During the 1970s, just after Ramesh Sippy's famous production Sholay was released, fear began to take on a new name for children across the Subcontinent – the name of a man. The surname carried an air of authority, masculinity and strength, while the first name was vaguely funny, even meaningless: Gabbar Singh, the film's iconic bandit chief. For adults a few years earlier, fear had already begun to acquire another name, one as obscure as 'Gabbar'. This was the name of a tiny speck of a village in north Bengal, a region hazy in the national consciousness: Naxalbari.
As drugs were to parenting for my parents' generation and an uncensored Internet is for those raising children today, Naxalbari was the indefinable fear for parents two generations back. My grandparents, villagers in Bengal's Dinajpur district, did not want to send my father to Presidency College in Calcutta for fear that he would graduate as a 'Naxal'. My father avoided becoming one, though many of his friends went missing only to return years later with stumps for hands and blotches of darkness in what should have been happy post-graduation memories.
My parents began their married life in Siliguri, an unremarkable small town that neither had previously visited. From there, Naxalbari seemed further away than it had in Calcutta, where they had met as students. It was only when my father became increasingly ambitious to engage in some 'foreign' travel that a curiosity-tinged fear began to gather in my mother. It was to Dhulabari, a dusty village-town in Nepal an hour and a half by bus from Siliguri, that my father often escaped with his friends. As we would discover later, Dhulabari was a smuggler's paradise. Full of cameras, video players, televisions, crockery, geysers, fancy 'fairy lights', hair dryers and candies in the strangest colours and shapes – the town was a veritable Disneyland for my young father's once-socialist eyes.
To get to that bari ('house' in Bangla and Rajbanshi), there was another my father had to cross. That was Naxalbari; and because my mother spent afternoons worrying about father's return, it became the equivalent of a house of horrors. When we asked her for a story about the place, all she would say was, 'You're too young to understand.' It was only after we had travelled through most of the rest of India that, one day in 1986, my mother expressed the desire to visit Naxalbari. My father's first reaction was to laugh. 'It's like visiting Ayodhya now,' he said. 'You want to see Ram or at least Ram rajya there, but instead all you see is a civilisation of dust!' But my mother was insistent. And so, one winter day we travelled to Naxalbari. It was to be a holiday, even a picnic, and in preparation the smell of oranges filled our house.