The weary and hungry vagabond who had been lying like a corpse since last night under the stairs of the overbridge on Platform No. 2 of the Jadavpur rail station, amidst all the dust, dirt, paan spittle, banana and orange peels, bread wrappers and other garbage there, woke up with a start to a crashing sound, and fully awake now, he looked wide-eyed in astonishment in all directions. He had no doubt now that he was the most fortunate person in the world. He pressed his hand on the left side of his chest and realised that his heart was thumping rapidly. That clearly meant he was still alive and possessed his perpetual worn-out state.
This world was most beautiful. There was nothing more pleasurable and blissful than being alive here. There couldn’t be. Which was why people kept their blind or lame or bedsore-ridden and even paralysed and comatose loved ones alive through a million means.
During the night that had just passed – so many hundreds of people had had to leave this earth and go away, whether out of natural or unnatural causes, and known or unknown reasons. But he had been saved from being devoured by a macabre death. Like a dearly beloved one, the breezy, pure, clean air of dawn smeared a pleasant sensation all over him. The universe’s message of life resounded in his auditory faculty, it lit hope in his breast, and in a little while the lordly sun would turn the eastern sky red and rise like a golden orb. That sunrise could be glimpsed to one’s heart’s content. This was most joyous, most blissful.
His eyes now fell on the hard floor of the platform and he realised that the object that fell with a monstrous metallic sound was not a heavy stone thrown at someone’s head by that murder addict. It was an innocent and innocuous fish-trough. A fish-seller had thrown that. He would get on the first Down-train of the day and go to some fish-market in the riverine country of south Bengal to bring fish.
With the arrival of the train, there could be no more delay. That seemed to be the message that emanated from the flow of life in the rail station as he woke up suddenly. By now some passengers of various ages had arrived at the rail station. The solitary tea-stall that was exactly in the middle of the platform was open now to quench their thirst. Cups of hot tea from the shop reached eager hands. Slurp, slurp, they sipped noisily.
If there had been food in his belly, his eyes would have been submerged in the deep slumber of dawn, and it wasn’t inconceivable that any person would have reason to be angry with the fish-seller for his offence of throwing the trough and making that awful sound and ruining his sleep. But the man sleeping in the dark niche below the stairs, who was suddenly woken up, couldn’t express his anger against him. To the contrary, he felt rather pleased inwardly. Being liberated from the terrifying nightmare that had seized him, like an octopus with its eight tentacles, and paralysed him with fear, he actually felt gratitude towards the unknown fish-seller. It was as if, amidst this darkness, he was revealed as a person dispatched by God to grant a new life to someone imperilled and facing death.
The recumbent had had a nightmare. It was a long and terrifying one. A murderer was standing near his head holding a huge stone raised in his hands, with the intention of killing him. He had been about to smash his head with the stone. His life seemed to be hanging by a thread. With his life dangling over endless, bottomless darkness. Being delivered now from that agonising moment preceding death, the supine vagabond laughed inwardly. He thanked the God of life for being given a new life.
Just like one can’t measure contentment, or say how much of it one ought to receive in order to call it contentment unless that was weighed against misery, similarly, it’s impossible to know what life is, and how valuable the breath of life is, unless one stood face-to-face with death.
The lights had come on in the rail station. Until a little while back the entire locality had been swallowed up by a terrifying darkness owing to a power cut, but that vanished the moment the lights returned.
A religious preacher had said that however fearsome and piercing the darkness might be, and even if all the darkness on earth was gathered together, it couldn’t extinguish the light of a small earthen lamp. But if the flame of the lamp was extinguished for some reason, the darkness could assume an intense form. Of course, he had said this out of anguish over the decay of belief in God and the spread and development of atheism in the world.
Light meant the splendour of lustre and warmth. Light meant truth and justice. Light meant the sun, it meant life. Light was the greatest means of survival and blooming of this earth.
It’s very difficult to say whether this beautiful earth would be suitable for humans to live in if a day dawned when there was no more light. But there’s no need for any such worry now. Because however fierce the darkness of that world might be, and however it might conspire, it did not have the power to extinguish a small earthen lamp. But if the lamp went out for some reason, the darkness would only grow fiercer.
This was true, and it is equally true in politics, sociology, art, literature, culture and all other spheres. These were bad times. In a sense there was no ray of light anywhere in this country. There was only darkness, a piercing, all-pervading darkness. A insidious, crippling, black, new moon’s darkness seemed to have descended upon society and life all over the country. It seemed there was perpetual night, suffocating and ghastly. A band of creatures of darkness romped around in that darkness like maddened elephants. They had no pity or mercy, no sense of good and bad, right and wrong, or fair and foul, no remorse or compunction. They roamed around with their ferocious fangs and claws bared, intent on devouring people. But they looked exactly like humans.
No one could say whose chest they would stab in the anarchic darkness, or when. No one could say which breast’s warm, liquid blood would wet the city streets, which mother’s bosom would be laid bare, and which woman would be widowed.
Time was a terrible assassin now. Everything was joyless, with only the great glee of murderers all around. The unfettered movement of exultant killers in the valley of death known as a country. Whether in street processions, or in public rallies or political meetings, it was killers who had hegemony. Right now, the creatures known as people had only one option, namely, death.
Although all the electric lights in the rail station were on at this time, the light could not reach the spot beneath the steps of the overbridge. It couldn’t, no light could reach everywhere equally. While one set of people flew around in jet planes, downtrodden Adivasi folk were oblivious of what even a train was. It seemed that all the darkness of the land had come fleeing and hidden under the stairs like a criminal who had escaped from prison. Like in prehistoric times, when man crawled out of a mountain cave into the light of this world, or even before that, when he emerged from the dark recesses of his mother's womb into the dusty earth – in the same way, the vagabond crawled out of the dark corner under the stairs. As if he had just been born. The sky above was packed with stars, as he stood on the hard cemented floor and stretched himself, and dusted the grime off himself. It seemed that it wasn’t just the grime, but all the failures through life, the defeats, and every old notion that he wanted to dust off. He turned his head and gazed at the terrifying dark corner under the stairs.
The vagabond suddenly seemed to be thoughtful. He thought he was discarding his deprived, futile, and humiliating past there, like a tree that shed its old leaves every autumn and then took on a new appearance come spring, or like a snake that forfeited its worn out skin every full moon. It wasn’t a dream, it had really happened, a stone had been dropped on my head this night. The stone had smashed my head to smithereens. I am dead. But it was no man with a stone who smashed my head, it was I who did that to myself. The I that was alive until yesterday is no longer there. This me is a different me. I have just been born. This dark night is the mother from whose womb I was born. The moment such a thought struck him, a bolt of energy shot through his long-starved, weary body. Until just yesterday, his knees trembled violently as they bore his body. But that had vanished in a trice. He stood up straight. He clenched his hand into fists, unclenched them, and then clenched them again. He glanced at the signal post. The red glowed in the pitch darkness, like a one-eyed monster. When that turned green, it meant that a train was arriving. The tea-stall in the middle of the platform was full of customers now. They were the passengers waiting at the station, mostly labourers, and rickshaw-drivers. They blew on the steaming tea and sipped it. All of them were worried lest the train arrived on time today. They couldn’t be sipping tea in that event. They would have paid for the tea in vain. That’s why they were hurrying.
The vagabond longed for a cup of tea now. Who didn’t want that after waking up at the crack of dawn! This small desire could by no means be seen as criminal. But his pockets were completely empty. It had been so for many days.
The man knew that there were two ways of obtaining foodstuffs in this country. The first was to put the money down before the shopkeeper with a bang, order whatever one liked, and then eat to one’s fill. The second was to order whatever one liked, eat to one’s fill, and then flee the place. But since he did not possess even a penny, there was no question of buying food. And if he had to adopt the second method, right now he possessed neither the strength in his legs, nor the courage of mind that were required for that. He had been unable to stand up yesterday; but he was standing up today. He would be able to walk tomorrow. And sprint the day after tomorrow. He had to wait until then. For just a few days! Couldn’t he do that? He certainly could.
He pinched his throat to quell his desire for tea, and climbed slowly to the top of the overbridge. If it had been yesterday, he would have had to take the help of the railing on the side to climb up. But his mind didn’t consent to that today.
The overbridge was at the western end of the station. Standing atop the bridge, the man looked both eastwards and westwards. Beneath him, the railway track stretched out like a taut bowstring. The two parallel rails seemed to have an extremely meaningful symbolic significance. They were like the straight lines of life and death. One was the complement of the other. If one of them was excluded, the other was rendered worthless and unreal.
After a while, the vagabond sat down on the bridge. He rested his head on the railing. The fresh air and pleasant breeze of dawn lapped his face. It was like the touch of a compassionate hand, patting the head of a dying person. The man dozed off again. No nightmares attacked him while he slept now. There was a squalid mass of innumerable tiny shanties on both the northern and southern sides of the rail station. Hogla reed, bamboo matting, discarded tin sheets, leaves, wood, gunny and various other items were used in their construction. All the labouring folk who dwelt in these shanty settlements were also asleep now, motionless. As were the happy citizens of the civilised and polished civil world beyond the railway area. Denying the environment of cold terror that pervaded the body of society, people were now submerged in the deep, inaccessible pit of unconsciousness.
***
The vagabond himself was unaware of how long he slept like that. One after another, Up- and Down-trains arrived and halted. There was a lot of commotion in the station precincts for a little while. The man lazily opened his eyes a slit. Once the train departed, unbroken silence once again descended upon the entire station. He shut his eyes again.
When he next opened his eyes, this time, as expected, there in the eastern sky, like a golden dish, like the big red dot of sindoor on one’s Ma’s forehead, was the round red effulgent sun. The city that seemed to be dead and ruined in the darkness of night seemed to have returned to life upon receiving the rejuvenating touch of the rays of the new sun.
The glow and shine of the light of the new morning had now spread to the ramshackle huts on both sides of the railway lines, and the artistry of the flickering light was also manifest in the glum face of the poor ragpicker boy with blistered hands and feet, setting off with a torn sack slung on his shoulder to collect waste paper, the scraggly hair of the girl who washed utensils in babu homes, and the eyes of the blind beggar who sang to the accompaniment of a tambourine.
The vagabond came down the stairs to Platform No. 1. All around him were large milk drums, huge bundles of newspapers, and massive baskets of vegetables. Averting all these, he advanced on wobbly legs, like a child that had just learnt to walk, taking tiny steps, and with his face turned towards the newly risen sun. He didn’t really know where he was going, or why. He thought he could, and so he did.
He walked till the end of Platform No. 1, stepped down and crossed the rail tracks on the left side, and hopped up to Platform No. 2. He walked westwards, and then crossed the tracks, and returned to Platform No. 1. After doing this over and over again a few times, it occurred to him, this isn’t my first time here, I have come here before, some time or the other. I lived here for a while. That’s why these streets, shops, markets, and people all look very familiar. That mad old woman in tatters sitting with a dirty pot on a torn kantha in a corner of the station, I had seen her one afternoon sitting near the railway yard and cooking rice on a brick stove, with leaves and twigs for fuel. That teenage girl looking at herself in a broken mirror and tying her hair was attending to her coiffure before leaving with her Ma for Hari Singh’s cattle-shed to collect the cow-dung there. She had once jumped naked into the nearby pond. She had played around in the water. He remembered everything now. But he could not remember when exactly, or how long ago, that was. A complex black curtain swayed between memory and forgetting.
The vagabond wondered, am I remembering things from a past life! Were all those incidents from some earlier life! When I came to this station, fevered, with ugly welts on my back, my whole body in pain, and passed out as I rested against the wall behind that paan depot, and lay there all night. I don’t exactly remember who it was that thrashed me badly with a lath of bamboo. Who thrashed me? Why?
And thus, while travelling without a ticket on a train, on an aimless journey yesterday, when the train halted here, the footloose vagabond had got off on account of some irresistible attraction. Standing now in front of the wall in the station where he had once lain unconscious, he tried to remember where exactly he had been impelled, with all his life, to try to reach, since yesterday, or even earlier, one could say, since the time his eyes first saw light! Everything seemed clouded in mist. He couldn’t remember anything any more. Once upon a time, there was a huge explosion on planet Sun. Many scientists have been able to provide an elaborate explanation, on the basis of their expert knowledge, of how this world was created, and how life gradually emerged on earth. But all knowledge finally failed before the behind-the-scenes mystery of human creation. No one has been able to say what kind of evolution took place, as a result of which ape was transformed into man. Scientists have identified this epoch of the triumphal journey of ape becoming man as the missing link. Also undiscovered till now, when exactly man forgot all his human responsibilities, feelings, virtues, and duties, and turned into a non-human creature. When the mother who could no longer bear the anguished cry of the offspring born of her own womb, ‘I’m hungry Ma, give me food’, herself went to strangle it to death. Much of this vagabond’s life involved a similar missing link. But he clearly remembered that he had been born in a thatched, twin-roof hut, from the womb of a woman who went around begging for a bit of rice foam. He wasn’t alone, he had a bunch of small brothers and sisters with protruding ribs. Among whom, one sister had shrivelled up and shrunk, out of starvation, at the age of seven or eight.
His father had never been lazy, or shirked work. He could toil from sunrise to sunset like a wild buffalo. But the number of job aspirants was always far greater than the number of jobs available in this “Saare Jahan Se Achchha” country. Which was why the day labourer father didn’t find work everyday. And if he did find work, the wages for that were too meagre for the hard work it involved. And so he didn’t get to eat everyday. As a result of which he fell ill. He came down with the ailment that starvation leads to. It was known as a gastric ulcer, in English. Everyone knew that ailments were cured with medicines. But when the man was a complete pauper, how could an ailment with such a fancy English name be treated by chewing the leaves of Bengal’s thankuni, or pennywort? An English medicine was required for that. Which was terribly expensive. It was difficult for a man who lived from hand to mouth to afford that. Consequently, the father’s ailment was never treated. The pain resulting from the ailment grew worse by the day. After a while, he lay writhing in bed like a slaughtered goat, and implored to God, ‘I can’t bear it any more, grant me death now!’ How would a family survive when its only earning member was confined to bed? The kitchen stove was no longer lit. The business of eating came to an end. After some days, the man’s sister shrivelled up and died of starvation.
One day – the man had been tortured by hunger. He was simply not able to bear it. As if there was a wrenching inside his stomach, like a python burning. He left home and ran away. And he had started walking like a crazed person, along a strange and unknown path. He was very young then. Just fifteen, or sixteen. He had not really seen the cruel ugliness of the world. Illusory souls spanned the nooks and crannies of his mind. He had thought, it’s such a vast world. Maybe not here, but surely in some corner or the other he would find food. Hot, steaming, red-coloured, plump-grained rice. And if there was some salt, a couple of green chillies, and a lump of boiled potato with that, what more could one ask for!
And when that rice was available, he would first eat as much as he could and fill his stomach, and then pack some in a bundle using his gamchha, and bring that for his starving parents and siblings at home. Owing to the lack of food, his siblings neither laughed nor played, they just cried all day. His Ma seemed to have become like a mad old woman as she went without food, his father too seemed to be dying. He didn’t know then that the world was most miserly. It hadn’t left even a fistful of rice for him. All that it had in store for these destitute folk was contempt, ridicule, hatred, deprivation and oppression.
After leaving home, he had arrived at the rail station and boarded a train there. He got off that later, and boarded another train. And then another. Day after day, and month after month, he moved from one place to another, solely on the quest for food. Where was the hot, steaming rice! Almost like a caged lunatic, or like a raging storm, he wandered, ticketless, and with an empty stomach, from one end of the country to another, in the hope of finding the desired food, but he didn’t get that. He had observed that except for a small number of people, all the innumerable people across the country were hungry. All of them spent their nights in the endless penance for food. Even in the various cities and metropolises where all the resources of the country were concentrated, hundreds and thousands of starving folk clamoured for a couple of stale rutis as they stood with a battered bowl or plate in their hands. The hill stations that nestled visitors in comfort and joy too had poor people without warm clothes, who wailed and wept because of the bitter cold. And in our beloved, most beautiful city, Calcutta, this paradise of enjoyment and luxury, here too people lay on the streets for want of the tiniest bit of kindness and compassion. They died on the streets.
From long personal experience, the man had realised that he was an outcaste and an unnecessary creature in this world. No one would give him anything here. And yet the quest continued. Going round and round again and again, like a wheel, which he had begun almost a decade ago – that still continued. He still walked the streets with the lamp of faint hope lit, and thought that he would surely find a bit of soft, tender soil where a small plant could gently take root and thus extract a bit of food for survival. He relied on his own strength and ability.
A madcap had set out in search of a touchstone. After much searching, and failure, he forgot the way back and lost all hope of finding the touchstone. All that he had left was the habit of searching, and the addiction of wandering the streets. In the same way, as this vagabond too wandered, and went from one place to another, somewhere along the way he somehow forgot the very objective behind leaving home and treading the road. The entire past, and the sad faces of his loved ones had begun to fade in his memory. The indomitable will forward was all that remained in his blood.
Someone had once opined that the earth was round. No matter where one began one’s journey, it was possible to return to the place where the journey had begun if one walked on incessantly.
This vagabond remembered the starting point of the journey, as he did the moment he had set out, but a vast emptiness surrounded almost everything else. An immense darkness overshadowed every fragment of memory. A big missing link in his life.
But since yesterday, or one could say, since last night, his mind and intelligence had started becoming active once again. He gradually remembered everything. That was why he felt terribly scared now. If this path of the world ever led me to my loved ones, what answer would I give them? After all, these two hands of mine are still as empty and bereft as before, I have been unsuccessful, a failure.
Someone had once said that life was a journey. The one whose journey came to a halt was actually dead.
Life may be a journey. But not all journeys were like life. The piece of grass carried by the strong current of the river was journeying alright, but was it alive? This vagabond’s life was a lot like that. It was as if he had wheels on his feet, because of which he had not been able to stand still on any spot of land, or in any role. He kept sliding away. And he slid and slid until he reached this rail station. He still did not know exactly what role his fate had brought him here to enact.
This is an excerpt from the novel, The Interloper, by Manoranjan Byapari (forthcoming from Eka), which forms the third part of the author’s “Chandal Jibon” trilogy. Translated from Bangla by V. Ramaswamy.
Manoranjan Byapari was born in the early-1950s in Barishal, Bangladesh. His family migrated to West Bengal in India when he was three. They were resettled in Bankura at the Shiromanipur refugee camp. They were subsequently forced to shift to the Ghola Doltala refugee camp, in 24 Parganas, and lived there till 1969. However, Byapari had to leave home at the age of fourteen to do odd jobs. In his early twenties, he came into contact with the Naxals, and he landed up in jail after that, where he taught himself to read and write. Subsequently he joined the famous labour activist Shankar Guha Niyogi, founder of the Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha at the Dalli Rajhara Mines, who were leading a struggle to reclaim Adivasi lands from the feudal lords who had appropriated them. Later, while working as a rickshaw-puller in Kolkata, Byapari had a chance encounter in 1981 with the renowned Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi, who urged him to write for her journal Bartika. He has published twelve novels and over seventy short stories since. Some of his important works include Ittibrite Chandal Jibon (an autobiographt), Amanushik, the Chandal Jibon trilogy of novels, Anya Bhubon and Motua Ek Mukti Senar Naam. Until 2018, he worked as a cook at the Helen Keller Institute for the Deaf and Blind in West Bengal. Byapari's first major recognition came in 2014, when he received the Suprabha Majumdar Prize, awarded by the Paschimbanga Bangla Akademi, for Ittibrite Chandal Jibon. In 2018, Interrogating My Chandal Life, the English translation of this autobiography by Sipra Mukherjee, was awarded the Hindu Prize for non-fiction. He is currently the chairman of the Dalit Sahitya Akademi in Bengal and was elected to the West Bengal Legislative Assembly in 2021.
V. Ramaswamy translates Bengali voices from the margins. He is best known for his long-term engagement with the anti-establishment writer, Subimal Misra, with The Golden Gandhi Statue from America: Early Stories, Wild Animals Prohibited: Stories, Anti-Stories, and This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar's Tale: Two Anti-Novels. The final Misra volume, The Earth Quakes, is under publication. Ramaswamy's translation of The Runaway Boy, the first novel in the Chandal Jibon trilogy by Manoranjan Byapari, was published in 2020. The Nemesis, the second part of the trilogy, was published in 2022. He was awarded the first Literature Across Frontiers – Charles Wallace India Trust fellowship in creative writing and translation in 2016 to translate the Chandal Jibon novels. Ramaswamy's translations of Memories of Arrival: A Voice from the Margins, by Adhir Biswas was published in 2022, as were Life and Political Reality: Two Novellas, by Shahidul Zahir (co-translated with Shahroza Nahrin) and Why There Are No Noyontara Flowers in Agargaon Colony: Stories. His most recent published translation is the novel, I See The Face, by Shahidul Zahir.