It was 1977. The emergency was lifted. The press, muzzled during emergency, was now enthusiastic to expose the emergency excesses. Perhaps, they were making up what they could not or were debarred from doing during the emergency. First time, a non congress party, Janata Party formed government; Moraji Desai was the prime minister.
We used to sit on a bench of the tea stall and hold
our Khatti (adda in Bengali) everyday in the afternoon in the college square in
front of the block office in Jajpur. Then, I was studying in N. C. College. The driver of the BDO sat
with us and was also a member of the Khatti.
The driver told us a story; he claimed to be privy to the
incident. One top bureaucrat, a senior member of the IAS, was corrupt and
oppressive. Field officers were mortally afraid of him. Wherever this IAS
officer visited, he stayed the night and a woman served him fried fish with
whisky in the inspection bungalow. He enjoyed his whiskey and the woman.
The driver told us that this IAS officer had visited
the Block where he was driving the jeep of the BDO, and had driven a woman
employee in the night to the inspection bungalow.
The story Behind
the Scene is based on the incident told by the driver. The story was
originally published in ‘Jhankar’ in 2000, the twenty-fifth year of emergency.
When I was treasury officer in Satyabadi (1992-96), my
batch mate was the BDO in Kanash. He was honest and sincere, but his honesty
did not go well with his political and administrative bosses. He could not
withstand the pressure, and harassment inflicted on him by his collector and
the minister. He committed suicide. This incident provoked me to write the
story Chakravyuha.
The story then created a sensation in Puri district, as
it was published in Katha within one
year of his death and the incident was fresh in the memory. The story upset the
collector, the petty politicians sent me hate and abusive mails; but the
officer in charge of the police station treated me with a sumptuous lunch in a dhaba. This story also facilitated my
transfer from Satyabadi, which I could not get despite all my efforts.
During my school/college days I was a member of the
students’ wing of a leftist party. Of course, party and politics disillusioned
me and I left soon. But I have not forgotten those friends. Whenever we have
chanced meeting we exchange greetings.
One day (in 1999) I met such a friend. He was a
committed member of the cadre. He was doing party works and for a livelihood,
he sold books supplied by USSR. The persons having a taste for literature might
have bought Dostovesky, Gorky, Turgenov, Tolstoy, Gogol, Puskin, etc in 1970s
or in early 1980s at a cheap price and have enjoyed the books. This was before
Gorbachev and his glasnost and perestroika. Gorbachev’s reforms broke up
USSR and Russian supply of books stopped. Communist movement in India weakened.
This friend of mine did not give up his ideology, but became a pauper. Once he
was dreaming of bringing revolution and changing the society, now he was struggling
hard to eke out a living to survive. His case inspired me to write the story Just for a Living. The Jhankar had
originally published this story.
Love for the Princess contains nine stories including the above three. The
stories are translated from original Odia by me, except one translated by Deepa Nayak.
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