The Beautiful and the Damned (24 page)

I went down to Armoor around one, intending to take another look at the burned mansions before I went to see Mahipal. I had arranged to meet with Saveen, a lecturer in literature at a local college. Saveen was Devaram’s nephew, but he could not have been more different in appearance from the truculent, bearded organizer. He was a clean-cut, handsome young man who wouldn’t have been out of place in a big city, although underneath the polish, he had an intensity that wasn’t all that different from Devaram’s manner.

I found it a relief to wander around Armoor with Saveen and to discuss something other than red sorghum for a short time. Saveen talked about a summer he had spent teaching literature in Libya. He had been impressed by the country, he said, especially the level of equality it had achieved, and he contrasted it with the scene around him, where Dalits like him were still treated badly and where, even as an educated man, he had to be on his guard. We approached Mahipal’s house, empty and gutted, with wind blowing through the gaping window frames. We went around the back to the spot where the police had fired at the farmers. Some of the bullets had struck the wall of a hardware shop, and as I fingered the holes in the concrete and in the metal shutter, the shop owner came out to talk to me. He had been terrified when the firing happened, he said, and had hurriedly begun closing his shop. But the farmers hadn’t been afraid, he said. They had laughed at the police.

We left Mahipal’s house and headed in the other direction, towards Anand Reddy’s house. The old man I had seen before was still there, still dusting away. He nodded when Saveen asked him if we could come inside. We walked past the black Ford to the house, and even
though we could have just stepped in through the gaps where the windows had been, we followed convention and went up the steps to a little porch, through a doorway whose wooden frame had been charred into black coal, and into the living room where the white marble floor was disfigured by great black patches.

Even in its present state, the house seemed opulent. Saveen appeared awed by the wealth it spoke of, and he whispered that it felt wrong to walk around inside the house without permission from the owners. He needn’t have worried. Some of the owners were at home, upstairs, and the old man had gone to call them. I turned around to see three people coming in: an elderly lady, a woman in her thirties and a girl in a school uniform.

My attention was drawn to the woman in her thirties, everything about whom suggested that she was the mistress of the house. She was wearing a bright blue sari, from the fringes of which one foot displayed a gleaming golden toe ring. She was slightly plump, and light-skinned – attributes that declared the upward mobility of the man who had married her with as much clarity as the marble and teak in the fittings of the house.

The woman was Mrs Anand Reddy, perfectly poised and quite unperturbed to find two strangers examining her devastated residence. ‘It’s all because of that Mahipal Reddy,’ she said, her fair face darkening a shade as she mentioned the name. She said that her husband and his brother had run a seed business for years in Armoor without any trouble. ‘We’ve never cheated the farmers. This time we didn’t even have any business with the farmers. It was Mahipal Reddy who made the arrangement with them. So why did they attack us?’ It became clear that her anger was directed at Mahipal rather than the farmers. ‘The kharif season is coming up,’ she said. ‘The farmers have taken out loans and were expecting to clear their loans with the payments for the red sorghum. They wanted to buy seeds to plant rice, for fertilizers and tractors, but they had no money and so they went berserk.’

She had just moved back to the house a couple of days earlier with her mother-in-law and daughter and was living on the upper floor, the least damaged part of the house. ‘He grew too big too fast,’ she
said, still thinking of Mahipal. ‘He made his money too quickly.’ She lowered her voice. ‘There are rumours that the collector got some benefits from Mahipal.’

‘What kind of benefits?’ I said.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Well, the collector’s daughter was getting married. We heard that Mahipal made a gift to the daughter, an
oddalam.’

‘I don’t know what that is,’ I said.

‘It’s a gold belt that women wear on their waists in this part of the country,’ she said, looking amused. ‘The one the collector got was supposed to be worth fifteen lakh rupees.’

I tried calling Mahipal soon after we’d left his rival’s house. He said he was still in Nizamabad and would have to cancel the meeting. When I insisted, he asked me to try him again around five. Saveen, who had been listening in on the conversation, said that Mahipal was avoiding me and would keep putting me off until I went away. I said I would just go to the warehouse and wait for him there, hoping that he would show up at some point.

Saveen looked worried when he heard this. ‘These are not very safe people,’ he said. ‘Do you have to meet him?’ When he realized I was determined to see Mahipal, he said he would take me to see a friend of his who was a business partner of Mahipal’s.

We rode on Saveen’s scooter to the outskirts of Armoor, stopping at the fraying edge of the marketplace where the highway curved away from the town. Saveen led me up to the first floor of a shabby concrete building where, in a room that was bare except for a desk and a few chairs, there was a man talking on the phone. He was in his thirties, clean-shaven, wearing an expensive-looking shirt with black and grey circles patterned on the white background. But it was his hands to which he had devoted special attention, with a big gold ring on his right index finger, while above a red sacred thread on his left wrist dangled two thick gold chains.

He was also the first rude person I had met in Andhra Pradesh. He asked me something in Telugu, and although I didn’t understand the question, the tone of his voice and the tilt of his head made it clear that he wasn’t being particularly polite. Saveen hurriedly launched
into an explanation to which the man listened carefully. Then he asked us to sit and switched to Hindi. His name was Rajkumar, and ethnically he was a Marwari, from the western Indian state of Rajasthan. In other ways, though, he could be considered a local man, with his family having settled down in the region many generations ago. The primary family business was in gold and jewellery, Rajkumar said, which meant that they were also moneylenders. ‘But don’t assume too much from what you see here,’ he said a little threateningly. ‘This is a small office. Just a front. My business is elsewhere, and it’s not only in jewellery. I’m a partner of Mahipal’s, among other things.’

‘I’d like to meet Mahipal,’ I said, ‘but it’s proving hard to do that.’

‘If I take you, he will meet you,’ Rajkumar said, snapping his fingers at an attendant to bring us tea. ‘But why should I take you? Who are you to me?’

He listened lazily to my answer and then to Saveen’s more elaborate explanation. He occasionally grunted in response to Saveen, but for the most part he seemed uninterested in our presence and was busy texting on his mobile phone. I was surprised when he stood up and said, ‘Come, the car is here.’

There was a white Toyota Innova van parked outside, its seats covered with white cloth. There was another passenger in the car, a man of about Rajkumar’s age who looked like a minor political functionary in his spotless white kurta-pyjamas and dark sunglasses. ‘He’s one of my business partners,’ Rajkumar said as he slid smoothly into the car. ‘He’s a farmer. A rich farmer.’ The rich farmer nodded and began texting as the van pulled out.

The Toyota sped away from the town, past the black rocks of Navnath and through the countryside. The hum of the air conditioning, the liveried driver, the white covers on the seats and the expressionless faces of the two business partners, both now wearing dark glasses, added a touch of menace to the more commonplace aura of power
and wealth in the car. I felt as if I was in the company of cocaine lords, and that impression was only heightened when the Toyota honked at the gates of Mahipal’s warehouse and drove in. We climbed out of the car, and as servants ran around to get plastic chairs, we joined a circle of men sitting in the yard, one of them intent on counting a large stack of currency notes.

Mahipal was eyeing me sheepishly, which seemed to indicate that he knew who I was even though we hadn’t yet been introduced. Rajkumar took him aside to talk, and when they returned, Mahipal asked me to sit next to him. Here, finally, was the man at the centre of the red sorghum story, someone who had either been the victim of a conspiracy by other dealers or who was directly responsible for all the chaos.

I had been expecting a hard-edged man, but Mahipal, with his glasses and wavy hair, looked very soft, especially when compared to the villainous Rajkumar. He began to speak quickly, almost airily, as he tried to show me how well his business was doing, his comments supported with enthusiastic exclamations from the surrounding crowd of yes men. ‘I am first and foremost a farmer, and the son of a farmer,’ Mahipal began, sounding as if he was addressing a political rally. ‘Everything I have done, I did it for the farmers.’

He had started as a small farmer, he said, with little education but with sufficient foresight to get into the seed dealing business in the late eighties. By 1990, he had built his warehouse and was dealing in seeds supplied by big companies, including multinationals, and supplying buyers from all over India. The other dealers in the area had been in the habit of giving low rates to farmers, who had naturally begun moving to him when he began offering them more money. This year, when the collector called an auction of all the dealers, Mahipal had been the only one to meet the asking price of 15 rupees a kilo from the farmers. It was a reasonable offer for him to make, he said. There was a lot of demand for lal jowar in North India, where many of his buyers were located. ‘Not just in North India,’ Mahipal said. ‘In other parts of India too. Even in Pakistan.’ The only condition he had set was that he wanted the entire crop of the area because he was worried that his rivals might buy some red sorghum and dump
it on the market to drive down the price. But this happened anyway, he said. ‘These other people, they went around and offered twenty-two rupees to the farmers. Five villages sold it to the other dealers at that price. They took it to Delhi and sold it for thirteen, at a big loss. Why did they do that? They wanted to finish off Mahipal Reddy.’

He paused to catch his breath, and the men around him nodded with approval at how well Mahipal was telling the story.

‘I applied for a loan of forty crore rupees from HDFC bank to finance the seed purchase,’ Mahipal continued. ‘The bank gave me a letter approving the loan, and I gave them a bond as security. Then these other people, they went to the bank and said that lal jowar was fetching a market price of only six or seven rupees. The bank called me and said they were cancelling the loan. I asked the collector for his help. He spoke to the bank, then to some of the other banks, but none of them would give me a loan. The other dealers then created a team to make trouble. They wanted to set fire to this warehouse and to murder me. Some farmers, mostly the Maoist party people, began a hunger strike. Then they held a big protest with some antisocial elements joining in with them.

‘I was in Hyderabad at the time, and not in the warehouse. I was afraid of what the antisocial elements hired by the other men might do to me. But they came after me in Hyderabad too. I have a house there and I was going home one evening when I got a phone call telling me to turn back. I asked the driver to slow down when we approached my house. We could see two cars parked right outside the house, both filled with men. I called my family to come out quickly and get into the car. We drove away and the cars followed us, but then, when they saw me driving to the Taj Banjara Hotel, they backed off. There were too many people for them to do what they wanted to do. We stayed in the hotel that night. Later, I found out that my house in Armoor had been ransacked and burned down. I took a loss of one crore rupees on the house. They didn’t even leave a spoon.’

I asked Mahipal if Anand Reddy was the dealer who had caused all the trouble.

‘No,’ he said. ‘The real villain is a man called Vijender Reddy. He lives in Hyderabad, not here, but he runs Ganga Kaveri Seeds. He’s
the one who stopped the bank loan. The people who went on hunger strike, he sponsored them. He’s the big dealer in the area.’

I had the odd feeling that I had heard Mahipal’s story before, but I couldn’t quite pin down the source. Later, I would remember the account Arindam Chaudhuri had given me of his father being driven to the campus of his management institute and seeing the men waiting to assault him. It was like an archetypal scene in the lives of men rising upwards in the new India, with similar elements: the mysterious phone call, the shadowy rivals, the view through the windscreen of a car, the thugs waiting at the end of the road and the refuge found in a hotel.

But I didn’t make the connection right then. The setting was too different, with an edge to the men who sat around me even if Mahipal himself seemed smooth and polished. I was also busy trying to figure out if I had followed all the parts of Mahipal’s narrative: the bidding, the syndicates, the price fixing, the loans, the rumours, the threats, the thugs, the hotel, the car, the arson and the riot. It brought back the feeling that I was tracing a story about cocaine rather than red sorghum. And perhaps there was a relation between cocaine and red sorghum in the way speculation filled the space between the supposedly neutral market forces of supply and demand. If one changed the scale of the profits so that the seed bought for 15 was sold to the wholesale buyer not for 22 but for 2,200, the scene around me would naturally be transformed. The dealers would be tougher, their warehouses heavily guarded and Rajkumar would presumably thrive. Red sorghum, in that sense, was just a very cheap kind of cocaine.

‘What is red sorghum for?’ I asked. ‘Can people eat it?’

‘No, no,’ the people around me cried out. ‘It’s for
bhains
, cattle, and for chicken.’