As he expected, Aadil got used to the killing. He operated mainly in Bhagalpur and Munger. Comrade Jansevak thought he was too well-known around Rajpur, and there were now too many informers and enemies who would take a personal interest in doing him harm. So Aadil fought his war far from home. He carried a rifle and a Rampuri knife, but his main work was education and indoctrination. He went from village to village, moving mostly at night and never crossing an empty field during the day. He conducted classes for the peasants, gathering them at midnight by the light of a single lantern. He taught them their own history, and offered them a vision of the future: equality, prosperity, no landlords, no debt, each person the owner of his own fate.
With each passing week, Aadil became more depended on by the commanders of the PAC. Since he was the Professor, he never commanded a squad, but he rose rapidly through the ranks and became a trusted tactician. The landlords had their armies, and the police their power and brutality, and so the game was played out across the hills and the riverine mazes of the diara. Aadil planned the operations, the executions in response to massacres, the ambushes of police convoys and kidnappings of engineers and doctors. He discovered an instinctive feeling for feint and counter-blow, for subterfuge and evasions. He delighted in the success of his schemes, and he was not impervious to the admiration of his comrades, and so he trained himself to be a good soldier. He was no longer sickened by the smell of human blood. He took part in a few operations, most notably the ambush of an eight-vehicle police party that was returning from an investigation of the killing of a sarpanch. There was a hot exultation in the firing of an SLR at the khaki-clad figures scuttling about the road below, confused and terrorized by the mines which had blown their three lead trucks. The plan had been entirely Aadil's. The sarpanch, who had been an informer and a reactionary right-winger, had been executed in a particularly public way, by beheading in the middle of the village market on a busy Tuesday. Since the sarpanch had been close to the local MLA, Aadil knew that the police would send out a substantial convoy to investigate and reassure. So Aadil and two squads had waited for them on the road, and found them. The final bag was thirty-six policemen killed, many injured, for not one PAC casualty. The Professor again won high praise, but what Aadil valued the most, afterwards, was the memory of the rifle jumping against his cheek, the smell of the powder. The sensations told him that he was not useless, discarded. He had tilted his shoulder against the leaning of the world, and he would shift it on its axis.
The years passed. The battles came and went, one after another. Aadil's parents passed, one after another in less than a month during one cold winter. His mother died content, knowing that her son was at last married. Aadil's wife was much younger than him. Her name was Jhannu, and she was a Musahar girl educated until the tenth class, a fiery ideologue of the party and a canny, experienced fighter. Aadil met her when he outlined an operation for her squad in Singhbhum. She pointed out the flaws in his plan, but was moved by his white hair and his reputation for dedication to the cause. They married, and he was overwhelmed by the heat in Jhannu's lean, brown body and his hunger for a certain soft place at the bottom of her throat, just next to the hard muscle of her shoulder. But in less than two years they drifted apart. She was assigned to lead a squad in Hazaribagh, and seeing her required an elaborate passing of messages and risky journeys. Aadil wondered also if she had begun to question the quality of his commitment to the struggle. He worked as hard as ever, but he found that knowledge had lessened his ability to indulge himself in simplicities. He was not quite a cynic, but in bed, maybe a little relaxed by the feel of her hair against his cheek, he had let slip a remark or two about the leaders of the party. For instance, he had complained to Comrade Jansevak when Jhannu was being sent away from him, and Comrade Jansevak had said, 'A worker of the party must take such things in his stride. Aadil, my friend, maybe marriage itself is not such a good idea for soldiers. We must sacrifice everything.' But Aadil knew that Comrade Jansevak himself had not one wife but two. There was one he had been married to long ago, in his childhood. And there was another, barely out of childhood herself and renowned for her blossoming beauty. Comrade Jansevak kept her in a house in Gaya, in a three-storeyed pink mansion equipped with a satellite dish and a television in every room, and two Kirloskar generators. Aadil knew this, and maybe he said something to his own wife. And once, only once, very late at night, he had whispered to Jhannu about all the killing, the executions and the retaliations. She quoted Chairman Mao. 'The country must be destroyed and re-formed,' she said, and grew stiff against him.
Aadil also knew where the money for Comrade Jansevak's mansion came from: it was taken from the levies and taxes the PAC extracted from farmers and businessmen. Aadil had learnt the business of revolution. Much of the money passed through his own hands, as it went from bottom to top. He appreciated that the logistics of war demanded funding, he knew the price of an AK-47 and the cost per thousand of bullets. There were other expenses, for salaries and pamphlets and travel and medicine. He knew all this, but there were times when he couldn't help thinking of what he was doing, of what he was directing, as nothing less or more than extortion. He took money. He gave guns to boys and girls and told them to bring back money. He tried to teach history to his soldiers, but he knew that many of them mouthed his lessons exactly as they had chanted religious hymns, without curiosity and without understanding. Jhannu quoted Chairman Mao in every conversation, and practised dialectical materialism every day, but for every one of her there were ten boys to whom Chairman Mao was only a hazy yellow god who gave them weapons. Some bastard zamindar had taken their land with the force of his lathaits, and so now they had a rifle and much ammunition. That was all they knew and all they wanted to know.
So Aadil knew all this, and spoke about it briefly to his own wife, and so lost her. And yet, he was no counter-revolutionary, no recidivist. His ideology was as clear as mountain water. He believed sincerely and completely, he trusted still in the promise of the future. The revolution would chip away at all forms of exploitation, until a truly classless and stateless world communism was achieved. This was inevitable. The revolution would continue. There was no liberation without revolution, and no revolution without a people's war. What could look like an imperfect practice of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism was often merely practicality. Perfection was to be sought with imperfect means. The virtues of the oppressed were cunning and subterfuge and deception. The duty of the cadres was to obey the dictates of the party. All this Aadil accepted and believed. He had no doubts about the purity of the party's aims no matter how many green sofas Comrade Jansevak bought for his wife and he would continue to serve with the utmost enthusiasm and vigour. He would give his life to the party, to the workers of the coming years. He had known only struggle, but they would know happiness. For them, and their future lives, he was willing to live with Comrade Jansevak's perks, with the burdens that were placed on peasants and small shopkeepers, he would put up with the executions of backsliders, and all the blood.
Killing was commonplace to Aadil now. Keeping score through the chaos and noise of ambushes was hard, but Aadil calculated that he himself had killed a dozen men, maybe twenty, maybe a few more. No more than that. He had seen many more than that killed, by bullet and explosion and axe and lathi. He couldn't remember all the dead bodies he had seen, the small piles of flesh and rags that he had stepped over. He had gone on, face always to the front, leaving the dead behind. At first, each death that Aadil had witnessed had been a momentous event, a change in the world that struck him with the force of a revelation. He had paid close attention to the symptoms, a twitching arm, an open eye with the shine gone off the sclera, leaving it blackish-yellow. The retina gone grey. Then, long ago, each of these transfigurations had promised a great transformation tomorrow, each dying had presaged the coming light of the worker's dawn. Now the corpses fell, and Aadil did not count them. Death was the ground he stepped on, the country of his existence. Aadil lived inside death, and so no longer noticed it.