The Lives of Others (79 page)

The following year, at the age of 19, he published yet another theorem that took the mathematics world by storm. This time he showed that either a prime number or a semiprime (a number which is the product of exactly two primes, such as 6 = 2 × 3) always exists between any two square numbers. As Professor Basu said, “This is one of the most famous, and most famously stubborn, unsolved problems, called Legendre’s conjecture, in number theory. And Swarnendu’s proof, worked out while he was still at his PhD, is the most promising progress on that problem that has been made so far.”

Almost as famous as his skills in solving difficult math problems is his reclusiveness. He never gives interviews or appears at public functions, not even departmental ones. Archishman Chakraborty, one of his graduate students, says, “His classes and seminars make you feel as if you’re eavesdropping on a private conversation with himself. He is hugely inspiring, not because he reaches out to encourage you, but because you get a glimpse of this focused, brilliant, obsessed mind. It is as if you’ve walked into a room where he is sitting with god’s book of numbers. You too want to enter that room.”

Professor Pfeiffer confessed that it had been an uphill struggle to draw his erstwhile student, and now colleague, out of his notorious introversion. ‘Well, most mathematicians, you’ll find, are creatures somewhat dissociated from the real world,’ he said. ‘The abstract matters to them much more than the concrete. Swarnendu is a very pure example of that. There is an innocence about him which the world has not been able to touch. He still lives with his mother, who came out to join him shortly after he was offered his teaching position in the Faculty. As far as I am aware, no one from the Department has ever visited him at home.’

Calls to try and contact Professor Ghosh’s mother at their home have not been returned.

San Jose Mercury News
, August 27, 1986

THE REPLY FROM
Dr Leif Carlsson of the Classics Department has arrived. He takes out the medal and places it next to the letter. The gold medal’s rim bears his name, Swarnendu Ghosh. On the reverse side the inscription
CONGREGATI
/
EX TOTO ORBE
/
MATHEMATICI
/
OB SCRIPTA INSIGNIA
/
TRIBUERE
means, Dr Carlsson writes, ‘The mathematicians, having congregated from the whole world, awarded [this medal] because of outstanding writings [ie., outstanding work].’ There is a branch of leaves behind the inscription, and then, behind that, mostly obscured, some etched curves and lines. He turns to the obverse side: a profile of Archimedes’s head – he can read the Greek letters that spell out his name – and an inscription running along more than three-quarters of the circumference of the medal. This one says,
TRANSIRE SUUM PECTUS MUNDOQUE POTIRI
. In Dr Carlsson’s translation, ‘To rise above oneself and to master the world.’

He looks at the medal for a while, turning it to one side, then the other. Suddenly the etched lines and curves on the reverse, the face of Archimedes, all relate into meaning. The diagram obscured by the branch of leaves is nothing less than an illustration of Archimedes’s own proof, which he considered his favourite: the volume and surface area of a sphere are two-thirds that of a cylinder (including its bases) circumscribing it, or a cylinder of the same height and diameter. Sona smiles; yes, of course. A voice inside his head, a voice from another country, says, ‘The Greeks laid the foundations of mathematics.’

Then he reads again, ‘
Transire suum pectus mundoque potiri
.’ To rise above oneself. That will do. That is enough.

Epilogue II

September 2012

THEY COME OUT
of the dark forest as if spawned by the night itself; the trees sending out their new kind of children. A single file of people, perhaps about a dozen or fifteen of them. They are silent like the scrub that surrounds them, or the red, dry earth out of which they have sprung. Each one of them is carrying something in his hand, or hoisted on a shoulder. It is a new-moon night and they need to walk for three miles or so in the breachless dark to reach their destination. They have torches, but it is part of their plan to do the walk without turning them on. In any case, they know where they are going: the railway line that cuts through Latehar district, nearly hugging National Highway 75 right after McCluskiegunj, then cleaving away from around Kumendi, through Gotang and Betla forests, via Chhipodohar and Barwadih, until it rejoins Highway 75 at Chianki and Daltongunj. Between Barkakana Junction and Daltongunj, the Kolkata–Ajmer Express passes by, without stopping, twenty-one towns and villages; their job is between Kumendi and Kechki, the last third of this sector, a distance of just over thirty-five kilometres. Four of them are going to get to work near Hehegara Halt, the rest are going to fan out after Barwadih Junction, near Mangra and Kechki, before the express starts to slow down towards Chianki for the stop at Daltongunj.

They have been trained in what they are about to do. They have maintained their individual jobs and other responsibilities within the Party, coming together only for the purpose of training for tonight’s action. They have been selected not merely on the basis of their military abilities, but also according to their political level and discipline. Tonight’s squad is under the leadership of Sabita Kumari.

Sabita Kumari, twenty-eight, a graduate from a tiny college in Daltongunj, has never dreamed of this role. Her parents expected her to become a school teacher. But that seems to her a half-remembered page from a book of someone else’s story. Her two younger sisters were killed eight years ago – the sixteen-year-old beheaded with a machete while her parents, tied to the bed, were forced to watch; the youngest sister, fourteen, gang-raped, her eyes gouged out, her tongue cut out and then her neck stabbed. Their crime? The family had tried to resist the moneylenders’ attempts to take over their land in the village of Pabira. The police at the nearest station, in Ranchi, refused to issue an FIR in response to Sabita’s complaint unless she fellated the duty officer; more action would be taken according to the escalation in services she provided. That, too, seems so long ago, from a different life.

People talk of rage as something fluid; it boils, flows, spills over, scalds. For her, it is not any of these things. Instead it is a vast, frozen sea, solid as rock, unthawable. She has never seen the sea, but she knows it wraps around three-quarters of the world. All her anger is that and more. When she joined the Maoists she was twenty. Within two years she had killed five officers at Ranchi police station, all those who had leered and asked for sex when she had gone to complain. When the little of her life had been reduced to nothing, the Party had held and rocked her in its iron cradle, told her that the nothing of her life could become a path, a straight, narrow, but tough one, at the end of which was a destination worth reaching.

She has repeated the same words, almost without change, to her comrades who are silently marching with her now to their business of the night. She has picked them with great thought and care. Underlying her choice had been one immutable principle: they must be people who are nothing too, whose lives are nothing, who have nothing. No recourse to any form of redress or justice. Revenge was their last roar. And what was justice but revenge tricked out in a gentleman’s clothes, speaking English? She knows the relevant section of the recruits’ histories like she knows the back of her hand.

From Simdega district have come two tribal brothers and their sister, Subir Majhi, Deb Majhi and Champa Majhi. The Majhis, members of a tribe who lived along the edge of Saranda forest, had been told that the land where their ancestors had lived from as far back in the past as the human mind could see is no longer theirs, but the state’s to do with as it wanted. They did not have a patta to prove ownership; the state did. Soon afterwards, policemen, contractors, officials spread out over it; their land was going to be mined; the earth there contained metals. A group of people from the city came and told them they would get compensation. But the forest was their home; what compensation would return that to them? Would they give them another forest somewhere? The compensation turned out to be 5,000 rupees per head, not exceeding 25,000 rupees for each family. The CRPF forces, with their AK-47s and metal breastplates, posted in the forest to deal with the Maoists, got 4,000 rupees a month. The tribal people knew what fate awaited them outside their land – daily wage-labourer in the city, maidservant in someone’s home, prostitute.

When the Majhis joined forces with the hundreds of forest-dwellers who were also being driven out, their land no longer theirs, the state deployed the military police. The police were protecting the lawful property of the mining companies, the property that had been the tribal peoples’ last year or the year before; they had a right to use force against the tribals, for they were trespassers and outlaws now. The campaign of intimidation began: a house looted and then razed to the ground; someone maimed for life after being hauled off to prison on the flimsiest of excuses and beaten in lock-up; a girl raped; a well poisoned; a man shot; food shops destroyed and supplies cut off, so that the jungle-dwellers could be starved into submission.

This had all happened before, their father said to them; it had happened in neighbouring districts, in Chiria, in Gua, when he had been a young man. The same story – forest-tribes banished after their land was sold by the state to mining companies; those meant to protect you turned into your attackers. Imagine coming home one day to find that your parents were waiting with knives to slaughter you. That is what the Maoists said when the tribes escaped into the forests to protect themselves from the military police. They had a choice: to be snuffed out overnight by the world or take on the world and wrest something from it; not very much, just a little, just to survive and live like a human, not an animal. This is the hope the Maoists offered, the hope of dark clouds gathering over parched, fractured soil; it could rain or it could not, but they brought something new into their lives: possibility.

Sabita has planted IEDs in the forest and blown up military vehicles, she has raided outposts of the Indian Reserve Battalion and blown up their buildings, she has burned security vehicles sent to protect the Prime Minister’s village road-building programme, the Gram Sadak Yojana, in Belpahari in West Medinipur; she is itinerant, like the rest of her kind, through several districts in several abutting states: two nights in Saranda forest, three nights in Dandakaranya, a week in Karampada, constantly on the move, bringing to the country their promise of a mobile war. But the end of tonight’s action is unknown. None of them is going to be there to witness it. Were her thoughts in the past, before doing something terribly beautiful like an action for the first time, was her mind then like it is now, all a-whirl? They would all die one day – and it will come a lot sooner in their lives than in others’ – but it was better to die fighting, like a cornered wildcat, than crushed underfoot like an unseen worm. You kick a dog, it will run away, but you keep kicking it and kicking it, it will have no option but to bite you back just to stop being kicked. How could you want to live a life that makes you yearn for one thing only – its end? Every human being in this world wants, strives for, a better life, but they are deemed to be below that wanting and striving. Their lives are nothing, less than nothing. They are lower than animals. How has this come to pass? Is it true of everywhere in the world that some people are just fodder? Or has their country taken a wrong turning? She does not know.

Her subgroup of four reaches the point near Hehegara Halt while the rest carry on towards Mangra. Not a whisper is exchanged. Even their breathing is cautious. A torch is produced, its light covered with a thin cloth before being switched on. They bend and squat and go down on all fours on the railway track, shining the torch close to the ground, until they find what they are looking for: the fishplate joining the ends of two rails to form the track. They are careful about not stepping on the stone chips between the rails; the crunching sound it produces is too loud. Sabita stands guard with her AK-47 removed from her shoulder to her hands, turning 360 degrees every eight minutes in four slow ninety-degree sweeps of two minutes each, with clockwork precision; the human equivalent of the swivelling turret on a tank. The night needs watching; she knows that the darkness skitters and slides between being a friend and an enemy with alarming unpredictability.

While she keeps watch, her three comrades bring out medium-sized wrenches, wire-cutters, jacks, industrial pliers and screwdrivers from their bags. Each instrument has been carried separately and individually to prevent clanking during the walk. They lie flat on the tracks, one on each side and one on the stone chips in the centre, and begin to dislodge the fishplate holding the rail-ends in perfect alignment. The trick is more than forty years old, she has been told during her training. Someone had come from Chhattisgarh to show them the ropes, and he had mentioned that according to local Maoist lore it was a Bengali invention, the work of a man known as Pratik-da in the late Sixties in some district bordering West Bengal and Bihar. Or was it West Bengal and Orissa? Pratik-da was no longer alive – he had been tortured and killed by the police in the notorious Naxalite purges in 1970 and ’71 in Calcutta – but his gift to his future comrades survived and, for those who cared to or were old enough to remember, he lived on in his bequest.

It is not easy work – their necks have to be held at an angle of forty-five degrees to the ground while their bodies are stretched out flat – and their hands have little purchase because of the limited freedom of movement. The sounds of creaking and clinking, of the tinkle of metal on metal and of metal on stone, of the occasional crunch of the loose chips, are too loud to their ears. They cannot concentrate fully on their work because a part of them is forever listening out for the slightest whisper of something awry, something outside the ordinary. But they are lucky. Their chosen area is nowhere-land, between two tiny stations in the middle of such abandonment that people talked of the place as being in the blind spot of even god’s vision; the nearest station is nearly ten kilometres away on one side and seven on the other. Besides, the fear of Maoists means that no one ventures outside after darkness falls. There are no vehicles passing on the dirt road running mostly parallel to the railway line a few hundred metres away, but at this time of night that is normal.