On November 12, Abhimanyu made a Facebook post:
A martyr does not die
But lives through us,
Through the blood that flows within us,
Saluting Comrade Fasil.
Photo of said comrade – 21-year-old Fasil, a CPI (M) activist who was hacked to death by a group of men in Kerala in November 2013 – is below the post, adorned with the traditional red garland of communism.
Only months later, Abhimanyu would join Fasil as one of those killed in the name of politics in Kerala. His smiling photo next to a flag saying, ‘Freedom, Democracy, Socialism’, would be circulated as he is mourned – not just by friends at the college where he studied, but the many who heard his story of his life and his early death.
At the Maharaja's College in Kochi, he was not just a proud member of the SFI, but a man with many mature visions. You can spot them on his timeline, now full of condolences, and memories of the days gone by.
A few scrolls below the condolences, were congratulatory messages. Congrats for becoming secretary of SFI Vattavada Local Committee. Congrats for becoming hostel secretary – the same hostel where, with one stab, the lean young man was killed by members of Campus Front, the youth wing of Popular Front of India.
Someone had written on the walls ‘Vargeeyatha Thulayate’ – Let Communalism Die. A message not taken well.
But if he were alive, Abhimanyu would probably still yell it out.
He seemed to have, in his 20 years, managed to gain wisdom people double his age don’t.
Last Independence Day, he wrote, communalism will be opposed in Maharaja’s. Communal groups are separating students in the campus, we don’t want temples or mosques or places of worship, he wrote. This is not shaming, this is a request, Abhimanyu posted.
He celebrated when the Kerala High Court withdrew the ban on campus politics. He celebrated when CPM scored its first victory in Himachal Pradesh after 24 years.
He knew what went on in the world. He was aware.
Abhimanyu proudly shared the news when Syama S Prabha became the first transgender teacher at the State Literacy Mission.
But perhaps one of his most sensible posts came in February when he wrote in detail about menstruation. He wrote of the girl who gave him her bag in a crowded bus, instructing him not to open it. “But with the curiosity of an orthodox Malayali, I opened the bag and saw her pad inside it and she took away the bag angrily.”
That's the first face he describes. The next is after he has ‘grown’, when political and general awareness had come to him. The face is of the friend who was reluctant to buy pads from a shop because there were no women. Abhimanyu took her hand and went to the shop and said ‘Brother, need a Whisper.’ He wrote of his friend’s proud face when the man at the shop looked with contempt. Many such faces bore the blood that flowed for a future generation, he wrote poetically.
Like Rohith Vemula, the Hyderabad Central University student who killed himself in 2016, Abhimanyu’s words are going viral post his death.
Abhimanyu never wrote of his poverty, the small house that barely had space for the five people in his family, now reduced to four. But a friend has shared a little note he wrote once:
Pattini mathramayirunnu innathe divasam
Ethayalum vayaru nirachu bakshanam kazhichu
Vayaru niraye bakshanam thannathinu orupaadu nanni
The day was full of hunger
Anyway, have eaten to my fill
Many thanks for giving food to eat my fill
He had left it inside the tiffin box of a girl from the women’s hostel, who gave the boys food one day. The friend who made this post writes, “I teased you then, only today when I visit your home, I understand its meaning.”