"I am a fighter, I have never walked away from a fight," says Mamata Banerjee at the end of her autobiography that sums up her stormy, roller-coaster life story. My Unforgettable Memories, Mamata's 190-page autobiography which she will release this week at the Calcutta Book Fair, is the tale through the chief minister's own eyes of how a pint-sized Calcutta girl from the wrong side of the tracks took on all comers and fought her way to the top of the political ladder. Brought out by Roli Books, it has been put together from previously published works in Bengali. The tumultuous street battles for which she was famous began when she was a student leader facing the Left government, which had just come to power. "Fighting for our lives on the streets of Calcutta was something we did 330 out of 365 days in a year," she says of the early '80s. But she was always determined to come to the forefront, sometimes turning the fact that she was diminutive and a woman to her advantage. For instance, when then Prime Minister Morarji Desai visited Calcutta, she vowed to drape a black flag across his car. She took advantage of the fact that she was still an unknown face to police, and pushed past the security cordon and the surging demonstrators to get to his car. Her tales of countless beatings, both from political adversaries and the police, are hair-raising to say the least. One attack in 1990 left her with a broken arm and head injuries that landed her in hospital. She says: "I was brutally attacked with iron rods in broad daylight near the Hazra crossing. I still remember two thick rods hitting my skull, and then blood everywhere. Yet, even in that moment of madness, I did not lose my nerve. Almost in slow motion, I saw the third rod descending towards me and, in a split-second reflex motion, covered my head with my arms." There is also an account of her epic Nandigram struggle, which she describes as an all-out war, with CPM cadres and the police on one side and the people of the region on the other. The details of the raging battles with the CPM cadres and the police are reported in great detail, culminating in her account of the events of March 14 when, she says, "the police took the CPM cadre force along with it to indiscriminately rain bullets and kill people. The people of Nandigram bravely faced those bullets." Street-fighting she could face fearlessly, but Mamata insists that she was at sea when it came to political intrigue. Once she was elected to Parliament, she found herself facing snide attacks from her own party colleagues. It was, however, Rajiv Gandhi who spotted her political talents and backed her to the hilt. "During those days, the person who steadfastly supported me and shielded me with his affection like an elder brother was Rajivji," she says. She is steadfast in her devotion to Rajiv Gandhi, who brought her to the forefront in politics and was always, she says, very kind to her. About his death, she says: "I was orphaned all over again, for the second time in my life since my father's death." By contrast, she is critical of Sonia and in most places refers to her as the "Queen Mother". She describes the last-minute politicking and meetings with Sonia, which she says were stretched out so that the Trinamul Congress would miss the last date for filing nominations for the election. Not surprisingly, Mamata is also critical of Congress culture, which she believes prevents the party from rising in many parts of the country, including Bengal. At one point, she says: "I do not know why Congress initiatives in Bengal simply lost steam. The culture in the party is that when any regional faction gets too active, it is immediately censored by the top leadership." Besides Rajiv, another veteran Congressman whom she praises unstintingly is former Bengal chief minister Prafulla Chandra Sen who, though he was very old by then, took to the campaign trail for her. She says: "Right through the election campaign, the nonagenarian Prafullada hit the streets — armed with a microphone on a rickshaw — to canvass for me. Yet, he did not know me personally at that time... we had never met." Even though she has been a political power to reckon with for years, Mamata has always viewed herself as the ultimate outsider. She recounts how there was always a distance between her classmates and her in school and college. She says: "This feeling of not fitting in is something I have carried with me all my life. When I was a young girl studying in the ninth standard, I used to listen to my classmates talk about the world outside. But I would never join them. I used to sit in a corner and think about other things." The other "things" occupying her mind were her overwhelming sense of destiny and of having been picked for a greater role in life. She's also deeply superstitious and is quite open about her beliefs. "According to my mother, it had been raining relentlessly for three days before I was born. However, it stopped raining the moment I was born. That is perhaps why rain plays such an important role in anything significant that I undertake." She says: "As far as I am concerned, I can do nothing successfully unless it rains. So we always take these sudden showers as blessing from above --– it is almost like a dear friend making his presence felt." She also believes in ghosts and is convinced she saw her father's ghost --- or more precisely his feet ---- soon after he died. "Suddenly, I saw a pair of feet near the toilet. I thought it was an intruder, so I picked up the lamp to check. But there was no one in the doorway, outside, or in the toilet. Later, when I thought about it, I realised those feet belonged to my father. I recognised them because I used to massage them every day when he was ill." The book, which went to press only a few days ago, has not been updated to include crucial events like the recent death of Mamata's mother, to whom she was famously devoted. It does not make any mention of her years as railway minister, her stint in the NDA coalition, or even her feelings on the electric moment when she dispatched the world's oldest democratically elected communist government at the polls. So, this is a story whose final chapter has clearly not yet been written. Mamata Banerjee is now the chief minister of Bengal --– her rise to the job she always coveted is mentioned in the foreword but not after that ---- and the crucial question is how the fearless fighter will make the transition to wise stateswoman. That perhaps awaits an updated version of her memoirs. | 
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