The tank-trapped tilapiya is off to the sea

Want to see a double chang? A double chang?

Cat, bat, water, dog, fish.

—Harbart Sarkar

Even the suicide note didn’t seem to contain any coded messages, although in the double challenge of the double chang a threatening tone was more than evident. Let the record show that in some areas of Howrah, especially venal swines and sons-of-bitches were indeed referred to as double changs. But “Cat, bat, water, dog, fish!” Possibly nothing more than mere whimsy. The man had been exposed by then. A severe shock, followed by the inevitable depression. And, of course, he’d been abnormal all along.

Still, it is not possible for a mystery so rife with gunpowder reek to remain inexplicable and irresolute. Such a state of affairs is not desirable for either the state or the people. In fact, such a state is particularly undesirable.

*

The crematorium catastrophe was all Binu’s fault. Yes, Binu the dead Naxalite. Night after night, it had been Binu and his friends who’d packed every inch of the mattress with dynamite sticks stolen from the ICI factory at Gomiah, dynamite sticks of varying lengths and force, manufactured to blow apart rocks and mountains. These advanced sticks were built to withstand considerable shock without exploding. Not crude handmade bombs these, that a little pressure and presto! they popped. Who is not aware of the positive role played by dynamite in ensuring the progress of this great nation?

Perhaps Binu and his friends had planned an awful apocalyptic affair. Perhaps the assassination of some prominent personality. Perhaps some even more unimaginable calamity. That had remained undone. That had remained undone, true, but for the last twenty-odd years, that assortment of explosives had lain winter-sleeping tight inside the mattress and then warmed awake by the flames of the furnace, exploded into angry life.

And what is even more astonishing is that if, since the Saha-da–Swapan case of May 18, 1992, the practice of burning the bed along with the dead had not been established, then none of this would have happened.

How strange, then, was this detonation!

The deplorable series of events that unfolded around the cremation of Harbart’s bloodless body inescapably signal that when and how an explosion will occur, and who will cause that explosion—of all such knowledge the state machinery remains woefully ignorant still.

Ten

In vain we come, in vain we go

To what end? We do not know.

—Akshay Kumar Boral

Without the bed, Harbart’s room looked very empty and large, although no one had observed it, since it had been put under lock and key and stayed that way for a long time thereafter. Then, much later, one night, in a pitch-black loadshedding-dark night, there had been a terrible storm. The window that had been opened, the window through which the fly had flown, that window had remained open. The storm wind, the wild wind, blew into the room, scattering all over it the pages, beginning from 171, of Accounts of the Afterlife. A bolt of lightning scorched with its reflection Harbart’s mirror on the wall shelf. Raging, the wind swung the hanging Ulster up and down. Mysteries of the Afterlife, Gopal Bhaar and the Spooks’ Soiree, Harbart’s notebook of poems, Shanta’s letter, the West Bengal Rationalist Association’s letter—the wind blew right through them, set them all aflutter, and flung the shirt and dhuti and towel from the line on which they’d hung and flew them to the floor.