory offered by technology, gadgets, outsorucing, handsome salary etc.and the culture centering it is going to dominate throughout my life time. Therefore farewell to all those heavy stuff of serious music, .poetry, painting, pure physics, pure mathematics etc. Chances are that I may prove wrong. So much degeneration is not quite natural. Day of judgement can wait. As a historian Dr. Mukherjee can wait a little before discovering the causes. Classical explanations may not be dumped urgently.

I HAVE DIED IN VIETNAM

I HAVE DIED IN VIETNAM

But I have walked in the face of the moon

I have befouled the waters and tainted the air of a magnificent land

But I have made it safe from the disease

I have flown through the sky faster than the sun

But I had idled in the streets made ugly with traffic

I have littered the land with garbage

But I have built upon it hundred million homes

I have divided schools with my prejudice

But I have sent armies to unite them

I have beat down my enemies with clubs

But I have built courthouses to keep them free

I have built a bomb to destroy the world

but I have used it to light a light

I have outraged my brothers in alleys and ghettos

But I have transplanted a human heart.

I have scribbled out filth and pornography

But I have elevated the philosophy of man

I have watched children starve from my golden towers.

But I have fed half the earth

I was raised in a grotesque slum

But I am surfeited by the silver spoon of opulence.

I live in the greatest country in the world in the greatest time in history

But I scorn the ground I stand upon.

I am ashamed

But I am proud

I am an American.

(Published sometime in 1976 in Time Magazine with 25,000 requests for reprint)

MOMENTS OF TRUTH

Several things are happening. After more than half a century Nazim Hikmet has been declared an honoured national poet by Turkish government. So far as I remember Nazim Hikmet died in exile in the then Soviet Union. He was seriously ill. What can be the explanation of this sudden reevaluation of Nazim.May be Turkish government are looking at the past happenings in the history from a different angle,or, it could be that Nazim Hikmet dead is no longer a danger and in view of popular sentiments a little accommodation can be offered to him. In any case we are happy that Turkey has honourably rehabilitated her great revolutionary poet. We remember with what great pride and emotion while in Pakistani jails we used to read and recite Nazim Hikmet. How inspired we used to have been.

From mid twentieth century to its end the church ,particularly the Roman Catholics told the world that Galileo was true in propagating Heliocentric theory and Darwin was perfectly valid in establishing the theories of natural selection and evolution in his Origin of Species. Calumny and humiliation were heaped upon truth for centuries. Ultimately moments of truth appeared with a thunderclap.

Lenin began his State and Revolution with an anecdote.In those times anti Marxists were praising Marx sky high and condemning the followers of Marx. Lenin concluded that in his death Marx was believed to have become harmless.So put an hallow around his name and praise him in order to mollify the ardent followers of Marx.

DO YOU SAY WEDDING?

K.P. Nayar appears to have been greatly relieved after his recent Caribbean round. In those parts imperialism, working class, words like these, appear in discussions like the old days. He started with the objective of showing how effective are the Venezuelan diplomatic actions and simultaneously held an overview of the political happenings in the Latin American countries. For more than last fifteen years words, terms connected with Marxian political economy have become passé to the blue eyed boys of the recent breed of journalists. This is in reference to his Unusual Wedding on the ninth page of The Telegraph of 10th December, 08.

Opportunism is a poor choice to avoid the travails of the path of reason Long before the great revolution in France, Americans fought British imperialism and proclaimed the Declaration of Independence. Decades earlier before the Bolsheviks routed the Czar Mexican working class and toiling masses staged a socialist revolution .Of course, ultimately it was destroyed by the ruling classes. The point is not actually finding out who was the first. This is not a race to become a first boy. The fact remains that revolutions take place. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they fail. Residual signatures remain enduring for centuries. Bonapartism could not finish off republicanism, or, science based atheism, or, nearer to home metric system for lineal, weight wise and all kinds of measurements and all that stands upon logic and mathematical reasoning. Great revolution of France advanced human civilization exponentially in spite of gory slaughter it entailed, in spite of it devouring revolutionaries in hundreds in guillotine.

Similarly, the revolution staged by Russian Bolsheviks in October, 1917 although fell through after more than seventy years of existence could not eliminate the contradictions those foster the revolutions. It is therefore very natural that revolutionary theories along with their jargon continue to be voiced to the great distress of reactionaries or renegades.