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his shoulder. Just enough money in his pocket for the train fare back.
    This is some sort of tour? their father asked. You’ve planned it with friends?
    That’s right. A change of scene.
    Why all of a sudden?
    Why not?
    He bent down to take the dust from their parents’ feet, telling them not to worry, promising to return.
    They did not hear from him while he was gone. No letter, no way to know if he was alive or dead. Though Subhash and his parents didn’t talk about it, none of them believed that Udayan had gone sightseeing. And yet no one had done anything to stop him. He returned after a month, a lungi around his waist, the beard and moustache overtaking his face not concealing the weight he’d lost.
    The tremor in his fingers had gotten worse, persistent enough so that his teacup sometimes rattled on the saucer when he held it, so that it became a challenge to button his shirt or grip a pen. In the mornings the sheet on his side of the bed was cold with sweat, dark with the imprint of his body. When he woke up one morning, his heart racing, his neck covered with hives, a doctor was consulted, a blood test performed.
    They worried he’d contracted an illness in the countryside, malaria or meningitis. But it turned out to be an overactive thyroid gland, something medication could keep in check. The doctor mentioned to the family that the drug could take some time to work. That it needed to be taken consistently. That the disease could cause a person to be irritable, to be moody.
    He regained his health, and lived among them, but some part of Udayan was elsewhere. Whatever he had learned or seen outside the city, whatever he’d done, he kept to himself.
    He no longer tried to convince Subhash not to go to America. When they listened to the radio in the evenings, when he looked through the papers, he betrayed little reaction. Something had subdued him. Something that had nothing to do with Subhash, with any of them, preoccupied him now.
    On Lenin’s birthday, April 22, 1969, a third communist party was launched in Calcutta. The members called themselves Naxalites, in honor of what had happened at Naxalbari. Charu Majumdar was named the General Secretary, Kanu Sanyal the Party Chairman.
    On May Day, a massive procession filled the streets. Ten thousand people marched to the center of the city. They gathered on the Maidan, beneath the domed white column of Shahid Minar.
    Kanu Sanyal, just released from prison, stood at a rostrum, and addressed the exuberant crowd.
    With great pride and boundless joy I wish to announce today at this meeting that we have formed a genuine Communist Party. The official name was the Communist Party of India, Marxist-Leninist. The CPI(ML).
    He did not express gratitude to the politicians who had released him. His release had been made possible by the law of history. Naxalbari had stirred the whole of India, Sanyal said.
    The revolutionary situation was ripe, both at home and abroad, he told them. A high tide of revolution was sweeping through the world. Mao Tse-tung was at the helm.
    Internationally and nationally, the reactionaries have grown so weak that they crumble whenever we hit them. In appearance they are strong, but in reality they are only giants made of clay, they are truly paper tigers.
    The chief task of the new party was to organize the peasantry. The tactic would be guerilla warfare. The enemy was the Indian state.
    Theirs was a new form of communism, Sanyal declared. They would be headquartered in the villages. By the year 2000, that is only thirty-one years from now, the people of the whole world will be liberated from all kinds of exploitation of man by man and will celebrate the worldwide victory of Marxism, Leninism, Mao Tse-tung’s thought.
    Charu Majumdar wasn’t present at the rally. But Sanyal called for allegiance to him, warning against those who challenged Majumdar’s doctrine, comparing him to Mao in his wisdom.
    We will