The Gypsy Goddess (22 page)

We were bound to lose. Because we do not know how to tell our story. Because we do not rehearse. Because some of us are tongue-tied. Because all of us are afraid and the fear in our hearts slurs the truth in our voice.

Hesitating would be of no help. We had made fools of ourselves with our speech and sloppy storytelling. Our silences made us traitors. We knew we had to fight. Fighting would bring us back to our right mind.

So, the poster wars continued and Keevalur's Chakravarti Press fattened on our hatred for each other and our love for catchy slogans.

The next season, we formally called for a strike. During the time of harvest, even a rat has five wives. It is the time of the year when we find a voice, when we can ask for more.

The farmhands are few and fields have to be reaped in a day, or two at the most. Landlords dread the overcast skies that could drench the paddy and damage their livelihoods. They spend sleepless nights, thinking of calamities that could befall them if they fail to act on time. They fear strangers from half a dozen villages away harvesting the entire crop by night, leaving the field as ravaged as a raped woman. It is the only time of the year when their arrogance climbs down its long ladder.

Because life had to go on, they agreed to a round of talks because they needed us now more than ever. Even the state stepped in to provide machinery for the settlement of their disputes. But the landlords thought of our gain as their loss, so they never yielded ground. The three-cornered talks went in circles.

The prime minister of India was to come to our state. The DMK government begged the Central Government to give 100,000 tonnes of food grain in aid, preferably rice. That is what the newspapers said. Preferably rice. It was nice when the newspapers got these tiny details right.

We did not know if the 100,000 tonnes came. The newspapers forgot to write about that part of the story. In any case, we did not see the rice. In any case, it does not befit a starving man to ask the price of rice. We had seen our share
of community inter-dining events, so we knew that what went by the name of a free lunch had a taste and an after-taste: spit of a mad mob, slag of its slur words, sour blood on a violent afternoon. Our hunger, accustomed to die on the mat, knows not to ask too many questions.

After the famine years, our state's budget could not make its ends meet. The Central Government said it would refuse to allow our state to present a deficit budget. The newspapers reported that the states had been warned not to overdraft or overdraw from the Reserve Bank. We felt that the country and states and the cities were no different from us. They were all villagers: some of them were landlords and some of them were peasants. Like us, some states were running in debt. Like us, they were lining up for help. Like us, they suffered under bad moneylenders. Like us, some states had no escape. Pledged for a pittance, we knew that our loans would outlive us. We assume that they too are aware of such simple truths.

Like newspapers that wrote that we had set fire to our own huts, we know that cinema is also a lie. We know that cinema changes the truth: it takes our eyes by the arm and shows them around. It can conceal and reveal, it can rush at speed or crawl in slow motion. It can show demons entering a home by breaking through a tiled roof; it can
show a man riding a flying lotus to meet a god and his wife in the clouds. Cinema loves the courthouse because it is full of drama and dialogue, because it is a chance for the lie to become the truth.

Cinema comes into our case too. Two men who run the Thevur Rajarajeswari Touring Talkies come into the picture. Chellaiyan. Chellamuthu. They give evidence of having seen Gopalakrishna Naidu when he dropped in at the cinema tent on the night of the incident at 8.30 p.m. The timing was during the interval they say. The rest of the picture remains there, waiting to be seen. According to Chellaiyan and Chellamuthu, Gopalakrishna Naidu came by car. He spoke with them for five minutes and then went away. He had asked them if they were aware of the clash at Kilvenmani. He had asked them if they had seen Harijan gangs passing by. Chellaiyan and Chellamuthu had replied that when it had started to darken, they had seen some Harijans going to bury a body. Gopalakrishna Naidu then left the place. Chellaiyan and Chellamuthu add that the police head constable came later and made more inquiries. When asked under oath, the head constable remained loyal to the same story.

When the landlord drives a car, many cinematic events unfold. On that fateful day, when Gopalakrishna Naidu was variously spotted driving to and from Kilvenmani and Irinjiyur in his ash-coloured Ambassador, he stops at the
cinema tent to enquire about a clash, he stops upon seeing the police lorry and offers to help, he gives money to Mrs Porayar to look after the medical expenses of her injured husband and son, and so on.

The court sees the picture as the landlords have painted it. But the picture in our minds is different.
Aadugal a nanainchadhu enru onaai aludha mathiri
. Here, the jackal weeps because the goats are getting wet from the rain. Here, the jackal weeps because the goats are on fire.

On the night of the tragedy, the Rajarajeswari Touring Talkies was showing the movie
Vivasaayi
, where MGR played the role of a humble farmer to perfection. In the course of two and a half hours, the hero milked motherhood out of Tamil women, tamed a lipstick-and-frock-wearing English-speaking Tamil shrew, ran an agricultural research laboratory that contained innumerable varieties of grain, repaired tractors and settled disputes, handed over the surplus paddy from his farm to the government, prevented his father from switching to cash crops, saved the shrew's honour by saving her from a field-hand ready to rape her, saved his father's life, saved his father's potential killer's life, forgave his enemies and traitors, excelled in exhibiting his fighting prowess, and sang continuously about the importance of being a farmer.

Paddy smuggling became the new highway robbery. Sometimes the policemen would fight smugglers. Sometimes they would overpower them but often these gangs overpowered the police. Sometimes the police would take a bribe and allow them to escape.

Sometimes, the rice-mill owners pose as government rice-procurement agents and they cheat the landlords. Or this is what the landlords claim; maybe there is a nexus between the mill owners and the landlords, and together they cheat the government. They always figure out new ways to steal.

First we heard it happen, then we saw it with our own eyes, and then it was in the papers, and, after a year, we saw these scenes played out even in the movies.

Our party was fighting. When the monsoons failed, the party wanted loans to be waived by the government. When famine hit, the party wanted relief measures. The party was fighting on the streets and inside factories. The party was fighting on the floor of the House and outside mills. There were indiscriminate arrests and wide-spread harassment.

This struggle was official. The truth about the wages was something else. We knew about it, the landlords knew about it, the Communist Party knew about it, the government,
which brokered these talks, knew about it. Whether we asked for five measures or six measures was only a reinstatement of rights. Every farm used a
mottai marakkal
. The harvest would be measured in a container that could hold five measures of rice, but the container to dole out the wages would hold only four measures. The scale used to pay the workers was smaller than the scale used by the landlords to take their own share. We wrote to the
tahsildar
to stop this practice, we complained to the party, we took it up during the talks. Nothing changed, really. They had new containers now, shiny ever-silver cylinders, but they knew how to cheat. But we knew we were being cheated and we were fighting against it. It would not take long to dismantle them.