Shining Hero by Sara Banerji

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. Therich 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,