‘The Nemesis’ by Manoranjan Byapari: Dark hole of life to literary excellence

Harvinder Khetal

AFTER his first book, ‘The Runaway Boy’, featuring the tragic childhood of Jibon, a poor refugee from East Pakistan during Partition, ‘The Nemesis’ is the much-anticipated second part of Manoranjan Byapari’s Chandal Jibon trilogy, brilliantly translated by V Ramaswamy from Bengali.

It keeps the reader engrossed in and engaged with the 20-something Jibon’s life which, in the early 1970s, continues to be an endless saga of trials and travails wrought by abject poverty. He is condemned to keep running from situations arising from his unfortunate circumstances. All the running unwittingly lands him in a dark prison cell. And before that, it takes him to “a veritable slaughterhouse, a pile of unclaimed corpses and the autopsy table in the morgue”.

One blow after another is dealt on Jibon — the alter ego of the award-winning author — despite his honest efforts to provide a square meal to his old, tired parents. Though he masters the difficult art of cooking for the haughtily autocratic households during their functions, his low-caste status — Chandal — compounded by illiteracy throws up injustices that push him back to the margins, the shanties along the railway lines.

Even love in the form of Kusum, though presented miraculously to him twice, eludes him.

His life exemplifies a society in which “while their pots are empty of foodgrains, a kind of deadly poison that they called ‘class hatred’ had occupied Bengal”. The low-caste people are expected to do menial works that no one else will do, but like crabs in a bucket pulling each other down, all their efforts for betterment go in vain as heaps of humiliations and misfortunes befall them. The quest to quenching his hunger sucks Jibon into the world of crime, which, in turn, shoves him down the dark black hole of the turbulent times.

In this outing, Byapari gives an impressive socio-political view of the West Bengal of the early 1970s that saw the uprising of the Naxalite movement, even as another wave of Hindu refugees descended on the state from the liberated Bangladesh.

Jibon gets entangled with Naxalbari “though he knew that the path he was walking on was one that knew only destruction, blood and tears. As easy as it was to walk that path, returning was near impossible. The path went through police custody, courts, prison, hospital, autopsy room of morgue and finally culminated in the crematorium”.

While taking refuge in Naxalbari seems the only saving option, later, to escape its deadly trap, Jibon’s family takes refuge in the forest. His father Garib Das, “who had once stood firm against going to Dandakaranya forest”, chooses to go there with his family and conceal their identity. “If a tiger chased you to the edge of a river, you had to jump into the river. You wouldn’t think about crocodiles in the water. To protect his son’s life, an extremely anxious and imperilled father finally considered the terrifying forest to be the safest place now.”

Such vividly evocative incidents underscore Byapari’s keen knack of grasping the happenings around him and his widely acclaimed talent of bringing to life the hardships endured by the underprivileged and fringe sections of society.

Byapari has lived that life. A rickshaw-puller in Kolkata before learning to write in a prison and going on to become an author and then an MLA, Byapari knows socio-economic distress. It comes through starkly as he depicts the struggles of chhotolok for a mere meal that unjustly land them into skirmishes with the oppressive bhadralok.