He was a Communist. Perhaps not.
He almost admitted it on a rainy June night after he’d held my hand and walked from the television room to his own for almost the last time. His health didn’t permit him to watch much telly after that night…
I was fresh back from ACJ – a committed socialist, though still embedding socialism in my mostly opinionated outlook in life. I was showing him three of the books I’d bought from an up-market mall in Chennai. On Che, another on the Naxalite movement in
“Dadu, you’re a Communist, aren’t you?” I asked. He smiled and looked away. The silence lasted long. Really long.
“Why? Why do you ask me that?” he said. “It’s…I dunno. You don’t pray. And you have all those books in the library,” I replied.
“I was in the I.B. I used to get many books like that each week; and was expected to present a thesis on each according to an allotted deadline,” he said, still looking away.
“But, there are so many other things, too,” I tried. “Like what?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I gave up; getting up to leave.
“In your line of business – as in mine, one should never accept one’s ideological beliefs. Or reject them,” he said.
My dad gave me my grand dad’s passport as he cleaned his room a few days after his death. In addition to a book on Islam that he’d written on orders commissioned by an officer in the I.B after retirement. And one on Sikhism – written in Punjabi in the Persian script.
His copy of the Holy Quran (“written in the Roman Script” – as the cover proclaimed) was purchased from
He was to be made a Sikh – in accordance with customs in his village in the Punjab; our ancestral land –
Partition – he walked from
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The first entry in his passport:
Next entry:
1962: One on one with the Chinese. Kills. Comes back alive. In the service of his country. Medal.
1967: No entry on his passport. Naxalbari. Communists vs. capitalists in Kerala, West Bengal,
He admittedly killed 12 men. Who, or what were they? “They impeded the founding tenet of Nehruvian India. Intelligence wanted them dead.” But what was their ideology. No answer. In the service of his country. Medal.
Trouble in
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I should have noticed it in the wry smile he had given me when I had picked-up on of his favourite books from the library, a year ago, before I went to Chennai. The book was called ‘Guerrilla Warfare’.
“Why do you want to read it?” he had asked me. “Well, I want to understand what it is,” I had replied. He shook his head. “The question for which you should be looking for an answer should be ‘why’ it is,” he had said.
What should I make of his strong disbelief in Hinduism – rituals, idol-worship et all, his library of books like the ‘History of the C.P.S.U (Communist Party of the Soviet Union), Red Star over China, collections upon collections of speeches made by Fidel Castro to a nascent Socialist Cuba and an eponymous thesis ‘Guerrilla Warfare’ containing Mao and Che’s writings translated into English.
I download the internationale. Make him hear it. He smiles…looks away…
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“Before you do anything anyone tells you to do, ask “why”.
“Breakfast at Saigon, dinner at
Maybe he was a communist. Perhaps not…
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