"ARROGANCE."
This was Manik Hazra's single-word explanation for the electoral loss that would soon end the 34-year reign of the Communist Party of -India (Marxist) in West Bengal. Manik looked up at me, sitting rigidly in his wooden chair, and waited for my response. I was busy tucking into my third maamlet, a peculiarly Bengali name for a dish that's really indistinguishable from an omelette, hoping he would continue. But he sat, silently, looking at me with his grey cataracted eyes, trying to discern precisely how I had changed in the 37 years since he last saw me.
I last visited Manik, my grandfather's first cousin, in 1974. Back then, the Bengali film star Uttam Kumar had far more fans than Amitabh Bachchan; Indira Gandhi, a former student at Rabindranath Tagore's Visva-Bharati University in Bengal's Birbhum district, was the prime minister of India and had just conducted the country's first nuclear weapons test in the Rajasthan desert. Bengal was under Congress rule again, after the brief tenure of a non-Congress coalition government that included the communists. The Congress chief minister, Siddhartha Shankar Ray, had crushed the ultra-left Naxalite movement in the state a few years earlier, and Bengal's rural hinterland was waiting for a change. At that time, they didn't call change "poriborton"—they called it revolution.
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