Chapter Six

"I am a poor person of Sudra caste. I am one of eleven sons of Jagdisvaran Bibhuti Muktanandaji who was with Gandhiji on his Walk to the Sea.

"My home is in the village of Anguda which is near Durgalapur which is along the rail line connecting Calcutta and Jamshedpur. It is a poor village, and no one from the outside has taken any interest in it except for the time when a tiger ate two of the sons of Subhoranjan Venkateswarani and a man came from a newspaper in Bhubaneshwar to ask Subhoranjan Venkateswarani how he felt about this. I do not remember this well, as it occured during the war — which was some fifteen years before I was born.

"Our family has not always been poor. My grandfather, S. Mokeshi Muktanandaji, once loaned money to the village moneylender. By the time I was born, the eighth of eleven sons, we had long since borrowed back my grandfather's money and much more. To pay off some of the interest on his debts, my father was forced to sell the richest six acres of his land — those closest to the village. That left fifteen acres, spread over many miles, to be divided among the eleven us. One cannot raise cane for two bullocks on that small a share of land.

"The problem was made a small bit better when my older brother Marmadeshwar went off to do his patriotic duty in 1971 and was promptly killed by the Pakistanis. Still, the prospects for the rest of us were not good.

"Then my father had an idea. For eight years I had gone halftime to the Christian Agricultural Academy in Durgalpur. The school was sponsored by the very rich Mr. Debee of the Bengal Cattle Insemination Centre. It was a small school. We had few books and only two teachers, one of whom was slowly going mad from syphilis.

"Nonetheless, I was the only member of my father's family ever to have gone to school, and he decided that I would go off to university. He planned for me to become a doctor or — even better — a merchant, and bring much money to the family. This also solved the problem of my share of land. It was obvious to my father that a doctor or wealthy merchant would have no need for a small plot of poor farmland.

"I, myself, had mixed feelings about this idea. I had never been more than eight miles from Anguda. I had never ridden in a train or automobile. I could read very simple books and write basic sentences in Bengali, but I knew no English or Hindi and only enough Sanskrit to recite a few lines of the Ramayana and Mahabharata.

"In short, I was not sure that I was ready to become a doctor.

"My father borrowed more money — in my name, this time — from the village money-lender. My teacher, in his madness, wrote a recommendation for admission to Calcutta University and directed it to his old instructor there. Even Mr. Debee, who in his pre-Christian days had sworn to Gandhiji that he would humbly work for our villages and have his ashes spread on the main path of Anguda, wrote a note to the University requesting their kindness in admitting a poor, ignorant, low-caste peasant child to their honored halls of learning.

"Last year there was an opening. I paid most of my borrowed money as baksheesh to my teacher and to Mr. Debee's secretary, and then I left my home for the great city. How terrified I was!

"I will not describe my reactions to all of the wonders of Calcutta. Suffice it to say that every hour brought marvelous revelations. I was soon downcast, however. My meager funds barely paid the first semester's tuition and left not enough money for the expensive dormitories or student hostels near the University. I spent my first week in the city sleeping under the bushes in the Maidan, but the monsoon rains and two beatings by the police convinced me to seek a room.

"My four classes were somewhat of a disappointment. There were more than four hundred students in my Introduction to National History class. I could not afford the textbook and was rarely close enough to hear the lecturer, who mumbled and, in any case, spoke only in English, which I could not understand. I therefore spent my days hunting for lodging and wishing I were home in Anguda. Even by eating only one meal of rice and chapatis a day, I knew that I would be out of money within a few weeks. If I was lucky enough to find a room to rent, I would starve that much sooner.

"Then I answered an ad for a roommate in the Student Forum and everything changed. The room was six miles from the university on the seventh floor of a building which housed mostly refugees from Bangladesh and Burma. The student who wished to rent half of the room was a junior — a brilliant man several years older than I who was then studying pharmacy science but who wished to someday be a great author, or, failing that, a nuclear physicist. His name was Sanjay, and from the first time I saw him standing there amidst piles of his papers and unwashed clothing, I knew somehow that my life would never again be the same.

"He wanted two hundred rupees a month for my half of the room. My face must have shown my despair. At that time I had less than one hundred rupess to my name. I realized that I had made the two-hour walk for nothing. I asked if I could sit down. The soles of my feet were in great pain from the beating with lathi sticks I had received a few nights earlier. I later discovered that the policemen had broken the arches of my feet.

"Upon hearing this, Sanjay immediately took pity on me. He became furious when I told him of the beatings and the size of the bribes demanded by the University dormitory wardens. Sanjay's moods, as I was soon to learn, were like monsoon storms. One minute he could be calm, contemplative, as still as a statue, and the next he would fly off in a rage against some social injustice and put his fist through the rotting wallboards or kick some Burmese child down the back staircase.

"Sanjay was a member of both the Maoist Student Coalition and the Communist Party India. The fact that these two factions despised each other and frequently came to blows did not seem to bother him. He described his parents as "decadent capitalist parasites" who owned a small pharmaceutical company in Bombay and who sent him money each month. His parents at first had sent him out of the country to study, but when he returned to "renew contacts with the revolutionary struggle in my own country," he further offended them by choosing the brawling, plebeian Calcutta University in which to pursue his degree rather than a more prestigious college in Bombay or Delhi.

"After telling me these things about himself and listening to my own story, Sanjay promptly changed the rent request to five rupees a month and offered to loan me the money for the first two months. I confess that I wept with joy.

"During the following weeks, Sanjay showed me how to survive in Calcutta. In the morning, before sunrise, we rode to the center of the city with the Scheduled Class truck drivers who transported dead animals to the renderers. It was Sanjay who taught me that in a great city such as Calcutta, caste distinctions meant nothing and would soon disappear when the imminent revolution arrived. I agreed with Sanjay's points, but my upbringing still made it impossible for me to share a bus seat with a stranger or accept a piece of fried dough from a vendor without instinctively wondering what the caste of the man was. Nonetheless, Sanjay showed me how to ride the trains for free, where to be shaved by a street-corner barber who owed my friend favors, and how to squeeze into the cinema for free during the intermission of the nightly three-hour film.