Yet Bhattacharya’s remains an unassimilated presence. “I don’t want the honor of this society,”* he says in a snippet from Q’s documentary, and for all the late, uneasy fame, the growing of something like a cult around him, he didn’t receive it. When he died, on July 31, 2014, the main English daily in Calcutta didn’t even carry the news of his death.

The work, however, lives on, its esthetics and politics showing a new way for fiction in an India drowning under the onslaught of corporations and right-wing politics, weakly oscillating between globalization’s fading sun and fascism’s stormy promise. One can see this in the way Bhattacharya brings Harbart to a conclusion, and in its refusal to accept the premise that the fires of revolution have been extinguished forever and that the only work left for novels is to offer ornamentation for the ruling classes.

When Harbart’s corpse is eventually released by the police, the underclass men of the neighborhood take it to be burnt, full of affection and drunken bonhomie. The scene at the crematorium is a bravura performance, full of laughter that will soon turn into something else:

Those who accompany the dead to the crematorium, they often like to make enquiries about how and why the other corpses died. One such man asked Koka, and a mildly intoxicated Koka replied thus:

“What happened, brother?”

“What happened to who?”

“I mean, what happened to your brother?”

“Murder.”

Koka thought that the word for death in English was murder. In Bengali, people die. In English, they murder. Once this word was out, a huge crowd swarmed down upon them for a glimpse of the murder-case victim.

One is still laughing as Harbart’s body, along with the bed he slept on, is fed into the electric furnace to be burnt. The ghosts of Harbart’s ancestors have gathered to watch the cremation, along with the neighborhood men and a crowd of onlookers. Even the businessman Marik is there, a little forlorn at this unexpected conclusion to his plans of expansion. But then there is an explosion, and then another: “Part of the wall on top of the furnace explodes, launching bricks and sand and chunks of plaster everywhere, and through that hole billow many-hued plumes of smoke, reeking of gunpowder and explosives.”

The bed being burnt with Harbart, the bed on which he had slept for twenty years, from where he has conducted his fraudulent occult consultations, had also been a secret storage site—before he was gunned down—of Binu the Naxal. All these years, and yet these sticks of dynamite, pilfered from a warehouse and intended, perhaps, for a political assassination, have been waiting. It is a grand finale for Harbart, the bombs eventually taking the entire furnace out and resulting in a blackout at the crematorium. One can still here the reverberations and smell the gunpowder as one closes the book—a warning from the dead intended for the living.

Siddhartha Deb

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cB4c3D-akt4 7.50

Translator’s notes

Corporation tap (p. 7): The Kolkata Municipal Corporation or KMC (formerly Calcutta Municipal Corporation or CMC), established in 1876, is responsible for the civic infrastructure and administration of the city of Kolkata, including water purification, supply, and the water taps in every neighborhood.