A Walk Through the Wild Side

By Ajit Chaudhuri

This is the story of the kidnapping of a Delhi-based management consultant by insurgents in the North East of India in the mid-1990s, told from the perspectives of the kidnappee, his wife in Delhi, and the commander of an insurgent group that has him in its captivity. It spans events from the 1960s onwards and takes the reader across India and its North East, with occasional forays into Bangladesh, Myanmar, and British India’s northwestern frontier.

The story delves into questions of ethnicity, identity, nationalism and sub-nationalism in the North East, explores their connection with insurgency, and describes the assumptions, compulsions and motivations of the time. In the process, it introduces the India of the twentieth century, and its North East, to twenty-first century Indians.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing India
• Release date: Mar 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781543708554

Ajit Chaudhuri

The author sits in the rabbit warrens of middle management in the Indian corporate sector, where he thinks up stories as a means of fighting sleep at meetings and pontifications on issues such as global warming, stakeholder capitalism and triple-bottom-line accounting. He had previously written the novel ‘Pax Feminica’, a sociological exploration of a world ruled by women.

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PART A

Up to 1997: Before the Event

CHAPTER

1

The Early Days (Suhasini)

I am waiting at the airport on a bright and sharply cold winter morning. My husband is returning home after two years, and I am here to receive him. No, he is not back after further studies or a posting abroad or anything remotely glamorous – he was kidnapped by an insurgent group in the North East, and he has just been set free. And I am not sure what to feel – happy for him that he’s finally free after a long and traumatic time, but also uncertain about what lies ahead – I have got used to being alone, managing by myself, and not being answerable to someone else or being deferential inside my own home and that sort of stuff. And Ghanshyam had turned into a bit of a prick in the last years of our marriage (before the kidnapping, that is), expecting to have his food served, his laundry done and the toilet paper changed while he went about doing the ‘man’s job of earning the money’, which hadn’t gone down well with me (to put it lightly) and I have no intention of reverting to that shit.

It wasn’t always like that.

I had grown up as an only child in what I now know was an outwardly traditional but inwardly deeply anarchical nuclear family. My father had won a scholarship to study civil engineering in Germany, which he duly completed, came back to India to join the Public Works Department (PWD) in Uttar Pradesh (UP), marry a girl he had never met, my mother, and conform to a life spent in the small towns of this sprawling state; Pilibhit, Uttarkashi, Chitrakoot, Maunath Bhanjan, Lalitpur, et al.

He had two qualities that set him apart.

The first was integrity. He never took a cut on the many construction projects that were implemented under his wing, he never allowed stunts such as increasing the proportion of sand in the concrete, selling of bricks to private housebuilders on the side, and having fake names and thumb prints on the labour muster rolls so that the wages could be pocketed. This was a huge problem, because there was a peculiar honesty in the dishonesty of the times in a system within which everyone from the Minister to the chaprasi had a prescribed cut and kickbacks were assiduously distributed according to fixed percentages no matter where in the hierarchy they were received, but also the concomitant issue of no space for someone to ‘opt out’.

Complaints about this, and about him, used to reach even me in school – there is no place to hide in the government residential colonies of small towns where we lived in close proximity to one another and studied in the same local schools, and we were all well aware of the goings-on in each other’s homes; who had a drink problem, who was beating his wife and why, who spent the occasional evening in the company of courtesans (Maunath Bhanjan in particular had a vibrant red light area, and there would be bawdy rumours about anyone even glancing in that direction), who’s elder brother’s hands patted who’s elder sister’s knee during the monthly film screening at the club despite her having tied a rakhi on him two years back, and so on.

I once asked him about it, along with an underlying suggestion that he should come to some compromise so that I would be spared the disparaging remarks and semi-threats that I subsequently got used to, things along the lines of ‘your old man’s too honest for his own good’ or ‘no doubt you’ll be buying two tickets on the bus once you have something baking in the oven’.

I will always remember his response.

"Suha, my dear, honesty is like pregnancy – you either are or you aren’t, there are no shades of grey in between. And I am! I can’t change that about myself, and even if I could I wouldn’t want to, and so I damn well won’t. You will just have to live with it.

And don’t forget that I am a government servant, which means that I have the option of being honest unlike politicians who don’t have this luxury. My salary is almost enough for us to live in reasonable comfort (nobody’s is quite enough), and it comes in every month no matter what people think or say – there’s nothing they can do about it. At the most, the powers-that-be can transfer me often and to what they think are terrible dehati places, away from the so-called metropolitan towns. Which is fine with me, I’ve had my share of bright lights as a student in Berlin, and I far prefer Lakhimpur over Lucknow, Kannauj over Kanpur and Askot over Allahabad."

His second quality was his respect for education.

Suha, he used to say, this is the one asset in life that, once you acquire it, it can never be taken away. All the others, cars, bungalows, jewellery and whatnot, even relationships, are here today and may not be there tomorrow, you can never be sure. But education, it can’t be stolen, it can’t be taken away at gunpoint, it can’t be lost, it will be with you until the day you die no matter what happens. So don’t compromise on it, give it everything you have in terms of effort and concentration! And stay in education until it is complete – it is difficult to return to studies later in life, and you will only be left with regrets about what could have been.

My mother was considerably more pragmatic. She had married my father fully expecting to live the high life as per what she had been led to believe was the lot of all wives of engineers in the PWD, soon realized that she was not going to get it, cursed God and her parents for agreeing to the match without adequate due diligence, and then went about living her life as best as she could with the resources available to her. She learned to turn a deaf ear to the remarks that came her way whenever she wore a new sari or purchased a pair of shoes, took the frequent packing and unpacking and the bureaucratic requirements of new school admissions and changed gas connections with calm and equanimity, and when people pointed to the contrast between the palatial mansion built by my father’s brother, also an engineer in the PWD, on his half of the plot of land left to them by their parents and the simple three-room structure built by my father on his, she would merely retort that one may own a thousand rooms but would at most be able to use only one bed to sleep in at night.

She gradually began to see the advantages of her situation, such as when her first child, me, turned out to be a girl – she had braced herself for a declaration of calamity within which she would have to do some serious blame management and, instead, saw only unadulterated joy and gratefulness in the eyes of the man she had had the child with. Or when, after some tremors in Uttarkashi had destroyed school buildings in the surrounding villages, the local sarpanch association had bypassed the District Collector and taken a delegation directly to the Minister in faraway Lucknow with a one-point demand – that the rebuilding of the schools be supervised by Kaushik Saheb because the safety of their children was not up for negotiation, a fact that was widely reported in the local newspapers. And, of course, the time when some prestigious foreign funded project in the Chief Minister’s constituency was in the process of being bungled and my father had been pulled out of whichever small town we were in at the time and sent to wherever the project was to ensure that it was done on time, at cost and to specification, which required him to update the Chief Minister on a weekly basis for a 6-month period on the police wireless – something that he never spoke about but nonetheless everyone in the colony knew.

Between them, they made sure that there were high expectations and no distractions for their only child on the academic front, none of that ‘you’re a girl so it’s OK’ or ‘learn how to cook or sew or knit or whatever, it’ll be important later’ stuff – it was a given that I was to make something of myself and live on my earnings later in life. I was also blessed with brains, good concentration, and a capacity for hard work, and I topped class right through school in whichever mofussil town we were posted in and then subsequently in engineering college as well, something that gave them immense pride that shone through whenever they spoke about me to others.

Until that point, I had had no truck with boys – my father’s constant transfers didn’t encourage the building of relationships with my classmates, and anyway in earlier days I saw boys merely as a bunch of noisy dirty morons fading away in the rear-view mirror of my academic progress. This didn’t change much as I grew older, and while some of them occasionally mustered up the courage to attract my attention (things like one fellow coming up to me in college to ask for my autograph claiming that I had done a role in the film ‘Disco Deewaane Part 3’, with four of his sidekicks sniggering in the background), nobody quite left me with an impression other than that of all of them being at an evolutionary stage between Neanderthals and monkeys. I didn’t speak to any of them, or for that matter to any of the girls, I didn’t attend any social occasions, see movies, or play any sports or musical instruments, it was studies, studies and studies, and I duly got the reputation of being an ‘ice queen’ wherever I went (which was fine with me, because they always left me alone after that). There was even a joke about it among my college classmates that continues to this day, that when they meet up and update each other on the old batch gossip they go Oh, you know, I met X, I met Y, I met Z, and I saw Suhasini.

CHAPTER

2

Management Education (Suhasini)

I’m not sure why I took entrance exams for business school in my last year of engineering. I didn’t even know what ‘management’ was other than that it seemed to be the pathway of the brightest of the bright and as the college gold medallist for the past three years (and every year in school before that) it was expected that I would take them. My father was not impressed, he had fully expected that I would do a Masters and then a PhD in engineering, probably in an Ivy League University in the US, and would then go on to design spacecraft for NASA or some such thing – and definitely not put my talents to use in finding ways to sell soap or talcum powder or whatever it was to the assorted peasantry, no matter what people earned for doing this – and he agreed only because my mother sat him down and explained that taking an entrance exam was just that, taking an entrance exam, merely a way of expanding the range of options from which I could make a choice from and therefore nothing definitive in itself. She too had no idea what ‘management’ entailed, but she did have a view of the possible pathways ahead via the engineering route that differed considerably from my father’s in that it included a lifetime spent in piss-pot towns, the company of inward-looking caste-minded dowry seekers with a lot of interest in the goings-on in their neighbours’ homes, little reward or recognition, and no chance whatsoever of her only daughter finding a civilized husband and therefore of decent and well brought up grandchildren cradling on her knee. She had long learnt not to press for her ideal option for me, the marriage-housewife-motherhood pathway, in our family discussions on my future and, to her, sitting in an airconditioned office in a metropolitan city, mixing with the type of people she came across only in TV ads, and being paid a starting salary that was five times more than what her husband would earn after 25 years of service, was not something to be sneered at or discarded without being given a chance. So, I did sit for them, did well, and did get selected to be interviewed for a place in the four top management institutes in the country.

This business of being interviewed was a first for me, until now all I had done was write the exam and receive the commendation that invariably followed, and there was none of this validating the results with face-to-face verbal interactions. I went in for these interviews not knowing what to expect, and I did spectacularly badly.

All of them followed a common pattern – a one-hour grilling by five different professors seated across me around a table on a multitude of topics, most of them unrelated to engineering. And as the hour progressed, they took on the hue of torturers in those old war films that were a craze during club ‘Movie Night’ – letting me know in no uncertain terms that ‘vee haff vays and means of making you look schtoopid’, taking turns at exposing my ignorance, and reducing me into a tongue-tied train-wreck in the process. I came out of each of them completely frazzled and in need of a strong cup of coffee (or, though I didn’t know it then, a cold glass of beer), and it was no great surprise to me to receive one rejection letter, then another and then a third. The fourth missive that came in, from the most prestigious of them and therefore the one I had the least hopes for, was a tentative one informing me that I was on a wait-list and that they would get back to me by-the-by if a seat became available. It duly did, and I had to make a decision about whether this was the path for me.

My father took the multiple rejections as a sign that it was not, and that I should stick to hardcore engineering where my strengths lay and not deviate to a line where one plus one did not necessarily equal two and how you spoke and presented yourself and your ideas were as important as hard work and innate mathematical ability. But I saw it differently, and as a fork in life’s journey. On one side was my comfort zone, where there was a degree of predictability and certainty and all the things that brought me comfort and joy, where I had been ordained to go for a long time. And on the other was the deep blue sea of management, unknown, challenging and unpredictable and for which the path ahead was hazy, where I would have to change my assumptions about who I was and what made me tick in order to succeed.

To cut a long story of hand-wringing and recrimination short, I found myself entering a large and beautiful campus in western India as one of a hundred plus aspirants for post-graduate education in management – among the bright young people selected to be the future of the corporate sector in India and abroad. I went through the initial mild hazing – for example, on the first day of class, a professor administered a quiz in which many of us, including me, were graded ‘F’ and I spent a day in deep distress, cursing my life choices and wishing that I had deferred to my father’s directives because he knew best while fending off fake sympathy from those graded ‘A’ and ‘B’, until we were all told that the professor was actually an older-looking doctoral student at the institution, the grades were fake, and this was all a practical joke organized by our senior batch to welcome us – and slowly settled in. The academic workload was manageable and life continued much as it did earlier, with no friends or distractions, all work and no play, with the minor difference being that I was not far and away the brightest in class, and the first semester duly passed.

The second semester provided a new challenge – something called ‘group work’. Our financial management class required us to divide ourselves into groups of four and do an assignment together, for which we would all be graded the same. The assignment in this case consisted of taking a book full of financial transactions and converting these into a balance sheet. How were we to decide upon our groups? We were left to ourselves on that. And it was positively Darwinian out there – the academic toppers and those who had a first degree in commerce were the superstars of the moment, courted desperately by others especially by other girls who seemed to have no qualms about dangling hints of future benefits as quid pro quo for an easy ride on the assignment. I had no clue how to get teamed up – I asked around, but everyone I vaguely knew seemed to have attached themselves to a group that did not want more members, and when I approached someone in the students’ academic committee with my difficulty she cruelly said, ‘don’t worry, there will be others without a group and you can all get together at the end.’

I was not so confident about this approach, it seemed a recipe to being dumped with the dregs of the student community, the duffers, the indolent and the apathetic, but given that the alternative was to put myself out and ask people who I had not yet spoken with but knew were bright, I decided, what the hell, I’ll work with what I get.

My heart sank when I discovered who I got – describing them as the dregs would be a compliment. The first fellow was a south Indian, but was as un-south-Indian-like as it gets in that they are usually decent, mild-mannered and intelligent; he was large, loud, perpetually drunk, and vocal in his intention to obtain grades that were as close to ‘fail’ as possible without actually failing so that he could optimize the balance between his leisure and his studies. The second fellow was from one of those posh Delhi University colleges who chain-smoked fancy 555 cigarettes that he kept in a Capstan packet – he rode a motorcycle that he called ‘chick-magnet’, and was the prime mover behind a betting pool with odds on who among the motorcycle owners would be the first to have all the girls in the batch on the backseats of their respective precious vehicles. The third fellow was from Assam and his little monologue at an introductory event at the beginning of the first semester went ‘I’m not interested in studies, I’m not interested in movies, I’m not interested in books, and I’m not interested in girls – the only thing I am interested in is football – I think football, I sleep football, I dream football, I live football’, and we discovered that this was not hyperbole, some stupid sport that consisted of 22 people in permed hair chasing a ball actually occupied his whole life. And while I did not know any of them and had never spoken to them, I knew who they were because of their constant loitering around in the common spaces of the institution, where they wiled time away by making leery eyes and passing lewd remarks at passers-by that were sometimes quite funny and usually just below the border line of offensive.

I almost burst into tears, and then grit my teeth and said to myself, ‘OK, Suha, you can make it work. Just do it all yourself, and tell these fellows to either get behind or get out of the way. They should be quite happy to get a good grade for no effort.’

But they were having none of my attempts at playing the boss.

The three of them sat me down and said that this is the way we would do it – we would identify the laziest person in the group, this person would figure out the shortest way to get the work done, and then we would all do it this way. They then fought over who was the laziest, with each one of them vying for the honour.

To avoid washing my undies, I wear them the correct way first and then turn them inside out and wear them again. After three days of this and three days of that, I then decide whether to wash them or just throw them away and buy some more.

"I used to hang around in my balcony that overlooks the neighbourhood park and lech at the ayahs rather than walk 200 metres to the market to ogle hot chicks."

I am a proud resident of a state where the work culture is so pathetic that the Bengalis are considered hard working, this was Altaf, the football-loving Assamese.

The others bowed to Altaf’s vastly superior manifestation of laziness and unanimously voted him as the one to crack the assignment. And I looked on at the proceedings feeling like an anthropologist at a tribal gathering.

Altaf decided that we would take one transaction and make a day book entry and a ledger entry for it and its converse before moving to the next transaction, rather than doing all transactions one stage at a time in batches, and we sat together for one full afternoon and evening doing this. We were able to begin the trial balance after dinner, and then by about 0030 hours we got out our calculators and started totalling. It was at about 0200 that we burst into a loud ‘Yaayyyy!!!!’ that resounded across the students’ residential area, all our columns’ totals had just balanced.

And I discovered some things in the course of that day that surprised me. One was how meticulous my teammates were – the entry, the contra-entry, the check, for each transaction at each stage – all done with rigour and diligence, and how intelligent they were as well. These were definitely not the bozos cum loafers that they tried to project themselves as. What a bunch of sheep in wolves’ clothing, I remember thinking at the time, these guys are seriously bright. Two, how well we worked together, breaking every onerous task into a collection of smaller and easier ones that we divided between us, and supporting each other in the most natural way when someone was stuck. Three, how naturally I blended in with the team – we all, me included, seemed to think it was normal that I was here, and I was comfortable in my role as an insider. And four, how much fun it was.

We got an ‘A+’ grade for the assignment, to the great surprise of the professors and the student community. My teammates acted as if I had done all the work and told me, when they saw me at the students’ mess after the announcement of results, that I was to blame for the fallout of the high grade on their respective hard-earned reputations. And I tried to contain a smile, didn’t succeed, and the smile transformed into a chuckle and then a full-blown laugh that went on and on with them joining in and everyone else wondering what the hell was going on. We decided there and then that we would work together on future group assignments, we were a ‘crew’, and there was to be no more desperately searching for people to work with for me.

And there wasn’t! We were invariably the first team up on the sheets for group work after that, we squabbled and we fought and we joked and we gossiped while we worked, and we slowly became friends. They made a lot of fun of my engineering mindset until, one day, the south Indian (who was always called Madrasi by the others, invariably suffixed with a common term denoting illegitimacy) had a problem.

How does a guy dress up as a hot girl, man? he asked, during one of our breaks while working together on an assignment to study tax treatment for related party transactions in limited liability companies.

What? the crew collectively responded. Is that why you are not contributing to the assignment, you Madrasi B? Your mind is on drag queens instead of tax laws? Please expound – what is it exactly that is bothering you?

"It’s to do with the student hostel’s inter-block variety entertainment competition next week, guys. My block is putting up a play, and I have drawn the short straw and am supposed to take on the role of a hot girl. Suha the chuha, I don’t suppose you can lend me provocative clothes and some female underwear?"

Happy to, Madrasi, I responded, not knowing at that time that girls are not supposed to lend boys their underwear when they wanted to cross-dress or, for that matter, admit to owning provocative clothes. But how will that convert you into a hot girl? Someone else, even slightly presentable, and I may understand. But you?? And anyway, what do you mean by ‘hot’?

The three of them were happy to contribute to my education on that front. Her hips should sway invitingly as she walks, she should have a soft but sultry voice that is promising without being obvious and, last but not least, her boobs should jiggle and bounce like they have a life of their own, were the nuggets of information thrown at me. It was the last-but-not-least bit that was creating a problem, and we decided that this was worthy of our focussed attention. How does one create the effect of boobs jiggling and bouncing inside a tight T-shirt worn by a boy?

What about wearing a bra with lemons inside them?

I vote oranges!

Watermelons, please!

Dream on, you mindless perverts, that was me, "Madrasi’s difficulty is not about size, it’s about jiggle and bounce. If he keeps them loose, they will move and maybe fall, and then he will have to adjust on stage using his hands, which is a no-no. If he keeps them tight they won’t move, forget about jiggle or bounce, and he will look like some strapped up Amma. There has to be an engineering solution to the problem."

And I duly devised one that did not require me donating a brassiere that would be stuffed with some indeterminate fruit. I got hold of a pair of socks, we put two cups of loose mud into each sock, tied the loose ends together around Madrasi’s neck, let the mud-full ends hang loose under the front of his shirt, and told him to walk.

Wow, we said when we surveyed the fruit of our endeavours, you have both jiggle and bounce. You can adjust size with the quantum of mud, and you can adjust how high or low-slung you want to be by how high you tie the loose ends around your neck. The hang provides the necessary movement. This is better than the real thing.

And my teammates looked at me as though I was a genius, who’s method for enabling men to play the role of hot women on stage was the gold standard in reverse gender empowerment and worthy of a Nobel Prize or, at the minimum, of an honourable mention in Penthouse along with a free annual subscription. The audience at the said variety entertainment duly concurred, with Madrasi receiving more catcalls than all the girls on stage combined, and I was left with the triumphant feeling that I had brought engineering in from