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what I really had in mind – armed peasant rebellion, an entire and comprehensive rehauling of everything, of land reform, food production, wealth distribution, of realising the full meaning of ‘The crop belongs to those who cultivate it’. Placed beside this aim, all this student unrest was like flies buzzing around a horse: the irritation caused was so ephemeral, it could be dispersed with one lazy swish of the tail.
    It became clear to me that the last thing the CPI(M) was interested in was radical change. I tested how much dissent against this sell-out would be tolerated by articulating my unease as innocent questions. None, it emerged. They even quoted Chairman Mao to justify their betrayal: ‘Battles are waged one by one and enemy battalions are destroyed one at a time. Factories are built one at a time. Farmers cultivate one plot after another. We serve ourselves the total amount of food that we can consume, but we eat it spoonful by spoonful; to eat it in one go would be impossible. This is known as the “piecemeal solution”.’ Their argument went something like this: a small presence of the leftist parties in government may appear to be insignificant, but this will give the opportunity to manoeuvre for more power and that, in turn, for more, until the nation will be run by a government that is wholly communist. India will become Vietnam.
    Towards the end, hearing these words and arguments, especially quotations from Chairman Mao, issuing from the blind mouths of these self-interested, power-hungry, corrupt Communist Party flunkies set fire to my blood. Not a single one of them was truly interested in the revolution to which they paid such assiduous lip-service. All they wanted was power, the rest of the nation could go to hell.
    While the spectre of erstwhile revolutionaries becoming Establishment figures within the folds of that great betrayer, the CPI(M), was painful and intolerable, something else was taking shape, something that was going to explode like a thousand suns in an unsuspecting sky – Naxalbari. For those of us who had been reading Charu Mazumdar’s electric writing in Liberation ever since we joined university, the events of May 1967 themselves were not a surprise so much as the fact that they happened.
    Being a Bengali, one is surprised when all the endless spume and froth of talk suddenly reveals itself to be the front of a gigantic wave of action.

CHAPTER TWO
    1967
    THE AUTUMN MILDNESS is just beginning to set in. The blue sky is dotted sparsely with cottony white clouds. Children are on holiday and the skeleton of the puja pandal – a wondrous structure made of bamboo and planks and coir ropes and coloured cloth, stretched and ruched and concertinaed across the bones of bamboo, covering them decoratively in furls and drapes – has already been constructed in the piece of land that abuts the Durga temple of 23 Pally. This cathedral of fabric will house the goddess Durga and her four children, Lakshmi, Saraswati, Kartik and Ganesh, two on either side of her, for nearly five days. On the final evening, the clay effigies of the goddess and her children will be immersed in Tolly’s Nala or the Hooghly at Outram Ghat, marking the end of the biggest festival in the Bengali calendar.
    For the last six weeks volunteers organised under the banner of ‘23 Pally Sharbojonin Puja Committee’, consisting mostly of teenagers and young men of the neighbourhood, have gone from door to door, collecting donations for the festival. The intricate, sometimes baroque, light displays have started going up along the street, on trees, on the water tank on the roof of number 11/A/2. This year, the most numerous of them, along the whole length of Basanta Bose Road, all the way to Jogamaya College, are in the form of a fountain tree: a tall column of yellow fairy lights exploding in a six-veined fountain, three on each side, parted in the middle like a child’s drawing of a palm tree. The coloured lights of