What do a youth disillusioned and angry at life, a cop driven by duty and a boy desperate to right the wrong have in common? They are all victims of a vicious system that uses them as pawns and discards them after wringing out the last bit of hope.
Author Arup Kumar Dutta meticulously arranges the chess board keeping in mind the hierarchy in power and vulnerability of individuals in his new novel The Bag.
The novel is set in the backdrop of insurgency-hit Assam and a precarious political situation both in the state and at the Centre. The Lilliputian characters against the Goliath state fight their already lost battles in the hope that some day justice will be meted out. Ethics, integrity, emotions, and above all trust, have no place in the struggle – that of Hiren Bora, Okon and Inspector Lahiri.
Hiren Bora, a bright young man from an obscure village in Assam, is one among the many youths from poor families who got lost in the labyrinth. His journey along the snaking kutchha roads of Chungijan village to the city of Guwahati is a revelation. There is nothing new in Bora’s story except that deception does not debilitate him. Instead, it transforms a simple village boy into a ‘rakshyasa’, a demon, or in the shrewd police inspector’s analogy, a civet.
Joining the ULFA does not make Bora a man of immense ideology. It only gives him the strength to see the system in the eye and retaliate. Bora knows the “pygmy revolutionaries” have no future and martyrdom is a farce and yet he marches forward leaving behind a loving family and a brother who worships him and is ready to risk everything to bring Bora back to the life of lesser mortals.
For someone like Bora who has already been indoctrinated, cynicism is just a way of life and there is no point of return. It is not a surprise then that even the strongest of bonds is weakened.
Inspector Lahiri, the philosophical policeman in the intelligence department, is on the other side of the wall and yet shares the visions of the “civet”. He knows Bora and can almost read his moves to escape the entrapment. The inspector, who grew up with middle class values and has straddled the boundary that separates him and the system, is passionate about his work and is dedicated to entrap the civet. He is goaded on by his senior officer, an opportunist and sycophant, to go on a secret mission. But is it possible to rewild the creature to the humble village life? Lahiri knows the possibilities more than his arrogant superiors.
Okon, Bora’s teenaged stepbrother and his shadow, matures too early. The train of events that follows his elder brother’s departure is devastating leaving the child scarred. But innocence begets hope and Okon, driven by the bleakest hope to get back his Hirukai, unknowingly enters the trap set up by the wily men in power. At the age of 14, Okon knows what is insurgency and the government’s surrender policy but is completely ignorant of the Goliath’s intentions.
So he leads the “rakshyasas” to the daini’s lair, a secret only known to him and his Hirukai, with the hope that freedom is inevitable for Bora.
The high-handedness of the army, the spineless police system, battered souls in Devil’s cage and the common man’s silent cry for life make The Bag a real story.
As Dutta commingles layers of emotions and brings the three characters to a crossroad, he exposes a system that plays a crooked game and boasts in make-believe victory.
The novel traces the history of insurgency in Assam, the rise of ULFA, its corruption and fall. It also describes the training of cadres and the ULFA’s kowtowing with the KIA and Chinese authorities. It goes beyond the boundary giving a flash of international affairs which has and will always remain unfathomable to the constituents who are more engrossed in finding ways to survive.
The blast in Dhemaji in 2004 that killed schoolchildren spelled doom for the once revered and feared armed group. Those who fought for their motherland turned into extortionists, petty criminals, the system’s mole or senile.
“The transient nature of dogma ensured that revolutionaries and their revolutions were impermanent – like everything else in the universe; martyrs appeared to Hiren Bora to be mere jackasses willing to sacrifice their lives for what they deemed to be a ‘cause’,” writes Dutta. But the ‘cause’ always sublimes and ‘comrades’ turn into ‘tragic figures’.
The story of Bora, Okon and Lahiri is a reflection of the socio-politico-economic convulsions which the country has experienced time and again in the post-colonial era. People like them can be jettisoned at will so that the system can grow stronger.
Despite a few slips in editing, the book keeps one on tenterhooks, especially as it nears the end and one is compelled to think whether staying in one’s cocoon and making truce with the crooked system is the only way to survive.
Book: The Bag; Author: Arup Kumar Dutta; Publisher: Niyogi Books; Pages: 290; Price: 395
~ NM