The Gypsy Goddess (4 page)

Thread One
: communism thrived in East Tanjore because this place had the highest number of discussion-inducing tea stalls in the province. It was often suggested, by none other than the decaffeinated bourgeoisie, that communism would be eradicated if tea ceased to exist.
Thread Two
: communism crept up only along the railway lines.
Thread Two Point Two One
: twentieth-century Marxists would turn feudal, almost fascist, and seek to silence everybody who spoke of caste in place of class.
Thread Two Point Four
: the first posters of Chairman Mao begin to appear towards the end of 1968. Sometimes, Comrade Ho Chi Minh put in a special graffiti appearance.
Thread Three
: a young man (native informant, with the added bonus of being this author's father) shudders first, then celebrates, on hearing the story of a class enemy (a landlord of Irinjiyur) being axed into four and forty pieces, his dead flesh wrapped in palm fronds and given away to peasant families as a souvenir of revenge.
Thread Five
: the first Communist protest in Tanjore seeking higher wages in agriculture takes place in 1943.
Thread Six
: if the people were to sight a Communist in hiding, they were asked to ring the temple bells in order to alert the police.
Thread Seven
: close to a thousand Naxalite Communists on remand are brought to
Tamil Nadu because the prisons in West Bengal do not have the capacity to hold them all.
Thread Eleven
: every owner of a gun or revolver or pistol, or any other fire-arm, should deposit the weapon (with ammunition) at the local police station, obtain the safe-custody receipt, fill out a renewal form and wait until procedural formalities are finished over the course of a week. This bureaucratic procedure ensured that even the most trigger-happy landlords were left unarmed for a period of time. The militant Naxalites, with their liquidation-of-landlords programme, waited for ages for the arrival of this week of disarmament.
Thread Thirteen
: mobilization of the agricultural slaves by the Communists puts an end to inhuman feudal practices.

Rest assured, dear reader: you are intelligent enough to find all the missing threads and tie up the loose ends. People in this land predict rain from the sound of faraway thunder, patterns of the dragonfly in flight, halos around the moon, answers of the spirit-possessed dancers, probability of picking vermilion over sacred ash and other random occurrences. Have hope, my fiction is much more fixed.

Just because this is a novel set in rural India, do not expect a herd of buffalo to walk across every page for the sake of authenticity. Eager mothers who hold salt and dried red chillies and circle their hands over your head before asking
you to spit into their palms three times to trick spirits of the evil eye into abandoning you have been held back at my behest because I do not want to lose you to nostalgia or exotica. The tinkling bells of bullocks could add music to these sentences, but they have been muted so that you can silently stalk the storyline.

Comrade, let's get this clear. There are only two possible ways of going about this. If you were able to get your papers stamped in the right places, if you have purchased your tickets, I could take you to the village of Kilvenmani and let you immerse yourself in the lifestyle there. I could let you live with them through the seasons, teach you to whistle as you work alongside them in the rice fields in a half-hearted attempt to declass yourselves, hold your hand as you watch the sunset and call it spectacular every single time, let you walk back home with my women. I could teach you what it means to winnow when the wind blows, how to sweep up the leftover grain on a threshing floor, how much the various measures hold, and how to walk with a bundle of firewood on your head. I could cook you gruel and watch you greedily relish it with raw onion. I could show you the sculpted shoulders of the working men; I could make you swoon at the sight of their sweat. I could make you listen to a grandmother's curse, a mother's lullabies, an aunt's dirges. I could ask the roving gypsy woman to tattoo your arms and your legs with an ink made from mothers' milk. I
could provide you the pleasure of being an economy-class voyeur on this exotic time-travel. And this would continue ad nauseam and you would be sick of the cloying sweetness. And chances are, you would never learn.

The only other way of doing this is the way I am doing it.

The gods in these lands outnumber the people. The demons in these lands outperform Satan. The devils are whirlwinds during daylight; they toss every twig and trembling leaf that comes their way. At night they assume other lives – turning into flickering lights, or stealthy, lamp-eyed cats or a corpse-lady walking backwards. They compete in cross-country racing in the dark, riding on invisible horses. Some demons are held responsible for failure in trade, most of them specialize in ruining crops. At some point of time in their lives, most demons are said to have taken part in stone-throwing and vandalizing public property. On drunken nights, they have caused whole villages to be deserted. If the Old Woman were to be believed, the primary agenda of these demons is to cause terror, and the most malicious of them have been known to set fire to thatched roofs. Watch out for these terrorizing demons, going about setting fire to thatched roofs.

Like the lone monkey in a coconut tree that has nothing better to do than mock itself, I perform these narrative
gimmicks to amuse myself. Much later, like the monkey, I might get a decent audience; I might even do these tricks for a living. I could launch into an enumerative, explanatory list of the tricks employed to tell any story in the magic realism mode. I desist because it is an unfair playing field. I am in no mood to give the game away. So, let us trot back to realism. There is Maayi the Old Woman. There is Muniyan the Village Headman. There is Gopalakrishna Naidu the Landlord. There is Muthusamy the Communist. There is Sikkal Pakkirisamy the Slain.

Keep in mind, though, that this narrator-novelist draws inspiration from Tamil mystics – shrinking to a microscopic speck, burgeoning into a ten-headed demon, assuming weightlessness, turning leaden, taking flights of fancy, transmigrating into other bodies, assuming authority and charming everybody. This fatal flaw in her prose follows her faithfully.

Do you suspect a murder merely because of this fancy prose style? Do you want a puppet-show in place of all this meandering prose? Do you rue the fact that modernism and postmodernism have killed our storytelling traditions? I am willing to try everything to get this story across. So, here I am, pitching a tent under a tree, propping up a blank screen, pulling out my puppets. Come, take
a peek. Authority is easy to caricature. The puppets with the overgrown handlebar moustaches are landlords. The puppets with a stoop worked into their back and a squeal stamped into their voice are the landless. The stiff-necked puppets who march as a pack are the policemen. And the mysterious Old Woman: she's the puppet with a head that shakes during the storytelling. She's the puppet who beats her sagging breasts to mourn, to make a point, to curse, to cry a call to arms. You do not see her face, the fading brown of her eyes, the skin collapsing into wrinkles. You do not get that close to the storyteller. The play of light here works with a binary logic – bright lamps cast dark shadows. And the shadows tell their stories as you watch them move and mimic the voices of men and women and birds and animals. Squatting, arms around your knees, wide-eyed, open-mouthed, you take away the story as the puppets walk the talk. When they are done, most puppets disappear. Some stay. Some drop dead.

If you are the emotional type, the puppet-show is not any easier than this book.

How does this work of art seek to declare itself?

It plagiarizes the most scathing criticism, it prides itself on its ability to disappoint. Why bother about the pain of accomplishing something and arriving somewhere, when
failure has been made a flashy trophy in itself? Humility is a convoluted highlight. Even this book's obituary is a copy; it steals verbatim from someone else's words to describe its own shortcomings; it keeps the reproduced text from all knowledge of the original – assuming that never the Twain shall meet; and thus, the borrowed barbs glow like golden back-cover blurb:

‘It has no invention; it has no order, system, sequence, or result; it has no lifelikeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality; its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words they prove that they are not the sort of people the author claims that they are; its humor is pathetic; its pathos is funny; its conversations are – oh! indescribable; its love-scenes odious; its English a crime against the language.'

For the sake of clarification, its English is
Taminglish
.

Everything is so precariously held together here that you might want a helping hand. Nobody is going to teach you that right after a harvest, poorly paid labourers were hungry enough to smoke out rodent holes and steal back the grains of paddy pilfered by rats. But, you will manage. You will learn to relate without family trees. You will learn to make do without a village map. You will learn that criminal landlords can break civil laws to enforce caste codes. You will learn that handfuls of rice can consume half a village. You will later learn that in the eyes of the law, the
rich are incapable of soiling their hands with either mud or blood. You will learn to wait for revenge with the patience of a village awaiting rain.

If you are finding this difficult to follow, remember that not only am I weighed down by the task of telling a story, but also that you are equally responsible for your misery. Art depicts people. So, this degenerate narrative merely mirrors the fact that all of you, my darling readers, have been living non-linear, amoral lives without any sense of purpose. Life is linear, I can hear you argue. It is, but it is cyclical, too. If you ask a mathematician, she will tell you that life possibly exists in the
n
th dimension, and beyond the third, none of your fucking senses can perceive anything at all. That's where stories unravel themselves. Those of you stressed out by this haphazard storytelling, please relax. Stay, those of you who have thought too many times of wandering away. How far away from me can you stray? This is a joint venture. We collaborate on the critical condition that we do not abandon each other.