The house of CPM leader Anuj Pandey in Lalgarh’s Dharampur, part of which was demolished by PCPA members led by Maoists in June 2009

The road passes through Mednipur villages. The huts are the saddest sight for anyone with even the most superficial nostalgic pull towards Tagore’s Bengal or even that of Gopal Ghosh or Jamini Roy: most of the archetypal conical thatched roofs are now reproduced in drooping tin, the corrugated metal toasting under the May sun.

Every now and then there is a solar panel stitched on the roof, whether tin or traditional khor. Voter Bajaar: on the verticals of the tiny, naked shops and rusty booths, a shifting medley of flags: the Baam’s star, hammer and sickle, the Tinno’s two-leaf clover, the Sheepeeaai’s red-yellow sickle and sheaf of wheat, the JMM’s green standard with Shibu Soren’s face paired with a bow and arrow, the visibly fattening lotus of the BJP, the ragged green and white stripes of the Jon Shadharon Committee/ the People’s Committee against Police Atrocities (PCPA).

Coming into Lalgarh this morning, we’ve driven past scruffy fields and CRPF fortresses. After a few kilometres, the Jhitka jungle begins in earnest, with stands of sal and shegun trees, tripping away into the horizonless distance. A few kilometres in, after the light green fully embraces the car and road, we decide to stop.

My guide pauses his story about the battles between the Force and Nokshals and the noise of gunfire recedes. With the car engine off, the silence in the forest is total. After a few moments, you realise it is not silence at all but a different kind of soundscape: bird calls from the ghughu pakhi and kokil, crickets amassing their buzz, the flap of odd wings, and, amidst all this, a busy highway of red ants crawling inaudibly up the trunk of a tree, one cluster freighting a large dead insect.

Anuj Pandey’s elder brother Bimal at his house in Dharampur. Pictures by Ruchir Joshi

Now we are driving from Lalgarh to Jhargram and the topography is different. The jungle is interrupted by cultivated fields, river beds and built-up areas. My guide again begins to point out sites: the Naxalites could move freely on motorcycles across that low bridge you see over there. This is where the CRPF had a temporary camp.

Passing through a village, car windows up, his voice still drops: “Eikhaane harmad shobdo ta jorey boltey nei, CPM’er elaaka (you don’t say the word ‘harmad’ too loudly around here; this is a CPM enclave).”

I try and connect this zone to Bosnia and Croatia, to Rwanda or Sudan, but the comparisons fail. There is an ethnic element to the conflict here, sure, between imported Bangals and local Adivasis of different tribes, between Bengali and Bihari, but then there are also the tiers: the fight between local interests, and wider agendas, between Lalgarh/Jhargram, Mednipur, Calcutta and Delhi.

This is also the eastern edge of the network of Mao-Mao pockets that stretches all the way across the belly of India like a suppurating, irregular appendix scar. This is also the blood-soaked set of squares on one side of the larger Bengal chessboard, littered with knocked-over red and green pawns that Grandmasters Baam and Tinno have forgotten to remove.

We are now looking to examine one such square left behind by a still alive but absconding pawn. “I think it’s down this road,” says the guide, asking the driver to turn off the highway. We bump past ramshackle half-pukka huts and the odd concrete building into the village of Dharampur. After more of the rusty-tin pagodas, we come to a clearing.

The CPM party office is a low, PWD-style construction, the open ground in front of it fenced by wire, with newly printed red flags flying from each post. The windows of the building look like they’ve been bombed out and then replaced by new grilles around which the concrete is still wet and deep brown. Three carpenters sit on the grass, sawing new doors. There are three Party workers lounging in chairs under a tree. I look right and see why they are so relaxed. Abutting the Party office grounds is a huge newish-looking CRPF compound, the concertina wire almost slicing into the simple wire of the Party fence. “All our leaders are out, we have no one who can talk to you.” We make small talk and then slip in that we wouldn’t mind seeing Anuj Pandey’s house, or whatever’s left of it.

We walk down a wide mud road, the tin dunce caps of the huts reflecting heat.

I’m not sure what I’m expecting but I walk right past the small white two-storey bungalow before the man stops me. “Eita. Eita Anuj Pandey’r baadi (this is Anuj Pandey’s house).”

One of the few moments Manoj Mahato, the second in command of the PCPA, has shown any passion is when he has spoken of this house: on whose money did the dreaded Pandey build a fancy house such as that? What I see is a typical, shoddily constructed bonsai-castle you find all over Bengal — the kind built by some petty nouveau riche or a mid-level government officer with no taste and not too much of a bribery-pension.

Bits of the house have been gutted and someone has clearly taken a hammer to some of the protruding bits. Looking at the bungalow and its sad conceit, I realise I’ve been searching for the wrong comparisons: this is not former Yugoslavia or Africa, this is more Garcia Marquez territory, the unending civil war as insidious and unending as tropical rain, the “war” itself a kind of fraternal mayhem where everyone’s known each other for generations.

Two houses down, a middle-aged man in a genji and lungi sits at a desk inside his small porch. “Come and sit,” he says. “I am Anuj’s older brother.” Sitting among open newspapers under his wax sealing pots, Bimal Pandey looks like no one’s written to him for a long time. Like Manoj Mahato, he doesn’t meet my eyes very much, but when he does he projects a weirdly confident sadness.

What will happen in the elections? “Oh, fifty-fifty in Jhargram.” But this is a Left stronghold, surely? “Maybe, but which stronghold can we be sure of now? There are people daring to stand up to the Party in Barddhaman, on the open road, in daylight. It’s over.”

His tone is flat but there is no hesitation. What will happen, then? “Oh, if the Front wins, they will go back to militancy. But if we lose, then the youths who’d gone to the Maoists will return and join Trinamul, which is good. Shubhendu Adhikari has brought some of them back into the TMC already. So these boys will return and stay with electoral politics and there will be peace.”

I sit, watching the newspaper flutter under the sealing pots. Pandey shakes his head apropos nothing and answers a question I haven’t asked. “Those who think they can fight the CPM without guns are stupid.” He smoothes down the newspaper and continues talking, lucidly, but almost to himself. “It will become like ’72 to ’77 again. Did you ever read the Ananda Bazar and Jugantar of that time? You’ll see there’s hardly any mention of the CPM. Now it’ll become like that again. The Congress goondas who infiltrated the Party will leave.”

A pause to smooth thinning hair. “Amar kaachh theke likhenin, Nirupam Sen dawsh hajar vote theke haarchhey (write it down from me, even Nirupam Sen’s going to lose by 10,000 votes).” Pandey first shakes his head and then acknowledges what he’s saying with a nod, looking away all the time. “Bhaalo. Herey geley CPM.” Good. If it loses, the CPM will become purified.

Driving back to Mednipur, we hear reports of the mine-clearing vehicles rolling near the Jharkhand border. On the highway, we pass more CRPF bunkers, a road opening party of the paramilitary spreading along the highway, the litter of sandbags that marks another dismantled harmad “bunker” and, finally, another sad, small, ugly building at the side of the road, this one yellow.

“That used to be the harmads’ Enayatpur HQ,” says my guide. Once bristling with guns and handcrafted ordnance of all sorts, the place now looks ready to be snapped up by some small-town builder. The suddenly smooth road makes me drowsy and I almost dream of little red ants crawling across 1970s Bangla newsprint, hanging on effortlessly as the wind makes the pages rise and fall under them. These are not the large, nutritious semi-transparent red ants the Naxalites make into what I now think of as Mao Marmalade, but the nasty, tiny, red, city ones that used to picnic on you as you sat on the grass.