A summer afternoon, circa 1981. A line of handpulled rickshaws waits near the Vijargarh Jyotish Ray College in south Kolkata. While waiting, one rickshawpuller, Manoranjan, reads a book. As classes end, students and teachers start pouring out and take (changed taking) rickshaws one by one. There are a dozen before Manoranjan; but he doesn't care. He is glad he has the time to read - it is his addiction. For a poor man, all addictions are a pain: time and money are, too, scarce to indulge one.
Manoranjan has learnt to read recently. As a child, he never went to school. His parents were Partition refugees, who came to India in 1947, and being from the lower castes, Dalits, they were shunted from one camp to another. A vagrant life of penury on the margins took Manoranjan to where it often does: petty crime. Caught, he is thrown into prison, where a fellow inmate, a Naxalite, taught him the alphabets, using a stick to write on the dust. That's how he was hooked to reading, and after he came out of prison, he sustained this new addiction with the fervour of a fanatic.
Now, a middle-aged woman, evidently a professor, comes to Manoranjan. While ferrying her to the destination, a thought strikes him: "Why not ask her the meaning of a word that he read a few days back and couldn't understand." The word is "jijibisha". He had found it in Mahasweta Devi's Agnigarbha. Naturally, the professor is surprised to hear a rickshawpuller ask the meaning of this uncommon work. "Where did you find it?" she enquires. He tells her.
"Do you read a lot," she probes.
"All the time," he replies.
"Do you write as well? I run a magazine, Bartika. Would you write for it," she asks.
Manoranjan says he has never written anything. But, if he were to, he would definitely submit it to her magazine. Would she give him her name and address?
The professor gives him a small piece of paper with her name: Mahasweta Devi.
Taken aback beyond words, he pulls out her book from under the seat of his rickshaw. "Come to my house tomorrow," she tells him.
The first time I heard this story was at the Patna Literature Festival in 2013. That was the first time I became aware of Dalit Bengali literature. For most people of my class and caste, there was no necessity of Dalit literature. There was no caste problem in Bengal, was there? Conflicts between the Bhumiyars and the Dalits, and the Ranvir Sena and the Naxalites happened in Bihar and Jharkhand. Yet, listening to Manoranjan Byapari, arguably the most famous Dalit Bengali writer, shifted my focus. Patna was the right venue for this. Soon after, I discovered the Hungry Generation.
After his panel, I accosted Byapari. (I was reporting on the festival for The Telegraph). As we settled down to have a conversation, he pulled out a pouch of tobacco and started expertly crushing it in his palm - a habit we usually associate with the rickshawpullers and labourers.
To do so proudly, while talking to a journalist from an English national newspaper, was a form of subversion, a proud display of his proletarian identity. He was no stranger to it: he had also taken part in firebrand labour union leader Shankar Guha Niyogi's Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha movement.
While parting, I promised to keep in touch - but, the promise remained unfulfilled.
When Mahasweta Devi died last month, the first person I thought of was Byapari. Tracing him down on Facebook, I called him, demanding a new story. He said he had none: "You have read or heard of all of it already." But, when I persisted, he recalled one.
Byapari had visited her rented accommodation at Ballygung one Sunday morning. There were a lot of other people: Santhals, Munds, labourers of brick kilns and shoe factories - all hopeful of narrating their troubles to her. "Introducing me to all of them, she said I'm a writer." He had not written anything till then.
"Will I be able to?" I asked her.
"Of course you will," she said.
"She was like my mother," recalls Byapari. "My own mother gave birth to me. She gave me rebirth."
We know Mahasweta as Hajar Churasir Ma. But, she was also the mother of Santhals, Munds, labourers, and this rickshawpuller; her writing illumined by their jijibisha-the love of life.
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