Reader’s Digest
88 august 2019
police. But those who had nothing,
especially the women who came to
the city as domestic help, considered
us their protectors,” he says. One of the
vulnerable women he saved from thugs,
a girl named Manju, later married him.
This life was also the shortest path
to Alipore Special Jail, where his life
took a U-turn. A man of around 60,
who everybody called Mastermoshai,
was lodged in the same prison wing as
Byapari. Mastermoshai took a shine to
the young jailbird and tried to convince
him to start reading and writing, but
Byapari was not interested.
One day, Mastermoshai called
young Byapari to a window in their
ward. Across the road, he pointed to
a small green shoot sprouting out of
the National Library wall. The shoot
got no moisture or nourishment, yet
it grew out in defiance. Mastermoshai
asked the young prisoner to reflect on
it. “This is our life,” said Mastermoshai,
“it’s possible to find sustenance,
if you look for it.”
On another occasion, Byapari
encountered a good-looking young
man in the jail asylum who said he
had been turned in by his mother.
Apparently, he had lost his mind
reading Sarat Chandra’s Charitraheen.
When Byapari asked Mastermoshai
how this was possible, his teacher said:
“How would you know what a book can
give a man? Go peel potatoes ... ”
“The next morning I felt a strange
turbulence within, and a change of
heart. I told Mastermoshai I wantedto read and write. We got down to it
straightaway: A twig was my pencil, the
jail courtyard my slate, Mastermoshai
was my textbook.”tarting with the Bengali
alphabet, Byapari progressed to
words, and eventually to books,
and discovered an insatiable hunger
for literature. There was no library in
his jail, but somehow he was able to
access them through his Naxal friends.
The more he read, the more he evolved,
and a new person started taking shape.
By the end of his sentence, he had
tremendous goodwill in the prison.
Out of jail, he worked as a rickshaw
puller, but his passion for reading had
gripped him further. “All I wanted to
do was read more books,” he says. He
scoured through scrap dealer stocks
for old books and magazines. He read
classics and pulp fiction, devouring
whatever he got his hands on. While
he joined a local library, many of his
passengers, thrilled to know about his
reading, passed on old books—Gorky,
Dostoyevsky, Rabindranath, Sarat
Chandra and the The Red Book. “I
went from the Himalayan peaks to the
bottom of the desert, voyaged in space
to the deepest forests and became a
globetrotter, even though I was only a
rickshaw puller,” says Byapari.
The world of Bengali literary fiction,
especially that created by Mahasweta
Devi and Chanakya Sen, amazed him.
“In the Pita Putra books, by Sen, I had
tripped on the word jijibisha. I just