The Gypsy Goddess (13 page)

‘Yes, sir,' I say for his sake. ‘The Communists could.'

He who has not dipped his hand in the blood of class enemies can hardly be called a Communist, sir
. (The novel, being a non-assertive territory, allows me the privilege of an aside about an aside.)

‘If you narrate the incidents, I can write them down, sir.'

I sound submissive enough for him to take the lead. He begins his haphazard dictation. I take notes. I fit them into the template of his former letters. Random paragraphs begin to appear almost as if they are revelations.

‘I write this letter under grave and pressing circumstances requiring your urgent intervention. The Communists appear hell-bent on forcibly fomenting violence during the impending harvest season. Their leaders are in a mad zeal to outdo and outperform themselves and with this intention in their minds, they have thoroughly led the people astray. Nowhere else in the world have we seen leaders asking their workers to set fire to food grain when they know that it will cause them to go hungry. Why do they incite their workers to go on strike when they know that they will starve? They want the masses to be hungry so that they can direct their anger. The Communists clearly want to cause carnage during the harvest. There is sufficient reason to believe that they are planning a brazen attack on the landlords, and, being the head of the Paddy Producers Association, I am their first enemy.

‘In this particular instance, their immediate objective is to prevent the harvest through violence and bloodshed. They have decided to whip up frenzy in the district by holding a series of public meetings throughout Nagapattinam. Every day there are new posters that seek to provoke us. They put up these posters in order to pull us down. I wish to point out that there has been a procession before every public meeting. In each rally, they have chanted slogans against me and against our association. They have openly challenged me and openly threatened to finish me off. Within the last one month, they have held meetings at Thevur, Tiruvarur, Iluppur, Karuveli, Manjakkollai, Avarani, Sikkal and Puducherry. There are more to come.'

He reels off the dates. He names their state-level and local leaders: K. Balathandayutham, P. Jeevanantham, Manali Kandasamy, KTK Thangamani, P. Ramamoorthy, N. Sankaraiah, M. Kalyanasundaram, G. Veeraiyyan, AM Gopu, Gnanasambandam, Dhanushkodi, Thandalai Kannappan, Paappakovil Kasthuriram, Sukumaran, Meenakshisundaram. Unencumbered by any guilt, I jot down details and remind myself that everything needs to be arranged in an alphabetical or chronological order. He continues to unload his rage.

‘When the Communists are openly pursuing a path of violence, of what match is my non-violence, my
ahimsa
, my devotion to Gandhi? They have attacked my people,
my relatives, my office-bearers. But I have stuck to non-violence. A week ago, when we organized a public meeting in the village of Kilvenmani on 15 December 1968, the Communists saw to it that none of the Harijan agricultural labourers from that village attended our meeting. Under duress and under misdirection, these illiterate coolies consider us their enemies and they consider the Communists as their fellow travellers and saviours.

Communism teaches the people that we are their enemies. That is why we have stopped fighting against the Communists. Robbed of their only opportunity to create chaos, they feel cheated. That is why their anger is turned towards me today. They have issued death threats to me in their public meetings. Their posters celebrate my death; they publicly observe remembrance rituals for me. As a result of such mischievous Communist agitation, the labourers have become insubordinate and they have lost all sense of discipline. They absent themselves frequently from work, they go on strike at the slightest provocation, they use every pretext to demand higher wages – all these activities have caused catastrophic problems in cultivation. In the last two years, the lands have returned very poor yields, and unless the government takes strong measures to halt the Communist movement among the coolie labourers, production will register a further fall. Bearing in mind that near-famine conditions exist in a dozen districts,
it is the first and foremost duty of the state to curtail the illegal activities of the Communists and crush them with an iron fist.'

I now work on a first-hand account of the indignity and humiliation that Gopalakrishna Naidu has suffered at the hands of the labourers. I am asked to write denigrating things about the agricultural workers: their brutishness, their blindness, their bad-assness. He plies me with stories.

‘These incidents to insult and intimidate me are not isolated ones. There is a long history of Communist-incited violence in the Nagapattinam region. These agricultural coolies, most of them belonging to the untouchable communities, have been brainwashed into attacking the landlords. One must remember what happened to Congress leader Vedaratnam twenty years ago. Although he was an elected leader, he was attacked by more than a thousand people. They mercilessly removed his clothes and tried to parade him naked through the streets. He had to run into a nearby grove, shin up a tree and save his own neck from that mob. The police were helpless. The army took seven hours to traverse a few dozen miles because these Communists had felled trees and dug trenches. This was the fate of a Gandhian, a Congress leader, while the Communist Party functioned as an underground movement. Today, when they are left to flourish in the open, is there a limit to their excesses? The Communists imagine themselves to
be warriors and revolutionaries, and they have trained the people not to be afraid of anything. Men who have been fattened on free food have no reason to fear the jail.

‘Is the police force protected against these violence-mongers? The police are routinely booed, hissed and pelted with stones. Being a member of the police force is no guarantee that they will escape the wrath of the Communists.'

I look at him in disbelief as he continues his dictation-narration-elaboration.

‘Where lives of the
mirasdars
and their trustworthy employees are concerned, the Madras Police is no longer providing adequate protection. Only a couple of years ago, Venkatesa Iyer, the power agent of Ramanuja Naidu, was beheaded in full view of fifty people. This daylight murder took place right in the middle of a harvest. Every worker claimed that he was looking elsewhere – there was not a single witness for the old man's murder. Then it was decided at our meeting that there was no point in trusting the police. We started employing bodyguards. Even the governor's approval of a special police camp in our district has not solved our problem. The Malabar Special Police eat, sleep and march around town, but they are toothless tigers.'

Gopalakrishna Naidu sets about explaining his reasons for deploring police cowardice: ‘On the ground, when we require security, they provide it. Not because they are strong; it is just their uniform. They are not powerful – I've
seen policemen getting teased by
cheri
women. And they are certainly no match for the labourers who have been indoctrinated by the Communists to treat all
mirasdars
as enemies. Moreover, one of the earliest lessons of the comrades lies in teaching the farmhands to use their sickles and their sticks as weapons against us.'

Gopalakrishna Naidu, like the Kuomintang of China, shares the informed opinion that the peasant movement is a movement of riffraff. This prejudice alone is sufficient to elevate me to the position of an esteemed letter-drafter, as opposed to my Communist counterpart, who scribbles out complaints to provide for his next cup of tea and daily ration of cigarettes, or the ‘writer' at the police station, who has to bargain for his bribe.

‘Communism is actually a killer disease that has infested agriculture. It is worse than blight. Just like curtailing an unruly goat from causing damage to his crops, it is the duty of every farmer to take suitable preventive action against the Communists. This party is a curse upon the human race. It is the only party that seeks to divide us, set us one against another and make us enemies.

‘This party is an imported poison – it is not from our soil, it is not meant for our people. It was brought to our shores by a man from Malaya, it was funded by the Soviet Union and, today, they have secret Chinese support. Their conspiracy is to keep India in the Stone Age. They target
the uneducated section of society and make them oppose every new step that will take us towards development. This foreign evil is worse than the white man ruling over India.'

Every Communist gospel is deliberately reworked until it sounds as though it were a part of a sinister agenda to murder him. It sets him at ease.

This tirade continues until I interrupt him with a sentence that sounds like a doubt and is phrased like an apology. He shoos away my question like a fly.

We come back to the letter.

His command is straightforward: ‘This letter should read like my suicide note.'

This is his working principle, his modus operandi, his craving to cash in on a sympathy wave. I catch the hint and decide to use every tear-jerking, heart-wrenching adjective at my disposal. Following his advice, I also learn to successfully imitate the formula of his previous letters and thus, under his guidance, I perfect my knowledge of officialese, petitionese and memorandumese. Five sentences ago, I came up with this one: ‘The ongoing agricultural dispute relating to the aforesaid parties in connection with the determination of wage labour was communicated to the concerned officials in the above-mentioned letter and, subsequently, a copy of the same was sent to your esteemed office.' With practice, it becomes easier to draft this crescendo of nonsense on demand. I am now queen of
clauses, poet of persuasive round-robin phrases. I swim in these sentences – here is a deadbeat one I want you to see: ‘These immeasurable advantages are inevitable when such a protective mechanism is implemented for the benefit and the welfare of the farmers who strive hard to provide for the entire society. On behalf of the Paddy Producers Association, I request you to take into serious consideration the untold misery of the farmers and the everyday turmoil that they are made to face because of the violent activities of the Communists. I believe that the writ of your government goes beyond the mere matter of providing sanction and approval, and that your government will exhibit its autonomy by taking stringent action against those who disrupt law and order and destroy livelihoods.'

And so it goes.

We work under a ticking clock.

On the job, I learn that every single sentence needs to be revised until he expresses his unadulterated satisfaction. Evidence for his approval is a subject matter of intuition and jurisdiction, but it is mostly discerned when he bursts into an anecdote in the middle of my re-reading the middle of his sentence. The impulse to narrate, or to deviate, does not occur at the extremities.

My idea of the sentence-as-a-story collapses yet again. I tag along. He hunts for common intents and criminal intents and I accept each of his elaborate findings. He crams
the letter with his fears and his facts. He fashions the letter to become history and historical intervention. He wants to include a reference to an incident ten years ago when he spent 200 rupees on the wedding of a farm labourer who was faithful to him. He wants to include another reference to a public meeting held last week in Kilvenmani in which he offered a truce to the villagers: jobs in lieu of joining his association. He wants to portray himself as a good man. I want to remain in his good books. I write my way out of this troublesome task.

Remember, dear reader, I write from a land where people wrap up newborn babies in clumsy rags and deck the dead in incredible finery. Unfortunately, I write for a man who cannot digest contradictions. His line of thinking often circles around its own grave, refusing to grow or develop into anything else. The Communists are evil, their peasant supporters are evil, Marx is evil, educated women like me are evil because they have read Marx. His thought processes have not expanded to understand dialectics; his wisdom is, instead, encapsulated in a handful of aphorisms he has heard growing up. The letter finally gets written with all these veritable inputs: childhood proverbs, random anecdotes, plagiarism of previous letters, standard petitioning jargon.

This missive to the state government ends with a misleading pleading: ‘Either you act now, or you shall
never get the chance to act at all. Like Gandhi made the white man vacate India, there shall come a day when our nation shall be rid of these Communists, too. Your government can initiate the first step in this regard by taking necessary action to eradicate Communist violence from Nagapattinam, for which the entire agricultural community will remain eternally grateful to you. I also beseech your Honourable Self to take into account the grave threat to life that I face at present, as a result of which I have been reduced to a walking corpse. In these dire circumstances, I beg you to provide me with adequate security so that I can continue to discharge my duties as a farmer and lead people along the right path. The onerous and all-important task of annihilating the Communists lies in your hands, and I pray that you shall save society in this manner.'

I re-read the letter aloud. We rewrite sentences. We rearrange paragraphs. Sometime during the course of these corrections, a tight-lipped smile takes the place of his practised frown.

He compliments my patience.

Murthy, his agent, walks me to the door.

I have become the mouthpiece of a miserable man. Like ochre snakes that enjoy the smell of burning corpses, he is a sadist who takes perverse pleasure in seeing others suffer. These words that I have written down for him might one day come back to haunt me. They might be quoted word for word. They might be read and re-read. Action might be taken. Action might be spared. These words might some day save his skin. These words might some day speak for him, and in speaking for him reduce others to a charred silence. I cannot foresee all implications, all consequences. Right now, the letter seems to serve as a precautionary measure of protection. I have completed my assignment.