Love for the Princess

 

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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