It is early June, and I find Kolkata awash with the joyous green of Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress. On the way from the railway station, the red graffiti and flags, a feature of decades, have vanished. The last time that West Bengal's hue changed was in 1977, when the communist crimson replaced the Congress tricolour. But on Friday, 13 May, when Bengal showed the door to the reds, the sari Mamata donned had an emerald border in triumph, and the abeer (coloured powder) that hung in the air was victoriously green. Jubilant supporters released white pigeons powdered with party colours into the sky, the fluttering wings presenting a tricoloured rainbow above, invoking the Trinamool flag. Underneath victory cries resounded: Herey chhe, herey chhe! The Left Front has lost!
In the small town of Shantiniketan, a little over 200 kilometres north of the hubbub in Kolkata, scholar Paul Mukerji, the son of an expat Kolkata doctor and a British nurse, wore a green kurta on Mamata's V-Day. 'Students smeared my face with green powder,' he tells me later. Across the swathe of the state, the scene is a vivid cinema-scope panorama: romantic and poignant, filled with memories of past violence but now hung on hope – a multi-layered saga of the divided colours of West Bengal.
Bengal's story is not a sharp black and white like the jerseys of Mohammadan Sporting Club, one of Kolkata's top three football clubs. Amidst the tale's many hues are closed or ailing jute mills in the capital's suburbs, the angst that is still found around Tata's Nano factory site in Singur, the Special Economic Zone (SEZ)-fuelled fury in Nandigram. The situation is rather more similar to the jerseys of the East Bengal Club, red and gold: the former being the state's omnipresent political hue for 34 long years, the latter reflecting agrarian wealth.
Even as I soak in the many colours of a Bengal with Mamata Banerjee at the helm, the fresh coat of deep red that Writers' Building, the state secretariat, has received tells the underlying tale of this state: a narrative of violence that has defined West Bengal's politics. Blood-red has indeed been the signature shade of Bengal, whose political cupboard contains many skeletons. The story of the removal of the long-ruling Left Front – the umbrella grouping spearheaded by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) – from the corridors of power is a moving tale of a state's small fires coalescing into a conflagration that engulfed the world's longest-ruling democratically elected communist government.