The Sichuan Broadcasts

The bus didn't get to the border of Sallyan district in time. There was a nationwide cease-fire, but some of the local curfews were still in force. We had reached the border after midnight; we had to wait there until sunset. The bus parked on the roadside, along a dozen other vehicles that had been stopped before us. My seat was narrow and uncomfortable. I was too excited to sleep anyway. I got off. Farmers had come out of the darkness, carrying logs and teapots. They lighted fires. There would be hot chai, and that was a welcome relief. I sat down by one of the makeshift hearths, and got myself some tea. I had been so eager to take that road. The month I had spent in Kathmandu making contact had seemed a year. It had all gone very fast in fact.

  January 21st 2003, I landed in New Delhi. The day after, I was sitting on rags that had been carpets twenty years ago, listening to a charming old lady explain me the origin of the caste system from the point of view of class struggle. I was in the office of the front organization of the CPI(ml)[New Democracy]. There are about fifteen communist parties in India. They're all splinters, or splinters of splinters, of the original Communist Party of India. Each one of them claim to be the only real CPI. Anything else is a rightist deviation, or a leftist deviation, and is utterly counterrevolutionary. Fifteen parties calling themselves CPI, that's a little confusing, so they add their brand between brackets. Ml stands for marxist-leninist, and actually means maoist. Naturally, the maoists have splintered too. For the sake of clarity, each CPI(ml) adds between square brackets the name of its central press organ. I had got the contact address of New Democracy in Paris. The comrades there had met them in some international conference somewhere in Germany.
  So, I was sitting in that one-room bureau in a miserable suburb of New Delhi, sharing tea and biscuits with the old lady who was one of the main leaders of that group. I had the feeling that for the last forty years, she had lived solely on dry biscuits and burning hot chai, slipping from a hide out to the next, always studying, always discussing, always teaching, speaking always in the first person of the plural. I was under the spell of her lilting Anglo-Indian. She took advantage of all the rhetorical ressources of a dialect that has retained grammatical subtleties and semantic nuances since long forgotten in England. Her speech had a slow swing, marked by a rythmical pattern of 'Acha!' and 'Tikke?'. The main points were stressed by the head rocking so peculiar to the Indians. I was very impressed by the way she led a political argument: she defended the line vigourously, and at the same time took an obvioux pleasure in the intellectual duel. I was falling in love with her. She finally told me that, since the struggle had turned into full-scale civil war between the monarchy and the maobadis a year ago, they had lost all contact with the comrades in Nepal. She knew somebody who might know somebody though. She gave me a phone number and instructed me to call every evening.