A conflict within, and all around

Sandeep Dikshit

Just when all the news around us emanates from the busting of militant launch pads along the border, Dhrubajyoti Borah, a powerful voice on the Assam literary circuit, has come out with his first book in English on what happens to nine survivors of an army attack on a not-so-fictional militant camp located in Bhutan. Cut off from their rainbow land of Assam, but living in an equally scenic mountainside, the lives of these fugitives is upturned when shells start raining on the camp.

One can legitimately ask if there is any freshness in yet another novel on a commando raid? This is because railway book stalls and private hospital lounges are piled high with tales of valour of testosterone-laden men and a few women out to avenge India’s honour with daring commando raids. Dhrubajyoti Borah is too grounded to fall for the post-Modi lurch in chick-lit literature for more brawny subject matters. Borah, after all, lived through the days of the anti-foreigner movement when every Assamese seemed to be on the streets, the transformation of the Robin Hood ULFA into gunslingers who brooked no dissent and then, finally, the broken revolutionaries lining up before the Chief Minister of the day to obtain what they had tried to appropriate with the help of the gun.

The Sleepwalker’s Dream is also different from the just-out-of-college fantasies that have just TV news and former service officers as the reference points. This is because it is premised on the author’s impressive body of non-literary work. And unlike new-age novels, which end at that point, this book opens with the aftermath of an army operation (Operation Rhino in real life that busted 16 ULFA camps).

In the aforementioned novels, the villains cease to exist; the avengers walk back with a loss or two, usually the third angle of the love-interest triangle. In The Sleepwalker’s Dream too, the ground duly trembled as shells rained on the camp and bodies were thrown in the air. One of them was the Leader. But he was in coma. Ron was leading the survivors and June was the only woman among them.  They were travelling upwards, beyond the tree line and into isolation, away from the ambushes and informers awaiting them on the down paths to the plains of Assam. 

That is on the surface. In very simple words and sentences that meld into one another as in the Assamese tongue, Borah builds a back story of this bunch of nine while, very exhausted and hungry, it finds refuge in a cave. Through them Borah picks his way through the nationality question, self determination, social alienation and his very own deconstruction of the myths of revolution and social reconstruction by rebels. In the present, the group hunkers for months. The Leader recovers to reminiscence and the group gets to know each other. There are desertions and breakdowns. There are no calendars, weather forecasts or word-of-mouth warnings. This is a world we will find difficult to recognise. The Leader’s years of reconnaissance and Ron’s field experience keep them from harm’s way.

Death is the only certainty in life and so it is with The Sleepwalker’s Dream. The Leader completes his assignment on earth and the group disperses from their high-mountain hideout. Borah, the veteran of novels on insurgency written during turbulence, seems in position for a follow-up.  The uncertainty could be picked up to follow their lives as beaten and overwhelmed, they started on their way down, to Mumbai, Goa. Were they ambushed as they had feared during the months in hiding?

Or did their fate match the facts? In real life, a clemency was declared. Over 7,000 youth surrendered with their arms. This was as lethal an insurgency as in Punjab and Jammu & Kashmir, anchored in a mass movement that began in 1978. It wound its way to the ULFA because of an unsatisfactory political settlement between the locals and the Centre and poor governance by the former street fighters. Some things never change. In the end, the wiser among them switched political horses. One is now the chief minister of Assam and many are ministers. If Dr Borah was to pen another post-conflict sequel, would Ron become like them?