© Anjana Basu

From Chapter 1 (Shyama)

They call me the woman who destroyed Bengal. No, there's no need to look at me again. You won't recognise me. It's been years since my photograph was in the papers, though you can still hear that phrase of course. My face was round then and my hair still black - despite a grey streak that last time, in that last photograph. I still wear white but, here, every woman does. I lose myself in the mass of whiteness, a woman who walks alone with all the others.

Once in a while someone comes out of the crowd, and looks at me for a long time. I have to hold my breath, waiting. Then there's a murmur of, 'Sorry Didi, I thought...,' and the face turns away again. There are people who have longer memories than others - curious people, the kind who hold grudges, the way an elephant holds hatred. Kindness is never remembered; only the mistakes collected one by one, until they gather into a towering wave.

Destroyed Bengal! As if a state could be burnt down like a house by a single pair of hands. No. Let me tell you it cannot. It takes years, and many hands working against each other, to do that. My master-tutor once told me about a woman who destroyed a thousand ships - some queen she was, and so beautiful that all the kings fought over her. I think that was the story. I can't quite remember now what it was ... even though I sit with my students under a banyan tree overlooking the river and tell them stories from the books.

There's no sound there except for their chanting, as they repeat after me, and the rush of the river - and, sometimes, the clanging of a temple bell as someone asks God to pay attention, to listen to his or her prayers. Surprising in a place that they call God's Threshold. Once, a dragonfly hovered over me - large, green, and grotesque - except for those wings that caught rainbows floating in the air. I sat there for a moment in silence staring at it, forgetting to correct the girls as their chanting went off-key; sat there so long that they stared at me, and then one of them got up, tiptoed over, and whispered, 'Didi, are you all right?' The dragonfly was startled and whisked away by the girl's voice. 'I'm fine!' I snapped. 'Go back to your seat! It's that chanting of yours! All wrong!'

Did I recognise myself in that dragonfly - the ugly body and the spirit that wanted to fly? A man once said, 'You're not ugly, you never will be but, yes, you have the spirit of fire.' He said that when I was eighteen, and growing up in his house in Kolkata. That was the year when people started whispering about my aunt who was living in his house, possibly because most people have minds that cannot rise above the gutter. They taint everyone they speak of. My aunt, Maya, had been brought to Kolkata by Paresh Maitra; yes, that Paresh Maitra, the chief minister, the one whom everyone praises for his open mindedness and transparency, and for his willingness to usher industrialisation into the state. People said that the roots of what I did lay in that beginning, in my coming to Kolkata with a man and woman who did not know their own minds. But it was not like that at all.

In the beginning it was all so innocent. My aunt had enemies in the village - men who believed that women could be condemned as witches, and their land taken away from them. My aunt was a wise woman, and on her own. Except for her father she had no one. Paresh Da came to the village after one of those attacks on her life and, when the village headman appealed to him, he agreed to take her back to Kolkata with him. She thought she would take me along - Shyama, the dark one, the one who would never find a husband because of the colour of her skin.

I was old enough to be a companion to her, to lend the whole thing some respectability - though I don't think my aunt ever thought of that. She was happy to have her life again, to walk free without worrying whether someone would accuse her of witchcraft and drag her into the open fi eld with hard hands and strip off her clothes, skin, and life.

It started there - my aunt and I and the beginning of my political education, in that village of twelve huts and one courtyard. She taught me all the things I ever learnt. Most people, of course, pointed fi ngers at Paresh Da. He had looked at my aunt with greedy eyes and brought her home because he was a man like that.

Here, when I join the women who jostle around the temple, I hear lots of stories of men like that. And there are women who have been robbed of their land by husbands and sons and nephews and then, finally, been left at God's doorstep to wait for some kind of divine mercy. They cluster together like clouds in their white saris on the tops of the hills, I myself one of them, though darker than most. The Dark One. The Destroyer.