Raghupati, Raghu for us, was my classmate for years during my undergraduate studies at Santiniketan. He was a colourful fellow with many special qualities. I haven’t come across too many people who are more capable. And more complex.
If I may digress from Raghu for a moment, during the last 25 years I’ve been writing the stories of my life, I have written only one anecdote on someone who I had to say something unpleasant about. It is unsurprising because memory works like a sieve and removes unpleasant incidents and people. Yet, some problematic people defy the memory filter and remain, by the sheer strength of their personality. Raghu is such a person.
I won’t tell you how Raghu looked, whether he was tall or short, slim or pudgy, handsome or otherwise. One of the finest Indian writers in English, RK Narayanan, would never describe the physical attributes of his characters. He believed looks didn’t matter, at least in most stories. Narayanan is one of my gurus, but I don’t quite agree with him on this point. However, to hide the identity of my friend, I would follow Narayanan’s style today.
I haven’t met Raghu for almost 40 years, but I’ve heard from common friends about his spectacular success in business. And although he has made crores, he’s the same down-to-earth Raghu of yore. The doors of his two palatial buildings in Kolkata – I am told – are always open to old friends. Some of them who visit the city on various errands stay in Raghu’s house for days together. Raghu doesn’t have the time to talk to them these days, but he has never been stingy about hospitality.
I spotted Raghu’s business acumen early and knew he would make it big. How did I know? That will come later. And before I come to that, here’s an outline of Raghu’s personality. He was great company, exceedingly intelligent, and a compulsive liar. Raghu was also ever-smiling and easy to deal with. But behind his happy-go-lucky exterior, he had a mind of steel. Unknown to the rest of the world, he was a local leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist Leninist), CPI ML for short, commonly known and dreaded as Naxalites.
There were other shades of Naxalites, but the CPI ML was particularly vicious. Under their – if I may say so – insane leader Mr Charu Mazumdar, they decided that the easiest way to bring in a just, egalitarian society and to remove all the socio-economic problems would be to kill rich people one after the other and also, policemen. To put a sheen on the act, they didn’t call the process killing or murdering. They would say it was “annihilation of class enemies”. Unfortunately, they couldn’t reach the big fish, so their targets were small money lenders and nasty landowners who treated poor people shabbily. They also killed policemen, but hardly any senior official among them.
The elderly physician Dr. Radha Krishna Sinha was rich, but he didn’t satisfy the other requirements to be annihilated by Naxalites. He was popular in our small town and was known to be a generous man who helped the poor. Once, in a bitterly cold winter morning when we returned from our departmental excursion to Ranchi, we heard that Dr Sinha had been “annihilated”. During the trip, Raghu had been with us and regaled us with his wit. Much later, I came to know – to our horror – that he was the mastermind (or one of the masterminds) behind the murder of Dr. Sinha. He had gone on the excursion only to have a watertight alibi.
His luck ran out after some time and he was arrested. And tortured in jail in the normal course of business. He lost several months of college in the process. However, before our final year exams, he was released on bail. Although he hadn’t had the requisite attendance, the university allowed him to take the final year exams “on compassionate grounds”.
This happened during the summer vacation that year, shortly after which our exams were scheduled. I was in Kolkata then. Raghu telephoned me at home and said, ‘Do you know what you should do when the police beat you?’
‘How would I? I’ve never been beaten by anyone except by father.’
‘Keep this in mind, it might come in handy someday. When they hit you, you should cry out as loudly as you can. You should say “Babare, maare, more gelumre, banchao!” (Dad! Mom! Save me, I’m dying!) or anything you wish, but you must holler as loudly as you can.’
‘How does it help?’
‘It makes your pain much more bearable.’
Raghu didn’t call me with the altruistic motive to train me how to deal with police torture. He wanted me to help him out with preparations for the forthcoming exams. It was decided I would cut short my vacation and return to hostel. He too would join me there. When no one else was around, I would help him and we both would prepare for the exam in the quiet solitude of an empty hostel.
I too thought it would be a good move. Besides, I was exceedingly fond of Raghu. The prospect of spending time with him was not a minor attraction.
On the appointed day, there was no Raghu. His family – they lived in a small market town – was well-off, but those days, personal telephones were unthinkable except in cities. There was no way I could get in touch with him.
After waiting for two days in the empty hostel, I became a little worried about Raghu’s wellbeing. Had he been picked up again?
I took a train to where Raghu lived. Although I hadn’t been to his home earlier and had no idea where it was, I could easily find out his digs, such was his fame. Well, digs wouldn’t be the right word to describe the evidently wealthy man’s three-storey building in gaudy colours and the usual embellishment of lotuses (or was it flying swans?) carved out on the parapets of the balconies.
The gate was stout and enormous. (Did Raghu’s old man too fear annihilation by Naxalites?) And no calling bell. After I made sufficient noise, a naked man in just a loincloth poked his nose out of the narrowly opened gate. When I asked for Raghu, he said, ‘Raghu Babu is not home.’
‘Where is he?’
‘Gone to attend a wedding.’
‘When will he be back?’
‘Don’t know, maybe a week, maybe …’
I returned to our hostel, had food at “Boudi’r dokan” (Sister-in-law’s eatery) nearby and spent the rest of the vacation studying alone. In the end, I was thankful to Raghu. That year, I did reasonably well in the exams, by my standards.
Keeping people waiting was something Raghu specialised in. Years later, he called me up one evening, I had no idea how he got my phone number. I was working for a bank in Kolkata then and Raghu had some problem with his bank which he wanted to discuss with me. There was a sense of urgency in his voice when he said, ‘I must talk to you face to face. Are you home?’
He hung up after saying he would be in my place in an hour. I didn’t expect him to come, an expectation he duly fulfilled. But a few days later, he did come to my office later to get some professional advice. That was the last time we met.
By then, Raghu had breached the commercial boundaries of his tiny hometown; he was a civil contractor and a somewhat well-known businessman in the district. He had his ways of dealing with people. For example, according to an apocryphal tale, once he bought a second-hand car, got it refurbished and drove it to the wedding reception of the daughter of a local Public Works Department (PWD) executive engineer. While leaving, he left the keys and papers of the vehicle with the government official and got home by rickshaw.
His rose spectacularly – I was told – specialising in bridges and fly-overs. He built some major fly-overs before the 1982 New Delhi Asiad.
However, among his many hits, there were a few misses too. A bridge built by him across the River Kopai collapsed. But unlike her more well-known cousin, The Bridge on the River Kwai, nobody dynamited her. The local people were furious and wanted to lynch the contractor, that is, our Raghu.
The powers-that-be quickly arrested him and kept him in jail for months, which incurable backbiters said was only to save Raghupati Banerjee’s precious life. Raghu had come a long way from his revolutionary past and joined the ranks of small-time dubious businessmen with flexible conscience who are an integral part of the power structure in Indian small towns. He had moved to the other side of the equation.
In the beginning of this story, I said I would tell you how I knew – early in his business career – that Raghu would be hugely successful. To make my point, I’ll have to take you back to 1973 or 74. We were doing Masters then. Raghu had dropped out after graduation. He had been in and out of jail since our failed rendezvous and the Naxalite movement was dying. He had also fallen in love with a beautiful and bright girl, Neera, a few years our junior.
We had a brutal government in West Bengal then, which was handling Naxalites in four different ways. The first group was killed by police or their goons in cold blood or otherwise. There’s no official estimate about the number, but it’s widely believed around 5000 young men and women, who included some of the finest of our generation, were eliminated. The second group, to which belonged a majority of the Naxalite activists, often suffered torture in jail and managed to destroy – completely or partly – their future prospects. After a point, they drifted away from the self-annihilating movement and found various ways to deal with life. As their stories are unspectacular, their sacrifices have been unrecorded and almost completely forgotten. A third, much smaller group, the offspring of people with power and deep pockets, were bundled off to Europe or America for higher studies and rehabilitation. The fourth and last group was encouraged to set up businesses locally and given financial support and bank loans. Raghu belonged to the fourth set.
Raghu’s story began with an annual excursion, and it will end with another, in a way, completing a circle. Our physics department students went to Darjeeling that year. Raghu wasn’t with us. He had left both studies and the revolution and just begun small-time civil contract work in his hometown. But he would often visit our campus, primarily to catch up with his girlfriend.
It’s often said, “The journey is more exciting than the destination.” The saying was literally true for the 70-kilometre from Jalpaiguri to Darjeeling, which the tiny, narrow-gauge “toy trains” would cover in four to five hours. The beautiful blue train had only three coaches with big windows without the usual iron gratings. It would move slowly, particularly while going uphill. There was a bitumen road beside almost all along the railway track. Getting off and on the running train was great fun for us.
As normal brakes wouldn’t work on steep inclines, there was another toothy rail in the middle, parallel to the rails. If for some reason the train had to be stopped on an ascent or descent, the engine driver would lower a gear which would catch the toothy rail. When the gear was jammed in addition to brakes, the train couldn’t but stop. Also, for some reason, not one, but three trains would leave the New Jalpaiguri station one after the others.
I was on the second train, standing at a door. We crossed one of the many picturesque rivers on the way, along a jangling bridge with no girders. I looked at the steam far below, from the banks of which children waved at us wildly. The winter sun was dipping on the horizon and the Himalayas looked gorgeous in the orange glow of the setting sun, while the aging train struggled on a steep incline.
Suddenly, I heard some noise ahead and looked up. The train in front was sliding back uncontrolled; gaining speed every moment. The engine driver was shouting and gesticulating madly to the driver of our train. After a minute or so, our driver too jammed the brakes and started reversing. I jumped off and saw the third train had stopped on the rickety bridge we had just crossed, a few hundred metres away.
If it remained stationary, our train would crash on it right on the girder-less bridge and it was scary to imagine the consequences. The people who had got off our train started shouting to the passengers, asking them to get off, because they could see the danger that was only seconds away.
Soon, people started jumping off our train. Some managed it neatly, but most of the ordinary people jumped in the wrong direction because they had never studied physics or the laws of inertia. I saw human bodies dropping like sacks of potato. The budding physicists of our group had no such problem, almost all of them were off the train without much trouble. However, two girls among us had nasty falls possibly because they were wearing sari. One of them was Neera, Raghu’s girlfriend.
I do not remember how our group completed the journey, but I didn’t, that day. Neera and Preeti – both of them had head injuries – had to be rushed to the nearest hospital in Kalimpong in hastily arranged taxis. They were admitted immediately. As someone had to be there to look after the injured girls and deal with emergencies, I stayed back in Kalimpong until their parents arrived two days later. Fortunately, they were safe by then, each with dozens of stitches on their head.
*
The down Darjeeling Mail reached Bolpur early in the morning a week after the accident.
As we were leaving the station, I saw a beaming Raghu, a little late, but eager to meet his girlfriend after a week’s separation. Clearly, he hadn’t got the news. I took him to a nearby tea stall and broke the story gently.
Dumbfounded, Raghu looked at me for a long time through the steam over our tea cups. The silence, which was beginning to be a little unbearable, was broken by a deeply thoughtful Raghu, speaking more to himself than to me, ‘I am getting some tarpaulin sheets at a throwaway price. I don’t need them right now, but should I buy them for the future?’
It was my turn to be dumbfounded. After hearing that Neera was out of danger, the pragmatic businessman in him had turned his attention completely to more worldly matters. Soon he asked me to join him. I said, ‘Raghu, you won’t find a more useless business partner, I can guarantee that.’
‘I know, but you can write and speak English.’
Therefore, I got the first job offer in my life thanks to the pernicious long-term effects of British colonialism. I asked him, ‘After working for so many years to emancipate the wretched of the earth, how do you find yourself in a position where you have to exploit workers?’
‘You’re dead wrong. In business, you can make money without exploiting anyone.’
I was almost as astonished as Karl Marx would have been, ‘Really? How?’
‘My first contract was to construct a road. Underneath the surface, I just put third quality bricks instead of first quality, as required by the contract papers. And made a huge profit without exploiting anyone. Do you get the point?’
I knew Raghu had a bright future.
[Gentle Reader, Except for the Visva-Bharati Physics Department and our excursions, every other character and detail given here are imaginary. Any coincidence with anyone dead, alive, or in coma is completely coincidental.]
Monday, 26 October 2020
[Photo of the Toy Train courtesy Wikimedia Commons. By Arne Hückelheim - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12719221 / The other picture is by me]
