Translated from Bengali by Rituparna Mukherjee. Cover image: graffiti mural in Marseilles.
Human skin lies on the side, and from each skin shell comes out a snake. Hissing, they slither onto the place where the pitcher of nectar is kept. Each snake has blue, venomous fangs, their long, forked tongues protrude in front, with round marks on its skin, and within each circle there are twenty-four teeth, turned blue with poison. Surrounding the pitcher of nectar, the snakes forge their way aggressively. i
The Optimists have just sat down to eat after an entire day of stories and laughter in their community. They have seen their public spaces brim with thready happiness. Monsoons will make an appearance soon with its heavy rains. The forest is fresh, bright green, and abundant making their living quarters beautiful. The rains have washed away days of intense heat. The locality is joyous because of a marriage. A young boy from one of the villages is marrying a girl from another village. They have known each other for many months. And in between them is the rushing waters of the Indravati river. The Optimists have ventured into the river to collect ceremonial waters for the marriage. And tomorrow, in this very river will float ten dead bodies of the Optimists, and in the shadows beside the river, will lie another twenty-nine bodies, scattered here and there.
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Many years later, on one hot April afternoon, Abhimanyu comes and stands in the barren landscape. Heat rains from the skies like fire. Humidity runs down like water from a canal and evaporates as quickly. Tons of minerals are being excavated from a distant mine. There are no trees left here anymore. No river either. Abhimanyu has never seen a bird. He has learnt the words ‘tree’, ‘river’, ‘bird’ from an abandoned wall in one of the old homes that is still upright, a few words etched on a blackboard in a ruined house. Abhimanyu sees the tarred roads catching fire, lorries plying that blazing street, trucks with many tires, carrying within them loads of minerals. His mother brought him to this arid place. She had shown him the corpses of dead people floating on the hot waters of the canal. Many of those impaled bodies, their hands and feet tied to bamboo posts, were carried across that burning road. Abhimanyu’s mother had shown him how the trees were torn down, how corpses of the Optimists were tied to the hewn branches of the trees. Abhimanyu’s Ma kept saying these things and birthed stones one after another, stones that had been thrust inside her vagina at the Jagadalpur police station. That was the first time Abhimanyu heard that snakes came out of human skins, with round marks, and within each circle lay etched twenty-four teeth. Their venomous blue fangs and forked tongue attack with the rashness of brush fire. Abhimanyu saw his mother lifted from the mine with the bauxite and coal. His mother was thereafter cut, sifted among the many trucks and taken away. He learnt of the tale surrounding the pitcher of nectar and the Optimists many years later, standing in this barrenness, cold like death, burning like hot summer.
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The Optimists know how to dance and sing. It is the festival of marriage between two villages. Thrifty happiness lies warm and comforting on everyone’s skin despite the looming clouds of war. Anytime now, that cloud can burst, venomous snakes can descend noiselessly, climbing down ropes from those clouds. There have been many instances of destruction in this pristine land. The Optimists have been defeated, captured and taken away to a large, cold, rocky place without water, land, forests. Sometimes they have retaliated, broken the teeth of this den of snakes and adorned their beloved land, built homes, constructed schools, written new songs ‘Gaon chhorab nahi, jungle chhorab nahi, mati chhorab nahi, larai chhorab nahi’—we won’t forsake our village, our forest, our land, our fight. They have devised new means of protecting that pitcher of nectar. The Optimists arrange their own happiness in their settlements—a land encircled with forests, smelling of rice, waters bordering the forests restful. And beyond that lies the den of snakes, who have sniffed out the hidden pitcher of nectar, with their forked tongues and venomous teeth, round marks on their skin.
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The pages of the history book keep fluttering, just like they always have. A few pages tear away from the geography book and a few are stapled and added together in the economics textbook. Gradually, the old pages fade away, new pages keep getting stapled, the binding of the book comes loose with the weight of the stapled pages. The mathematics books gloss through the ratio of the number of Optimists and the hissing snakes. The statistics in the mathematics books slowly transform into disproportionate ratios of the displaced labour and the loot. Kritabarma knows the letters and words of these textbooks will one day spread like sentences and reports. He owns these trucks, these mines. Kritabarma wants to douse the fire on these streets, but he doesn’t know the words to awaken the river. He wants trees to be planted on both sides of the road, just like before, but he doesn’t know the method of planting trees. He rushes, hissing, to cut down more trees, and empty more fields and localities. His snake-like skin, round marks, and twenty-four blue teeth within those circles gleam clearly. He has fetched more like him to this place. Thrusting more venom into his fangs, he roams one locality to another. The sound of their collective footsteps has awakened the countryside. Night descends. They want to completely drain the pitcher of nectar. They hang the dead bodies of the Optimists at the entrance of each settlement. They have placed freezers and power sprays to wash away the blood in this barren land. They have constructed mining industries, increased the research and production of fangs. He knows how to kill quietly, in the dead of the night, mixing poison in food. And then one sees the dead bodies adorned with rifles and rocket launchers, press meets organized in that celebration. There is a curious fusion of anthem and hissing sounds there. The cold blood of a snake flows through Kritabarma’s veins, a giant round mark on his skin, twenty-four blue teeth within it.
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The Optimists return from the marriage festivities to their homes at night. The food they have had is laced with poison. They are sitting around a fire by the Indravati river strategizing on their plans to protect the pitcher of nectar, while eating mouthfuls. They are aware that in the space of a few days, their enemies will climb down tri-colour ropes from those dense clouds again. Just a few days back, they destroyed one of the schools erected by the Optimists, razed the village whose water-land-forest they had sworn to protect. But the snakes felt the force of their retaliation. A few of them had forked tongues that were a hundred metres long with equally large fangs. The Optimists chopped off their tongues, broke fangs through ancient modes of warfare and defense, the numerous Verner rifles ablaze like the myths. Their lush fields were razed one after another by monstrous trucks with fifty wheels. Two dangerous hoses sat atop those trucks. One spewed brush fire, while dried food and cold drinks spouted from the other. The Optimists know that this fight has been raging for ages and will continue for many years hence. These form a part of their oral myths—the duel between the snakes who shed their human skin and the Optimists. That there will be days both for fear and for merry making. And on one such festive night, they have dinner in their land of hope, a dinner of meat and brown rice. They will be asleep in some time, unaware. The people from the other village are busy in the festivities, making their own arrangements. No one spots a snake, with round marks and forked tongue, enter the festival ground in disguise, mixing poison in the food.
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Thirty-nine maimed bodies surround the Indravati river. Ten corpses float in its waters. Twenty-nine roughened bodies lay mixed with the soft mud and grass on the banks of the river. Another eight bodies are found scattered helter-skelter after two days. No sooner did the Optimists partake the poisoned food, than a few trees in the forest shook. The snakes came out of their hiding place, leaving their olive skins behind; cold blood, round marks on their bodies, inside every circle twenty-four teeth. The bodies of the Optimists are porous with the brush fire, floating on the Indravati river. The river smelled of corpses the entire night, speckled with the blood of the dead. In the morning, flashes and bright lights gleam on these bodies, rocket launchers and assault rifles to their sides. The snakes sit on the mound of these corpses and laugh, baring their forked tongues and fangs. They have their olive skins on. They declare that the pitcher of nectar is almost within their reach, just a few more days to the complete demolition of the Optimists. And then, the land will be mined, tons of bauxite, coal and minerals fished out from its great depths. The twenty-four blue teeth within those colourful rings become immense by then, almost reaching the sky. And the place rings with anthem and hissing sounds.
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It rains heavily when the Optimists lay senseless with their boot-trampled bodies and their gouged eyes, so torrentially that the olive colours wash off the skins of the snakes, such a downpour that the camera flashes refuse to work. It rains disastrously in that locality for days on end. And once the rain stops, fires burn like pathways. Boiling vapour accumulates like river water, not a trace of a tree anywhere. But that is much later. Before that the Optimists lay quietly in the all-consuming rain. They can’t feel the ants sheltering themselves in the hollows of their eyes, in the caverns of their mouths. The ants take parts from inside their bodies to the very depths of the soil, far away through tunnels dug in the mud, accumulate pieces of the Optimists, carry their ancient weapons and their ways, hidden in the leaves. As in the ancient proverbs and lore, their bodies mingle with the river, the soil, the clouds and its rains. A few months later, when the rain stops, the bodies of the Optimists disappear. And when Abhimanyu will stand in that barren aridity with his mother, ages later, those wordless facts will roam in people’s words, and become myths. Abhimanyu will discover the legend of the Optimists, new ways of protecting the pitcher of nectar and minerals. The war will rage still. And this tale of the Optimists will begin anew.
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Translator’s Note:
Prabuddha’s story “Hope, People, and a Tale of Fire”, translated from the Bangla “Aalo Manush ow Agun-er Loko Kotha” is a powerfully evocative tale of the Anthropocene greed for resources. It is a story where the simple livelihoods and entire ecosystems of indigenous communities are upended because of the extractive nature of the government-corporate nexus, reducing the land and its wealth to a resource to be extracted for material gain, hiding their greed under the cover of security and economic stability.
One of the main challenges of this story is its symbolism, especially in the naming of indigenous community. That defied a literal translation because it would not have carried over the connotation. It is not a character dense story because there are no individual heroes in this fight. So, the text reads like an eye-witness account. There are people who fight with the same zeal, suffer the same fate irrespective of gender. Gender is a tool for the powerful. Geographically it is located in the mineral-rich landscape of the Chota Nagpur Plateau, famed for its mineral reserves, its lush forests and quiet, simple indigenous population that take arms only to protect their own. It is a risky tale, but one that needs to be told. The choice of using the present tense in the translation is deliberate, to indicate the sustained nature of both the exploitation and the resistance, the pride in the resistance, the power of lore and how stories are the only things that keep hope alive for the successive generations to guard their land, the pitchers of nectar, to use it sustainably, respectfully, even in face of erasure from written history.
Author Bio-note:
Prabuddha Ghosh lives in Kolkata. He is currently working as an Assistant Professor at The Royal School of Languages. He writes poems, short-stories and essays. His stories have been published on webzines like Aihik, Nagorik.net, 4 Number Platform. A collection of poetry named Jakhon Sangbidhan Bodle Jachche was published in 2021 from Yapanchitra foundation. Prabuddha also plays and teaches Chess. Shah Maat, a book on Chess, was published from Boibhashik Prokashoni in January 2023.
Translator Bio-Note:
Rituparna Mukherjee teaches English and Communication Studies at Jogamaya Devi College, Kolkata. She enjoys writing short fiction and flashes. A Pushcart prize nominee and a multilingual translator of Bengali and Hindi fiction into English, her original work and translations have been published in many international journals. Her debut translation, The One-Legged, translated from Sakyajit Bhattacharya’s Ekanore, has been shortlisted for JCB Prize in Literature 2024 and won the KALA Literature Awards 2025. She is the fiction reader for Usawa Literary Review.
