Binu had bought him full pants. And a belt.

“Oof, Harbart-kaka, just like an American filmstar!”

Dhanna got a bit of a shock when he saw those pants. Later, he was even more shocked to hear that Binu was the one who’d bought them, with money saved up from his tuitions.

“See?” said Jyathaima, “Look and learn a little. Not everyone is a miser like you!”

“Oof!” said Dhanna-dada, “stop your scratching! Learn what, tell me, from all this show-show of love? Although the ones who could look and learn are my younger boys—no studying, no manners between the two of them.”

“Peeyu kahaan!” said Jyathamoshai, “Peeyu kahaan!”

*

To hereafter-obsessed Harbart, Binu had provided a different definition of death.

“What’s all that mumbo-jumbo you read? Nonsense. Ridiculous! He died, went off a ghost, she died, came back a ghost—all these pages scrawling-crawling with ghosts, tell me, have you ever seen even one? It’s not as if people aren’t dying all the time. Why, in this house alone, who knows how many deaths there’ve been.”

“Just because I haven’t seen a ghost doesn’t mean it’s all lies.”

“Not only you—no one has seen one.”

“Then what about the planchettes?”

“What about them? I was there for one in Baharampur.”

“You were? And?”

“And what? And nothing. The ones who do it are the ones pushing the glass or shaking the pencil. Although, of course, I don’t blame you. As long as a handful of men can keep fooling the greater millions into working for them till they die, can keep cheating them, for just as long your ghosts and ghouls will thrive, your gods and goddesses, your dharma and karma. Listen, listen to this” (Binu opens a small book, turns a few pages):

“ ‘Countless revolutionary martyrs have laid down their lives in the interests of the people, and our hearts are filled with pain as we the living think of them—can there be any personal interest, then, that we would not sacrifice or any error that we would not discard?’—Do you know whose words these are?”

Harbart shakes his head. He has no idea.

“Mao Tse-Tung.”

*

The night of November 19, 1970 was the night of the bloody Barasat killings. The night when Jatin Das, Kanai Bhattacharya, Sankar Chattopadhyay, Samir Mitra, Swapan Pal, Samirendranath Dutta, Tarun Das, and Ganesh Ghatak were killed by the police in cold blood.

Charu Majumdar, General Secretary, Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), sent out a call in his communiqué dated November 22, 1970:

Today the most sacred task of every Indian is to rouse the intensest hatred for all these cowards, imperialism’s running-dogs and assassins. This is today the demand of our countrymen—the demand of patriotism.

Every revolutionary cadre should take the resolve to avenge the heroic martyrs. These butchers are enemies of the Indian people, enemies of progress and lackeys of foreigners. The Indian people will not be liberated until these butchers are liquidated.

Binu heard the call and sprang to action. Some nights he wouldn’t come home. Dhanna-dada’s neighbourhood, though, was a completely Congress one. Even if a few red drops remained, they were barely visible.