Heb je gelezen hoe Naxalieten 55
politiemensen vermoordden in Dantewada, India? Wij zijn daar
geweest en we spraken er toen met de commandant van deze
communistische rebellen. Het stond al in de Gangs & Cults Issue in de States, maar toen is het in Nederland weggevallen wegens gebrek aan ruimte. Daarom plaatsen we het nu hier. Die commandant is werkelijk
één van de meest intense kerels die we ooit ontmoetten, en
wij hebben ooit Peter Halley (google hem) ontmoet… Behoorlijk
intens dus.

I’d just gotten to Dantewada, a little village in central India. Two
men and two women circled each other the middle of the road, each with
a slipper in hand. They were wasted people—drunk, dried like leather,
hair like cornhusks—and they circled. Then one man darted forward and
slapped the sole of his shoe across a woman’s face. A cloud of dust
like a cartoon, and they resumed the circling.

Forty kilometers south, there lived a communist politician nicknamed
Comrade. It was past midnight when we got to his house, a two-story
log-cabin sort of thing. On the concrete porch, two men slept. Comrade
explained that they were strangers, peasants making the journey to
Dantewada on foot.

“This house is built in the traditional style,” my translator
blurted out. “The wall is mud and upstairs, there is not a roof, but
another floor. And this,” he gestured at the beams, “is teak.”

We went inside and met Comrade’s wife, son, and friends. They were
eating goat and drinking whiskey—no public vegetarianism or avowals of
sobriety here.

Comrade’s son looked about 35. He was tall and healthy and wore
glasses. He said, “Tribals now in many areas don’t keep their pigs,
goats, and chickens alive, but rather eat them. They say, ‘I know that
I will die, and so it is better to enjoy what I have.’”   

I asked what he meant, and he pointed to a houseguest, a drunk guy in trousers who was making flirting eyes.

The flirty guy said: “I am building a school in the forest.
Recently, I was in my truck, and a police officer asked me to give him
a ride. I couldn’t refuse him without incurring a penalty, and on the
next day, Naxalites set my truck on fire.”

Asked who was worse, the police or the Naxalites, they said they
were equally dangerous. We talked more like that, and then Comrade and
his son pulled an extra string bed into the reception room and the
translator and I went to sleep.

In the morning, I went out to wash, and when I returned to the
sitting room, the translator jumped up anxiously. He held out the comb
that he had been stroking through his beard and asked if it was mine.

I told him it wasn’t, and he sat and returned to the meditative combing.

And then Comrade came out of his bedroom and we all—me, the
translator, comrade, the driver, and a tribal man who had one loosened
eyelid—got into a car and drove at a breakneck pace through the jungle
for close to an hour. On the road outside, I saw a person every five or
ten minutes—a kid on a bike, a short woman with the physique of a
cougar. And then for a long time nothing; the jungle began to look like
a jungle.

We came to a clearing and four mud houses. Comrade and the man with
the loose eyelid introduced the translator and me to a shy family and
instructed us to wait there. An hour passed. The family brought us red
tea, and a monkey with a string leash around its neck leapt out of the
trees, skittered over the cooking pit, and came to a halt in front of
me. He paused long enough for me to see his golden hoop earring and
then leapt into my lap and bit me on the knee.

Another hour passed before Comrade and Drop Eye returned and led us
down the narrow path to a valley where three Naxalites in full uniform
were waiting under a shelter of sheet metal supported by wooden poles.

They were tall men with fully developed physiques. They were clean
and wore camouflage uniforms. The commander wore rubber sandals, and
the other two wore rubber slip-ons. I knew he was a commander because
his cap was embroidered in white with the word “commander.” He spoke
and the translator told me, “The commander wants to know who you are.”

He looked about 40. He was solemn, and his eyes were funny, with no
distinction between pupil and iris. They were flat, like there was no
lens beneath, and so no light to play at its back. I began to explain.

He asked a few questions, I answered, and he, appearing to have made a decision, switched into English.

“We are in the middle of an operation, but I received word that you were here, so we have come only to greet you.”

I asked what the operation was, and he sat silently, unreacting.

The other two Naxalites were quiet. One, a smiler, was young, giddy.
The other was older, with early hepatitis, and a red star on his cap.

The commander said, “What is it you would like to know?”

“I want to understand how the ideology and actions meet.”

Again, he stared flatly.

“Can you tell me,” I said.

“Yes.”

And he sat.

He asked me who else I’d talked to, and I rattled off the names. When I said, “KPS Gill” he started.

“What did KPS Gill say?”

“He spoke in platitudes. He said Naxalites are murderers, they cut
off the hands of policemen, they kill poor people, they are nothing but
bandits.”

With venerate stillness, the commander took my number and said he
would call and arrange to meet within a month. I pleaded with him to
talk now, but he was obdurate. Weeks later, I was watching The Bone
Collector in my hotel room when the phone rang. It was a local
journalist; he said Naxals in the commander’s district had kidnapped a
group of peasants, cut their stomachs open, and slit their throats.
When the conversation ended I let the horror movie continue to run.
There was no need to perform it: I was afraid to die.
AMIE BARRODALE