“You’re under arrest,” the policeman in front said, pushing out his big belly. “You must come with us.”
“Why?” asked the teacher. “I’ve not done anything wrong, have I?”
“You haven’t?” the policeman turned and grinned at the others. “Did you hear that?” he asked. The other five tittered. They reminded the teacher of the children of his class, who dutifully laughed at his tired jokes even though, as he was certain, none of them had the mental capacity to understand what he was saying anyway. “Listen to him!”
“You must come along with us, Masterji,” said one of the “volunteers”. The teacher recognised him now, though for the life of him he could not remember his name. A few years ago, he had been a pupil in the school and had dropped out like everyone else. “We know you’re a Maoist.”
“Huh?” It was what the teacher had been expecting, but the charge still shocked him. “Why are you saying that?”
“Well, to begin with,” said the fat cop, pushing past the teacher, “there’s that on your wall.” He pointed at a poster of the Great Wall of China and grinned again. “Shouldn’t leave the evidence out in the open like that, should you?”
“But that’s only from a calendar...”
“Shut up! I’m not done.” The fat policeman glared around the room. It was poorly furnished, with only a metal almirah, a cot and a wooden table apart from a shelf loaded down with books and papers and a clothes-rack on the wall. “Why do you live like this eh? Answer me!”
“Live like this? But on my salary...”
“Don’t make us laugh. We know how other teachers live, with the same salary. You pass on the rest of the money to the Maoists to buy arms with, don’t you?” The policeman scratched his big belly. “You probably go out into the jungle and teach the kids to use arms too.”
“No, I promise you I don’t...”
“He does,” said the former student. “I remember Chakradhar Toppo was a favourite of his in school.”
“I haven’t even seen Chakradhar Toppo in years,” the teacher protested. “I barely remember what he looks like.”
“You know as well as I do that he doesn’t call himself that anymore,” scoffed the fat policeman. “You know he calls himself Comrade Viplab these days.”
“He’s the head of the local Maoist dalam,” the ex-pupil added. “You must have heard that name, Masterji.”
“Yes, of course I heard people talk of Comrade Viplab,” the teacher agreed. “But I never knew he was Chakradhar.”
“It doesn’t matter whether you knew or not,” the fat policeman said. “We can prove you’re passing on money to the Maoists.”
“How? I never did.”
“I saw you giving money to Asha,” the ex-pupil said. “I heard that you give money to a lot of them, whoever asks.”
“Asha?” The teacher remembered a dark thin face, eyes sunken and lips pale with anaemia. “Her husband is badly ill. She needed money for medicines.”
“A likely story,” said the fat policeman. “Why can’t she use the witch doctor like everyone else? That’s all these people are good for.” He began riffling through the shelf of books and held up a tattered volume; Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War by Che Guevara. “What’s this? Maoist propaganda!”
“No, it isn’t; it’s just a personal memoir of the Cuban...” the teacher stopped as one of the other policemen cuffed him across the back of the head.
“Maoist propaganda,” the policeman confirmed, slipping the book into his pocket. “We’ll find more tomorrow for sure, when we come back and have a proper look.” He picked up another book, this one so newly bought that the teacher had not even finished reading it, Everybody Loves A Good Drought by P Sainath. “More Red propaganda,” the policeman grunted. “Well, let’s go.”
“Wait. I have to inform people...my relatives...”
“All that can wait. You can tell them all when you come out...if you come out.” The policemen all laughed. “The state government wants some Maoists eliminated quickly,” the fat cop said. “You’ll do just fine.” He pushed the teacher out of the door and down the steps. It was now fully dark, except for a few distant fireflies and the dim glow of a lantern hanging under the roof of a neighbouring house. Only a few of the buildings in the village were blessed with electricity. The village street was rutted and stony, and the teacher stumbled. The policemen grabbed at him and knocked him down. “The bastard wanted to get away!” the fat cop exclaimed. “Get up you.” He pulled the teacher up and sent him stumbling in the direction of the police station. “Do that again,” he said, “and I’ll just shoot you here.”
“Be careful, or you’ll be ‘encountered,’ Masterji,” the ex-pupil said, laughing. The teacher said nothing. They pushed him along until they reached the police station. It was one of the most modern buildings in the village, or reinforced concrete construction, two stories high, and with a wall around it and a barrier of sandbags at the gate. The fat policeman pushed him into a cell and locked the door.
“Enjoy the mosquitoes,” he mocked. “Tomorrow, we’ll talk to you, and the day after, we’ll probably be finishing you off, unless we find a better use for you, you old crow.”
“Lal salaam, Masterji,” the ex-pupil said, and laughed. “Isn’t that how you Maoists greet each other? Lal salaam.”
The teacher sat down on the floor of the cell. He wanted to go to the toilet but there was nobody to ask and in any case he was sure they’d refuse. There was no furniture in it at all, not even a stool. The barred door looked out onto a bare wall, and there was no window; the only light was reflected from the corridor further along from his cell. There were clanging noises and voices, but little by little everything fell silent. The teacher’s head fell forward on his chest and he dozed.
He dreamed. In his dreams he was back in his school, watching the little kids of the primary classes run around the dusty patch that served for a playground. The little kids were usually without a teacher because the teacher who was supposed to teach them only came about once or twice a month, on market days when he could buy vegetables cheap. So he, who lived in the village, would try and teach the little kids what he could, so by they didn’t reach his class as total illiterates. It was a losing battle.
This time, in his dream, he called the children to come to him. They always preferred to play, but when they had to learn, they would prefer to sit outside rather than indoors. Most of them spent almost all their waking hours outdoors and felt like caged animals inside a room. This time, though, when he called them they came trooping in like little soldiers and stood waiting like little soldiers, drawn up in ragged rows, on the bare floor. He asked them to sit down. Instead of sitting down they stared back at him with their big eyes and began chanting in unison, “Lal salaam, lal salaam, lal salaam.”
Then the whole top of the class, roof and upper walls, came off and he could see the sky and in the sky was a plane, a dark plane, and the plane would lay explosive eggs which would come down and burst on them. He had just decided this when the first explosive egg began to fall.
He woke to a terrible confusion of sound. For a moment he thought his dream was the reality and that he had somehow gone blind because there was no light. Then he saw flashes reflected on the wall and there was a lot of shooting, and a lot of shouting. This went on for what seemed to be hours, but was probably only a few minutes. At last silence fell. The air smelt of gunpowder.
The teacher found his neck was very sore. He was massaging it when someone came along the corridor and peeked into the cell. “What have we here?” this person called, in the local tribal dialect. “Who are you?”
The teacher identified himself.
“Is that so?” A torch beam stabbed out and lit up the teacher. “What are you doing in here? Sodomising the kids, were you?”
“No, I...” the teacher was about to explain but the man had already gone. A moment later he was back with another man. They bent over the lock and the teacher heard the jangle of keys.
“Out with you,” the first man said. “Let’s have a look.”
The police station was full of armed men and women in green uniforms and rubber flip-flops, coming and going, stripping the building of as much of its equipment as possible. Apart from the two who had got him out of the cell, they scarcely spared him a look. “So, what were you in there for?” asked the first man. The teacher explained.
“A likely story,” sneered the man. “You’re a government stooge, a hireling of the state. Why would they arrest you as one of us? You probably call the police if you even hear any reports of our dalam coming.”
“You ask the station chief,” the teacher said. “He came along with the others to arrest me.”
“Ask him?” laughed the man. “You ask him.” He pointed at the floor behind a desk. The teacher saw the fat policeman lying on his back. He did not appear to have a face any longer. “We don’t have any time to waste,” the man said. “Comrade Viplab wants us out of the district before daybreak. So tell me again, why did they arrest you?”
“I already told you,” the teacher insisted. “You tell Chakradhar, I mean Comrade Viplab, to come and talk to me. He’ll vouch for me. I was his old teacher.”
“Comrade Viplab isn’t here,” snapped the man. “And he has better things to do than talk to you.”
“Come on, Manohar,” one of the Maoist women said, coming up. “We have to burn the place and go now.” She peered curiously at the teacher. “I know him,” she said. “He’s the schoolteacher. Harmless.”
“We can’t take that chance,” the Maoist man, Manohar, said. “Well, Masterji? What is it to be? Should we take you along with us or set you free?”
“Damn it, Manohar,” the woman said. “Let’s go!”
“I think you’d better be set free,” said the Maoist. “You’d slow us down too much if we took you along.” Too late, the teacher saw him raise his gun.
“Lal salaam, Masterji,” said the Maoist.
{Notes: Lal Salaam means "Red Salute" and a dalam is a local unit of the armed revolutionary forces of the Communist Party of India (Maoist).}
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