The Lowland

task.
    Using the screwdriver, he started taking the radio apart again.
    The wiring to one of the coils or switches must be loose, he said..
    You need to fix that now?
    He didn’t stop to answer. He’d already removed the cover, his nimble fingers unthreading the screws.
    It took us days to put that together, Subhash said.
    I know what I’m doing.
    Udayan isolated the chassis, realigning some wires. Then he put the receiver back together again.
    The game was still going on, the crackle less distracting. While Udayan had been fiddling with the radio, Germany had scored late in the second half, to force overtime.
    Then they heard Hurst score again for England. The ball had hit the underside of the crossbar, and bounced down over the line. When the referee gave him the goal, the German team immediately contested. Everything came to a halt as the referee consulted with a Soviet linesman. The goal stood.
    England’s won it, Udayan said.
    There were still some minutes left, Germany desperate to tie. But Udayan was right, Hurst even scored a fourth goal at the end of the match. And by then the English spectators, triumphant before the final whistle, were already spilling onto the field.
    4.
    In 1967, in the papers and on All India Radio, they started hearing about Naxalbari. It was a place they’d never heard of before.
    It was one of a string of villages in the Darjeeling District, a narrow corridor at the northern tip of West Bengal. Tucked into the foothills of the Himalayas, nearly four hundred miles from Calcutta, closer to Tibet than to Tollygunge.
    Most of the villagers were tribal peasants who worked on tea plantations and large estates. For generations they’d lived under a feudal system that hadn’t substantially changed.
    They were manipulated by wealthy landowners. They were pushed off fields they’d cultivated, denied revenue from crops they’d grown. They were preyed upon by moneylenders. Deprived of subsistence wages, some died from lack of food.
    That March, when a sharecropper in Naxalbari tried to plough land from which he’d been illegally evicted, his landlord sent thugs to beat him. They took away his plough and bullock. The police had refused to intervene.
    After this, groups of sharecroppers began retaliating. They started burning deeds and records that cheated them. Forcibly occupying land.
    It wasn’t the first instance of peasants in the Darjeeling District revolting. But this time their tactics were militant. Armed with primitive weapons, carrying red flags, shouting Long Live Mao Tse-tung.
    Two Bengali communists, Charu Majumdar and Kanu Sanyal, were helping to organize what was happening. They’d been raised in towns close to Naxalbari. They’d met one another in prison. They were younger than most of the communist leadership in India—men who’d been born in the late 1800s. Majumdar and Sanyal were contemptuous of those leaders. They were dissidents of the CPI(M).
    They were demanding ownership rights for sharecroppers. They were telling peasants to till for themselves.
    Charu Majumdar was a college dropout from a landowning family, a lawyer’s son. In the papers they saw pictures of a frail man with a bony face, a hooked nose, bushy hair. He was an asthmatic, a Marxist-Leninist theoretician. Some of the senior communists called him a madman. At the time of the uprising, though not yet fifty, he was suffering a heart ailment, confined to his bed.
    Kanu Sanyal was a disciple of Majumdar’s, in his thirties. He was a Brahmin who’d learned the tribal dialects. He refused to own property. He was devoted to the rural poor.
    As the rebellion spread, the police started patrolling the area. Imposing undeclared curfews, making arbitrary arrests.
    The state government in Calcutta appealed to Sanyal. They were hoping he’d get the peasants to surrender. At first, assured that he wouldn’t be arrested, he met with the land revenue minister. He promised a negotiation. At the last minute he backed out.
    In May it was reported that a group of peasants, male and female, attacked a police inspector with bows and arrows, killing him. The next day the local police force encountered a rioting crowd on the road. An arrow struck one of the sergeants in the arm, and the crowd was told to disband. When it didn’t, the police fired. Eleven people were killed. Eight of them were women.
    At night, after listening to the radio, Subhash and